Honest sweat

We celebrated harvest home last Sunday — late in the season by conventional standards, but postponed from the early days of autumn for the best of reasons. In our village, church and school are indivisible and it was agreed that the pupils should not switch from work to worship until half-term was upon them. So, in the words of the hymn, the thankful people came to a family service last Sunday morning and the school was grateful for all things bright and beautiful on Wednesday.

Harvest Festivals are not what they were in the days when Canon George Cherry Weaver MA (Oxon) was vicar of the village in which I was brought up. The bells which called us to worship, the lectern, in the shape of a brass spread eagle, and the organ music — which ‘swelled’ as organ music should before the service began — were comfortingly familiar. But it seems that, in the modern Church of England, hymn and prayer books are part of the past. No