Friends Beyond the Summer Wine

Foggy Dewhurst, Nora Batty, big Sid making cups of tea,
Compo Simmonite and Eli,
And Blamire, Seymour and Edie, lie in Holmfirth cemetery!

"Gone, I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads
Yet at evening rush-hour,
Or last orders when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads

They’ve a way of whispering to me—fellow-tyke who yet abide—
In the muted, measured note
Of a ripple under archways, on a  Pennine hillside.

“We have triumphed: this achievement turns the bane to antidote,
Unsuccesses to success,
Many thought-worn eves and morrows to a morrow free of thought.

“No more need we buns and coffee, free of all West Yorkshire stress;
Chill detraction stirs no sigh;
Fear of death ne'er seemed to scare us: yet death gave all that we possess.”

Wainright: You can burn the Karl Marx picture that I kept beside the bed
Close the library, flog the books off
We're all equal now we're dead.

Nora Batty: Let the pigeons foul the path that once I kept so cleanly swept.
Snap the clothes prop, break the yard-brush
Dirt and soil I now accept.

Foggy Dewhurst: You can sell the campaign medals that I won in countries far
But though you search through all the boxes,
You won't find the Burma star.

Compo: Throw away my woolly hat, and let my ferrets run quite free
Let the women pass un-harassed
No attraction now, for me.

All: Pints of Tetley, Syd's foul cuppas, coffee gatherings so long
Scary women, feeble men-folk
They don't matter where we've gone.

Do we care in which far dale Howard and Marina ride
Or that Pearl, with shrewish wisdom,
knows he's something still to hide?

We don't care who's in the Co-op, who's no better than she ought,
Who's gone riding in a bath-tub
Or donkey-chasing for his sport.

We don't care if Norman Clegg still goes to Ivy's caff for tea,
or if the former Mrs Truelove's
as awful as she used to be.

Thus where Yorkshire grit's not needed, where flat-capped folk finally creep
In that quiet, moonlit bone-yard
As  mill-girls and landlords sleep,

Foggy Dewhurst, Nora Batty, big Sid making cups of tea,
Compo Simmonite and Eli,
And Blamire, Seymour and Edie, whisper gently now to me!


(After "Friends Beyond", by Thomas Hardy)

Death of Thomas Hardy (1928)

1st Yokel: That Thomas Hardy's still dead, then?

2nd Yokel: Aye, reunited with the Immanent Will as we all will be.

1st Yokel: Come again?

2nd Yokel: Yes, he be dead. One of the Things Growing in a Country Churchyard, as we all will be.


1st Yokel: Shall we drink to that?

2nd Yokel: I've not seen a drap o'drink since nammet-time on Lammas-tide, though that were as pretty a drap o' tipple as I've seen this side o' sheep-shearin'. Otherwise it's all been nowt but smalls.

1st Yokel: Can you please speak English. Is that "yes" or "no"?

2nd Yokel: That's "yes".

1st Yokel: Then knock it off, and let's get a pint.

2nd Yokel: 'Tis an ungodly remedy, but we ought to feel deep cheerfulness that a happy Providence keeps it from being any worse.

1st Yokel: What?

2nd Yokel: I said, it's your round.

Burning the Holly

O You are sad on Twelfth Night,
I notice: sad on Twelfth Night;
You are as sad on Twelfth Night
As any that I know.

"Yes : I am sad on that night,
doubtless I'm sad on that night.
Yes; I am sad on that night
For we all loved her so!"

Why are you sad on Twelfth Night,
Especially on Twelfth Night?

Why are you sad on Twelfth Night,
When wit and laughter flow?

- "She'd been a famous dancer,
Much lured of men; a dancer,
He'd been a famous dancer,
Facile in heel and toe...

"And we were burning the holly
On Twelfth night. the holly,
As people do; the holly,
Ivy and misteltoe.

"And while it popped and crackled,
(She being our lodger), crackled;
And while it popped and crackled,
He face caught by the glow,

"In he walked and said to her,
In a slow voice he said to her;
Yes, walking in he said to her,
'We sail before cock-crow.'

"'Why did you not come on to me,
As promised Yes, come on to me?
Why did you not come on to me,
Since you had sworn to go?'

"His eyes were deep and flashing,
As flashed the holm-flames; flashing
His eyes were deep and flashing,
In their quick, keen upthrow.

