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THREE drones provide their August music all day, the combine, the grain-dryer, and the south wind in the poplars. The latter often rises to a roar and is sumptuous. It is as if the village is in full sail. The harvest is snatched between heavy showers. The Big Field was cut all night. Moonlight led the way. I lay in bed and listened to the solitary harvester as he grabbed the damp corn.
“What a difference!” said Susan the following afternoon. On her parents’ Irish farm, and this only 40 years ago, harvest meant feeding the 5000 — well, a lot of workers — and it was making sandwiches and tea for 20 all day. This morning, the same figure in the lurching cab is lightly harrowing the stubble. No aftermath. No following birds. No shout of triumph. Only Duncan’s dryer playing its part in the drone trio.
Christopher and I went to Snape for a Mozart, Britten, Schubert concert. It was cool and still, the reed-beds hardly moving. They levelled off to Iken and Aldeburgh, the rivulets glittering round their roots. We sat in front of one of those people who come to concerts to clap, stamp, and bawl. How guilty one feels when one decides to end applause. The concert was good, familiar, and a pleasure to be at, and I would have liked its final moments to ring in my ears.
Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin on television. Dawkins’s evangelical atheism fills his face with a light similar to that of a saint. Which will not please him. Darwin is beetle-browed, his eyes filled with the suffering caused by infant death, as one by one his beloved children slipped into what he believed was oblivion, and what Mrs Darwin believed was heaven.
He and Dawkins come together in their tribute to the earthworm. All that I can think of as the programme ends, and Darwin’s battered leather armchair and Dawkins’s bright face flicker from sight, and for no logical reason, is George Herbert walking along the Broken Bridges footpath with Jesus.
Having summed up the courage to call the electricians in to rewire the whole house, and the job done, I walk through the rooms, bursting with self-congratulation.
I miss Radio 1, of course, but my admiration for those who are able to trace faults through plaster and wood, much as a surgeon is able to bypass blocked veins, grows at every step. Nice new switches, nice new fuse box. I hear Carl calling from the loft about the dead rat. And Philip unable to take another step because of a live spider. Life is all arrivals and departures, I tell the white cat.
A Shadow Cabinet columnist in The Times dismisses Dudley Green’s Letters of the Reverend Patrick Brontë in much the same fashion as George II dismissed Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for being too thick.
Other than being the father of three brilliant novelists, Patrick Brontë was a great curate. Mrs Gaskell left us with a caricature of this caring man. His writings show a very different person: a priest in a rough parish who fought for his people. Those who see the Church of England in the usual superficial terms should read this book.
Mr Brontë was never more than a curate, but then he never had to be. His Christianity was lived, and that was enough.
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