In Memoriam

It's the beginning of the quiet summer season, so yesterday afternoon as the rain poured down across Surrey I spent an hour in the local museum trying to find out more details about some of the memorials in the church. There were two in particular, inscriptions to pious ladies and their undefined work for the people of the parish at different times. I did discover this tribute paid by the Rector in 1923 to Miss Northwood:

There is one in the thoughts of most of us this morning by whom this command to feed the lambs, tend the sheep and follow Jesus was gladly accepted. The name of Emma Northwood has been honoured and loved in this parish for many years now, and I hope some means will be found of recording to the coming generations her long service to God among the people of Swanvale Halt. There was hardly a parochial activity with which she did not identify herself, and her wonderful conscientiousness was a shining example to every one of us. Soon after I came here, it was evident that her strength was waning, but it was only with the greatest difficulty that I could persuade her to spare herself a little; and more often than we realised, it was only by the exercise of a grim determination that she carried on. As a District Visitor she was assiduous, and many a cottager today is feeling that she has lost a real good friend; but it was to the young girls of the parish that she gave most of her love and thought. I shall never forget the bright happy smile with which she greeted me a few hours before her death, and the pride with which she showed me a great batch of letters she had just received from the highest standard of our Girls’ Day School. “Look”, she said, “they have signed themselves ‘Your loving little friend’.” And before the night came, she had passed into the nearer Presence of One whose great joy it was to be the Friend of little children.

A bit sentimental for modern tastes, perhaps, but we still need these local examples of undramatic sainthood and the Rector's account of Miss Northwood will go into the little guidebook we're preparing ready for September. 

The other monument I wanted information about was the inscription at the bottom of the organ loft recording the work in the parish of Miss Forster. I eventually found a reference to her death in the parish magazine. She apparently lived for twenty years or more in the Rectory with Mr Bibling the Rector, and although they were clearly close and accepted as such - Canon Bibling's successor sent the parish's 'sympathy on his great loss' - the nature of their relationship is nowhere defined. The other odd aspect is that the inscription dates Miss Forster's time in Swanvale Halt to between 1896 and 1919; whereas her death is recorded in the parish magazine in 1918. That her work for Swanvale Halt is recorded as carrying on beyond her earthly demise speaks much both for her dedication and for confidence in the doctrine of the Communion of Saints ...