Eye - 22 September 2017

From flourishing flowers to silence and yakking

Flourishing flowers

Friendly blossoms can be found on the table of Rochester Meeting.

Jill K Bruford Clarke, of West Kent Area Meeting, shared: ‘In the small garden of Rochester Meeting house we have a Peace rose, a new white Quaker Light rose and a large, prolifically flowering, Quaker Star rose.

‘Friends often include the Quaker Star in the garden flower posy for the Meeting table. This arrangement caught my eye particularly as the roses complement the colour of Quaker faith & practice so well.’

In a cupboard with a kettle

A novel mention of Friends has been spotted in the tale of a tormented artist.

Roger Seal, of Spalding Meeting, told Eye that one of the characters in Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale says: ‘I like the way [Quakerism] manages to be mystical and no nonsense at the same time – meditation in plain surroundings. It offers you the divine but it keeps it in a plain pine cupboard alongside the kettle and cookies and Band-Aids.’

Guilty pleasures and mutant Smarties

The description of Quakerism in a recent Guardian article had some Friends raising their eyebrows.

‘Did George Fox laugh?’ A reader asked Eye after perusing Sheila Hayman’s piece, published on 8 July, explaining how she adopted simplicity as a way of life after growing up in New Earswick, ‘a Quaker village without a pub… [where] most of the inhabitants worked at Rowntree’s’.

Sheila wrote: ‘When I was a child, every kitchen window held a jam jar crammed with rancid silver milk bottle tops, destined for Guide Dogs for the Blind…

‘The paper from butter packets was kept for greasing cake tins. The thicker paper from cereal packets was kept for sandwiches. No piece of string, however minuscule, was ever thrown away.

‘All this was explained away by the privations of rationing, but really, it had more to do with those Quaker principles.

‘I don’t go to Quaker Meeting, but by the time I had my own family, I’d discovered climate change. So I do everything [my mother] did, only more so…

‘Of course, the crucial difference is that her motivation was the dogma of a rather joyless religion, whereas mine is the glorious fight to preserve the ecosystem for generations of baby turtles yet unborn.’

Thankfully an earlier article by Sheila Hayman, published in the Guardian on 10 June, shone a light on the sweeter side of life.

She fondly reminisces about her grandfather, who worked at Rowntree’s and, at Christmas, rescued the ‘sad casualties of the production lines’, including ‘mutant Smarties, bulbous KitKats, arthritically swollen Lions… it was comforting to know that even Quakers believed in indulging guilty pleasures, now and then.’

For the scrapbook…

The tale of a scuffle at a Quaker school has meandered its way through a family’s grapevine.

Richard Seebohm, of Oxford Meeting, told Eye: ‘I don’t know whether there is a scrapbook of Great Ayton stories following its sad closure. My aunt remembered picking up two cousins after school there during the second world war. A fight had broken out in the cloakroom and boots were being thrown. “Don’t worry, Aunt Felicity,” she was told, “it’s just the conscientious objectors against the non-conscientious objectors.”’

Silence and yakking

Joan Wright, from Lyme Regis, spied a mention of Friends in Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson.

‘The truth was going to come out anyway, might as well be Barry who told it. “Speaking truth to power.” That was what the Quakers said, he’d had to arrest a few in the eighties, peaceniks, yakking on about “direct action” and Cruise missiles.

‘For people who worshipped in silence they seemed to talk a lot.’

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