”I don’t feel comfortable hanging around here. Shall we buy some food and eat in the car? We can pull over once we get out of Thornbury.’
‘OK, as long as there’s plenty of food.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Robin, switching on the engine, ‘I remember your theory that nothing eaten on a car journey contains calories.’ ‘Exactly. Got to make the most of these opportunities.’
So they purchased food on the High Street, got back into the Land Rover and headed out of Thornbury. After five minutes , Strike said, ‘This’ll do. Pull in by that church.’
Robin turned up Greenhill Road and parked beside the graveyard. ‘You got pork pies?’ said Robin, looking into the bag. ‘Problem?’ ‘Not at all. Just wishing I’d brought biscuits in the first place.’
“The Running Grave” JK Galbraith
Normally/usually – [can’t make up my mind which is the better word] – when I categorize a post as “Potwell Inn Library”, it’s because I’ve liked a book I have just bought and read. In this case it isn’t true because I haven’t yet read “The Running Grave”, the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike series. My son sent a photograph of a single page and said I should read it. For reference it’s page 703 according to the photo. Madame, having seen the photo ordered the book immediately so I’ll get to read it eventually I’m sure.
I have no idea whether the location of this little scene crops up before or again in the book; it just went off like a Chinese Cracker in my mind because unusually for a detective novel, I was able to locate the exact place to an eight figure British National Grid reference. Rowling certainly does her research thoroughly, whether by picking random place names from maps, or by actually noting them down in person. I suppose she might have stayed at Thornbury Castle, bought the pies at Riddifords (the inspiration for the TV programme “Open all hours”), and driven up Thornbury hill turning right at the traffic lights and passing the church on her right hand after the playing field. The single error in the description is that you couldn’t (or shouldn’t) turn right into Greenhill in order to swing around the green and park next to the graveyard. Or maybe she recorded that tiny detail before the one way system was put in place maybe twenty or so years ago.
How do I know this? Well because the church in question was where I was Vicar for 25 years. The graveyard was full of familiar names; people I knew and those I knew about. I knew about the oldest occupant who died at 104 years old. His father had fallen off the wooden scaffolding and broke his leg when the church was being built. The family were all builders, quarrymen and masons and many still live in the village today. At his funeral the church was unusually packed for a person of such great age, and I had several wonderful conversations – one with a cider maker who would hoax the Customs and Excise by concealing his produce, which always exceeded the limit, by hiding the large 1000 litre barrels in the hedges.
Novelists and parish priests have entirely different modus operandi. Novelists, especially the good ones like Galbraith, gather sufficient detail to make their narrative believable. My job was to know as much as was humanly possible about the people I worked with, so that, (as I would occasionally confess to their grieving relatives) I knew where the bombs were buried. There are always bombs, landmines, secrets and evasions. People would sometimes say to me after a funeral – you sounded as if you knew him really well! – ‘oh yes I did! I’d think to myself’ and there are always ways of expressing people without revealing any secrets. Unlike one funeral where a son gave the address and said at the beginning that “my father was a good friend to most of the lonely women in the parish”.
That brief paragraph in the Strike story embraced a tiny patch of my parish in which lives were lived and occasionally wasted. In that couple of roads resided the echoes of real murders, of violent attacks, of incest, of betrayals and redemptions, of drug dealing. Over a period of 25 years I became the village Sin Eater and keeper of the secrets and the histories of the family feuds which stretched back over seventy years and hinged on such tiny details as who was driving the motorcycle and who precisely abandoned whom on the stone bridge at Berkeley. Did the village funeral director really turn his car over as a young man, while speeding down Thornbury High Street. It’s the novelist’s job to construct plausible narratives from the fragments of everyday life. It’s all very tidy and comforting to end a novel with each piece in place. Characters come, say their piece and often disappear again to live their fragmentary lives because real lives don’t resolve out like musical keys. Real lives don’t end with a triumphal modulation from minor to major – a modulation which Bryn, my first piano teacher would always describe as a “Curse de Picardy”. Real lives sputter and glow, flare out and turn to ash. I once married a couple on Saturday and buried their stillborn baby less than two weeks later. There are no words for that.
People often say I should write this stuff down – well I suppose that’s what I’m doing now. I love the Galbraith stories and I’d love to have her gift of cabinet-making the scenes together into a perfect narrative. But I’m more of a carpenter, like my Grandfather. My tools are the ripsaw and the nail. No hidden dovetails and Rosewood veneer for me, but a rough plank of Elm with a few scribbled pencil research notes on the side.
At the end of my incumbency I was approached on the street by a young man who asked me – “are you still Rev Dave?” ”Still Rev Dave!” I replied and wondered whether I would ever find a way to tell the stories.
