An Audience with an Elephant (31 page)

The gardens went first, because of the cost of the upkeep. The grass tennis court under the trees became a lawn, and then the lawn went and there was just undergrowth. The greenhouse was abandoned, and the sheds left locked. When the auctioneer’s men finally came they had to fell trees just to get to the garage.

The older villagers, who remembered the vicar’s daughter as a young woman riding her bicycle erratically down the hill, kept an eye on her, but the majority, the newcomers, did not even know of her existence. She was ferried like royalty from her house to church and the odd tea party; the village shop delivered her groceries. Just outside the front door was a tiny hutch where she kept her one hen; daily she must have groped her way to that, and the one egg.

When I was first told about her I remember thinking that I would probably never come on anything like this again, a community, not its social services or its nurses, but people who had known her looking after one of their own, as their ancestors would have done. The blind lady in the wood was one of the village’s last links with its history.

She was ill for just three weeks and went into hospital, asking one of the villagers to keep an eye on the house for her, but she did not return. She died, as she had lived, without causing trouble to anyone.

And now her house is up for sale. For weeks people have come and gone; gouging into the window sills with penknives, hacking pieces out of the plaster, the way house-hunters do now. Soon someone else will be there, felling the trees, cutting a path, painting the beams white. They may frighten truculent children with tales of the old lady in the wood.

I drove past on the day of her death, and on the gate someone had left a single red rose.

A Ghost in the Church

SMALL CHURCH IS TO CLOSE
. There were a few paragraphs in the local paper, but it is the usual matter of accountancy, a congregation of nine unable to afford repair bills of £150,000. But this is no ordinary church – this is St Guthlac’s at Passenham in Northamptonshire. Come inside for a moment.

It is a summer evening and there are shadows on the two inscriptions above the south door. Both are in Latin. The first celebrates the rebuilding of the chancel in 1626, and the text is what you would expect. Psalm 116, verse 12. ‘How can I repay the Lord for his goodness to me?’ But the second text is not at all what you would expect. St Luke 12, verse 20,
Stulte Hoc Nocte
. . . ‘You fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you.’

The church guide-book, its words chosen with care, describes this as an enigma in its context. It does not mention the story, still told, that when the man who had the chancel rebuilt came to be buried, his bearers heard a known voice speak from the coffin. ‘I am not ready.’ They opened the coffin but there was no movement in the wild, spade-bearded face, which now, in marble, is also in the chancel wall. Yet when they buried him beside the altar the voice spoke again. ‘I am not ready yet.’

And you are in familiar territory, are you not? An English parish church; a puzzling quotation; a dominating long-dead local figure. All you are waiting for is the horror to come as quietly as the tide and break among stone flags and the damp, for in life you have stepped into a ghost story by M.R. James.

Three-and-a-half centuries after his death they still remember Sir Robert Banastre in Passenham, mothers bringing children to order by the mention of his name. Architectural historians also remember him. His chancel, said one, was unique. And it is. Sit down, for the restoration work of the 1950s has restored it to the way it would have looked in Banastre’s time. You will have already noticed that you are in an unusual place, entering from the west through the bell tower, past the eighteenth-century boxed pews painted a pale matt green. And then you come to Banastre’s chancel.

Even old Pevsner was startled into one of his rare, wintry adjectives. ‘Very remarkable furnishings,’ he wrote. The roof is a deep blue, sprinkled with gold stars so you feel you have strayed into a planetarium. But everything else is deliberately archaic. On the walls are paintings of biblical figures, not put up to overawe the poor, but huge and elegant. The only thing is, they were put up centuries after the fashion for wall paintings had gone, and just before it became imperative to whitewash them over. The man who had this done must have thought himself in his private chapel, and where St Mark should be, his own face, under a linen skullcap, looks down.

And Sir Robert had only just begun. His choir stalls froth with carvings and there are misericords from a time long after these had gone out of ritual. You sit there, passing your hands over carvings in the twilight, and you have the odd sensation these are moving. So you bend to look, and wish you hadn’t. For these are not the quaint beasts of the Middle Ages, these were meant to terrify: hoofed demons, legs shaggy with hair, their mouths agape, eyes bulging, breasts sagging.

Why did he have all this done? It has been suggested Banastre was a secret Catholic, this prominent courtier to James I and Charles I, but no secret Catholic would have dared commission anything like this. And why did his villagers hate him so? The local historian Sir Gordon Roberts thought it might be because Banastre had enclosed their common land, but this, he found, had been done long before. As for the stories of cruelty, he found that Banastre’s will bulged with bequests.

Yet they did hate him and went on hating him and told so many ghost stories these have become matter of fact. I asked one man when he had last seen a ghost, and he said Tuesday night, when a voice spoke out of the darkness. A human shape? Oh yes, except this was a human shape in a large hat with a feather.

How odd it should feel so remote here, for the main road is only half a mile away and over the water meadows the roofs of Milton Keynes show above the willow trees, massed like an army. There are just fifteen houses in Passenham, also a tithe barn, the manor, the church. And if it is remote now, think how much more it must have been in the early seventeenth century, when a powerful man might have done what he wanted here.

A summer evening with shadows, and the sudden wish to be elsewhere.

Note: But the church didn’t close.

Author biography

Byron Rogers writes for the
Sunday Telegraph
, the
Guardian, Saga
magazine and most other publications. He is also the author of
The Green Lane to Nowhere
:
the Life of an English Village
and
The Last Englishman
:
the Life of J.L. Carr
, both published by Aurum Press. A Welsh-speaking Welshman, he lives in Northamptonshire and has succeeded in marrying an Englishwoman.

Copyright

First published in 2001
by Aurum Press Ltd, 7 Greenland Street, London NW1 0ND

This eBook edition first published in 2012

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© Byron Rogers, 2001

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ISBN 978–1–84513–850–9