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- 2 Jessica and I strolled back, past the pond, and up the High Street, back to the church, and climbed the steep, gravelled path between the leaning gravestones to the ancient wooden door. We went inside the church and the air still seethed quietly with the wedding that was just over, it was warm with all the breaths of the people and sweet with flowers and scent. We stood very still by the altar, looking at a great vase of white and yellow narcissi and apple blossom, and I felt the imprint of this marriage service somehow sinking gently down and down on to us and being imprinted on to the fabric of the church itself, into the stone of the walls and the brass of the rails and the stained glass of the windows, being absorbed into the ancient building as everything before it had been so absorbed, every hymn and anthem and voluntary, every blessing and vow, every petitionary prayer, every praise in the morning and thanksgiving at evening, every bidding of welcome to a child and of farewell to a dead soul. The church was empty apart from my daughter and me, and it was not empty at all. She felt it too. She wandered quietly about, touching this and that, talking a little to herself. We closed the great door carefully, let down the latch, in case a bird would get in and be trapped. Outside, there were white and pink paper petals on the ground, and spring sunshine. That Easter Monday evening, Mrs. Miggs, in her ninety-sixth year, rolled up her crochet, and took in her chair, at the end of the afternoon, and closed her door and went to bed, early, as she always did, in the room that used to be the parlour, for she had not been able to climb the stairs since breaking her hip five years before, and in the night, in her sleep, she died. And so there was a funeral service at the church to follow the farrier's wedding, and people in Barley felt saddened, for Mrs. Miggs was so well-known and liked, such a familiar figure, she had seemed immortal, and another link with the old days, the old village life, was severed. Sad too, we said, that she did not reach her hundredth year, to which she was looking forward. There would have been a party for her and the children would have made posies and taken them, and sung to her outside her window in the early morning. But a good funeral service, at the peaceful end of a long life, is not altogether an occasion for mourning. This one felt fitting, and things were in their proper order. Mrs. Miggs' cottage is up for sale now, and it will have to be renovated and perhaps altered drastically, and never look the same, and we miss the sight of her, on her chair with her crochet, as we go up the lane past her door, of an evening. [From "The Magic Apple Tree" by Susan Hill] NEW LIFE Move onward, Life; we cannot stop to grieve The seed demands the soil, that it may live; This mystery of contact, strange, devout In union, as the general scheme of love. See, in our careful hoard of leaf-mold, sprout Chestnuts from conkers, little pallid leaf Of beech from mast, from acorn little oak, Each in their germination hopefully Intent on growing to a forest tree; Close consequence that seed and soil provoke! Each to his Kind, majestic or minute, Following unaware but resolute The pre-ordained plan That makes an oak, a daisy, or a man. Vita Sackville-West: The Garden /3