11 March 1985

A fine, fair morning, the third in a row. One of the first things I saw when I pulled the draperies to let in the light from the strong morning sun was a cock pheasant gliding into the evergreens on the hill. The glistening flash of mottled earth and enameled green as the bird spread its wings in the sunlight made me eager to take a walk around the grounds, which I did right after breakfast. My sweater and light jacket were more than I needed out in the clear, warm air but not enough in the chilly darkness under the evergreens. "It's springtime in the sunshine but winter in the shade," I said to myself.
     Moving repeatedly every hundred yards or so from one season to the other provided a sort of theme for the day: all was contrast, opposites succeeding each other turn and turn about. Pussy willow buds swelled fat and silken on branches overhanging an ancient, rotting stump covered with lichen and fungus—the cold blossoms of decay. Coots and mallards raced and flapped and skimmed noisily in courtship rituals on the surface of the great lake, at the edge of which I saw a blue tit crushed in mud and, again today, the remains of a munt jac deer, dragged once more by carrion creatures out of the thicket into which Robert Denton had lifted it yesterday. Looking at the thickets growing right down to the water and the rampant marsh grasses thrusting through the lake's muddy banks, I remembered, probably imperfectly, part of a line of Thoreau's about the New England coast: "...a wild rank place with no flattery in it." Later in the walk, as I made my way up the northern edge of the grounds, the racket of a rookery scraped against the chimes of All Saints' clock, floating, round and full, like bubbles in the air.
     For quite some time, I stood on the mound below "The Cataract," listening to the plash and gurgle of the water and remembering Horace Walpole's delight in sitting in the Chinese Pagoda that once whimsically graced the crest of this little hill. Thoughts of Walpole reminded me of another literary figure who had visited Wroxton, Henry James. In a passage that I have squirreled away from somewhere in his writings--just where I forget right now, he left this recollection of the wonderful old building: "And what shall I say of the color of Wroxton Abbey, which we visited last in order and which in the thickening twilight, as we approached its great ivy-muffled face, laid on the mind the burden of its felicity?"
     I then turned onto the path leading to the church and met Rector Walker just opening the door of the south porch. We renewed our acquaintance, interrupted by eighteen years of not having seen one another, and he told me briefly, though with persistent stammers that set his chin tab to quivering, of Walter Naylor's death. Mr. Naylor, whom Patty and I got to know in 1967, had worked hard one day, the Rector reported, mowing and tidying up the Church's graveyard. He finished his task, returned homeward down Lime Walk, and dropped dead. The paradox of his having died, in a sense, out of caring for the dead, disturbed me as another of this morning's odd juxtapositions.
     Standing in the shadowy nave of the church, looking up at the W N carved in the arch above the chancel screen in memory of Mr. Naylor, I felt that both the Rector and I were in need of cheering up. I decided to read the Rector one of my favorite short passages from Kilvert's Diary, which I had in my pocket:

"April 27, 1874: ...the Vicar of Fordington told us of the state of things in his parish when he first came to it nearly half a century ago. No man had ever been known to receive Holy Communion except the Parson, the Clerk, and the sexton. There were 16 women communicants and most of them went away when he refused to pay them for coming...At one church there were two male communicants. When the cup was given to the first he touched his forelock and said, `Here's your good health, Sir!' The other said, `Here's the good health of our Lord Jesus Christ.' One day there was a christening and no water in the Font. `Water, Sir!' said the clerk in astonishment. `The last parson never used no water. He spit into his hand.'"

The Rector's hearty laughter echoing in the gloom and dust of the vault intensified, rather than lessened, my odd uneasiness with the day's discrepancies. A strange antiphonal music seemed to fill the air.
     I said goodbye to the Rector and strolled slowly through the lichen crusted stones in the graveyard, acutely conscious of the inappropriate brightness of the sun's rays falling upon memorial tablets from which the turning years had rubbed virtually all the names and dates. One or two refracted rays fell in the same sprightly and unsuitable way upon the deeply shadowed commemorative plaque on the south wall, asking the parishioners of All Saints to remember those village men who gave their lives in "The Great War." Although Wroxton was then, as it is now, a settlement of a few hundred souls seemingly remote from the disorder of the world, the names of the war dead totaled sixteen, four times as many as in World War II.
     I reentered the south porch of the church, saw a wrinkled notice in a frame fixed to the wall, and took out my pencil and copied what appeared there:

"Canon XCIX. No person shall marry within the degrees prohibited by the Table here set forth: The Table of Kindred and Affinity wherein whosoever are related are forbidden by the Church of England to marry together.

