Confirmed!

We hadn't hosted a confirmation service at Swanvale Halt for years; nor had we had many people to offer as confirmation candidates for years, I think five since 2000 to be precise. So I was very keen indeed to secure a Deanery confirmation service for the refurbished church, regardless of how many people we actually had ourselves to offer forward. As it turned out, there were eventually five of them, all adults - a civil servant, a school caretaker, a plumber, a mum and school assistant, and a civil engineer - and we had a really good series of sessions in preparation. They joined another ten candidates from across the area, and enough of their families and friends to fill the church. The only elements over which St Rita of Cascia made her presence felt were the thurible coming open and spilling incense and charcoal over the floor (thankfully during a hymn so the frantic scrabbling around after bits was possible to disguise) and the bishop's microphone going haywire so that, from behind at least, it sounded as though he was doing a passable impersonation of the late Norman Collier. It was, however, lovely. I insisted that we not water down the service to the usual middle-of-the-road common-denominator and instead give everyone something to remember, which is just what happened. I also insisted we put on a really good spread after the service was over, and that happened too. Heaven knows how much that cost, but I can think of few things better to spend money on than a party to celebrate fifteen people making a public declaration of faith.

However once upon a time this wouldn't have been anything much to get excited about. The modern custom of confirming people (and baptising them if need be, as two of ours were) and them taking communion at the same time has only arisen because numbers are small enough to make this feasible, whatever the Church may argue in terms of this being the right way of doing things, which is of course true as far as it goes. I checked back through the old confirmation register in our strong box, and discovered that Swanvale Halt had on its own produced 48 confirmation candidates in 1960, 18 in 1961, 40 in 1962, 34 in 1963, and 48 again in 1964. Of course the majority of them were aged under 16, but not all - the number of adults being confirmed was never below 7 in any year. Equally striking was the gender imbalance: the figures hovered around one-third men and boys and two-thirds women and girls, except in 1964 when 83% of the confirmands were female. That tells you a lot about the sociology of the mid-century Church of England.

Survival

I am very fond of my old mobile phone, and joke that it only has a black-and-white licence. In some senses I am too fond of it as when it went missing a couple of weeks ago I went completely frantic with the accompanying sense of disorientation. It turned out to be in a colleague’s house, wedged down the side of the chair I’d been sitting in.

On Spring Fair Day the phone went missing again. Partway through the afternoon I realised it wasn’t on me, so cycled home to check, thinking it was in the coat I’d worn in the morning, but no. Nor was it at church. As I made my way back to the field having concluded that it must have been in my bag after all, I spotted it lying by the side of the main road in a waterfilled gutter. It had obviously dropped out of my pocket. The phone was very unhappy, with water sloshing around behind the screen, which could have been an interesting visual effect had it actually been designed like that.

The SIM card was undamaged so I simply took the phone apart and popped it in the boiler cupboard; by the end of Sunday it was completely dried out and ready to use again. Try that with your smartphone.

Taking the Air

The churches around Hornington take it in turns annually to host the Town Rogation Service during which the town councillors parade around an area in full regalia praying for God’s blessing on the community and its common life. This year it was our turn, for the first time since our former curate had planned the service and it poured with so much rain that she had to lead it entirely inside the church, leading everyone around indoors and inviting them to pretend they were at the allotments or the infant school. This year, we were able to go outside and even to walk through the allotments, following pretty much the same route as our ex-curate had planned, with an additional stop at the railway station; I decided that the station forms such an important part in the life of so many local residents that it needed to be recognised – and not just because people commute but because the two level crossings dictate so much of the pace of life in the village. Coincidentally, I’d just taken the funeral of the man who was Swanvale Halt’s signalman for over thirty years.

I am of course used to wandering around in a biretta and vestments, and the councillors are no strangers to dressing up, but I was full of admiration for Rona our crucifer who had to go up front and lead us. It’s a very un-English business because it involves taking religion out of the cozy (and invisible) confines of the church building, so you just have to set your jaw and get on with it.

The highlight was when a car drew past us, and a chap wound down his window and shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ at the assembled procession. ‘There is insight in Swanvale Halt’, a friend of mine commented.

Spring Fair 2013

I have been absent from the blog for a long while - there's simply been too much going on over the last month to leave energy for any writing not driven strictly by necessity. The hump is now past, though, so I can do a bit of updating on things that have happened over the last couple of weeks.

The Spring Fair took place again this year, as previous years, though not after a lot of struggle to reorganise the administration. Last year, you may remember, it rained almost constantly on top of weeks of rain beforehand, so the field was a boggy mess. This year, I assured myself and anyone who would listen, we were already scoring an advance before we’d even started.

The forecast was for ‘light showers’ in the morning followed by intermittent sun in the afternoon. We’d certainly had the ‘light showers’ by the time came to declare the event open, so I looked forward to better things and told everyone so over the PA system. No sooner had I handed back the microphone than the heavens opened and for half an hour we experienced probably the heaviest deluge I can remember since moving to Surrey. Then one of the tea urns failed. Then the barbecue flooded. Then we discovered that the band didn’t have any chairs. I sat in the ‘command caravan’ looking at the rain and reflecting that God might be trying to send a signal. The sky was a uniform dark grey and there was no sign of it so much as shifting.

