Some people watch birds. I watch clouds. Sometimes it’s the same thing, as when the buzzards soar on a rising thermal above the garden, or the swifts and house martins chase high-flying gnats on a summer’s day. But mostly it’s just clouds I watch: the hard edge of a retreating cumulonimbus, the thin veil of cirrostratus as a warm front comes in, the halo of rainbow-coloured ice crystals around the moon in a mackerel sky. In winter the clouds run down from the north and the east, from the open land beyond the garden; in spring they come bowling up the valley from the south-west, their shadows scudding across the hillside, the fields darkening and brightening with their passage.
I came here to make a garden. In the red earth I find fragments of blue-and-white willow-pattern china, white marble floor-tiles, rusted iron nails. A litter of broken clay pipes in the flower-beds, their air holes stopped with soil. Opaque slivers of medieval glass, blue as snowmelt. Flat wedges of earthenware dishes with notched rims and looping patterns of cream and brown. Who drank from that cup, who smoked that pipe, who looked through that window? Did they stand as I stand now, watching the clouds on the hillside?
Angles and Romans, Cornovii and Normans, monks and soldiers, herdsmen and farmers; millwrights, iron-founders, carpet-makers and railwaymen, they came this way too — following the valley, up from the river, looking for land, iron, work, a home, the hillside brightening and darkening with their ebb and flow. Only the land remains, and the land remembers — in crop mark and hollow way, ridge and furrow, bell pit and Roman road, turnpike and stew pond.
I first came to Morville in the dark; felt, rather than saw, that same high horizon and that round bowl of land. Driving down from the Holyhead ferry in a winter dusk, I made a detour off the old A5 south of Shrewsbury. Night had fallen before I reached Morville. The hairpin bend at the turn to Ludlow was as sharp as it appeared on the map, and there, by the light of the headlamps, were the gate piers to the Hall. I left the car at the end of the drive and walked down the avenue to the house, my feet feeling for the road in the blackness. Emerging from the trees I was conscious of open space curving away from me, and of the dark bulk of the Hall beyond. I kept my distance, half-embarrassed, half-unwilling to be seduced by this new place. I stood, instead, looking across the lawn at the illuminated windows on the first floor, at the light streaming from the narrow embrasures of the turret stair. I could see two pavilions, one on either side, joined to the main house by high curving walls. In the light from the windows, the outline of cupolas was just visible, with a glint of filigree ironwork from the weathervanes above. To the right, the untenanted Dower House; dark, its windows yielding nothing. To the left, a high wooded horizon, black against the first stars. Water rushed somewhere below. And then, high up, behind me, a clock struck the three-quarters — two bells combined in a musical phrase of two notes, one high and one low, repeated three times — their softly muffled sound drifting out into the darkened valley. A church! I had not expected that.
I was at that time working in Dublin as Keeper of Early Printed Books in the library of Trinity College, and commuting back and forth from Oxford. My husband had a bookshop in Oxford, and he was still living there. Morville was his plan to lure me home. He used to meet me from the plane at Heathrow every Friday night with a wallet of photographs of all the houses he had been to see in the previous week — diminutive Georgian manor houses we couldn’t afford; gaunt brick ruins with walled gardens filled with nettles; sagging timber-framed palaces. They haunt me still, the ones that got away; like parallel universes, the alternative lives I might have led. In Lincolnshire, Cumbria, North Devon, Wales, Yorkshire — anywhere where land and houses were (at that time) relatively cheap.
And then he found Morville. Shropshire had always shimmered on the periphery of my vision: Housman’s A Shropshire Lad was an anthem of my childhood, a copy always in the house (though it was not until later that I understood why). Ludlow and Clee were familiar names, though as yet unvisited; Wrekin and Wenlock Edge were tinged with longing and regrets, though not mine. My father bought me books every Christmas and birthday. When I was twelve he gave me the poems of Mary Webb. I learned them by heart.
We were in the hills of heaven
But yesterday!
All was so changeless, quiet, fair,
All swam so deep in golden air;
White-tapered chestnuts, seven by seven,
Went down the shady valleys there …
‘I think this is the one,’ said my husband.
We agreed to take the Dower House on a twenty-year lease, but I had yet to see it, except in photographs. I was reluctant to leave Dublin and my job and friends there, and I was unsettled by the impermanence of a lease. But as I stood in the darkness that night and listened to the bells dying away and the sound of the stream welling up into the silence, everything suddenly seemed possible. We moved to Morville August 1988, with two removal vans of books, three cats and two carloads of plants.
