Free The Main Cages by Philip Marsden
Authors: Philip Marsden
chaplain in Aldershot, fifteen happy years in India and now he was going to spend fifteen happy years in Cornwall.
He climbed down from the rectory cart, stretched his long limbs and breathed in deeply. ‘Sea air!’ he called to Mrs Hooper.
Peering through the lych-gate, he saw the church tower below and the Glaze River beyond it and the graveyard half-hidden by vegetation.
‘What did I tell you, my dear! A jungle!’
Hooper had already read the passage in
The Cornish Coast, South
(1910):
The grounds of Polmayne’s 14th-century church of St Cuby tumble into a quiet creek to the east of the town. In the 1860s the Reverend Pratt, antiquarian and horticulturalist, assembled the plants for this unspeakably lovely churchyard which, once seen, remains for ever in the mind as the England of one’s dreams …
Pratt’s planting, it later turned out, was largely the result of his ‘Lent Prayer Tours’ during which he would visit the duchy’s great houses, conducting informal theological discussions while his driver took cuttings from the gardens’ rare plants.
But in his twenty years with the living of Polmayne, Winchester had allowed Pratt’s sub-tropical gardens to lapse into a state of tropical disorder. Hooper wasted no time in restoring them. He recruited a team of part-time gardeners. ‘Hackers’ he called them, and he spent that first winter alongside them, clearing and slashing at the brambles and creeper. ‘Assaulting the pagan thorn!’ he trilled, and in doing so discovered for himself the half-hidden history of the town.
The granite cross commemorating the victims of the
Adelaide
had almost toppled over; he re-bedded it. Down towards the creek, beside a swampy patch of gunnera, the Hackers came across a group of unmarked graves under an overgrown mound of ship’s tackle – rotting blocks, mossy warps, an anchor and shreds of cloth which may once have been sails or may have been clothes. The discipline of the tropics heeded Parson Hooper to burn the cloth for fear of cholera.
Parson Hooper transformed the grounds of Polmayne’schurch, and nowhere did he leave his mark more visibly than with his ‘Tablets’. Each month, after his diocesan meeting, he would visit the yard of Truro’s Pascoe & Sons (Monumental Masons), with a quotation of some sort. The following month he would put the Tablet in the back of his trap, return to Polmayne and install it alongside the main paths of the churchyard. The first month he put in a series of three. The first was by the lych-gate:
And I will make thy windows of agate
And thy gates of carbuncles
And all thy borders of precious stones.
At the beginning of the path’s descent:
The Path of the Just is as the Shining Light
That Shineth more and more unto the Perfect Day.
Halfway down, the path took a steep right-hand bend and plunged into a bower of holm oak:
They heard the voice of the Lord God
Walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
Each time he put in a Tablet, Parson Hooper gave a short ceremony. In time, the ceremonies came to be attended by the same group of dedicated Anglican women.
Late in October Mrs Franks returned from several months in India. She was sorry to hear of Winchester’s death but pleased to see that Hooper was making such progress in the churchyard. Bending to inspect one of his new Tablets, she read: ‘They heard the voice of the Lord God/Walking in the garden in the cool of the day.’ When she found Hooper himself in his overalls, she beamed at him. ‘So you’re the new vicar?’
He smiled humbly. ‘Madam, I am the gardener.’
After Winchester’s creaking ministry, here was a man of energy and life. As Hooper stood half-singing his prayers of dedication the women looked up at his Asia-weathered face, and vowed to give more of their time to beautifying the church.
CHAPTER 9
O n 11 November the
Maria V
left Polmayne for Plymouth. Losing the nets in Newlyn had made Jack even more determined to continue fishing. He
He climbed down from the rectory cart, stretched his long limbs and breathed in deeply. ‘Sea air!’ he called to Mrs Hooper.
Peering through the lych-gate, he saw the church tower below and the Glaze River beyond it and the graveyard half-hidden by vegetation.
‘What did I tell you, my dear! A jungle!’
Hooper had already read the passage in
The Cornish Coast, South
(1910):
The grounds of Polmayne’s 14th-century church of St Cuby tumble into a quiet creek to the east of the town. In the 1860s the Reverend Pratt, antiquarian and horticulturalist, assembled the plants for this unspeakably lovely churchyard which, once seen, remains for ever in the mind as the England of one’s dreams …
Pratt’s planting, it later turned out, was largely the result of his ‘Lent Prayer Tours’ during which he would visit the duchy’s great houses, conducting informal theological discussions while his driver took cuttings from the gardens’ rare plants.
But in his twenty years with the living of Polmayne, Winchester had allowed Pratt’s sub-tropical gardens to lapse into a state of tropical disorder. Hooper wasted no time in restoring them. He recruited a team of part-time gardeners. ‘Hackers’ he called them, and he spent that first winter alongside them, clearing and slashing at the brambles and creeper. ‘Assaulting the pagan thorn!’ he trilled, and in doing so discovered for himself the half-hidden history of the town.
The granite cross commemorating the victims of the
Adelaide
had almost toppled over; he re-bedded it. Down towards the creek, beside a swampy patch of gunnera, the Hackers came across a group of unmarked graves under an overgrown mound of ship’s tackle – rotting blocks, mossy warps, an anchor and shreds of cloth which may once have been sails or may have been clothes. The discipline of the tropics heeded Parson Hooper to burn the cloth for fear of cholera.
Parson Hooper transformed the grounds of Polmayne’schurch, and nowhere did he leave his mark more visibly than with his ‘Tablets’. Each month, after his diocesan meeting, he would visit the yard of Truro’s Pascoe & Sons (Monumental Masons), with a quotation of some sort. The following month he would put the Tablet in the back of his trap, return to Polmayne and install it alongside the main paths of the churchyard. The first month he put in a series of three. The first was by the lych-gate:
And I will make thy windows of agate
And thy gates of carbuncles
And all thy borders of precious stones.
At the beginning of the path’s descent:
The Path of the Just is as the Shining Light
That Shineth more and more unto the Perfect Day.
Halfway down, the path took a steep right-hand bend and plunged into a bower of holm oak:
They heard the voice of the Lord God
Walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
Each time he put in a Tablet, Parson Hooper gave a short ceremony. In time, the ceremonies came to be attended by the same group of dedicated Anglican women.
Late in October Mrs Franks returned from several months in India. She was sorry to hear of Winchester’s death but pleased to see that Hooper was making such progress in the churchyard. Bending to inspect one of his new Tablets, she read: ‘They heard the voice of the Lord God/Walking in the garden in the cool of the day.’ When she found Hooper himself in his overalls, she beamed at him. ‘So you’re the new vicar?’
He smiled humbly. ‘Madam, I am the gardener.’
After Winchester’s creaking ministry, here was a man of energy and life. As Hooper stood half-singing his prayers of dedication the women looked up at his Asia-weathered face, and vowed to give more of their time to beautifying the church.
CHAPTER 9
O n 11 November the
Maria V
left Polmayne for Plymouth. Losing the nets in Newlyn had made Jack even more determined to continue fishing. He