THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME

 

Green

I’m not a painter. Far from it – a teacher at my Primary school once delivered her termly verdict on my ‘art’ with the devastating/amusing put-down ‘messy but improving’. If I were to try my hand at painting today, I guess the same would be said, undoubtedly with the coda: ‘but not a lot’. Nevertheless, I like watching Sky TV’s annual ‘Landscape Artist of the Year’. A group of contestants is often asked to grapple with a scene that’s mostly green, and it’s always interesting. Because, of course there isn’t a single green, as my six-year old self might have naively thought, but an astonishing range of colours with a family resemblance such that we’re able to refer to them by the same adjective.  And in this spring, right now, the whole Dulux colour chart of green-ness is on display, fresh, enlivening, calming in equal degrees.

Today I’m glad of the green, because my mood is sombre. Sue’s Nana, Hilda Woods, would have been 125 today, and in this county of airfields, many of which line(d) up along many miles at the top of the Lincoln Cliff, the sad event which shaped her middle and later life is at the forefront of my mind.  Her son Frank is buried in a Forces’ cemetery at Dreux in northern France. At 22.44 on the 2^nd June 1944 the Halifax bomber he was piloting (LK 784) took off from Holme-on-Spalding Moor in Yorkshire, not far from the Lincolnshire border. Its mission was to drop ordnance on the railway yards at Trappes, west of Paris, as part of an attack involving as many as a hundred heavy bombers. At some point the plane was intercepted and shot down near the village of Faverolles. All seven of LK 784’s crew were killed.  They weren’t alone. Sixteen planes were lost that night. The date is of course significant – it’s just a few days before the Normandy landings. 

Frank was aged just 22, a Flight Sergeant (1320640) with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (76 Squadron).  The shock is that, like so many, he was so young, and in his youth carried so much responsibility.

To the fallen: Leadenham

Our annual remembrance in November is evolving. It will (or should) have moved on this year because of the Israeli pushback against the Hamas 7^th October atrocities. New alliances are forever being made, new enemies perceived. The struggle for peace is the same as it ever was and just as difficult. The ripples of personal sacrifice and tragedy eighty years ago can still disturb a family’s calm equilibrium. Grief and regret live on. The meaning of the 1939-45 conflict needs continual re-assessment, and clear thinking, particularly since the Russian leadership is successfully promoting the idea that somehow they’re fighting the Great Patriotic War #2.

With all this in mind I drop into the Aviation Heritage Museum just off the A15 near Cranwell, but there’s no-one there, and not much to see at this point in the year.  I drive on glumly, to start my walk at Caythorpe.

For a change, not a poem of mine… the words seemed particularly appropriate, and anyway it’s Ascension Day tomorrow.

Ascension  by Malcolm Guite

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory

Whilst we were rooted still in time and place

As earth became a part of Heaven’s story

And heaven opened to his human face

We saw him go and yet we were not parted;

He took us with him to the heart of things.

The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted

Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,

Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,

Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,

Whilst we ourselves become his clouds of witness

And sing the waning darkness into light,

His light in us, and ours in him concealed,

Which all creation waits to see revealed. 

It isn’t so easy to walk in my customary circles just here, because of the topography and the legacy of the Second War. From Caythorpe church I pass through the pleasant grounds of the Hall, on a re-routed path that honours both the owners’ privacy and the convenience of ramblers, and come into Fulbeck through the back door.  Fulbeck had its own RAF station until the early fifties, decommissioned faster than most, leaving behind it an echo of the Americans who once lived here in the form of a karting track near Stragglethorpe, just to the west. I thought the ‘Ful’ in the village name might imply that the wash down the Cliff kept the local stream flowing nicely. Not so. Apparently, the derivation takes us to the modern-day ‘foul’, which doesn’t fit today’s exceedingly pretty village very well. There’s an open green opposite what looks like a nice pub (‘The Hare and Hounds’) where one can sit beside the gate of St. Nicholas’ church and enjoy the sun.

