Marmalade England
There are some place names which seem to contain a landscape of their own. Malmesbury is one of them.
The word itself has a curious, almost old-fashioned sweetness. It sounds of honey-coloured stone and rolling Wiltshire hills, of the Cotswolds lying somewhere beyond the hedgerows, of warm bread arriving at a table and marmalade catching the September sunlight through a kitchen window. It suggests a spring morning in an English garden, perhaps with a white-painted table, a lace cloth, china cups and somebody slicing strawberries with considerably more ceremony than the strawberries strictly require. There is, in the very sound of Malmesbury, something faintly redolent of old England.
Marmalade England.
Apple-and-hops England. Bread-warm-from-the-oven England.
The England of handsome stone cottages, ancient towers, village greens and homely pubs where the beams have been polished by generations of elbows and the smell of cider seems permanently absorbed into the timber. Florence knows this England well enough. She is hardly a stranger to the West Country. But Malmesbury is a particularly persuasive word and, as it turned out, the place itself was rather good at living up to it.
She arrived on a September morning of extraordinary sunshine, with the hills lying softly beyond the rooftops and the stone glowing almost golden in the heat. Yet Malmesbury was not quietly presenting itself like a picture on an old biscuit tin. It was preparing for a carnival, and that altered the atmosphere rather wonderfully. Bunting stretched between buildings. Tables and chairs emerged from unlikely doorways. Cars were being moved, barriers assembled and people carried things about with the brisk determination of those who had already been told several times where everything ought to go. The effect was unexpectedly charming. Here was this place of abbey stones, kings and centuries of accumulated memory, currently occupied with the more immediate business of decorating streets and finding somewhere to put several hundred folding chairs.
Before she surrendered herself to wandering, there was the pleasure of seeing her son's home for the first time. His place sat within one of Malmesbury's older buildings in the very midst of things, where daily life unfolded beneath ancient roofs and every lane seemed to lead somewhere worth exploring. From the windows the eye travelled over chimneys and weathered rooftops towards the wider Wiltshire countryside. Seeing him there felt entirely right and it delighted Florence to see him so perfectly placed.
Florence had never been particularly good at keeping an outing within the boundaries originally assigned to it. A church tower glimpsed beyond a roofline, a bookshop, a carved inscription, a lane disappearing between hedges — any of these possessed the ability to rearrange her plans. The peculiar freedom of turning left simply because one could remained, in an otherwise fairly military life, one of her greatest luxuries. The streets revealed themselves gradually. Buildings leaned companionably against one another. Doorways appeared where they were least expected. Stonework carried the marks of alteration, repair and reinvention, each generation leaving its own small amendment without quite erasing what had gone before.
The bookshop was inevitable.
Florence liked the smell of old books: dust, paper, leather and that indefinable trace of other people's lives. There were inscriptions in fading ink, forgotten bookmarks, pencilled prices and occasional receipts abandoned between the pages. The books felt less like merchandise than travellers. Then she saw the Penguins. The familiar covers carried her straight back to a time when books belonged quietly to ordinary life. For a moment Malmesbury contained a room she had not visited for years. She left with a penguin under her wing.
Naturally, it became the Malmesbury Book. Florence had a habit of attaching place names to possessions acquired while travelling. It seemed a perfectly reasonable way of preserving a memory.
Drifting towards the Abbey the surviving arches and ruined western end still suggest the scale of what once stood there. St Aldhelm, William of Malmesbury and King Athelstan all seem to linger nearby. Athelstan, who died in 939, was buried here, though his remains have long since vanished and the present tomb is a later memorial. Florence stood beside it awhile, struck by the oddity that a life could survive so completely in records while the man himself had disappeared.
Her attention soon moved elsewhere. The Luce Window caught the light almost immediately. Designed by Edward Burne-Jones and made by Morris & Co., it commemorates William Scott Luce, killed in action during the Boer War in 1900. The name lodged itself somewhere in Florence's mind. She wondered about this family and knew she would return to this later.
