MUCH water has passed under the bridge, or down the weirs, or wherever it is water flows in the proverb, since, nearly thirty years ago, I closed my account of the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me, or (perhaps it could be put this way) the most extraordinary thing I ever happened to. For all I know, Constance might have gone with it, though water, they say, finds its own level, and that is one of the few things Constance never tried to find. However that may be, from the moment when my father, Henry and I said good-bye to her after her party at Lessways we have never seen her again. ‘I have enjoyed it all so much.’ Those were her last words to us.
Yet there have been more than hints in the passing years that she has never travelled far away from us. For example: when I was married in Cornford Cathedral Dr Carless, who was to have played the Wedding March for us (Mendelssohn, not Wagner), said that he was driven out of the loft by a kind of a warm blast, and that he saw the keys depressed, and saw the stops shoot out, as the Wedding March sounded. (And who will forget with what brilliant timing the tubas were coupled on that occasion!) Then there is my father, Cornelius (who still runs his bookshop in Cornford); many times, he says, he has been aware of a disturbance of the dust on the books in his ‘specials’ case, where he keeps his Tennyson ‘firsts’, and other treasures. And then there was the mystery of the ‘Bundle’: although we had some run off by a local printer and gave most of them away, the original copy was shot ‘like an arrow into the air’ falling to earth ‘I know not where’. In short, it was pinched; and who is to say the Author didn’t pinch it? Fortunately, I still had the typed copy which I made from the original; and I cannot end a latter-day edition of a book which has wandered around the globe a good bit since its first publication, without giving some of the verses in full. Lines from some are quoted in the preceding pages (and some misquoted, due to my carelessness); but there are some which are only hinted at, and not included in the text.
And as to these hints of Constance’s continued existence there is also my wife, Marjorie, who swears to this day that our oldest son, Peregrine, has often been heard talking to Constance over the telephone at the Ministry of Dis-establishment, where he has an office. In Cornford Cathedral the shadow of a tall hat has from time to time been seen in the bishop’s throne, falling across the pages of the great Prayer Book on its dark blue velvet cushion. Much of the City itself–which I seldom visit nowadays–would be unfamiliar and perhaps not pleasing to Constance: a supermarket where once the old Butter Cross stood (with the Butter Cross itself enshrined in a hideous courtyard within the place); an abominable hotel eavesdropping right by the north-east corner of the Cathedral; Canticle Alley all offices; ‘Lessways’ part of the new Town Hall–one would hardly know the place if it weren’t for the Cathedral which, fortunately, ‘they’ dare not touch. What would Constance make of the place now? Even though she might dislike much of it, I have the feeling that she would still be at home there, because although she always celebrated the past she was also essentially a part of the present. I would give very much to see her in command of play in the new skittle-alley, which is built on the site of the old flea-pit cinema. Or bidding her chauffeur drive contrariwise in the oneway traffic of the High Street.
This is not the place for me to say anything about myself–where I live and work–nor what I work at. Suffice it, that it took me a long time to ‘settle down’ (to use a phrase my dear Mother used); and that now, sometimes, of an evening, when it is quiet about the house, I hear a harp playing ‘Over the sea to Skye’, and I know there are certain harmonies which can never be lost.
So I leave Constance Hargreaves, not behind, but beside me.
And on those words, I will close, once and for all (knowing that if I go on it will continue, as they say in my village in the West); I will close, leaving the Reader with some of Constance’s own thoughts about life, as expressed in ‘Wayside Bundle’.
Norman Huntley
July, 1965.