| Lurgashall |
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I’d no plans except to live in a borrowed tent and write a book. Presumptuous? Well, yes; but I was young; and a rebel. After all, it was the Swinging Sixties and I hated the way work squashed you into a nine to five mould. It stole your identity and turned you into a number on a clocking-in machine. And all you did was to perform tedious tasks for someone else’s profit. So I opted out. And, since dad was on his way to Chichester to sell office stationery, he offered to drop me off anywhere I wanted to stop along the route. An obscure sign pointing to ‘Lurgashall’ caught my attention, so that’s where I went. I trudged a mile or so into a picturesque village with a green, a church and a pub, and pitched my tent in a field. And so I began to write. It was about a hard done-by man and his friendship with a girl called Inga. The man was my outlet for tirades against society and church and anything else that got in the way of my own commitment to me. The girl was the girl I fancied in one of my short-lived jobs. She didn’t take any notice of me then; but in the ‘book’ she changed her mind. It reached ninety two hand-written pages before slowing to a halt and, eventually, found its way to a dustbin. I don’t know what the people of Lurgashall thought about this lonesome hippie in their village. There may have been a lot of wrangling and wrinkling of noses behind the scene; but if so, it never came to my notice. Instead, they lent me a key to the cricket pavilion so I could wash each morning; and told me where to earn money picking strawberries or blackcurrants. When I hiked off to a party in London and a storm demolished the tent, some youngsters tidied it up and dried my stuff. I was even offered some sexual favours (which I refused out of cowardice) and played in a ‘friendly’ cricket match on the village green wearing hippie civvies and bare feet. After a while the farmer needed his field back and arranged for me to move to the glebe, a piece of parish land. So I moved and shared my tent with a stag beetle until summer came to an end. It worried me that it was church land, but to my relief the village was between vicars. One had just gone and the new one hadn’t arrived. So, out of curiosity, I looked round the church without fear of being hijacked into religious conversation. No-one else was there and I saw a Bible on a lectern. I read the open page: ‘They seized Simon from Cyrene, who was on his way in from the country, and put the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus.’ That’s when the Muse took over. A poem bubbled in my mind. It didn’t matter that the theme was biblical because that didn’t bother men like Michelangelo or Handel or Dostoevsky. This was art, not religion. I imagined how Simon felt; cursing the Romans, despising the prisoner, humiliated at carrying a criminal’s cross. I felt his sweat as he dragged it uphill. I saw him dump it at the top and then, with a hateful look at the condemned man, turn to go. But … The prisoner, Jesus, locked eyes with him and he saw innocence there. The poem was about that look; the realisation that he’d helped an innocent man to his death. He heard the sound of hammering and a thud as the cross dropped into its hole; and, as he guiltily walked away, the echo of a voice saying, ‘Father, forgive them.’ Soon afterwards I went back home. The weather was deteriorating. But I couldn’t get the thought out my head, that if the prisoner was really innocent then my attitude needed forgiveness too. I’ve lost the poem. It’s disappeared. But the weird thing is this. Five years later I was a ‘vicar’ myself. By Dave Winfield |
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