December 2008/January 2009

Obituary: John Brewerton, 1931-2008

A lot of villagers remember John on his allotment plot and from his picture on the Village Calendar. He will also be remembered for his performance as the serf in the village ‘Son et Lumière’ in St Agatha’s church to celebrate the Millennium, making everyone laugh.

John was also Father Christmas for the Bishopswood School which he loved doing. He had to give all this up when he became ill.

John was originally from Wantage, moving to Wallingford in 1957 and to Brightwell in 1996.

John did his National Service in the army and saw time in Korea where he was awarded medals including the United Nations’ Service Medal. He also spent time in Japan recovering from injury. His regiment was on parade in London for the Queen’s coronation. In 1962 he was rewarded for outstanding service and devotion for duty to Her Majesty.

John worked for pressed steel for 35 years. When he retired he became a full-time gardener.

My family and I wish to thank everyone for all their support and kind words and cards – such a comfort to us all. Well over 100 people came to the church service and over 50 to the wake in the Red Lion. A big ‘thank you’ to Sue and her staff for doing us so proud, and to the undertaker, Roger Barker, for his support and ensuring the day went so well. Thank you to the Vicar for the lovely service, and to the piper who played so beautifully.

A total of £370.15 from the collection at the church service has been given to the Nuffield Orthopaedic centre, and £90 from donations sent to the house has been given to the British Legion.

Janet Brewerton

Goodnight John Boy

This poem was written and read in church by John’s grand-daughter, Claire Copley.

If you should miss me
Close your eyes tight.
I’m under the apple tree
I’m in the sunlight.
My chin on my chest
So peaceful and calm
I’m silently sleeping
I’m having a rest.

My hands do not hurt
I don’t need my chair
I’m quietly watching,
I’m just over there.

Do not worry and don’t be so sad,
Remember me smiling and the good times we had.
I’m happy here waiting with people I love
Driving that motorbike and sidecar somewhere up above.

I know you will miss me but try not to a lot,
I’m over there digging in the allotment plot.
I’m eating jam tarts, apple crumble all sugar and cream,
I’ll visit you sometimes in a very nice dream.

When you plant bulbs and seeds,
I’ll look over your shoulder.
When your children are born,
I’ll watch them grow older.
Take my advice sit out in the sun
Spend time with loved ones and have lots of fun.

One night soon when your hearts full of joy,
Remember me before turning off the light and say “Goodnight John Boy.”

Claire Copley

Requiem for Remembrance Sunday

Conductor Norman Large
On this special day of Thanksgiving and Remembrance, what a delight it was to attend the concert in St Agatha’s church.

The church choir had boldly set out to rehearse Fauré's Requiem in the confidence that their numbers would be augmented by others wishing to share in the singing of this beautiful work. No less than 26 singers responded to their requests for help. Volunteers came from the village and elsewhere and together they formed a really fine choir to make this event a truly memorable occasion.

The programme was skilfully enhanced by a great selection of poems and readings. We were entertained with Houseman’s ‘The Lads in Their Hundreds’ by a gentle Yorkshire accent and Rossetti’s ‘Remember’ also a selection from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’. We heard moving selections from Rupert Brooke and John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Field’ all sensitively woven into the programme of music and to quote the programme ‘the readings selected were appropriate for Remembrance Sunday to be interspersed with music in what might be described as a semi-liturgical format’.

Polly Dow sang a beautiful Pie Jesu and the baritone Chris Mousely –Jones was sensitive in his rendering of the Libera Me. We owe our thanks to these soloists and the choir and conductor Norman Large for a first class performance.

How fortunate we are to have such enthusiasm in our church choir and church wardens to put this programme together for us and how grateful we are for the talent of our church organist, Derek Nightingale, for his accomplishment on the organ – no mean feat when he is playing with his back to the conductor!

The event was very well supported and everyone had a splendid evening to remember.

The proceeds for the evening (£454) were divided equally and donated to the British Legion and to St Agatha’s Church funds.

