by Andy Palmer
TALES FROM THE VALE
Tales From The Vale
Not Andy’s unmown chruchyard, but the similarly wild Durweston churchyard this summer. image: Courtenay Hitchcock
with Andy Palmer
The slow escape
Big hoo-ha in Mappowder: a tortoise has gone missing (easily identifiable – it’s wearing a shell suit) which led my wife to ask, ‘what’s the point of tortoises?’ I told her that was a bit rich from someone who as a girl had a pet stick insect and claims that ‘Sticky’ was ‘very interesting’ because ‘sometimes he moved.’
Cutting remarks
For four years or so I, along with Ivan Croad, would regularly mow the church lawns and graveyard in my village. It was fun: Ivan always has a wealth of stories and jokes, which he delivers in his lovely deep Dorset burr and, as I grew up in Stalbridge, we know a lot of the same people, for example, three sisters who lived on a farm, of whom in my youth I was very fond. Very fond indeed! (For God’s sake don’t name them, they may read this. Ed). Ivan would tackle the tricky bits around the gravestones and I was given free rein around lawns. But I was loath to mow the wild flowers so would cut around them. Over time this resulted in lanes, or passageways, banked by fivefoot high wild flowers. Ivan and I agreed that it looked charmingly wild and natural – unlike the clinical bowling green trim of some churchyards. ‘It’s what Jesus would have wanted,’ I said, actually meaning it. Despite not believing, I grant that there was a charismatic bloke 2,000 years ago who may
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have been a good egg (unless you were a Roman). After one session at the church, I was back sitting in my garden when a villager (my then neighbour, now emigrated) approached wanting ‘a word about the church land.’ I didn’t expect wholesale praise from a breathlessly grateful village (just as well as apart from a couple of exceptions I didn’t receive any) but I certainly didn’t expect her to tell me that ‘some of the villagers didn’t like the wildflowers being left and the lanes in the tall grass.‘ She was a bit vague on who the villagers were. Well, blow me down: I was minded to say, ‘I’m sorry to hear that, maybe they’d like to spend their own time and petrol mowing the (insert mild swear
word) grounds themselves!’ But do you know what? Unusually for me, I didn’t. I pointed out that the wild flowers attracted bees and butterflies and that children loved running through the passageways. I made it clear that I’d continue leaving the wild flowers. She went off in something of a huff. Next year I started mowing again in May or when the grass started shooting-up and, absentmindedly, I mowed everything. My fellow mower, new to the game, came up and strongly rebuked me. ‘We don’t do it like that,’ she said, ‘we like to avoid the wild flowers in order to attract pollinating insects and children like to run in the passage ways.’ Not often I’m lost for words. Always free - subscribe here
