Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Read online

  The lord sat atop of the last load to leave the field and then the women and children came to glean the stubble. Master would then kill a couple of sheep for the Horkey supper and afterwards we all went shouting home. Shouting in the empty old fields—I don’t know why. But that’s what we did. We’d shout so loud that the boys in the next village would shout back.

  Stacking was the next job, all very handsome they had to be—handsome as a building. Then thrashing. It was always reckoned you had to thrash a stack in a day. There wasn’t any rest after the harvest. The year had begun again, you see.

  * Feed.

  2. GOD

  If you came this way,

  Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

  At any time or at any season,

  It would always be the same: you would have to put off

  Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

  Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

  Or carry report. You are here to kneel

  Where prayer has been valid.

  —T.S. ELIOT, Little Gidding

  High over all

  By none observed

  A wooden Cross, side-tipped,

  At which three darkling birds

  With ancient, horny beaks

  Pecked everlastingly for food.

  —JAMES TURNER, The Interior Diagram

  See yonder preacher to his people pass!

  Borne up and swell’d by tabernacle-gas:

  Much he discourses, and of various points,

  All unconnected, void of limbs and joints;

  He rails, persuades, explains, and moves the will

  By fierce bold words and strong mechanic skill.

  GEORGE CRABBE, Religious Sects

  OVER A third of Akenfield’s population is engaged in a proliferation of Church- or Chapel-based activities, with councils, committees, charities, amusements, social welfare, education, youth work, national organizations and much else, all of it connected with Church membership. This large percentage doesn’t include those who write “C of E” or “Chapel” on official papers but contains those who worship regularly in the two buildings, one erected soon after the Conquest, the other shortly after the defeat of Napoleon. Besides the two main groups, the village has three Roman Catholics who hear Mass in the neighbouring market towns, a Quaker, two Unitarian families and a few Presbyterian Scots. Nearly everybody, including many of the chapel folk, uses the Anglican church for their weddings and funerals, and crowd it for harvest festivals, carol services and Armistice Day. The latter is held in particular veneration, whilst Good Friday is barely observed at all, everybody playing football then.

  The Christian God of both church and chapel is approached by worship which is low-toned, pragmatic and unemotional. Where the Anglicans are concerned, the national attitude towards religion, seemly, decorous, polite, restrained, sensible, still dominates both the personal and the intellectual. Suffolk farm-workers use the incomparable English of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible with naturalness and ease. Modern translations and the 1967 new Communion Service do not possess for them the virtue of the immense Elizabethan and Stuart incantations. Simplification is bafflement. So, to a great degree, is the business of moving out of the parish cloister into the broad ecumenical scene.

  The Baptists are even more insular. Against their extreme withdrawal and backs-to-the-World attitude, the Anglicans appear quite eagerly outward-looking. Even adventurous. They are Strict Baptists who have descended from part of the fiercely unconforming East Anglians who helped to settle New England, a church which has been constantly paring itself down to scriptural fundamentals. The Akenfield church has been autonomous since 1812, since when it has never abandoned a single strict sentence of its code. It is, strangely enough, a rather cosy and gay church, a church of summer marquees, enormous Sunday-school anniversaries announced by florid posters, vast tea-parties and outings. It is a ceaselessly expository church where country people worry the meaning out of the Word Sabbath by Sabbath, generation by generation. Since all else is rejected—science, learning, art, history—the Bible has to focus all inquiry and all inventiveness. The Strict Baptists are quite logical for, after all, what is Beethoven, Polaris, 400 million Chinese, moon-travel or Picasso when, as they say, “God had predestinated an innumerable multitude of persons to be conformed with the image of his Son with all the blessings of eternal life . . .” and that God “is self-sufficient, immutable, eternal, omniscient, holy, almighty and incomprehensible”? The highest human achievements hardly seem worth bothering about in such a context. For such certain folk it can only be, “Lord Jesus, come quickly!” Nothing else would make sense. There are 2,180 members of the Suffolk and Norfolk Association of Strict Baptist Churches. It is an intimate, inter-married rural minority, an exclusive religious club whose deliberations smell more of tea and trodden grass, Sunday-best suits and varnished wood than of brimstone. The World racketing around outside at an ever madder pace makes the assurance within even more of a relief. Solid Suffolk caution informs the faithful about Christian unity. “Hands are being held out to us . . .” warns the Moderator, “. . . there appears to be a big friendliness. . . . We can soon have unity if we make the platform low enough . . .” The chapel doors in all the gentle villages and the great doors of Ipswich’s Doric Bethesda are blocked by implacable texts.

