Bourne Diary - August 2000
by
Rex Needle
Saturday 5th August 2000 I showed a friend around Bourne Abbey a few days ago and he was quite surprised at the state of the churchyard that is so badly maintained, the grass unkempt and weed ridden in many places while saplings sprout from many crevices. There is much litter and a general air of neglect hangs over the entire area, a sad commentary on a building that has been the centrepiece of this market town for a thousand years. Those who helped forge its destiny sleep beneath the surrounding earth while their tombstones crumble and topple and become obscured by ivy as the years pass. If for no other reason, they deserve better than that which we have given them.
The churchyard is part of England's heritage, a haven of peace within the community, but few are properly tended and most have become eyesores when they should be places of beauty. This is not a matter of Christianity, or even of religious belief, but one of birthright because these small havens are our inheritance from those who went before, who handed down a tradition that the land surrounding this ancient site should be preserved for those who come after. Indeed, many of our churches are built in places where pagan worship once took place and so there is a continuity with our ancestors stretching back into the mists of time.
Why then should we neglect these oases of tranquillity at a time when such spots are much needed, somewhere to sit in peace and quiet, a place for contemplation, when our green and pleasant land is being eroded by the tarmac and concrete of road and housing development? The upkeep of our churchyards is the responsibility of the Church of England and although our parishes repeatedly plead poverty, the church itself still spends large sums on pomp and panoply, on lavish vestments for its bishops, high salaries and pensions for senior clergy and ill-advised investments that have in the past failed miserably. We cannot then look to the church to save our churchyards.
Finance must come from elsewhere and why is it that money destined for the public good is not spent on preserving God's little acres? The national lottery fund is an obvious source but although this project was well intentioned, that the profits should be used for community projects, this weekly pot of gold has been far too attractive to government who now see it as a regular provider of funds for those things that should actually be paid for by our taxes, education and schools, health and hospitals. Too much is being snatched for public projects that ought to be funded by central government and less and less is being allocated to those community schemes for which they were originally envisaged. It is then a flight of fancy to imagine our churchyards being saved from extinction by a Heritage Secretary who suddenly decides that they ought to be preserved and that money from the people will be used for this very purpose.
England has around 18,000 parish churches and most are Grade I listed buildings. But although a dedicated band of volunteers tries to keep their churchyards tidy, they are fighting a losing battle. The popularity of our churches is not in doubt for although few may attend services, one only has to inspect the Visitors' Book to see that there is a constant flow of people dropping in, often on the off chance but more frequently by design, to inspect the place where their ancestors worshipped, married, were baptised or buried, and to take away with them a memory of that occasion. What do tourists who come here from abroad think about our heritage when they see such ancient and magnificent buildings surrounded by graveyards where our glorious past should be celebrated but are left instead to decay and become little more than waste ground?
A grant of £25,000 each would pay for an initial clean up of these churchyards and then finance an annual maintenance in perpetuity from the interest on the remaining capital. This may seem a very large sum of money but is only half of the £800 million, much of it lottery cash, that has already been ploughed into the Millennium Dome, which after a very brief life is now being sold off at a massive loss to a Japanese-financed company who will be paying only one tenth of the original cost to turn it into a giant urban amusement park. Why should not the people's money be spent on projects that will benefit the people? Such investment in our churchyards would provide every town and village in the land with a green and pleasant place of comfort and quiet that would become an everlasting memorial to a generous government's philanthropy in the cause of the community. But as I said, this is merely a flight of fancy.
My comments last week about the futility of the current "Buy in Bourne" campaign to save our small shops have caused some discussion in the town and one contributor to the Bourne Forum has suggested that if they do not have what we want then we should choose something else from what is already in stock and pay the price they ask. "Three years of different choices and decisions by people spending the money will reverse the whole trend", he says. This is a rather bizarre solution and I know of no one willing to buy goods they do not want at prices they cannot afford just to keep small shops in business. After all, they are commercial undertakings, not charities. The very reason why the supermarkets are succeeding is that they are offering an attractive alternative of a widely varied stock at the lowest possible prices but there are now so many of these retail outlets that we are getting strong competition between them and this can only be to the added benefit of the consumer.
