The Old Rectory
By A LAY READER
WHEN the canon married money a two-acre garden cramped his style. He made inroads on the rectory field for the sake of statuary and a terrace. A new wing to the house gave him a spacious drawing-room and two more double bedrooms. In late middle-age, when the walk to the church-hall began to be irksome, he built an extra kitchen and above it a large room to be used for meetings. He demanded an outside staircase for the meeting-room, so that those who came for confirmation classes or to uphold the Mothers' Union had no need to tread through his hall and up the passage. As a Victorian he knew just where to draw the line between gentry and flock. Life in the sunlit front of the house and life at its crowded back moved to separate rhythms. Two worlds might meet, but they did not mix.
About 1914 the canon found that he had a weak heart. He passed the family living to a son, but he still held the private purse- strings, and overnight the twenty-room rectory exchanged affluence for the discreet poverty in which ends precariously meet. A staff of five servants shrank to a part-time gardener and a parlourmaid. It was almost the bare minimum, for without a parlourmaid who could have answered the front door ? The wife of the new young rector moved with the times (she wanted the franchise so tl.at she could vote Liberal), and when wages went up a little she started a poultry-farm. The rectory field soon swarmed with hens, and at the end of six months it was seen that the hens had earned just enough money to pay for the two men engaged to look after them Another effort was needed ; rabbits would help to feed the meatless and to clothe women munition-workers in fur coats. Hutches rose profusely on the tennis-court. The rector's wife grew fond of ,the rabbits, coined their nicknames and refused to let them go. So they died naturally, like most of the parishioners.
The part-time gardener showed no surprise when he was urged to enlist, and to cover his departure the rector and his wife were up at six in the summer mornings for two hours' work in the garden All went well until the mandarins of church property read a report on the state of the walls in the kitchen-garden and ordered their repair. They were built more than a century beforehand by the rector who was once a pirate. At forty he took the cloth, and he ought to have ended his long life in unclouded peace, for he was an exemplary incumbent. It was his misfortune, however, to accept a living near the Channel, and when his wagon went on market-day to the neighbonring port, a seafaring ruffian saw that .it bore his old master's name. He followed the wagon home and
turned blackmailer. Decades later Barrie stayed at the hall and heard the story of the rector who was scholar, gentleman and pirate. He gave us Captain Hook.
The rector's wife was too forward-looking to bother about a dead pirate, and, when she saw the estimate for repairing the walls, she decided that shabby grandeur should stand in the way of her husband's work no longer. She found a tenant for the rectory and moved to a cottage nearer the church. The Great War was making the village more resigned to change. Even the canon was heard to say that the young people had done the right thing ; but it took the Ecclesiastical Commissioners another twenty years to admit that no rector would ever again inhabit the overbuilt house.
They sold the rectory in the nick of time. With the renewal of war came brusque requisition. Nissen huts sprawled across the lawns. Boughs were lopped from kingly oaks to allow passage for army lorries. Mounds of zinc, gravel and coiled wire-netting showed the village that the Old Rectory was ready for Hitler's invasion. In those dark days it housed North Country troops, who got worried when letters told them of air-raids at home. " In 1943," one wrote on an attic wall, " victory will surely come." The date beneath his name marks a time when the raids on Manchester and Liverpool were heaviest. The attic hai been repainted, but the soldier's inscription is left untouched. It belongs to history as much as the pirate's walls.
The village was not sure when the army left the Old Rectory. Behind, grass-grown to a man's height, stood stacks of coal, coke and wood, but the gates were padlocked and no one was- about. Then a stranger climbed the fence, tracked down an executor and bought for a song. The Old Rectory came back to life for a while as a guest-house. Within four years it was sold again. Its spirit may have been unfriendly to a commercial enterprise. I should not like to run a guest-house myself. It may be delightful to entertain holiday-makers who mean to enjoy each hour of their fortnight's break from the office, but would there be enough of them to make a guest-house pay ? A stock of permanent guests is needed, and here is the rub.
Thousands come to their retirement without mental preparation. They have not seen it as a time for changing work and the scope of service, and nothing is more destructive than boredom. Ever consulting his watch, the permanent guest waits for his morning cup of tea, the newspaper, breakfast, the constitutional walk round the garden, luncheon, tea, dinner, the nine o'clock news, the night- cap. Re guards his chosen armchair, and he even infects- those who minister to his needs with the scourge of dissatisfaction. To be five minutes late is to crush him with the burden of human irregularities. It is hard to grow old if grace is withheld.
The Old Rectory needs not commerce but family life. We who live within its walls are a group of families. We have divided the property, like Gaul, into three parts. The outside staircase which the canon built for his flock now leads to a self-contained flat large enough for four people. A second family lives in the gardener's cottage. Together we work the garden, which has begun to triumph over the army's malefactions. Mine is the lion's share of the house, and 'I write in the rector's study, which seems never to have lost a deep repose. Here, I 'think, the pirate-rector at last brought the blackmailer to his own state of inward repentance.
Other rectories and vicarages are up for sale, and the Church shows no regard for their future. Some could be divided to make two houses or three. Some could combine parsonage and youth hostel. Some could be a parish centre, and some could spare a wing for the aged villagers, who dread the day when they may be taken to a municipal hospital far from their friends. Longevity creates new social needs, and we may soon regret the dissolution of the vicarages. The Old Rectory, however, deserved to go. It swaggered too much. Its high walls shut out the parish and the church which is half a mile away. A strong will is needed to cope with its rich past. Down the rectory lane struts an old man with a still roguish eye. He wants the odd job to help him out with his pension. He believes that his claim upoli me is strong, and ho may be right. He was the page-boy here seventy years ago.
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