Re-entry

                                                    Georgian in Ecton
My metaphor for ‘lockdown’ has been a personal space-trip to Mars. Well, it seems as if we may now be into a ‘phased easing’ of the restrictions. From the days of early manned spaceflight I remember vividly the ground-breaking live television which accompanied the final hours of those missions, culminating in an ocean splashdown. The first generation tele-graphics made us all edge-of-the-seat aware that re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere was perhaps the most perilous moment for the astronauts. There was no room for error with the calculations.

Today I’m on what feels like a real pilgrimage. It’s a straight there, straight back, no frills walk from our front door to All Saints, Earls Barton on a route where the ground contours would certainly have been familiar to the Anglo-Saxon population, and perhaps to a Roman one too.

On my way through the green space in Weston Favell known as the Pyket Way Park, I pass an auburn-haired lass who lives round the corner, toddler trotting ahead, baby in buggy. She looks radiantly happy to be in the fresh air under a warm sun, and we share how good it is to be outside. We agree we’d go bonkers if cooped up for much longer. Further along, near Billing Brook, I meet Hilary and Doug Spenceley. Their son Haydon is the Rector at Emmanuel Church Northampton, which sits in the Shopping Centre most people think of as Weston Favell, even though it’s a mile from the village. Doug is a priest himself, and son and father now share work in a parish of considerable size and need. They don’t recognise me at first, because I’m wearing my scruffy hat. As every spy and n’er-do-well knows, you don’t need to change much for a disguise to be effective.

Up at Great Billing, I slow my step because fifteen metres ahead are two very fat people walking ponderously. They have a little girl with them. The woman coughs and staggers slightly and the man puts a steadying hand on her back. You can’t help wondering…

The Virus is raising some interesting questions about liberal values and truth-telling. Certain communities are clearly more vulnerable than others, and sometimes we’re able to say so openly. Sometimes however, societal mores still prevent us from candour. Obesity and addictions are factors which have actually endangered all of us. Cultural expectations may render some groups more susceptible to infection. Poverty amongst some may drag the many down. These issues shouldn’t cause either the political ‘right’ or ‘left’ to say ‘told you so!’ but they do suggest the work to which future society should turn its attention. For the people of the Church, it may suggest that neither a ‘social gospel’ or ‘evangelism’ is the answer alone: we need both. Did we ever really need to debate this?

The path winds on between houses, everything green and white with the cow parsley on the wayside. Beyond the dip to Ecton Brook and its scummy pond the fields begin, the broad, baked track rising until the tower of Ecton church appears suddenly large on the horizon. The view to the right over the Nene is expansive and shimmering. I have a theory, expounded earlier in the blog, that this was a Roman road, albeit a minor one. I based this on the alignment of the settlements on the spring-line, the location of Roman villas, and the fact that a known road peters out to the west at Duston just where it seems to be drawing a bead on the large Roman manufacturing plants at Irchester. Since then Ruth Downie, a friend with much greater knowledge of matters Roman, has pointed me towards the LIDAR ground radar surveys which include the fields to my immediate north. Sadly, no traces of any road seem to be visible on them.  

                                                 An ancient track...

Just short of the village of Ecton I drop to the bottom of another undulation, and climb through a collection of disdainful cows, much more interested in the lush grass than itinerants, to emerge on the pretty High Street. I beat the bounds of St. Mary’s churchyard, and then sit on a bench to snack. My eye lights on the graves of Edgar and Janet Dicks, neighbours of ours until their deaths two or more decades ago. Janet was the niece of W.J. Bassett Lowke, a famous name in early railway modelling and metal toys. Late in the first world war, Bassett Lowke commissioned Charles Rennie Mackintosh to design the interior of 78 Derngate in Northampton. This originally rather undistinguished town house has become a charming small-scale museum showing the full range of Mackintosh’s influential styling. His visual trademarks would make an interesting curatorial contrast with the De Stijl school whose striking, confrontational 3-D design can be seen in Dutch galleries alongside Piet Mondriaan’s more famous paintings. Janet played a large part in the preservation of 78 Derngate for the town and its visitors. Northampton doesn’t tend to do ‘chic’ or ‘on trend’, but there’s something timelessly attractive about Mackintosh’s work, though his black and white wall hangings in one of the bedrooms would give me a migraine.

