where art collides

I must have passed it dozens of times but had never noticed it before.

It was a church. The usual sort of ancient edifice, as scattered by the hundred across the ancient land. Surrounding it was the graveyard, fairly full and over the road stood the Vicarage.

The road itself was a small country lane that will have once seen the occasional horse and cart and a flurry of activity on a Sunday though rarely what might be called a good crowd.

The nameless resident cleric will have led a life of rural nonentity, his mechanical existence ordained by tradition and poverty. This was not a rich living. The parish sparsely populated. In return for a small stipend he administered a menu of rites and was not required to contribute with original thinking.

His small flock ruminated acceptance of this with equally unthinking obedience as they had always done.

The church was a few miles outside town and looking round from my vantage point I could count three or four other spires that will have represented the same countryside cameo, a fearful society ruled by the exploitation of ignorance.

I was on a train which passed within a hundred yards of the church across a field. The building of the railway line must have come as a huge shock to the parish, or at least to the clergyman. His peaceful existence shattered by progress, probably concurrent with a dwindling attendance caused by the move into town to the “railhead”.

The big silos of the sugar beet factory gazed down in contempt at the scene whilst dense white smoke emitted from tall chimney stacks.