Ida Gandy
author of Heart of a Village
ANYONE who visited that Aldbourne festival of 1970 as I did at the instigation of Mrs Ida Gandy, will appreciate that it has a pride and an individuality all of its own.
I have had no intimate association with Aldbourne though I recall that it gave me my first newspaper job. When Lady Currie of Upper Upham died I was set to copy out in laborious longhand the details of her life from the dusty files.
Then Ida Gandy went to live at Upper Sixpenny, Aldbourne.
Then She has always been one to capture the feel of a place in a book, notably in the past the village of Bishop's Cannings of which her father was Vicar, in A Wiltshire Childhood and Round About the Little Steeple.
A year or more ago I used to see regularly Mr Oliver Hawkins, of Aldbourne, and once when I asked him for news of Mrs Gandy he took me into a corner and whispered confidentially that she was a writing a new book .
Surely this would be a book on Aldbourne. It was. Today it appears on the bookstalls. The
once familiar figure, who on a journey to Hungerford to fetch his pension, sat down by the roadside and died. He had helped to carry Napoleon's coffin at St Helena.
For isolated Aldbourne could never escape what was going on in the outside world, the Civil War, when as Ida Gandy says, the kneeling figures of the Goddard family in St Michael's Church lost their fingers (hands too, incidentally), the agricultural revolution, transportation, emigration, the Enclosure Act.
Some of the characters appear anonymously, the farmer's wife who took in washing to save sovereigns to buy a few more acres for the cows; the four-year-old son of the Manor who was carried howling all the way up to the belfry to set the new clock going; a woman who lit her coper with a mass of paper under a faulty chimney-- unpopular for Aldbourne had been devastated by fire more than once.
May I stick my neck out in the belief that Ida Gandy herself appears anonymously in these pages. Could she be that owner of a cottage and a bank that echoed the church bells so that she discovered she had "bought n echo as well as a cottage"?.
"the best, sweetest and fattest in England. Those evergreen names that crop up, Stacey, Barnes, Jerram, Liddiard, all continuing to make up the village with its feast and band and carnival, where the dandelion is its patron saint and the swift its signature bird.
Then of course and inevitably, the pond and the tale which give Aldbourne natives the epithet "A' born Dabchicks", at first the butt of ribaldry from the rival Ramsbury but later a source of pride.
Ida Gandy's eye is happily a critical one as the pond testifies.
Men arrived to "paint the floor of the pond sky-blue to brighten it up for the Feast; a surprising decision taken by the parish council when it was either in exuberant mood or too exhausted by a long meeting to realise what it was doing."
In fact in 1953 "a little concrete prison robbed it of its own water supply and kept clean and tidy. But never again can Aldbourne claim that it has a real pond".
It is redeemed, it seems, because it still reflects the parish church. No redemption, however, for "a new Vicarage (which) has been built on the steep hillside, very close to the church against the wishes of