The sheep mutter and coo to each other over the walls of Barton Fields where the clumps of nettles betray the sunken house platforms of the long-gone part of Ecton. This section of the path is new to me, and very lovely it is too, rising gently through fields and then dropping once more to a broad valley with stands of trees in the bottom, from which three gunshots ring out. I laugh because this reminds me of a famous line from the Jennings and Darbishire books: ‘Three shots rang out. Two of the detectives fell dead and one whistled through his hat…’

Now the sturdy mortared tower of All Saints appears behind the houses on top of the next ridge. I climb steeply but briefly, cross the road, and walk through the centuries of this ancient settlement to the entrance of the churchyard. It’s an awe-inspiring thought that the tower was probably constructed just a hundred years after Aelfred began to bring England together. There are puzzles galore about its origins. Behind the church is a castle mound and a deep ditch, unfeasibly close to the building as we see it today. Strip away everything except the tower, and it makes more sense as an element of the impossibly grandiose church of a rich manor. But then again, perhaps there was a monastic foundation here, pre-dating the arrival of a secular power which for a while had designs on demolishing the over-weening ecclesiastical presence. Pilgrimages are so frequently to the past, unless pilgrims are drawn for healing to the more immediately miraculous, as at Fatima or Lourdes. We need – I need – to be reminded of the generations who have trod the paths before me, and to bulwark my little faith with theirs. This is one of the hard things about ‘lockdown’: we begin to fight the battles with doubt on our own.

My mantra for the Church throughout this blog has been ‘better together’, but what I fear may be the case when we emerge from this contemporary nightmare is that we shall all be further apart, divided by poverty, age, ethnicity even more than we were before. And because we the Church have been largely silent and unavailable, I wonder if the ordinary people in Britain will forgive us. We are giving them an excuse to see us as deluded and irrelevant. I sit in the shadow of All Saints’ tower and think of the words of the hymn:

City of God, how broad and far
Outspread thy walls sublime!
The true thy chartered freemen are
Of every age and clime…

In vain the surge’s angry shock,
In vain the drifting sands:
Unharmed upon the eternal Rock
The eternal city stands’
            Samuel Johnson (1822-1882) *

But. We are not alone, and it isn’t just about us.

Will I resume the main part of my Big Walk next time, two feet back on terra firma?  I don’t know. I’m nervous how the heat shields are going to hold up…

·       No, not that Samuel Johnson…this one was an American clergyman, who sought the ‘religion behind all religions’, so you couldn’t say he was exactly mainstream. Our friend the late Michael Jones, a great student of hymnology, was apt to expostulate and rumble were this to be rostered for a church service near him (AMNS 173), on account of the writer’s heretical views, despite its ostensible Augustinian links.

Zoning out of Zoom? No like no lip sync?

Try ‘Ten On Sunday’ on www.vincecross.co.uk

It’s short. It’s free.  It’s just prayers, readings and music for each Sunday.

Life with the Glums

I don’t know about you, but these days I sometimes find it hard to get out of bed if there isn’t ‘something that must be done’, like for instance, putting out the refuse bins. N.B. Messrs. Veolia: it’s a real downer if, one of us having done that, at an exceptionally early time, you decide you’re not going to collect the food waste caddy this week because your dog’s had kittens. But I digress. The thing that usually gets us going is to say Morning Prayer together, but even then we often discover one or the other is struggling with the Lockdown Blues.  ‘Woke up this morning had me the lockdown blues/ Well, I woke up this morning had me the lockdown blues/Ain’t feeling too much better since I read me the BBC news…)’ There I go digressing again. Self-isolation doesn’t do much for the attention span.