Gloria Hamilton-Peach

Parish Church

I’ve just had a brisk, if wet, walk along the Thames path. There’s a point at a bend in the path where you turn the corner to see, in spring and summer particularly, a corridor of green stretching out in front of you for at least a hundred yards. It must be something to do with the wet summer but I’m told the turning of the leaves will be particularly slow and beautiful this year as we head into winter.

Today, early November, ‘the tunnel’ was every shade of green into yellow ochre – it was quite a feast for the eyes if I stopped long enough, keen as I was to be hurrying along, to appreciate it. And soon they’ll be ‘chopping down trees and putting up reindeer’ as the Joni Mitchell song goes, and Christmas will be upon us again. I think our job, if we can ‘hang in there’, is to welcome the season slowly and to be grateful for the changes in our lives and the lives of those around us, however fun or difficult, which the end of the year will bring.

Our lives tend to be so fragmentary these days – pitched into summer before spring’s over, pitched into Christmas before we’ve seen the leaves turn. We need to regularly stop and try to ‘join up the dots’ so to speak. I’m in danger, for example, of forgetting the euphoria of the election of America’s first mixed race president; quite a landmark, whatever your politics. Back in the dark days following the assassination of JFK, an American Jesuit wrote a book called ‘America is Hard to Find’. This afternoon I was sitting at table with a couple of parishioners and had been presented by their son with a hugely detailed drawing of musketeers fighting the cardinal’s men, in a book called ‘Where’s Wally’. It proved to be beyond me; I couldn’t find Wally amidst all that confusion – I needed longer to study the picture.

However long it takes this yuletide, I do hope you at least manage to find glimpses of the Christ child; he comes to us so often in hidden packages – wrapped up as something else. He surprises us, sometimes with sorrow, sometimes by joy; all we have to do, like the rabbi said, is to try to meet him half-way, try joining up the dots in our lives.

Jeremy Goulston

Website News

If you haven’t visited the village website for a while, you should check out our latest additions at www.brightwellcumsotwell.co.uk. Besides news, which is regularly updated, there are picture and video galleries of Datchet Green ducks, the Teddy Bear Parachute Drop, the Village Fete and the Cricket Club anniversary match. There is also the Visitor’s Page, Trevor Twentyman’s history of the Sinodun Players, new family histories – and, of course, highlights from The Villager.

The last time I logged on, the counter at the bottom of the Home Page told me I was visitor number 31,470. This is actually an underestimate, since the counter was added a few months after the site was launched, in May 2004, but by any calculations it’s pretty good going. We regularly receive between 100 to 250 hits a day. The top 10 pages for Remembrance week in November were:

1. Community Listings
2. News
3. Business Listings
4. Calendar
5. Visitors' page
6. Village Life
7. History
8. Links
9. Brightwell Garage
10. Royal British Legion

The British Legion site was obviously topical, and the Visitor's page is a new entry – otherwise the rest of the pages are consistently present in the top 10.

Sally Dugan and Myron Edwards

Brightwell Free Church: Harvest, bonfires and Christmas

I always enjoy reading The Villager and hope you do too. A lot of effort goes into producing it and those that do so are deserving of our thanks. Two items in the last edition formed the basis of a sermon I preached at our harvest festival in October. One was the correspondence concerning bonfires; the other was the comments on the harvest. One of the few harvest hymns in the hymn book is “Come ye thankful people come” which includes the line “All is safely gathered in”. Angus Dart made it clear that all was not safely gathered in at the time he wrote the item and there must have been other years too when the song was premature. Of course that does not mean we should not be thankful for what has been gathered in, but what is the link with bonfires?

The same 19th Century hymn by Henry Alford refers to the parable that Jesus told about a farmer who sowed good seed but an enemy got in and sowed weeds. The workers wanted to try to dig out the weeds but the farmer was concerned that the wheat would be damaged so he told them to let both grow together, harvest them together then separate them, the wheat to be stored and the weeds to be thrown on the bonfire. I wonder if Jesus in telling this had thought about saving the planet by reducing carbon emissions. I suspect that is not what was in his mind since He spoke more about saving people’s souls than saving the planet. In fact He made it clear that the planet will not last forever. Like seed time and harvest it has a beginning and an end. It is the people who will last forever.

