Category Five

At the end of this episodic summer, the farmers have dived through a window of dry opportunity and suddenly the harvest is done. Where I walk today the fields have all been cut, but the stubble stands as proud as on the cheeks of any reality TV star, awaiting the plough.

 On the other side of the Atlantic, the Bahamas have been flattened by a Category Five hurricane, a meteorological rarity that’s becoming almost an autumn commonplace. What adds to its destructive power is that Hurricane Dorian has become stuck between two areas of high pressure, and, travelling at just one mile an hour, is expending its awesome power in the one place, like an earthly version of Jupiter’s ‘Great Red Spot’. It will probably head towards the US East Coast. Trump is so worried for his Mar-a-Lago resort that he’s cancelled foreign travel and sent deputies instead.

 After all my talk of circles in the previous post, today’s walk is a game of two straight, there-and-back halves, visiting places in the diocese that have become hard to reach because of geography or my poor planning.

 On a brisk, fresh day with autumn in the air, the sky Canaletto bright, I leave the car in the lane which is all that there is of the hamlet of Pilton, and head out on a hay-strewn, bone-dry path towards Stoke Doyle.  The path appears to be heading directly for Stoke’s little Georgian church, before it veers away through pasture to join the road. From a mile’s distance there’s an odd trompe d’oeil where a modern barn in the foreground seems to form the church’s nave beside the real tower. Once on the Oundle road, I pass the beautifully restored Mill House, a field of shorn alpacas and the Shuckburgh Arms (closed on Mondays!) and turn right down the lane to St. Rumbald’s.

 In a faint echo of the Brexit debate, you have a choice of belief in respect of the church’s dedication. First: the English candidate. It’s true that the county seems to have been a cult centre for the veneration of ‘Rumwold’ who in this diocese may be encountered variously in Strixton, near Wollaston, where the little chapel is dedicated to him, and in King’s Sutton where the saint was buried. Are you sitting comfortably? Rumwold was the miraculously gifted child of Ealhfrith and Cyneburh. Ealhfrith was the son of Oswiu, King of Northumbria at roughly the time of the Synod of Whitby (A.D. 664). Cyneburh was daughter of Penda, the Mercian King, so this was an important diplomatic marriage in the centuries before England finally began to coalesce under Alfred. The story goes that Cyneburh converted Ealhfrith, holding herself pure until he became Christian. When he said yes, so did she. Alas, Rumwold survived just three days before his death, but that was enough for him too to profess his faith as a Christian and preach a sermon. The Venerable Bede hints that the missionary St. Wilfrid spread his cult as he travelled. It was a time of miracles and marvels. Politics and religion coincided. A feast used to be celebrated in Stoke Doyle for Rumwold/Rumbald on the Sunday after All Saints Day.

Second: the international version. St. Rumbold was an Irish or Scottish evangelist, commissioned in Rome, who during the Dark Ages spread the Gospel in what is now Belgium until he was murdered by two men whom he told off for financial malpractice. The Cathedral in Mechelen is dedicated to him, and his relics are deposited there. If you want to celebrate him June 24th is the day. In a local postscript, to this day there’s a family in our parish by the name of ‘Rumbold’.

The interior of Stoke Doyle’s church is delightfully plain, dignified and unfussy. The current church replaced its dilapidated Gothic predecessor in 1727, showing a determination to do something new and different. The Georgian fashion was for clear windows, letting light into the mysteries of religion, celebrating God’s lordship over the natural; science and faith as one. It holds one important treasure in the side chapel, now a vestry. The son of Sir Edward Ward, one time ‘Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer’ ( a posh judge) lived in the local Manor House after his father, and financed St. Rumbald’s rebuilding. The price he exacted was to have his father’s noble form rendered in marble by a brilliant young Flemish sculptor, Jan Michiel Rijsbrack, who was later responsible for the tomb of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.  It is a lovely thing - even I who have little feeling for sculpture can see that – but I find it difficult to read. Is the noble Baron on his death bed? Or, a la Stanley Spencer, is he caught in the act of resurrection? Or is his attitude simply one of a habitual, careless disposition of justice from his couch? It is at any rate, a touching testament of a son’s love for his dad, accompanied by a lengthy inscribed tribute.