The sound of the church clock became the regular accompaniment to my daily labours in the garden. It provided a sort of basso continuo to life at Morville, so quiet that the fog across the Church Meadow could stifle it, or the north wind blow its notes away into the trees. In the warm wet violet-smelling air of April, a gusting south-westerly would bring the notes in breaths and snatches. One heard it best in summer dawns before the drone of road or field; or on winter evenings when Orion burned coldly above and the congregation made its way over the potholed road towards the lights of the church; or in the watches of the night, when the clock numbered the long sleepless hours till dawn. For much of the year, I could see the clock from the garden, glinting gold on the north face of the church tower. I would watch the interplay of light and shadow, perpendicular and horizontal, plane and angle — tower, nave, chancel, aisle — as the sun made its daily revolution around the church. In high summer the tower was hidden in the green leafiness of the trees, and that was when the clock would chime clearest of all, the sound vaulting over the empty air in the valley bottom where the sleek brown mill-race ran, springing up into the bright wooded air beyond, and echoing back from the high horizon.
One day I climbed the tower with the clockwinder to look at it, clambering hand over hand up a zigzag of wooden ladders inside the dim void of the tower to a platform halfway up where a confection of shining brass cogs gleamed in a cupboard in the dust-smelling darkness. Vast counterweights on chains disappeared into the gloom below. Hawsers ran up the rough surface of the stone walls above and disappeared into the floors overhead, linking the clock’s mechanism to the dial and to the bells on which it struck the hours — a Victorian mechanism attached to eighteenth-century bells in a Norman church — the counterweights rising back up the tower like buckets from a well, like water brought up slopping from the past. The church was built in the early twelfth century by the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Shrewsbury, twenty miles away. Then in 1138 the Abbot of Shrewsbury received permission from the Bishop of Hereford to appropriate the church into a new daughter house, a priory he wished to build at Morville, to be headed by a Prior drawn from the senior monks of the Abbey.
The names of the priors of Morville survive — four Johns, two Williams, two Richards and a Walter — scattered here and there in miscellaneous documents over the succeeding four centuries. There are many gaps. Where a name is recorded, it is more often than not because of some misdeed or inadequacy. The Priory seems to have begun in a grand enough way: in about 1168 additions were made to the church which included an extended chancel capable of accommodating two dozen or more. But in later years the size of the community seems to have shrunk to just two or three. It cannot ever have been a rich living. In 1253 Prior John Wallensis (John ‘the Welshman’) was charged with receiving part of a deer poached from the royal forest. In 1290, when the Bishop of Hereford visited Morville with his retinue, the Prior managed to provide fodder for the thirty-five horses, but the Bishop had to provide the greatest part of the food for his men himself.
For four hundred years the monks worked the land around the village: the flat land near the church, the heavy land down by the stream, the sloping side of the hill, the stony ground where my neighbours and I garden. Then came the Reformation. The Priory was dissolved, the monks ejected and the land bought by the local merchant who built the big house here. Of the Priory buildings now there is no trace. Even the site itself is now in doubt: perhaps it lay beside the church, to the north, where the remains of buildings still show themselves as parch marks during drought; perhaps to the west, underneath what is now Morville Hall; perhaps at the crossroads, on the high ground where the road to Ludlow meets the road from Shrewsbury, sliced through now by modern roadworks. Only the church still stands, with its eighteenth-century bells and its Victorian clock striking the hours.
The word ‘clock’ comes from the Middle English clok, the bell that called monks to prayer. And as I stood in the garden in those early years listening to the church clock striking the hours, it recalled for me the Hours of the Divine Office, that ancient system of worship followed by the monks who once worked this ground under the Rule of St Benedict, with its discipline of physical labour in all weathers, tempered with the injunction to study. It recalled the rhythm of a day which began with Vigils and Lauds, then Prime, Terce, Sext and None, Vespers and Compline, the bells raising the monks before dawn, guiding them through the day in measured steps of work, study and prayer, and delivering them safely back into the night once more. It also recalled for me a half-forgotten time in my childhood when I too had been part of that world. My mother had converted to Roman Catholicism in the mid-1950s and, increasingly drawn by the monastic life, she had become what is known as a secular tertiary, a member of the Third Order of St Dominic. (The first order consisted of monks, the second of nuns, and the third of laypeople, one of several such institutions founded in the thirteenth century in response to a surge in popular religious feeling.) A tertiary commits him- or herself to the Rule of the Order, as far as that is compatible with life in the world, and to the recitation of the Hours of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, the shorter version of the Divine Office devised for the use of laypeople, at the appointed times each day. My mother used to take me on retreats to Dominican abbeys, and while she was at her prayers, I — a child of eight or nine — would roam about the grounds or help the lay brother in charge of the gardens as he weeded the paths or dug the vegetable patch.
