There is a shadow over this land, a memory that hangs like the mist on an autumn morning, over the fields and between the trees. The silver gold beams break through and disperse its rising and sometimes they settle upon an almost departed shape settled deep heavy weight in the soft ground at the heart of our living spaces.
It shows up damp ancient moss green and brown grey broken stones and symbols and inscribed words, our forebears buried bones, some in the walls; a nave and tower and vane and clock.
The school run mums have just all marched past with barely a glance back.
And sometimes, just sometimes, it sounds a quiet echo of voices: of great, great grandmothers and fathers kneeling, praying; strange coats and hats and different yet so much the same: our blood. Praying hearts that haunt the imagination of their children in every village and town in this land.
This still stone, still watching form, looks over its people now as ever did, over their coming and going and coming and going; over their gossiping: of babies and other mothers faults; over their crying and striving and living and dying.
It watches still in the night, over insomniac pacing and infants waking, over raised voices and the dreaming rest of drilled and administered bodies.
You can just about hear their voice if you stop for one moment to listen, if you take a break from searching for the keys and gulping the tea and rushing out the door to join the effort and strain of the great managed, frenetic, order. They quietly tell of another shape of what was once and once was so obvious; what was true and taken as read, and perhaps a little of the names that once lived within.
The church buildings punctuate the landscape, they are the first thing that you see of an English village when you emerge from a wooded hill. The bells still ring, the words are still said, but the people hear not.
The people of this land have a sense, know there be some, something background to their own noisy days, a whispering tale of ancestral feeling, of how faithful and godly your parents were.
But we…well we might try but just cannot hear,
we cannot hear as they did hear, we do not know what they once knew and felt and smelt.
We hear the mechanic hours of turning wheels announcing the time to start and the time to go home. We hear the rhythm of engines that do not know how to stop and could not suffer the silence that would follow if they did.
The people of this land hear, know only what they think was said, and felt and smelt: all dirty drains; blackened, missing teeth; unwashed bodies and human waste thrown from a window; a time of wretched ignorance and simple stories.
The prettiest myths in refracted light take on shape in Sunday’s soft and unchallenging dramas. It comforts you to hear tell of communities where everybody knows everybody else, everybody supports everybody else and there is no loneliness and no longer any fear.
But the best intuition is the one that feels, that knows that it does not know, and there are some as walk or stride purposefully past the enigmatic, mediaeval, English perpendicular structures, on their way to take up their position, on their way to take their place in the repetitious, revolving wheels of input and output –
some who, at least for a moment, wonder at whether there be some connection between enigmatic still small voice in stone, and the sweet, once upon a land time out of mind.