BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS

Jonathan

Bradley

Elegy for David

David, we know that you lie by the church at the Barrow Court that you loved, but where else might you be?

Your laugh made a long generous echo, now small, very small, but still sounding from the far distance of years.

The elegant words of your books speak out when we turn the page, and the notes of your music, though they sleep on the staves, revive and re-live through voices and strings, and your memory sings.

Your neighbours and friends who still live can walk by the primroses in spring on the way to our great stone-hewn house, whose walls heard your walking-stick tap on the steps and push on the door as you struggled with your failing frame.

We can still be uplifted by full peals of bells and reflect for a moment by the great cedars in silhouette on a late autumn afternoon; and we see through the same lead lights the jackdaws fly into the sunset.

We can pass through the great wooden gates under gables and chimneys and cast iron pipes to a well that may still hold memories, where, on a still night, the bats circle round and your favourite owl still calls; there are deer in the fields and hares in the lane.

You were not of your time, yet of all and any time. You’d rather read Austen than Amis or Pound, and favoured traditional meter and sound; you thought that a grating or poor fitting rhyme was quite a regrettable literary crime.

And, as for your musical tastes, they were clear: composers there were that you just wouldn’t hear –so Schubert and Wagner would bring on a smile but Cage or Stockhausen were simply just vile.

Wherever you are, don’t forget Barrow Court, and maybe we’ll see you again one day, with a book in your hand and your panama hat on the pathways and byways here on the estate with a chuckle and a “fancy that!” and a kind word for each of us.