Bedfordshire Archives Service Catalogue
  • Reference
    AU34/21/7/16/31
  • Title
    Letter from R P S Waddy
  • Date free text
    8 December 1986
  • Production date
    From: 1986 To: 1986
  • Scope and Content
    A handwritten letter from R P S Waddy (former Rector of St Andrew's, Ampthill) to Honora Grimmer, on headed paper from Maiden Newton, Dorchester, Dorset: "My dear Nora, Isn't that a nice quotation? After 5 years at Ampthill, 7 years of Derbyshire and 7 of Norfolk: and now 7 1/2 of Dorset, I ought to have acquired the smell. Once again I satisfied the examiners that I am fit to drive for another year, so I still celebrate and preach nearly every Sunday - although there has been no Mars Movement to worship. Now that winter has come, Margaret can't come too: we are 25 yeards up a slope to the road, and she can only shuffle between two arthritic hips. But still we go on going on - yes, we listened to part of the Ampthill brains Frust last week (Christopher rang us up to warn us) without enjoying the argybargy of politicians. My trouble is arthritis in the thumbs, which makes watch-winding and spectacle polishing a painful process. But other people are always ready to clean one's glasses - it is the most subtle of insults to offer such a service when someone refuses to acknowledge that you are right and he is wrong - and for use after a car collision! In fact, we are still very well cared for: Stacy brings Giles Marking down most weekends. And Christopher manages to visit us from Kent. So I don't have to do all the sodding of the pottage, although I am improving - but I haven't yet tried red lentil broth. (I still think that NEB's worst effort is to substitute 'red coral' for 'rubies' - which devalues the price of Wisdom considerably!) All four grandchildren: Havana doing well at Bryanston (she was confirmed this summer), Drusilla Waddy at Benenden, and the boys still under 10, at a prep. school. I wanted to choose the best 30 of those 30,000 days and write them up for grandchildren: but I'm afraid it's too much like work. Like the old scribe of Boys Own Paper days, I eats well and I sleeps well. But when I see a job of work I go all of atremble. All good wishes for 1987 - I don't suppose you think more highly of old age - but what good days we have had! Yours affectionately, Pat Stacy Waddy" Accompanied by "an extract from Who (Never) Was Whom?" "The country clergyman must smell of heaven, as Esau smelt of the fields. So says The Country Parish report. Old hymns bade me 'Dare To Be A Daniel' and pleaded 'O Give Me Samuel's Feet': but never in 58 years as a priest have I been offered Esau as a model. Jacob, yes: that shrewd cook, whose 'sod pottage' was worth a birthright (NEB says it was lentil broth.) So in the happy After-life of our Further Retirement in Dorset, we are still nursing the unconquerable hope tha the Best is yet to be, in spite of our slowing down, and the aches and pains of 30,000 days. God keep us in His holy fear, and prepare us for a happy eternity. Thomas Ken"
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