 

I’m lurking just inside the church door when in come Liz and her niece Sophie bearing flowers, and I unwittingly make them jump. Liz is in charge of Stoke Doyle’s contribution to the diocesan ‘Ride and Stride’ which will happen in a fortnight’s time. This excellent annual event raises money by sponsorship to be split between Historic Churches and local needs. When I tell Liz I’m from Weston Favell, she asks me if I know John White, and of course I do. He and Jane are stalwarts of our congregation, and for many years co-ordinated St. Peter’s part in ‘Ride and Stride’. Liz observes that St. Rumbald’s has a good acoustic, and it’s true. Sound waves can bounce off all sides of the little Georgian box: it would be a good place to come and sing Evensong one day. A pretty little organ too.

Just as time moves more swiftly the older one gets, so a return journey seems to pass more quickly, a sort of instant habituation to a landscape such that the brain bothers to take in less, or maybe is still struggling to process the information recently absorbed.

                                                              Gretton Baptist Church

Back at the car, I look at the map, and work out the quickest route by road to the second Walk Of The Day which will take me from Rockingham to Gretton and back. It takes a surprisingly long time to navigate Corby’s peripherique and the afternoon’s well started by the time I park outside the pub at the foot of Rockingham’s hill.

 There’s a famous hymn tune named Rockingham, and we sang it at Evensong last night, though not to the words with which it’s most closely associated:  ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. The composer is Edward Miller but I’d not previously noticed the slight equivocation in its attribution. Although some books suggest he wrote the tune, in A&M it says merely that he adapted it. But from what? And if so, who was the original composer?  It betrays no great signs of being traditional, although I suppose if I close my eyes and stick a finger in my ear, I can just about imagine a demotic version. Beethoven and Schubert were adept at ripping off folk melodies and taking them up-market, so why not E. Miller? He was a Yorkshireman but ended his days at Wheatley in Oxfordshire, not so very far away, so I’m making the assumption that he was thinking of this Rockingham, so attractively situated underneath the castle above the Welland valley, and not another somewhere in the Ridings.

 Yesterday we sang it to ‘My God, and is thy table spread’. David the Rector remarked that it felt all wrong, and that’s an opinion with which I reluctantly agree. Doddridge’s words are well meant, but somehow too anodyne for a tune we’re used to rendering with contrasting dynamics – double piano for ‘See from his head, his hands, his feet…’, double forte for ‘Were the whole realm of nature mine…’ My retort was that Doddridge to Rockingham was a thoroughly Northamptonshire experience.

Philip Doddridge was a remarkable man. He was caught up in the fervour of Revival inspired by Wesley and others, but had his own particular take on the matter. Was there any ‘side’ when Wesley described him as ‘the late, pious and learned Doctor Doddridge’? He was orphaned by the time he was in his early teens, but even then his education and upbringing outside the Anglican mainstream was leading him towards a ministry of challenge which he informed by attending a ‘Dissenting Academy’ in Kibworth. In time he formed his own Academy in Daventry, and as Doddridge’s fame grew, this mini-university migrated to Northampton. It’s said that his hymns (numbering in the hundreds) were developed to illustrate the sermons he preached. The Doddridge Memorial United Reformed Church is still a part of modern Northampton. Perhaps his most famous lyric is the Advent hymn: ‘Hark the glad sound, the Saviour comes…’ and a majority of Anglican congregations probably sing it each year, the rebel returning home. William Wilberforce and Joseph Priestley both owe something to his influence.

The path to Gretton is a joy. Underfoot there’s a bit of everything, grassy tracks, stony paths, a passage through a recently cut field where treading through the hay gives the sensation of a walk through freshly fallen snow. After I pass under the railway line going north from Corby (mostly freight, single track, unelectrified) there’s a steep climb up the scarp which gives the Jurassic Way its name, and then there I am in the handsome town/village of Gretton. There is the Baptist church, resolutely, defiantly, proclaiming its identity as a ‘House of God’ by its low square architecture. There is Lydia’s coffee shop, where I have a mug of Americano and a piece of Victoria Sandwich. And here is St. James’ generous, open church with its amusingly wonky east window, an adapted-catholic ambience with a little chapel space for private devotion, candles, crucifixes, a tree of remembrance.

