I’m careful when I park the car in someone else’s village. Of course, I check to make sure I’m not across anyone’s drive – we live in a house where that’s a fairly common occurrence, and it’s the thing most likely to have me indicted for breach of the peace – but more selfishly, I ponder how often farm vehicles are likely to pass by. How wide precisely is a combine harvester or muck spreader? I play the tortoise and suck in my wing mirrors. Expensive things, wing mirrors.
Down the hill in Bisbrooke is a building that says it was once the Village Hall but looks more like an old Post Office. Then round a bend Baulk Lane drops steeply. The last two days have seen the first serious stay-all-day frosts of winter, and the fringes of the road are icy with the run-off from the waterlogged fields. There’s an extra meteorological peculiarity this week. An unusual configuration of the jet-stream is causing near record high levels of barometric pressure, so if I’m hearing a singing in the ears, perhaps for once it’s not tinnitus.
It’s also Blue Monday, the day when allegedly the New Year glow has finally worn off, and we realise that all our futures are much like all our yesterdays. I guess, whether we’re people of faith or not, this kind of blueness is a common experience, but of course what might be an opportunity to apply a little critical examination to our attitudes and behaviour is craftily subverted by the marketing types. Go on, the siren voices hum, what you need is a little more retail therapy. Something to help you through the darkest days of winter…you deserve it, you know you do…
The ridges of the wolds lie west-east. There’ll be quite a bit of up and down today. This isn’t exactly the Lake District but it is Rutland, where the streams cut just that extra percentage further into the land compared with Northamptonshire. I’m puffing as I reach the crossing of the A47. The literal upside beyond is the wide airy view across a landscape much less wooded, now that I’m north of the patchy remains of Rockingham Forest. The lane rollicks on down a second time before climbing again past the well defended Rutland Alpaca Farm. I’ve never heard of alpaca rustling, but there must be a risk. Preston sits the far side of the Oakham main road. In its main street, the traffic noise subsides around the quietly graceful cottages, the first flowering cherry of the season decorating the entrance to Holly Farm. The church of St. Peter and St. Paul is down a lane on the margins of the village, overlooking fields. There are some advantages to being liminal. It’s good Christian symbolism for our time. We are…edgy, not identified with the mainstream. On the other hand people may not come to find us: it costs them effort, and as they see it, lost opportunities. We’re missing a whole generation of twenty to forty somethings, constantly waiting for a better offer to arrive courtesy of their apps and social media. Perhaps we aren’t being clever enough to draw them in. Or maybe their fate is to find that all else is vanity before they give us a go, a Hail Mary. Will we be up to the challenge when/if they do?
There are many wonderful people, clergy and laity, paid and unpaid, working for and within the Church of England. But is it enough?
Clergy, you sometimes give the impression of thinking you’re not like the rest of us, that there'll be a special place reserved for you in heaven. You are overworked, but do you understand that this is a problem shared by many other jobs and professions, and that it's not OK to use your busy-ness as an excuse for rudeness and evasion? Sometimes, in my experience, you don’t really seem too interested in what other people do between Monday and Saturday. A huge question: does being collegial with the laity preclude being teachers and spiritual counsellors, or will it deny you identity?
And Laity, ‘we the people’, the ‘priesthood of all believers’, we can't afford to act so smug. We collude with the same reasoning, and disempowered, leave the Church’s work to the ‘professionals’. More than my job’s worth, mate/luv. We don’t skill up with theological curiosity, Biblical knowledge and empathy. What’s a search engine for, for God’s sake? We hide our Christian identity for fear of ridicule. We don’t give the Church too much of our valuable thinking time between Monday and Saturday. It’s Fortnite, footie and Love Island for us (please supply your own weaknesses!)
We all have to raise our game - a lot – if we’re to be successful persuaders – if evangelism is any longer important to us as the Christian Remnant. Cor blimey, guv’nor, Blue Monday’s got to me.
Having given offence to some (and as always, it’s fine for you to tell me I’m wrong), now I’ll make you cry. Whether Michael Morpurgo knew the story or not, the saga of the Preston War Horse ought eventually to have provoked a film or book. You can read it in full on the ‘rutlandremembers’ website, as recounted by Jane Micklethwait. Briefly, in 1912 General Alfred Codrington, the owner of Preston Hall, bought a five year old called Lincoln. He had two sons. On call-up for military duty, the older brother Geoffrey shipped Lincoln to France along with a groom, as sometimes was the custom with well-to-do folk. In 1917 Geoffrey was badly wounded, and his brother William took over Lincoln plus amanuensis. Together and against the odds all three survived the war. As Jane observes, of a million British horses to go to France, only five per cent returned. I’ll let her tell the rest:
‘In 1918 Lincoln and his groom (arrived at) Manton station in a special horse carriage attached to the train. Lincoln walked out onto the platform and across onto the road. He stood totally still for a minute or so. His groom left the reins loose over his neck, and without any prompting or need for directions, Lincoln walked back up the hill, past Wing Grange into his old stable at Preston Hall.’
Lincoln lived on until 1926, and to this day, on a mound beneath some hawthorn bushes below the Hall is a stone marking his burial place. This tells you so much about so many things, I think, including the character of the County of Rutland.
