In recent months Pauntley’s Parishioners have been exposed to an exploding Vicar, a Communicant’s muddy wellies and this month, Jack the Simmental Bull.
Excitement ensued when two parishioners, who were strimming and mowing the churchyard, dropped grass clippings over the wall so as to provide a tasty morsel for Jack and his lady Holstein friends. However, Jack was late to the feast and, in his anxiety to get to the front of the queue, shouldered his female acolytes out of the way and in so doing went right through an adjoining fence.
After considering his ungentlemanlike behaviour, his harem then turned their thoughts to the possibilities inadvertently opened up. Pausing only to reach a majority verdict, they then surged through the gap in a manner reminiscent of those Cowboy movies of my youth when the Rustlers cut the fence and, with much whooping and yelling, stole the cattle from the hardworking hero whose beautiful but timid wife had just joined him from her comfortable home back East.
Unlike our celluloid hero however, our two Pauntley mowers weren’t cowpokes eager to chase villains or lasso recalcitrant bulls and then return to the ranch in triumph, instead they phoned their wives. They in turn contacted the farmer, who disappointingly arrived by Land Rover rather than on horseback, but very soon the three men had the herd corralled and rural tranquillity was restored.
To those readers entranced by the Cowboy novel, the ending might appear to be anticlimactic, but to our intrepid mowers it was yet another motif woven into the tapestry of rural life.
Talk of weaving brings me to wonder why modern hassock makers do not currently adorn their products with pictures of flaming Vicars, Wellington boots and rampaging Bulls, after all the stone masons and woodcarvers of old used to incorporate episodes from daily life into their work. I suppose the hassock makers do not do it, because people nowadays find themselves too entertained within their own homes to notice the eccentricities of rural folk and the oddities of rural life.
I don’t suppose however, that this explains why modern gravestones lack any sense of the individuality that once thrilled through the body of the incumbent and which would, if revealed, have distilled to us something of that person’s experience and allowed them to speak to us today.
It is indeed a dull set of Bishops that deprives the common man of opportunity to write his epitaph of the things he values as most precious.
However, speaking of messages on tombstones written at a time when Bishops were less obsessed with not offending anyone, reminds me of the carving on the stone of Albert Wallace in Ribbesford near Bewdley
The children of Israel wanted bread so
The good Lord sent them manna.
But when clerk Wallace wanted a wife
The Devil sent him Anna.
And finally, thoughts of Hollywood cowboys bring to mind a message dated 1880 on a tombstone on Boot Hill, Naco, Arizona which records the final resting place of Lester Moore a Wells-Fargo station agent who was gunned down by a local villain.
Here lies Lester Moore.
Four slugs from a 44.
No Les No More.
View from the Pew 