The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell: The Life Story of the Victim of Germany's Most Barbarous Crime
9781465672971
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In the early seventies there were living at the country rectory of Swardeston, near Norwich, a clergyman and his wife and little family. There was a “New” and an “Old” Rectory. Both are still standing, much as they were then, except that the trees are older, and the “New” Rectory has long ago lost any signs of newness. It is one of the ways of Old England to call some of its most ancient things New, as if it could never learn to tolerate change kindly, even after centuries of wont. There is a Newtimber Place in Sussex whose walls were built before the Armada. There is a New Building in Peterborough Cathedral which was completed before the Reformation. New Shoreham took the place of Old Shoreham before Magna Charta was signed. The Rector, the Rev. Frederick Cavell, lived with his family at the New Rectory. It is a pleasant sunny house with a large garden. Such parsonages are common in all the unspoiled rural parts of England. A little gate leads to the churchyard close by. In a great city no man would live willingly close by a cemetery. In such a village as Swardeston the nearness of the graveyard is a consecration. New graves appear among the old ones from time to time. The oldest of these others have faded gently into the grass. Nobody is left to tend them or to remember whose bones they cover. Yet the history of many a family can be traced back for three centuries on the lichen-covered stones. Some day, when the war is over, another grave may be dug in this quiet spot. If the poor mutilated frame of Edith Cavell is ever permitted to be brought back home, her countrymen will come here to look upon the place where she lies. In this October of 1915 she sleeps in a land ravaged by war, and those who killed her will not stoop even to the tardy pity of giving back her body. But in those early seventies the village churchyard was not a place of sadness to the Rectory children. They played hide-and-seek among the sloping tombstones. The church and churchyard were, as they still are, the centre of the village life. Gay doings, such as a wedding, took place under the shadows of the elms and yews. The whole community assembled there on any day of special interest. The churchyard was the Trafalgar Square of Swardeston. For it was not remote from the houses, as many village churchyards are. Norfolk labourers swung their heels on the wall in the long evenings of the days before village institutes and reading rooms were invented. In these early seventies the village talk still harked back sometimes to the War of the French and Prussians. Its politics dealt with such names as “Dizzy” and Gladstone and Joseph Arch, the agricultural reformer—and, what was more to the point, a Norfolk man. In later years the village church saw the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s two Jubilees and King Edward’s Coronation—“a Norfolk landlord, and a rare good ’un,” as they liked to say in Swardeston.
