Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Page 9

  This making an open confession of Christ is our chief difficulty where getting Strict Baptist Church membership is concerned. We’ve got about seven families who count themselves chapel and attend the services but they don’t belong. They are held back by the witnessing. They are that bit shy of making this open confession, you see. You have to be very careful with cases like this because of the Serious Step. It is a free-will choice. You could, with a little persuasion, make some of these people come out to be baptized, but in a year or two they’d resent being pushed. So, while a general invitation is made and the hint is dropped, we don’t make a straightforward approach. I think that immersion is some of it. But the witnessing could be worse. If you want to become a member of our church, first of all you must tell the pastor and he will tell you that you must be baptized by total immersion in our pool. You’ve got to have courage to face this. But before this happens, the pastor tells the full church that you want to join it and the church then says that two “Messengers” are to be sent to you. The Messengers are chosen from among the members and are as near as possible the same sex, age and status as the applicant. So they can get into the person. These Messengers are very responsible. They see you in your home and hear why you want to join the church and listen to you make your confession of Christ as Saviour. They then report back to the church and give an account of their Visitation, as we call it. The whole church listens and then asks the Messengers, “Is this a true report?,” and whether they think you are a suitable person to join the church. If the Messengers say yes, then you come into the church and take up a position in front of all the members and give an account of yourself. A lot of folk can’t face this, so they just come to the services. They don’t belong and they can’t take the Supper. They can’t face two people from the village calling on them and wanting to know all the whys and wherefores. But we are the Strict Baptists—so it can’t really be any different, can it? The thing of it is, you see, we don’t want any impostors. Well, after you have come before the church and have been accepted, the pastor says, “When would you like to be baptized?”

  The baptism usually takes place a fortnight later at the close of the Sunday evening service. You’ll get people coming just out of curiosity and there’ll be plenty of children present just because of the novelty. And you’ll get the regular old diehard Baptists from all round, as this is a great solemn occasion for them. They live for this sort of thing. So the church is packed. Well now, just imagine yourself. You’ve confided to the Messengers, you’ve stood in front of about forty village people and given your testimony, and now you’ve got to step out in front of everybody you know for miles around, and dressed in a white cricket outfit, and again be asked if you own the Lord. You say yes, so the pastor will say, “Then do you want to be buried with the Lord?” Again you say yes. Then he says, “Shall we go down on to the water together?” And you are taken under. It is hard and we never make it easy. We say we will never make the Lord’s Table an easy factor. This Table was strictly instituted by the Lord for His disciples and it must never be that any Tom, Dick or Harry can lightly eat the Supper. The Sunday following the baptism, the new member is given a set of the church rules and told that he must help run and pay for the church.

  We have no pastor at present: the church is run by five deacons and nine Sunday-school teachers. We have about fifty members and twelve of them are aged between fifteen and twenty-five. Seven of the teachers are under twenty-seven. There are more than forty children. We are a young church. Fifty per cent of the children belong to parents who aren’t chapel folk; we pick them up in a van every Sunday morning from five surrounding villages. But nearly all the adult congregation lives in Akenfield. Each Strict Baptist church likes to choose its pastor from away and has to pay his wages when he comes. We paid our part-time pastor £5 a week but we would have to give a full-time man £10. We also have to pay for the upkeep of the chapel and the manse, so the money side is quite a problem. Twenty-five years ago, when money was short, we had a full-time pastor and ran the buildings all on £3 a week! We could do this because the pastor was, well, a saint you might say. He was Akenfield. Ask anybody. Nobody ever did so much good or was so kind. A rich friend from Ipswich, a rare big businessman who wasn’t one of us, gave him a car—this was when cars were rare in the village—and he never used it for his pleasure. Only for others. It was known as the “hospital motor” because he used it to take patients and family visitors to Ipswich and Melton hospitals. It never mattered what time of day or night it was. We don’t quite know where this man came from. He arrived soon after the First War—out of work, I think they said he was. Anyway, he stayed and cared for us, and none better. He stayed thirty years and was one of us.

  We meet twice every Sunday. You get the cream of the people in the morning who know it is right to worship the Lord first thing, and the skim of an evening. We worship, eat our Sunday dinner, take a walk and have a piece of tea, and worship again. It is reasonable. The Strict Baptists don’t change with the changes, you might say, it is very much the same. The biggest thing which is upsetting us is this Ecumenical Movement. It is getting the Roman Catholics in. If it does this, we must stay at loggerheads because with us the Roman Catholics are completely out. We stay at peace in the chapel. With your own denomination you have to live together and tolerate one another as best you can.

  If you think we’re strict, you should see the Brethren at Wickham Market! They are well-to-do people and the strictest Christians you can get in Suffolk. You have to hand it to them. They are farmers and smallholders and they do a lot of good but never say a word about it. They are really out of the World.

