WAGBAI: The Rectory

            We moved south for my father's health. He was offered a living (the Anglican Church jargon for "a job") in the village of Aspley Guise, a few miles from the county seat of Bedford in the diocese of St. Albans. The Rectory, directly across the road from the church of St. Botolph’s, was a huge, redbrick Victorian, set on a slope uphill from the church. I say huge because that was how it seemed to me, in my early years. Returning, years later, I was surprised by the fact that it seemed much smaller than I remembered; and years after that, on my last visit to Aspley Guise, it had disappeared altogether, the house with its front lawn and the orchard behind replaced by a development of small tract houses. Only the ghost of the Rectory stood there, in my memory.

            Still, it was a large house. The ground floor consisted of a spacious drawing room, my father’s study, the dining room—which in later years became his wood shop—and the kitchen and pantry area. It was not only the drawing room that was spacious, though it was perhaps the largest room in the house; every room on the ground floor could be described with the same word, as indeed could the dark cellar beneath, with its dusty bins of coal partitioned off from the multiple racks where we stored potatoes and fruit from the garden—an important source of food in the war years.

            From the (yes, spacious!) front hall, a grand flight of stairs led up, first, to a landing with a great window looking out to the orchard, then on up to the second floor. The smooth banisters were excellent for sliding, and the carpeted stairs provided a good slope for sledding down on the tin trays our mother kept--not for that purpose!--in the kitchen. Gathered around the large second landing were the bedrooms. My parents occupied the largest. Across from their room was the nursery, where my sister and I slept until we were old enough to deserve rooms for ourselves. The nursery became my sister’s room. Mine, later, was the tiny room that lay between the two. The other room off the main landing was a guest room, large enough for two double beds.

            From the landing, a long, narrow corridor led past the bathroom and the head of the back stairs, down to the far end where there was yet another large bedroom—I remember the twin beds with their orange and yellow counterpanes where the Bletchley girls slept (more about them in due course)—along with the heated linen closet and the laundry room. The back stairs led further upward to an attic floor, with a small apartment at one end that must once have been maid’s quarters, in the days when Rectors could afford to have maids, and probably had several, but which my parents now rented out to various couples over the years.

At the other end of this top floor was the attic proper, with its circular, unglazed oriel looking out from the façade down over the plains of Bedfordshire below, through which a barn owl used to fly for many years at night to make its nest in the rafters. To our delight, as kids, when we dissected them, the big bird's expectorations were filled with the brittle bones of mice and other small animals.The attic otherwise was a mysterious, ill-lit place where we kept odd, unused pieces of furniture and trunks overflowing with old stuff, including the clothes we used for dressing up. You had to be careful, up here, to step only on the struts, or risk falling through, we were often warned, to the floor beneath.

Out front was the long, curving driveway that led past the big front door to the garage where my father parked his Austin 10—and later, his prized Armstrong Siddeley with its "pre-selection" gear system, an extremely early version of the automatic transmission in most cars today—and adjacent to it, the chicken run, home to the dreaded rooster that flew at me with sharp talons and beak when I fulfilled my chicken-feeding chores. Beside it, a sandy path with treacherous roots from a great pine tree led down to the street. It was down this path that my father strode each day, his black cassock swinging at his ankles, on his way to the church for prayers or services. Behind the house was the orchard, with its apple trees—Blenheims for cooking, Cox’s Orange Pippins for great eating—and its Williams pears and Victoria plums, and an assortment of berry bushes: raspberries, red and black currents, gooseberries… The blackberries grew wild further up the hill, and we picked them there.

So this was the Rectory. This was where my parents lived to the first ten years of my boyhood, and where I spent my own first six very happy years before heading off to boarding school. But that, as they say, is another story.