Not Forever in Green Pastures
The personal memoirs of
The Rt. Reverand Henry T. A. Kendall
October 1946, Lyneham

As all my ministry up to now had been so far from home, the Bishop offered me Winterbourne Stickland in Dorset. Winterbourne did not sound propitious for a parish and it was too much like Stick-in-the-Mud. However, he withdrew that before we got as far as looking at it, and offered me "Lyneham-with-Tockenham and Bradenstoke-cum-Clack". The latter two names referred to one village, the smallest of the three. We went up to North Wiltshire by a roundabout train journey to have a look and meet the Wardens.

The senior warden was Mr. Hodges. He and his wife were an old couple living in a rather run down farmhouse in the middle of the village. The other was Jim Gaisford whose farm was some way out of the village, and therefore intact. He has a lovely family of a wife and five children who at that time were all at school. He is an utterly sincere Christian and would sooner have seen his hay rot in the field than work it on Sunday. A huge area between Lyneham and Bradenstoke, including much of the farm land, had become Lyneham R.A.F. Station. From the village green, with its pond, village hall, pub, post office and saw mill, the village straggled west along the road to Chippenham and Bath, and north, past the Vicarage, to Swindon and Oxford, while another road ran south, past the church and the shop to Calne on the Great West Road. The stone St. Michael's Church was some five hundred years old with a peal of five bells and carved oak screens, 300 and 400 years old, and a yew tree outside which is mentioned in Doomsday Book (A.D. 1070).

It was the best part of a mile from the Vicarage to the Church, while Bradenstoke was getting on for two miles. To get there you cut across a corner of the aerodrome and then up a narrow lane between high banks and hedges. The village was along this lane. As well as modern council houses, there were some quite ancient cottages and, at the far end, the crypt of an Abbey. The top part had been removed by an American for re-erection over there. However, he never achieved this and it was last seen advertised in a New York paper at so much a foot. There was a Strict and Particular Baptist Chapel, dating from the time of the Wesleys and a century older than St. Mary's Church, Tockenham didn't come into it. When the three parishes had been joined some twenty years before, which took an Act of Parliament, the Rector of Tockenharn had not approved and nothing could be done during his incumbency. In 1946 he was still Rector at the age of about 96. He had married a second time, Jim Gaisford's sister Cecily, who became one of our very good friends. It was no doubt thanks to her that he kept so well so long and that the parish was kept in good order. She is still doing that as a great help to another Rector on the other side, to whom the parish has fallen without an Act of Parliament.

The Vicarage stood by itself near the edge of the village. It was on the outside of a sharp bend on a narrow main road and was several feet below it. Access to the road through a stone wall was quite dangerous. It was made out of two old red brick houses. But the front had been renewed with Cotswold stone to match the older houses of the village. Three rooms downstairs had bay windows, pushed out and surmounted by a battlemented balcony onto which looked three bedrooms, and above them two attics beneath the stone tiled roof, under the weight of which the oak beams sagged. A wing stuck out at the back with two more bedrooms, two kitchens and two sculleries with stone-flagged floors. Passages went up and down steps with low and very solid oak beams overhead. There was over three acres of garden, most of it walled. It included a grass tennis court in front of the house, a tiny but permanent stream-the Swan River-and on the far side of it a large vegetable garden with many apple trees and pears and plums. Outside the wall was a pig-sty and a bit of waste ground.

I accepted the parish and my Institution and Induction were fixed for November. The stipend was just under £400 p.a. Most of it was paid quarterly in arrears by the Church Commissioners, but some odd amounts were still paid as tithe direct by the farms concerned and collected by a legal firm in Bath. Beggars couldn't be choosers. The old clergy had stayed at their posts patriotically through the war; now they, still stayed because they couldn't find anywhere to live. The average age of the clergy in the large Salisbury Diocese was well over sixty. We were always described as "young and energetic".

Setting up house was not so easy. Everything was rationed. Food rationing was worse at that time, just after the war, than it had been all through. The meat ration was one shilling and two pence worth a head a week and the butcher decided what you got. But there was a sweet ration and we never wasted a ticket and ate far more sweets than we had ever been used to. In summer some of this could be converted into sugar for jam making. But it was not only food and clothing and we were quite unprepared for the English winter. Coal was rationed and you saved up enough in summer, when fires were unnecessary, to start the winter. But we were starting in winter. Even furniture was rationed. As newly-weds starting a home, we received not quite enough dockets to furnish two rooms with "utility" furniture, made to government specifications. We started with two deck chairs given to us by St. Anne's School for the boat trip. For the rest we had to go to second-hand auctions. People had given us wedding presents in cash for this sort of purpose. In Salisbury there were three or four auctioneers holding regular sales and we worked out the method, getting a catalogue and having a look beforehand and marking our limit against things we wanted. We got to know the other buyers, private and trade, and the auctioneers. On one occasion, when we had got separated, one stopped Ray in full bid and said, "I think you're bidding against your husband." Our best buys were: a mahogany round table with one central leg for eighteen shillings and sixpence, we left it at Bishop's House, Dogura, nearly thirty years later; and a Welsh dresser in dark oak for £20. The bottom made a handsome sideboard and the top was the bookshelves in my study.