I walk the ridge (not the same as walking the line, thank you, Johnny!) looking over a few miles to the gleaming stone facade of what I think is Burley Hill House atop the next undulation, and on to the village of Wing, where lives musical colleague Bill Coleman, distinguished bass player and arranger. Bill has helped me out with dots-writing a number of times, particularly with jazz inflected show tunes, where I just can’t hear how all those clever combinations of brass instruments and rhythm section slot together. At a certain point in the 1980s, ‘Barron Antony’, swapped playing bass in the Barron Knights pop group for windsurfing in New Zealand, and Bill took over, which was where I first met him. In a time somewhat after the band’s heyday, I was occasionally hidden behind a curtain to play extra keyboards on their occasional TV appearances. As I enter the village, I pass Wing Hall which advertises itself as a perfect venue for weddings, bar-mitzvahs etc., and smile to myself that Bill has a ready-made source of income on his doorstep, have keyboard, will busk.
Then it’s on, over the fields, less sticky than I fear, into the hamlet of Pilton with its simple chapel of ease and twin bell tower, and further by a sweeping road into the lovely village of Morcott. Two very serious power walkers (male) pass me in Pilton, one wearing shorts - which in view of the temperature is just plain showing off. Later five dogs and three humans scatter as we coincide on the lane, while yet another home improvements van accelerates past. Today they’ve constituted fifty per cent of the traffic. Clearly it’s what you do or have done in Rutland this winter, in lieu of sticking cash in the bank or attic. Vanjanuary.
The tower of St. Mary the
Virgin in Morcott is mortar-clad, and in that respect reminds me of All Saints,
Earl Barton. It’s not a beautiful material, but speaks of age, and some would
call it ‘honest’, which is a double-edged sword of a word. I sit inside, and in
a few moments the door opens. A chap has come to put out the bins for emptying.
He’s mildly startled to find me there. I assure him I’m OK. He tells me not
only has St. Mary’s a claim to be the oldest in Rutland, but also the coldest.
From chivalry I hesitate to agree, but thinking again say, well, it is a
tad on the chilly side. We gaze up at the high hung electric heaters and I ask
how the church is doing. He replies that on a Sunday they get as many as a
dozen people for worship. The 2011 census records there as being 321
inhabitants. It’s difficult being a 4% minority, but that’s what we are, and
while it’s so cold in our churches, five months of the year at best, it’s the
way we’ll remain.Last week I played the organ in a large urban church. The eucharist ran towards one hour twenty. By the end I was rocking myself back and forth on the organ stool to keep myself vaguely warm and concentrating, despite my Sunday best woollen suit. At one point I thought of reaching for my nearby overcoat, but the console was on public view, and it could have seemed a hostile act. The clergy were swathed in many layers of clothing, and thus insulated from the environment. They detained the children who’d come to be present during the eucharist with a lengthy interrogation of what they’d been up to during the earlier part of the morning’s worship time, while the rest of us twiddled our fingers and hoped to be entertained. I wonder what the future associations of ‘church’ will be for those kids? Baby, it can be cold inside, as well as out. Equally, in our own St. Peter’s, it’s usually nice and cosy on Sunday mornings, but because there’s nowhere to put your coat and scarf, the congregation mostly keep them on. Would you do that in a restaurant? Or a cinema? Or anywhere you wanted to be? When I was teaching it was often a battle to get teenagers to take off their anoraks and coats. It was their way of showing their alienation, that lessons in school were nothing to do with them. As I say, we have to up our game. A lot.
The path to Glaston (no bury!) leaves the Pilton road on a slant to follow a hedgeline until it doesn’t, disappearing into a newly planted field. I tut and slog up the field’s slightly firmer margin by a copse to the main road, then stomp and sigh along the A47 verge until the village games field where I should have emerged. At the heart of the settlement on the back lane, St. Andrew’s church is charming, with a tower right in its middle. Suddenly I’m reminded of a Beyer Garratt steam locomotive. These were built with heavy duties in mind, articulated into three sections, with the boiler (and the cab) in the middle and two steam engines front and back - I think I may not quite be conveying to you the prettiness of Glaston’s place of worship. As at King’s Cliffe, it’s slightly strange sitting in the nave and peering through an aperture to the sanctuary. One could perhaps try to find symbolism in the bells, ringing out Good News to the surrounding countryside, but my thinking is dominated by the perceived distance from the sanctuary, the implied separation of the holy ones from the common horde of the unwashed congregation.
The last pull up the lane back into Bisbrooke is the steepest of them all. Take 2. ‘This isn’ t the Lake District but it is Rutland etc. etc.’ Penny is standing in the garden of the erstwhile Village Hall/Post Office, where she lives. She remarks that I look contemplative as I drag myself towards the car, just a hundred metres away. I thank her, and say no I’m just knackered, and explain why it’s nice to be described as in contemplation, being on a sort of pilgrimage n’ all. We chat about a wide range of things – the garden, Rutland, a little of Penny’s background, change, friends who audit the contents of churches: it’s amazing the ground you can cover in fifteen minutes. I’m warmed by conversation after a day largely on my own. All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Stones in the North Wall: 18 km. Five hours. 5 deg.C. Bright, sunny and cloudless throughout. 5 stiles. 4 gates. (This was mostly a walk along metalled lanes) 5 churches. 3 open. A startled hare in the fields near Wing, running a long semicircle around me. Twittering birds everywhere, grateful for the sunshine.
Father God
I thank you that your Church unsleeping,
While Earth rolls onward into light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping
And rests not now by day or night…
…So be it Lord; your throne shall never
Like Earth’s proud empires pass away;
Your kingdom stands, and grows for ever,
Till all your creatures own your sway.
Amen.
John Ellerton (1826-93)
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