An Audience with an Elephant (13 page)

‘I’ve got some flowers for Di in the van,’ said the man.

‘That’s very nice,’ said Fred.

‘Where do I take them?’

‘You can bring them in here, put them on that table.’

Mr Huggins returned to his crossword. An addict, he once found a crossword, untouched, in a five-year-old copy of the
Sunday Express
someone had left in a farmhouse in the Falklands. Sergeant-Major Huggins, then in the middle of a war, completed it, and when the war was over he sent the crossword to the paper, apologising for the fact that it was a bit late. His letter was printed, and for a while Mr Huggins, to his amazement, found he was having more mail than the entire battalion. Among those who wrote was the lady who became his wife.

Now anyone capable of completing a crossword with shells bursting overhead is not a man easily deflected. But on that day in August the smell of massed flowers began to register, and when Fred looked up there were tables covered with them. And the delivery man was still coming and going.

‘Good God,’ said Fred, ‘who sent all these?’

‘People, mate, just ordinary people. Just shows what they think of her.’

‘I didn’t realise Di was that popular.’

For a moment the man stared, his eyes bulging.

‘Well, you’re the only man in England then.’

‘But it was all so unnecessary. I mean, what was she doing out there at that time of night?’

‘Live and let live, mate. She’d been through a lot, she had.’

‘What do you mean?’

But the door had slammed, and to Fred’s amazement even the skittle table had disappeared under a covering of flowers. The cats, unable to find anywhere to lie, were prowling irritably. Then the delivery man was back again, his arms full of roses.

‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ said Fred, ‘are there any more?’

Almost done, mate. Just some big lilies, and that’s it. Hey, you couldn’t run to a cup of coffee, could you? It took me an hour to find this place.’

They sat at the bar together, two men among flowers, like gods of the old world. Flowers unopened, flowers in full bloom, some brought halfway across the world by jet, some from the most expensive glasshouses in England. The seasons and the turning globe had all been stopped to allow this crop of tulips and carnations, roses and lilies. And the smell. . . a man could reach out and roll it in his hands.

‘Lovely flowers for a lovely lady.’

‘They are, aren’t they.’

‘I saw her once, you know.’

‘You saw Di?’

‘Yes, in Northampton, this was. . .’

‘At the Cash and Carry?’

‘Come on, this was in the street, she was going by in a car.’

‘Really?’

‘God, she was lovely. I’d give anything to see her now.

‘But you can. She’s on her feet again, now. She’ll be down in a minute. What’s the matter? Oh my God, you. . .’

In a pub in Middle England two men stared at each other. Neither was breathing. When I came in there was just the one, who, when he moved, moved like a man in water.

A Man Who Fell to Earth

HIS IS THE
story of a fall.

Well, it must have seemed like that, for afterwards he did not talk about it much, and those people he told muttered asides about the ravings of old men. At least, they did at first, when even his own daughter did not believe him. He was 80 when he fell 45 feet from the church roof. He lay thoughtfully in the earth for quite some time, then got up and walked the mile home to his tea.

I, too, was on my way home, having failed to get an answer at the house where the key to the church was kept, but then through the trees I saw a light in the nave windows. A man with a line of primed mousetraps in front of him was pushing them under the organ. Not exactly Christian behaviour, he said, but it was either that or no music. And these mice were so fat, not like church mice at all. He was in his seventies, neatly dressed, the sort of man on whom all churches now depend, in energetic retirement turning his hands to most things. Honourable men. Guardians.

As we walked along the aisle, his vendetta postponed, he walked about the church as though it were an elderly relative, pointing to the small Norman tiles so casually hacked into by parsons to make way for their own tombs. Above the pillars were unnervingly real stone heads left by the Knight Hospitallers. The centuries were moving like windscreen wipers as he laid his hand on a rood screen to which Cromwell’s men had tethered their horses.

The church safe was stolen in my guide’s time, only to be found years later after a drought at the bottom of a pond, everything written in the old ledgers still legible. But all the entries in modern ink had gone, the record of his own marriage amongst them. Helpfully he informed the makers of Quink of this, but the makers of Quink seemed not to share his interest.

And then he told me of the Fall. Another guardian, his father-in-law, had taken a stepladder up so he might climb from the chancel to the nave roof. But it was wet and the ladder slipped. ‘Now if he’d landed a few feet to his right or a few feet to his left, he’d have been dead, but he landed on the one spot where there was no building and no gravestones. If it had been a dry summer or a cold winter, that would have been the end. But the weather was mild, there had been a lot of rain and the earth was soft. When my wife, a schoolteacher, got home, her father did not have a cup of tea ready as he usually did. She noticed he was very pale and was not saying much. So she made the tea herself, they sat down, and after a while he told her. She felt very sad, thinking her father had begun to go a bit funny.

‘But after tea she went down to the graveyard with a flashlight and saw the steps fallen at the side of the church. Beside them was this strange shape in the ground. When she shone the light on it she said it was the perfect outline of a man, inches deep. The arms were wide and the shape of the fingers was there, the legs, everything. She took her father to the doctor that night. He examined him, found nothing at all wrong and taking her aside began to talk about hardening arteries. He said it was sad but there it was, she would have to live with such tales.

