Church visitors’ books

I am memorialised twice in my village church. Not in some premature lapidary way, but in the visitors’ book. The first time was with my toddler, when I wrote her name down. Some years later I showed her that scribbled evidence and inked us in again. There we were, here we are.

I always sign these modest manuscripts, with their columns for date, name, address and comments, and I’m always touched by the commonplaces: ‘So peaceful.’ ‘Thank you for being open.’ ‘Beautiful.’ Sometimes the signatories are far from home; tourists who stumble in, or those searching out forebears. On a recent trip to Ludlow, in pursuit of A. E. Housman, I randomly opened the book in St Laurence’s, where he lies interred. Visiting on 22 November 2017, from 90 miles away in Calne, were Michael and Janice Housman. Distant relatives? They don’t say.

It’s funny how often the names of those I know turn up. One, a professor of the ancient past, left his in the 11th century church of St Oswald’s, Widford, a sublimely remote survivor of an otherwise disappeared medieval village by the Windrush in the Cotswolds. Another, a student of antiquarian disposition, made his mark in the book in the Norman church of St Mary, Wissington, near Bures. Inside, an animated wall painting of a dragon named the ‘worm of Wormingford’, seemingly associated with an escaped ‘cockadrille’ (crocodile?) brought back from the crusades for Richard the Lionheart, which then developed a taste for the local sheep. ‘I prefer this to my church,’ my friend notes. That would probably be Christ Church, Oxford. A few lines down, there’s the poet Tom Paulin.

Philip Larkin in ‘Church Going’ signs a book near Belfast, donates an Irish sixpence and reflects that the place was ‘not worth stopping for’.