Reflection Diary: March

It’s around 5.30am. I’ve woken up thanks to the early spring sunlight, and I’m hearing voices.

A casual observer might think it’s my guilty conscience speaking, to judge by my ‘well-furnished’ desk. Or perhaps that I’m being haunted (also possible). Those who know me best would swear I’m not exactly the type to wake up with the Book of Isaiah looming foremost in my mind. Yet here I am. And it’s not Nick Robinson from the Today programme waking me up today; it’s a voice from the past.

It’s my own fault. Until late last night I was comparing ‘preambles’ in early modern wills - the opening section that often begins with the phrase ‘In the name of God, Amen’, before usually laying out in formulaic fashion a commitment of faith and a desire for a Christian burial. But I fancied I had started to notice how the language changed, from the sparer, harder English in our earliest texts to those of a few decades later, softened perhaps by growing familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer, and thus more rhythmic in their cadences, more detailed and poetic in their imagery, and consequently far more musical to my ear.

But I can’t dwell on it. Because, blaring in my other ear, is a mariner’s trumpet.

I quietly visualised the scene of his friends carousing and toasting his name, drinking up the proceeds of his bequest, and once the strapline (and title) urging them to ‘blow his old trumpet’ emerged, the song took shape.

"Being sick in his body
Yet perfect in mind
John made his bequests
For his shipmates in kind:

Let us blow his old trumpet
And pass round the bowl
Here’s a health to John Lux
And may God bless his soul"

By mid-afternoon it was finished.

Some voices require careful attention in order to be ‘heard’. Others blaze from the rooftops. So it is with Whitelock, an incredibly wealthy 18th century gentleman whose self-penned will brims at times with a rare venom. Square in his sights is his son’s ex-wife, and her viper’s brood of ‘naughty, nasty persons’ who appear to be hatching cunning plans for all manner of misdeeds. Sadly, we don’t seem to have his original document, just the scrivener’s copy, so I can’t study his handwriting as well. I imagine a fevered, scratching hand, with a thick goose quill and a generous ink pot. His scandalised and, at times, acidic turn of phrase is reminiscent of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ and his suspicions surrounding a crooked lawyer, conspiring catholics and familiar Irish tropes paint a vivid picture of a man who would never, ever let sleeping dogs lie.

Only the week before, on what felt like the first true day of Spring, I had headed for a wonderfully engaging talk given by Laura to a group of academics, volunteers and anyone else intrigued by how the project was progressing. We heard of another will with an ‘inner drama’ - a story within a story of an unpaid debt, a character slighted and a spell behind bars. Wills aren’t just lists of bequests; they can also be reckonings, where injustices may be petitioned and uncomfortable secrets shared as a kind of expiation.

The next day I am back working at my kitchen table (I’m still avoiding the desk). I don’t need many tools. An old scribbling diary, fountain pens (I think better that way), a pencil - and, bizarrely, my old school wooden ruler. Now warped with age, in a rather baroque fashion I like the way it can only aspire to draw straight lines. Still capitally engraved in biro with my SURNAME at one end, it is stripped of varnish at the other when I unwisely used it to measure the depth of a batch of marmalade. Yet it’s always there when I need to write out staves on a diary, a notebook or paper bag, before the precious scrap of music or lyrics that have popped into my head blow away into the nether distance, like a parking ticket at the beach. The most important tool I need to hand is that most precious of commodities these days: time.

And it is time itself which resonates most strongly as I try to imagine myself as the wife of an Exeter Alderman of the mid 1500s. Living in the shadow of the great cathedral transept towers, her husband was an upstanding pillar of society, a puritan so ready for death that he had his tombstone prepped months in advance and then he parked it in the hall. His requested funeral rites are performative, even a touch theatrical, and there is also the matter of a locked box (we do not know the contents) with two keys, neither of which will be given to his widow. Time waiting for death. The time after, in the hands of the executor and other actors, and before various specific requests can be enacted: mourning rings made, dinners prepared, long black gloves worn. Time that is somehow not yet hers, but is still - despite being dead - unquestionably his.

Speaking of time - it’s getting late. And there is that voice again.

"I hear you", I say to the vacant room.

"But - if you’ll indulge me - I’m going to crack on with these lyrics."

That desk next door will have to wait.