  All the same, chapel and church in Akenfield have managed to practise ecumenicism for years, the occasional union being forced on them by the fact that the war memorial is in the church. Nor are chapel-church social divisions at all extreme. In fact, it must have been the rigid entrance terms demanded by the Strict Baptists which forced working-class people to remain Anglicans during the latter half of the nineteenth century when so many parish churches became a middle-class preserve.

  The parish church itself retains the mysterious quality of an ancient sacred place which has never been out of the possession of a long line of simple rural people. It is a steep, light building consisting of nave and chancel in one, an extravagant tower built of narrow orange-coloured bricks during the reign of Henry VII and a pinnacled Tudor porch. It stands near the foot of the hill to the north of the stream. The village once sat on the crests all around it, but for a hundred years since the draining of the valley more and more houses have appeared along the low road. The south side of the church is elaborate, decorated with flint cameos, stone carvings, rich windows and intricate brickwork, and it also displays all the important tombs. The north side is an almost blank rubble wall looking much as the Norman/English left it. Paupers were buried behind it. Above the main churchyard, in an acre carved out of Accommodation Meadow, lie the recent dead under a harsh drift of stone-mason’s chippings and white marble kerbs, crosses and books.

  The interior of the church preserves the evidence of almost a millennium of national religious history. Two windows not much later than Domesday, stairs to the vanished rood, the Host and Mariolatry incised deep in the flushwork, decapitated evangelists huddled under the font, table silver (valued at £10,000 by Sotheby’s) lent by a Renaissance squire for the altar after the King had taken the chalice, a table made for the divine Suppers of 1630, the mutilations of 1650, a great Jacobite bell named for Dr Sacheverell, the pomp and Latin of the Augustans, an Oxford Movement reredos, Empire glory banners and now, on Laud’s oak table, the flood of booklets about Vietnam, Marriage, Unity, the New English Bible and well-printed signs of expert publicist talents being employed to disseminate the new caritas. “You must see our church,” they say in the village, “it is a pretty little place.” A long roster of servants arrange its flowers, polish its brasses, oil and wind the clock, tend the bells, hoover the carpets, launder the linen, mow the grass, heat, dust, trim. Gargoyles shoot the rain from the roof through screaming mouths. On its patronal day, the keys of St. Peter whip from the flagstaff, and in winter gulls sit in the louvres of the bell-chamber. The sea is near, yet, by Akenfield, quite unfelt. The tower is like a fin
ger held up to test its existence. “No, I’ve never been up it,” said the ditcher born in the village in 1908. “I migh’n fancy what I’d find.”

  The chapel is a pleasant square building made of red bricks and has a pyramidal “Roman” or pantiled roof. There is a burial ground behind it. The windows have the blankness of an injured retina, a bloomy sightlessness. Texts in glass cases hang outside on the front wall and can be read by passengers in the village bus, which stops just there. Inside, there is a high rostrum for preaching, galleries and more texts. A trap-door in the centre of the large pale room covers a tank—the baptistry. The chapel says little—it doesn’t intend to. It is no more than a sounding-box for all those words describing the Word. Above it there is the spring from which the deacons, carrying pails on a shoulder harness, fetched water for the immersions before the mains were laid. By the side of it is the field in which their huge June rallies are held, in a tent which seats a thousand. It is a famous chapel and people once walked twenty miles to hear the Word in it. “Of course,” said the deacon, “you’ll get those who can’t stop, as you might say. I remember a man who went on for over an hour and so someone got up and said, ‘Excuse me, but, with all respect, I think you have said enough’—‘And with all respect to you,’ answered the preacher, ‘I’d like you to know that God is still putting words into my mouth, so where do we go from here?’ And so we had to let him go on. He used up five people’s preaching time. I wouldn’t call that Christian.”