 

 

The clouds are gathering as I return to Rockingham along the valley, a few barely discernible flecks of moisture wafted on the lively breeze. I haven’t written a great deal about the British political backdrop to my Walk over the last three years, since remarking in June 2016 that we were entering a tunnel of uncertain outcome: it’s not the purpose of this project.  But now we are in our own Category Five. As this week we enter this first stage of what we must now assume to be Britain’s divorce from Europe, whatever that means, I think I see a necessary adjustment coming for members of the Church of England…perhaps for all Christians living in the UK, or at least that rump of the UK that will remain when the hurricane has passed. As a Church we’ve gradually become used (over hundreds of years) to a particular relationship with our state and a negotiated, compromise notion of democracy (How should a Christian feel about democracy?) But if a faithless, humanist State continues to co-opt us as a Church to endorse a changed view of how society should be governed, either populist or non-democratic, what then? Consider the roles the Catholic Church played in Poland under Communist rule, for a while merely the province of old people, then resurgent after 1989, now accommodating to liberalism. Or think of the challenge the Anglican Church made to South African apartheid during the sixties, seventies and eighties? Who are we? Where should the Church sit in a society which doesn’t accept our values, either at ground level, or in its government – by any major political party?  Are we in the tent, or outside?

 

Birds on the wire: 
(Pilton to Stoke Doyle and back)  5 km. 1.5 hrs. 20 deg. C. Six stiles. Eight gates. 2 bridges. 

 (Rockingham to Gretton and back) 10km. 3 hrs. 4 stiles. Twenty gates. Eight bridges. Two churches: both open.

 Kites hunting. Squirrels snuffling. Wagtails wiggling.

Lord

Little and Large…

If we are a remnant
How should I think of that?
Are we a ragged thing
A popped balloon
A fragment
Of something that was once
Beautiful and beloved?

Or are we torch-bearers

Guarding a flame
Heroic
And the stuff of future legends?

Being me

Half empty, not half full
I see the downsides of both.
Either
(Or so I think)
We shall be demoralised
Or hubristic.

Teach us good Lord

To be the leaven
In a doughy world
So that we all rise
In Glory
To celebrate You
As we should
For all eternity.
Amen.

                                    One man and his dog: detail from old map: Stoke Doyle

The Circle Game

                                                         A straight interlude: Barnwell

Circles are mysterious, paradoxical, elusive in their perfect ideal self, ubiquitous, even a little sinister. You don’t think so? Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game is such a sad, sad, knowing song for a (way back then) woman barely out of her teens. We’re captive on a carousel of time. Childhood will never come back. Even if we believe in reincarnation, she hints, everything is forgetting, as we go round and round in the Circle Game. Mark Gertler’s 1916 painting The Merry Go Round is for me an uber-powerful artistic statement, an inspiration (perhaps!) for Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War. Even Pooh and Piglet, walking in the snow, are in their world of anguished circle bemusement. The Woozles - which might be ‘hostile animals’ - are in reality only themselves. They’re being misled by their own footsteps as they circle the Hundred Acre Wood.

 If you identify as a Christian, do you identify with this too…that our life is wholly caught up in the unending hoops of our own inadequacy?  The sin that we would not…that’s what we do, over and over again by the day, the week, even from one minute to another. We so want to be better, but whoops, here we are, back where we started. Again.  And our understanding that this is so, and our belief in redemption from this unfortunate situation, defines us in contrast to those who identify as non-Christian. The ancient Greeks knew and wrote in Tragedy about the recapitulation of violence from one generation to another, but they had no solution, except a pious hope that man might learn by suffering.

 I guess that’s the appeal of exploring the labyrinth – though corn mazes seem to have gone out of fashion. We make our salvation-frustration a little more concrete by entering.

 

I’m Vince Cross and I’m walking to every Anglican church in the Diocese of Peterborough from my home church in Weston Favell, by a Rule which says every walk should strive to be circular, and each successive walk should touch the circumference of a previous one. I’m more than three years into the project, and after eight-seven walks and about a thousand miles, I’m more than two-thirds of the way to my finishing point at the Cathedral. You can read about what's happened so far in this blog. The incumbent of each parish I visit gets a card through the post to say I’ve been, and that I’ve prayed for them and the people who live there. Here are the routes of my more recent days out…

 Walk 77:         Wilbarston – Pipewell – Cottingham – East Carlton – Wilbarston.  16.5 km.

 Walk 78:         Kentish interlude.

 Walk 79:         Geddington – Brigstock – Stanion – Geddington.  18 km.

 Walk 80:         Brigstock – Sudborough – Wadenhoe – Lyveden – Brigstock. 19 km.

 Walk 81:         Brigstock – Weldon – Benefield – Brigstock.  24 km.

 Walk 82:         Great Oakley – Corby St. John’s – Corby town centre – Corby St. Columba –
                          Corby SS Peter and Andrew – Great Oakley. 15.5 km.

