The Fete
I happened to be one of the judges of the procession of vehicles that opened the fête there in July, and my barely concealed view was that every turn-out ought to have had first prize. What a dramatic sense cf the past, what ingenuity in make-believe, what a wealth of cultural taleit survive, through a century of depression, not only in our villages ht hamlets! Por the total population of Waterperry is but 150 souls. le rickety old farm-wagon, draped,to the very spokes in the emblems f Jack-on-the-Green, might have come straight_ out of the pages of Hof s Everyday Book, published in 1801. After an interval to stroll rod the sideshows came the Oxford folk-dancers, footing it featly on tennis-lawn. The church-tower and its queer little turret of- diagjal timbers, the parapeted façade of the Georgian mansion and a bro r- hood of venerable trees,, including an ancestral copper beech of • y- scraiiing stattire, were the placid backcloth of the animated scene. e maidens in their coloured frocks—there was one that to my idle be d- ing seemed a reincarnation of the Medicis' Simonetta—the interwe of the happy dancers, the pulsating rhythm of the folk-tunes, the rm air, the clouds with their canvas billowed to the breeze, all endow me with a memory as ancestral as the copper beech. I' seemed to fiew the scene in a multitude of costumes but essentially the same timugh an avenue of time that had no termination. For we know as neir as may be that, as far back as Aurignacian man capering in the twilight of his painted caves, with the huge crowded fauna of the Ice Age looking , on and taking on a _life more vivid in paint than its (Awl there was a ritualistic grace in man's dealings with the earth, the nina De, a thanksgiving service for her bounty. A cornmercial and in4tstrial agri- culture has made a clean sweep of such nonsense. But it is i eradicable, and, in a summer fete or some such festivity, the archa memory reawakens and the fertility rite is in our midst. Thanks be it so: 'For when this sense of obligation fails to find measured voice r action, whether pagan or Christian, the sickened crop and the dust owl are the answer.
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