WOBBLE AND HOBBLE

 

Driving back along the Stamford road with provisions for a day’s walking, I’m dodging lycra-bound cyclists, racing or time-trialling or whatever – hundreds of them, all male, all earnest, mostly bearded, and grimacing. Nearing Morcott, I’m astonished to see a drone flying towards me following the pedallers, maybe only fifteen feet above the road surface. I think to myself ‘I’m not having that!’ and phone the rozzers, much good that it’ll do on a Saturday morning.

As you may guess, the members of this hip, self-regarding would-be-elite (no, not the police!) aren’t taking part in today’s ‘Ride and Stride’ which raises money for the Churches’ Conservation Trust, with half of it going to the individual parishes from which the walkers and cyclists come. No drones for us to make video records of our glorious progress from church to church, or analyse our style and gait so that we go farther and faster next year. This blog will have to serve.

My ‘Walking to Peterborough’ is really just an elongated version of ‘Ride and Stride’, except I’m not raising money by sponsorship. That good and practical purpose of today’s activity is a necessary part of helping the CCT survive to maintain its excellent work. More than that, today’s a countrywide occasion for bringing Christians together in awareness of our heritage, of the help-towards-the numinous which our lovely churches afford. Maybe stories will be exchanged, differences forgotten, new understanding forged, a sense of unity glimpsed. As always, Better Together, and on a lovely September day, Better in Colour. Hurray! Let a thousand anoraks bloom.

My spin on the day is to walk to each of the churches in our Benefice, and play some of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues on their organs or keyboards. I begin at home, and stroll down to St. Mary’s Morcott…

                        ‘The tower’s mortar doesn’t lie

                        It speaks of practical common sense

                        A trinity of candles on the floor

                        A past a present and a future tense.

There are wrong notes and infelicities

No matter… 

where I’ve placed Book One on the organ’s music stand. I play the C major and C Minor. Yes, those ‘wrong notes’... My fingers haven’t woken up, and aren’t used to the sticky manuals, so there’s a whole bunch of ‘infelicities’.  I say goodbye to Tricia who’s on duty counting callers. Her husband John - who could lend me the odd year - is a doughty walker and is up at Oakham, crossing churches off his list.  He’ll be raising hundreds of pounds for the cause today. Then it’s back to Mill House to pick up a light pack and off I go, across the clovered field to the A47, and down the hill towards Barrowden. Gerry passes me in the Armstrong’s Volvo and gives me a cheery wave. 

                        ‘Tixover and Luffenham

                        Duddington and Barrowden

                        Each a wonder and a solace

                        Casting blessings from a high place

                        On the river as it flows…

St. Peter's Barrowden from Morcott Road

Richard is minding St. Peter’s until noon, and welcomes me. The church is set up for Sunday’s ‘café-style’ worship which will be followed by Harvest Lunch. I eschew the Makins organ, and play the G major prelude from Bach’s second set on the piano – it’s the one which might remind you of ‘Ski Sunday’, then follow it with the A Major pastorale, topped off with the Sicilienne-like E flat major and its solid fugue. Halfway through John Comber arrives. I think he may have come to play the Makins, but graciously says he hasn’t, and remarks that he didn’t know I was a musician. I remind him that I’ve sung to his accompaniment a few times now, and quip that of course this still may not qualify me.

The 48 Preludes and Fugues are a marvel: it’s no wonder so many keyboard players worship at their altar. They span so many styles, and are capable of being rendered in so many ways,  each one contributing new insights. If you’ve never come across it, try to find Anne Dudley’s version of the B flat minor prelude from the first 24, as Good Friday a piece of music as Bach ever wrote. Ace bass player Tim Harries, himself no slouch on the keyboards, once said to me ‘such difficult music!’, and the older I get, the more I agree. You can get away with playing a lot of music approximately, but not Bach. The impossibly intricate detail of the composition demands total accuracy and attention. Nothing can be out of place in the performance because nothing is out of place in the composition. The second set of 24 were composed twenty years after the first set and a lot of personal water had flowed under JSB’s bridge. I puzzle why he returned to the idea of composing a prelude and fugue for every key (hence the 24) when the first set had been such a tour-de-force. To my ear the second set is more complex and dense. They carry a sense of a life lived, have more weight, less obvious joy, though the C major fugue is pretty sunny. Nowhere will you find the utter carefree, sublime happiness of the C sharp major fugue in the first 24 (which I can’t get near playing, and probably never will, unless I take a year’s sabbatical from the world).

