John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Class war and the making of the English landscape

In his will Jim invited me to raid his large and excellent collection. So I've been reading some great books recently, thanks to my late friend. And as always, I'm making connections between them. In Real England Paul Kingsnorth describes as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'class war' the sorts of ways which the forces of capital are destroying so much of our physical and cultural heritage - from the PubCos monopolistic grab of the pub trade, choking the life out of it, through the gentrifying developers' eradication of the 'indigenous' boat people from the canal system, to the supermarkets' fruit policies which - in a land which has thousands of different homogenous apple varieties - reduce choice to just two or three, max. 

'Ethnic cleansing' and 'class war' are strong descriptors, but when you get into the detail of what's happening you realise that Kingsnorth is justified in using them. His answer - a rallying cry for us to 'Know our Place', cherish the genius loci, and be prepared to fight for it. He quotes Patrick Kavanagh's The Parish and the Universe, 1952:

All great civilisations are based on parochialism... Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals. To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience... A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience.'

Then Gillian Darley's Villages of Vision, a celebrated 'Study of Strange Utopias', the planned settlements and villages of Britain from the creations of philanthropic industrialists (Bournville, Port Sunlight) to the work of vain aristocrats, wealthy eccentrics or monied visionaries. The opening chapter introduced to me a word which brought me up short and caused me to revisit my 2005 essay, The Making of the Croxteth Landscape. Darley's word is 'emparking' - ie, the creation of parks and country estates which often happened - and this is what I hadn't grasped before - through a process of 'the removal of entire communities and, therefore, their rehousing elsewhere or in a planned settlement nearby'. 

Those planned settlements, designed by expensively-appointed architects were intened to show off the sophistication of the wealthy estate-owners who commissioned them. Some were, indeed, very good. Others were worse than the houses which the displaced local poor had been forced to leave. 'Ethnic cleansing', 'class war', anyone? It made me wonder what happened here, back in 1575 perhaps, when the first Croxteth Hall was built for the Molyneux family, or at other points in this estate's long history. Maybe it wasn't just in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the poor of West Derby were 'cleared' to make room for showy, expensive redevelopment...?

Columba's tears

Columba's Tears is the name given to the green and white marble stones of Iona. Tourists and pilgrims fill their pockets with them and take them home. It's a wonder that there's any left on that small island. But a lot of things about Iona are wonderful. Searching through some old papers at the weekend I came across this poem, which I penned during a work week on Iona in 2002. I reproduce it here aware that there's a Greenbelt party on Iona at the end of May. I won't be with them this year: hope they have a good time.

Columba's island called me
So I dutifully came
By plane and bus and ferry boat
Through wind and driving rain.
I've been drying out my trousers
But they just got wet again.
I'm feeling very windswept and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

They've put me on a chore team
To make me feel at home
I thought, 'This is a holiday'
But didn't like to moan.
Those mealtime conversations meant that
I've never been alone.
I'm feeling very tired and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

They've processed me round the island
And sent me out to sea
Thev've sat me down with videos of
Macleod's Community.
They've caused me to drink gallons of
Odd-flavoured herbal tea.
I'm feeling decaffinated and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

I thought I was retreating
But they've brought me face to face
With life in all its rawness
In this light-filled edgy place.
I'll leave here with a song to sing
About amazing grace.
I'm feeling almost holy and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

This green rock begs a question:
What makes Columba cry?
And what can keep the tears away from
That missionary's eye.
The answer's in my lifestyle
Beneath God's lively sky.
I'm feeling liberated and quite wonderful.

My forehead's red and peeling 
There's blackbirds in my ears
And I'm walking round with pockets full of
Columba's tears.

Celebrating inventedness

Preparing a workshop on Celtic Spirituality it strikes me again, the inventedness of it all. We have a generous record of the 'ancient' hymns and prayers of the ordinary Scots because the civil servant and amateur folklorist Alexander Carmichael toured Gaelic-speaking Scotland between 1855 and 1910, collecting them. But it's generally recognised that Carmichael heavily edited his Carmina Gadelica, tidied it up for Victorian consumption. So what I, in my workshops, present as the spiritual outpourings of everyday folk, rooted in peaty land and rugged history, is as invented as, let's say, the druidry at any chosen Eisteddfodd (for which we must thank Edward Williams, aka Iolo Morganwg).

You can go one of two ways with this observation - moan about the artifice, suggesting that there's no real value in Carmichael's work because his radical alterations are so far removed from the original words of the Hebrideans he visited on his tours; that Iolo Morganwg's rituals are a contrived charade. Or you can hold your hands up and say, it's probably impossible to get to the raw source of anything in history, so we  should be grateful to the Carmichaels and Morganwgs for bringing us something glorious to play with, however invented it may be. Folk expressions change all the time: so celebrate!

This strikes me as a theme in Cole's book, which recognises that of all the nations in the British isles, England is the least reluctant to celebrate itself, but then goes on to note the emergence of a new kind of Morris Dancing (The Morris side Hunter's Moon 'smash huge sticks together instead of waving wimpish hankies'; Cole's website references Goth Morris sides Wolf's Head and Vixen) and the increase of all sorts of 'traditional' festive events (Lammas etc, which could be called a return to the pagan, but in a good way - valuing the earth and celebrating the seasons). Which is all invented - but wonderful. That it is also an English spirituality rather than something borrowed from the Scots, is even more encouraging still.

Still open for business

My other website www.johndavies.org is still up and running, though its front page will remain pretty static due to all my blogs being posted here instead from now on. Nice to get an email off Gareth today, saying he finds my online sermons 'inspirational and “normal”. Heaven in ordinary kind of stuff'. Comments like that... keep me going.