 Walk 83:         Cottingham – Rockingham – Caldecott – Great Easton – Bringhurst - Cottingham.    

                          14.5 km.  Weston under Welland.  2.25 km.

 Walk 84:         Titchmarsh – Clopton – Barnwell All Saints – Barnwell St. Andrew – Pilton – Achurch – Titchmarsh. 24.5 km.

 Walk 85:         Barnwell – Thurning – Luddington – Hemington – Polebrook – Barnwell. 19.5 km.

 Walk 86:         Polebrook – Lutton – Warmington – Ashton – Polebrook. 17.5 km.  

 Walk 87:         Ashton – Tansor – Cotterstock – Glapthorn – Oundle – Ashton. 15 km. 

 

Maybe physics has yet more to teach us about the circle.

And may God give us all his peace and sense of satisfied completion as we near the end of our
earthly Walk. Amen. 

We're all one...

                                                   Raw material for the Championships 

Apparently a great opportunity awaits you on October 13^th, and boy, are we all going to need some cheering up this autumn! Sign up now. There’s just the chance you could become a World Champion – at conkers. The hosting of this prestigious event is just one of the many charming and quirky things about Ashton (near Oundle, as opposed to the one up the road from Roade!)

 Like many of his family Charles Rothschild (b. 1877) was a banker, but there was much more to the chap than that. He was passionate about Natural History, and the family story is that he was drawn to the area of Ashton - where as in many other places the Rothschilds had a house and land - because of the plethora of butterflies to be found there. He employed the architect William Huckvale to pull down the old house at Ashton Wold and build a new, healthier one furnished with all the turn-of-the-century mod cons. He also built a model village for the estate workers near the Polebrook road in a style that recalls the more famous Edwin Lutyens, providing an enlightened degree of comfort for a community of ordinary people too. Charles’ interest in the natural world passed to his daughter Miriam, who became a world expert on fleas.

 There’s no church in Ashton as such, but there is the ‘Creed Chapel’, which was built in the eighteenth century on a parcel of land known as ‘Play Close’ near what is now the Chequered Skipper pub. The ecclesiastical history of this little chapel is odd. Never consecrated, it was only licensed for ‘divine service’ after many decades. The Creed family charity provided for a clergyperson to come to Ashton until as late as the nineteen eighties, at which time it decided to concentrate on its major function of supporting the education of the village children . The door’s locked so I can’t get in, and so don’t get to see the family paintings.

 

I’m replaying my last walk in reverse as far as the shooting range, which I now know to be for the young men and women of Oundle School, so should be safe to cross during the summer vacation. I find being in the presence of guns anxiety-provoking – it causes an unpleasant, visceral, sympathetic, stomach lurch. There’s been much discussion about firearms in recent days: two more mass shootings in the US, greeted with the usual faulty reasoning and hypocrisy by their politicians and lobbyists, and calls in the UK for the police to be routinely armed after an unprovoked machete attack on an officer. This is surely not way-to-go. As with Nixon and Reagan, unorthodox Republican presidents sometimes achieve the unexpected. It’s probably within his power for Trump to make some limited moves towards gun control in the US, but whether he’ll deem it an electoral plus or minus is another matter – and I suppose that’s probably the significant factor.

 I hang a left and follow the bridleway across the fields to Tansor Lodge. Once I’m on the far side of the A605, I find myself in a field system with a gang of sprightly young calves, who look like they’re up for a rumble. They sprint along behind a hedge a hundred metres away on a parallel line, clearly aware of my presence, play peek-a-boo at a water trough, and then bounce round the field’s short side to huddle challengingly near the gated exit. ‘Yeah, well, watcha gonna do about it?’  seems to be the message: a bunch of teddy boys fingering their flick knives. Maybe they’ve seen West Side Story. (I’ve certainly been watching Shaun The Sheep!)  I try to look as big as possible, and as little like a source of food or entertainment as possible, and maintain a firm path towards the gate. When I’m within a couple of cricket pitches’ distance, they do an ‘only kidding’ and make like they’re being pursued by a team of rancheros with lassoes back whence they came. Kids, eh!

