At Home - Bill Bryson [242]
Of the thirteen thousand parsonages that existed in 1900, just nine hundred are still in Church of England ownership today. Our Old Rectory was sold into private hands in 1978. (I don’t know for how much.) Its history as a rectory lasted 127 years, during which time it was home to eight clergy. Curiously, all seven later rectors stayed longer in the house than the shadowy figure who built it. Thomas John Gordon Marsham departed in 1861, after just ten years, to take up a new post as rector of Saxlingham, a position of almost exactly equal obscurity in a village twenty miles to the north, near the sea.
Why he built himself such a substantial house is a question that can now never be answered. Perhaps he hoped to impress some delightful young woman of his acquaintance, but she declined him and married another. Perhaps she did choose him but died before they could wed. Both outcomes were common enough in the mid-nineteenth century, and either would explain some of the rectory’s design mysteries, such as the presence of a nursery and the vague femininity of the plum room, though nothing we can suggest can now ever be more than a guess. All that can be said is that whatever happiness he found in life, it was not within the bounds of marriage.
We may at least hope that his relationship with his devoted housekeeper Miss Worm had some measure of warmth and affection, however awkwardly expressed. It was almost certainly the longest relationship of either of their lives. When Miss Worm died in 1899 at the age of seventy-six, she had been Mr. Marsham’s housekeeper for over half a century. In that same year the Marsham family estate at Stratton Strawless was sold in fifteen lots, presumably because no one could be found to buy it whole. The sale marked the end of four hundred years of prominence for the Marsham family in the county. Today all that remains as a reminder of that is a pub called the Marsham Arms in the nearby village of Hevingham.
Mr. Marsham lived on for not quite six years more. He died in a retirement home in a nearby village in 1905. He was eighty-three years old and, apart from time away for schooling, had lived the whole of his life on Norfolk soil, within an area just slightly more than twenty miles across.
IV
We started here in the attic—a long time ago now, it seems—when I clambered up through the loft hatch to look for the source of a leak. (It turned out to be a slipped tile that was allowing rain through.) There, you may recall, I discovered a door that led out onto a space on the roof giving a view of the countryside. The other day, I hauled myself back up there for the first time since I began work on the book. I wondered vaguely if I would see the world differently now that I know a little about Mr. Marsham and the circumstances in which he lived.
In fact, no. What was surprising to me was not how much the world below had changed since Mr. Marsham’s day but how little. A resurrected Mr. Marsham obviously would be struck by some novelties—cars speeding along a road in the middle distance, a helicopter passing overhead—but mostly he would gaze upon a landscape that was seemingly timeless and utterly familiar.
That air of permanence is of course a deception. It isn’t that the landscape isn’t changing, but that it is changing too slowly to be noticed, even over the course of 160 years or so. Go back far enough and you would see plenty of change. Travel 500 years backward and there would be almost nothing familiar except the church, a few hedgerows and field shapes, and the dawdling line of some of the roads. Go a bit farther than that and you might see the Roman fellow who dropped the phallic pendant with which we began the book. Go way back—to 400,000 years ago, say—and you would find lions, elephants, and other exotic fauna grazing on arid plains. These were the creatures that left the bones that so fascinated early