To Greet the Spring

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22540, 3 October 1936, Page 6 (Supplement)

To Greet the Spring

tability is apt to be questioned by the average landlady, and it was nearly 11 when we found ourselves in the police station, where we told all our troubles to the inspector, who had us escorted by a charming constable to the cleanest, cheapest room in Shrewsbury. The two chief thrills o£ Shrewsbury were buying some real antiques for about an eighth of what they would have been in London, and finding Mary Webb's grave and planting flowers on it. Mary is buried in the big cemetery, and the one grave in England that one would expect to be covered all over the whole year round with flowers, was bare of everything but a few-straggling geraniums. We planted hollyhocks at the headstone, and special prize candytufts all round the grave. An avenue of huge elms surrounds the cemetery, and under these Mary's grave lies. The headstone is engraved very simply. "Mary Gladys Webb,'' with the date of her birth and the date of her death. The sexton cannot understand why anyone who, " 'Afore she was married used to live just behind j-onder church," should attract people from all over the world, but he leads people from Canada, New Zealand, Germany, India, vind from every part where books are read to that white cross under the trees. It is quite beyond him. We caught a bus for Chester from the market square. This old walled city has one of the loveliest cathedrals in England. It was built by the Romans, only to be destroyed by the heathen Ethelfrith in 607. Its history is hazy for a few years, and then it appears to have been rebuilt by Ethelfreda, along with the waste of city and city walls. Here the old monks worked at their books, their illuminations, their flowers and their vegetables. It has lived through most of the history of England —one can read it all in the old red sandstone, and hear it in the silence of the cloisters.