The next question then is who are the wheat and who are the weeds. Henry Alford wrote “Lord of the harvest, grant that we, wholesome grain and pure may be”. The problem with that is that none of us can claim absolute purity or wholesomeness so here we come to the bit about new beginnings. Jesus told another parable about a sower who went out and sowed good seed. Some fell on hard ground and some on good ground. The good ground received it and the seed grew. The hard ground didn’t and it didn’t. He explained that the seed in this case was the “word of God”. One could take this at its most obvious meaning that it was the words that He spoke or, looking a little deeper, you could recognise, as John did in his gospel when he said that “The Word became flesh and lived among us”, that The Word is Jesus himself.

So how do we become “wholesome and pure”? The answer is clear. We can’t do it ourselves, we do it by receiving Jesus, by believing in Him, by trusting Him. That is why the coming of Jesus was such a momentous event, because he reconciled man to God. It is the turning point in the whole of history. This was recognised by the use of AD and BC to define our calendar and by celebrating Christmas. There are moves to try to eliminate Jesus from our calendar and our culture and to an extent they are succeeding but He cannot and will not be eliminated. The harvest will happen one day whether we like it or not and whether we reduce our carbon emissions or not. All is not yet safely gathered in. What matters to you and to me is what the Lord of the harvest thinks of us and that depends on what we think of Jesus. We wish you all a very happy Christmas and hope and pray that you will receive Him who we celebrate.

Neville Burt

Molecular Reactions

Last year, 2007, was wet enough to leave me with one unused butt at the end of the summer. This summer it has been ridiculous. I have had two overflowing butts all summer. The only water used has been to wash mud off hands and boots. And do you know what, we will soon have a water tap on site. The idea I think is to squirt it back to Thames Water and save them the bother of an Abingdon reservoir.

Forget water, how about your Moles I hear you ask. Thank you, but sadly they are alive and well. What you need to know is that in the depth of last winter I surrounded The Ponderosa with buried planks, 6 inches deep. Indeed, I thought I was a molecular-free zone until I tried to harvest potatoes. No molehills had given away their presence. But there they were, in a tunnel 8 inches down. It started at the compost heap, round the potatoes, past asparagus, through 180 degrees under strawberries and raspberries, back by beans and onions, to re-enter the compost HQ at the pumpkins. A molecular highway had secretly been constructed, a tunnel worn smooth by rushing moles, which you can tell they traverse in an anticlockwise direction. Occasional exits, which I thought were made by mice, access the surface no doubt to allow them to devour any poor unsuspecting worms forced above ground by the incessant monsoonal deluge.

Now, inspired by CERN at Geneva and the start of experiments two months ago to recreate the Big Bang, I have devised yet another cunning plan to rid my world of moles. But I need your help. Find me some right handed moles. What I want to do is fire them through the tunnel but clearly in the opposite direction to mine. Imagine it, molecular disintegration, mole on mole collisions, sub-atomic mole particles flying in all directions. It’s delicious.

And if its the end, that last split second before our world disappears back into the Black Hole from whence we came, then for a moment I could be really, really famous. Forget the Higgs Boson, think Debneys Moleson, the first, and under such circumstances, definitely the last, furry particle known to physics.

Tony Debney

Bach Centre: Brightwell Film Stars

A new DVD on Dr Bach's life and work, including his discovery of the Bach flower remedies, is now available from the Bach Centre.

Nelsons Ltd, who make and distribute Bach Original Flower Remedies, commissioned Bach Flower Remedies: The Journey to Simple Healing, and the film was produced with the help of the Bach Centre. Most of the filming took place in the village. A few scenes were shot in the Red Lion, and if you look closely you can spot local people playing the part of locals! – including Red Lion landlady Sue Robson.

The DVD is being used on Bach International Education Programme courses around the world, and as such features subtitles in Czech, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian.

Nelsons are not distributing the film commercially, but the Bach Centre has secured exclusive rights to sell it to visitors to Mount Vernon, and to mail order customers.

Stefan Ball