First and Last Loves

are signs of the past—clear glass panes, patched and flaking outside walls looking like an old water colour. And then the inside! You walk into the church of a Jane Austen novel, into a forest of magnificent oak joinery, an ocean of box pews stretching shoulder high all over the church. Each is carved with decorations in a Strawberry Hill Gothick manner. The doors and sides of the pews take a graceful curve either side of the font and another curve above them is made by the elegant west gallery. Norman pillars just raise their sculptured heads above the woodwork of the aisles. Two huge pulpits stand, one each side of the chancel arch. The old stone floors remain, the long cream-washed walls, the stone arch mouldings, picked out subtly white to form a pale contrast. The chancel, as it should be, is richest of all—panelled, with elaborate-carved pews for the squarson and his family, a carved canopy hanging over the Commandment board behind the altar, delicately carved communion rails in the Chippendale style. Even the red leather kneelers at these rails and the scarlet service books are the same date—1816.For there it is, written in gold letters on shields that look down from the corbels of the nave roof:—

“This church deeply in decay has been all but rebuilded generously and piously at their own expense by—”

and then are given the names of the churchwardens and ten other men who loved their church.

It is not simply that it is an old building that makes this church so beautiful (there are thousands of old churches) it is that it contains all its Georgian fittings. Though the date is 1816, the style and quality of workmanship is that of fifty years earlier. I believe the designer was one of the Pinch family who must also have built the cross-shaped village school with its octagonal Gothick style tower in the centre and who designed Hungerford church and later did some churches and houses in Bath and the Isle of Man. Whoever he was, he was an artist.

Through the clear glass windows you can see the Kennet meadows, the brick and thatched cottages of the village and to the south the chalky-green cliff fringed by overhanging beeches of Savernake Forest. The Rector (a squarson) before this one preserved the eighteenth-century tradition I have seen nowhere else. He changed in the chancel and his scarf and surplice hung over the communion rails during the week. He used one pulpit for the service and crossed to the other for the sermon. Grand and reposeful those sermons were in the oil lamplight (now alas, replaced by gas) as one sat penned up in a box pew and saw his fine eighteenth-century figure towering above one in the tall pulpit. He was a great man, loved in the neighbourhood and so no doubt is his successor, but I have never “sat under him” as the old-fashioned phrase of sermon-tasters goes.

Mildenhall is a patriarchal country church. It is the embodiment of the Church of England by law established, the still heart of England, as haunting to my memory as the tinkle of sheep bells on the Wiltshire Downs.It puts me in mind of Jane Taylor’s poem, ‘The Squire’s Pew’:—

A slanting ray of evening light

   Shoots through the yellow pane;

It makes the faded crimson bright,

   And gilds the fringe again:

The window’s gothic frame-work falls

In oblique shadow on the walls.

And since those trappings first were new,

   How many a cloudless day,

To rob the velvet of its hue,

   Has come and passed away!

How many a setting sun hath made

That curious lattice-work of shade.2ST. MARK’S, SWINDON

How different is the atmosphere in the churches of Swindon. The train draws into the outskirts. One hundred and eight years ago, there was nothing here at all but a canal and a place where two newly-built railways joined, the Cheltenham and Great West Union Railway (the Gloucestershire line) and the London to Bristol line, known as the Great Western and which not rack or thumb screw will ever induce me to call Western Region British Railways. On a hill above the meadow was the old market town of Swindon. Then New Swindon was built in the meadow by the Great Western. It was a convenient point between Bristol and London. It consisted of sheds, and a few rows of model cottages with open fields round them. These cottages are of Bath stone taken from the excavations of Box Tunnel. They still exist and are called the Company’s Houses. They must form one of the earliest-planned industrial estates in Britain.

The parishioners of St. Philip and St. Jacob in Bristol entreated the Great Western to build a church for their workers; directors stumped up money, subscriptions were raised, land was presented and by 1845, St. Mark’s church was built.

There it stands today close beside the line on the Bristol side of the station. A stone building, all spikes and prickles outside, designed by Gilbert Scott who was then a young man and who lived to build hundreds of rather dull copy-book churches all over Britain, and to build St. Pancras Hotel, the Foreign Office in London and to restore many cathedrals.

One cannot call it a convenient site. Whistles and passing trains disturb the services, engine smoke blackens the leaves and tombstones, and eats into the carved stonework of the steeple. But it is a strong church and though it is not much to look at, it is for me the most loved church in England. For not carved stones nor screen and beautiful altars, nor lofty arcades nor