Fields of Gold (almost...)

Martians who’ve been accompanying my every ululation and undulation since 2016 might well scratch their heads and wonder if everything they’d been told about the British weather is a load of old Boris. Rain seems to intervene only infrequently. It’s a fair cop. I choose the days on which I walk carefully, aided by the panoply of modern forecasting - multiple sources, weather radar etc. etc . And yet…

 Even in the twenty-first century the Met and BBC sometimes contrive to get things so annoyingly wrong. Like today, for instance. At eight this morning there was no mention of precipitation anywhere near Oundle. Yet here I am two hours later, standing outside Barnwell’s Montagu Arms, and the rain’s hosing down. But hey, I have an anorak, and an umbrella, and Goretex boots.  What’s the problem with a little dampness now and again? I’m told it’s what you have to expect as you get older.

 In one way, there’s no problem at all. Walking in the rain can be a blast. I have very happy memories of getting soaked in various nice places throughout my life. At the age of twelve and half way up Snowdon, quizzing mystified passers-by on what they were doing there and where they’d come from for a National Parks survey, I learned that if you were wet through to your underwear, eventually you dried out again, quite possibly several times in one day. A first girlfriend got persuaded into the Kentish woodlands in a cataclysmic downpour because we weren’t going to let a little thing like that prevent our courting, were we? (and we’re still corresponding as friends more than fifty years later so it can’t have been too bad an experience). According to the Baptists, childhood Bank Holiday Mondays were made by God for walking and family bonding, and were then as now usually blessed not just in showers but in torrents.

 Sod’s law operates. The first part of today’s walk isn’t along roads but tracks through fields of barley and wheat, where the farmer has very helpfully cut good paths for the rights-of-way. But they are rather narrow paths, and the grain has seeded down the middle, in a rather exaggerated version of the way grass grows down the middle of extreme country lanes. After a few hundred metres I’m soaked to the waist; boots, socks, trousers, anorak, M & S n’all. I squelch for most of the rest of the day.

 

The paths on the way to Thurning are well kept but often ridged by the tyres of farm vehicles. I’m quite surprised how quickly they’ve become tacky/slippery, and how much dirt is accumulating on my boots. It’s hard going. I turn away from the Alconbury Brook up to the village, which is a collection of lovely houses in a compact summer-flowery settlement whose population struggles to make three figures. I’m disappointed not to find St. James the Great open, because the excellent Northamptonshire Surprise website says ‘The best Arts and Crafts church in the county…a perfect, if small, well-preserved example of Anglican high church decoration…The spirit of William Morris hovers here – indeed the draperies come from his emporium.’  I’ll have to come back.

 This week courtesy of Radio 4’s The Life Scientific I’ve become aware of the ‘Dunbar number’, named after its anthropologist ‘inventor’ Robin Dunbar. As an undergrad Dunbar studied under the great Nico Tinbergen at Oxford, and based on a lifetime study of both animals and humans his contention is that there’s a more-or-less magic number of 150, which is the quantity of individuals with whom the average human being can maintain stable relationships. Extroverts may manage more, introverts less. He also connects the number to the average size of medieval settlements (by which ancient standard, Thurning is today on the smaller, less sustainable end of the spectrum). Dunbar’s number raises a number of interesting questions for me. The first is whether this is merely ‘true but trivial’ - insofar as there’s only so much time in the day, and staying close to even the most intimate circle of friends is sometimes difficult. Keeping up regularly with as many as 150 seems to preclude work, telly or days out walking, but please understand this is me talking - at best a ‘sociable introvert’, aka miserable git! Another intriguing possibility is whether at this precise moment in human history Dunbar’s metric might be changing. Is it easier to keep in touch with more people now because of social media? Or are the people we’re close to more demanding than they were, so in practice, might Dunbar’s number actually be decreasing? And what does this have to say about patterns of church organisation and church growth?  We’re apt to be very worried when congregations fall in number. Is 150 the optimum size at which we should aim before we divide or re-plant (And I hear a lot of people say ‘We should be so lucky…’) And what would Dunbar predict about the combining of communities, say, making one from two lots of fifty. Does this result in a successful congregation of one hundred? Or does our church experience lead us to think the actual number would be much less than that. A problem for the Church is that we become very attached to our roles. If Gladys is the inadequate organist in church A, perhaps discouraging people from attending services where her poor accompanying and scatter of wrong notes are only too obvious, but is replaced by the organist from church B when the two churches combine (who may be able to dash off Widor’s Toccata to the satisfaction at least of himself, if not entirely to the more musically snobby, thus maintaining the numbers at the Sunday Eucharist), do we think Gladys will be among the congregation to appreciate his superior skills? Perhaps not.

 

On the door of St. James in Thurning is a woven picture of a pilgrim; hat, staff and scrip. He looks not altogether unlike me. I try a selfie, for the purposes of comparison, and fail hopelessly. It’s a generational thing. Appropriately for the dedication of the church, there’s a scallop shell on the gate. I’ll see one or two more during the day in various places. Opposite the church in the old school building is ‘Jade College’ where pilgrims can learn holistic massage, which might come in quite handy for travellers.

