Don't tell 'em your name, Pike...

                                             First in show: creative scarecrow near Papley

Pre-walk coffee: 10 a.m.: the commodious lounge of the Olive Grove garden centre just outside Polebrook. Unexpectedly I find I’m a walk-on in a Samuel Beckett play.

 Her:     (rustling the pages of her Express) …Don’t know about tea for tonight. There’s not much in the ‘fridge.

 Him:    (a subterranean rumble from inside his Telegraph) You don’t see marrows these days.

 Her:     Marrows.  No…

 Him:    Only those courgettes…

 Her:     Lots of them…( not concentrating…) Vegetables…

 Him:    I like ‘em stuffed…marrows.  Or steamed.  (Pause)  With a cream sauce…

 Ugh! Really? I park in Duke Street, opposite the church, and follow the way uphill where the sign directs to four mile distant ‘Norman Cross’ (no relative), a once important marker on the Great North Road. The air’s still and ominous in the valley, but clears with a slight breeze as I gain height. A shower tracks away to the south, the cloud purply blue and crowned with white like a Regency wig. The fields are summer yellow-brown now, but give way to a tract of woodland on either side of the Lutton road at Bluestone covert. It’s cool here, and the scents of childhood are with me. A pretty 20’s house reminds me of my long lost home on the edge of Kentish forest, a child’s closeness to the earth, the wonder of the changing seasons, the freedom of tea and cake carried off among the apple trees, the sense of a pioneering life away from the urban sprawl.

 

 Lutton straggles where the road wiggles through the village, the houses each on their own spacious plot, because there’s land here to spare for everyone in the Cambridgeshire hinterland: no need to huddle. The church of St. Peter is open, and I’m glad of its shade. Where the road opened out between the fields again, the heat reflected fiercely from its surface. Maybe I started today’s walk too quickly. Inside, St. Peter’s isn’t the tidiest church. There’s a pretty little (baroque?) organ, and I could probably wind it up to see what it can do but I’m feeling shy. The noise of assiduous strimming is close at hand. Perhaps someone’s working in the churchyard. I guess that forty or fifty years ago, there was heavy and neat restoration of some of St. Peter’s internal stonework. Kingdoms and enthusiasms rise and fall. I read Psalm 84 to myself, the pews and walls, Brahms playing in my head, Wie leiblich sind deine Wohnungen, Herr Sabaoth: that deeply concentrated mellow timbre of a nineteen sixties’ equal voice choir: Let The People Sing, The Huddersfield Choral, The Glasgow Phoenix…

 Outside again, I see that one of the nearby houses is having its beard trimmed. There’s creeper everywhere – a decorative theme repeated on some of its neighbours, hiding less-than-distinguished design. I’ve neglected to bring my camera with me, and am momentarily peeved, but it’s a very small discipline for a pilgrim to do without such a very discretionary prop. Then I recall that, though I’ve never used it for such purposes, my ‘phone will take pictures. Sitting on the bench beside the church I fiddle with focus and zoom, and realise that the ‘phone takes a perfect selfie without requiring physical contortion on my part (see the previous post). Oh dear! Another loss of innocence… Now I too can be a public nuisance in art galleries. And here’s me with another Vermeer…and there I am with Rembrandt…is that a spot on my nose?

 We sometimes buy strawberries and raspberries grown in Lutton from Sywell’s excellent Beckworth Emporium, but at Grange Farm there’s no sign of soft fruit, just a friendly farmer forking muck, who directs me round his barn to a bridleway which meanders across to the lost medieval village of Papley, now just a row of self-catering tourist cottages at the end of a track. The village lies under the grass; the raised sides of a moat where the Big House was, fishponds that became decorative garden features in post-medieval times, and the lumps and bumps of the platforms on which the villagers’ houses once stood, scattered post-apocalypse remnants in a Northamptonshire field. Beyond Papley the bridleway becomes…notional. I trust instinct and the line of the wood to my left, and emerge where I hope, not far from the road into Warmington. At a certain point, I glimpse the stately Perpendicular of Fotheringay’s church through a hedge. Suddenly Peterborough seems very near.