 Near Tansor, I cross to the road through a field of near-ripened wheat, and my mind goes to the story which provoked Jesus to his comment that the Sabbath was made for man, and not the other way round. I think (because my dad‘s in my mind a lot this week) how childhood Sundays in the Cross household seemed pretty much like a day of work rather than a day of rest. I’m still dealing with this sixty years later, still trying to grasp the fact that worship should be fun, relaxation, mind-expanding, full of colour and light:  something that also seemed to be eluding Libby Purves in a particularly cranky Times article a week ago, in the course of which she laid about her to all sides, including condemning Peterborough Cathedral for temporarily installing the space capsule which took Tim Peake to and from the ISS. Libby, there’s a great deal to be said about this, but to start with (and I don’t know if you took the time to visit?) it was pretty discreetly situated in a vast building. And Christians are often criticised for not being science-friendly, whereas in truth faith for many of us is only enhanced by our understanding that the universe is impossibly vast, and we impossibly insignificant by its standards, and yet God cares for us, just as much as he notices a sparrow’s fall.  Etc.

 The theme has been picked up in today’s BBC News website, not mentioning Peterborough, but renewing Libby’s attack on cathedrals: Norwich, where a helter-skelter has been erected in the nave, and Rochester, where they’ve set up a nine hole crazy golf course celebrating bridge-building. Yes OK, a bit weird, but hey, I haven’t been down to play a round, so provisionality ought to be the order of the day. And after all, thinking high culture, Caravaggio isn’t exactly to everyone’s taste either. Yet Gavin Ashenden, a Bishop in the breakaway Christian Episcopal Church offers the opinion that the clergy at Norwich had been ‘unprofessional’ and were ‘making a mistake about what a cathedral is good for’. I know it’s the silly season, but I’d hope the BBC could be clearer that as far as mainstream Anglicanism is concerned Gavin isn’t one of us, not now. He may indeed have been a chaplain to Her Majesty, but resigned from all that some while ago. In the way of things schismatic he would of course maintain that he’s the mainstream, and it’s all of us C. of E. remainers who are crazy in our women-ordaining, space-capsule loving apostasy. You’ve heard my refrain before, but we Anglicans are better together. And Christians are better together too. There’s nothing wrong in disagreeing strongly, but we should declare our interests properly. Gavin, and possibly Libby, please take note. And BBC, please find yourself some editors of greater competence for your influential website.

St. Mary’s, Tansor is an oasis on a humid sticky morning. Both south and north doors are open so a cool breeze wafts through, and birdsong is the music which accompanies my prayer and reading. It’s a church of nooks and crannies, many of which, as Pevsner has pointed out, are now beyond resolution or explanation, the accretion of need and fancy through many centuries. Libby Purves would like Tansor too, I think. Maybe even Gavin Ashenden. Oh no, sorry, the vicar’s a woman. I forgot.

 

Onwards along lanes, through Cotterstock where I have a fight to get into St. Andrew’s churchyard, let alone its high-towered building (I kick the gate hard to force it open – maybe the churchwarden has a better knack!) and forward to Glapthorn where low-slung St. Leonard’s backs on to a working farm. I can imagine Nativity services there might easily be accompanied by the lowing of real life cattle. Of the two villages, Cotterstock is the more apparently up-market, offering gracious buildings and a jolly mill. Glapthorn seems more workaday, stretching out longingly towards Oundle, only a mile distant across the fields.  Not everything about Cotterstock is classy. At the Manor, amongst a selection of admonitory notices aimed at the would-be intruder there’s one which reads ‘Smile, your on camera!’  I resist the temptation to ring the bell on their gate intercom, and begin a conversation: ‘Did you know…?’

                                                         St. Andrew's Cotterstock

And so to Oundle, the first of three towns out in the east of the diocese which are more or less defined by the schools named after them. If any American friends are reading this, these are our ‘public schools’, by which of course we mean ‘private schools’, last bastions of the famous English class system – an opinion which the schools themselves would of course hotly dispute. Change has come, not least because Oundle school is now co-ed, but a seven year stint there for a day pupil is going to cost over £125k, and boarding maybe a cool quarter of a million once everything’s taken into account. The facilities are marvellous, reminiscent of an Oxbridge college, and perhaps the contacts they make at their Oundala Mater will set pupils up for life, but this isn’t working towards an egalitarian society.  However when a new Ferrari 812 Superfast is a snip at £338k from your local South Kensington dealer, Public School education begins to look cheap. The morality and desirability of both perhaps needs to be interrogated by each new generation.

 The school buildings press in on all sides around the lofty needle spire and well-proportioned body of St. Peter’s church. In the context of the foregoing, is the slogan prominently displayed on all sides of the church as pointy as the spire?

