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St Dunstan's
Apr. 15th, 2025 09:32 am Why did my mother make a pottery figure of St Dunstan for my friend Stephen?
Because she was learning to pot and wanted a project and he owned a house that backed onto St Dunstan's churchyard in Canterbury. It was a happy conjunction.
As I said in an earlier post I believe he still has that house. I don't know for certain because it's been a long time since we were last in touch. Friendships peter out- or at least the outward expression of them does- but as Yeats said of his friendhip with that rather wonderful, rather silly man McGregor Mathers, "Friendship never ends."
He and I had a project to make a collection of verse epitaphs from churchyards in Kent. That's how I spent much of my free time as a student, hunting for epitaphs (I like to think I'm more fun now)- and my chief memory of St Dunstans is of the two of us grubbing around an 18th century headstone at night, trying to decipher the epitaph by candlelight. It's a memory I don't altogether trust. Did we really do that or just think about doing it? At the distance of over half a century I can't be sure.
St Dunstans is an old church- but not a particularly attractive one. It figures twice in the history of these islands. Firstly because it was where Henry II changed out of his finery into sackcloth in preparation for making his pentential pilgrimage to the shrine of his erstwhile friend Thomas Becket and secondly because Thomas More's daughter, Margaret Roper, interred her father's head there after rescuing it from its spike on London Bridge. Two St Thomases, how neat! The last time the Roper vault was opened, in 1978 the careful archaeologists noted a niche in the wall, sealed with an iron grille- which they didn't force- containing the rotted fragments of a human skull.
Because she was learning to pot and wanted a project and he owned a house that backed onto St Dunstan's churchyard in Canterbury. It was a happy conjunction.
As I said in an earlier post I believe he still has that house. I don't know for certain because it's been a long time since we were last in touch. Friendships peter out- or at least the outward expression of them does- but as Yeats said of his friendhip with that rather wonderful, rather silly man McGregor Mathers, "Friendship never ends."
He and I had a project to make a collection of verse epitaphs from churchyards in Kent. That's how I spent much of my free time as a student, hunting for epitaphs (I like to think I'm more fun now)- and my chief memory of St Dunstans is of the two of us grubbing around an 18th century headstone at night, trying to decipher the epitaph by candlelight. It's a memory I don't altogether trust. Did we really do that or just think about doing it? At the distance of over half a century I can't be sure.
St Dunstans is an old church- but not a particularly attractive one. It figures twice in the history of these islands. Firstly because it was where Henry II changed out of his finery into sackcloth in preparation for making his pentential pilgrimage to the shrine of his erstwhile friend Thomas Becket and secondly because Thomas More's daughter, Margaret Roper, interred her father's head there after rescuing it from its spike on London Bridge. Two St Thomases, how neat! The last time the Roper vault was opened, in 1978 the careful archaeologists noted a niche in the wall, sealed with an iron grille- which they didn't force- containing the rotted fragments of a human skull.