The small shops have had it all their own way in the past by charging what they wanted and opening when convenient for themselves and it is not so long ago that unless you finished your shopping by 5.30 p m then you got nothing, even if you needed a loaf of bread or bottle of milk, because that is when they shut the doors on their customers. The supermarkets have changed all of that by opening when people want them to, evenings and weekends included, and soon we will be able to shop around the clock if we so wish. This is a changing world, dictated by market forces, and those who fail to keep up with the times will be left behind.
One of the delights of living in my present house is that I have a stunning view of the fen between Bourne and Dyke village and from my first floor study window I can observe the changing seasons. My desk is positioned so that I can see out of the large window that overlooks meadow and farmland to the distant horizon and out there somewhere are the salt marshes of South Lincolnshire and beyond that the North Sea. Saturday 12th August 2000
My daily panoramic view of the countryside takes in several fields edged with trees, an old dyke dating back to Roman times, several churches, a few cottages from the next village and a windmill but, most rewarding of all, I am a constant observer of the farming year in its entirety because I sit here most days usually writing something and watch the plough and the harrow in the autumn, preparing to plant new crops of wheat and barley, and then the frost and the snow which turn our landscape into a winter wonderland overnight, and then the spring when the green shoots push through the earth and as the weeks pass, they grow taller and soon those mellow mid-summer days are here and with them comes the harvest and then the annual cycle begins again. And so the changing seasons act as a marker for our life span and constantly remind us that the years are passing and we must enjoy each day to the full.
The corn harvest is currently upon us and the hum of combines can be heard early and late as the huge machines cut a swathe through the golden acres to replenish our larders for another year. Here in Bourne, we are on the edge of the Lincolnshire corn belt and so wherever we look there are fields full of grain about to burst from the ear and as reaping progresses, the tractors run a shuttle service with their trailers, taking load after load back to the farm for storage ready for shipping to the wholesale merchants. Out here in the countryside, the changing climate is an important factor for food production and a perpetual topic of conversation for it governs our lives and we look at the sky each morning and wonder what the day will bring. Fortunately, the weather has been good for the crops this year and the uncut wheat stands proud and erect with hardly space to slip a pound note between the stalks and so the yield will be high and profitable.
Haymaking is the peak of summer and the grain harvest heralds the beginning of the end. Already the nights are drawing in and soon the holidays will be over and the children will be crawling unwillingly back to school. The seasons come and go more or less on time here in England but even the oldest rustic wiseacre cannot go through one month without some sort of surprise, for there never is a season with a regular weather pattern.
No one knows what to expect and the best efforts of our meteorological technology can only forecast a few days ahead and even then they are more likely to be wrong. The entire countryside is full of weather lore, from the old legend of St Swithin to myths about providence providing plenty of berries for the birds if the winter months are harsh but we cannot depend on these old beliefs to predict the weather. Cloud caps on local hills, the presence or absence of dew and the swallows flying high in the sky may all have a meaning for the next twenty-four hours and so they are usually reliable when it comes to saying what will happen tomorrow but beyond that neither they nor the professional weathermen can make any sure prophecy which deals with as little as a week ahead.
After all, if you stick year after year to a firm prediction that we are going to have a hard winter then sooner or later you will be right and prophets are remembered for their successes and not their failures. We must then accept these fluctuations of weather as the seasons pass for it has been unpredictable since the earliest times. But one thing is certain, for in the words of Noah after the flood (Genesis 8:22): "While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." On that, we can depend.
Notices abound in Bourne in an effort to persuade pet owners to keep their dogs under control. There are signs at the entrance to Bourne Woods warning that they should be kept on a lead but no one observes it and those who walk them appear to think that their dogs are entitled to jump up and muddy approaching walkers with their paws and, worse still, to leave their faeces along the public footpaths.
The situation is even more acute in the streets of Bourne despite signs erected by South Kesteven District Council warning: "Clean it up or face prosecution" yet the sight of a dog owner with his pet dropping its pile on the grass verge or even on the pavement while they look the other way is a common one. Some dogs are let out early in the morning to deface our streets and there was a time when a terrier always headed for my front drive to do its business while the playing fields and other open spaces in the town all have notices warning that dogs are prohibited and yet their poo piles up and creates a health hazard for those use also use these green spaces.
