Mother's Day in Essex

Sunday, March 22, 2009
Bishop Stortford, Essex

I awoke to another glorious day--this time in Essex. It is Mother's Day here in the UK and Rosa's mother Margaret from Manchester was with her at her place. We sat down to breakfast that included toasted Hot Cross Buns from the poem (usually seen around Lent) and then the Fradleys told me they would drive me around some interesting towns in their part of the world.

We drove first to Thaxted, a very old and very quaint town that sits right in the midst of the rolling Essex countryside. It was a good thing that Matt lost his way as we had the opportunity to see the little villages that dot the landscape in the simplest and yet most appealing of ways. At Thaxted, no one seemed to have awoken, except the folks who had found their way to the Norman Cathedral whose spire dominated the landscape. Thaxted also has a windmill, a rather unusual structure in the Essex countryside.

We discovered that the Parish Church of Thaxted dates from Norman times but is in a terrible state of disrepair attacked by woodworm and other deadlier sounding pests. It takes an enormous amount of money to keep such buildings standing in England and everywhere I go, I find on-going fund-raising activity to help support these churches. We arrived in the church at the end of the service and were invited repeatedly to join the congregation for coffee and chocolate biscuits. It is amazing to me how warm and hospitable these places are to strangers and how privileged they feel when you arrive to poke around their ageing monuments. Each woman who had 'mothered' anyone in her life had been presented with a little posy of daffodils and they walked out of the church with vivid yellow flowers in their hands.

Since it was only an easy walk towards the windmill, we passed by the church graveyard and made our way to the rather short structure that probably once ground corn for the area's farmers. The rural idyll was perfect at this point--horses grazing near by in pasture, the red roofs of the village lying almost submerged in a hollow in the terrain, the church spire rising up behind us and a thatched cottage around the bend.

Walking through the village streets with its tiny shops, we returned to our car, at which point the Fradleys decided to drive to Saffron Walden--a market town that dates from the medieval period. The drive continued to be picture-perfect and I have to say I enjoyed this part of our outing as much as I loved the little towns we visited.

Once again, after we parked out car, we went for a walk in the town which seemed far more upscale than Thaxted. This town has many listed buildings and many of them are unique for the 'pargetting' or decorative stucco work on their walls--which I had seen and learned about in Lavenham on my visit last week to Suffolk. I found a great deal of similarity between the landscape of Suffolk and Essex which, I suppose, is not surprising, as the counties kiss each other. When we passed by the beautiful Sun Inn, we also discovered that it was used as Oliver Cromwell's headquarters once upon a time. This was also the spot where I saw my first multiple frilled daffodils in the cathedral yard (yes, there is another Norman cathedral in this town). Indeed, daffodils were everywhere, many abundant banks of them glowing softly in the spring sunshine. People have already started planting their window boxes with primroses and the entire area seemed to be basking in Spring's early abundance.

On the way back, it was Rosa who suggested to Matt that we drive by Audley End House, a grand Tudor manor in the heart of the Essex countryside--a home once associated with the ill-fated Howards who had played such an important political role in the era of Henry VIII. Though the manor does not open to visitors until the end of March, we were able to stroll around the grounds landscaped by the legendary Lancelot "Capability" Brown and see the bridges that he constructed to look like a natural part of the garden. Geese, ducks and mallards paddled busily in the stream that encircles the house and with the sun shining abundantly upon it, it was a perfect spot to stop for pictures. I am very tempted to visit Audley End House, an English Heritage property, and I understand that there is a train from the station of the same name and then a mile walk, if one wishes to get there by public transport.

Mother's Day Lunch at the Fradley's:
Then, it was time for us to return to Bishop Stortford to the Fradley's home where Rosa got busy preparing the herb dumplings to place on the top of her lovely Beouf Bourgignon that was her special offering for Mother's Day lunch. The kitchen filled with the most appetizing aromas as the casserole cooked away merrily and bubbled forth. A little later, we sat down at the kitchen table to a delicious lunch with red broccoli served on the side. Rosa had made olive bread at home to accompany the meal and we used it to sop up the gravy which was amazingly flavorful--what with its combination of beef stock and red wine.

Not too long after our lovely meal, it was time for me to leave. Matt dropped me off at the local British Rail station and off I went towards Liverpool Street Station where I stopped off at Tesco to buy myself some groceries for the week. I was opening my door at exactly 5. 30 pm after what had been a truly exciting week for me--what with my travels in Italy initially and then the bonus day in Essex.

Needless to say, I spent the next five hours unpacking, catching up with my email and voice messages, sorting out items for laundry (which I did before going to bed) and getting ready for my classes at NYU tomorrow as I will be teaching all day. Tomorrow evening, I have a play at the West End to look forward to--Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge--and since the reviews have been uniformly dazzling, I know it will be a long but very eventful day indeed.