Ronald Blythe makes plans to put out more flags

Growth and the ascension are reaching heavenwards together, as they always do in mid-May: The lanes close in; the river vanishes behind soaring armies of plants; all nature flowers and branches.

My once open walk to the little spinney that Celia devised as part of her plan, to make John Constable feel at home in his native landscape, should he come back to check on our handling of it, is now a plunge into a green bath. I am soaked in spring from the waist down, and a north wind freezes the rest of me. Moorhens., are sculpting the cold surface of the horse-pond. But when the sun comes oat it burns. This is May for you.

I am scything a nettle highway. I feel guilty about taking the nettles' life on a wet blade — so, new and so tall, and with as much right to this moment as the first roses, of myself, for that matter.

Nettles seem to cling to where men made a living. Perhaps we leave something behind amid our farm­ing failures which feeds them.

Or maybe they.come to draw a stinging curtain over our failed enterprise. Discreetly veiled in nettles, there is, on all farms, a cemetery for dead machinery, iron monsters tangling with each other in their uselessness and which are thankful when winter no longer exposes their poor parts.

The spring growth has its divine and unmistakable message, for, as Emily Dickinson says, "God is a noted clergyman whose sermons are never long."

Michael the Vicar and Elaine the Reader arrive, and we sit round the dining-table to devise a Jubilee service, a grand sing-song about Christ tbe King and Elizabeth the Queen; and, no, the choir will not be up to "Zadok tbe Priest". The British Legion is coming, and there with be flags. In fact, every­body is coming, and we shall have to set out more chairs. And nobody will need to be told what to do, for, whether in Westminster or Wormingford, the British are dab hands at ceremonial. Already peals are being planned and liturgies expertly run up.

And, of coarse, Wormingford is used to it Elizabeth I was here once or twice, ruining the Waldegraves at the Hall, and hunting the deer where Mr Rix now has his onions; and tbe same bells that rang for her will be ringing for her successor.

I stand in the shorn churchyard thinking of all this hubbub at Smallbridge Hall below, its Tudor chimneys struggling to be seen above the growth, and again I re­member Emily Dickinson:

This quiet dust was Gentlemen

     and Ladies

And Lads aad Girls,

Was laughter and ability and

     sighing

And frocks and curls.

It is Mother Julian's time. It most have been a struggle to sit tight in that anchorage in May, with the scent of the Wensum drifting through the stink of Norwich, and the spring birds calling where now the football club is yelling in Carrow Road. It must have been this time of year when she saw her dear Lord, and each one of us gardening to­gether, "Digging and banking, toiling and sweating, taming and trenching the ground, watering the plants the while... making sweet streams to flow, fine abundant fruits to grow..." The humility of her Jesus is an unsurpassed description tlhis aspect of him.  (17-May-2002)

As he reads a favourite book, Ronald Blythe is enchanted again

May-time, when I like to read Kilvert’s Diary to the congregation. It is not all that keen on readings, much preferring speakings without notes. I see the youthful Francis in his Clyro pulpit, trying not to see the girls. And I think of handsome Mr Elton eyeing Miss Woodhouse and her £30,000.

I look down on the same dear ones year after year, often seeing them in the places that they have vacated. The lasting enchantment of Kilvert’s Diary is its lasting freshness. And particularly in May. It is dewy, and untouched by matur­ity. He would die suddenly at 39, never having quite grown up or grown out of his freshness. It was heaven’s special gift to him. In May, he blooms like the plentiful flowers in this parish.

“Wednesday 13 May. This happy afternoon I went lilying in Hart­ham woods with sweet Georgie Gale... Today was the Bath Flower Show. But I would rather have gone lilying with sweet Georgie Gale in Bartham Woods than have gone to a hundred flower shows.

“A lily of a day

“Is fairer far in May

“. . . We were talking of Father Ignatius and his monastery in the Black Mountains.”

Kilvert’s happiness came and went like our May’s downpours and sunshine. Witnessing young men in habits hacking away at the soil as if they lived in the Middle Ages made him miserable. No en­lightened Church of England, no girls. And when all around them in the Welsh hills the spring was in full tilt, and when clearly Robert Browning’s God was in his heaven, well, it was perverse. Yet he was touched by their holiness. And thankful that he had a gardener. Parish duties aside, he needed all his energy for walking, and all his confessions for writing.

As president of the Kilvert Society, I haven’t enough energy to attend its meetings on the Welsh border, but my heart is often there. And, anyway, what would the white cat, let alone our three parishes, do if I followed Kilvert around?

Herefordshire in May is both near to and distant from East Anglia. At the moment, ignorant as much of distance as of time, the white cat slumbers on an old chest. She has pushed aside a pot of dried poppy heads and a dozen novels to make a polished bed.