Among the books I brought with me to Morville was my mother’s Dominican prayer book, containing a modern text of the Hours. Slim, black-leather-bound and discreet, almost devoid of illustration or decoration, it was a far cry from the gorgeousness of the medieval Books of Hours. I went to the Bodleian Library in Oxford to look at some of them. Tiny, of a size made to be held in the hand or carried in a pocket, they opened like small dark jewel boxes to reveal a kaleidoscope of colour — lapis lazuli and turnsole violet, verdigris and vermilion, orpiment and cinnabar. Whole processions of saints filed by as I turned the pages, each with his or her identifying object — St Peter and his church, St Catherine and her wheel, St Cecilia playing the organ — the richness of their robes set off by the plump gold-leaf cushions of their haloes. There were complete cycles of images of the Passion of Christ or the life of the Blessed Virgin, each gilded page more splendid than the one before, bordered with curling tendrils of foliage or a scattering of trompe-l’oeil flowers rising from the page as if newly picked. Books of Hours like these are among the treasures of Western art.
As I followed the familiar words in the unfamiliar script, each letter as narrow and pointed as a Gothic arch, I was decoding the sources of my mother’s spirituality, rediscovering something which for me as a child had been a daily reality. Books of Hours now are studied in minute detail, the chain of their ownership traced, the location of the workshops tracked down, the artists identified, their handiwork exhibited in art galleries and printed catalogues. But I was less interested in the iconography of the saints, in the delicacy or psychological realism of the paintings, than in the words themselves, and in the half-remembered music they conjured up: the haunting cadences of the Gregorian chant, at least as old as the Hours themselves. I found, as I read, that I could still sing the Latin text of whole prayers and hymns — learned fifty years ago and buried in the back of my memory — Glorias and Credos and Salve Reginas; Kyries, Sanctuses and the Dies irae.
And there was something else too, something which in those days when I was first beginning the garden, and would stand, spade in hand, listening to the church clock striking the hours, had for me even greater resonance: the calendars that prefaced the Books of Hours, with their illustrations of the horticultural and agricultural tasks appropriate for each month; their tables of saints’ days and holy days, Simple and Double, Semi-Double and Greater Double, Doubles of the Second Class and Doubles of the First Class — the ‘red-letter days’ of joyful celebration — picked out in red ink; their columns of Dominical Letters and Golden Numbers for calculating Sundays and the date of Easter; their days marked ‘D’ for the dies Aegyptiaci or dies mali — the bad-luck days (from which our word ‘dismal’ comes), when anything begun would come to naught and seed would shrivel in the furrow; their dual system of dates — Arabic figures and Roman numerals, the one counting by tens, the other by ides, nones and kalends (the source of the word ‘calendar’); and their ancient Babylonian signs of the zodiac tracing the sun in its annual progress across the sky, each governing not only a segment of the heavens but a part of the human body, dictating what medical treatment might or might not be appropriate that month. The calendars made up a cycle of multiple resonances, spiritual and secular, terrestrial and sidereal, liturgical and agricultural, pagan and Christian, breathtaking in its richness and antiquity and in the geographical spread of its references, but also grounded in the here and now, in the everyday.
In the world of the Books of Hours, tiny emblematic figures dig, prune, sow, chop wood, mow grass, reap grain, tread grapes, each in their allotted month. There are animals being fed, tended, led to market, slaughtered, consumed. There is an interlude in April and May for picking flowers, courting, making music. Another at Christmas for feasting. In a world of electric light and central heating, where one month is much like another and vegetables are flown in daily from Kenya and Spain, this all seems like an echo from a vanished world. Nowadays, adrift in an affectless no-man’s-land, we are cut off not only from the hopes and fears, the triumphs and despairs of the agricultural year, but from the shared emotions of the great story which plays itself out month by month in the liturgical year. The twenty-first century is fighting a losing battle to keep its calendar. Gardeners of course have never lost it.
So it was that the Hours came to mirror my life in the garden — not only the calendar illustrations with their regular round of tasks, but also the feasts and the fasts, the highs and the lows, the red-letter days and the dies mali: from the crunch of grass underfoot at midnight on a frosty New Year’s Eve, to the drip of trees in a melancholy March dawn; from a perfumed May Day morning when the whole world seems sixteen again, to the enervating heat of a midsummer noon; from the bloom of blue-black damsons picked on a golden September afternoon, to the smell of holly and ivy cut in the dusk of a rainy Christmas Eve. Senses seemed keener in relation to the Hours, with their lesson of attentiveness. Theirs was a world where time was accounted for, each second precious: instead of hearing, one listened; instead of seeing, one looked; instead of tasting, one savoured; instead of touching, one felt. ‘Listen,’ said St Benedict, ‘listen with the ear of your heart.’
