I am an expert on the preservation and restoration of churches and have been so for many years<\/p>\n
Sadly as I have travelled from place to place I have had no time to find a wife to accompany me<\/p>\n
Just over two years ago I was asked to visit a church in Suffolk to oversee the placement of a rood screen which had been found derelict in a nearby manor house<\/p>\n
The screen which had connections to Jane Seymour had been removed during the poor 1849 restoration of the church and had been considered lost<\/p>\n
On a warm summers evening I was greeted at the village railway station by the vicar of St Michael\u2019s who was called Robert Abbott<\/p>\n
His family had lived in the parish for years and his father and grandfather had been vicars before him<\/p>\n
As we drove towards the church where the rood screen was now located we passed a rural cricket ground<\/p>\n
This was Robert\u2019s other passion<\/p>\n
Abbotsfield Cricket Club<\/p>\n
He played as much as he could and was a famed compiler of cricketing obituaries<\/p>\n
We parked the car and walked up the slight hill towards the church and were passed by a woman whose raven hair was as the darkest I have ever seen<\/p>\n
She smiled shyly as Robert muttered a greeting<\/p>\n
The rood screen was in better condition than I had anticipated as the preservation work had gone well although I realised that I would not be able to return it to its original position as the Victorian pews now infringed that space<\/p>\n
It was agreed that the rood screen would honour the Lady Chapel<\/p>\n
Over sherry that evening Robert handed me his book of his cricketing obituaries which had recently been published<\/p>\n
Turn to page seventy-six and you will find an obituary which has connections to this village <\/i><\/p>\n
THOMAS ARTHUR SIMMONDS \u2013 Died Port Talbot on 29th<\/sup> July 1932 aged 62. Thomas was not remembered as a cricketer of any great distinction having turned out infrequently for some of the minor counties<\/i><\/p>\n His main claim to fame is a romantic one as during a match between the County Clergy and a Wateringbury Eleven on the 15th<\/sup> of July 1899 he saved the life of a female spectator when she was in danger of being struck in the face by a cricket ball.<\/i><\/p>\n The incident happened when a mighty stroke by E S K Macbeth had cleared the boundary and was hurtling towards an unsuspecting Miss Burns who was preparing refeshment for the players Without a thought for his own safety Thomas dived across a row of chairs and diverted the errant stroke from the fair maiden <\/i><\/p>\n Miss Burns was only struck by a glancing blow on her breast bone and after a faint asked the brave cricketer to marry her<\/i><\/p>\n Many romances have connections with the game but I doubt if there was one that started in such dramatic circumstances <\/i><\/p>\n Robert smiled at me<\/p>\n There is something that I did not mention in the book and that was the strange birthmark that has occasioned all female descendants of Fanny Burns <\/i><\/p>\n He reached into a drawer and handed me a photograph dating from the 1960s<\/p>\n It was a beach scene showing a group of girls posing for the camera<\/p>\n If you look at the girl second from the left what do you see?<\/i><\/p>\n She has a marked resemblance to you Robert<\/i><\/p>\n She was my mother but what else do you see? <\/i><\/p>\n She has what looks like a bruise on her breastbone <\/i><\/p>\n It is not a bruise but the birthmark I noted <\/i><\/p>\n What an unusual place for a birthmark<\/i><\/p>\n Ever since the incident each female member of the family has been born with this birthmark <\/i><\/p>\n What an unusual story why did you not include this in your book? <\/i><\/p>\n It is a story for another book <\/i><\/p>\n The actual placement of the rood screen was more difficult that I had originally expected as I continued to find the many deficiencies in the rushed Victorian restoration<\/p>\n During this time I met Robert\u2019s sister Joyce who enthusiasically showed me her birth mark to my slight embarrassment<\/p>\n By the end of July my work was complete and the rood screen was in place<\/p>\n I was invited to the dedication service at which the Bishop of Norwich was to be present. I had also been invited to play in the County Clergy verses Wateringbury Eleven cricket match which was due to take place on the Saturday before the dedication<\/p>\n This famous match had been played every year for generations and created a great deal of interest locally<\/p>\n Although not an outstanding cricketer I had played for my school and university and had turned out occasionally for my village eleven when my work allowed me to<\/p>\n I was a competent batsman and normally batted in the middle order<\/p>\n On the day of the match there was not a cloud in the sky and the thermometer was well into the eighties<\/p>\n This attracted a large crowd many of whom watched the match from beneath coloured parasols<\/p>\n To my surprise I opened the order and had hit a quick twenty-one before my middle stump was taken out by a ball that I did not react to<\/p>\n As I sat in the pavilion drinking a cool glass of orange juice I noticed the raven haired woman I had seen on my first day in the village<\/p>\n She was wearing a dark blue cotton dress and was happily serving tea and other refreshments to the many people around her<\/p>\n Sadly my score of twenty-one was not exceeded by any other member County Clergy team and we were all out for eighty-six<\/p>\n After a break we took the field and I was asked to field on the boundary as I looked the most athletic<\/p>\n To my surprise our opponents were making heavy weather of chasing our moderate score and I found myself almost unoccupied<\/p>\n Then suddenly their burly ginger haired batsman caught a poor ball with all his might and the ball\u00a0 disappeared into the pristine blue sky<\/p>\n It was heading in my direction and as I prepared for the catch it I realised to my horror that ball was going to fly over me into the crowd<\/p>\n I ran blindly over the boundary rope in an attempt to push the ball away from the spectators and this was really my last memory of the event<\/p>\n My sweet brave man <\/i><\/p>\n These were the first words I heard<\/p>\n Keep still I think your nose is broken<\/i><\/p>\n It was then I realised that my face was covered with blood having come into contact with cricket ball<\/p>\n I could taste blood in my mouth and could only see out of one eye<\/p>\n The raven hared woman was cradling me in her lap and as she leant forward I noticed that on her breast bone she too had the birthmarkbut I did not study it for long as I passed out again soon afterwards<\/p>\n The match was abandoned as a draw as my injury was quite severe.I had not only broken my nose but the ball had damaged my eye socket which necessitated minor surgery<\/p>\n I was in hospital for nearly a week and was visited every day by the raven haired woman whose name I found out was Virginia<\/p>\n She was the cousin of Joyce and the great granddaughter of Fanny Burns<\/p>\n We were engaged before the month was cold and were married in the village church nine months later<\/p>\n The rood screen that had brought me to Abbotsfield had been finely decorated for the occasion and I looked at it with pride as we approached the altar<\/p>\n Our first born was a girl who we named Fanny and I noticed as she lay in her mother\u2019s arms on the day of her birth that she had not inherited the birthmark of her ancestor<\/p>\n The cricket match had ended<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am an expert on the preservation and restoration of churches and have been so for many years Sadly as I have travelled from place to place I have had no time to find a wife to accompany me Just over two years ago I was asked to visit a church in Suffolk to oversee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/i><\/p>\n