TRAVELLIN' SOLDIER

It's that time of the year again...Hallowe'en prep in Cottesmore

Military metaphors abound in Christian hymns of a certain age: ‘Fight the good fight’: ‘Onward Christian soldiers’: ‘Soldiers of Christ arise’. Some of them draw from biblical sources, others more from the lived experience of Victorians. After our first visit to Israel in 1977, I remember going into church the following Sunday to discover we were about to sing ‘Who is on the Lord’s side?’, a hymn steeped in nineteenth century battle imagery.  It made me so angry that after the second verse I walked out.  We’d just spent three weeks under a more or less perpetual security alert. It had come as a shock. We’d been guests of a Tel Aviv local authority. Our group of teenage dancers and musicians had been accompanied by an armed guide wherever we went. There’d been at least two incidents related to our presence. Near the Lebanese border our evening meal was interrupted as men with rifles dived into the bushes, searching for intruders. At one venue near Haifa, an evening performance became an afternoon show because insurgents had been shooting at the lights on the open-air stage. At one kibbutz the kids bopped along to the Bee-Gees in a bomb shelter, oblivious to its practical use. Back in Northampton that Sunday, the idea of a church full of comfortably middle-class Brits singing enthusiastically about the ‘heat of battle’ was, hem-hem, a ‘bridge too far’.  Now, looking back over nearly fifty years, of course my perspective has changed.  I could have cut that congregation some slack. In 1977 the conclusion of World War 2 was only twenty-eight years away: for many of our fellow-worshippers it was as recent a memory as 9/11 is for us today.  But I still have a problem with ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Don’t expect to find it in a service when I’m choosing the music!

Today’s walk takes me all the way round the site of the former RAF Cottesmore, now the Kendrew Barracks. Some of it I’ve walked before, and the record of that can be found in: https://walkingtopeterborough.blogspot.com (walks 109-111: July-August 2020). In the waiting time before what everyone expects to be a larger Israeli invasion of Gaza, with all its attendant diplomatic flurrying, and shaking of heads concerning likely outcomes, military matters are naturally on my mind today.

Even as I walk out of Greetham along the main road past the southern perimeter of Kendrew, I can hear a chopper practising takes-off and landings. Although the noise is extremely loud, I can’t see it because the morning is very misty and the cloud base very low. It’s rather eerie. Maybe the Army has developed a ‘stealth technology’ so effective it matches the fictional ‘cloaking’ of the Klingons. Insert your own ‘laugh’ emoji!

Two of the three churches I visit today were closed last time out because of Covid. Like most people, I’m not shy of using a ‘fighting’ metaphor in relation to disease, so why am I so sensitive when it comes to spiritual health?

There’s an RAF chapel in St. Nicholas’ Cottesmore. The altar cloth has RAF wings on it, and in a strikingly imaginative move, a model of a World War 2 era Mosquito fighter-bomber is suspended over the chairs.  By the instructions of a former priest, this is at the ‘height of three choirboys’. Cottesmore church is large and very agreeable. It’s a pleasure to sit in its airy space, surrounded by encouragement for the presence of children, and remember.

I walk out the back of the churchyard, past the well-appointed C. of E. primary school, and slog up the busy road towards Market Overton. A flatbed with two portable ‘Euro-loos’ tied to it passes me at speed (what makes a loo ‘Euro’?) trailing a sanitising, non-natural floral perfume behind it. I divert to the hamlet of Barrow. On my left near the village limit, a ‘Grand Design’ of a house is being constructed, its foundations so well sunk that I assume one of its storeys will be below ground. The floor plan seems massive. On the other side of Barrow’s stream, almost on a level with it, another development is in its early stages. The flatbed with the loos has just arrived there, for the workmen’s comfort. I have difficulty watching Kevin McCloud’s programme these days.  Initially entertaining and thought provoking, perhaps it’s fed too much the desire of people to provide for their own wellbeing at the expense of others. 

It was a hot day when last I’d walked to Market Overton, and I was tired, so I’d failed to fully appreciate the loveliness of the buildings clustered around the green with its well-preserved  stocks – where I guess the ‘market’ was once held.  The Overton family were the original Lords of the Manor in our own village of Morcott. Now I think of the two cricketing brothers of that name, who this week have lost their England contracts. They’re massively big men. I wonder if their Rutland forebears were similarly sized? 

In St. Peter and St. Paul’s churchyard, I’m greeted by Martin who’s working his way round its considerable area with his mate, tidying up the graves and clearing the unwanted foliage. Martin is a P.C.C. member: its youngest at the age of – well middle-aged, anyway. On an average Sunday he tells me there’ll be maybe fourteen worshippers. About the same as us, I say, which we agree is maybe a little disappointing for a place the size of Market Overton. The village is part of the Oakham benefice, which has divided itself into quasi-sub-benefices. The excellent Deborah Marsh, with a background in nursing, is its priest-in-charge. She also looks after Whissendine (one of the larger villages in Rutland), Ashwell, and the utterly beguiling Teigh. No small job. Martin was at one time with the RAF, and for a short while served at Cottesmore. He’s done lots of other things too.  I should think his practical skills and can-do attitude will be invaluable to the parish. Go, Martin! How we need folk like you.