"As if she had been ready,
Had furtively been ready;
As if she had been ready
For his insistence - lo! -

"She clasped his arm and went with him
As his entirely; went with him.
She clasped his arm and went with him
Into the sleeping snow.

"We saw the prickly leaves waste
To ashes; saw the leaves waste;
The burnt-up prickly leaves waste....
The pair had gone also.

-"On Twelfth Night, two years after -
Yes, Twelfth Night, two years after;
On Twelfth Night, two years after,
We sat - our spirits low -

"Musing, when  back the door swung
Without a knock. The door swung;
Thought flew to her. The door swung.
And in she came, pale, slow;

"Against her breast a child clasped;
Close to her breast a child clasped;
She stood there, with the child clasped,
Swaying it to and fro.

"Her look alone the tale told;
Quite wordless was the tale told;
Her careworn eyes the tale told
As larger they seemed to grow...

"One day next spring she disappeared,
The second time she disappeared.
And that time, when she'd disappeared
Came back no more. Ah no!

"But we still burn the holly
On Twelfth Night, burn the holly
As people do; the holly,
Ivy, and mistletoe."


Thomas Hardy, From Winter Words, in Various Moods and Metres

A Dorsetshire Labourer

We've had a bit of a surprise this evening.

A knock came at the door. We opened it to a strangely familiar, rather skeletal form in a white smock-frock - a little tatty, but still well-care-for.

Thomas Leaf.

It would appear that, way back in September 1858 when Leaf pushed our Porsche Cayenne off the cliff to achieve the right speed, he fell off the cliff after it. Actually, it wasn't just Leaf - he had his two fellow-idiots, Christian Cantle and Joseph Poorgrass, with him and they all simultaneously forgot to let go. As we reached the critical speed it wasn't just the Cayenne and we inside who were transferred back across the multiverse. It was the three smock-clad gorms who were still pushing.

When we staggered out of the wreckage we were able, with the remarkable collection of mint Victorian postage stamps we brought with us, to get some quick cash and a car to drive back home. The three yokels who had been left in the bushes on the side of the cliff, we hadn't noticed. It turns out that Thomas has spent the last fifteen months in tracking us down.

To be fair to him, he's been making himself useful. After doing a rough impression of Tess of the D'Urberville's  journey from Sandbourne to Stonehenge, he turned sharp right and washed up in Bracknell.

An odd place, is Bracknell. It is technically in Hardy's Wessex, but I'm not sure Tommy H would ever have approved. Thomas Leaf, dressed in a smock, speaking with a 19th Century Dorset accent and with old-fashioned views of value, naturally got a job in the Waitrose marketing department. After his dedication to tradition was recognised by the higher-ranking powers that be, he ended up in Victoria Street where, due to his inability to understand post-modernism and lack of insight into the human condition, he came up with the idea of the John Lewis Christmas ad.

And from where, with some advice, he made his way to Husborne Crawley. He says he doesn't want to be in Marketing any more - as a character from a 19th Century pastoral novel he's  had quite enough living in a fantasy world. He wants to be a farm labourer again, but the days of dozens of people harvesting one field are long gone.

We've given him a spade and told him to clear the ditches. He's happy as Larry. In fact, it was hard enough to stop him going out there immediately. He's not got any brighter after 18 months in Marketing. And we can get no real idea of what's happened to Christian Cantle and Joseph Poorgrass - apart from Tommy Leaf remarking that they're "something in the City now".

Goodbye to the last Hardy Player

Norrie Woodhall has died, aged 105. When Norrie was born, Thomas Hardy was 65 years of age, She knew him when, in her twenties, she was part of the Hardy Players, and took part in his own stage adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.


I feel an era has closed. Old things pass away, 'tis true. But her family have lost a grand old lady, and we have all lost our last direct link to the Great Man. The world's a sadder place.

Evening Liturgy for the death of Thomas Hardy, OM - 1928

Hi:Viz: Pillow-case whiteness

1st Yokel: That Thomas Hardy's dead and gone then.
2nd Yokel: Ay, dead and gone as we all shall be.

1st Yokel: Should we open a bottle o' Hardy's Ale then?
2nd Yokel: Nay, the brewery's been taken over, as they all shall be.

1st Yokel: I mid as well sit by the fire.
2nd Yoke: Fire's gone out, as all fires shall.