The magnificent illuminated Bible of 1407 was another matter altogether. Its pages seemed to open a door into a world almost impossibly remote from the bright September afternoon outside: vellum, ink and colour painstakingly brought together by hands that had worked more than six centuries ago, the letters and decoration carrying something of the patience and devotion of another age. Florence lingered over it, fascinated by the thought that these pages had survived fires, fashions, upheavals and generations of readers, and had arrived here to be opened beneath the electric lights of a modern town. For a moment it felt less like looking at an ancient book than being allowed to peer through a narrow window in time.
On leaving the Abbey she discovered, unexpectedly, the Athelstan Pilgrim Way passport. This was exactly the sort of thing Florence found difficult to resist. Thirty-six churches. Thirty-six empty spaces waiting for stamps. Maps. Villages. Lanes. Places she had never heard of. The possibilities were were already making plans in her subconscious.
Later she wandered towards the river and out towards the wider views, where the land rolled away towards the Cotswold edge in long folds of green. A conversation with a local woman brought other stories into view: tales of the Abbey's beginnings, of Maildubh, the monk from whom the town takes its name.
An Irish monk, naturally.
Florence was beginning to suspect that a surprising proportion of Britain's history could ultimately be traced back to an Irishman who had wandered somewhere and decided to stay.
By late afternoon the carnival was beginning to take possession of the streets. Florence considered her options. She left the carnival to its own merriment before every route out of Malmesbury became caught in the tide of chairs, laughter and celebration. She had always posessed a talent for finding her own kind of magic, and more often than not it tended to linger at the edges; a little way beyond the crowds, down an overlooked lane, behind an unassuming door or turning tbat most people passed without a second glance.
The road home offered one final chapter. Somewhere beyond Malmesbury, the Luce Window returned to mind. Foxley, which had been merely a name in a guide, suddenly seemed worth a detour.
A small sign appeared: To the Church.
Florence slowed. There are certain invitations she finds almost impossible to decline.
The church sat quietly among the surrounding fields, the sort of place one might pass repeatedly without suspecting what lay inside. There she found the memorial window she had come looking for. Walter Cecil Luce, youngest son of Colonel Charles Luce, churchwarden, brewer and later Malmesbury's first mayor, had died in South Africa in 1901. Not in battle, but from typhoid at Springfontein. Two cousins of the same family lost their lives in the same war. They were one of the most wealthy and politically influential families in Malmesbury for over a century. When Walter and William died, the whole town mourned alongside the family that had poured great personal wealth into local infrastructure.
The window, designed by Louis B. Davis, places St Michael and a host of angels above scenes of the landscape Walter had left behind, including Malmesbury Abbey and Daniel's Well near Halcombe Hall, the Luce family home. Florence recognised the Abbey immediately. There was something deeply satisfying in the connection. A memorial in one place had quietly led her to another, and the two now seemed joined across the countryside like pieces of the story waiting to be rediscovered. Leaves lay scattered before the doorway and crackled beneath her feet as she crossed them. With that small, brittle sound came the unmistakable sense that the wheel of the year had begun to turn once more. Autumn was already making its presence known, quietly but firmly, and Florence found herself reluctant to welcome it too enthusiastically. She wondered if summer still had some unfinished business.
On her way back to the car, a cabbage-white butterfly drifted lazily across the churchyard. It seemed entirely unconcerned by the approaching winter.
Perhaps the butterfly had the right idea.
By the time she reached the car, the day bore little resemblance to the one she had imagined that morning. A visit to see her son had quietly introduced her to a new place. Her day had been stitched together from unexpected turnings, conversations, memorials, books, churches and one particularly dangerous pilgrim passport.
She sat for a moment with the little booklet beside her. She was oddly pleased by a collection of empty spaces. Then again, possibility has always been one of Florence's favourite travelling companions.
For the moment, thirty-six adventures remained unopened. That seemed quite enough.
Sister of William Luce of the Luce Window lived an incredible life. Read about her in the link.
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