AFGHANISTAN

 

It was completely unexpected of course, but by accident this journal has charted a strange passage of British and world history through the last five years.

 Last week, for the first time in eighteen months Sue and I ventured into a more or less crowded public space by visiting the Tate Modern gallery. It was an enjoyable but nerve-jangling afternoon. Maybe you identify with this mixture of emotions?  We’d come to see art, but our gaze was as much on our fellow-travellers. (Even for this routine scan of the regular exhibition the tickets were timed, and we had to follow a pre-determined route through the rooms, masked throughout). My thoughts went to that Gospel story where Jesus restores the sight of a blind man who then in amazement describes the people he now sees as tall trees – ‘but they’re walking around!’  Many of us are learning public life all over again. For a while at least, new meanings attach to everything we encounter.

There were three works of art which caught my eye. The most monumental and memorable was a piece by Cildo Meireles called ‘Babel’. It’s a tower of hundreds and hundreds of pre-digital radios in varying shapes and sizes, rising ten metres above the viewer as she walks around it. It occupies a room of its own. A randomised soundtrack plays simultaneously as if from a thousand speakers, music pop and classical, speech English and not, animated and calming. It’s both funny and provoking – and easily interpreted by someone with the slightest Bible knowledge. Even so, I wonder how many visitors to the Tate ‘get it’.

Away from Helpston, on what will inevitably be something of a John Clare Crawl, I cross the various railways at the Maxey crossing, where no less than six tracks must be traversed at one go, and the red lights frequently flash to halt drivers, cyclists and pedestrians as the LNER express trains whoosh past. St. Peter’s Maxey is a little way from its village, set on a shallow bump which is noticeable mostly because the surrounding countryside is much flatter now. The grass is mown, the churchyard tidy, but the church and even the loo in the churchyard’s far corner are firmly shut.  The name ‘Maxey’ is familiar to me, and for a moment I can’t think why. Later I remember. Looking up the name in the index of archaeologist Francis Pryor’s comprehensive book, ‘Britain BC’, the reader sees:  ‘cursus pp. 183-5; Great Henge pp 184-6; ritual landscape, 207, 305; barrows 344’. I’m going to quote Francis Pryor at unusual length:

           ‘Over the years, I’ve been excavating parts of a long (2.5 km) cursus near Maxey…(it) cuts a diagonal swathe across a low gravel ‘island’ in the heart of the floodplain of the river Welland. Near the centre of the island it passes beneath a huge ceremonial site, known as the Maxey Great Henge. In fact it isn’t a henge in the strict meaning of the word, because it’s rather too early in date (about 3500 BC), but we do know that it was constructed when the cursus ditches were still open….At Maxey the alignment of the cursus takes you from one of the lowest spots in the landscape (where we find Etton:  ed. the neighbouring village) to one of the highest (the site of the Great Henge, and near to the church). It ends at another low spot on the north-west ‘shore’ of the island. We know that conditions at Etton were becoming progressively wetter, and I wonder whether the cursus was constructed to conduct the magic and mystery of that special place to a new ceremonial centre, the Great Henge, on higher and dryer ground… I would imagine that such a place would involve many communities, and would have been very time-consuming…’

 On the OS, just to the east of a diagonal footpath, it simply says ‘settlement’.

I find the above extraordinarily moving and humbling. Think about it. More than three millennia before Jesus, near enough on the same ground where St. Peter’s now stands, crowds of people with hand tools laboured tirelessly together through their presumably short lives over many generations in a way that bound faith and community together. As a worshipping Christian with a pre-made church building, written scriptures and all the blessings of contemporary life I am in awe, and have as much difficulty in reconciling their experience with our account of salvation history, as if I were confronting little grey men stepping from a flying saucer.

I walk through Maxey, past the quarry entrance, dodging up onto the kerb at frequent intervals to avoid the HGVs, cross the busy A15, and enter Northborough, which seems a workaday sort of place. I’m only a mile or so from Market Deeping in South Kesteven. Mindlessly, I turn right into Lincoln road, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or my friends in the Lincoln family from Northampton, or I don’t know what. It’s only later in the day, when I briefly walk back along a more southerly stretch of the same road that I twig. It’s not any old Lincoln road, it’s the Lincoln Road, at least just here – the road to Lincoln. Northborough may seem workaday, but like so many villages, at the core of the quotidian expansion, there’s loveliness. On the corner, where I turn towards the church, is the dignified gatehouse of Northborough Manor House, where Oliver Cromwell’s wife ended her days. St. Andrew’s church looks fascinating in its own right, with an intriguing collection of angles presenting to the worshipper arriving at its north door, but I’m out of luck today. It too is locked. The road which passes the church betrays its age by the amount it twists and turns (this is a reliable guide to medieval origins even in London – contrast Marylebone High Street with its more linear neighbours). In a little while I turn right onto Paradise Lane, which passes beside Paradise Cottage. The description is slightly hyperbolic, but it’s still a pretty nice place to live…

