An English Country Churchyard-and Mr. Jackson's Socks

THE EPITAPH. Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.	120
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,
He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,	125
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose,)
The bosom of his Father and his God.

From Gray's Elegy written in an English country churchyard. The churchyard that reminded me of this poem was at Kirkby Lonsdale. Just over the border between Lancashire and Cumbria on the Cumbrian side by about a mile. This pristine,  or perhaps twee on another less perfect day, small town far from the dark classroom at Kenton Comprehensive   in brutal Newcastle, where as a youth I heard these lines  for the first time. Read to us as always by Mr. Jackson a man who had a gift. He made English literature come alive to urchins like myself. Something for which I have  felt grateful  ever since. The favorite teacher of lore, he wore odd-socks, failed to notice the presence of extra boys in the class and was fond of wearing his wife's spectacles, by accident or design we'll never know. Despite, or more likely because of, his endearing eccentricities and the fact that he came from a place beyond  ( descended on us from his Oxbridge world, went to university with Spender and was on a nodding acquaintance with Auden no less among others)  he transmitted his values without having to broadcast them. The gentle socialism of his generation, the veneration of  well-constructed and living verse, the making of his life a philanthropic exercise in bringing education to the masses he didn't understand. And make no mistake. He had absolutely no idea of what life was like for us on the estate- not the kind inhabited by Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I am not being trite heres, and in these days dominated by the fleeting and the shallow simply making  a statement like this about value may sound distinctly odd. In the cluttered world we inhabit such value is said to have been swallowed up whole and seems as but a wisp against the huge clouds of information without depth that rush past us from dawn till dusk. No time for anything, they say. Bloody fools they are. People don't have the same attention span they had. Silly nonsense. The day they can't take the time to appreciate the sonnets that glow, the words that connect us to our past, the odd sock wearers of the world is the day we all die a little. And that simply cannot come. You see, a few of us had time for it. We were taken down into mysterious caverns where Alph the sacred river ran, we could feel the presence of the the miller's wife when read aloud from a tattered Chaucer for the umpteenth time. Totally convincing and enthralling. And he took the time to make those who would listen understand. We loved our Shakespeare and our  war poets and our Lawrence. (A man from a place like our own. grandparents'). We learned to question the placing of wreaths on the war memorial in town. We learned that the map with filled with pink on the classroom wall was half the story. We learnt that old men in the street  with shell-shock he been to a world beyond out imagining. And returned. They had been the lucky ones. And I spoke of him to the retired parson and his wife Marcus and myself had met having lunch in the quintessential pub in the quintessential English village on the quintessentially English spring day. Daffodils and all. And this parson had bemoaned the youthful clergy's inability to produce strong arguments at will to counter the evil Dawkins and crew. (I kept silent of course on that one.) But he too was of the same generation and unworldly in the best sense. We talked of logic and language and how it was taught in his day. Languages in the plural-as they say.  He told us of how each morning all of the boys (and all boys they were) had been required to write on the blackboard a word a day as the register was being called . In Latin, Greek and Sanskrit! The huge board having been divided for this very purpose. Before long they had acquired a respectable vocabulary of each. The idea, he said. of another inspirational teacher.  He asked if I could help him with understanding this internet thing. Happy to do what I can-but far from understanding it, I'm beginning to get a clear picture of why my original suspicions of its worth...it's real worth...were well-founded. The pair of them  like characters from Austen or Trollope themselves, except that the lady wife of the good parson was reading the latter on a Kindle before our two hour chat. What Mr. Jackson would have made of the Kindle, I really don't know. Or maybe I do. A gentle, tolerant soul like his would have been glad to see Trollope was being read no matter how. We wandered through the churchyard conversation flowing before going our separate ways. Marcus and myself to Ruskin's View and to the Devil's Bridge and they to their cottage. Oh yes. Quite the English day. And thanks to Mr. Jackson, I saw it as a pleasure to be taken and one to remember for a long time to come. http://www.kirkbylonsdale.co.uk/home/