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Old Friends
Old Friends
The sky widens to Cornwall. A sense of sea
Hangs in the lichenous branches and still there's light.
The road from its tunnel of blackthorn rises free
To a final height,
And over the west is glowing a mackerel sky
Whose opal fleece has faded to purple pink.
In this hour of the late-lit, listening evening, why
Do my spirits sink?
The tide is high and a sleepy Atlantic sends
Exploring ripple on ripple down Polzeath shore,
And the gathering dark is full of the thought of friends
I shall see no more.
Where is Anne Channel who loved this place the best,
With her tense blue eyes and her shopping-bag falling apart,
And her racy gossip and nineteen-twenty zest,
And warmth of heart?
Where's Roland, easing his most unwieldy car,
With its load of golf-clubs, backwards into the lane?
Where's Kathleen Stokes with her Sealyhams? There's Doom Bar;
Bray Hill shows plain;
For this is the turn, and the well-known trees draw near;
On the road their pattern in moonlight fades and swells{:}
As the engine stops, from two miles off I hear
St Minver bells.
What a host of stars in a wideness still and deep{:}
What a host of souls, as a motor-bike whines away
And the silver snake of the estuary curls to sleep
In Daymer Bay.
Are they one with the Celtic saints and the years between?
Can they see the moonlit pools where ribbonweed drifts?
As I reach our hill, I am part of a sea unseen {---}
And oppression lifts.
Trebetherick by Sir John Betjeman
Trebetherick by Sir John Betjeman
We used to picnic where the thrift
Grew deep and tufted to the edge;
We saw the yellow foam flakes drift
In trembling sponges on the ledge
Below us, till the wind would lift
Them up the cliff and o’er the hedge.
Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea,
Sun on our bathing dresses heavy with the wet,
Squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea,
Fleas around the tamarisk, an early cigarette.
From where the coastguard houses stood
One used to see below the hill,
The lichened branches of a wood
In summer silver cool and still;
And there the Shade of Evil could
Stretch out at us from Shilla Mill.
Thick with sloe and blackberry, uneven in the light,
Lonely round the hedge, the heavy meadow was remote,
The oldest part of Cornwall was the wood as black as night,
And the pheasant and the rabbit lay torn open at the throat.
But when a storm was at its height,
And feathery slate was black in rain,
And tamarisks were hung with light
And golden sand was brown again,
Spring tide and blizzard would unite
And sea come flooding up the lane.
Waves full of treasure then were roaring up the beach,
Ropes round our mackintoshes, waders warm and dry,
We waited for the wreckage to come swirling into reach,
Ralph, Vasey, Alastair, Biddy, John and I.
Then roller into roller curled
And thundered down the rocky bay,
And we were in a water world
Of rain and blizzard, sea and spray,
And one against the other hurled
We struggled round to Greenaway.
Blesséd be St Enodoc, blesséd be the wave,
Blesséd be the springy turf, we pray, pray to thee,
Ask for our children all happy days you gave
To Ralph, Vasey, Alastair, Biddy, John and me.
GREENAWAY
GREENAWAY
I know so well this turfy mile,
These clumps of sea-pink withered brown,
The breezy cliff, the awkward stile,
The sandy path that takes me down.
To crackling layers of broken slate
Where black and flat sea-woodlice crawl
And isolated rock pools wait
The wash from the highest tides of all.
I know the roughly blasted track
That skirts a small and smelly bay
And over squelching bladder-wrack
Leads to the beach at Greenaway.
Down on the shingle safe at last
I hear the slowly dragging roar
As mighty rollers mount to cast
Small coal and seaweed on the shore.
And spurting far as it can reach
The shooting surf comes hissing round
To leave a line along the beach
Of cowries waiting to be found.
Tide after tide by night and day
The breakers battle with the land
And rounded smooth along the bay
The faithful rocks protecting stand.
But in a dream the other night,
I saw this coastline from the sea
And felt the breakers plunging white
Their weight of waters over me.
There were the stile, the turf, the shore,
The safety line of shingle beach;
With every stroke I struck the more
The backwash sucked me out of reach.
Back into what a water-world
Of waving weed and waiting claws?
Of writhing tentacles uncurled
To drag me to what dreadful jaws?
The St Enodoc church we see today, with its iconic crooked spire, is largely thanks to a significant restoration project in 1863 led by the prolific and sometimes controversial Victorian architect, James Piers St Aubyn.
