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SO, A second Railway Age dawns. New tracks are to be laid, and the glorious superstructure of the first will no longer be endangered by ignorant politicians. What havoc they wrought in their day — though mercifully not to our viaduct.
John and I were talking about it, he having lived in its shadow for most of his life. It came into sight, so to speak, when we were discussing the habitats of nightingales, how they loved blackberry thickets, and John said that there were dense ones at Chappel in the rail cuttings.
Chappel is where Mr Bruff and Mr Wythes built the viaduct over the River Colne in 1847-49. First of all, they thought of using timber, but they settled for bricks, all of them made locally. Eighty feet high, 1136 feet (346 metres) long, it straddles the pretty river, and takes our breath away.
John’s great-grandfather helped build it, walking miles to the site, along with an army of brickies. The scaffolding hardly bears thinking about. Ropes and dizzy planks. Swaying cat-walks in high winds. Clinging figures. People fell off. Viaducts cost blood as well as money.
The line that the Irish navvies (navigators) laid across Rannoch Moor was expensive in hurt and death. It was floated on bracken beds. John and I put down our glasses (it was breathing time after Songs of Praise) and remembered how poor men once toiled — where our stunning viaduct was concerned, not unlike Pharoah’s brickies. And now, if they are lucky, the commuters can arrive home to the sound of nightingales.
My dear friend John Whale, who invented this column, has gone to his rest. We met when the Church Times was printed in Colchester, and he would drive down, calling at Bottengoms en route.
There would be wonderful letters from Villers sur Mer in Normandy in his elegant hand. His Anglicanism responded to mine, creating a bond. Writers have to have a few real letters a month, a year — from writers. John’s were such.
We met through a friend when I was chairing a committee whose task it was to choose the best religious radio and television programmes for an award. But we really “met” in our letters. He was a great man. All these different meetings.
It is Midsummer Day. Thinly veiled blue sky, a southern wind. Loud robins. A rattle-trap machine of sorts is crashing about behind the hedge. All the windows are wide. Convolvulus winds between the kitchen bricks. I lie in the garden, reading the letters of W. H. Auden, and the white cat lies on me. No one would believe how hard we are working. Papers blow about.
Auden’s inherited high-churchmanship runs like one of those clear rills that one moment are open to the heavens and next are a concealed movement. Like so many of the major poets of his day, he climbs from university stage to university stage, making a pittance. They said that at home he would sit at his desk from nine to cocktail time, whether he wrote or not. He is a Christian whom many of today’s Christians should read — to be startled, shocked even, but eventually to be better-informed.
The massive volume dents the grass. Ladies call for “the list” of July sidesmen and lesson-readers, and we have mugs of tea. July for Deuteronomy and Matthew. How well the apostle would have known this majestic book. Its name means “repetition of the law”. The Jews know it by its opening phrase, “These are the words . . .”.
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