Bedfordshire Archives Service Catalogue
  • Reference
    AU34/21/7/16/33
  • Title
    Letter from R P S Waddy
  • Date free text
    31 December 1987
  • Production date
    From: 1987 To: 1987
  • 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, Thank you very much for the Church and Towns: I am glad that my dish of nostalgia was recorded for history, and I have enjoyed the history-to-date of all that is happening now. They were awaiting my return from a family Christmas in Kent, with Christopher and three grandchildren. I was allowed to go to sllep wherever and whenever I wanted to. I recommend this to you in case you still feel, as I did once, that sleep was what you saved up for after death: if I may coin an expression, it knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, here and now - knitting, according to the collect for All Saints, is what we are recommended to do. End of moral. What enabled this to happen was that Daniel (10) and Jocelyn (7) were given a computer, and spent happy hours in the attic, inventing games. They even offered to explain it all to me, but I've saved that for next visit! Meanwhile Judy - Stacy Marking - has taken Giles and Havana, via Sri Lanka, to ski in Kashmir, where the midwinter is still bleak and they can ski-amid-the-winter-snow, unlike all those poor Swiss. It is sad that you too are wearing thin and becoming dependent. I suppose it is just what 'second childhood' always meant, but that does not make it any easier to bear. I'm glad that you prefer birds to cats or dogs - speaking as one who is in charge of Havana's ancient cat for six whole weeks. There is a wonderful scrap in the life of Ian Ramsay, once bishop of Durham. Lying in the little ward, with virtually no outlook, his source of joy was the light of a street-lamp shining on the wet twigs of a tree just outside the window. Light and growth and a Pattern: there to the eye of faith were a glimpse of God. There is always something just outside the window, isn't there? (I've just found the story of the Queen, at Christmas 1929, listening to carols and the Good Tidings 'to You and Old Mankind' and saying to George V, 'That's you, grandpa. You are old, and you are very kind.') So - may 1988 be all that God wants for us. Yours affectionately, Pat Stacy Waddy"
  • Level of description
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