Stories and Articles

Mugworth St Hyacinth ...

by Ean Lawrence

One of Eve Kelmscott-Arden’s greatest pleasures was church-crawling; wherever she was, she couldn’t resist the temptation to visit the local church.  The varying modes of architecture, the traces of medieval paintings, the magniloquent inscriptions on the tombs of antique knights, the stained glass ancient and modern, the anaemic altar hangings and the carved oak and marble all attracted Eve’s interest and fuelled her passion.  But among the ecclesiastical gems studded around the country, the humble church of St Hyacinth, Mugworth, occupied a special place in her heart.

Eve made her way down the winding lane to St Hyacinth’s, admiring the rich tapestry of flowers that lined the hedgerows on either side of her that glowed in the summer sunshine. The entrance to the churchyard was a good quarter of a mile from the main road, the rusty latch on the gate a small clue that the church, lying in seclusion at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by a girdle of trees, was neglected by petitioner, pilgrim and pedantic brass rubber alike.

The church of resolute moorland granite possessed a squat tower with round-headed windows, which were little more than slits with a sliver of unframed glass to keep out the wind, the rain and the Devil. The shallow-pitched roof of irregular-sized slates was, on its north face, almost completely covered with a layer of emerald moss; reflecting the purity of the air, the stonework of the building and the slanting stones planted in the graveyard were mottled with a rash of lichen.

The porch, where on half-days and holidays boys had played unholy games, was loose and pulled away from the main body of the church, as if it were ashamed of the rude boys’ antics and the backsliders’ indifference. Eve passed under a sundial, its scratches faded and gnomon long gone, opened the heavy oak door and entered, with only a moment’s hesitation, the gloom, to be met with the smell of wet earth, damp hassocks and mildewed hymn books. As Eve’s eyes grew accustomed to the murk, she went to the chamber at the base of the tower where the bell ringers had served their time and rung the changes in unchanged lives. On the wall, where sallied ropes hung mouldering, she looked for the board her grandfather – dear old Granfer – had affixed to it on which was written ringers’ rhymes. But where the board should have been there was only an enclave of wall that was lighter in colour than the rest of the hostile surface that surrounded it. Eve lowered her gaze and saw the board, split in two, lying on the dusty floor.

She returned to the nave and went to the old familiar place in the narrow, straight-backed, pitch pine pews where she had sat with feet uncomfortably short of the floor, and was joined by the ghosts of sermons. The parson was wont to preach for up to an hour, and during this droning time the battered Bible that occupied the pulpit’s lectern would be pounded when the preacher sought to emphasize an important, if obscure, doctrinal point. Eve closed her eyes and immediately heard the squeaking boots - polished to within an inch of their lives - of the warden as he trooped up and down the aisles and passed the long-handled box along the lines of the faithful to collect the Gospel’s dues.

With a start, Eve was aroused from her recollections - her reverie fragmented - by the imagined poke in her back that would have been delivered by her mother to serve as a reproof to a sinful daughter and to urge her to sit up and listen to the warnings that were coming down from the pulpit and, by implication, from God. She would look to her left and see that Granfer was struggling to keep awake, his head nodding, and then jerking up as the shockwaves from the assaulted Bible reached him, only to fall slowly again until he received, as the rest of the congregation did, the parson’s ‘lastly’ with a feeling of relief and gratitude, as if the good Lord himself had taken pity on them and intervened to release them from their suffering.  It was time for Eve to bring an end this day’s bitter sweetness.

he intervals between Eve’s visits were getting longer, and she thought that the returns to be obtained from them were diminishing.  As Eve closed the gate on the past and returned to a world in which the creeds preached by men seemed full of everything except what Christ had taught, she wished she was a girl again and sitting with her beloved Granfer enjoying the certainties of c