From Fulbeck to Leadenham I follow the path beside the A607 which meanders along a ledge with the Vale to the left and the Cliff to the right. I pass the boundary that takes me into North Kesteven, and find a world of difference without a clear explanation. Leadenham was once a small town rather than a village. The buildings were constructed on a grander scale than at Fulbeck, but now an air of benign neglect hangs over everything.  In the centre of the village where you’d think a park or playground might be, there’s a lumpy overgrown field, suggesting buildings now lost. The George Hotel is decaying, and so are the outbuildings at the rear of Leadenham House. Other houses are being refurbished after moderate disuse, but there’s some new build too, and St. Swithun’s church looks in good heart. The large churchyard is recently mown. The well-appointed organ (mixture stop on the Swell Organ!)  is open and works fine for the most part. There’s an unusual Pugin ceiling to admire in the chancel.  On the opposite side of the road is the Polo club, which has a full sized, laser-levelled and irrigated pitch. I ponder ‘Leadenham: The Enigma’  as I retrace my steps to the car. I almost stop at Leadenham’s Post Office to ask what happened, but my courage fails me.  You can’t really walk into somewhere and say ‘Your village looks a bit of a wreck. Tell me the story…’ and not expect to be sent away with a flea in your ear, can you?  So I don’t.

Under new management - but not yet...

On some expeditions, energy runs low, and putting one foot in front of another is about all one can do. ‘Keep thou my feet/I do not ask to see the distant scene/One step enough for me’, as Cardinal Newman put it with a poetic sigh. Am I wrong to feel a similar lack of energy within the contemporary Anglican Church? Ascension brings things to a crisis. Avoided by many clergy and almost all the laity, (as Trinity Sunday may also be from a preaching point of view), the intellectual effort to look our theology straight in the eye often seems missing.  We’re too worn out by the labour of putting one foot in front of another. And dazzled as it is by the excess and ‘Let it all hang out’ of Eurovision season, secular society is just the same. No one can be bothered to ask the hard questions, or is willing to say they can’t fathom the answers. We’re due to take the service at St. Mary’s Morcott this Sunday, and will together read the excellent sermon written by Stephen Gamble our Rector. It’s insistent about the questions Ascension poses, and suggests some solutions. Hurray!

Apologies for the late posting of the above. May seemed to run away fast. Since writing, an extra-poignant piece of news. A Spitfire of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight came down on the edge of the airfield at Coningsby, killing its pilot, Squadron Leader Matthew Long, who for some years flew the RAF’s Typhoon strike aircraft. The RAF’s tribute to him said that he had been ‘a great friend, colleague and a passionate professional aviator’.

Caythorpe – Fulbeck – Leadenham – Fulbeck – Caythorpe

13 km. Four hours. 19 deg. C. Sunny and warm throughout.

‘The green, green, grass of home’ was famously a hit in the UK for a youthful Tom Jones who heard the song on a recording by Jerry Lee Lewis during his first tour of the US in 1965. (It had been written not long before by Claude ‘Curly’ Putnam Jnr.) 

As maudlin story songs go, this just about takes the biscuit, working a slow reveal to the fact that the narrator has just woken up on the day of his execution. The pastoral description at the song’s outset turns out to be a dream. Back in gritty Nashville reality, his body will indeed shortly be returned to the ‘green, green, grass of home’, maybe in Kentucky, who knows? Although of course, the grass of that state is for ever blue. For lovers of Aylesbury music, a rather different but entertaining version of the song was recorded by John Otway on his Greatest Hits album.

Jerry Lee Lewis was in much later years booked for a gig at Northampton’s Derngate Theatre. The theatre management were somehow unaware of Lewis’ hellraising reputation, and his tendency to destroy pianos. They’d just bought £10k’s worth of Steinway (perhaps worth two or three times’ that now) which they exposed to the rock’n’roller’s stomping boots. An expensive mistake.

It’s relatively simple to put a piano out of tune by playing it too hard. Actually breaking it in the course of playing is more difficult. It was often alleged that the jazzer Dave Brubeck would do this regularly, usually by other piano players who were jealous of his fame and commercial success.