 

 The child in me is really pleased when the automated church doors swing open for me to enter. Simon Jenkins thinks the interior ‘rather dull’, but I think it’s wonderful. The airy sense of space, and the soft light suffusing the harmonious decoration makes it a lovely, thoughtful, worship space. Everything reinforces the message that this is an inclusive church where all are welcome. Years ago that excellent slide guitarist Bryn Haworth recorded a Christian song called ‘We’re all one’. I remember standing in the crowd at Greenbelt and singing along with 25,000 others…and feeling a little uneasy about the experience. There was too much of a Hare Krishna chant about it for my taste, but then I’ve always been wary of the mass reactions of rock n’roll/festival audiences. (I’ve never felt so alone as amongst the punters at a Fish gig, feet sticking to the Northampton Roadmender’s beer-swilled floor, while everyone except me was punching the air and shouting the lyrics of each song. And I like Fish’s music!)

 

Thirty years later the swelling cult of the individual causes one to revisit the possible ideas behind ‘We’re all one’. Leaving aside any unintended Buddhist interpretation, how do you read it? And who is left outside our cosy psycho-physical unity? Not Gavin Ashenden or Libby Purves for sure, however much we might disagree with them. But thinking politically for a moment, are there any ideas which disqualify from entry to the Christian tent? Or if not from entry ( because only sick people go to hospital) then from claiming permanent membership status? Our first definition as Christians is clearly by who we are – positively – and Who we follow. Should we ever secondarily define ourselves by what we’re not?

As you’ll have gathered, I really like the vibe of Oundle’s church, and it goes on the list of: ‘I could worship here week by week'. One small gripe however. In the pews there are copies of St. Peter’s ‘Supplementary Songbook’. Their regular hymnbook is the familiar red-covered Hymns Ancient and Modern. The supplement gives a customised selection of more modern well-known hymns written and published after A&M’s issue. This is good, but nowhere in the supplement can I find any credit for the writers and publishers of the hymns. At best this is rude, and at worst it’s illegal and (this is going to sound very harsh) a kind of theft – though readers will appreciate that as a sort-of-meeja person I have a particular bias. The hymns aren’t the property of any individual or church, and their writers get very little, if any, reward for their efforts. They deserve this small celebration. It’s an omission which could easily be put right.

 

                                                                An Oundle scene...

In the sunshine, the Thursday market is winding down. I pass the Seven Wells butchers’ shop, purveyors of most excellent sausages, and take a coffee and cake in the café near the lane down to the Co-op. A large local family gathering occupies half the dining area with their friends, the kids mildly out of control, the adults invading my personal space as I’m served at the counter. I have to laugh at myself, so much a campaigner for the common people at one moment, so annoyed when I actually have to mix with them the very next. I suspect (though I don't have the carapace to be one) it’s a perennial dilemma for politicians. And the church?

 

Passes at GCSE:  15 km. 5 hrs. 24 deg.C.  Four stiles. Thirteen gates. Five bridges. Five churches and chapels. Two open. I don’t visit Oundle School’s chapel, which I maybe could have done. I look for kingfishers at the Nene crossing, but sadly there are none in evidence. I saw one there once. A preening peacock in Ashton. Six tourists in Oundle church.

                                                            The Nene at Ashton

Father
I praise you for
All the people
Who can do what I can’t
And never will.
I sit in these churches
And am amazed
At the accumulated skill:
The exactitude of the stonemason:
The subtlety of the wood carver:
The delicacy of the weaver:
The enterprise of the architect.
I sit in my house
Surrounded by
The appliance of science:
The wonder of electricity:
The reach of technology:
The creativity of entertainment:
All of which I do no better than half understand.

As I thank you for

Multiform human ingenuity
And feel its fragility,
I ask you to
Have mercy, O Lord,
And in your loving kindness
To prevent us from harm.
Help us be your partners
To make your Kingdom come
According to your will.
Amen.

 

Don't tell 'em your name, Pike...

                                             First in show: creative scarecrow near Papley

Pre-walk coffee: 10 a.m.: the commodious lounge of the Olive Grove garden centre just outside Polebrook. Unexpectedly I find I’m a walk-on in a Samuel Beckett play.

 Her:     (rustling the pages of her Express) …Don’t know about tea for tonight. There’s not much in the ‘fridge.

 Him:    (a subterranean rumble from inside his Telegraph) You don’t see marrows these days.

