How Many Lives Has A Goldfish?

Is there no end to the stress the pond can bring me? I went outside to feed the fish today and found one, the one who was savaged some months ago and spent several weeks recuperating in the hospital tank, on top of a stay there last year after its fins began falling apart, lying on top of the netting that covers the pond. Its head was still in the water so it was able to breathe but lay passively waiting for help. I scooped it up and put it back in the water whereupon it swum happily away. How did it get there? I can only imagine that it found its way into the little gully next to the plant pot which is not covered by netting, got stuck, and flipped itself out of the water trying to escape. Just as well no heron or cat was anywhere around as no fish could be in a more vulnerable position. I've now adjusted the net.

Last night, though, I managed to see two bats flitting about which has only happened once before. Every year I wonder whether there will be any bats and their reappearance is always a relief: I feel has though delight has not abandoned the garden.

St Mary's, Thorpe

Our SCP chapter met at Thorpe in the northwest of Surrey on Tuesday, or at least a number of us consonant with covid restrictions did. There is no guesswork needed at all about the tradition at Thorpe, though I’m not quite clear when it started; the advowson was owned by the Lords of the Manor, the Leigh-Bennetts, who must have approved of the actions of the combative priest installed in 1907, Somerville Henry Lushington. However, it wasn’t just Fr Lushington’s High Churchery which provoked a visit from the Kensitites in 1910 but also a set of very grubby personal disagreements which don’t really show the aristocratic vicar and his supporters in that good a light. There were rowdy Protestant demonstrations (‘Ritualism means Ruin!!’) and in 1911 the church was broken into and the altar fittings dumped in the churchyard wrapped in an altarcloth. By 1916 Fr Lushington was dead, and his replacement, Basil Edrupp, while firmly maintaining Thorpe’s Catholic tradition, was apparently a much more emollient character who aroused no opposition at all. In 1930 the Leigh-Bennetts sold the manor house, Thorpe Place right opposite the church, to the Sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage as a new home for the Spelthorne Sanatorium at Bedfont, a hostel for women especially with alcohol problems; there it stayed until 1955. Some of the fixtures in the church come from the convent chapel.

The church as we see it now has undergone waves of refurbishment. There was a 19th-century rebuilding in which the 13th-century arcades were taken down and rebuilt – though it’s uncertain when this happened – and we owe the small building’s spaciousness to Fr Lushington who at the cost of local controversy cleared out the pews. Then there are the fittings brought in from the convent, almost certainly including the altar furniture in the cramped north chapel – now known as the Benedict Chapel – and possibly the canopy over the high altar. That replaced a wooden reredos which, to judge by a photo in the hallway at the church, was probably 1930s or 40s, in a major reordering in the 1980s also including new flooring and a nave altar.

These sedilia are genuinely medieval, as is one of the piscinae. Guess which is the fake.

Thorpe is a lovely church, almost cleared of its medieval atmosphere and yet wonderfully warm and comfortable, and laden with attractive things. I try to avert my eye, however, from the grim crucifixion over the chancel arch, painted by an expert on, of all things, Ethiopian manuscript illustrations, Beatrice Playne. If only it had been based on one of those. You’d never guess it dated to the 1960s.

And what did we discuss? Catholic mission, of course, rather as usual!

School Scenes

Delivering assemblies at the infants school is still a new experience; I sit in front of the children and realise how few of them I am very familiar with having spent a year, really, not going anywhere near the place. On Monday I waited for the headteacher to finish her assembly with Year 1 before I did mine with Year 2. She was relating the story of St Paul escaping Damascus by being lowered down the city wall in a basket. As the children lined up to leave the hall, one small boy pointed out to me that 'It was still Jesus helping Paul, because he gave people the idea to rescue him'. 'Ah, you're doing what's called theology', I replied.

I looked out of the window at the playground where Year 2 were finishing break before coming in to hear me tell them the story of Pentecost. On the far side two small girls were engaged in what appeared to be a deeply serious conversation, in between bites of apples. They were using emphatic, nay histrionic, gestures, waving, pointing, holding out their hands as each replied to whatever point the other had made. I wonder what they were talking about. They looked like a pair of seven-year-old French philosophers. 

Owlen (= 'roaming about at night')

A woman wanders through a wood, or a setting with the appearance of a wood, making odd gestures and talking about dead sheep and thrushes, and wearing a dress with an eyeball scrawled on it. Were we not aware that she is PJ Harvey and therefore an emissary of the powers beyond, we might simply assume that she was nuts. Our heroine was performing at the (slightly abortive) livestreamed Glastonbury Festival: not singing, but reading poetry, another couple of offerings from what we all still hope is the forthcoming collection ‘about a haunted sheep farm in Dorset’. But then it’s been forthcoming for four years now …

The poems were trailed as being ‘in Dorset dialect’. This is interesting, because Dorset dialect is not something anyone now uses, nor has used for a very long time. Remember I am a mere six weeks younger than Ms H, and, though I grew up in suburban Bournemouth rather than a village just northeast of Beaminster, my mother’s family in particular come from pretty close by there, in south Somerset, and they were all farm workers and the like: one of my mum’s cousins lives just round the corner from the Harvey quarrying business on Ham Hill. PJ’s accent, too, always strikes me as quite gentle (though she stresses it a bit in the Glastonbury performance), much more so than some of my relatives’. Nor is there even just one uniform Dorset accent: Polly clearly has the West Country rhotic ‘r’ in her speech – at least she often does – while I grew up without it, and it’s not that prevalent on the east side of the county anyway. In his 19^th-century Dorset dialect poetry, which she surely has in mind, William Barnes spells the name of the county Dosset, as though it has no ‘r’ sound at all; certainly not the ‘Darzet’ of general non-West Country imagination. You don’t hear that until you get to Cornwall.

