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.
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…’
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.
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