Margery

 I don't have any photos of Margery, or I'd put one here.

The Ashburnham Stable Family tasked itself with praying for revival in East Sussex, and with maintaining a 24/7 prayer presence in the stable block at Ashburnham. They also recommended all of us form prayer triplets or find prayer partners, because "Where two or three meet together in My name, there I am in the midst of them."

It was natural for Margery to get together with me, because our homes were within walking distance of each other. As I had five young children, we met at her place!

So every week we set aside a morning to pray together for revival in East Sussex, for the church and the world, and for friends in need of prayer.

Margery's home was the ground floor of a beautiful old house set in spacious and leafy grounds. This was the way in to where she lived.

Her garden had tall, old trees which she loved and defended passionately against the sometimes wistful longings of others who lived in that house to fell one or two. Her garden was not exactly wild and not exactly tame either. She had a grassy patch at the centre that she mowed, and places to compost grass cuttings and hedge clippings. By her front door she had a huge pink hydrangea that she loved, and in the summer she liked to cut blooms from it and put them in a vase with fiery orange crocosmia, delighting in the combination.

She used to save crusts of bread and small pieces of cheese for a robin who came to her doorstep — US friends, your robins aren't the same as English ones; ours look like this.

She had entered agreements with her neighbours that she adhered to strictly — Margery was quite firm and determined, I expect they had to adhere to said agreements as well. This included things like how early in the morning (or late at night) they were allowed to flush the lavatory and run the bath, and taking care to avoid being noisy in the house.

Margery was old-fashioned in her habits of mind and life — in age she was midway between my mother and my grandmother, born on the day the first world war was declared in 1914. Having lived through two world wars, she retained the ingrained patterns of practical frugality that characterised her generation. I remember a day when, toward the end of her life when her sight was going, she asked me to check her fridge and make sure nothing was going off. Setting about this I discovered a small dark lump of stuff in the middle of a tea-plate, and asked her what it was and if I should throw it out. She was horrified! Oh no, that was still good for re-hydrating and further use. It was, she explained, the final portion of meat from a tin of corned beef she'd been slowly eating.

Every day for supper she had two and a half slices of toasted Hovis bread; she had three at one point but decided she was getting fat and reduced it to two and a half. 

She liked brie with chicory. She drank Lapsang Souchong tea brewed in a dark brown teapot (the kind we all had years ago) —

— poured into elegant plain white china cups.

She made (every week) a wartime traybake that was halfway between a cake and a cookie, in two flavours — spiced and with fruit, or chocolate. Both were simple but delicious.

She had been a girl in the days before the high streets with their shops full of mass-produced goods. Twice a year – once in readiness for winter and once in readiness for summer — a dressmaker would come to her family home to measure them for the clothing they needed this time. Perhaps two summer dresses, and maybe a tweed skirt and two blouses for the cold weather? They would have knitted their own cardigans and sweaters of course.

Once I learned about autism and neurodivergence, I realised that Margery was definitely on the spectrum. Nothing was easy for her, nothing flowed simply, she planned and strategised and defined everything. She talked sometimes of how she had learned to make friends. As a young woman she felt the want of friends, but didn't know how to make a friend; so she thought about it until she evolved a strategy (she never said what it was) that proved successful. But then she realised having only one friend could be rather suffocating, so she employed the same strategy and made a second friend, and having two was just right.

In considering people, she was neither harsh nor kind, she was truthful and accurate, balancing what she knew of their weaknesses and strengths in the light of their benefits and adversities.

To our praying she brought absolute unshakable conviction in the power and goodness of God. She believed in the power of God to heal. She averred that no person ever needs to die of illness, that every condition and ailment could be healed, and death would come when God called us home.

She was very analytical in her thinking; she used to say that she had a masculine mind. This manifested in all sorts of little ways. One example of it was that she took her car to the garage to have the mechanic design and fit an extension of about an inch and a half to the turn signal lever, so it was precisely where she wanted it to be. Another example was the way, sometimes when I went to see her, she'd tell me, "I have had three shocks this week" (or however many it was), and then proceed to detail happenings — whether trivial or profound — that had jarred her inner being and upset her equilibrium. In everything she was honest, particular, and thoughtful. 

Her income was modest, and she regarded all of it as belonging to God. In her giving she was astonishingly generous, and she tried to identify people in need but who qualified for no government or charitable assistance. She was very aware of how costly were things like moving house, and when she saw someone — perhaps a young couple just starting out — whom she thought might need help, she'd take it into prayer and ask God a) if she should give them some money, and b) exactly how much. Those were the days when South Africa was still an apartheid state, and Margery used to send regular (large) gifts to a pastor growing a church in the townships.

She had a particular concern that we should pray during August, when so many prayer groups break for summer activities and vacations — she said August was a dangerous month, when we were in peril of war starting, partly because people had stopped praying.

She cut her own hair, and she planned her clothing purchases very carefully using the Colour-Me-Beautiful seasonal designations. She always wore the same brand of shoes (Ecco), and she kept a black velvet jacket for special occasions, worn with a silk scarf in the correct colours for her (Spring). She kept some pale pink items of clothing especially for when she had to go and see a bureaucratic official to get something done; she said pale pink was very good for making a woman look harmless. And she did get things done, persuading the council to add a bus shelter for people getting wet in the rain, and a traffic island giving a halfway point of safety for pedestrians on a busy stretch of road.

She had no jewellery except a Taizé cross on a leather thong that she always wore. I think hers was brass, and made as a cross-shaped space cut within a circle, but the shape of it was like this —

She set aside Wednesdays every week without fail for her creative work as an artist; she made a distinction between art and craft — if she was inspired, she'd design and create on a Wednesday, but if ideas and dried up she'd work on the craft aspect, the making.

Every single thing in her home was an art piece, beautifully designed and specially chosen and loved. In her hallway, which was not a corridor but an actual room, she had her dining table — one of the Arkana whitetulip tables from the 1960s, like this.

She never got tired of things; she loved them for their design. The rooms of her house were large and lofty, and she painted them white, except for one wall in a bold colour. 

She didn't tidy up too carefully — she would let her huge display of hydrangeas in a vase just stay there dead — because she said a certain amount of disorder created interesting shapes useful for creating designs.

Twice she had seen angels; once when her husband Bill died and (at his funeral) she had a vision of heaven opening and the angels singing Gloria in excelsis Deo; and once when she woke up in the morning and saw an angel ascending by the window.

Oh, I could tell you so much about her. I still miss her. She was a true spirit, and the very best of friends.