The Life of England
And may it return
This piece is part of the Choc Board, a 30 day writing challenge instigated by Chocolate Knox. You can read his Substack here. This is day 6.
Many visitors to England miss out on its chief delights. London has sights, and sounds and history, no doubt. And certainly, zone 1 of the tube map is worth a visit. Maybe even two visits. But once your underground ticket says zones 2-7, you've entered the realm of the purely functional. At that point you're either commuting or heading-off to wrestle with sanity at London Heathrow.
News of England these days is almost wholly grim: protests, riots, and WEF communists. Play those headlines with a backdrop of London's North Circular on a rainy day and you might wonder why anyone ever loved it. Is it not a place of concrete misery and tinpot tyranny through and through? Just dysfunction, and disorder from the soggy end to the boggy end, and through the damp bit in the middle?
In this post I want to show you England, the whole thing, by showing you just a very small part. Not a particularly special part when all things are considered, but the part I know best.
If you travel up the West Coast of Great Britain, past the coves and caves of Cornwall, beyond the dragon shores and cambric wilds of Wales, and through the lingering haze of imperial smoke in the sea-ports of Liverpool and the mouth of the river Mersey, you will in time come to the mudflats and saltmarshes of Morecambe Bay.
This large inlet of the Irish Sea-coast curves round from Heysham and Morecambe (beloved resort of English comic Eric Morecambe, graveyard of the regrettable 'Mr. Blobby Land', and home to a junction that cost me my first attempt to get a driving licence). From there it passes under the vigilant eye of the city of Lancaster, through the mouth of the river Kent, and on into the shadows of the Lake District fells and the Furness Peninsula.
Halfway between Lancaster and Kendal (famous for mint-cake), as the River Bela curls her final lazy turns, is the small village of Beetham, and up the hill, the even smaller hamlet of Slackhead, where I grew-up.
Oh, you should see the summer sun catch fire on the candle blossoms of horse chestnut on that road up that hill. You should wander those woods on an evening in April when the blackbird's song sets the celandine ablaze with golden glory and he dances with anemone, his shining silver bride.
There's an old house in the woods. I don't know who lived there, I suspect no one does now. But I do know that one January, hundreds of snowdrops moved in.
Part way along the road up the hill, is a hole in a wall. Inside the hole is a statue of St. Leoba, protected (or kept captive, you can never be too sure with saints) by a metal grate. The old Saxon church in the village was dedicated to her, though she died helping her cousin St. Boniface in the Germanys.
Everyone knows about the fairies of course, and how if you walk their steps without touching the sides, they might give you a wish. Not that you'd want that, mind. Best to leave fairies alone. Their staircase, a narrow passage between two rock faces, lie on the old corpse road, the best path for carrying coffins from Arnside on the shore to the graveyard in Beetham.
The hill is mostly owned by the grand estate, as it has been for time immemorial. The old lord didn't mind the locals, he let them wander the deer tracks and forestry trails without much bother. But when he died more distant family moved in. There's CCTV in the trees now.
Some old timers are left in the village; or one at least. Rodney still collects wood, a habit left over from his lumber-mill days, agelessly spry for a man in (or at least approaching) his 90s. Maybe he remembers who lived in that house in the woods, or who first planted the corner orchard, or who went to the spring in the forest for water. Maybe.
But though many things are gone, there are things that will linger a little longer. I remember where I and my sisters played, the secret clints and grykes of limestone under a blanket of yew needles. I remember birthday treasure hunts with friends we thought would live forever but didn't.
I could write more. And perhaps some day I will. I haven't touched on the skeins of geese returning for autumn rest on the marsh, or summer sports days, or winter sledges. I haven't told the story of the memorial plaque at midnight on Christmas Eve, and a joddery taper that could've burnt it all to the ground.
I could write more, but I've written enough to do what I set out to do. I said that I'd tell you about England, by telling you about one little part of it. This is England, this village a thousand times over.
The way these places, with their thousand thousand stories, hold together isn't through ideology of progressive 'tolerance', it isn't shared skin colour, or a ruthless pagan implementation of power.
These places, with their web of people and landscapes and history, don't have life because of the blessings of the green man, or Odin, or Allah.
The unknown stories, unfixed wrongs and unfulfilled hopes of this village (or any other) will find no resolution in government programs or scientific progress.
Any life that England had came from the hand of God via the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the resolution of every inch of it all is bound up in him as well.
Which is why, despite the grim picture, many of us are not ready to give up calling her to repentance just yet.
Celandine and Anemone Photo by Chris Wood: https://www.oakleywood.org.uk/2014/03/photos-by-chris-wood/anemone-and-celandine/