If I walk a hundred metres or so from our front door, I find myself at what is probably a very ancient crossroads where the ‘Three Horseshoes’ pub stood before it was pulled down. Running more or less northwards is Booth Lane, taking the present day walker past schools and colleges up to ‘Buttocks Booth’. This is the site of a Roman villa, which sat on a hillside with a once-visible cleft, such that it reminded the ancients of…well, you know what it reminded them of! The ‘booth’ may have been the extant remains of the villa or a subsequent house.
Running east-west from the crossroads is the old turnpike road from Northampton to Wellingborough, built in the 1770’s, a newcomer to the business of road-charging, filling in what must have been a noticeable gap in the turnpike grid, but arriving too late to make the big profits that would have been hoped for. What were these eighteenth century motorways like? Well, first of all they were obviously an improvement on what went before, or else people wouldn’t have paid for them, but looking at this road in particular, one suspects the width, location and novelty of the road was as significant as any improvement in the technology initially employed in constructing the road surface. A little later, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, John Loudon Macadam’s innovations in the use of crushed stone made a difference to horse-speed and the comfort of travellers. Between Weston Favell and the toll bar in Abington the road skirts the estate of the Big House, holding to the higher and drier ground above the villages along the spring line. Nevertheless, a couple of minor depressions in the current successor A4500 road show where more persistent streams would have crossed the thoroughfare, and I guess it would have been pretty sticky thereabouts outside the summer months without constant patching and reinforcement. The appliance of greater science was necessary and Macadam was the man, though whether Northampton ever consulted him I don’t know.
Today I stroll in towards the town, past St. John’s Care Home, a lovely place with a croquet lawn laid in front of the main house, which must be a great rarity for such an establishment. Opposite it is an Aldi, spoiling the possible view out over the Nene Valley - but then before the Aldi was built a few years ago, the site was occupied by a sprawling and even less lovely garage. I hope all the residents are safe: they’re fearsomely vulnerable to the infection. Buses pass me, mostly completely empty, because potential passengers are heeding the coronavirus lockdown advice, and folk have spotted that public transport is a danger – which doesn’t help the drivers much. In London a number have died, either contracting the virus through walk-up at their counters, or perhaps from association with colleagues who have it. But how would one know the exact method of transmission? For the record, there’s not enough testing, because we don’t have the kit, either in terms of reagents or laboratories.
To my left the houses become grander and then the view opens up as I arrive at Abington Park, the grass falling away to the duckponds, which once provided the Manor its Friday fish. The profusion of March daffodils is fading fast by the intersection where the toll stood. I cross at an angle under the trees and creep up on St. Peter and St. Paul’s church from behind. Without musicians the bandstand always looks a lonely place, as if the circus had just left town and abandoned some of its hardware. The aviary is closed because of Covid - to protect the birds or us? In a 1980’s golden summer I wrote some incidental music for a production of The Merchant of Venice here. I manned the tape recorders for most of the performances, and the evening warmth, the soundscape, the scent of the flowers, and the vocal interruptions of the park’s peacocks float back to me in a synaesthesia - the rapture of youth. There’s a very local connection to the Bard. His grand-daughter Elizabeth Bernard lived in the Manor.
The current Rector of St. Peter and St. Paul’s, ‘the church in the park’ is the Rev. Byung Jun Kim, a relatively young man from South Korea. Some of us tutted when we saw the virus expand its grip in his home country so rapidly during late January because of a cluster of cases arising from the culpable negligence of a cult religious group ( a negligence which has shaped worldwide ecclesiastical policy). Now the boot’s on the other foot, and Rev. Jun finds himself in a besieged Europe, while the careful monitoring of the situation in South Korea has apparently contained the virus to a remarkable degree. They did have the kit, and they tested relentlessly.
But this is no time to apportion blame, point fingers or find scapegoats. Very close by is the site of the Abington Gallows where those convicted in the 1612 Northampton witch trials were executed. One wonders what the posh people in the then newly constructed Manor house thought of such judicial murder carried out on their very doorstep. Some at least of those hanged had been subjected to trial by water. The theory was that if the authorities ducked the accused and they floated then they were guilty, because one of the properties of being a witch was unnatural lightness. If they sank, well then clearly they weren’t guilty after all. Opinions differ as to whether this was a true ‘Morton’s Fork’ to ensure that once indicted, the victim would inevitably die. Some say that if they sank, a rope would have been attached with which to extract them prior to drowning, others take a more cynical view. I’m inclined to think of the seventeenth century as a society not so very unlike ours. But these proceedings reveal thought processes which superficially are a million light years away from our own. It’s instructive to look them in the eye though, particularly if we have a Christian faith which may be about to face novel challenges and attacks.
On my way home across the park, I pass the scene of a cricket match which lingers in the memory. I was called to the colours suddenly because a friendly team for whom I was still registered were one short for an August game. I opened the batting, having not touched a bat for six months, and was up to the early twenties in no time with a series of nice boundaries, one dabbed through third man, another more assertively off the back foot past point, a third turned past square leg’s right hand, and a fourth struck firmly through mid-on. Then on my call my opening partner asked for an impossible single. The throw was annoyingly accurate. I returned crestfallen to the ring. I can’t complain: my running’s never been very reliable. Bill and I had put on more than a hundred together one sunny day the previous season. He’s proud to be a Kingston, whose family in the late nineteenth century formed the complete county team when the County Ground had just been built five minutes up the road. It’s a story without parallel in the English game, and it brings a smile to my lips as I think of it now. There was a clergyman amongst their number: cricket and the Church have usually been good companions to each other, the game providing a too easy metaphor for correct moral behaviour.
My Father God
It’s the Government!
It’s the Unions!
It’s the Vicar!
It’s the PCC!
It’s the bloke next door!
It’s my parents!
It’s Philip Larkin!
It’s…
It’s everyone but me
And I know even in that moment
The self-deception of which I’m capable…
Thank you for the cycle
Of recognition
And repentance
And absolution
And forgiveness
And picking myself up
And moving on.
One more step along the world I go.
Limping but still more or less mobile.
Amen.
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