Through Barrowden’s beautiful village. There are Kevin and Alison standing in front of their gate. Here are some more affable people to say hello to. Then it’s down Mill Lane and across what are some of the few genuine water meadows still to be found – that’s to say they will flood during winter – and up into Wakerley. Last time I came this way on my Big Walk the ground was saturated, and the ancient track impassable. At Wakerley-among-the-quarries, St. John’s is open, but only a few people have visited so far. St. John’s is our CCT church, a grand building for what is now a very small community on the Welland’s south side, but Simon has opened it up for the day. Here I can only pay lip service to my promise to play. The organ is hand-pumped, the handle resting on a propped-up chair. I release it, and heave up and down for a few moments, then rush round to slide onto the stool to see how much I can play before the air runs out. The answer is about eight and a half bars, but in the process I’ve invented a new Olympic sport in the tradition of the triathlon. I suppose the extra elements might entail rushing down to the Welland bridge and swimming a hundred metres, before scrambling back up to the church on a mountain bike.

As I replace the pump handle, I read the graffiti carved in the wood above it: ‘This church is Norman and erly (sic) English. Sunday 1953.’ There are a few names, presumably choristers of the time, earning their stripes while an organist better than me bashed out some Widor or Mendelsshohn. Maybe even some Bach.

Visiting this church, quite proximate to the old railway whose low viaduct is still very visible (and walkable) back towards Barrowden, I’m reminded of Flanders and Swann’s ‘Slow Train’ written in the aftermath of the 60s’ Beeching cuts. Will we find ourselves writing in similar elegiac vein about our lost churches in twenty years’ time? Write your own ecclesiastical version of the following:

                        ‘No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe

                        On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road

                        No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat

                        At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester le Street…’ 

The Welland near Barrowden

On and on, following the north bank of the river where the meander leaves quite a steep drop down to the water by a grassy field, through a patch of woodland, and then eventually up to Percy Gilman’s fields, where a straw-stack the size of a major condominium awaits transfer to fuel a power station. The track down to lovely St. Luke’s is announced by a sign directed at walkers like me: ‘To the church’!

                        ‘A friend who is Reformed

                        Writes in admonition.

                        Candles may obscure, he thinks.

                        I say that where we’ll be tonight

                        There is no choice.

                        It’s that or nowt.

                        There is no cabling to St. Luke’s…’

 David is at the church door. He’s been waiting for visitors who’ve largely not come, St. Luke’s being out on a limb at the far end of the hamlet of Tixover, which is itself a single street stretching off the A47. Candles are indeed the only lighting here, and the organ has to be foot-pumped harmonium-style. I haven’t done this for years, but wheeze my way through a couple of jolly numbers, testing out what works and what doesn’t. David tells me that the bellows were fixed a couple of years ago after predations from local mice and temporary solutions courtesy of Mr Gaffer and his tape, but it sounds to me as if it’s going to be a job of work and some expense to keep the instrument going much longer. I wish I were a millionaire who could ride in and solve the problem: a nice little baroque job would look and sound appropriate here.

Up the lane to the A47, and along beside the Hall until the roadside path ducks to one side, briefly revealing the previous, more winding tarmac, then down across Duddington’s lovely bridge past the mill and up to St. Mary’s. Church warden Sandie is on her way, dressed up ready for a nice lunch, after a morning stint with the biscuits and lemonade. Here too, not many have passed by. At Tixover David had asked me where I was going next and when I said ‘Duddington’ he pretended to be momentarily perplexed: ‘But that’s not in the county…’   

 It’s true.  ‘Ride and Stride’ is organised on a county basis, but our Welland Fosse Benefice is divided between Rutland and Northants. Duddington (and Wakerley) are about as far out in the sticks as you can be in Northamptonshire, albeit the former sits beside a major road junction. So perhaps not many Northamptonshire walkers and riders make it this far, and Rutlanders eschew it as not part of the Shire .

