Kipling’s ‘The Gardener’

I went to our village Baptist church this Easter Sunday evening for ‘Songs of Praise’, a joint service. The minister, Sydneysider Steve Rodda, talked about Mary Magdalene, who asked a man she took to be the gardener where they had taken Jesus’s body. It’s one of the most touching moments in all the gospels.

Afterwards I talked to Steve about Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘The Gardener’. It’s about a woman who goes in search of her nephew’s grave in Belgium after the end of the First World War.

A late work, it may be his finest, most poignant short story – Kipling lost his own son on the Western Front, of course. I re-read it often, as I did on my return home. Really, one has to go at it twice, maybe more often, to understand it more fully.

Here it is: http://www.greatwar.nl/books/gardener/gardener.html

 

Still no girls in Chichester Cathedral’s choir

Visiting Chichester, wonderful singing from the Cathedral Choir at Evensong on Easter Sunday. Magnificat and Nunc dimittis by Stanford. The anthem: the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah.

So much more musical than I recall them from previous services over the past two decades - the improvement evidently springing from their superb, musicianly “choirmaster”, Sarah Baldock (above).

But why has she not yet enabled girls to join? They are still an all-male outfit.

Anachronistic. No?

And given that boys’ voices break at such a young age nowadays, there must be a reduction in musical maturity among the trebles compared with, say, a century ago. Enabling slightly older girls to join would solve this problem at a stroke.