LET 'EM IN

There’s more to Wymondham than I’d thought – it’s just that you don’t see most of it when creeping up on the church from the Oakham side.  There’s a confluence of roads from the surrounding villages, a pub (The Berkeley Arms), and above the village beyond the site of the old railway station on Butt Lane, the Windmill, with a lovely café and a few courtyard shops. I begin the day there with a restorative coffee.

Thinking about it again, and today being St. Edmund’s day, perhaps the saint was the derivation of ‘Edmondthorpe’ (the station was once ‘Edmondthorpe and Wymondham’). On the other hand, since you have to climb a hill for the windmill (duh!) there’s a nice symmetry about the two place-names, if ‘Wy’ can be stretched to stand for ‘west’ and ‘Ed’ is east. Viewed from the centre of Wymondham every way is up, eventually and a little bit.  This is not mountainous country.

From the junction beyond the windmill, near a trig point which has my elevation at 133 metres, I take the lane towards Saxby, with the ‘Old Grammar School’ clearly visible on my left, before I tire of dodging the traffic and take the shorter and not-much-used field path. The school was only open for a couple of decades from 1882, a stopping-off place as a national education system began to emerge between 1870 and 1944. The children admitted (the boys admitted!), twenty-five of whom were to board there, qualified if they could read, write from dictation, and do a few sums. For a few of them the education would be free.  What a huge distance we’ve come over a century or so, in terms of organisation, and the perceived value of learning, not only in terms of usefulness to the individual and the nation, but for its own sake too.  Don’t get me started…

The footpath zigs and zags through increasingly smaller fields and then I pick my way round to Saxby’s one-time church of St. Peter, now privately owned, though as a condition of sale, one can wander around the churchyard.  I want to knock on the door and ask some questions, but the front door in the bell-tower is forbidding and I lose my nerve.  What was the asking price?  Do the owners regard themselves as guardians of what is in fact a most handsome Georgian building, a country cut-down of one of Hawksmoor’s London churches? Do they feel any spiritual connection from living in the place?  Or in retrospect, do they have regrets about the purchase? (It might have deficiencies, or be expensive to maintain, or they might suffer nuisance from nosey-parkers like me!)  All this I am curious about, but none the wiser. There may also have been stipulations about what should be preserved internally, and this too I’d like to know. This is a concern which will recur elsewhere during the next twenty or thirty years: it’s already been a stumbling block in one redundant church near Northampton. 

I decline the opportunity to push further west to Saxby’s twin star, which rejoices in the name of Freeby. If there’s a village shop or pub, I should think they’re weary with the jokes, like people whose family names are Sidebottom or Goodenough. Saxby and Freeby are tiny, in common with the other hamlets I visit today. Partly in consequence of that, like Teigh, just down the road, Saxby was/is a ‘thankful village’ i.e. it lost none of its sons and daughters in the ‘Great War’.  There are just two others in Leicestershire.

There’s a ‘road closed’ sign in the bushes beside the track which leads northwards from Saxby. The ground surface has apparently dried a little in the last week, but underneath everything’s still very damp, and maybe the field road is deemed impassable because of the floods:  I negotiate several large puddles, tip-toeing around the track margins, trying to avoid snagging my anorak on the brambles. Had it been drier I’d have taken the path around the woods to cross the low ridge down into Garthorpe, but I choose the easy option along the metalled lane.  St. Mary’s church stands at a crossroads, beside a lonely house, and even its gate is unforgiving when I try to push it open (and even harder to shut after I’ve used the shelter of its porch as my restaurant).  It’s under the care of the CCT, and their on-line description (which I read after the event) makes me wish I’d called for the key – except for the bat-droppings - apparently a recurrent problem.  But in the moment, I remember that I’m here to pray rather than observe – for the people of the village, the vicar, and those who do and don’t have any care for their place of worship. 

Churchwarden

The smallest thing – to unlock the church

and then each afternoon to shut its door again;

putting to bed for one more night the sacred silence;

writing another line in the epic tale;

pausing to check there’s no one trapped inside.

No.

Nothing happened here today,

only Mr. God waiting for requests that never came,

eternally immanent in His temple,

while round the walls life revolved uncaring

of the salvation poised within

(except sometimes at birth and death).

No small thing then, as the darkness falls,

to offer some token for the loneliness.

Good night, old friend:

we shall greet the sunrise you and I

and hope for a better day.

From Garthorpe it’s a slightly perilous trek up the B676 to Coston. The verges are narrow, but the tarmac has been re-laid, so the walk is smooth, unlike me. Even the roadside hedges look glorious in the sun of this very late autumn. Maybe it’s just that I’m watching old editions of ‘Time Team’ at the moment, but approaching St. Andrew’s church from the west, the core of the building and the north aisle strongly remind me of artists’ impressions of high-status Roman architecture.  And this shouldn’t be surprising, given the importance and ‘multi-valency’ of the medieval parish church within a community, but the connection to the distant human past still takes my breath away. An unusually readable guide to St. Andrew’s by Dr. Pamela Fisher can be found on-line, full of interesting detail. Such descriptions can be over-fussy and technical, but Dr. Fisher steers the fine line to combine architectural accuracy with the anecdotal.  The church contains a memorial to the actor Temple Crozier, the son of a one-time Rector by the same name. In 1896 Crozier the younger met his end on stage at the age of only twenty-four when a prop was replaced by a real dagger during a performance of the play ‘The Sins of the Night’ at the Novelty Theatre in London’s Great Queen Street.  The ‘accident’ was by the hand of Wilfred Moritz Franks, who’d unaccountably swapped the dummy weapon for a real one for one night only. He was said to be a friend of Crozier’s, and no charges were ever brought, but at this distance in time the combination of the substitution and the ‘well, my hand just slipped’ testimony doesn’t look good for Franks.  Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much cops and robbers’ telly.

St. Andrew's Coston

17 km. 5.5 hours (but 45 mins of that was spent in the tea-room, and some of the rest navigating water-logged fields on the way back to Wymondham).  12C, but at noon feeling warm in the sunshine.

Wymondham – Saxby – Garthorpe – Coston – Wymondham 

‘Let ‘em in’  is a song by Paul MacCartney recorded by his band ‘Wings’ in the early 1970s. The verse lyric runs: ‘Someone’s knocking at the door/someone’s ringing the bell/Do me a favour/Open the door and let’em in…’ 

All three churches today were locked. The dilemma between protecting the fabric/contents and allowing free access to a place of worship remains.  We heard only this week of the theft of irreplaceable artefacts from Malmesbury Abbey.  The silverware, if melted down, will have tragically little value compared with its historical and emotional significance.