St Aubyn was a true powerhouse of the Gothic Revival. He was responsible for restoring hundreds of churches across the West Country, often bringing them back from states of ruin or neglect. His work at St Enodoc being a prime example – effectively "excavating" it from the dunes and ensuring its survival. It’s hard to imagine this iconic church looking like it does in this image (based on a sketch) but it did so for many years!
While St Aubyn was busy at St Enodoc, a young Thomas Hardy was also making his way in the architectural world. Just a few years later, in 1870, Hardy himself was dispatched to another remote Cornish church – St Juliot's (not far from Boscastle) – to oversee its restoration.
It was there, in the setting of a church restoration, that Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, who would become his first wife and the muse for some of his most poignant poetry and his novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes.
So, while St Aubyn restored St Enodoc, and Hardy worked on St Juliot, they were both part of the same powerful wave of Victorian church restoration that swept through Cornwall. These architects weren't just rebuilding stone and mortar; they were preserving centuries of history, and in Hardy's case, inadvertently shaping the course of English literature!
If there is an end note for this post it is surely apt that it is from John Betjeman, who was buried here and loved visiting Cornish churches and especially the six other local ones to St Enodoc: St Minver, St Michael, St Mabyn, St Endellion, St Kew, and St Teath. In his poem, "Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall," he praised the authentic elements like the "smooth, slate floor, the rounded wooden roof" but also commented on the "drastic restoration," "absurd, truncated screen," and "sticky pews" which were part of the Victorian work carried out by St Aubyn in 1863-1864.
Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall
Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall
Come on! come on! This hillock hides the spire,
Now that one and now none. As winds about
The burnished path through lady's finger, thyme
And bright varieties of saxifrage,
So grows the tinny tenor faint or loud
And all things draw towards St. Enodoc.
Come on! come on! and it is five to three.
Paths, unfamiliar to golfers' brogues,
Cross the eleventh fairway broadside on
And leave the fourteenth tee for thirteenth green,
Ignoring Royal and Ancient, bound for God.
Come on! come on! no longer bare of foot,
The sole grows hot in London shoes again.
Jack Lambourne in his Sunday navy-blue
Wears tie and collar, all from Selfridge's.
There's Enid with a silly parasol,
And Graham in gray flannel with a crease
Across the middle of his coat which lay
Pressed 'neath the box of his Meccano set,
Sunday to Sunday.
Still, Come on! come on!
The tinny tenor. Hover-flies remain
More than a moment on a ragwort bunch,
And people's passing shadows don't disturb
Red Admirals basking with their wings apart.
A mile of sunny, empty sand away,
A mile of shallow pools and lugworm casts,
Safe, faint and surfy, laps the lowest tide.
Even the villas have a Sunday look.
The Ransom mower's locked into the shed.
"I have a splitting headache from the sun,"
And bedroom windows flutter cheerful chintz
Where, double-aspirined, a mother sleeps;
While father in the loggia reads a book,
Large, desultory, birthday-present size,
Published with coloured plates by Country Life,
A Bernard Darwin on The English Links
Or Braid and Taylor on The Mashie Shot.
Come on! come on! he thinks of Monday's round -
Come on! come on! that interlocking grip!
Come on! come on! he drops into a doze -
Come on! come on! more far and far away
The children climb a final stile to church;
Electoral Roll still flapping in the porch -
Then the cool silence of St. Enodoc.
My eyes, recovering in the sudden shade,
Discern the long-known little things within -
A map of France in damp above my pew,
Grey-blue of granite in the small arcade
(Late Perp: and not a Parker specimen
But roughly hewn on windy Bodmin Moor),
The modest windows palely glazed with green,
The smooth slate floor, the rounded wooden roof,
The Norman arch, the cable-moulded font -
All have a humble and West Country look.
Oh "drastic restoration" of the guide!
Oh three-light window by a Plymouth firm!
Absurd, truncated screen! oh sticky pews!
Embroidered altar-cloth! untended lamps!
So soaked in worship you are loved too well
For that dispassionate and critic stare
That I would use beyond the parish bounds
Biking in high-banked lanes from tower to tower
On sunny, antiquarian afternoons.
