Well, it's high time I posted something, but I have little of consequence to impart. With the departure of the Canadian branch of the family, and the absence of the Lichfield branch on holiday in Spain, things have fallen strangely quiet, though the latter contingent return today. I spent last weekend over the border in Derbyshire with my cousin, doing very little but enjoying it, and yesterday I took myself off to Tamworth to walk from there to the village of Hopwas and back. This proved largely unrewarding, but on the return leg, walking beside the river Tame (or rather a flood relief channel thereof), I was accompanied some of the way by a small flock of linnets, I heard (according to my birdsong app) the call (not the song) of a willow warbler, I saw a single small copper basking, and, best of all, a feral black sable ferret ran across the path in front of me. Earlier, in Tamworth, I dropped in to St Editha's church, not for the first time. A guide greeted me, and even recognised me: he told me he remembered talking with me about 'the blue flower'. The blue flower? Do you mean the novel, I asked? No, the blue flower you're wearing – at which I realised I was wearing a rather lovely blue enamel forget-me-not pin badge, in support of the Alzheimer's Society, and all became clear. (I can recommend the badge, and it only costs £3, in a good cause). When I arrived back home, I discovered that my blue flower was missing, lost in transit. An exciting life I'm leading, is it not? I hope to be back soon with something of more substance.
Meanwhile, here is my latest in the Literary Review (with some minor differences from the printed version) –
Church Crawling: The Secret Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches
By Rachel Morley
(Bodley Head 374pp £22)
In the past few years, there has been quite a spate of books about our English churches: Peter Ross’s Steeple Chasing, Luke Sherlock’s Forgotten Churches and Andrew Ziminski’s Church Going have all made an impact and sold well. And now, along comes Rachel Morley’s Church Crawling, a highly individual and illuminating exploration of our parish churches and the many stories they have to tell us.
Morley is certainly well qualified to write it, being a building conservator and church ‘rescuer’, who is the director of Friends of Friendless Churches, an organisation that has done great work in repairing and reopening some of the country’s most neglected churches. She cares deeply about our precious legacy of twelve thousand-plus parish churches, almost every one of which contains something of interest, and most of which have a great deal more to offer in terms of beauty, heritage, architecture and history. Morley is alive to all of this, from the tiny detail to the big picture, and her book is not only learned and wide-ranging but eloquent and heartfelt.
The term ‘church crawling’ was coined by John Betjeman in 1948 to describe his days out visiting churches, poring over them and trying to capture their essence. Surprisingly, Church Crawling begins not with a typical English parish church, but with the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire, a small ‘Holy Box’ painted by Stanley Spencer with vivid scenes of military life on the Macedonian front in the First World War, scenes that commemorate, as parish churches do, ‘people that the rest of history has forgotten – the onlookers, the people in the sidelines of the stories, the people just living their lives. The people most of us are.’
Fittingly, Morley’s book is as much about people as about buildings. As she says, our parish churches ‘thrum with the drama of life’.
Church Crawling is not a linear history, but it does begin at the beginning, when early English Christianity, ‘its roots in pagan soil’, began the long process of ‘making nowhere into somewhere’ by establishing churches and parishes. Morley neatly tells the story of the Danish and Norman conquests in six churches, including St Olave’s, Chichester, about which ‘it’s unanimously agreed that the Victorians gave it a godawful going over’ (she has a bracing turn of phrase).
She goes on to celebrate the extraordinary variety of rock types that lie under England’s soil, from granite to chalk by way of all the limestones and sandstones – all of which have been used to build churches, making them ‘at one with the landscape’ of their particular place.
Morley is very good on materials and makers, pointing out that often ‘some of the greatest art and craft this country has to offer is waiting in the local church’ – and, unlike a museum, a church offers free interaction, sensory fulfilment and true connection.
She writes about the Christian calendar of feasts, fasts and saints’ days – and that Victorian invention, the Harvest Festival, when ‘House of God becomes House of Gourd’. Beyond the circle of the years, medieval churches told the whole story of the world, from Creation to Apocalypse, with a heavy emphasis on the Last Judgment and its attendant horrors, often painted in gory detail over the west door. In a chapter neatly titled ‘Concertinaed Centuries’, Morley explores how a church can embody a vast tract of time, as in Knowlton, Dorset, where the now ruined church was actually built within a pagan henge. She also identifies ‘wormholes’ in time, details in a church that are short cuts to the past, as with the name of an imprisoned Civil War Leveller carved into the lead font of Burford church in Oxfordshire, or the sixteenth-century village armoury that survives in a room over the church porch at Mendelsham in Suffolk. Churches are, as she says, ‘places soaked with human experience’.
One of the most vivid chapters describes the terrible devastation wrought by the iconoclastic vandalism of the Reformation and the Civil War, which ‘sought the entire erasure of social and cultural memory’, down to the last trace of the old religion, so rich in imagery, colour and spectacle. Here Morley tells the heartening story of one man who would have none of it – Robert Shirley of Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, who built a new Gothic church at the height of the destructive madness, and adorned its west tower with a defiant motto. Other remarkable people whose stories she tells include England’s first woman parish clerk (in 1818) and the ‘Icarus of the North’, Robert Cadman, who died attempting a daredevil flight from the top of the spire of St Mary’s, Shrewsbury.
Writing of church monuments, Morley draws the salutary lesson that ‘we, the living, are just the ligature between our dead and our descendants, the soft tissue between the past and the future’ – which is indeed the lesson to be drawn from everything in our ancient parish churches. She ends this wonderful, wonder-filled book with a passage that expresses how churches are so much more than the sum of their parts, offering to the receptive ‘something beyond words … Something that comes from a building that has witnessed all human emotion, that condenses the essence of human society and human life, and receives you, a fleeting moment in its long existence. And offers a rare glimpse of the soul of England – and ourselves.’
