She thought, this church was built in the years after the Black Death had killed a third of the people. It was built out of fear. It’s a bribe to God: Please don’t do it again. ‘All things bright and beautiful,’ she sang, ‘the Lord God made them all.’ Presumably, the Lord God had also made the malaria which had killed nine of the blacksmith’s children in Wakenhyrst, prompting his desperate wife to smother the last one in its cradle, ‘to get it over with.’
