An Audience with an Elephant

by Byron Rogers

  We met, as arranged, in the bar downstairs just before dinner. We were given one free glass of wine each. Now I had always thought I could drink anything, but the red wine I was given at the Hotel de la Bere near Cheltenham was off all gastronomic maps. Yet the Singlers drank it. The men stood silently by the bar, and the women, in long dresses, sat together. We had the nervousness of teenagers, though few of us would ever see 40 again (and even fewer would want to, with wine like that in the world). We were 25 in number, teachers, accountants, farmers, lab technicians. There were just three under 30, and at least one over 60, and we were as uncomfortable as anyone at a school dance. Perhaps that was why we were there. Certainly nothing but nerves could account for the fact that we were actually drinking the wine.

  The organiser (or host, as the programme called him) was a very thin young man who came and went during the weekend like the White Rabbit. He made no introductions, and spoke to very few of us. Most of the time he hovered on the fringes as though trying to pluck up courage to ask somebody the time. ‘Last time he claimed to have jet-lag,’ said my roommate, who now smelt like a herbal border. ‘Wonder what it’ll be this time?’

  He told us the programme for the weekend. On the Saturday morning we were to be taken on a bus tour of the Cotswolds. In the afternoon (and it was a really warm day, remember) we were to be split into two teams, one of men, the other of women, who would then play each other at darts. On Sunday there was to be more darts. At night there would be discos. Oh yes, and we should be allowed to pick any item from the á la carte menu.

  The irony was that this little speech broke the ice among the Singlers. Most grumbled. A few looked at each other with incredulity. One looked pop-eyed with rage. But Singlers are gentle people. At dinner we earnestly chose the most expensive items from a menu crackling with French. La Galantine á Canard Truffée. Pintadeau á la Vigneronne. And one amazing dish which I translated as being kidneys in their petticoats. We conferred with each other. We sought each other’s advice. We listened, entranced, as each in turn ordered some meaningless overpriced item. It was suddenly Singlers versus the rest of the world.

  But dinner, after the French and the ordering, was stiff. There was a lot of shyness. Topics were stumbled on, or frantically unearthed, only to be buried again: the price of fish; bicycling in London. But then a girl arrived late and said she had come by motorcycle. We quivered with excitement. Did she. . . did she always travel by motorcycle?

  ‘Yeah. Off North next weekend for a show.’

  Was she. . . was she a dancer? Some of us had stopped breathing.

  ‘Oh no. I play bagpipes. Dagenham Girl Pipers.’

  We were talking about her two days later: the Singlers had acquired their first character.

  We were wary of each other, and of that sense of failure we knew we shared but none of us would mention. A large confident redhead sat at another table, smoking languidly between courses. I said to my neighbour that I didn’t think she could be a Singler, and was asked, sharply, ‘Why?’ Tread softly, tread softly. After dinner I began to drink, very quietly and deliberately — doubles of white port with Carlsberg Specials as chasers. If man ever gets to the stars it will be on something of this kind.

  The next day was our bus tour. The driver had a sense of history hazier than that of mediaeval man: ‘’undreds of years old, that,’ he nodded at a castle. A country house showed through the trees. ‘Very old, hmmm,’ he confided to us. He reserved his fascination for matters of finance. He told us about rate increases in villages, of the cost of housing, of the dilatoriness of farmers with bills. ‘Us got surnmin for everyone, round ’ere. Hospitals for the sick, prisons for bad ’uns, schools for illiterates.’ He swung his bus through the lanes like a Panzer commander, awarded us three-quarters of an hour in Bourton on the Water, a genteel tiny Black-pool, half an hour in Stow, and then whisked us home. The Cotswolds were just wallpaper to us Singlers.

  We were a group now. There was a dignity to being a Singler. One or two who had met on earlier weekends talked of the Super Singler, a dapper man with an expensive car, who, it was rumoured, came to every weekend. He regarded himself as of too high a rank to talk to most of us, and in public was usually seen with the disappearing host.

  On Saturday afternoon we rebelled. Nobody went indoors for the darts match. Instead we lay, white and veined, by the hotel pool and watched the local teenagers basking like little bronze gods. The Super Singler, in some kind of G-string, lay apart from the rest of us. The host was nowhere to be seen.

  There was a wedding reception in the hotel that afternoon, and rounding a corner I came on a young married couple quarrelling with that quiet bitterness you only get in marriage. Was it for this we had forked out our cash? But nobody admitted to having come specifically to meet a mate. A young widow said she’d come to get away from the kids, and to be looked after; it also relieved her of the embarrassments of being a woman alone in a hotel. The Dagenham Girl Piper said she’d come because she fancied a weekend in the country. Only one, a woman, after many drinks told me quietly that such a weekend afforded the kindest, most uncomplicated form of sexual release.

  That night at the discos the dancers were closer.

  It rained in the night and the next morning, and the thin host who had popped up from somewhere muttered something about a darts championship. Alas, nobody in the hotel could find the darts. We tried bar billiards, but the table machinery had broken. So we played bar pool and, oddly enough, it was the best time of the weekend. We were doing Something, we were not just being Singlers. My roommate, smelling like a large boiled sweet, was Pool King, modestly advising the rabbits on their strokes. Then there was the lady-novice-who-was-good, and the lady-novice-who-was-terrible-but-giggled. Suddenly there was no tension and no awkwardness. Yet after lunch we left the way people do when a ship enters harbour. There were lives to be picked up again, and a few polite farewells. I doubt if many addresses were exchanged.

  As an organised weekend, it was something of which the Singles industry should be ashamed. But why should they bother? No industry that trades on human loneliness can ever fail. It was so much easier once when we lived generation after generation in small towns of 12,000 people and knew half of them. Now we turn up in cities like survivors of shipwreck.

  The irony is that abruptly it would seem to be much better to be homosexual. They are organised. They have clubs. They have newspapers. The London borough of Islington had even helped finance a homosexual introduction agency, to which went the lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites and homosexuals new to London, on different nights of course. But the poor old heterosexuals had to finance themselves to be allowed to play darts in the Cotswolds. Only, of course, the darts couldn’t be found.

  The Middle of England

  Mixed Emotions

  N THE PUB THE scent was so heavy it was as though I had walked out of an English village and into a tropical rain forest. I looked around me and on every table there were scattered stalks and leaves — so whatever had been there had clearly been gathered up in a rush. Fred Huggins was behind the bar, staring into space.

  On 31 August 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash, and a week later was buried at Althorp, her family home in Northamptonshire. At some point between these two dates Di Huggins of Abthorp, also in Northamptonshire, fell into a rabbit hole and broke her ankle. Mrs Huggins, the wife of Fred Huggins, licensee of the New Inn, had been out looking for a lost cat in the dark.

  It was two days later, just after 12.00 noon, a quiet time with the pub not long open, and Mr Huggins was doing the Telegraph crossword. He looked up when the door opened to see a man standing there.

  ‘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.

  From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve.

  A summers day; and with the setting sun

  Dropped from the zenith like a falling star. . .

  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.