Outside, soaked horses devour soaking grass. Down below, the Stour is high. The lanes are better paddled than walked. Every now and then, the skies are turned off to allow me to mow a lawn; for life in a village is concessionary. No sooner do I go in at the first spat than green woodpeckers, collar-doves, pheasants, and chaffinches come out.

And so have all the bluebells at Tiger Hill — maybe a million of them. We all paid court to them, treading slippery paths, intoxicated by their strangely beautiful scent, awed by their psychedelic blueness. Are there words for it? A new Way­faring tree has been planted in their azure realm. Our ancestors set Viburnum lantana on pilgrim routes just for ornament.

Human cruelty often stops Kilvert in his tracks. Mindless cruelties born of ignorance were part of the old rural year. Walking to the Bronith, he finds a dead blackbird in a gin. It is a late Easter, and the creature reminds him of the Cross.  (7782)

A New Testament page-turner

And the rain it raineth every day.  The white cat is writing to the RSPCA to complain about my cruelty at allowing this to happen.  To have to be dried out on a radiator every morning.  It is intolerable.  But the horses are animated by the mighty showers, and careen over the hill, their happy sloping bodies showering the grass.  Sepia skies are streaked with gold.  Things are coming up in the beds with all their might.  One might be in Wales.

On Sunday, I preached on St Mark, a fast favourite.  What style!  His Gospel is brief and brilliant.  He is the Ezekiel of the New Testament, youthful and charismatic, addressing the universe.  His symbol is borrowed from Ezekiel’s winged lion, the noise of whose wings was like a great torrent, or cloudburst.

Ezekiel said, having to explain himself, one supposes: “A spirit lifted me up and carried me along, and I went full of exultation, the hand of the Lord strong upon me.”  Mark, too, is a winged intellect who knows how to keep the pages turning.  His Gospel contains no nativity, no holy boyhood, but opens with a shout: “Prepare a way for the Lord!”

It is only in Mark that we have the parable of the sower, and a command to stay awake.  He is a broadcaster — a word for throwing seed this way and that in springtime.  He knows a lot about waste, hazard, and survival.  Its agricultural imagery, for the first time in 2000 years, falls short of familiarity these days.

Who was Mark?  As the cousin of Barnabas, he was probably from Cyprus.  Paul took him on those long walks into Asia Minor.  He and Timothy.  Paul is old, battered, and near to death.  He tells his young friends that it is their turn to pursue integrity, love, and peace, because “I have run the great race, have finished the course, and the prize awaits me.”

My favourite Pauline instruction is when he tells Timothy to “Pick up Mark, and bring him with you, for I find him a useful assistant...  When you come, bring the cloak I left with Carpus, and the books; above all, my notebooks.”

Like Mark’s Gospel, John Keats’s poem “The Eve of St Mark” is unfinished.  Not concluded.  But it might have been written at this moment.

The city streets were clean and fair 

From wholesome drench of April rains; 

And, on the western window panes, 

The chilly sunset faintly told 

Of unmatur’d green vallies cold...

A girl closes an old book, and walks to evensong in Winchester Cathedral, her head full of puzzling thoughts about its “legend pages”.  Curious and beautiful things sparkle on it, such as the

Candlesticks John saw in heaven, 

The winged Lion of Saint Mark, 

And the Covenantal Ark 

With its many mysteries, 

Cherubim and golden mice.

(7781)

These are a few of my favourite things

Certain happiness.  Pear blossom.  Six a.m. tea.  Matins for a dozen in the chancel.  Making my sweet-pea wigwam.  Seeing strangers pass.  Listening to the director of the British Museum on the radio.  Watching the manes of the horses on the hill being caught in the wind.  Reading Psalm 96.

Eating a miser’s meal — pot d’jour, a curling crust, cheese ends, and a wizened apple.  Loving my little cat.  Not going to the party.  Sploshing up the farm track.  Remembering the Garretts in Cambridge.  Listening to David Holt reading George Herbert.  Seeing the boundary ditch full of water.  A whisky at bedtime.

Silence.  Oaks before ash promising a splash.  Re-reading Swann’s Way.  Finding the nail scissors.  Visiting the new bookshop in Stoke-by-Nayland.  Watching the world greening.  Remembering the Turners in Cornwall.  Finishing a chapter.  Choosing a page of Kilvert’s Diary for a sermon.  Hearing a climbing rose scratch against the window, like Catherine Earnshaw’s escape-me-never hands.

