17th century grammar, one handed clocks, thatch and wonder

>>  Sunday, October 26, 2014

 Cog had to visit a new music teacher this week, in a village not too far from where we live.


Whilst I was waiting for Cog to finish I noticed this building plaque. I pondered 'this/were' and couldn't make it sound right no matter how I read it. I'm sure the school and well endowed Sir George must know their grammar better than what I do.











I was so busy pondering the words, I didn't notice the truly noticeable thing about the front of this building until I was looking at the photograph later.

The one handed clock.

This is from the school website: 

"Single-handed clock, possibly one of only a dozen of its kind in the country, with the clock face hour intervals divided into quarters and half hours (in the 17th Century when the school was built, time was not so critically measured as we now do in the 21st Century)."
 I've said it before, but I live in a lovely part of the world and it's (mostly) tourist free.


 The church yard was peaceful and pretty normal for this sort of village church, but this memorial stood out like a sore thumb amongst the rest of the 'normal' headstones.  I pulled the ivy off the writing to read about a 15 month old girl.  Such a huge memorial for one so small, at at a time when infant mortality would have been fairly common.
But this memorial also stood out.  She was a vicar's wife.

Born 1891 and died 1973.  What a lot of change to live through.

She would have been :
9 when Queen Victoria died,
10 when Edward VII was crowned
20 when the Titanic sunk,
22 when World War 1 started,
26 when the Spanish flu epidemic was killing millions,
45 when King George was crowned
47 at the start of World War 2,
53 when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
61 when Queen Elizabeth was crowned
71 in the Cuban missile crisis

That's just the big stuff, what about the lesser events but the ones that would change life so much: electricity becoming common place, fridges, washing machines, television, telephones, even the changes to transport, the introduction of the social state, contraception and free love.   The world at the end of her life would have been unrecognisable from the world at the start.

An hour of my life spend wandering and pondering, an hour well spent.

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