I try out the little organ which Harry made sound nice last Sunday, and find the noises I’m producing are a little less musical, though I don’t know why. This instrument too seems to be missing a lot of notes where you’d want them. I wonder when a manufacturer will wake up and start making a sampled organ which is cheap, sounds good and really caters for the needs of non-organists in small churches. A simple, single manual with optional pedals?  No bangs and whistles, just £5000 of someone’s good money to make a congregation happy, and don’t worry about the fancy woodwork. Right now a pop keyboardist can buy an awful lot of synthesiser for five grand. To my mind there’s too much fuss and blag about electronic organ-building.  Duddington could perhaps do with a Clavinova as an organ alternative. Dear old Syd’s ‘One more step along the road’, will always have a touch of vaudeville about it, but played on a pipe organ it too easily reminds one of the fairground.

This walk reveals an odd thing about our Benefice. Our name is ‘Welland Fosse’, which refers to the ditch (!) or trench of the Welland, in which four of the churches sit. However, Morcott and South Luffenham are on the far side of the ridge, and there’s a peculiarity insofar as one can’t walk directly from Duddington to South Luffenham, though a series of zigzags will do it if the walker risks a perilous few hundred metres along the narrow verge of the fast and furious A47. I won’t, so retrace my steps to Barrowden, planning to walk the lane over the hill from there to South Luffenham. However, by the time I reach the beginning of the ascent I realise I’m out of puff. Twenty one or twenty two kilometres is my limit these days, and if I complete my walk the way I want to, it’ll be twenty six or twenty seven by the time I’m finished.  I accept my frailties and alter course for home.

I don’t want to push the comparison too far, but the Church too is having to learn the meaning of ‘a bridge too far’. As our son Matt would say, ‘Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good’. This sometimes goes against the grain for those of us (him and me) who were told, ‘Only your best is good enough…’  We have too much plant and too few people. Too much heritage and too little money. This is painful for a historian. We have a conundrum. We need a miracle or two. 

                        ‘Shall we run whooping from Morcott to Barrowden

                        Flaming out along our own Santa Pod?

                        Shall ‘The Street’ in Luffenham resound

                        With Swahili and Spanish thanks to God?

                        Shall sermons spill out from the Duddington stone?

                        Shall Tixover sheep dream a Lamb on the throne?

                        Expect the new in a heavenly shower

                        Hope for a thousand gifts to flower

                        The Fosse transformed by Holy Wind power

                        Praise him!’

The Pounds in your Pocket:  21.5 km. 6.5 hrs.  23 deg C.  No stiles.  Eleven gates.  Four bridges. One tractor a-ploughing. Pigeons everywhere. A flock of sparrows on Percy’s farm. Fewer Runners and Riders than one might have wished for.

 

With the exception of the extract from ‘Slow Train’, all other quotations in the above are from ‘Candles’ written for the octave of prayer for Christian Unity © Vince Cross 2021

 Postscript

The following day we hear the farewell sermon of Sarah Brown, Canon Missioner at Peterborough Cathedral. She’s leaving after nearly four years to become Dean at Hereford, a poacher turned gamekeeper. It’s a wonderful occasion and Sarah preaches memorably, challenging herself and her congregations with Mark’s account of the Transfiguration. The gist of her message is this. We Christians are first and foremost tasked with revealing God, and nothing else is of much account unless it works in that direction – not glorious churches and cathedrals, not extraordinary music, not elaborate worship and liturgy. Our concerns for these other things must be held in tension with Christ’s commission to his followers.

Her words make me feel like the rich young ruler (or in my case a moderately wealthy old codger…) The job seems impossible. The demands too great. How then can I enter the Kingdom of Heaven?

In memory of John White who Rode and Strode over many years, and went about doing good for his family, his clients, his parish and the diocese.