  As a deacon I have to be like Timothy, sober and a ruler of my own house . . .

  The Rev. Gethyn Owen · aged sixty-three · Rural Dean

  I arrived in the village immediately after the last war and so I have seen the “revolution”—I think you can call it that. I came from the Welsh valleys, where my father was also a clergyman, and where the industrial dereliction of the 1930s sprawled for as far as one could see, to a part of Suffolk where the old feudal system was dying hard. The men had not as yet come back from fighting and those who remained in the village seemed to be as they had been for all time. Many were still drinking the pond-water and were goitrous because of it. The old dialect was pretty much undisturbed, horses worked the land and the “big people,” as the landowners were called, still ruled it.

  I have been very happy here and what I have to say about the people mustn’t be taken for negative criticism. I am a Celt and different to them. They are the children of dissent; Unitarianism, radicalism, anabaptism, these are the forces which have moulded them. I came to them when they had, for several generations, been literally worked to death. There was scarcely a moment they could call their own, a time when they could stop toiling and ask, “Who am I?” Yet so were the miners in my father’s parish—I mean it was even worse for them—yet nothing made them indifferent to colour and beauty. If you can measure the spiritual nature of men by these things, then the nature of the people of Akenfield strikes me as being uncultivated and neglected. The church was abysmally dull when I came and there was no parish communion. No warmth or feeling. It was very noticeable after Wales.

  I came to live in friendship and understanding with most of the inhabitants but I found that to talk on any deep level about their Christianity was intensely difficult—even when death was round the corner! It could have been me, of course! I don’t think that the ordinary villager, who is linked to deeper propitiatory practices in the fields than he is aware of, has either the energy or feels the need to inquire what the Church is all about. Where it might have touched him—at the imaginative or creative level—all this side of his personality has been blunted and crushed by toil. I am talking about the older folk now, although a man doesn’t have to be much over forty to have the results of the bad times marked on his heart.

  I have sometimes dared to question the incredible perfection
attached to certain tasks—this is heresy, if you like! Take ploughing or ricking, why should these jobs have had such a tremendous finesse attached to them? The harvest would not have been the less if the furrows wavered a little. But, of course, a straight furrow was all that a man was left with. It was his signature, not only on the field but on life. Yet it seems wrong to me that a man’s achievement should be reduced to this. It was a form of bondage if he did but know it. Their wives had their part to play in this; a woman was admired if she scrubbed and polished until she dropped. In my father’s Welsh parish it was the doorsteps.

  One of my most difficult tasks has been to persuade little groups of people to get together and, in a very simple and friendly way, to discuss the meaning of the Faith. But no one would come to a meeting if he thought he had to say something. When they have said something, one often finds that it is something quite irrelevant to what is being discussed. Religion has a lot to do with where their families and ancestors are buried. They spend hours tending graves and they are also very concerned about the state of the churchyard. Television is now breaking down their silences. They are getting accustomed to the idea of dialogue. The older villager was very different: he accepted or rejected but he said nothing. There was no debate, or argument, as he called it. One discovered saints, of course, people of prayer and worship, men of a profound simplicity and to whose natural conception of the divine one could neither add nor subtract a thing. But generally speaking, the God of the Suffolk countryman tended to live outside the church, which was a building near the graves, and thus holy. It was all very vague. One could never get really near to them where such matters were concerned, as one could get near to the Celt.

  I remember an example of the importance attached to church burial. When old Thrussel died, his widow came to me and said that he wished to be buried in the churchyard. I was very surprised to hear this because he’d been a Strict Baptist all his life and had been far from friendly towards the church. The Baptists, of course, have got their own burial ground behind the chapel. Why couldn’t he be buried there? “He fancied the churchyard,” stated his wife—“that bit up by the top there.” The penny now dropped. I recalled great battles with Mr. Thrussel about a scrap of his land which we had had to take in order to extend the churchyard. He had fought us all along the line but lost. Now he was getting his own back by being buried, as he believed, on his own farm! I always liked this old man. He and his family were all out of the common run, vital and clever. In the early days they had to struggle in a way you never see now. It made him tough and acquisitive. Whatever he gained he held. Bitterly. He was like the rest of the working farmers here. They didn’t see this attitude as meanness but as strength. Life had taught Mr. Thrussel to hang on tight!