Eventually the torrents ceased and the niggles were resolved. This was the cue for the CD player to malfunction. Well, we had another at church, I said, and cycled off to get it, wedging it into the basket before heading back to the field. Above there was a stark celestial contrast between a lowering grey mass of cloud to the south – over the fair site – and blue sky with white cloud to the north. The Spring Fair lay right under the frontier between the two. As I cycled, down came the rain again, so heavy and wind-driven that at one point I could barely breathe.

Yet, by the time the infant school children came bounding into the arena to do country dancing there was a bit of watery sun and we were fairly busy by the end of the afternoon. It was, all in all, a near-triumph just saved from being a near-catastrophe. As I went around the field later on gradually drying out (visiting one stall I reached out to something and water poured off my sleeve) ordinary members of the public said to me more than once how they look forward to the Fair, how it marks the start of Spring, how they spend so much time there talking to friends and how nice it is that it brings people together. So I suppose we do have to do it again next year. But not in the same way.

I said that last year.

 

The Right Kind of Magnolia

Three whole years ago, over my first winter in Swanvale Halt, the snow brought down the lovely magnolia tree planted by my predecessor-but-three. The stump has remained and the corner of the front garden where the tree stood has become progressively more disgusting. Today I finally got around to buying a new infant magnolia and planted it out.

It's there, in the middle, with the tag around it. I hope my nan's concrete tortoise will do a better job looking after it than he did of some other recent additions to the garden. Trouble is, he moves even slower than the slugs.

Festal Set

This Easter Day I wore my old gold set for both the 5.45am and the 10am. I don't believe I've posted about it before, so to celebrate the festal season (and my post-Easter break), here it is:

 

 

On the right-hand photograph you can see the embroidered monstrance which is highlighted with blue and white jewels. The orphreys are woven with gold fibre and the edging is in gold as well - though it's not actually particularly bold or showy, it just catches the light.

 

The set came from the now-redundant church of St Margaret, Upper Norwood, more details of which can be found here. At least I think it's only redundant, it may actually have been demolished. It came to me via the good offices of Church Antiques at Walton on Thames, as has quite a bit of my personal stuff.

 

You will notice that the maniple is not of the same design; when I bought the set it didn't have a maniple so I got that separately from eBay. You can imagine how spectacular the set this once belonged to must have been:

 

Roman chasubles have a lot of strain put on the shoulders which is why the silk tends to go there first. My set it no exception and I've had to do quite a bit of repair work as you can see in this photo:

 

From a distance it looks fine, but although I use the stole quite a bit for special occasions, notably weddings, I don't put the set to too much work. So I was twitching a bit when I came back into the vestry to get ready for the 10am only to see the Roman Catholic congregation's latest stand-in priest, Fr Stan from Poland, breeze in wearing it, sling it off his shoulders and plonk it on the table. The one they'd brought along for him was too small, so he wore mine. There's ecumenism for you.



A Walk Around Wotton House

Not too far from Guildford is Wotton House, once the home of the Evelyn family which included the 17th-century diarist, politician and scientist John Evelyn. I went for a post-Easter walk around the footpaths leading past the house today, intrigued by reports of its follies and landscape features and not sure whether it was possible to glimpse any from the walks. It wasn't, though behind one of the estate cottages on the drive to the house it was possible to see a long brick wall terminated by a pair of little Gothick belvederes, if such you can call them:

The outside of the house, and the urns in the drive, sport a charming range of faces, grotesques and gryphons:

 

 



I thought it would be a shame to go without making any effort to see the garden features, so without expecting anything very much I asked at the hotel reception whether that might be possible. 'Of course', said the girl on the desk much to my surprise, 'Just go through the French doors along to the right and wander around the garden', so I did. There is a Temple erected by John Evelyn himself and his brother George, adorned with a variety of now-rather damaged statues, none the worse for being a bit battered:

 

Meanwhile, just to the west of the house was a delightful Grotto:

Back inside the house, I passed this luridly lit Gothic hallway. It made me reflect how it might have been all very well in the 19th century, had you enough money, to build a house that looked like a cross between a church and a stage set for a Wagner opera, smothered with marble and encaustic tiles, but it must have been absolutely exhausting to live with. Wotton House actually isn't like that - not another Tyntesfield - as this is the only Gothic Revival chunk I saw.

 Perched on the hill north of the house is this cottage complete with a belltower, which reminded me of Portmeirion. Crying out to become a Landmark holiday let, it is:

And the last call was at the delightful, albeit locked, church to the north on the other side of the Dorking road. I found this little cherub on a tombstone, imprisoned behind rails:

Wotton is very much not a Gothic Garden - it's one of those places where there are elements of what will definitely become Gothic Gardening some decades later, but there is no sense of an interaction with the landscape which binds the individual elements together in gloomful exuberance. There is, however, a very amusing collection of features which I was very glad to have the chance to see.