Walking’s acknowledged as a remedy for mental health issues. Even twenty minutes can lower the blood pressure, and it can stimulate the creativity of poets and singers, sometimes at inconvenient moments. The invention of the mobile phone has been a great boon in this respect, allowing the owner to scribble the perfectly epigrammatic line or hum another killer hook into his/her little black vesta case while hanging by a fingernail off Striding Edge. Sue and I enjoy our daily permitted steps, which usually exorcise the demons of gloom and restore perspective. The longer the walk, the better, because a combination of endorphins and lactic acid gives one something else to think about, like how to conquer the world, or put one blistered foot in front of the other just one mo’ time.

Today I’m dispelling the Glums* by visiting the shades of the nuns at Delapré Abbey. As I pass our local, the owner’s emerging from the side door to exercise her dog. She lost her life partner not so long ago, and now the pub’s closed, and for all I know the beer’s going off down in the cellar. She’s worth an arrow prayer, I reckon, and gets one. That’s the thing about prayer – you don’t need anyone’s permission. On a narrow section of pathway, a bloke stands foursquare in its middle yacking down his phone, oblivious of my approach (see the previous posting!) I say ‘excuse me’ with as little attitude as I can manage, and turn my head to avoid any germs he may be directing towards me as I pass. I say a prayer for him too, less sympathetic, more pithy.

When I was a student an older friend who was going through a rough patch was walking around with a copy of Martyn Lloyd Jones’ ‘Spiritual Depression’ under his arm. I remarked that personally the sheer weight of the tome would leave me with the Black Dog. Reading one’s way out of despair wouldn’t work for me now, and hasn’t in the past.

The day is grey, but there’s that quality of light in the sky which lets you know the cloud is going to burn off: it’ll be lovely before long. I wish I could feel the same way about Covid-19 for all that the Tabloid Press intermittently promises the nation a release into the Sunny Uplands. As someone remarked this week, we keep hearing about ‘green shoots of recovery’, but there aren’t any signs of flowers yet… 

Down at Washlands they’re about to shear the sheep, and the flock has been penned right across the fieldpath towards Great Houghton. Strangely, I think the same thing happened here earlier in my Big Walk. I explain to the shearing team I need to use the ‘right of way’ and rather grudgingly one of them lets me through into the pen. I talk to the woollies soothingly as we all crowd together until I can slowly advance to the gate at the pen’s far end. It’s very jolly and cheering to be in such close proximity to so many gentle animals, the week after the Sunday Gospel would have been John’s account of Jesus’ likening himself to the ‘door’ of the sheepfold.

I pause in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Great Houghton, and look over the wall at the pluperfect lawns and fountain of the adjoining mansion. There are thirteen on the electoral roll of this desirable village which though situated so close to the centre of Northampton still retains its rural atmosphere. I love the area opposite the church with its beautiful ironstone houses and the ancient hollow way that drops down over the field towards the Nene. Everything about the place tells me there’s a great, thriving community here. So why do so few of them beat a path to the door of St. Mary’s, and will that change once we’re in the New Normal and have left the Before Time behind? And can we find some new ways of referring to these changing circumstances please?

I always thought I knew the green spaces of Northampton inside out, and am humbled and amazed to find that the Brackmills Country Park totally eluded me pre-Virus. Having enjoyed a taster of its delights on the previous walk, this time I’m going to try and follow it around the perimeter of the Industrial Area all the way to Hardingstone before making my way on to Delapré. I track the green ravine of the old railway from Great Houghton until I can turn into the Park, and then follow the tarmac up to the left in the area known (with some exaggeration) as ‘Little Norway’. A pair of red kites wheel overhead. They’ll be roosting on the roofs of the Guildhall soon. Shielded from the bruiting of the commercial area, the choir of humbler birdsong is loud in my ears, and then when I go ahead uphill, now on a grassy path, the scent of the may is really heavy on the quiet air. Friend Richard the drummer used to design industrial areas for the Development Corporation in the 70s, and in retrospect what a brilliant job they did. In effect I’m walking through an arboretum of thirty/forty year old trees all now in their prime: it’s a total delight. At the top of the hill there are occasional fine views across a hazy Northampton, the sun glinting off the white roofs of the warehousing, in one place giving the illusion of a lake. In the middle ground I can see the Express Lifts Tower, and beyond it the rise to Duston with the tower of the old St. Crispin’s hospital on its crest. There’s always a serpent in the garden, though. I try to stay high, but this turns out to be a mistake – the Country Park is really divided into two sections split by a feeder road, which means the walker needs to lose height before climbing again. My laziness brings me out to an area designated for future housing needs and currently surrounded by chain link fences. Three quarters of a mile of scrappy paths into Hardingstone is the consequence. Make the most of this woodland while it’s pristine. My experience along the paths of comparable areas around suburban London suggests its quality will rapidly degrade once the housing estates are contiguous.

