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The Scarecrow? Well, therein lies a tale! Perhaps it’s best that I simply tell you all the facts, such as they are, and let you draw your own conclusions. Jeremy and the twins invited themselves to stay up at Pagets for a few weeks. Had I told you they’d moved back to Pimlico? After Jenny [ ]
One of the best things about having any kind of relationship with an old house — seeing it, visiting it, living in it, owning it — is the chance to image other lives that have also, over the years, passed through it. Better still, of course — although, admittedly, it isn t always possible — is [ ]
“You argue by results, as this world doesTo settle if an act be good or bad.” TS Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935) For three nights in a row, Agnes dreamed the same dream. On the morning after that third night, she washed her face, put on her best red damask gown, fresh linen and also [ ]
British painter Frank Auerbach has died, at the age of 93 years. Whatever else they may have been, Auerbach’s pictures were never easy — easy to make, or easy to love. Effort was demanded on both sides. First impressions of his work — on the part of critics and, indeed, the rest of us — [ ]
On that afternoon when I first learned of Lucinda’s death, it was as if some sort of filter had fallen between me and the rest of the world. The bright September sunlight was suddenly dim, irresolute. The shadows lost their crisp autumn rigour. They became almost apologetic. When, on a whim, I went to the [ ]
For several years now, I ve shared examples of my short fiction here on this website. Today, though, sees the start of something new — the publication of The Lammas Ghosts, a collection of fifteen of my own original, Norfolk-based short stories in printed form. You can find out more here. For me, ghost stories have, [ ]
This is not a ghost story, at least not in any normal sense of that term. Nor is it much of a history. It answers no important questions. Nor does it make a satisfying progress from A to C, stopping smartly upon arrival, with B folded neatly into the middle. Instead, what follows is an [ ]
The enshrining of historical facts is a curious business. It is generally believed these days — by all sorts of people, which is to say, those who know very little about the Norfolk village of Blakeney and those who know quite a lot — that the chancel of the church of St Nicholas was built and [ ]
In 1086, when the Domesday Book was composed, what is now the little village of Langham in Norfolk — in our own time, a small place of fewer than 400 souls — already had two churches. These two churches stood only about 300 meters distant from each other. Langham had long been divided into two main [ ]
[The following is yet another family history essay. It has no connection with Norfolk, although it does contain a story about a witch. I doubt it will interest anyone other than my close relatives, but I am posting it here in case it might be of use to someone who shares some of my father s [ ]
It was a great treat to see one of Benjamin Britten’s least-performed operas, Gloriana, at the ENO last night. The production, taking place on one night only, was a special tribute to her late majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The tribute was very fitting. Gloriana (op. 53) was composed by Britten in 1952, to a libretto [ ]
What follows is unlikely to be of interest to anyone who isn’t at the very least a cousin of mine, and indeed might not be very fascinating in that case, either. This has nothing to do with Norfolk, nor is it a ghost story. It’s family history, and not very good family history at that, [ ]
‘It’s going to be a hard winter.’ There are few joys known to the Norfolk-born so profound as the joy of well-informed pessimism. The three of us were standing in the kitchen courtyard, looking ruefully at the hawthorn tree that grows in the centre, at the edge of the old dipping pool. Brian’s face, lean [ ]
For those of us who feel compelled to imagine our own familiar places in past times, the release of the 1921 census data was inevitably an exciting day. Yet I doubted the new material would tell me much that I didn’t already know about my home, an old rectory in Blakeney, on the north coast [ ]
Between the years 1621 and 1639 the rector of Blakeney, a village on the north Norfolk coast, was a youngish yet very learned man named Ralph Lowde. As someone who now lives in the house once occupied by Ralph Lowde, I naturally wished to see what, if anything, four centuries on, I could discover about [ ]
Not much is left of one of my very favourite no-longer-extant neighbours, Sir Christopher Heydon of Baconsthorpe and Saxlingham in the county of Norfolk, who was born in 1561 and died at the start of 1623. Heydon was the son and grandson of Norfolk landowners — the culmination of intermarried lines of ambitious lawyers and [ ]
This is an iron boot-scraper. For the better part of a century, it stood outside the front door of a Church of England rectory in a Norfolk village perched on the cusp of the eastern England, a liminal place where a vastness of greyish-lavender salt marsh softens the edges of the North Sea. The rectory [ ]
At present, the modest, interwar building shown above — Two Oaks, in the village of Kelling, Norfolk — is threatened with demolition. The planning application requesting demolition is here, on the website of North Norfolk District Council. North Norfolk District Council has form for allowing the demolition of interwar buildings, including my own village s New [ ]
There is something distinctive and, yes, slightly thrilling about the sound made by an auction house catalogue being pushed awkwardly through the letter-box then falling, cushioned by its soft plastic envelope, onto the worn-out coir matting beneath. And indeed, this morning I was glad to discover a Sotheby s catalogue arriving in just such a way. [ ]
When I was a little child, not more than four winters old, my mother used to sit up with Parson Poynter, when he was dying, in his chamber upstairs at the parsonage. Sometimes, she would take me with her. This was in the year before the old king died. I mean King James. My father [ ]
