Articles From The Classical Teacher

Sayers Omission 2

  ... when I was four-and-a-half years old, he was presented with the living of
Bluntisham-cum-Earith, in Huntingdonshire-an isolated country parish, which was one of the ancient ports or bridges to the Isle of Ely, and which contains to this day the bulwarks of a Roman camp.  I recollect very well my first arrival at the Rectory, wearing a brown pelisse and bonnet trimmed with feathers, and accompanied by my nurse and my maiden aunt, who carried a parrot in a cage. It was January, and the winter must have been mild that year, for the drive near the gate was already bright yellow with winter aconites-a plant which is said never to grow except where the soil has been watered by Roman blood.  For all I know, this is true; for they grow thickly in my present garden in Essex, which lies along the road by which the Emperor Claudius marched upon Colchester.  I do not know whether my father missed his small choristers amid the new duties of a country parish, or whether he was actuated only by a sense of the fitness of things and a regard for his daughter's intellectual welfare.  I know only that ...