Eating olives.  The lawnmower starting at first pull.  Feeding chaffinches.  Watching Dan draw.  The unbelievable scent of bluebells.  The kindness of strangers at the hospital.  Ash log fires.  New jerseys.  Giving Vicky plants.  Hearing bumble bees.  Knowing that the summer spreads before me.  Finding true sadness at the passing of Gerald, the village-shop dog.

Finding stitchwort and wild garlic in their accustomed spots.  Touching the sun-warmed Roman bricks of the Saxon tower in Colchester and imagining the hands that formed them.  Seeing beautiful girls lean on the 1000-year-old doorway.  Myself seeing for the thousandth time the house of John Wilbye, the madrigalist, whose patron gave him a sheep farm for his services.  Listening hard, what bliss to hear him singing among the shoppers.

Catching sight of my little owls in the blackthorn, where they have always been.  The satisfaction when flowers and creatures know their places.  Choosing hymns for Sunday — carefully, of course, as our three churches have three different books.  Three parish magazines as well.  Three of everything.  One of the vicar; one of myself.  I consider our oneness.

Rape will soon yellow everything.  Its seeds will go to the crusher, and their oil to Waitrose.  News from a foreign country comes.  Owen has died in Wales.  I hear his piano thundering Bach in his cold house.  Also our talk as we climb the Black Mountain.  How quiet it will be now.  No loud voice, no confident keys.  He was staunchly Chapel, and went on taking services until his congregation went to God before him.  Then he followed.  I took him to Shingle Street when he came to stay in Suffolk — as a treat.  Was I having a joke? He had shown me mountains, wonders...  His bewilderment at this time-distance makes me joyful.  It was quite something to disconcert Owen.

The April happiness of finding so much promising.  To have it all before one.  Though not to count the days, but to let them bud and open; the weather to try everything on from gale to serenity; the pages of the current book to fall into chapters; the man from the British Museum to show Shakespeare in a handful of artefacts; and George Herbert to show us the Church as only he can.   (7780)

The soft song of the trees

[Bottengoms, half hidden in the trees]

“HOW many trees have you got?” asks the little boy.  One, an enormous willow, has tipped over, and he sees it split in three.  A hundred, 200, I hazard. I planted a few broad-leaved ones a lifetime before he was born.  To fill the spaces left by the elms. I live in a small wood, thus, tree-music is a constant.

The wood is greening at this moment — greening and whispering.  I have sent a postcard of John Constable’s bark-study to Dan to tell him: “Please come on Monday.” My trees enchant him.  He has been to the David Hockney exhibition, and to Paris.  The Hockney wood puzzles him, as it does me.  The absence of botany, shall we say.

When Constable was a lad, and walking to see his Wormingford family — “the Wormingford folk” — he had to pass an enticing medieval park, about five miles from here, and the baronet kindly gave him a pass which said: “Pray permit Mr Constable to draw the trees.”  This so that the gamekeepers did not drive him out.

Tom Gainsborough had painted Cornard Wood a few miles away.  They say that there are more trees hereabouts now than in their day.  Paul, our tree man, has to hold an inquest on my tumble-down willow — what to do?  A standing tree inhabits the sky; a fallen one lives nowhere, and dies everywhere.

In the past, Christians called the Cross “the Tree”.  Fortunatus sang:

O Tree of beauty, Tree of light, 

O Tree with royal purple dight, 

Elect on whose triumphal breast 

Those holy limbs should find their rest!

In the Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood”, the writer is contemplating the crucifixion:

The finest of trees began to talk: 

“I remember the morning, a long time ago 

That I was felled at the edge of the forest 

And severed from my roots. Strong enemies seized me 

And fashioned me for their sport, bade me hold up their felons on high. . . 

I saw the Lord of Mankind courageously hasten to climb upon me.”

My trees certainly chatter away — best of all, the aspens in summer; sotto voce, enticingly, articulating tree happiness.  I lie beneath them, book unread, seduced by their soft song, like John Clare or Thomas Traherne.  So much occurred under trees in the Bible.  They became markers for beginnings from Eden onwards.  Scripture is a virtual forest and a simple shade, a bare wood and a glorious orchard.

Our churchyard trees were planted by a Victorian priest.  Should one of them depart, we introduce another.  Their dust and our dust have an arrangement that suits us both.  I sit under them, waiting for the ringers to approach an end.  They have to be pagan in spite of our poets, which is another kind of sacredness.

There are wayside oaks that are contemporary with Arden.  And, down by the river, delicate, shivery cricket-bat plantations, which are harvested every 15 or so years.  An Easter full moon looked down on them. (7779)

Ronald Blythe muses of the death of two archbishops

I HAVE been re-reading, as I sometimes do at this time of the year, Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop.  It tells of an elegant French priest sent to carve out a diocese in New Mexico in the 1850s, when, by nature, he would have much preferred to read Madame de Sévigné in the gardens of Italy.