1st Yokel: Then I mid as well sit on the five-bar gate out i' the thicket.
2nd Yokel: Five-bar gate was the last fuel for the fire. Replaced by a metal gate, as all shall be.

1st Yokel: Then shall we jolly fellows hark down school lane to White Horse for pint?
2nd Yokel: Spent all my groats at Christmas, as all shall have.

1st Yokel: Looks like an early night then.

Morning liturgy for the Death of Thomas Hardy, OM (1928)

1st Yokel: The sun, as visiting landowner on a foreign demesne, rather than an accustomed landlord, glimpses his smiling visage over the fair Vale of Beaker.
2nd Yokel: Fair mornings mek for death by nammit-time, I'll warrant it.

1st Yokel: Shall we take out the convertible for a drive on this fine morning?
2nd Yokel: Convertible's not been out sin Lammas. Dree months afore we even give it a clean, if you ask me.

1st Yokel: Still, lambing-time is nigh upon us.
2nd Yokel: Yes, and the deaths of ewes and sleepless nights that they shall bring us! We shan't hae a day off this side of Beltane or my name's not Norman.

1st Yokel: With thy face so unsmiling and eyes so hollow-cheeked, why didst get up at all this forenoon?
2nd Yoke: Wife threw me out. Turns out she was secretly married to the Lord of the Manor twelve long years ago, and my bairns are his, and the cottage is his, and I've till Candlemas to find a new job and who's looking for council environmental planners with this government in charge?

1st Yokel: And so the Lord of the Immortals had his laugh, and the Council Environmental Planner had to dwell like a gipsy around the environs of his former estate. And the Lord of the Manor was revenged.

A poem for Christmas Eve

It is only today that I have felt a pang of nostalgia for those happy days we spent in Victorian Wessex. It seems like only last summer, and yet it was 162 years ago. Two whole generations have passed since we organised the well-attended "Three Village Idiots" performance of Nessun Dorma.

I remember young Tommy Hardy telling me about how he celebrated the traditional Victorian Christmas. On a snowy Christmas Eve - such as this one, indeed - the whole family would gather round a log fire and lose its faith. It was a simpler, more optimistic time.

Hardy wrote this poem in 1915 - a much less simple time - when faith in Progress was lost just as much as faith in God. And in many ways I feel it explains the Beaker religious philosophy.

Happy Christmas, and Gord bless us one an' all.

THE OXEN

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

A face on which time makes but little impression

Can all Beaker Folk please note that tonight is "Return of the Native" Night. Time to start reading the great novel, on the day the novel starts.

Possibly the best written work in the English language. Featuring love, betrayal, death, loss and gawping rustics. A world of community. A world of danger. A world where oosers run amok while demented housewives say the Lord's Prayer backwards.  A world where yokels jump around in dying bonfires because they can. A world we'll never understand.

You've six weeks to read it. And then it's time for "Under the Greenwood Tree".

Harvest Festival

I feel we did enough Harvest and lickle animaws last week, particularly the ickle bunnie wabbits.
But Church Mouse has been bringing the issue up and he's reminded me of the towering, oh-so-Victorian figure that was Robert Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow.
In those days before the Diocese of Truro and resurgent pseudo-Celtic nationalism, Hawker was also able to hold the living of Welcombe, the other side of a little brook that does the job that the Tamar does for the other 99% of the border between Devon and Cornwall.
To hold both livings, in the days before they invented cars, shows the hardiness (pun intended) of the average Victorian. The drive from Welcombe to Morwenstow church is about 10 miles by car. The walk is a couple of miles, but this is serious walker's country. It's also the sort of terrain to make a good Beaker Person spit, with a holy well dedicated to the so-called "Celtic" saint "Nectan" at Welcombe.

Hawker could have defined the term "eccentric" - although I doubt that modern-day bishops would tolerate a vicar who smoked opium while sitting on the cliffs looking out for shipwrecks in case there were any sailors he could bury or - in extreme cases - help to save. He is said to have excommunicated his cat for mousing on Sundays. He wrote the Cornish national anthem, a song of rebellion against the English (indeed, British) Crown. On his deathbed he converted to Roman Catholicism.

And how do we remember Hawker?

As the inventor of the Harvest Festival.