The lane down to the industrial estate is flooded after the recent heavy rain (Storm Babet). I take to a soggy field to circumnavigate it, and then continue on a track I remember as hard work the last time I tried it.  It still is today, though not corrugated as three years ago. The extra centimetre or two of height in each step across the long grass saps energy and leg-power. Around me are fields which were restored when the Stewart and Lloyds company stopped extracting ironstone. I hover on the verge of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, then turn back to Thistleton with its tiny chapel of ease, another St. Nicholas. In doing so I’ve passed the Thistleton Gap, famous for a different kind of fighting. The church’s ‘Community Hub’ has produced a number of local history leaflets with the assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund. One of them is entitled ‘When Thistleton hosted a World Championship Boxing Match’. IMO it’s an exemplary piece of work about nineteenth-century prize-fighting. You should easily find it on the Web if you can’t visit Thistleton in person.

 

St.Nicholas' Thistleton

What is it that makes young men want to fight? Apart from testosterone, that is.  Or maybe that’s all it is, though questions which involve body chemistry and morality can be un-nerving. At the moment I’m transcribing my grandfather-in-law’s account of his Victorian/Edwardian life.  During the Second Boer War, all he can apparently think of is, how can he get as close to the ‘excitement’ of the events as possible?  No consideration of personal danger or death. Not much thought about the rights and wrongs. Is it a sense of wanting to be where history is being made? An act of rebellion against his dominating father – to prove himself a ‘real’ man? Or simply to rid himself of his relentless, urgent energy? 

I pick up the Viking Way as it passes along the eastern edge of the former RAF base on the way back to Greetham. At its nearest to the boundary of the airfield, a security van makes three journeys parallel to me, though I’m never closer than two hundred metres to the perimeter fence. Interesting.  Are there any hidden cameras?  I’m hobbling by now, and if they can see me at all, they should be able to work out I’m distinctly senior. I suppose my ancient ‘knobbler’ stick could be mistaken for a weapon, and my scummy hat for primitive military wear, but I’d rate my threat potential as ‘very low’. The runway seems in good condition, despite its lack of current use.  There are two explosions in the distance, one particularly resonant. A plume of smoke rises from an area on the far side.  And from the far east, as there often is, the sound of fast jets rehearsing for combat over the flatlands of Lincolnshire, growling, but unseen.  They’re keeping us safe, I know, but in the midst of international uncertainty it’s all a little unsettling.  Onward Christian soldiers. I hope we’re not marching to war, except against sin and the Devil.

Thistleton and Greetham (Louie Burrows and D.H. Lawrence) 

Storm in a tea-cup

I felt the tempest

of him everywhere;

the wind in the trees

blowing them bare,

raking my mistletoe

bundle of hair.

 

And crazed as ever

our world went round;

his mouth on my pulsing

neck pushing down,

as his breast to my stifled

breast was bound.

 

And my heart at the centre

of all, whirled round

in eccentric orbit

o’er the ground

where he, still as a pivot

stood without sound.

And still in my memory

we were all enmeshed

in taste and grip;

repulsed and refreshed

like ripened grain

garnered and threshed.

 

And the world collapsing

in the withdrawal of joy;

the end of the dance;

a rhythm destroyed

as reason and sense

still spun like a toy.

 

But firm at the end

my heart was found;

no longer to his pulsing

Heart-beat bound.

No frenzy, no drama;

my feet on the ground. 

‘Oo-er, missus!’  Not the kind of thing you’ll normally read on these pages. Louise Burrows, later of Thistleton and then Greetham (as Mrs Louise Heath), was engaged to the writer D.H.Lawrence  ( ‘Bert’!) after they’d trained together as teachers in Nottingham. It was a love affair doomed by Lawrence’s wayward temperament. He wrote a poem about ‘Louie’ entitled ‘Kisses in the train’, and this is my parodying answer to it, but in Louie’s voice, rather than Lawrence’s.  She remained fond of him, who knows why – he was a cad - but eventually married well. She was probably the model for ‘Ursula Brangwen’ in ‘The Rainbow’. 

As always, and I know you know this. All material herein © Vince Cross 2023 

Greetham – Cottesmore – Barrow – Market Overton – Thistleton – Greetham 

19 km.  5.8 hours.  13 C. max. Initially misty/cloudy but brightening to clear skies with a little cloud later.

'Travellin' Soldier' was written by Bruce Robison in the mid-90's. It tells the tale of  a girl who, during the Vietnam War, serves coffee to a young recruit, and then writes him letters while he's away. This being country music, as you can guess, the story doesn't end well. It was recorded by 'The Chicks', formerly 'The Dixie Chicks', good Democrat gals, who changed their name to avoid suggesting an unhelpful stance in the current American political and social climate.