                                                               Papley: fish ponds

 It’s very difficult for someone d’un certain age, not to add ‘on-Sea’ to Warmington village’s name, pushing a button so that all those much-loved images of Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier and John Laurie flood the mind. At much the same time as Dad’s Army was becoming a telly perennial, Laurie imported his wild-eyed tartan into a memorable portrayal of John the Baptist for a radio production of Dorothy L. Sayers The Man Born To Be King. Inside St. Mary’s church where contemporary evangelical energy sits side by side with the ancient, contemplative cult of the Virgin, I start thinking about the famous Arthur Lowe line to Ian Lavender as they confront enemy protagonists: ‘Don’t tell ‘em your name, Pike…’ 

 How many Christians, like me, feel some sense of failure in our commission to explain? ‘No one’s ever been converted by you, you miserable worm’, goes the voice inside the head. ‘Call yourself a Christian?  By their fruits shall you know them? Pah!’ And we review our sinful lives and tell ourselves we’re not surprised. On the rare occasions we have poked our heads above the parapet to say Who we follow and what we believe, we sense that we’ve been undermined by our own pitifully inadequate behaviour. People have seen through us, and quite rightly. What price God, if we Christians can’t be better people? We’ve failed to preach the Gospel and shown our lack of faith all at the same time. We’ve failed to tell ‘em our name, but nonetheless betrayed our calling in a trope that could be called the Reverse Mainwaring.

 But clearly, something has changed in evangelism. The successful, more or less mainstream ‘crusades’ of the fifties and sixties are a thing of the past – though Billy Graham had his detractors even back then. It’s nearly 2020. Unless someone has stuck their head in the sand, you’d think there’d be no excuse whatsoever for not knowing 1) that millions of people worldwide still look to Jesus for an example of how to live, and 2) that they believe him to be God incarnate, a potentially Saving Presence for every human being. The only problem is how to make this series of startling claims stand out on the supermarket shelves of belief, among Area 51, buses on the moon, dianetics and all the other manifold esoterica. Is our job to be Desperate Persuaders, or merely to say ‘Here it is: it’s good. You should want some!’? 

 Iteratively, I try to lose the guilt about my inadequacy, and concentrate on being smart about my recommendation of God. As with everything else, I backslide, check myself, confess, pick myself off the floor, and have another go.

 

Warmington’s church is handsome, lovely and restored by Gilbert Scott et al. during the ‘Gothic Revival’. Simon Jenkins honours it in his 1000 Best Churches. He says: ‘This is Northamptonshire squat rather than soaring…the tower low and lucarnes uncommonly big, as if someone had grasped a taller structure and squashed it short’. This sounds like damning with faint praise, but it’s a noble place notwithstanding. And remember…Jenkins only lists 25 Northamptonshire churches in his thousand – though 14 in Rutland, which seems disproportionate, given the respective size of the two counties. (Apparently ‘lucarnes’ are dormer windows. No, I hadn’t heard of them before either.)

 I have a little fatigue difficulty on emerging into the sunlight. Suddenly, in the absence of a compass (I left that at home too!) I can’t make sense of my orientation. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m knackered and my brain won’t work. Too little water or food? Poor oxygen intake? I wander around for ten minutes before figuring out where I can pick up the Nene Way, and then head south on it following the line of the Roman road from Water Newton to Irchester in the unseen company of long dead squaddies, complaining about their feet and the inadequacy of the privies at the last camp. Near Elmington, where alternative routes are non-existent, there’s a quirk as the walker must cross a rifle firing range but is told not to do so if a red flag is flying.  Happily, the flagpoles are bare today, so I yomp on to Ashton.

 

 

 I sit on the green outside the Chequered Skipper pub, and watch as two patient horses are shod by a mobile smithy, the steam rising between the shady trees. To our friends Polly and Peter who have horses of their own, this would be an everyday matter, but for me, here among the picturesque ‘model village’ cottages of the Rothschild estate - which anyway feels like the set for a period drama – it’s a timeless, moving scene, marked by the utter nonchalance and complaisance of the two animals.

 Pennies from heaven: 17.5 km. 5 hrs. 22 degrees. It felt hotter than that! Increasingly sunny as the day wore on. No stiles. Five gates. Three bridges. Two churches, both open. England fighting back in the Test Match, despite injuries and dodgy technique, only to collapse hopelessly on subsequent days.

 Lord

I commend to you
All the lovely people I know.
My family.
My neighbours.
The community at St. Peter’s church in Weston Favell.
The friends we have
Scattered around Britain
And now sometimes abroad.
The talented musicians, actors and engineers
With whom I work.
The kaleidoscope of character
I encounter accidentally
Marrows, mince and Daily Telegraph.

‘Bring us, O Lord God

At our last awakening
Into the house and gate of heaven.
To enter into that gate
And dwell in that house
Where there shall be
No darkness nor dazzling
But one equal light;
No noise nor silence
But one equal music;
No fears or hopes
But one equal possession;
No ends or beginnings
But one equal eternity;
In the habitations of thy glory and dominion.
World without end.
Amen.’

(John Donne 1571 -1631)

 If you don’t know it already, check out the setting of these words by W.Harris, perhaps on the recording made by The Sixteen. Sublime, yearning and shiver-inducing.