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.

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