Induction
Shortly before the Induction, we went over to get the house ready for moving in. The Gaisfords kindly invited us for the night. We took bikes, a bucket, mop, scrubbing brushes and kneelers. We booked to Wootton Bassett, just past the station for Lyneham, so as not to have to ride through the village. I set my camera up with a delayed action release and got a snap as I carried Ray over the threshold. We lit up the hot water system and eventually knelt down side by side on the study floor with all our gear, and looked at each other. Neither of us had ever scrubbed a floor. Ray was only used to hosing down a verandah. We went down to Preston at 5.00 p.m. for tea after the Gaisfords had finished milking and sat down to bread and jam, cake, fruit and cream. They said, "Come back at 9.00 p.m. for supper."

We imagined a cup of cocoa and a biscuit. But no, we sat at the table and began with a pie containing four or five rabbits shot on the farm.

The only thing I remember about the Induction was, at the back of the packed congregation, Mr. Lean in morning suit and top hat. He lived at what he was pleased to call the Manor House at Bradenstoke. He was a most devout churchman of an extreme kind. His rosary beads used to rattle on the pew as he knelt. There seemed some mystery about him and it eventually turned out that he was ordained but had resigned his ministry in protest against his bishop. In the course of a few years, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Malmesbury, but died in Rome where he was attending a seminary. He was the only man of substance in Bradenstoke and really quite apart from the people there. The Churchwardens there were Wilf Wright, a most handy man, who worked in the railway works at Swindon, and his wife, who was Sunday School teacher, and, I think, Mrs. Burgess, a most lovable mother of three fine sons. Lyneham is only seven miles from Winterbourne Bassett and inevitably there was someone in the parish who had nursed me as a baby.

We inherited the services of Bessie Morse as an occasional help. She was not young and not mentally developed. She lived with an old widow who, whenever we visited her, complained about the fleas that emanated from her and we soon found we could manage without her. The garden was not much help to the food situation. There were, as there should be, a few rows of Brussels sprouts. They must have frost on them before they are good. They soon did. There were also some parsnips, horrible things. But soon they were frozen into the ground and had to be quarried out with a pick. Two-thirds of the vegetable garden was let off for a nominal rent to Stan Stickler who lived in a council house just up the road. The thing was that he worked it and kept it clean. He also had a couple of geese which fed on the rough grass outside the wall. They were rather alarming. But we got used to them as something alive in our lonely position and they were good watch dogs.

Two things helped our rations, one was food parcels from Australia and the other eggs and butter from the churchwarden. All their produce had to be sold to the appropriate Board. But they were allowed to retain what they needed for themselves and were very generous. The butter was home made.

Snow fell in December, early. It was exciting and beautiful. We raced out and had a snow fight. But the novelty soon wore off on St. Thomas' Day, just before Christmas, we biked down to church, unheated, at 8.00 a.m., with the temperature down to 0°F and back again with only woollen gloves on our hands. When we got back Ray was crying with the pain. One evening when we came home there was no challenge from the geese, only two splashes of red on the snow. Nearby we had a gorgeous holly tree which never failed to be covered with brilliant berries. The gypsies would come and ask to buy the right to it, to sell it in the market, but it was wanted for decorating the church and the Vicarage.

It turned out to be one of the coldest and longest winters on record. For six weeks we never saw the grass on our tennis court. Anyway, the paper announced that the thaw was on the way. It even gave maps showing the time it would arrive in different parts. So we took no precautions before we left, such as turning off the water to prevent the pipes bursting. From London we went to Dinton for a night. But the thaw didn't get through. It rained and the rain froze where it fell. As we travelled across Salisbury Plain on the now defunct railway from Andover to Swindon, the setting sun glistened through the clear ice casing of every twig in the hedge and of the telegraph lines. Meanwhile it had snowed again. We were lucky that the bus from Swindon was prepared to run. It skidded all over the place. And then, at 9.00 p.m., we had to find a spade and dig our way in to the back door. But soon after, the snowdrops growing on the bank of the Swan River were poking their buds through the snow.

Most of the women wore sheepskin boots, but they were impossible to buy now. However, dear Betty Harford produced a pair for Ray which made life a little easier. She lived alone in a lovely stone house in a beautiful garden. She was a cousin of the Duke of Beaufort and "well in with Royalty". To this day she is a dear friend but, sometimes she was a little overawing, such as the time when she told Ray that she had heard Ray had been scrubbing the church with the Mothers' Union members. Miss Halford didn't think that was right. Ray ought to remember her husband's position. The R.A.F. padre had an American wife. One day she told Ray that she had heard around the village that Ray wasn't a lady because she did not employ any servants. However, she was approached by the Mothers' Union (M.U.) Secretary, Mrs. Wright, who had just had her silver wedding, and the Treasurer, Mrs. Bryant, who had had her golden wedding and, in the first year of her own marriage, they asked her to be their Enrolling Member.

There was a network of bus services covering the countryside. We could go direct to Swindon and thence to Marlborough and Salisbury, direct to Calne and to Chippenham where there were connections to Bath and Wells and Glastonbury. We would go to Bath to our favourite sweet shop and to the dentist; and as Australian visitors began to arrive we would send them down to see Wells and Glastonbury. The first were two Rhodes Scholars, Ken Bradshaw, from All Souls' School and Gordon Donaldson. We took them round on bikes and boiled the billy in the bush. Lacock, with its pretty village and Abbey where the first photograph (2.20) in the world was taken, was among the places we took them to.

The garden came alive in Spring with all the fruit blossom, a double red May tree, peonies, Indian poppies besides anything else we put in. We cleaned up the strawberry beds and raspberry canes and planted an asparagus bed. I had planted my seed potatoes as soon as I could and put in cabbages etc.

Continued Part 2 more..