Sometimes things happen to trigger memories. We have recently been watching the Poldark series on Netflix, not having seen the programmes when they were released initially. They serve to remind the watcher of the harshness of life in Cornwall in past times. Hunger and the grinding poverty of the poor together with limited medicine and rudimentary justice made for a cruel environment.
On 24th September, Derek Grimshaw wrote his superb Thought for the Day about Morwenstow and the eccentric Parson Hawker who is credited with the introduction of the Victorian Harvest Thanksgiving to this country. Parson Hawker was quite a character. In a remarkable Freudian slip on the same day, my digital sermon was attributed to William Glass – Neil’s accidental (but entirely understandable) misspelling of my name was the final link in a chain of memories.
My father’s family bailed out of Cornwall in the last years of the nineteenth century to come to live in East London and thence to Kent, Essex, and Suffolk. My Grandpa used to quote his elderly relatives saying how miserably hard life was for so many in Cornwall. For some reason, when they migrated east, they added the ‘e’ to our name, making it Glasse. Unsuspectingly landing us, the digital age generation of Glasses, with the problem of pointing out the spelling to stop emails going adrift – far from distinctive, it is just plain difficult – but others have worse problems.
In the early winter of 2017, my son Charles and I went back to Morwenstow for old times’ sake, as a thing to do, before Charles and Hannah were married. So, in the picture, young Glasse with an ‘e’ stands looking out of Hawker’s hut on Morwenstow cliff, for all I know, looking at the changeless view of that untameable sea which generations of people called Glass, without an ‘e’ looked at. Compared with them our lives are easy and yet without eccentrics like Hawker and without the tiggers of other people’s stories and mistakes, we might forget where we have come from.
The people of God are called to be forward looking, journeying people, always pressing on a looking up – but let us not forget those for whom times are hard and who might well wish they could add a letter to their name and make a fresh start in a better place.
A prayer
God of cliff and beach, sea and sky, past and present, in you we find all our future hope. We thank you for the lives we live, and we pray for those for whom life is difficult or who wish their name were not associated with unhappy memories or that they could journey to a better place. Bless us when we look back fondly and forward faithfully, we pray. Amen.