Although an aesthete, however, Fr Jean Marie Latour possesses a spiritual toughness that makes him the right choice for this enormous work.  Thus, in unforgettable prose, he rides off.

New Mexico was converted ages before by the Jesuits, but the faith has been distorted by folk-art, etc., and Latour’s task is really more difficult than if he had to bring the Church to where there was no Christianity at all.  Cather’s writing is that of a great traveller, and her psychology that of a supreme artist of the 1920s.  Her young priest, who is often dreaming of Paris and thinking in poetry, does all that is demanded of him, and dies an old archbishop.

Latour comes to mind in April because it is when we should remember Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in 1012 by some drunks who had kidnapped him.  Like Becket — and like a surprising number of priests who hoped to evade high office in order to live as their personalities required them to live — he had been forced to leave his cell in the ruins of Bath to be Bishop of Winchester.  He was 30.  Twenty years later, he was a reluctant Archbishop of Canterbury.

The convention of Danegeld was in full swing when the northern raiders demanded ransoms to stop their burnings and rapes.  In 1012, they demanded the enormous ransom of £48,000.  The King was too scared to do anything; so it was Archbishop Alphege who held a council, at which, instead of talking about money, he reminded everyone of the laws of Christian civilisation, and how these must prevail at all costs in the face of lawlessness and inhumanity.

Alphege’s position and courage were very like those of so many martyrs, including Becket — and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by the Gestapo at Flossenbürg in 1945, the pattern never changing over a thousand years.  The mockery and violence was that of the soldiery before the crucifixion.

This is what Bonhoeffer wrote on the eve of his execution.  He had been in New York — he need not have returned to the Nazis:

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray
And to concentrate my thoughts on you:
I cannot do this alone.
In me there is darkness,
But with you there is light;
I am lonely, but you do not leave me;
... In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways,
But you know the way for me...
Restore me to liberty...
Lord, whatever this day may bring,
Your name be praised.

(7778)

Ronald Blythe steels himself to read a graphic crucifixion

I am apt to forget that old neighbours are as likely to know the interior of my old house as well as I do.  The garden and wood, too, of course.  The other day, David told me about my black-leaved blackberries.  And I showed him the walnut tree that had been planted for his parents’ golden wedding.

The babysitters of the inter-war years are few on the ground; ditto the old chaps in the snapshots who tiffled about with hoes and scythes.  And the lads drinking Tizer on the wall are likely to be no more.  But the pond plants are golden every spring.  They found blackberry seeds in the tummy of the Neolithic man who was taken from his grave at Walton-on-the-Naze, I was told.

A long time ago, a very ancient person came to see me, wondering if he could still hear the church clock strike from the pear tree.  He could.

“Hev you still got that ol’ glasshouse?”

“It collapsed.”

“I’m grieved to hear that.”

It is Passiontide, and I am thinking of the Lady Julian.  Not that it is her time, but she comes into my head now and then. I am thinking of her account of the crucifixion, which I hardly dare read, though I must.  We all should.

“And the words of Christ dying came to mind.  ‘I thirst.’  I saw that he was thirsty in a twofold sense, physical and spiritual... That his blessed frame was drained of all blood and moisture... What could be seen of the skin of the face was covered with tiny wrinkles, and was tan-coloured; it was like a plank when it has been planed and dried out.  The face was browner than the body... He was hanging in the air like some cloth hung out to dry.”

Julian the writer is the mistress of aridity.  Hers is the dustiest language we have for the desert experience.  But, when she describes Newman’s “second Adam” in gardening imagery, she really does make the rain fall and the streams flow.  God is the master, his Son the servant.

The latter is “dressed simply, like a man ready for work — ‘He was wearing a single white coat, old and worn’.  For he was to be a gardener, digging and banking, toiling and sweating, turning and trenching the ground, watering the plants the while.  And by keeping at this work he would make sweet streams to flow, fine abundant fruits to grow; he would bring them to his lord, and serve them to his taste.”

From her window on the world, Julian would have seen the River Wensum in flood, and the orchards of her Norwich neighbours.  Also a scaffold, maybe.  They say that Celtic crosses do not show the crucified Jesus, but the risen Lord.  We sang “My song is love unknown” at evensong.  It is a play on George Herbert’s poem “Love Unknown”, and it, too, rehearses the appalling nature of the crucifixion, although not with Julian’s realism.

The media never draw the line.  Young bodies show their mutilations while we eat and chat.  The Cross dangles from bracelets.  I preach on contemplation, knowing that neither I nor my listeners are able to see what Julian saw.  (7777)