So I imagine them celebrating in advance their private Harvest Festival, the event in the church calendar that strikes the richest chord in this pagan place, as he’ll discover. ‘We plough the fields and sca-a-a-tter / The good seed on the land.’ Was that how they managed contraception – coitus interruptus, aggravating the sin of adultery? Deliberate infertility, the luxurious, forbidden pleasure of taking pleasure by itself, must have spiced their lovemaking. Theirs was a feast of blissful barrenness. MB may well have used a sponge and a spermicidal douche. A nurse, being a professional spinster, was assumed to know about these things; and in any case all nurses had lost their conventional aura of feminine innocence – their collective moral virginity – because of their intimacy with other people’s bodies. They administered enemas and sponged the sick, and washed the dead and laid them out and plugged their orifices. They helped other women’s babies into the world. At the same time, since a nurse couldn’t keep her job and marry, she was a bit like a nun – a nun in a salacious story.
Nurses were suggestive. And so, for slightly different reasons, were priests of the Church of England, who could and did marry. Grandpa had the shamanistic glamour associated with the magical ability to transform the bread and wine, of course, and he combined it with licensed access to other people’s private spiritual parts. He officiated at a distance in church, but also close to, at home. He talked with women, and with the aged and the sick, during the day when other (real) men were out at work. An Anglican vicar was, in terms of cultural fiction, a eunuch of sorts. Yet everyone knew that actually he wasn’t vowed to celibacy, hence the comic naughtiness associated with his situation, too. Perhaps that is why it’s inviting to picture this love affair – the Vicar and the Nurse – in the style of a Hogarth etching of carnival appetite on the rampage. Flesh triumphs over Spirit. An allegory of hypocrisy. The holier (or in MB’s case, certainly cleaner) than thou rutting away in the ripe season, no purer than the peasants to whom they preached hygiene and holiness.
Peering down the years, a voyeur through that dense bramble hedge, it’s hard to see them except in outline, etched in archetypal postures. But why not remake them out of Arcimboldo fruit and veg, since it’s a less moralising transformation? O father, at last I see the fruition of my desires, in apple cheeks, cabbage curls and a damson mouth.
On 31 August he pauses for a second to count his blessings: ‘The end of a wonderful month for me. Thanks be to God.’ A couple of days later he foresees possible ‘complications’ with MB, but for now he’s so happy he steps right out of character and simply refuses to brood. He has to admit to having a good time: ‘Well I must take life as I find it and make the best of every circumstance,’ he writes, for all the world like a saintly stoic accepting the delights the Lord has seen fit to pelt him with.
He makes a brief return trip to South Wales, where Hilda and the children are staying at Hereford Stores, packed up to leave. While he’s there he sneaks some vertiginous glimpses of his hated old parish – ‘went for a walk over the Coronation Hill within sight of the parish of Ynyscynon’ – before travelling back north on his own, to be met in Wrexham by MB. Then, on 13 September, the family ARRIVE IN HANMER in capital letters. Hilda has brought her beloved sister Katie along to help and to soften the blow of leaving the Rhondda, but this doesn’t prevent her from being ‘very down in the mouth’ at her first sniff of country air. ‘She is utterly miserable this evening,’ he tells the diary. The next day she is no better (‘terribly miserable’) and the day after that he sends them off to go shopping in Whitchurch, the nearest town, six miles away, with the same result – ‘Hilda again miserable.’ On Saturday, taking stock, he finds his own secret sense of well-being wearing a bit thin: ‘Am not feeling very well again. This is due to the pressure of moving and Hilda’s lack of spirit.’ He seems to feel, rather unreasonably, that she should be sharing in his elation, sympathising with the revolution in his feelings. ‘I have to bear everyone’s burdens and my own,’ the entry ends, with a surge of self-pity.
Of course, Grandma didn’t yet know about MB. Once on the bicycle, on the byways of the parish, he was off her mental map. And in any case from Hilda’s point of view MB was only one of a set of local ladies who had taken doting possession of their new vicar during his first lone weeks. Chief among them was widowed Lady Kenyon, who was (it turns out) the real head of the Hanmer community, and outshone the eponymous Hanmers in both rank and wealth. The diary records that he was frequently chauffeured around in her car, and that he was regularly invited up to Gredington, the comfortable Kenyon pile, for tea and for dinner tête-à-tête. Then there’s Miss Crewe – the headmistress of the parish school – and her friend Miss Kitchin, who ran the bakery and doubled as the church organist. Miss Crewe, too, owned a car, which Miss Kitchin drove, and they gave him lifts to Chester, Shrewsbury, Oswestry and so on, and more invitations to tea. He was, it seems, God’s gift to all the grander single women of the parish. It must quickly have become apparent to these new female friends that he and Hilda were a most ill-matched and disaffected couple. She hadn’t the health, inclination or the social background to play the role of the vicar’s wife. And this unhappy fact must have added to his air of availability for them all, and particularly for MB.
She called shortly after the family’s arrival and walked Hilda to the church ‘for the first time’ (as the diary records, possibly with irony). Instead of cooling down, their affair intensifies: ‘Went to Tallarn Green … met MB. A lovely day altogether’ (19 September). He is hardly ever in his new vicarage and often eats supper or goes to play cards with the people at the lodgings he stayed in when he first arrived in the village, where MB often drops by, too. And very soon this family – the Watsons, who keep the shop – are in on the secret. As the autumn closes in, and the weather gets wet and foggy, his double life keeps him idyllically busy. Official parish duties even promise fun, too: ‘Went to the meeting at the Parish Hall for entertainments … there will be quite a lot to do at Hanmer as time goes on.’ Although the pace occasionally gets hard to sustain, it seems, for on Saturday, 7 October he reverts to the old ploy of hiding in his study and pretending he’s elsewhere: ‘Decided to be away all day so as to have a quiet day.’
It’s the day the clocks go back. He finds himself pausing for reflection and – for the first time – misgivings. Has he been led down the garden path? ‘Thank thee O God for hearing my prayer to get a removal from Llwynypia. But I wish I could have removed to some other parish in S. Wales instead of coming up to the north.’ Or perhaps he isn’t as smitten as he first thought, for the entry ends enigmatically, ‘My heart is in the south.’ But the very next day he goes to the Watsons after evensong, where he meets MB and ‘stays late’. There’s a gratifyingly ‘huge crowd’ at church for Harvest Festival a week later and he’s able to rest on his laurels, since MB is going away for a short holiday. And then, suddenly, just as he relaxes, there comes a stroke of fate that whisks away the very means of his freedom.
In other words, he had an accident on the bike. He was speeding alone down the dark lanes between services when he came a cropper – ‘tore the cartilage of my leg. Laid up at Pritchards’ farm. Dr McColl set my leg and brought me home,’ he writes, staccato style with clenched teeth: immobilised, grounded, trapped in the vicarage. That dawns on him gradually. By Wednesday the leg ‘is far from getting right’, on Thursday the doctor calls and tells him he won’t be fit for his duties on Sunday and