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Last Visit to Burford.1994

I suppose that I've become rather philosophical about life.  I tend to live every day as it comes, and try to obtain maximum fulfilment from every waking hour.    I am referring to when I lost my previous wife Sue from cancer a few years ago. 

For our last holiday - when I knew that Sue's time was running out - I took her down to the market town of Tenbury Wells in the English midlands, and to the nearby village of Burford, and then to Burford Gardens where I was evacuated during WW2.
Burford House was built in 1728 for William Bowles, M. P. for Bewdley and proprietor of London's famous Vauxhall Glass Works. The house which is an excellent example of Provincial Georgian architecture stands on one of the country's most historic sites, that of Burford Castle, which dated back to Saxon times.

It is recorded that during the reign of Edward the Confessor, Richard, son of Scrob held Richards Castle together with vast lands including Burford. It then descended through the de Says, and Mortimers to Sir Geoffrey Cornwall who became the first Baron of Burford. It remained in the Cornwall family for the next 400 years when Francis, the 16th and last Baron, sold the Castle, then in ruins, to William Bowles. Many relics of the once powerful Cornwall family may be seen in the nearby Burford Church.

I'd known for 10 years that poor Sue was doomed.   I was acutely aware that the end was drawing near.       Of course, it was a very moving experience for me - for a number of reasons.  To see my mortally ill wife, who I loved desperately, walking the paths, opening the gates, sitting on the seats that I had sat on as a small boy, was very moving.  The knowledge that time was rapidly running out for her, and for me  - and for all of us in this world -  and the realisation of her brief time-span left with me - together with the intimations of my own mortality and everybody else's who was ever born  - the juxta-position of that grim fact with the familiar scenes of my childhood, was a volatile cocktail of emotion enough to initiate a dull ache and a concealed tear. 

The weather was perfect.  The aromatic shrubs, plants and blooms were at their summer best.  The bees buzzed from bush to bush in their time-honoured unhurried way, and the murmur of the River Teme, as it caressed the smooth, washed pebbles that form its weedy bed, was like sweet music from another age.      I was suddenly struck by the reality of decay and death.  The exquisite herbage that surrounded us, was the green inheritor of its countless annual vegetative progenitors that had grown and then decayed into the earth again down through the millennia.  The very bees were recipients of innumerable donated genes from bees that had flapped their long-gone ancestral wings in centuries past.  They'd been born, wriggled their way free of their pupae - flown and buzzed their brief hour, then fallen - kicked  - and been swallowed into the soil - swallowed into history - swallowed into the deep black bottomless sack of time.

Burford House, and its grounds, was purchased by the present owner in April 1954. Hardly any garden at that time existed. Only the North and South Lawns, an exceptionally fine Copper Beech, London Plane trees and a Sequoiadendron were the outstanding features. Immediately John Treasure set about the task of designing and landscaping. The achievement of the operation and the success of planting which has produced such wonderful combinations of texture, colour, shape and overall quality of plants is entirely due to John Treasure's perceptive skill, enthusiasm and hard work for he worked entirely alone for many years. The Gardens are acclaimed throughout the country for the high standard of gardening attained together with the plant associations and the collection of rare and unusual plants.

I see the village of Burford in a sharply delineated time-slot.  From 1939 to 1945, the Tenbury and Burford people that I knew then are still smeared on a chronological laboratory slide.  I can take it out from time to time - slip it under the microscope - and there they all are wriggling on the glass of my memory.  They never leave their position or change their shape and character  - they just move around in circles endlessly repeating their eight-year cycle of existence as seen by the eye of my remembrance.   The recollections of the area are very special to me and will always remain so.