  I am not really close to them. When I first came they said, “You’ll have to winter us and summer us, sir,” and twenty years later I’m still doing this, if the truth be known. Newcomers have broken down many of the old community ideas and people have become sentimental about the passing of ways and customs, although many of them were narrow, limiting and bad. The church has been improved out of all recognition by the new inhabitants, who have brought fresh life and leadership to it. All the young people are mobile-minded, and that is a good thing. But men are still leaving the land and the land itself has less and less place in the mind and emotions. The power of the gentry has gone. Nobody takes any notice of such people nowadays. But behind the progress there lies the great imponderable of the East Anglian character, something to which I now know I shall never have the key. I have spent most of my time searching for the point of contact. They are hard people. Their lives at the higher level—and make no mistake, there is a higher level: I have seen it, a fugitive glimpse into a country where I cannot belong—present an imponderable. It is the only word I have for it. Fatalism is the real controlling force, this and the nature gods, the spirits of the trees and water and sky and plants. These beliefs seem to have no language, but they rule.

  The more one visited the homes (which are improved out of all recognition since I came here) the less one bridged the gulf. No one likes to think that after so many years of genuine love and caring one is defeated, so I don’t think of defeat. They have been awfully welcoming . . . helpful. Yet I don’t know. It makes one wonder. The young are different. They have common communications with the world. The old look inward at things we cannot see. The young have a common image. The past is boring and shabby to them. They don’t want to know about it.

  There is another thing which is better now—morality. There were people living in the cottages near here who were like—well, I hardly like to say it—like animals. They had a sort of code but all the natural human relations were covered by cruel and ugly taboos which obsessed some of them. They loved children. Every child was “the little dear” except if it was born out of wedlock. This was regarded as a terrible thing and never forgiven. The village would remember such a thing for ever.

  The people who do best are those who leave the village for a spell and then return. Such people are quite astonishing. They have usually lowered their defences and the effect on their friends and family is extraordinary.

  3. THE RINGING MEN . . .

  Ardua molimur: sed nulla nisi ardua virtus

  We attempt the difficult, but there is no virtue in what is easy.

  Written in the Ipswich Senior Society’s records after it had attempted a peal of 6144 Treble Bob Major at Woodbridge Church, March 1851.

  Robert Palgrave · aged fifty-five · bellringer, tower captain

  Handel called the bell the English national instrument and still, in a great loud web of percussion, there are the hundreds of bellringing societies, guilds and associations which unite town with village from one end of the country to the other. The societies are ancient but those belonging to them are invariably called “youths,” and there is something in the tensely permutating atmosphere of the ringing chamber, the dozen or so reaching out figures, the leaping ropes and the blindingly passionate clamour above, which suggests the climatic ascension of young blood. The ringers are utterly absorbed. Such a total absorption takes over their mortgaged, class-bound, year-measured lives that these conditions of existence are temporarily cancelled and the Self revels in noise, logic, arithmetic and a kind of intoxicating joy which accompanies the striking of one’s own particular bell in the deafening harmony.

  The ringing men must reach stages of exultation which are on a par with those of cannabis, but if this is so there is no outward evidence to prove it. The less extreme degrees of pleasure derived from the art of campanology are similar to those derived from chess. Yet, perhaps because all bells are feminine and are “raised” or “turned over” by the neat strength of the bellmen to “speak” their Pleasures, Tittums, Superlatives and Surprises, something less entirely cerebral than chess causes the contentment. The towers literally rock and the peals can be so overwhelming for those living near the church that the belfry windows are louvred so that the sound can be cast out at the highest level.

  Ringing is an addiction from which few escape once they have ventured into the small fortress-like room beneath the bells, and the sally—the soft tufted grip at the end of the rope—leaps to life against the palm of the hand like an animal. There then begins a lifetime of concentration, of perfect striking and a co-ordination of body and mind so destructive to anxieties and worries of all kinds that one wonders why campanology isn’t high on the therapy list.

  The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with the names of saints, princes, squires, parsons and merchants, as well as rhymes and prayers, engraved on their sides. The ringing men know them both by parish and individually, and will travel from tower to tower across the county in pursuit of a particular sound. The world to them is a vision of belfries. Some part of the general fretfulness of humanity seems to be soothed by this vision. Theology is put to the count. Lost in an art-pastime-worship based on b
locks of circulating figures which look like one of those numismatic keys to the Great Pyramid’s secret, the ringing men are out on their own in a crashing sphere of golden decibels. The great changes are mesmeric and at half-way through the “attempt” the ringers are drugged by sound and arithmetic. Their shirt-sleeved arms fly with the ropes and, because their whole personality bends to the careening mass of metal above, they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them. They are famous for avoiding church services. They keep in touch by means of a weekly magazine called The Ringing World which, to the outsider, presents a scene of extraordinary fantasy. The ringing men are indifferent to all the usual “craft” or ancient art talk and are a different race altogether to Morris Dancers, say. They just walk or drive to a given tower—the fact that the building is a church is always a secondary consideration—and ring. The curious thing is that the sweet uproar of change-ringing is so integral a part of the village sound that it is often not consciously heard. When listened to by the non-ringer, the general effect is soothing, bland, a restoration of God to his heaven and rightness to the world. The reality of what is occurring is known only to another ringer.