The English people (and the Cornish, our noble cousin-race) had been celebrating Harvest Home since time immemorial. But the Victorian clergy couldn't be having that, could they? People celebrating the blessings of the harvest with John Barleycorn's finest and a few rowdy ballads. They had to be tamed, calmed - made safer.
And so the Harvest Festival came about. A sanitised, sanctified equivalent to the Harvest Home. Where the Harvest Loaf could be raised on high in place of the ale of the Harvest Home. Where the Good Health of the Barleymow would be replaced by some polite words from the vicar.  Who was the only person in the parish allowed to be off his face of a Wednesday lunchtime - all the peasants were supposed to be sober and hard at work.

If you're interested, the Harvest image here is a bunch of alpacas (I've no idea what the collective term is) grazing oblivious to the cloud of chaff being kicked up by the combine at the top of the page. When a South American mammal is grazing quietly in the dust of a mechanized harvesting machine the size of Dunstable, you know you can only be in England.

Weathers

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at 'The Traveller's Rest,'
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.


This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.
 
Thomas Hardy

Channel Firing - April 1914

"Channel Firing" is a great Thomas Hardy poem for Lenten themes.  The idea of the dead being awakened, thinking it's the big day - but in fact, nothing's changed.  Humans are still killing each other and the world still waits.
Was Pa'son Thirdly's preaching all wasted?  Does the Prince of Peace still wait to bring it?  Is eternal rest the best thing for all of us?  And when will we ever learn?  (breaks into hippy pacifist song accompanied by Young Keith on the banjo).

---

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, 'No;
It's gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

'All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

'That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scour
Hell's floor for so much threatening....

'Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).'

So down we lay again. 'I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,'
Said one, 'than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!'

And many a skeleton shook his head.
'Instead of preaching forty year,'
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
'I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

The Pride of Yeovil

A suitable remembrance of a great man.  Yeovil remembers - well not really one of its favourite sons, as Thomas Hardy only lived there for a short period of time while trying to keep his mother and his wife apart.  But certainly one of its most famous inhabitants.

Thomas Hardy, OM.    Truly "Wessex Man".  A man of Dorset - but also of Somerset.  One of the few people famous as both a poet and a novelist.  And seriously, seriously good at both.  With his nostalgic yet modernist mind-frame, one of the great examples of the Victorian spirit that gained a world but realised it had lost its soul.  In his ability to recreate the past and make it more like what he would have liked, he has been a real inspiration to me (although Hnaef hates the novels).

Who could not be proud of Hardy?  There's a quiet suburban house in Paddington, London with a blue plaque on the wall, celebrating the mere few months Hardy spent there while working as an architect.  But he wrote two short stories with Yeovil settings.  He lived in Yeovil while preparing for, it could reasonably be argued, his greatest novel, Return of the Native.  A novel in which the love lives and rivalries of a group of assorted misfits and half-wits living on a heath are played out below Rainbarrow, within which sleep the Beaker Folk whose mere presence mocks the shallow considerations of the living.  So of course Yeovil, home at one time (I am reliably told by a local religious leader) of the great Sir Ian Botham, Ashes saviour and Shredded Wheat-eater, would celebrate Mr Hardy (OM) appropriately.

Now, we know Hardy was not a tall man.  "Of middle height" was what he claimed, and he may have been on tip-toes to manage even that.

But - we reckon he was probably taller than this plaque.

Sandwiched between a parking meter and a dustbin.  In close and convenient reach of what appears to be a grit box, in case anyone reading the plaque should slip over in this wintry weather we're suffering.  Although, to be honest, it's more likely that getting a rush of blood to the head would make them fall over given the angle they'd have to be at to read it.  I mean, they could even have stuck the plaque on that lamp-post and it would have been more prominent.

We note that Yeovil's "famous residents" appear to be, generally speaking, not very famous outside Yeovil.  Frankly, they seem to be struggling for celebrity.  Even "Sir Beefy" made sure his son was born in Yorkshire.  Perhaps they should treat their genuinely famous people better, if they think they deserve to have any more?  However we do note that TS Eliot also briefly resided there.  Goodness knows how he's been commemorated.  Maybe they've sprayed the fact on the wall of the house where he once lived?  Or named a bus shelter after him?  Or maybe - we can see it now - "Yeovil is proud to commemorate the opening of the 'Wasteland' Shopping Centre... "

Yeovil town were beaten to the Conference title in 2001 by the mighty Rushden and Diamonds, pride of those people from Bedfordshire who can't stand Luton (and those from eastern Northants who can't stand Kettering).  Yeovil followed the Diamonds up two years later.   The "Glovers" are currently mid-table in League 1, while Rushden once again languish in the Conference.  This posting has nothing to do with any kind of bitterness in any way.