  Extracts from the Rules of the Akenfield Strict Baptist Church:

  That persons wishing to join the Church . . . shall be requested to relate the dealings of the Lord with their souls . . .

  That any member knowing ought against the moral conduct . . . of any fellow member, shall not make public the statement . . . but shall communicate the same properly authenticated to the pastor and Deacons . . .

  Should any inconsistency of life and conduct be brought to the Pastor’s notice . . . and there should be no amendment . . . he shall bring the matter before the Church.

  That every member shall keep the business of the Church to themselves, it being unseemly to carry the solemn deliberations into the World.

  That any member absenting himself from the Table of the Lord for three consecutive Ordinance Sabbaths without justifiable reason, shall be deemed to have forfeited their membership . . .

  That the majority shall rule all matters . . .

  The Church has 31 members (including 5 deacons) but the congregations are usually double this number. There are 40 pupils in the Sunday School and 9 teachers, and there is also a Fellowship of Youth (12 members).

  Except for £6 2s. contributed to the Association’s central funds, the Church manages its own financial affairs.

  Its worship is led by visiting itinerate preachers, of which there are 56 in Suffolk, or by the deacons.

  The whole Strict Baptist movement in East Anglia has been severely shaken by the rapid change of events precipitated by Vatican II and the liberalization of sexual behaviour, and a well-written Affirmation of Faith has been issued (1966). It is the doctrine of Cromwell’s Saints set in Baskerville 11 point.

  The parish church involves more people in more activity than any other institution in the village. The living is worth £1,175 and is held by the incumbent in plurality with two other livings. There is no centralization; the three villages each have their church and parochial church council, and operate separately. Akenfield church is governed by fifteen councillors, two of whom are church-wardens. The council sends representatives to deanery meetings and to the annual diocesan conference. The vicar and his wife use their elegant Victorian vicarage for Sunday schools, meetings and countless interviews, and the village tennis club uses the courts made in the grounds by a previous vicar in 1927.

  The following is an analysis of the events connected with St. Peter’s Parish Church, Akenfield in 1967.

  Number of services: Holy Communion 46

  Matins 27

  Evensong 6

  Litany 2

  Attendances: Average, Sunday Mornings 31

  Carol Service 110

  Harvest Festival 102

  Armistice Day 94

  Easter Day 44

  Christmas Eve 55

  Prayer and Bible study evenings in private houses 38.

  Lectures on “Why Chapel?” and “Why Church?” 2.

  Visiting preachers 12.

  Talks: “The Ipswich Telephone Samaritans”; “The Wycliffe Translation”; “The Race for Tomorrow”; “Christian Aid”; “The Challenge of England.”

  Cantata: From Olivet to Calvary (Maunder).

  Billy Graham All Britain Crusade: The church was one of 2,000 which was linked with the mission.

  Whit Sunday: the congregation worshipped with the Strict Baptists as an act of unity.

  October: Church and Chapel worked together to revive the “Horkey”—the great harvest feast which was traditional in Suffolk up until about 1900. It was held in a decorated barn and was attended by almost the entire village.

  Charities: Some £70 is given away annually to various charities and the congregation helps to support, with money and clothes, a shelter for destitutes and meth-drinkers in the East End. It also sends regular gifts to the local mental hospital, the Red Cross missionaries in Persia and old people.

  Finance: Collections for 1967 £316 0s. 1d.

  Complete church funds amount to £896 6s. 7d. of which £600 is invested in the Rural District Council.

  Diocesan Quota: £75 0s. 0d. Total expenses for year (including donations to charities) £427 13s. 6d.

  Among the almost endless list of involvements was a house-to-house collection for the East Suffolk blind and visits to the local Borstal (twelve miles).

  Publication: The Parish News, monthly, price 4d. and delivered to nearly every house.

