On the tower of St Mildred's, Tenterden
Who has ever heard of Tenterden? Even among
those who know Kent well it elicits a crumpling of the brow or a narrowing of
the eyes as they struggle to place it. Sometimes it will bring forth a mumble
about ‘having heard of it’ or, occasionally, a cry of over-exaggerated recognition,
normally falsified out of politeness or pity. When I speak of it, I sometimes
wonder whether I have my places confused and, like Mrs Elton doggedly insisting
to Emma that Surry was the Garden of England, I have mistaken Kent for somewhere
else- be it Sussex or Suffolk or Laputa. True, there is the odd individual who recognises
the name, normally from its modest role in English history as the birthplace of
Caxton; but to them Tenterden might be the capital of Costa Rica or the name of
Gladstone’s chancellor or of Pavlov’s dog. It is not so much a Kentish market
town as a piece of trivia, not a geographical location (still less anyone’s
home) but a tie-break answer in a pub quiz. Such people are aware of the
existence of Tenterden, but they do not know it.
I do not write this out of wounded
pride for this corner of Kent, trying to earn it accolades beyond its modest
merits. Still less do I desire to paint a twee watercolour from my childhood
for, as the great Doctor said of the proscenium of his own youth, ‘To write to
you about Lichfield is no use, for you never saw Stow pool or Borowcop Hill’[1]; rather
it is hoped that the above gives a sense of the sort of a place Tenterden is- pretty,
no doubt, but ordinary. To my childhood self, however, Tenterden, some miles
from the village in which we lived, might as well have been Las Vegas. I would
lobby my grandmother endlessly to take me to this modest settlement- especially
when it held a market or fair. Make no mistake- the former was no Hardyesque
scene where the tails of cattle flicked away flies and dust as the beasts were driven
to sale by a scrumpy soaked lad, rather it was a collection of trestle tables scattered
with objects that trod the fine line between curios and junk, whilst the latter was no earthy carnival- where vice was winked at and order subverted- but instead
a carousel plonked onto a recreation ground. But still, to me, Tenterden was
where a glimpse of the tantalisations of urban civilisation might be found.
Despite this lofty position in my
head, the town had none of the great physical markers of modern city life- no
skyscrapers afforded views towards the Romney Marsh, no ringroad cut through
the High Weald- indeed, its only building of any note was, and to my knowledge, still is, its church, St
Mildred’s. Pevsner thought it a good example of the English style and claimed
its tower was the finest in the county. I am inclined to agree with him; although
my knowledge of England and her buildings is but a drop in the ocean compared
to that accrued by the feisty and fussy Saxon. Certainly, as a child, the tower
was a marvel- though I remember being primarily transfixed by the arched windows,
two near the top and one about half way down, with a big blue clock in between,
which gave the appearance of a face elongated in shock or horror. Not the horror,
you understand, of a witness to some dreadful and bloody crime, but that of a
maiden aunt on hearing some piece of innuendo. The sort of horror, in short,
that suited Tenterden.
The tower is testament to the town’s
medieval wealth and so mostly, like many of England’s finest examples of
carved and crenelated stone, built of wool. I would often look up- something
children are much better at doing than adults- and wonder at all this great stone
maiden aunt had seen. Her po-faced arches had looked out on the excesses indulged
in to celebrate the defeats of Hitler, of Bonaparte, of Philip of Spain, and of countless Louises, had been the sole witness to the silent burials of
strangers under the old Poor Law, had felt against her shell spangled
sandstone both the echo of bells and laughter marking couples united for
richer and poorer and the reverberations of the sobs of parents cruelly
bereaved. As such, St Mildred and her handsome tower is as much a temple of the
human spirit as the Holy one, a reminder that Tenterden, for all its
ordinariness, has been, and remains, a stage on which all the petty and
heartbreaking dramas of humanity are played out.
Yet, that great tower so admired by
Pevsner speaks of so much more than just the business and busyness of Tenterden’s people.
Above those windows that speak of the town’s perpetual Great Aunt-hood sit four
handsome pinnacles that speak of its resident’s quest for Heaven. The tower
stands as a reminder that all Tenterden’s people- those plump, fur clad
medieval merchants, those deliriously relieved survivors of war, those unnamed
vagrants that rest in its shadow, those happy couples and those weeping
mourners, even those latter day pushers of tat and that strange, crick-necked child- all of them, were made for something greater than milling around their
market place. St Mildred’s points, not through great beauty or otherworldly
scale but through stately ordinariness, to the Heavenly, and thetrue identity which might be found there. Yet, on rare returns
to Tenterden I, now bereft of childish awe, so rarely look up to where St
Mildred’s is pointing but instead, like its other denizens, keep my eyes firmly
on the goods and the ground which there surround me; aware of its and my
respective existences but choosing not to know, in any Platonic or indeed Christian sense of the word, either. It is no wonder that her tower
still looks on with such matronly disappointment.
[1] I
am grateful to The Samuel Johnson Society for drawing this line- and many
others uttered or scrawled by that hulking but kindly titan- to my attention.