The church is getting a new lady vicar, a foreigner too, that will put a pigeon amongst the cats. When I say the church I mean the one at the bottom of my garden, not the gloomy Baptist sepulchre to the right of the main road, nor the even gloomier Methodist home for Dracula to the left , depending on whether you are coming or going. My church is a concrete insult to worship that was piled up in the 1950s after the Germans carelessly fired one of their doodlebugs, missed the docks by some miles and demolished the old village church. The woman who lived in the shadow of the old Norman walls died too, there is a prefab there now.

Not that I go to church. I do look after a couple of abandoned graves that i pass on my shortcut back home, I suppose I am on disturbingly close terms with the local dead and decayed. Harry killed at 18 in the First World Tantrum, and the 2 babes drowned by their despairing father in the Depression that followed. His wife and remaining child were rescued before he could do more, presumably he was hanged, maybe he knew Harry.
It can get very depressing in this village, specially when it is raining and muddy
.