With thanks to Martin Pakes of Crewkerne for permission to use these images, and to Fraser for alerting us to them.

The Husborne Quire - or Keeping Men Under Control

Elizaphanian comments on the way in which the Victorians drummed the music bands out of churches, replacing them with an organist and a choir (sick) rather than quire (sic).  This was most memorably commemorated in Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, most light-hearted and therefore under-rated of the late great Mr H's work.
Revd Sam Norton sees this as, in part, resulting in the exclusion of men from the church, by reducing their participation in the worship and therefore their stake in the work of the church.
Here in Husborne Crawley, it's true to say, we have a music group based very much on Mellstock West Gallery principles.  Which is to say, they're not very good but they're volunteers.  The heart of the group over the last year or so has been very much Young Keith on bodhran, Edith Weston with the pan pipes and Burton on ukulele.   And it's fair to say that on the whole they're pretty awful.  However, in an attempt to instil an authentic Wessex feel, we're delighted now to welcome Burt on violin and Elspeth on serpent.  It's true that neither can actually play their instrument, but with the cat-like screaming of the violin and the serpent resembling a flatulent ox, the band is now sounding increasingly rural, and that can only be authentic.  So far so good with the Mellstock model, I say.

But reading Mr Norton's posting, I sense a certain Blokeist theology about it.  This idea that somehow people have to be involved - to be participating.  To be active.  All Blokeist virtues, to be sure.  But dangerously democratic in a religious institution that is dedicated to keeping things well-managed, quiet, non-confrontational and above all fluffy.

That is why we in Husborne Crawley have adopted a policy of "quiet conformity".  It works like this.  At all times people are encouraged to get in touch with their feelings, and by being in touch with them to accept them.  Every time it seems that people are wanting to go and actually do something - about the world, about their own nature - we encourage them to talk about it.  We find if you talk about something enough, it will probably resolve itself.  Or at least it won't seem so important as how you feel about it.

We think it is important to sing songs that are deeply in touch with our feelings, and directed to a nebulous concept that we refer to as "God-as-boyfriend".  We're still working on this, and we regard ourselves as mere apprentices compared to the real masters, the Evangelical-Charismatic Christians.

Most important of all - at the end of every ceremony we encourage everyone to form a circle, join hands and bless everyone else in it while looking them deeply and caringly in the eyes.  You'd be amazed how many testosterone-laden Neanderthals have decided, having realised they were standing between Hnaef and Young Keith, that maybe the Community isn't for them.  The words "it's not that I'm hiding from that side of my nature" have been heard more than once from men as they run for the car park.  In the early days, some men were intelligent enough to make sure they were always sat between two attractive women.  Nowadays, the introduction of the "drawing of lots for seating arrangements" ceremony has put a stop to that.

In an analogy to Mr Darwin's Patent Evolutionary Theory, we have succeeded in selectively removing all disruptive, aggressive, destructive - let's just say male - tendencies.  Indeed, we can say that we have now reached the point where most of the men of the community are, to all intents and purposes, honorary women, distinguishable only in being more gormless.  I say most - we still have Young Keith and Hnaef.  Although even Hnaef is showing promising signs of taking up knitting.  But we have to retain the odd y-chromosome around the place.  After all, if we didn't who would chop the logs and push the cars out in the snow?  There's a place for everyone in the Husborne Crawley fellowship.  Just as long as they're placid and do what they're told.  You'd have thought after all this time, surely one of the men would have noticed our policy?  But again - we've weeded that type out.

The Thomas Hardy Plot Generator

Sadly the Great Man is no longer with us.

But Christmas is above all a time when we think of Tommy H, with his poems such as "The Oxen" evoking an idyllic past of simple belief, destroyed by modernism and human autonomy.
But to show that the Spirit of Mellstock is not dead, we are happy to present the "Thomas Hardy Plot Generator" (beta).  Currently there are over 5 billion scarily-similar tales of doomed love to view, and a new one every time you return to the site!  Happy depression!  (and please let us know if there are any bugs).