  Societies connected with the church: The Over-Sixty Club; Mothers’ Union; Caleb Club (teenagers); Friday Fellowship; The Saplings (under-tens).

  The Village Doctor

  I’ve thought of following Christ—many, many times. But it would have to be the real thing—not this business going on in the church. St. Paul altered it, spoilt it all at the very start, didn’t he? Yes, I’d certainly have a go at the original idea if I had the nerve, but I wouldn’t waste my time on the rest of it.

  The Brigadier (rtd)

  The church is going to pot because of all these young inexperienced parsons. Servicemen make the best parsons. They are men of the world who are used to handling people. You take these chaps getting ordained in their twenties—what do they know about life? What you need is the padre type, somebody who will have a drink with you in the bar and who has the right to say to you, “Now look here, old boy. You’ve been grizzling away about your Ethel and her shortcomings, but do you ever think about how she feels being left alone all the evening while you are lining them up here? I mean, fair’s fair. . . .” A man shouldn’t be a parson until he’s in his forties; he can’t know about life till then. The best advice I ever had was given me by a padre, you know. Changed my life, you know. “Think of the other fellow,” he said—something like that. Made me a different person, you know.

  The Teacher at the Agricultural Training Centre

  There are a couple of hundred village boys taking the courses and on the whole I’d say that Christianity isn’t relative to their lives. Most of them have little real knowledge of it. They’re all in the book as baptized Christians but you watch them in church on their wedding day! The vicar will be saying, “Stand here, kneel, rise, find page 22, do this, do that. . . .” They’ll be all at sea. They’ll have about as much notion of what to do as if they were being married in a Buddhist temple. I can quite understand this because I don’t believe either. It isn’t just their generation, is it? It is mine—their parents’ generation, too. We doubted—they ignore.

  The old village people communed with nature but the youngsters don’t do this either. The old people think d
eeply. They are great observers. They will walk and see everything. They didn’t move far so their eyes are trained to see the fine detail of a small place. They’ll say, “The beans are a bit higher on the stalk this year. . . .” I help to run the school farm but I’d never notice things like that. The old men can describe exactly how the ploughing turns over in a particular field. They recognize a beauty and it is this which they really worship. Not with words—with their eyes. Will these boys be like this when they are old? I’m just not sure. Nobody is trying to bring it out in them. Nobody says to them, “This is heritage.” Somebody should be saying to them, “Let’s go and look. . . .”

  Orchard worker

  When we had our son, my wife wouldn’t leave the house until she could take him to the chapel and thank God for him. She wouldn’t step outside the door until she could do this. We went down there and we said to the minister, “We want to give thanks for the birth,” and the minister said a prayer for our boy before the church, and said his name to them. He didn’t make a song about it, it was just a passing word.

  The Deacon

  I was baptized into the Strict Baptists after the Caravan Mission to Village Children visited Akenfield in 1950. The evangelist travels across Suffolk in the summer-time with his tent and caravan, and when he arrives in a village the church parson and the chapel pastor go out to welcome him. He stays for a fortnight and holds two meetings in the tent every evening, one at six for the children and one at seven for the grown-ups. The evangelist is a strict time-keeper and if he says his meeting starts at seven, it starts at seven—and not at five past. So you know where you are. On the last evening, at the end of the meeting, he said, “I don’t want to force anybody but if there are those present who would like to come forward and make a confession of the Lord Jesus, they would be very welcome.” Well, funnily enough, there were seven of us went forward. We were nearly all teenagers. I was nineteen, my wife-to-be was seventeen, there were two college girls of sixteen and three lads round about eighteen. One of the college girls became a missionary and went out to Africa, I became a deacon when I was twenty-one, my wife became a Sunday-school teacher and not one of us who accepted Christ that night has fallen away from Him. I mention this because you hear a lot of mention of the falling away after Billy Graham and not a lot of the staying. Five of the converted went to the Strict Baptist chapel and two to the parish church. And there they are still. This is because the evangelist is a man who is well-equipped with the Word and can more or less explain himself to everyday people in church or chapel. He created a wonderful spirit in his tent and all the village felt it.