I can’t remember anyone from my childhood using dialect words, either: rather, the older generations spoke what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, just with an accent. The closest they came to it was my grandad’s insistence on referring to rats as ‘longtails’; but that smacks more of superstition than general usage, a bit like the reluctance of Portlanders to name the rabbits that undermine the quarries, instead describing them with any number of circumlocutory epithets. In early 1970s Corscombe, I suppose, some of the old farm workers may have used the dialect words they picked up from their grandparents, calling ewe-lambs chilvern or the meal in the middle of the day your nammet – ‘noon meat’; but by coincidence I’ve just read Thomas Hardy’s introduction to his Selected Poems of William Barnes, published in 1908, and even then he laments the demise of the old Dorset speech thanks to mobility and education, and the condescension of the well-to-do. I can’t imagine ‘Dorset Dialect’ was very prevalent even in the Blackmore Vale nearly fifty years ago.

William Barnes used dialect to emphasise the dignity of the Dorset people he worked with as schoolmaster and priest, the relevance of their outlook and experiences. Harvey isn’t doing that; nor does she seem to be using it to recall a culture the tail-end of which she may have brushed against in her childhood. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness of the old Dorset speech becomes an incantation, a means of piercing through normality into a heightened awareness of nature and a soul’s place in it: a way of meditating on identity and feeling, the opposite but equal of what Elisabeth Bletsoe does with her poetry of complexity and technical naming.

Goo on an' publish, Polly!

Music Lives Again

PJ Harvey may be reading poetry at the online Glastonbury Festival today (it is conceivable that I may say more about that another time), but this evening two cellists have been performing in Swanvale Halt as part of a renewed season of classical concerts, and how lovely it is to hear the instruments breathing the music - that's what the cellos sound as though they're doing, it seems to me. The looming red lanterns are this year's decoration for Pentecost tomorrow: I have replaced single-use rubber balloons with bamboo and paper!

Losing Yourself

 

It's nothing more exotic than Widelake Pond on an afternoon of gusty wind and rain, but being sheltered under a canopy of trees and looking out at the drizzle - the fishing gear isn't mine! - calls to mind again that strange sensation of homecoming I have felt before and which seems to connect with very early experiences indeed. But there is something else going on beyond mere familiarity, which the phenomenon of being immersed in sensory experience - sights, sounds, sensations, smells. Birds tracking across the lake and dogs occasionally visible on the far bank: rushes of rain shaking over the water: the ever-shifting patterns of ripples. One feels oneself most 'real' when least self-concerned, just an observer of outside events, lost in things.

'Purbeck - The Ingrained Island' by Paul Hyland (1989 edn.)

The Isle of Purbeck has a wider variety of wildflowers than any other comparable area of the British Isles. This is because of its complex geology, its bands of different rock running east-west along it, and the alluvial sands and gravels of the heath along its northern, Poole Harbour, side. And of course it’s not an island, even if you count the River Frome and its one-time marsh margins south of Wareham as a water barrier; westwards Purbeck sort of just disappears into Dorset generally and it’s not completely clear when you have left it.

On my last Dorset sojourn back in the Autumn I bought a secondhand copy of Paul Hyland’s Purbeck: the Ingrained Island. Hyland organises his meditative travelogue around those different geological regions, so wildly distinct within this compact area – the Provinces, he calls them, and names each after the tool that characterises human use of that mini-landscape. Soils, natural history, and the business of human exploitation, lay over each other in what is a thoroughly sedimentary approach to landscape-writing, not written chronologically, but each layer packing down to form a palimpsest portrait of a remarkable part of the world. The Ingrained Island was first published in 1978, when some of the old lads who’d worked in Purbeck’s quarries west of Swanage could still be found nursing pints at the Square & Compass in Worth Matravers, coated with limestone-dust, one pictures; early enough for that, and late enough for its author to worry about what the result of oil drilling on the Isle at Kimmeridge and Arne might be. Forty years later those oil fields are almost exhausted and another layer of Purbeck’s past settles into memory. Each facet of the past Hyland calls attention to is not an isolated fact but one detail of a vast and interlocked picture: every location rests on its own history, linked to every other’s, not a separate fact but a note in the grey-green music whose great themes are rock and work. The book concludes with the mock-Saxon cross at Studland, blessed only a couple of years before the text was complete, weaving birds and jet planes with a vine, making the author’s point for him.

It’s quite a brutal narrative, sometimes, one feels when reading the poetry which introduces each section, perhaps deliberately so. But there is not a page you feel you’ve wasted your time reading. Purbeck ‘is like a hand that holds a secret. Finger by finger it opens, disclosing only itself, a scarred and work-worn hand, an ingrained palm to be lovingly grasped, and read’; and here is the secret’s key.