Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall

I will add a verse a day as it is quite long.

But it really is a very eloquent and beautiful poem.

It would be lovely if Susan and Andrea could give me their accounts of the Sunday service they encountered.

Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall

by Sir John Betjeman

Come on! Come on! this hillock hides the spire,
now that on and now none. As winds about
The burnished path through lady's finger, thyme
And bright varieties of saxifrage,
So grows the tinny tenor faint or loud
And all things draw towards St Enodoc.

Come on! Come on! And it is five to three.

Paths, unfamiliar to golfers brogues,
Cross the eleventh fairway broadside on
And leave the fourteenth tee for thirteenth green,
Ignoring Royal and Ancient, bound for God.

Come on! Come on! No longer bare of foot,
The sole grows hot in London shoes again.
Jack Lambourne in his Sunday navy-blue
Wears tie and collar, all from Selfridge's!
There's Enid with a silly parasol,
And Graham in gray flannel with a crease
Across the middle of his coat which lay
Pressed 'neath the box of his Meccano set,
Sunday to Sunday.

Still Come on! Come on!

The tinny tenor. Hover-flies remain
More than a moment on a ragwort bunch,
And people's passing shadows don't disturb
Red Admirals basking with their wings apart.
A mile of sunny, empty sand away,
A mile of shallow pools and lugworm casts,
Safe, faint and surfy, laps the lowest tide.

Even the villas have a Sunday look.
The Ransome mower's locked into the shed.
'I have a splitting headache from the sun',
And bedroom windows flutter cheerful chintz
Where, double-aspirined, a mother sleeps; 
While father in the loggia reads a book
Large desultory, birthday-present size,
Published with coloured plates by Country Life,
A Bernard Darwin on the English Links
Or Braid and Taylor on The Mashie Shot.
Come on! Come on! he thinks of Monday's round - 
Come on! Come on! - that interlocking grip!
Come on! Come on! he drops into a doze - 
Come on! Come on! more far and far away
The children climb a final stile to church;
Electoral roll still flapping in the porch - 
Then the cool silence of St Enodoc.

more to come!