 I retrace my steps to the Alconbury stream, which gives its name to today’s next village destination ‘Luddington-in-the-Brook’. The suffix is to distinguish it from a village up the road, now usually called Lutton, formerly known as ‘Luddington-in-the-Wold’. Today’s walk is unusual insofar that it takes in all the villages in the newly-named ‘Brookfields’ benefice bar Lutton: a reminder that incumbents like Cathy Brazier have a Herculean task as they draw together a collection of Dunbar country communities to love and serve each other. Judging by the jolly, engaged, edition of the Brookfields mag I pick up later in Polebrook, she and they’re making a good fist of it.

 However. As you’ll see from the foregoing, the question keeps nagging away as to whether this is the future of our Church. I think the parochial system is worth hanging on to, if for no other reason than that national disaster might one day make it crucially important. So then people, let’s not just sell off our ancient churches for private housing. But what could be done with Church/public/private initiatives, to supplement our Christian functions in a community-facilitating way? We’re getting used to food banks. What other kind of banks, for profit or not-for-profit might our churches host without compromising the core salvation enterprise – and maybe even enhancing it? Villages (or Dunbar communities anywhere) need honest, artisan shops, and opportunities to share – machinery/ transport/ coffee. And yes, cake with the caffeine, if you must.

 

I walk on to Hemington. As Johnny Nash once opined:  ‘I can see clearly now, the rain has gone/It’s gonna be a bright (sing those b/v’s, soul-sisters) (bright), bright, sunshiny day’ – and it’s now warm and humid enough that I choose a route along the road, rather than the longer one through the fields. On either side are fields of barley, wheat and (less pleasingly) decaying oil-seed. The corn isn’t toasty yellow-brown yet, but it’s going that way, with just that interesting, sophisticated undershade of not-quite green where the breeze is rippling the surface.   Hemington’s church, at the top of the rise, is shut and barred - as Luddington’s was - but it gets a good press from other writers on the Web. On the little green at the end of the village’s Main Street, is a pretty decorated sign telling you what you need to know about Hemington . Around the bend I pass a large and ancient , spreading, oak tree, which may be the one depicted on the sign. Another scallop has been tacked in at head height onto its bark.

 

 I walk the straight lane towards Polebrook with the site of the World War 2 airfield on my right. In the distance I can see the one remaining collection of surviving buildings from that era, now re-purposed. In the fifties the airfield had something of a revival. It sited a deployment of Thor ICBMs which were the West’s nuclear shield at the time. The now-available accounts of the reliability of these missiles is hair-raising. If there’d been an attack to which we and the Americans had responded, the chances of successful launches on our behalf would appear to have been slim. One imagines the Russians would have done no better. But only one missile needed to get through for the death of millions. MADness indeed. Deterrents don’t have to work. The protagonists just have to be in doubt that they will. And what don’t we know today about the details of our own ‘security’?

 

All Saints in Polebrook is the only church I find open today, and very lovely and moving it is, not least because of the beautiful chapel in its surprisingly spacious transept which is dedicated to the memory of the American WW2 flyers stationed locally. Amongst their number was the heart-throb actor Clark Gable, who was strapped in for a few missions over Germany for publicity and propaganda reasons (which is not to minimise the risks he undertook). The most literally awesome story is that of Lt Truemper and Sgt Mathies. They were aboard a Flying Fortress (nicknamed Ten Horsepower) on a bombing mission over Leipzig when it was attacked by German fighters. The co-pilot was killed, the pilot severely wounded. Truemper told Mathies to take over the controls of the ‘plane (neither had any flying experience) while he did the navigating. They contrived to get back to the very fringes of Polebrook. All the other crew were ordered to parachute to safety, while Truemper and Mathies attempted to land. They crashed into a nearby field and were killed. It’s an extraordinary and humbling story. No spur of the moment gallantry this, but calculated self-sacrifice on behalf of others, which makes it all the more suitable as a focus for the attention of worshippers at All Saints, and passers-by like me.

 

Just over the border in Cambridgeshire is the village of Little Gidding, subject of one of T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets, poems seasonal, contemplative, of Time and Eternity, and apt to my moment alone in Polebrook’s ancient church.

 

‘You are not here to verify,/ Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity/ Or carry report. You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more/ Than an order of words, the conscious occupation/ Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. / And what the dead had no speech for, when living, /They can tell you, being dead: the communication/ Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living./ Here, the intersection of the timeless moment/ Is England and nowhere. Never and always.’

 

The route back to the car takes me through the elevated hamlet of Armston, and then across the fields behind Barnwell Manor, one time country home of Prince Richard and his family, although they now live a less expensive life in Kensington Palace. The Manor has become an up-market (presumably  very upmarket!) venue for the display of antiques. One cannot duck economic necessity. But for royalty, the Church, all of us as individuals, pain is thereby entailed.

 

Tears for souvenirs:  19.5 km. 6 hrs. 23 deg. Rain and sun, and an enlivening breeze. 1 stile. 16 gates. 4 little bridges. Slugs a-plenty. A buzzard on the hunt. Guns popping on the Barnwell estate. 4 villages. 4 churches. One open.

 Dear Lord

 I carry in my heart always:

‘Summer and winter, and spring-time and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To thy great faithfulness, mercy and love...’

And as the congregation with one voice sings:

‘Pardon for sin, and a peace that endureth,
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside’…*

I shed tears.

Amen.

* from 'Great is thy faithfulness':  Thomas Obadiah Chisholm 1866-1960