averilburystedmunds: Counting My Blessings!

View from the Abbey Gardens' bridge
over the Lark, near the tennis courts

June 28th
Suffolk Flower Flash
Angel Hill
Unsolicited photo taken
by one of the flower girls

ith ageing, I mean Serious Ageing, at least, some opportunities arise for reflection which may, or may not, have been present in earlier days. I realise that I now have time, space, maturity and inclination to ponder on Life and present circumstances. Engaging in this process seems to have developed in me a greater capacity to notice details, delight more intensely in the visual and truly live in the moment.

I loved living in Bruges and did not want to leave it but decided that it was time because of increasing feelings of old age arriving which came with a desire to live closer to ‘family.’ My youngest lives in Bury with her daughter so I had visited the town several times but hadn’t truly appreciated its charms until I began to live here last February. I have grown to love the place and its many splendid buildings, gardens, historical features. I have fallen particularly in love with the Abbey Gardens where I walk practically every day, in company with many dog walkers, lone walkers maintaining their health, bird lovers going to listen to the canaries in the aviary, families en route to the playground and teenagers perhaps going to the tennis courts or in search of green privacy for a kiss or a smoke!!

St Edmunds' Abbey in its considerable heyday

I am quite bewitched by the history of the Abbey with its architecturally beautiful Abbey ruins to remind of splendours past and the famous ignominy of Henry V111 who seized the treasures of the largest Benedictine Abbey in Europe in 1539 and systematically demolished it to demonstrate his power and control. Between 1536 and 1541 the Dissolution of the Monasteries covered the disbandment of not only monasteries, but also friaries, convents and priories. Henry expropriated their incomes and disposed of their assets, often to fund wars but particularly to accumulate their wealth in his coffers. The Dissolution abruptly severed the old way of life for perhaps as many as 12,000 people directly but with consequent indirect negative effects on surrounding villages and towns like Bury St Edmunds. Henry did not have a long life but he managed to fill it with destruction, violence, grudge-filled hatred and countless deaths. It remains a pleasure to ponder the fact that his sister, Mary Tudor, briefly Queen of France, then Countess of Suffolk, married in a reputed love match to Charles Brandon, was first interred in the Abbey when she died in 1533 aged only 42, then was later transferred to St Mary's Church, [built 1424-46] where she remains, acknowledged and admired as her brother never was.

Mary Tudor & Charles Brandon
Duke & Duchess of Suffolk

En route to the West Front, about to
pass the Chapman gravestone

The West Front built into part of the Abbey ruins

The church abuts the Great Graveyard at which I gaze as I pass, savouring its variety of seasonal green accoutrements. Presently, the gravestones are totally hidden beneath, and behind, the tallest nettles and highest, frothiest trembling grasses ever seen! I often finish my early Gardens walk along the tree-lined avenue leading directly to the West Front homes built into some of the ruins; another object of my admiration. At this height of summer, that particular allee is so thickly arched by the copious leaves on the branches curving to form a natural arc, that the sensation is of walking within an airy tall green tunnel. Delightful. Along there I generally nod to the large gravestone of William and Harriet Chapman who died in the early18^th century; I love their Austenesque names, perfect for any of Jane’s exquisite novels set in villages and small
communities like Bury St Edmunds! And following that, I arrive at the first of the West Front houses which has the most special exterior, perhaps six-sided, though all are touchingly attractive to the historian’s eye. This little row of dwellings, created mainly during the seventeenth century by burrowing into or adding on to, the existing ruins from the 1540s, using rescued Abbey stones, are both historical and imaginative and certainly induce a longing within this passer-by!

Wolf in terrifying close-up

Passing in parallel to, and in front of, the West Front mediaeval constructions, after glancing to the left to check the statue of the legendary wolf is still there, poised on the grass, guarding the Elizabeth Frink statue of St Edmund, I come to another favourite spot; the Rose Garden, supported financially by the generosity and far-sightedness of John Appleby, one of th
e few men to have penned any autobiographical account whom I would love to have met. He was an American pilot who trained other pilots in celestial navigation and was stationed in Suffolk for the last few months of WW2 and several months afterwards. He clearly fell in love with Suffolk, bought a bike and explored as much as he could. He even learned how to produce brass rubbings with which he became obsessed! He loved his time here so much that he wrote about it after he returned home and gifted the royalties from his Suffolk Summer [1946] to establish and maintain a rose garden, still here in the Abbey Gardens. His book is still on sale here though he is, no doubt, long gone. I am always touched with his writing and with his clear-sighted generosity.

These above I experience almost every day and each time, I experience an active delight and appreciation. And as I pass, I often acknowledge my good fortune in having a loving family dependably there, for each other and for me. And I can see why I wake up each day, benedictions as the French say, intact, understanding why I do wake up happy to greet the day!