I set off
northwards from Bury St Edmunds railway station,
and within a few minutes I was leaving the
suburban houses behind me, and the traffic
hurtling towards Mildenhall. Instead, by the
grace of County Council planning policy, I found
myself in the thoroughly rural surroundings of
Fornham St Martin, the church sitting grandly
above the road beside a beautiful old pub.
The church sits end on to
the road, the north side pointing a delicious
late medieval red brick porch towards an avenue
of yew trees which lead diagonally towards the
village. At the entrance is a huge war
memorial, a reminder of the significance of that
conflict in the collective memory of the Church
of England. There is a pleasing mixture of old
and new headstones, and from beyond the
graveyard, the shouts of a football match echoed
off of the flint walls. I felt a sense that this
place still has an importance, the church a
significance in the day to day life of the
parish.
The shape
is curious, the plan made square by a huge Victorian
south aisle; nothing subtle there. The tower
is a grand affair, a result of an extremely large bequest
in 1425. So much has always been obvious to the
passer-by, but I was looking forward to seeing more. When
I had made my first tour through the churches of Suffolk
at the end of the 20th Century, St Martin was one of a
number in the area to the north of Bury which was kept
locked without a keyholder. I had grumbled rather
vociferously about this. Rather pleasingly, I was
challenged by one of the churchwardens after a talk I
gave to the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust. She had put
a considerable amount of energy into persuading the PCC
that they should be more accessible, and today there is a
keyholder. The church is actually open in Summer, which
is even better.
In 2002, a couple of years
after I had been this way, I had found a poignant
Easter Communion card on a junk stall at a fete
in a north Essex village. It shows two British
Tommies glancing back at clouds which form the
shape of a cross, while a rather ghostly Christ
looks on. It is dated 1916, a few months before
the Battle of the Somme, and the caption reads Easter
Dawn, "Lo, I am with you always",
Fornham St Martin Church. At our Easter
Communion, let us pray for the Sailors and
Soldiers of our King. H. Huckton, Rector.
As you might imagine, this card was
in my mind as I came back to Fornham St Martin. I
had kept it as a valuable reminder, not only of
the mindset of the Church of England during that
grisly conflict, but also of the High Church
enthusiasm for pseudo-Catholic paraphernalia: the
sentiment was resolutely protestant, and yet
there was a devotional quality to it, like the
colourful prayer cards handed out at a funeral
Mass in some Mediterranean village church. In
retrospect, there is a horror to this
sentimentalising of the carnage in Flanders, but
it needs to be understood as a way in which grief
was ministered to and mediated. Such imagery is
also an important element in understanding how
the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to the
way that many of our parish churches look today.
On this
winter morning, I found the porch locked, but I had
noticed a car parked at the churchyard gate, and so
rather than go and bother the keyholder, I tried the
priest door into the chancel. It opened. I stepped
inside, to be met by two kind ladies who were preparing
the church for Sunday. After a chat, I wandered down to
the west end of the nave, where there is a stunning
modern window by Abbot & Co, illustrating the
Benedicite, the canticle traditionally sung in Anglican
churches during Lent (I wonder to what extent this
tradition is still observed in the churches of England?). O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye
the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O
ye Angels of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise
him, and magnify him for ever.
The interior of St Martin is rather lighter
than you might think from the bulkiness of the exterior,
and this is notwithstanding a large range of late 19th
and early 20th century glass, much of it excellent. A lot
of it appears to be the work of the Clayton & Bell
workshop and the Heaton, Butler & Bayne workshop, and
the subjects suggest the same High Church enthusiasms as
my prayer card: St Genevieve and St Elizabeth, the story
of St Martin, and so on. Best of all is the window in the
south-east corner depicting the three Marys confronted by
an angel at the empty tomb; unfortunately, it is partly
obscured by the huge organ.
There are a
couple of curiosities. Some medieval misericords
have been built into the lectern and reading
desk. They are as likely to have been bought by
an antiquarian as to have come from this church
originally, but interestingly one appears to
depict St Martin himself. Up in the chancel there
is a huge 1840s hatchment depicting the arms of
the Duke of Norfolk. There is something similar
in the Catholic Cathedral in Sheffield.
Back in the nave are two
rather sweet memorials. One of them remembers
Vice Admiral James William Rivett-Carnac, winner
of the Legion D'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre,
who was a man greatly loved. Nearby,
Henry William Claughton was HM Inspector of
Schools in this county for 38 years. When he
died in 1924, his memorial was erected to the
memory of an unselfish sportsman, by his wife and
hunting and cricketing friends.
Simon
Knott, 2001, updated 2008
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