Travelling companion
IT IS a long walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I wonder, as I’m sitting by the bedside, whether the Psalmist might have been thinking not just of the person in that shadow, but of those stumbling along with them and sharing the journey.
I look around the room. The sun is shining, the curtains are fluttering, and there’s a faint tinkle from the Aeolian chimes hanging in the window — the ones that she has had in all the places she has lived. Dying is not for sissies. The Easter eggs still unopened in July tell their own story. The legs that walked the Pennine Way can’t hold her up any more, and the mind is somewhere neither she nor we can fathom.
I shared the first days of that 300-mile Pennine Way walk. She was carrying so much kit that she rattled like a tinker’s cart. When she fell over, she couldn’t get up again, and, when I tried to pull her up, I fell over as well, and we both rolled in hysterics in the grass.
Now, as she lays down her burdens, we are laying down our own. We are watching and waiting. That is all there is to do.
Places where they sing
SPEAKING of the Psalms, I am inordinately excited to receive in the post a facsimile edition of the 1708 Supplement to the New Version of Psalms by Dr Brady and Mr Tate with the addition of Plain Instructions for all those who are desirous to Learn or Improve themselves in Psalmody.
“Oh, that’s me!” I want to say fervently to the good gentlemen. I’ve set a pivotal scene in church in Lunar Man, my work in progress about the clockmaker and early geologist John Whitehurst (1714- 88), who wrestled with reconciling the story of Noah and the evidence of the rocks in his Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth.
He worshipped at the parish church that became Derby Cathedral, a stone’s throw away from his house. Because we mostly perform in church and cathedral settings, I love nothing better in a play than some raw hymn-singing from the ensemble cast, but it has to be strictly of the period. Finding the right thing is an area of research in itself.
Treasure trove
IT IS when I’m still fresh from discovering the West Gallery period of church music, sometimes dubbed “the music the Church lost” (Features, 25 August 2017), and exploring how it might run as a thread through the play, that I find the reference to the 1708 Psalmody and a link to a source where I might find it.
For my £14, I’m expecting the facsimile to be an A4 document of some kind. But, when it arrives, it is a beautifully bound book, six inches by four inches, with gold lettering. I respond with ardent thanks.
The seller writes back: “I am pleased you are happy with it. I found the original in a charity shop from memory, and scanned and cleaned all the images, and then I have a friend who does book binding and he printed them and bound them to order. It’s reproduced to exactly the same size as the original. So it’s about as near as you will get to an affordable psalm book used by the congregation to sing from in the early Georgian period.’
I shake my head in wonder.
All God’s creatures
ONE of the things that helped to kill off West Gallery music was more churches’ acquiring organs to lead the singing. I’m half thinking about that as I take my dustpan and brush and prepare to sweep round the enclosed organ space on our Monday-morning church-cleaning exercise.
I’m feeling assiduous and am about to poke my brush into a recess by the wooden surround when I spot what at first I think is some kind of cloth stuffed into it. I’m about to put my hand in and pull it out when I notice that it’s furry. And there’s the tip of a tail.
At first I think it’s a rat. But then I realise it’s more like a squirrel. And then I realise that it is a squirrel, and that it’s very dead indeed. Maggoty, in fact. I seek out the churchwarden, expecting sympathy for the shock to my system. But his face lights up. “That’s brilliant!” he says. “We’ve been looking for that for a fortnight. Can you wrap it up in some newspaper?”
No, I can’t, I tell him. Maggots, even church ones, are above my pay grade.
Inward parts
MY FREQUENT journeys north in the past year or two have followed a route that I have known for most of my life: a road that forks at a point beyond Bradford and Keighley to take me in one direction, to Colne in Lancashire, where my husband came from, and, in the other, to the Yorkshire Dales and thence to the Lake District.
I’d never noticed, until idling in a traffic jam beside it last week, the huge factory in Bradford that is a Specialist Dished Ends Manufacturer. I’m so intrigued that I have to look it up when I get home. Dished Ends are used in “storage tanks, pressure vessels, road tankers, food processing, chemical plants, nuclear, oil refining, architectural features, art sculptures, traditional renewable power generation, to name but a few”.
I still don’t know what they are. But how did Man ever do without them?
Pat Ashworth is a journalist and playwright.