It’s been there for about 850 years.
During that time, the Church of All Hallows at Tillington has seen, like every parish, its share of plague, famine and civil war. It has also seen my own christening, my sister’s wedding, my parents’ funerals and my own childrens’ christening. I have sat on its uncomfortable oak pews through countless matins and communions as a child, idly scanning through the hymn book for potentially rude words, or staring vacantly up at the strange coloured saints in the windows, whilst the vicar was droning on about sacrifice.
I have gone in to it, alone, on countless occasions, to light candles on behalf of something or someone; the great thing about lighting a candle is that it makes no demands on a very imperfect faith. It just sits there shining brightly and looking pretty. If it ‘works’, great, and if it doesn’t work, then nothing is lost.
For a village of around 1000 people, it lost 32 of its young men in the Great War, including all three brothers from a single family. Then, at 10.25 a.m on the 29th September 1942, a lone Junkers 88 German bomber missed its intended target of a Canadian troop encampment in Petworth Park and, instead, directly hit the local boys’ school. Another version of the story says that the pilot was simply unloading his cargo to make good his quick flight back to Germany.
Whatever, it was a misty and wet early Autumn day, and three bombs were dropped in all.
Some accounts say that the fatal bomb bounced in the park, flew over what is now the Northchapel Road, and embedded itself into a classroom full of 11 year old boys. All 28 of them were killed instantly, as was the headmaster, as was a young teaching assistant called Charlotte Marshall. In an instant, one entire year of the area’s male population had been scythed down, including the first cousin of the children who lived at the time in what is now our house.
The boys were buried in a communal grave in a little churchyard by the school. It is hard by a road that many of the readers of this blog will drive past often, maybe every day, but few people ever go there now.
All through my childhood, this was a subject that was never really spoken of. What had happened was too harrowing for anything other than the outpouring of individual grief and remembrance, and I was a teenager before I even knew about it.
For some reason or other, I was thinking about this tragedy yesterday when I was running my inelegant way past All Hallows, also idly wondering where the extraordinary events of Covid-19 would fit in the long history of the village and its church. For an instant, I found myself looking forward to the Good Friday midday meditation the next day, that is, to my shame, the one moment of the year into which my weak Christianity has now distilled. But then I remembered that my church, as with all churches, was closed. And then I worked out that what it was that I really loved about my occasional visits to church was the very predictability that I thought I hated, and the poetry in every line. I never really believed, for example, that I wasn’t ‘worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table’, to be honest, but I loved hearing it all the same. Even at the age of 60, God to me sits behind a cloud, has a big, white beard and counts sparrows falling. He knows that I am a lousy Christian but lives with it.
What I love about All Hallows is not only that it will be standing there long after me, but that it allows my lazy brain to understand that the sun will rise and the world will keep on turning.
And just when I least expected to, I felt a tiny part of it again.
Happy Easter,
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