I am prompted to write about this unpleasant subject this week because there is a growing disquiet in the town about the situation that has been reflected in recent entries in the Bourne Forum. Terry Butcher is particularly outraged after finding many of our attractive footpaths, to Cawthorpe and along the Car Dyke, fouled in this way and even children's play areas are no longer sacrosanct even though this practice is likely to cause illness by spreading an infection called toxocara canis that can cause a range of symptoms from aches and pains to bronchial conditions and in rare cases, the eyesight can also be damaged. It is then quite disgraceful that dog owners do not take more care.
The one act of allowing a dog to defecate in public places has earned their owners a very bad reputation indeed and although there are those who carry plastic bags to pick up the mess, they are in the minority and so our streets have become a public lavatory for these animals and you cannot walk more than fifty yards without encountering yet another obnoxious pile that reflects not on the dog but on the owner. The dirty dog is often the one carrying the lead and not the animal at the end of it.
All problems for society carry within them the seeds of their own solution and if public notices do not work, if they are continually ignored and the streets continue to be defiled by such anti-social activity, then our legislators should act. An annual dog licence fee of £100 would be an obvious answer because only those dedicated to the welfare of our canine friends would pay such a price to keep them as pets and for that money, they would ensure that either they left their business at home or picked it up for them if they dropped it in the streets. Such an income would also finance the employment of more dog wardens to ensure that our by-laws were observed.
There is a little verse, very popular with dog owners, that is often sculpted on stone tablets sold by garden centres and erected in their gardens, and it is called The Doggie's Prayer:
A walkies and a meal each day,
Is all I ask for when I pray.I would therefore like to offer my own Doggie's Prayer to those owners who disregard the rules relating to the fouling our public places:
If I must stop along the way
Please use a bag and take away.When I was a boy, we sang our school song with little regard for the words but as the years passed, they took on real meaning and now when I repeat them or sing them to myself in my mind's eye, they hark back to those times which seemed happier and more carefree than anything we experience today. Images of past times are potent because we have been there and have passed through in safety while the future is uncertain and the journey may be perilous, especially for those of advancing years, Saturday 19th August 2000
We are therefore sustained by this nostalgia but the remembrance of those years is but an innocent enjoyment although it is difficult to convey such pleasure to our young folk who pursue life so relentlessly and without realising that this too will come to them one day.
On Speech Days, our rendering of Forty Years On was loud and robust, though not always musical, but sufficiently appealing to our guest of honour to grant us the half day holiday that was within his gift on such occasions and we would canter home with the words by Ernest Mills still ringing in our ears, words that have followed me down the years and now in old age reveal their true meaning.
Forty years on, when afar and asunder
Parted are those who are singing today,
When you look back and forgetfully wonder
What we were like in our work and our play.Then it may be there will often come o'er you
Snatches of notes like the catch of a song;
Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,
Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along.I am reminded of these things by a recent email from a friend in the United States with whom I have corresponded since 1998. He is a retired insurance agent who lives at Fort Worth in Texas and during our exchanges over the past two years, he has frequently dwelt on memories of his childhood for despite the hardships of America during the depression years, it was a magical time that he remembers with great affection and he finds that life today can often be bewildering and even frightening. John is 78 and his marriage to Margaret has flourished for almost sixty years. He is a gentleman of the old school who values such qualities as courtesy, kindness and good manners, and although he remembers the world when it moved at a far slower pace, he accepts change but realises that it is not always for the better and his latest message is particularly touching. John writes:
Recently my thoughts have dwelled on my youth because I have tried to determine why there are vast differences in today's and my generations. The obvious comes to mind but there are reasons not mentioned, obscure and yet so simplistic when defining the life-styles between the two. Having fun and passing the time in my day consisted of building ones own kite out of newspaper, tree limbs, mixing flour and water for the paste, and using old rags for the tail. It was the days of spin the bottle at parties, walking your girl around the block, or doing tricks with a five cent yo-yo. What a thrill to go fishing using worms for bait that we dug up for ourselves. At night we would often lie on our backs and look up at the billions of bright stars that were always visible when not raining or cloudy.