Come on! come on! a final pull. Tom Blake
Stalks over from the bell-rope to his pew
Just as he slopes about the windy cliffs
Looking for wreckage in a likely tide,
Nor gives the Holy Table glance or nod.
A rattle as red baize is drawn aside,
Miss Rhoda Poulden pulls the tremolo,
The oboe, flute and vox humana stops;
A Village Voluntary fills the air
And ceases suddenly as it began,
Save for one oboe faintly humming on,
As slow the weary clergyman subsides
Tired with his bike-ride from the parish church.
He runs his hands once, twice, across his face
"Dearly beloved..." and a bumble-bee
Zooms itself free into the churchyard sun
And so my thoughts this happy Sabbathtide.
Where deep cliffs loom enormous, where cascade
Mesembryanthemum and stone-crop down,
Where the gull looks no larger than a lark
Hung midway twixt the cliff-top and the sand,
Sun-shadowed valleys roll along the sea.
Forced by the backwash, see the nearest wave
Rise to a wall of huge, translucent green
And crumble into spray along the top
Blown seaward by the land-breeze. Now she breaks
And in an arch of thunder plunges down
To burst and tumble, foam on top of foam,
Criss-crossing, baffled, sucked and shot again,
A waterfall of whiteness, down a rock,
Without a source but roller's furthest reach:
And tufts of sea-pink, high and dry for years,
Are flooded out of ledges, boulders seem
No bigger than a pebble washed about
In this tremendous tide. Oh kindly slate!
To give me shelter in this crevice dry.
These shivering stalks of bent-grass, lucky plant,
Have better chance than I to last the storm.
Oh kindly slate of these unaltered cliffs,
Firm, barren substrate of our windy fields!
Oh lichened slate in walls, they knew your worth
Who raised you up to make this House of God
What faith was his, that dim, that Cornish saint,
Small rushlight of a long-forgotten church,
Who lived with God on this unfriendly shore,
Who knew He made the Atlantic and the stones
And destined seamen here to end their lives
Dashed on a rock, rolled over in the surf,
And not one hair forgotten. Now they lie
In centuries of sand beside the church.
Less pitiable are they than the corpse
Of a large golfer, only four weeks dead,
This sunlit and sea-distant afternoon.
"Praise ye the Lord!" and in another key
The Lord's name by harmonium be praised.
"The Second Evening and the Fourteenth Psalm."
The Church with a famous mouse!
‘Diary of a Church Mouse’ by John Betjeman is a satirical look, through the eyes of a mouse, at the relationship humans have with their church.
It goes like this:
Here among long-discarded cassocks,
Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks,
Here where the vicar never looks
I nibble through old service books.
Lean and alone I spend my days
Behind this Church of England baize.
I share my dark forgotten room
With two oil-lamps and half a broom.
The cleaner never bothers me,
So here I eat my frugal tea.
My bread is sawdust mixed with straw;
My jam is polish for the floor.
Christmas and Easter may be feasts
For congregations and for priests,
And so may Whitsun. All the same,
They do not fill my meagre frame.
For me the only feast at all
Is Autumn's Harvest Festival,
When I can satisfy my want
With ears of corn around the font.
I climb the eagle's brazen head
To burrow through a loaf of bread.
I scramble up the pulpit stair
And gnaw the marrows hanging there.
It is enjoyable to taste
These items ere they go to waste,
But how annoying when one finds
That other mice with pagan minds
Come into church my food to share
Who have no proper business there.
Two field mice who have no desire
To be baptized, invade the choir.
A large and most unfriendly rat
Comes in to see what we are at.
He says he thinks there is no God
And yet he comes ... it's rather odd.
This year he stole a sheaf of wheat
(It screened our special preacher's seat),
And prosperous mice from fields away
Come in to hear our organ play,
And under cover of its notes
Ate through the altar's sheaf of oats.
A Low Church mouse, who thinks that I
Am too papistical, and High,
Yet somehow doesn't think it wrong
To munch through Harvest Evensong,
While I, who starve the whole year through,
Must share my food with rodents who
Except at this time of the year
Not once inside the church appear.
Within the human world I know
Such goings-on could not be so,
For human beings only do
What their religion tells them to.
They read the Bible every day
And always, night and morning, pray,
And just like me, the good church mouse,
Worship each week in God's own house,
But all the same it's strange to me
How very full the church can be
With people I don't see at all
Except at Harvest Festival
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