WHEN, giving a hostage to fortune, I recklessly announce that I
do not take holidays, meaning that I don't have a fortnight in
Spain, or Felixstowe, the reply is: "But your life is all holiday!"
So much for the years at the desk.
This country was all holy days until the Reformation, after
which you were lucky to get time off for Christmas. Bank Holidays
began in 1871, when banks were closed for one day a year. In Thomas
Hardy's novels, you got a day off only if some minor mishap - a
whitlow on your finger - prevented your working - although, in the
old half-dreaming, hard-working countryside, skiving was an
honourable art.
As a boy, I would vanish into the long grass, so to speak, to
read and escape jobs. As country children, we had our jobs, and
mine included milking goats, running errands, and looking after
small brothers. I longed to be alone, like Greta Garbo. And now I
am - alone with three parishes.
Their wants are part of my happiness, something that puzzles my
friends. I have long stopped worrying about repeating myself when I
talk to them Sunday after Sunday. Sometimes I read to them,
sometimes I teach them. The lesson-readers take such trouble. I
could listen to some of them by the hour.
It is Isaiah now, peerless prophet. And a lengthy one, thank
goodness. He flourished, as they say, in the eighth century BC. And
what a writer! His wonderful book begins with human desolation, and
ends with the new heavens and the new earth. His God tells him: "Be
glad, and rejoice for ever in my creation."
"I know I should be happy, if in the world I stay," we sang in
Sunday school. Not, of course, on the News, which is as unhappy as
journalists can make it: a sad entertainment on the hour. But human
nature's balancing propensities defeat such expert gloom, certainly
when the sun shines as it does at this moment, hotting up the roof
tiles, and driving the white cat under the sheltering leaves.
I am re-reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves. "The sun
struck straight upon the house, making the white walls glare
between the dark windows. Their panes, woven thickly with green
branches, held circles of impenetrable darkness.
"Sharp wedges of light lay upon the window sill and showed
inside the room plates with blue rims, cups with curved handles,
the bulge of a great bowl, the criss-cross pattern in the rug, and
the formidable corners and lines of cabinets and bookcases." Just
as now, this minute. Nothing need be changed in the description.
The virtue of such writing is to show us all over again the beauty
of the ordinary, the commonplace.
Washing dries between two plum trees. The postman rattles down
the stony track. But fewer walkers than in days gone by. It has
been a public road since Alfred the Great or John Bottengomes,
c.1375. It tilts towards the River Stour, with pastures on
one side and crops on the other. I know its every flint. They shine
in the July sun, just as they do in the spring rain.
The summer birds sing, but I am bad on birdsong, try as I might
to identify it. "But that's a goldcrest," the old friend tells me,
although it will merge into "birdsong" the minute she leaves.
The Old Testament is terrible on natural history. I learnt some
of mine reading the Palestinian information at the back of my Bible
during sermons. This when I was a child. I am all attention now, of
course. But the summer does make one drift off. It is partly what
it is for - meditation.