     A Man may not marry his

Mother
Daughter
Father's mother
Mother's mother
Son's daughter
Daughter's daughter
Sister
Father's daughter
Mother's daughter
Wife's mother
Wife's daughter
Father's wife
Son's wife
Father's father's wife
Mother's father's wife
Wife's father's mother
Wife's mother's mother
Wife's son's daughter
Wife's daughter's daughter
Son's son's wife
Daughter's son's wife
Father's sister
Mother's sister
Brother's daughter
Sister's daughter

     A Woman may not marry her

Father
Son
Father's father
Mother's father
Son's son
Daughter's son
Brother
Father's son
Mother's son
Husband's father
Husband's son
Mother's husband
Daughter's husband
Father's mother's husband
Mother's mother's husband
Husband's father's father
Husband's mother's father
Husband's son's son
Husband's daughter's son
Husband's daughter's husband
Daughter's daughter's husband
Father's brother
Mother's brother
Brother's son
Sister's son

and this Table shall be in every church publicly set up and fixed at the charge of the Parish."

     Soothed somewhat by the parallelism, balance and completeness of the Canon's columns, I was reassured also—for a reason I didn't fully understand—by the placard next to the Table of Kindred and Affinity. A listing of the charges for various services provided by the Church, it revealed that the cost of a wedding or a funeral was almost exactly the same, the most complete possible set of marriage services running to £33, only £1.50 more than those for burial.
     Across Silver Street, in the yard behind one of the cottages on Church Walk, a pretty young woman was hanging her fresh washed clothes upon a line. As I headed toward the gate in the Abbey wall, I waved to her and said good morning. She stuffed a damp garment under her left arm and reached up with her right hand to remove a clothes pin held between her teeth. "Good morning," she replied cheerfully. "A splendid start to the day, isn't it?" "Yes it is," I called back, trying to sound confidently contented. On the other side of the high wall, I heard Robert Denton's happy whistle and, as counterpoint to it, the sad, slow notes of a wood pigeon.
     The mismatched sounds brought a comforting thought quickly to my mind, crowding out a persisting dreariness of mood: This contrapuntal background music doesn't have anything at all to do with disorder, I conveniently convinced myself. It's a proper sort of anthem celebrating something fundamentally a part of this England full of contrarieties, a musical evocation of all sorts of cultural characteristics: the reflexively quarrelsome response of one Times reader to another's comments on avocados, or train schedules, or army underwear—to anything; the ritualistic hoots and "Hear-Hear"s of Westminster's question periods; the elaborate incidental politeness that is often not much more than the result of impatience and a fervent wish simply to avoid further involvement; the communal satisfaction over the condign misfortune of those victimized by their own rashness, disobedience, indifference, or foolishness contrasted with the universal—and often spontaneously sentimental—compassion for blameless sufferers, especially if they are      It's also, I remembered with a smile, a tribute to that creatively perverse assertion of the dissident private view that enriches England's literature with irony and iconoclasm and its history with admirably stubborn rebels shouting their beliefs to the muttering mob even as the headsman nudges them toward the block—or, as Raleigh did on the eve of his beheading, carefully crafting poetic lines of farewell to life like these: “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,/ My staff of faith to walk upon,/ My scrip of joy, immortal diet,/ My bottle of salvation,/ My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,/ And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.”
     I knew that the explanations were calculatingly Pollyanna-ish simplifications, but they served my needs. The last village sounds I heard as I crossed the sward to the Abbey's front entrance were the happy shouts and bright laughter of little children at play in Dark Lane.
     Walking up the Abbey driveway, I remembered that the first residence one sees entering the village is named Alpha Cottage and that the last one one passes on leaving the village is named Omega Cottage.