 Her:     Marrows.  No…

 Him:    Only those courgettes…

 Her:     Lots of them…( not concentrating…) Vegetables…

 Him:    I like ‘em stuffed…marrows.  Or steamed.  (Pause)  With a cream sauce…

 Ugh! Really? I park in Duke Street, opposite the church, and follow the way uphill where the sign directs to four mile distant ‘Norman Cross’ (no relative), a once important marker on the Great North Road. The air’s still and ominous in the valley, but clears with a slight breeze as I gain height. A shower tracks away to the south, the cloud purply blue and crowned with white like a Regency wig. The fields are summer yellow-brown now, but give way to a tract of woodland on either side of the Lutton road at Bluestone covert. It’s cool here, and the scents of childhood are with me. A pretty 20’s house reminds me of my long lost home on the edge of Kentish forest, a child’s closeness to the earth, the wonder of the changing seasons, the freedom of tea and cake carried off among the apple trees, the sense of a pioneering life away from the urban sprawl.

 

 Lutton straggles where the road wiggles through the village, the houses each on their own spacious plot, because there’s land here to spare for everyone in the Cambridgeshire hinterland: no need to huddle. The church of St. Peter is open, and I’m glad of its shade. Where the road opened out between the fields again, the heat reflected fiercely from its surface. Maybe I started today’s walk too quickly. Inside, St. Peter’s isn’t the tidiest church. There’s a pretty little (baroque?) organ, and I could probably wind it up to see what it can do but I’m feeling shy. The noise of assiduous strimming is close at hand. Perhaps someone’s working in the churchyard. I guess that forty or fifty years ago, there was heavy and neat restoration of some of St. Peter’s internal stonework. Kingdoms and enthusiasms rise and fall. I read Psalm 84 to myself, the pews and walls, Brahms playing in my head, Wie leiblich sind deine Wohnungen, Herr Sabaoth: that deeply concentrated mellow timbre of a nineteen sixties’ equal voice choir: Let The People Sing, The Huddersfield Choral, The Glasgow Phoenix…

 Outside again, I see that one of the nearby houses is having its beard trimmed. There’s creeper everywhere – a decorative theme repeated on some of its neighbours, hiding less-than-distinguished design. I’ve neglected to bring my camera with me, and am momentarily peeved, but it’s a very small discipline for a pilgrim to do without such a very discretionary prop. Then I recall that, though I’ve never used it for such purposes, my ‘phone will take pictures. Sitting on the bench beside the church I fiddle with focus and zoom, and realise that the ‘phone takes a perfect selfie without requiring physical contortion on my part (see the previous post). Oh dear! Another loss of innocence… Now I too can be a public nuisance in art galleries. And here’s me with another Vermeer…and there I am with Rembrandt…is that a spot on my nose?

 We sometimes buy strawberries and raspberries grown in Lutton from Sywell’s excellent Beckworth Emporium, but at Grange Farm there’s no sign of soft fruit, just a friendly farmer forking muck, who directs me round his barn to a bridleway which meanders across to the lost medieval village of Papley, now just a row of self-catering tourist cottages at the end of a track. The village lies under the grass; the raised sides of a moat where the Big House was, fishponds that became decorative garden features in post-medieval times, and the lumps and bumps of the platforms on which the villagers’ houses once stood, scattered post-apocalypse remnants in a Northamptonshire field. Beyond Papley the bridleway becomes…notional. I trust instinct and the line of the wood to my left, and emerge where I hope, not far from the road into Warmington. At a certain point, I glimpse the stately Perpendicular of Fotheringay’s church through a hedge. Suddenly Peterborough seems very near.

                                                               Papley: fish ponds

 It’s very difficult for someone d’un certain age, not to add ‘on-Sea’ to Warmington village’s name, pushing a button so that all those much-loved images of Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier and John Laurie flood the mind. At much the same time as Dad’s Army was becoming a telly perennial, Laurie imported his wild-eyed tartan into a memorable portrayal of John the Baptist for a radio production of Dorothy L. Sayers The Man Born To Be King. Inside St. Mary’s church where contemporary evangelical energy sits side by side with the ancient, contemplative cult of the Virgin, I start thinking about the famous Arthur Lowe line to Ian Lavender as they confront enemy protagonists: ‘Don’t tell ‘em your name, Pike…’ 

 How many Christians, like me, feel some sense of failure in our commission to explain? ‘No one’s ever been converted by you, you miserable worm’, goes the voice inside the head. ‘Call yourself a Christian?  By their fruits shall you know them? Pah!’ And we review our sinful lives and tell ourselves we’re not surprised. On the rare occasions we have poked our heads above the parapet to say Who we follow and what we believe, we sense that we’ve been undermined by our own pitifully inadequate behaviour. People have seen through us, and quite rightly. What price God, if we Christians can’t be better people? We’ve failed to preach the Gospel and shown our lack of faith all at the same time. We’ve failed to tell ‘em our name, but nonetheless betrayed our calling in a trope that could be called the Reverse Mainwaring.

