Free Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

myself in it’) and accepts the living on 3 July, so that on Friday, 28 July he’s able to read the announcement of his appointment in the Church Times , which makes it real – ‘O father at last I see the fruition of my desires . . .’ – and within weeks the fun began, as we know.
    Everything is suddenly on the move, unfixed, the old landmarks of his depression left behind in the Rhondda – along with his wife and son and Valma too, for the moment, since the vicarage in Hanmer is to be cleaned and refurbished a bit, and in any case they need time to pack up. All at once he’s alone in this new place (‘a lovely spot’) where people don’tknow him from Adam. Mobility. Freedom of a kind. He must take up his duties immediately, now that the old Canon, long ailing, has finally admitted defeat and been persuaded to go. His two churches are three miles apart down shaggy, meandering country roads blistered with cow pats and hemmed in by weedy ditches. He acquires a bicycle, and finds himself walking it up gentle hills (no mountains here) and freewheeling down again on the other side. The diary shows him threading his way along a necklace of new place-names – Bangor-on-Dee, Wrexham, Ellesmere, Horseman’s Green, Eglwys Cross, Bronington, Bettisfield, Whitchurch – marking out a map on which, more and more often, his path crosses that of the district nurse, Nurse Burgess, who of course has a bicycle too . . .
    Just days before, ironically enough, he is all prepared to be lonely and bored. ‘Hanmer is very quiet,’ he notes ominously, ‘very . . . Time hangs somewhat on my hands in this place.’ Then the new bike arrives. There’s an August heatwave, the kids are swimming in the mere just as we would twenty years on (except that in 1933 it’s only the boys) and on the very day he admits to taking his first ride with the nurse (‘ Here the fun begins ’) they are both summoned to the mereside in their professional capacities, because one of the young men has drowned. It’s the beginning of a tragic sub-plot that keeps up a kind of background thrumming for months to come: drowned Jack is Molly’s young man, bereaved Molly comes to work in the vicarage as a maid, loses her mind, Nurse Burgess tries to get her put away and so forth. For now, though, Jack’s death is the main, telling event, a focus for feeling. It permeates the humid atmosphere and puts paid to any illusion of serenity. His body doesn’t surface for three days and the whole of Hanmer keeps a vigil, people standing in hot huddles talking under their breath, gazing at the innocent flat water onlydimpled with fish taking flies. He was a strong swimmer, too, so there’s a niggling element of mystery about his death: cramp, or weed, or cold currents must have got him and it’s true – was still true twenty years later – that sometimes when the water near the edge was soupy warm you’d suddenly find your legs entwined with chill streams snaking in under the lily pads, just before the bottom shelved right away.

    Hanmer Mere
    Grandpa was swiftly out of his depth as well, but he was having a marvellous time and only noticed how far he’d gone when his family actually turned up. Out of his depth, and in his element . He and Nurse Burgess, now MB for short in the diary, pedal to paradise every day of the week, including Sunday. Trailing a cloud of midges, they’d hump their bikes off the road, through some muddy gateway and, behind the hedge, hug and knead each other among the mallows and Queen Anne’s lace and nettles dusty with pollen. Perhaps they spread his tobacco-scented black cassock on the ground to protect them from ants and the crawling wasps drunk on crab apples. Or more likely they’d keep their uniforms on and each get toknow the other’s body in bits. He is lean and wiry, MB in her starched blue