Those were the days of slicked back hair held down by a handful of Vaseline hair oil. What a treat it was to take one's sweetie to the soda fountain and order a Coke float, malted milk shake, or splurge on a banana split. We waited patiently for that next episode on the radio of our favourite drama or laugh at the silly jokes of our favourite comedians. Musical movies made us feel good about ourselves and we could go home humming or whistling one of the songs we heard. The big bands influenced our lives with melodies and words we could understand. We had no difficulty handling violence that we saw in the movies because we knew the bad guy always got caught and were punished. As we grew older, we were ready to handle our responsibilities because those values had been ingrained in us either by word or action.
I am sure it was not one single action or thing that turned many into barbarians but a culmination of so many little things that appeared unimportant at the time. Perhaps it was too much wealth that brought on the explosion of indifference. I wish I knew the complete answer but the simple comparison awakens me to the stark reality that the bygone pleasures indeed played a great part in our lives and maturity.
I am not suggesting for one moment that those were the good old days because there was extreme poverty and deprivation during the 1930s and 1940s and there was no benefits system to fall back on as we have today. In the years that have passed, medical science has advanced life's expectation by ten or even twenty years while the consumer society has brought ease and comfort to the home and given us luxuries undreamed of when I was a lad. But the rules that governed our lives and social contact have also been relaxed and this has spawned a yob culture that at times is frightening in its extremes and, as an example, the events on a council estate at Portsmouth over the past few days have highlighted the fine line that exists between barbarism and civilised behaviour.
We must embrace progress because it is inevitable and necessary but we should not forget those other attributes that were once ingrained in us and that can make life so worthwhile and living together so pleasurable.
The summer bugs have taken their toll in my garden, decimating the roses and honeysuckle and killing off a huge yellow marguerite that was giving us such pleasure. I try to keep them at bay but am reluctant to use pesticides when I repeatedly complain about farmers polluting the environment and destroying our countryside with their chemicals and so I fight the invaders with solutions of soap and other folk concoctions. But after receiving an email from one of my correspondents, I think that my troubles are but small ones.
Winnie Nowak, a Lincolnshire lass and a busy gardener despite her 80 years, writes from Anchorage, Alaska: "My garden has been devastated by an intruder. A moose got in and cleaned out my crop of vegetables and then came three nights later and ate my roses. I am now cutting my lilies because if he spots them, he is bound to jump the fence and take them too."
After reading that, I will never complain again about the greenfly and red spider mite that I have to contend with year after year.
A colourful crop is creeping into the South Lincolnshire countryside where cereal production dominates the landscape. Side by side with the wheat and the barley in these wide open fields can now been seen the occasional burst of sunflowers that are being grown for their seeds and for the oil they produce. Saturday 26th August 2000
The common sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is a native of Mexico and Peru and was introduced into this country in the 16th century but is now one of our most familiar garden plants. It has been grown commercially for many years but its appearance in this part of the country is relatively new and a field in full flower as you pass through the fens is a sight to behold.
The sunflower is an annual herb with a rough, hairy stem and grows three to twelve feet high. The genus Helianthus to which it belongs, contains about fifty species, chiefly natives of North America, the name being derived from helios, the sun and anthos, a flower, and is popularly supposed to have been given this name because of the belief that they follow the sun by day, always turning towards its direct rays, although the word sunflower is known in English literature long before the introduction of this Latin name and a better explanation is that it was so named because the flower resembles the radiant beams of the sun.
In Peru, the sunflower was much revered by the Aztecs 600 years ago and in their temples of the sun, the priestesses were crowned with sunflowers and carried them in their hands. The early Spanish conquistadors found numerous representations of the sunflower in these temples wrought in pure gold.
The sunflower also has a long history of medicinal applications. The leaves of the plant are used in herbal tobaccos and the seeds have diuretic and expectorant properties and have been employed with success in the treatment of bronchial conditions, coughs and colds while a tincture developed in the Caucasus region of Russia has been used in the treatment of malarial fever. In Turkey and Persia, a concoction prepared from the seeds with a mixture of wine has succeeded in the treatment of some fevers when quinine has failed.
Today, the sunflower is a ubiquitous garden plant and very popular with children because the seeds are large and easy to handle and require minimal attention while the end product is not only eye appealing but often a cause of competition with friends because they can grow over 20 feet tall and their bloom up to two feet in diameter. In the peak growing period, sunflowers can grow as much as 12 inches per day. The world record for the tallest sunflower is 25 feet 5½ inches that was grown in the Netherlands while the largest diameter head measured 32¼ inches and was reared at Maple Ridge in British Columbia, Canada. Growing sunflowers is therefore fun for the whole family who will be rewarded with not only a beautiful flower but also seeds for their pets and the birds.