Books of Hours were family treasures, expensive items in a world where books were scarce; a place where births and deaths might be recorded, at a time when such records were few; pious relics, handed down from one generation to another, with the imprecation, written or implicit, to pray for the soul of the departed donor. With the advent of the printing press, their numbers multiplied. They became the single most common book — often the only book — in English households. But once Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church in England, their use became increasingly problematic. References to certain saints had to be deleted (to Thomas Á Becket, a saint who had famously stood up to a king), the title of Pope to be scratched out wherever it occurred, certain prayers excised. A new prayer book was commissioned, the Book of Common Prayer, enforced by the Act of Uniformity in 1549. The reforms were repealed and the deletions reinstated under Mary Tudor, but were re-imposed under Elizabeth. By the 1560s Books of Hours had become off limits to all but the defiant few. The calendars, however, with their calculations of good- and bad-luck days and their counsels of the right time to prune, sow, reap or harvest, survived into an age of mass print as secular almanacs.
In addition to my mother’s Book of Hours, I had an unidentified fragment of such an almanac, given to me by my husband: lacking the first and last leaf, it was illustrated with black-and-white woodcuts of the same familiar labours of the year, but with the addition of proverbs and wise sayings, the phases of the moon and mnemonic rhymes about the weather. It proved to be a fragment of the Shepherds’ Great Calendar, which began life in 1491 and remained in print for three hundred years, with sporadic revivals thereafter. To the monthly recital of saints’ days and its portrayal of the agricultural labours and their accompanying signs of the zodiac, the Shepherds’ Calendar also adds another dimension: the years of a human life, six for every month — the infant, the child, the schoolboy, the adolescent, the lover, physical prime, maturity, the beginnings of decline, prosperous old age, senility, decay, final extinction. And gradually I began to see that in the Hours — with their joyful Te Deum and litanies of praise, their Office of the Dead and Penitential Psalms, their despairing De profundis and final serene Nunc dimittis — was reflected the arc not only of a single day or a single year, but of a whole lifetime, with its trajectory from darkness into light and from the light into the darkness once more.
And in the background, as in the calendars’ scenes of rural life where the activities of the year were played out against a painted backdrop of high-walled castles and turreted towns, was Morville itself: the hill, the house, the high-wooded horizon, and the church tower with the gilded hands of the clock turning, turning.
But then the clock stopped. There had been aberrations before, as when the clockwinder was on holiday and his deputy proved forgetful, or when hard weather froze the hands on the clock face, but this time the fault was mechanical, more serious, the stoppage of the clock prolonged. In its absence, I pined. Seen across the Church Meadow in the swooning heat of midsummer, the church tower appeared to shimmer, encircled, unreachable, drowned in a spell that would last a thousand years. I remembered Brid Ellen, who had run widdershins round the church through the shadow of the tower into an enchantment so deep that she was spirited away to faerieland. A kindly neighbour, missing the point, said, ‘Don’t you wear a watch?’
Unlike a watch, which marks off how much time has gone and how much remains, the sound of the bells ringing the quarters had seemed to say, ‘Stop. Think. This is here. This is now.’ In my previous life there had never been enough time: time was always running out. But in the garden, where I was acutely aware of the passage of time — the changing light as the hours of the day passed by, the shifting pattern of the seasons as the years passed by — there was paradoxically the feeling of having all the time in the world, of hours and days stretching and expanding into a shimmering pool of now.
All gardeners are aware of that sense of flow, of losing oneself. Modern timekeeping is too rigid for the likes of us — pinned like a moth to a framework with no give in it. Modern hours are set at one-twelfth of the day or night at the equinox: sixty minutes, three hundred and sixty seconds of tedium. In the garden, a single minute, a single second, can be an eternity. In classical times, the Horae were bringers of blessings, invited to weddings; now they are the presiding deities of the time-clock, the stopwatch, the facelift. There were originally three Horae — goddesses not of times of the year, but of processes: of growing, flowering and fruiting. Only later did they come to be associated with periods of time: the four seasons, the hours on a clock. Ordinary people told the time by natural events, cock-crow and noon, full market and first sleep, the lighting of the lamps. When hours were used, in the sense of formal divisions of the day and night, they were calculated as one-twelfth of the day or night at that particular time of year, and so varied according to the season. I like that. I like the feeling of time expanding with the unfolding of the leaves, contracting again with the first frosts of autumn.