                                                Cowslips at Brackmills                                  
I stop for running repairs and a sarnie on the stone seat of the village War Memorial, and in this weekof the commemoration of VE Day fall into conversation with a chap from Liverpool much the same age as me. He served in the Royal Engineers and so is passionate about all things military. He and his wife have the letters written to and by one of the WW2 dead celebrated on the Memorial – James Morris. This man was killed during the siege of Monte Cassino. My co-conversationalist himself lost a close friend at Goose Green during the Falklands conflict. We agree that few families avoided bereavement in the Second War. As I follow the path down under the dual carriageway and into the green spaces of Delapré, I remember the Battle of Northampton, fought close to here in 1460. The nuns tended the wounded and dying, quite possibly including Henry VI. It must have been a frightening chapter in the ministry of this Cluniac foundation, although a hundred years previously they confronted the terrors of the Black Death, which carried away one of their Mother Superiors. For me, it’s just another reminder of the long-standing cross-European links – Cluny is, what, six hundred miles from Northampton? But I mustn’t preach.

                                 Seen in the window of a Hardingstone house

I relish the graceful early summer parkland, the golf course naked of players, the careless remains of the nineteenth century landscaping, featuring the delicious lemony green of the parades of low spreading oak trees, and emerge into the housing sprawl of Far Cotton, with its massively spired church of St. Mary’s. I pause in the churchyard beside the apse and gaze up at its height, wondering how a church this size can ever come back into proportion with its ministry and congregation. Yet Sue tells me that when some friends of hers worshipped here in the early 70s it was a thriving Anglo-Catholic community.  The demographics have changed markedly since then.

Do we have to let whole portions of our personal church history go? Will we ever sing together the way we did before?  Well yes, perhaps -  in five or ten years’ time, but will we be able then to re-set to where we were? And is that even desirable? Some will have died. Some will have no inclination. Conceivably there’ll be new doctrines and attitudes. The old shibboleths may seem irrelevant. There’ve been times over the last two thousand years when the laity has been happy to maintain a representative priesthood, by which I mean that the clerical caste spoke to God for us, took communion for us, prayed on our behalf, while we the people kept the world turning by the sweat of our brows. Is that what’s happening in this (temporary?) situation? Do you like that idea? Do you have the spiritual resources to stay faithful without collective worship?

I walk home, following the river. The 60s modernistic bulk of Carlsberg hums, unattended. How long will it take to gear it up for production again? Becket’s park is almost empty, even on a warm sunny afternoon. The university is closed.  A solitary heron takes flight. A policeman on a bicycle passes me, says a wary hello. I’m not glum anymore, just in a state of passive acceptance. For the time being.

Lord Jesus Christ
You taught us to love our neighbour
and to care for those in need
as if we’re caring for you.
In this time of anxiety, give us strength
to comfort the fearful, to tend the sick
and to assure the isolated
of our love and your love.
For your name’s sake. Amen.

(From the church noticeboard: St. Mary’s, Far Cotton)

*for followers of Musical Theatre, ‘The Glums’ may reference the long running hit ‘Les Miserables’. Going back a little further, some of us remember the Glum family in Muir and Norden’s famous radio sitcom ‘Take it from here.’  Ron, the hapless and perpetually disappointed son was played by the evergreen Dick Bentley, his girlfriend by the lovely June Whitfield, who passed away only last year after a distinguished career in comedy which took her onwards to ‘Ab Fab’ and beyond. All of these are Glums to enjoy, if you can access them.

                                               The Church of St. Carlsberg...