SUMMER rain. The land is thirsty for it. No birdsong to speak of, just the perpetual running of my stream to the Stour. I say Robert Louis Stevenson’s prayers at matins — the ones he wrote for his Samoan community. They called him Tusitala, the writing man. He was dying in his thirties; tall, thin, Scottish, amazingly fertile, with everything from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to Treasure Island lined up on the shelf. The only protraction to time was pure air.
It was like this in the Stour Valley when I was a boy and saw grown men in prams. Consumption, they called it. This disease consumed them. They waved to us with stick-like arms. Stevenson was part-way through his last novel, Weir of Hermiston, when death pounced. It was my weir that made me think of him. This, and the summer rain.
I had planned to “do the back of the house”, i.e. tackle the dizzy, seeding weeds, scrape mossy cushions from the roof, and generally prepare the ground for a bit of scything.
Since we must all boast of something, I will boast of my ability with a scythe. I bought it from the scythe shop in Stowmarket, ages ago — this unremarkable little Suffolk town was where my teenage father joined the 5th Suffolks for Gallipoli. John Milton had also had a holiday there with his old schoolmaster, now the Vicar of Stowmarket. They say that the mulberry tree he planted in the vicarage garden still bears fruit.
Anyway, it was where I bought my scythe. It glitters plaintively on the brick floor, waiting for the rain to cease. And I remind it that
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
As if to confirm this, the spade that my brother gave me long ago promptly snapped. I was doing a little archaeology with a friend when it broke in half, splintered by donkey’s years of wear and tear. What remains is a dib, which is better than nothing.
It has always been a mystery to me that our ancestors looked down on tools and those who used them, and looked up to those who carried guns and swords. Something to do with the defence of the race, they said. How perfect that Mary should have mistaken the risen Christ for a gardener.
Quite a long time ago, my friend Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote a novel about three women who founded a cell in the Fens — founded Ely Cathedral, as it happened. It is called The Corner That Held Them. They didn’t get on, of course, but the cell did.
You should just see Ely! See it from the train, the dead-straight roads, the roof of a Cambridge college, from a distance and from simply looking up. Its lantern balances on oak trees above a landscape that is as flat as a pancake, yet at the same time is a soaring spiritual experience. For no reason at all the hymn “How shall I sing that Majesty Which angels do admire?” comes into my head when I enter Ely. It goes on:
Thou art a sea without a shore,
A sun without a sphere;
Thy time is now and evermore,
Thy place is everywhere.