As my days spent alone in the garden turned into weeks and the weeks into months, I got into the habit of leaving the front door of the house open — not just unlocked, but standing open to the garden — from spring to autumn, all day long. I would open it first thing in the morning to smell the air and close it only at midnight as I went to bed. House and garden became extensions of each other. The kitchen filled with plant pots and tools and string, the hall with boots and jackets and gloves, the bathroom with tender seedlings. Plants spent part of their year in the house and part outside in the garden; I could tell the time of year from the tide of greenery in the house. And gradually I came to know the creatures who shared the house and garden with me: the jackdaws who roosted in the roof space; the black newts in the cellar, dining on woodlice; the harvest spiders and the tortoiseshell butterflies who found a winter home in the dim recesses of the ceiling; the swallows who reconnoitred the bookshelves in the hall for nesting places in spring. Outside, there were other creatures and other worlds to discover: the citadels of bees and ants, the papier mâché galleries of the wasps, the subterranean refuges of badgers and moles. Then there were the wanderers — the animals who came and went unseen: the night owls and the foxes, the birds who left their arrowed footprints in the snow. The cats were louche go-betweens, at home in both worlds, belonging to neither.
I found companionship too in the other people who inhabited the same landscape — the tramp, the hedge-layer, the stockman, the gravedigger; the sheep-shearer, the farm labourer, my neighbour who tended the vines, the lad who brought the logs, the butcher who delivered the meat — present-day inheritors of those figures in the calendars of the Books of Hours. Country people seem to have all the time in the world. Not really, of course. Concerns are as pressing here as elsewhere. But there seemed to be a country courtesy which required that conversations over the field gate or in the lane or down in the Church Meadow be unhurried — a mutual satisfying of curiosities, an exchange of information, a bond formed: Welsh voices, Shropshire voices, Black Country voices, telling stories of the land and the village and its people.
Other voices too, the competing voices of those who lived here in the past, jostling for my attention — the monks of the Benedictine Priory and the dynasties of Smyth, Weaver and Warren, their voices rising up from deed boxes and document cases, rustling like dry paper. They cajole and wheedle and sigh. Make us a herb garden and plant valerian and poppy and wolfsbane for Prior Richard, the last Prior of Morville. Sweet-smelling knots for me, sweet Frances Cressett, a bride when Elizabeth was on the throne. A parterre of clipped box and yew of which Arthur Weaver could approve. A rose border of pillars and swags for a Victorian patriarch. A gentle wilderness for Juliana, ‘fifth and last surviving daughter’. And there were others, nameless, numberless, the self-confident and the lost, the careless and the carefree, their existences reduced to a fragment in the earth, to a single instant — the sound of a willow-pattern cup shattering on a stone floor, the blur of a hand throwing away a broken clay pipe. I came to make a garden, but found that one garden was not enough to tell all their stories.
Gardens are about people first and plants second. Like our multi-layered language, gardening is made up of different elements, bits and pieces from far and near, now and long ago, taken and incorporated into the vocabulary of plant and tree, the grammar of path and hedge. I divided the garden up, hid each part from the others behind high yew hedges, played a game of multi-dimensional chess with myself. In my twenty-first-century garden, bits of the seventeenth century are still here — and the nineteenth and sixteenth and eighteenth — poking through the gauzy surface of the present like Marley’s pigtail. And there is China and America and Africa, as well as Shropshire. And stories — many stories, of this house and the people who lived here, and of the people who live here still — handed on from person to person, told and retold, a skein of stories. Like the lavender my father took as he moved from house to house, from one job to the next, and I from him, taking cuttings of the lavender, and cuttings of the cuttings, and cuttings of the cuttings of the cuttings, rooting it each time in a new garden.
And me? What is my story? My father carving my name in the speckled green side of a vegetable marrow so that I could watch the letters stretch and grow as wide as my own four-year-old smile. Violet-blue Michaelmas daisies and basking Tortoiseshell butterflies. Fossils in wrappings of cotton wool. Books on leaning metal shelves. The smell of pipe smoke in a cold room. A typewriter. Blue hyacinths. Iron Age forts and the worn steps of church towers. A dozen clocks chiming the hour for dinner. A black-and-white marble floor. A yellow climbing rose. Clouds passing over the hillside. Each a fragment of memory, a lost moment, a shining and irreducible ‘now’.
So come with me now into the garden. It is New Year’s Eve.
This is here. This is now.
Listen.
