Time and times (concluded)

After seeing the stone, steepholm and I retired squelching to a pub lunch and a look round the church at Chew Magna.  A good ring of bells there, an excellent Elizabethan tomb—its sleepers Christianly composed, assured of green pasturage—and a brass plaque for that irredeemable neo-pagan Giles Lytton Strachey.  A pity there’s no monument.   Those long long hands cry out for stone.

As in most Anglican churches, there is a board listing the incumbent vicars, back to first records of the parish.   Besides the names and dates, this one gives each vicar’s patron and how his tenure was vacated—usually per mort, though one was deprived by Queen Mary and his three successors resigned.  The year 1643 was striking:

Incumbent                               How Vacated                          Patron

Robert Joyner                              Dispossessed                              John Amory
Stubbs—A Preacher                                                                          The Mob
Robert Cross                                                                                      Commissioners of the Great Seal


Having begun it the night before with steepholm 's other guest, a scholar of medieval Welsh, we were hoping to finish watching The Owl Service (1969).  I’ve wanted to see that ever since 1975 in Cambridge, when I heard Alan Garner rant.  As I recall it, he was glittering mad.  He seemed to feel dispossessed by the boy who played his character, Gwyn.

Anyway, we got through about two-thirds of it.  O my.  I’ll bet that haunted some dreams.

(Later in Florence I saw cut and folded paper owls, very much to Alison’s pattern.  Hand-marbled Florentine paper, and alas! quite dear:  so I admired and sighed and went on.)

On the way to the airport, steepholm (ever the family archivist) handed me an old letter to read.  O my O my.  Some years ago Garner wrote a poem—an elegy, a celebration—on the late glorious David Munrow; he wanted steepholm ’s brother the composer to set it.  A lovely lost undertaking.

Nine