The track crosses the Maxey Cut, and I’m aware that I’m on the very edge of true fenland country for the first time, before ever I see that I’m emerging on ‘North Fen Road’ into Glinton. I cross an unremarkable bridge across a drain where the needle spire of St.Benedict’s rises dramatically from the trees. At this bridge it’s said that John Clare and his possibly unrequited love Mary Joyce were wont to stop and talk. They never married. She died a spinster at 41, and is buried in Glinton’s churchyard. Clare wrote of the church:

 Glinton! Thy taper spire predominates

Over the level landscape, and the mind

Musing the pleasing picture contemplates

What elegance of beauty, much refined

By taste, effects. It almost elevates

One’s admiration: making common things

Around it glow with beauties not their own.

Thus in this landscape, earth superior springs;

Those straggling trees, though lonely, seem not lone

But in thy presence wear a conscious power,

Even these tombs of melancholy stone

Gleaning cold memories round Oblivion’s bower

Types of eternity appear, and hire

A lease from Fame by thy enchanting spire.

Oh dear. Am I getting old? I’m acquiring a taste for Clare… I wish people wouldn’t call him ‘The peasant poet’. Nothing peasant about those lines.

In Glinton and Northborough one can sense the closeness of Peterborough. Allegedly there are three thousand people living in Glinton, though on this acquaintance I can’t say where. But there are kids on the grassy corner by the pub, opposite the church, gratuitously blasting rap from their ghetto rig, hoping I’ll complain, and the traffic is moving just that little faster. Places to go, people to see.

I cross a field to Etton and its church of St. Stephen, which is more shut than most, and then walk the long way back to Helpston. Overhead the RAF or some other foreign power plays war games with Wittering in their sights. At Woodcroft I cross the mainline with the help of a youngish woman in a safety vest whose job is to manually open and close the gates on what must therefore be the most dangerous level crossing in the UK – it’s years since I’ve seen this necessity – and never where there are six sets of rails and trains doing a ton or more. When I arrive back in Helpston, I hope for tea and cake in the John Clare Centre, but they’re closing. I’m Hooked on Clareics now. I’ll definitely be back.

Towers of Babel? Afghanistan?  Oh, all of us with any kind of conscience are this week perplexed by the events in that country, and those who reckon it the most shameful moment in foreign policy since Suez in my view have it absolutely right. The MP Tom Tugendhat made the most remarkable speech in the House, encapsulating from an informed personal perspective what a lot of us feel who’ve been lucky enough to live at a safe distance from any real engagement with the issues morally or militarily.

We feel, many of us, that something has gone badly wrong, that our country at the instigation of the US has done something badly wrong (and though Tugendhat didn’t spell it out, as a result of Brexit, we’re now left with no real influence among any of our former allies, transatlantic or European, whatever the Johnsonian bluster may be). But we don’t know what could have been done to avoid this tragedy, and above the chorus of competing voices, heard only partially, none of them truly comprehending or listening to what anyone else is saying, we can’t make any sense of any of it. Our moral compass is deranged.

This is partly because of the incessant media chatter – which I take to be the point of Meireles’ ‘Babel’ sculpture – there’s simply too much noise. And even in Church matters, this is true. We can read the Church Times, and even through that single source of information, have the greatest difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees. Who are all these people, and what right do they have to their opinions?  What axes are they grinding? What do the words they use mean, and what are they signalling to those better in the know? Is our Church in dire trouble, as many of us suspect? And where is God in this? - the same God possibly, who was in the minds of those shoving earth and gravel around at Maxey fen so long ago. Though with the curtains of history in the way, we won’t get a perspective on that until the surprises of heaven.

Flies in the ointment:  16.5 km. 5.5 hrs. 21 deg. C. Mostly sunny but moments of cloud and breeze: promised later showers never materialising. 1 stile. 5 gates. 6 bridges. Numerous drains and water courses. Four churches. One open (St.Benedict’s). The offer of a ploughman’s lunch the following day care of Gill, Jane and Polly in Church St. Northborough. The harvest in progress – wheat still to be cut, everything else down to stubble. Snooty pigeons everywhere.

 Heavenly Father

Lord God of St Benedict

And Joe Biden

St. Paul

And Vlad Putin

Mary Joyce and John Clare

Maxey fen and Mini beasts

We stretch our hands to you

And implore you

To come to our aid.

We know we are feeble and frail

But sense your greatness within us.

Help us be the best we can

Wherever we are

With whomever we meet.

And never to give up on the struggle.

Amen.