The sunflower also has its place in art, the most famous exponent being the Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh who depicted them in a series of twelve pictures, all completed during the month of August, 1889, when they were in bloom and he worked fast because the flowers wilted so quickly once they had been cut. His most famous example, "Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers", was sold at auction in 1987 to a Japanese buyer for £22 million and can now been seen in the Seiji Togo Yasuda Memorial Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.
But the sunflower is valuable from an economic as well as an ornamental point of view because every part of the plant can be utilised for some purpose. The leaves can be used to produce a cattle food and the stems contain a fibre for paper making. The seeds are rich in oil and reckoned to be the nearest approach to olive oil than any other known vegetable oil while the seeds can also be used to feed poultry and the flowers contain a yellow dye.
This then is an all round crop and one that is extremely popular in countries such as Russia and Spain, India and Japan. Sunflowers have also been grown in England for many years and even during the Second World War, the Ministry of Food issued information to growers about their cultivation and harvesting and undertook to purchase the ripened seed that was used in the manufacture of margarine and other essential fats used in the making of munitions. But sunflower production has been largely confined to the southern and south western counties where conditions are more tolerant and now the crop is beginning to appear over large tracts of the South Lincolnshire countryside and one farmer currently has sixty acres at Baston Fen, near Bourne, devoted to them. With diversification high on the farming agenda, we can expect to see an even greater acreage of sunflowers in the future.
My diary item about the "Buy in Bourne" shopping campaign on July 29th has caused much discussion in the town and on the Bourne Forum but I have also been rebuked for my remarks by the committee and members of the Bourne Chamber of Trade & Commerce whose apparent aim is that we should buy from local shops irrespective of choice or cost. This is a totally untenable view and those traders who pursue such a policy will not survive and do not deserve to. They are in a buyers' market and ought to credit their customers with more common sense.
The chairman Mike Holden complains that my comments are "not constructive" and that "this negative article does little to promote the town which was, presumably, the intention of having the site in the first place." Such constructive criticism was bound to fall foul of those at whom it was intended although the points I made were perfectly valid. The truth is usually controversial and often unpalatable but it remains the truth. The chamber also appears to think that the Bourne web site should be a platform to promote their businesses and I have now put them straight on this point.
It is not the objective of this web site to "promote" Bourne in the way the chamber infers but to give an account of its history and heritage while my weekly Diary reflects life here day to day, warts and all. This is purely a voluntary project while my views are honestly expressed and no commercial interests are involved which, of course, the Bourne Chamber of Trade & Commerce cannot claim.
I therefore learn with some gratification of similar dissension on the other side of the world in a small town called Balaklava that is 60 miles north of Adelaide in South Australia. One of our web site visitors who lives there has emailed me to say that the Bourne Diary has become compulsory reading for a fascinated group of people who, as they say down under, "wouldn't miss it for quids". He goes on:
'Buy local' my God! Where have I heard that before? Let us really do something for the town, something innovative, new, exciting, bold, visionary, hi tech and clever. I know. Let's put a few coloured balloons and streamers out, baseball hats proudly proclaiming 'Shop local', T-shirts at ten dollars each 'I buy in beautiful Bourne because it's better'. See if anyone around here has a picture of Princess Di which sheds tears whenever a tourist coach passes the town. We'll write to the Bayreuth festival director suggesting Bourne as an alternative site for Wagner's masterpiece and if they're too stuck up, we'll try the Edinburgh Tattoo. After all it doesn't have to be in Edinburgh all the darned time and we could dress up the town hall to make it look a bit like a castle. Maybe Bill Clinton could come over and open it for us. Crackpot ideas which are a waste of time, money and resources without the slightest expectation of fulfilment, and later when the town band has gone home and the balloons have been popped by school kids, and the streamers stolen and the shops moribund, it will still be 'Sorry mate, we haven't got a pair of tan slippers size ten, but you can have two pairs of green, size five.'
Well, I think that just about sums it up for the moment.
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