Patrick Comerford
I am on my way this evening from Cambridge to Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire and to the High Leigh Conference Centre at Hoddesdon, where the annual conference of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) is taking place this week.
I caught an early bus from Milton Keynes to Bedford, and during a brief stopover I went to see the rowing clubs by the River Ouse and in search of the sites of the mediaeval Jewish community and the later 19th century synagogues on High Street, before catching a connecting bus to Cambridge.
I was last in Cambridge in June 2019, on my way to and from that year’s USPG conference in High Leigh. This afternoon’s visit to Cambridge was an opportunity to refresh old memories, to return to Sidney Sussex College, to see the last of the summer wisteria there, to see the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies (IOCS) at Wesley House and Westcott House on Jesus Lane, to stroll by the Backs and to visit some churches and some of my favourite bookshops, before catching a train to Broxbourne, the nearest station to Hoddesdon.
I arrived at High Leigh late this afternoon, in time for dinner, and may go for a stroll back into Hoddesdon later this evening.
I was first in High Leigh 18 years ago when I was the chaplain in 2006 at the annual conference of the Friends of the Church in China and the China Forum of CTBI (Churches Together in Britain and Ireland). Since then, my journeys to and from conferences in High Leigh have offered opportunities to explore nearby towns such as Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, Saffron Walden and Newport in Essex, to visit Rye House, the venue of the Rye House Plot in 1683, or to return to Cambridge.
My first USPG conference was in Swanwick in Derbyshire in 2008, and I have been at USPG conferences in Swanwick and High Leigh almost every year since then. I missed last year’s conference in Yarnfield Park in Stone, Staffordshire, on the theme of ‘Justice and the Church,’ because I was in Dublin working on a television documentary with a production company from Montenegro. But it is hard to believe that is now two years since I have been at High Leigh and at a USPG conference.
This year’s conference theme in High Leigh is ‘United Beyond Borders’ and the guest speakers and contributors include Bishop Anderson Jeremiah of Edmonton, the Very Revd Dr Kelly Brown Douglas of Episcopal Divinity School, Bradon Muilenburg who is working with refugees in Calais and Bishop Dalcy Badeli Dlamini of Eswatini (Swaziland), who is leading the Bible studies each morning.
The conference is an opportunity be inspired, encouraged and refreshed, and to hear about USPG’s support work with refugees in northern France, where they need hospitality, support and care, to engage with topics such as gender justice and racial justice, and the intertwined legacies of slavery and racism, colonialism and empire. They are topics that are also timely and sensitive given the rise of the far-right in elections in recent days in both the UK and France, fuelled by racism and intolerance towards refugees and asylum seekers.
I am looking forward to the opportunities the conference brings to meet many old friends, to hear from the guest speakers and to engage with workshops and Bible studies. And I am also looking forward to walks in the countryside and by the rivers in a part of East Anglia that I have now known for almost 20 years.
Hoddesdon and Broxbourne are in a part of Hertfordshire that typifies the English countryside and picture-postcard English towns and villages. As a travelled on the train from Cambridge to Broxbourne I enjoyed the views of the fields and countryside described by Betjeman as
… Clothed, thank the Lord, in summer green,
Pale corn waves rippling to a shore
The shadowy cliffs of elm between,
Colour-washed cottages reed-thatched
And weather-boarded water mills,
Flint churches, brick and plaster patched,
On mildly undistinguished hills
In his poem ‘Hertfordshire’, Betjeman recalls trudging through these fields in his childhood, and he returns to this area, perhaps at this time of the year, to find some of those fields are still there, but the Hertfordshire he knew as a child has been devastated by the spread of urbanisation,
Its gentle landscape strung with wire,
Old places looking ill and strange.
One can’t be sure where London ends,
New towns have filled the fields of root ...
Tall concrete standards line the lane,
Brick boxes glitter in the sun …
But in the sunshine and ‘summer green’ this week, I expect to enjoy some walks through these “mildly undistinguished hills” and lanes, and through welcoming fields, to find some timber-framed houses and pubs, and, perhaps, some ‘Flint churches, brick and plaster patched.’
‘Hertfordshire’ by John Betjeman
I had forgotten Hertfordshire,
The large unwelcome fields of roots
Where with my knickerbockered sire
I trudged in syndicated shoots;
And that unlucky day when I
Fired by mistake into the ground
Under a Lionel Edwards sky
And felt disapprobation round.
The slow drive home by motor-car,
A heavy Rover Landaulette,
Through Welwyn, Hatfield, Potters Bar,
Tweed and cigar smoke, gloom and wet:
“How many times must I explain
The way a boy should hold a gun?”
I recollect my father’s pain
At such a milksop for a son.
And now I see these fields once more
Clothed, thank the Lord, in summer green,
Pale corn waves rippling to a shore
The shadowy cliffs of elm between,
Colour-washed cottages reed-thatched
And weather-boarded water mills,
Flint churches, brick and plaster patched,
On mildly undistinguished hills—
They still are there. But now the shire
Suffers a devastating change,
Its gentle landscape strung with wire,
Old places looking ill and strange.
One can’t be sure where London ends,
New towns have filled the fields of root
Where father and his business friends
Drove in the Landaulette to shoot;
Tall concrete standards line the lane,
Brick boxes glitter in the sun:
Far more would these have caused him pain
Than my mishandling of a gun.