‘And then she told him what she’d seen.’

The old gentleman lived on for fifteen years, dying at 95. In another age the faces on the pillars would have been round him in a half circle, accusing him of trying to fly. But Harold Crump chose the right century when he fell off the roof of Harrington Church near Market Harborough.

The Riddle of Brixworth

T WILL NOT BE
headline news, there will be no ITN reporter breathlessly repeating his 200 bald words to camera: all that will happen is that later this year a laboratory report will come through the post. But this could be the answer to one of the oldest riddles in British archaeology as men may finally know the true age of Brixworth Church.

The Reverend Anthony Watkins has been Vicar of Brixworth in the county of Northampton for just a year. He came after ten years in two of the oldest buildings in the country, Chester Cathedral and Tewkesbury Abbey; but nothing he saw in either prepared him for his new church. ‘I remember getting off the bus, and then I saw it. I get the same feeling now, especially late at night. It’s an uncomfortable feeling. There’s nothing scary about it. The place just isn’t anyone’s idea of a parish church: it feels like something much more, there’s something tangible there. You are looking at a church, and yet at the same time there’s something quite unreal about it.’

When you come by car from Northampton you see it first rising up among the bungalows at the start of Brixworth like any conventional church with its spire. Later, from the older ironstone village at its foot, you are conscious only of its size, on the ridge among the winds.

As in most Midlands villages, there is a counterpoint, a Methodist chapel, a brick building put in in 1811, now in ruins; but the life and death of Nonconformity was a mere half-hour in its history. There is the stump of a village cross, so old the stone is blurred; and the church was centuries old when that was new.

No, the real shock comes when you first step inside, and you are in a building the like of which you have never seen anywhere in these islands. Not Norman, no cascades of carved stone and pride. Not even any Saxon style you have ever seen, there is no homely weight here. There is just austerity and elegance and great height. You are in a rectangular hall ending in a raised half circle at the altar, and there are high arches and a triple window looking down on the nave. A suspicion comes that you are in an alien place.

You remember a sentence you once read: ‘In the cold fogs of Scandinavia and beside icy Russian rivers, in Venetian counting houses or Western castles, in Christian France and Italy as well as in the Mussulman East, all through the ages folk dreamed of Byzantium, the incomparable city, radiant in a blaze of gold.’ In the middle of England you are in a place which seems to reach out beyond our native history to the certainties of a greater civilisation.

Nothing led away from this, no other church in Britain has survived on this scale in this style. The Church of All Saints at Brixworth could have materialised upon its ridge as abruptly as the cabinet of Dr Who.

George Freeston, antiquary and local historian, has known Brixworth all his life. ‘It feels so odd, all that great space. The English church started off as a small structure, and then men built outwards and added side aisles. But here there just seems to have been an explosion at the start. That vast zeppelin hangar seems to have been there in the first instance. It’s quite incredible’.

Consider one fact. Between 1832 and 1873 the Vicar of Brixworth was the Reverend Charles Watkins, a remarkable man. The Reverend Watkins took out all the mediaeval stained glass in his church. Just think for a moment how you would react if you heard about that now. But the archaeologists working in the church venerate the vicar’s memory, for mediaeval stained glass is as appropriate in Brixworth as plywood would be in a castle. He took out the windows to restore the great arches they obscured.

He did much more. He demolished the mediaeval square-ended chancel, for he found it concealed something very mysterious indeed. In the course of burying his parishioners he had come on the remains of an apse and, beneath that, a passage crypt around which the faithful had processed.

Watkins was the first incumbent to address himself to the riddle of Brixworth, and has not been the last. Almost without exception his successors have peered into graves and all the building works necessary for repair, while wild theories have passed through their minds. Why had the great 15-foot door, now filled in, been built at the west end? For what ritual, what great man? Names loomed up. For whom had the room in the tower behind the triple windows been constructed? Was it Offa, King of Mercia, who considered himself the equal of the Emperor Charlemagne?

Where had the stones come from? In an area rich in ironstone, geologists have identified 40 different kinds of stone in Brixworth Church. Why had men gone to such trouble? It has been reckoned that the cost of carting stone in the Middle Ages was just as expensive as quarrying it. And what does the small stone reliquary which was found in the wall of the south aisle in 1809 contain? On being opened this was seen to have in it, ‘a fragment of bone and a scrap of filament of Paper or Parchment, which had the appearance of a cobweb, and on opening the box, fell to pieces’, recorded the parish register. Had that been the reason for the passage crypt, the holy relic around which the procession moved? What saint, what terrible martyrdom in the forests, did that commemorate? Had that alone been the reason for the grandeur?

Or was this something far more mysterious? Around the arches were Roman tiles, and the church itself was a perfect basilica, the court of justice of the Roman Empire, borrowed, as was so much else, by the early Christians, and the oldest of which, dating from the fifth century, still survives in Ravenna. There was the long rectangular hall. There was the apse where the judge would have sat. What was all this doing in a Midlands village?