 But clearly, something has changed in evangelism. The successful, more or less mainstream ‘crusades’ of the fifties and sixties are a thing of the past – though Billy Graham had his detractors even back then. It’s nearly 2020. Unless someone has stuck their head in the sand, you’d think there’d be no excuse whatsoever for not knowing 1) that millions of people worldwide still look to Jesus for an example of how to live, and 2) that they believe him to be God incarnate, a potentially Saving Presence for every human being. The only problem is how to make this series of startling claims stand out on the supermarket shelves of belief, among Area 51, buses on the moon, dianetics and all the other manifold esoterica. Is our job to be Desperate Persuaders, or merely to say ‘Here it is: it’s good. You should want some!’? 

 Iteratively, I try to lose the guilt about my inadequacy, and concentrate on being smart about my recommendation of God. As with everything else, I backslide, check myself, confess, pick myself off the floor, and have another go.

 

Warmington’s church is handsome, lovely and restored by Gilbert Scott et al. during the ‘Gothic Revival’. Simon Jenkins honours it in his 1000 Best Churches. He says: ‘This is Northamptonshire squat rather than soaring…the tower low and lucarnes uncommonly big, as if someone had grasped a taller structure and squashed it short’. This sounds like damning with faint praise, but it’s a noble place notwithstanding. And remember…Jenkins only lists 25 Northamptonshire churches in his thousand – though 14 in Rutland, which seems disproportionate, given the respective size of the two counties. (Apparently ‘lucarnes’ are dormer windows. No, I hadn’t heard of them before either.)

 I have a little fatigue difficulty on emerging into the sunlight. Suddenly, in the absence of a compass (I left that at home too!) I can’t make sense of my orientation. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m knackered and my brain won’t work. Too little water or food? Poor oxygen intake? I wander around for ten minutes before figuring out where I can pick up the Nene Way, and then head south on it following the line of the Roman road from Water Newton to Irchester in the unseen company of long dead squaddies, complaining about their feet and the inadequacy of the privies at the last camp. Near Elmington, where alternative routes are non-existent, there’s a quirk as the walker must cross a rifle firing range but is told not to do so if a red flag is flying.  Happily, the flagpoles are bare today, so I yomp on to Ashton.

 

 

 I sit on the green outside the Chequered Skipper pub, and watch as two patient horses are shod by a mobile smithy, the steam rising between the shady trees. To our friends Polly and Peter who have horses of their own, this would be an everyday matter, but for me, here among the picturesque ‘model village’ cottages of the Rothschild estate - which anyway feels like the set for a period drama – it’s a timeless, moving scene, marked by the utter nonchalance and complaisance of the two animals.

 Pennies from heaven: 17.5 km. 5 hrs. 22 degrees. It felt hotter than that! Increasingly sunny as the day wore on. No stiles. Five gates. Three bridges. Two churches, both open. England fighting back in the Test Match, despite injuries and dodgy technique, only to collapse hopelessly on subsequent days.

 Lord

I commend to you
All the lovely people I know.
My family.
My neighbours.
The community at St. Peter’s church in Weston Favell.
The friends we have
Scattered around Britain
And now sometimes abroad.
The talented musicians, actors and engineers
With whom I work.
The kaleidoscope of character
I encounter accidentally
Marrows, mince and Daily Telegraph.

‘Bring us, O Lord God

At our last awakening
Into the house and gate of heaven.
To enter into that gate
And dwell in that house
Where there shall be
No darkness nor dazzling
But one equal light;
No noise nor silence
But one equal music;
No fears or hopes
But one equal possession;
No ends or beginnings
But one equal eternity;
In the habitations of thy glory and dominion.
World without end.
Amen.’

(John Donne 1571 -1631)

 If you don’t know it already, check out the setting of these words by W.Harris, perhaps on the recording made by The Sixteen. Sublime, yearning and shiver-inducing.