Lift up Your Hearts

For the fourth Sunday in Advent, as the church considers the imminence of the birth of the Christ, part of the Invocacio ad Mariam from the Second Nun's Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, translated by Neville Coghill (Tr 1913).

Image of the Mother and Child in the Haileybury Chapel

Thou maid and mother, daughter of thy Son,

Thou well of mercy, balm to sinful nature,

In whom God chose His dwelling, as in one

Humblest and highest over every creature,

Who gav'st such nobleness to human feature

That God had no disdain to clothe and wind

His Son in flesh and blood of human kind.

Within the blissful cloister of thy womb

There took man's shape the eternal love and peace,

Lord and guide of the trinal circle, whom

The heavens and earth and sea shall never cease

To glorify, pure virgin the increase

Of whose fair body, never by man mated,

was the Creator of all things created.

Off Topic

I cannot find a way to link this to Haileybury unless to note that wherever young people are there is a digital life, and that is certainly true round College. Anyway, I thought it was fun and worth the link.

Where is Bobs?

It was the end of term today and I have made the journey yet again up the A10. I was late because of the traffic. My spy in Lawrence told me about a bit of nomenclature I did not know. "I was waiting for you at Bobs."

Given what seems the inexorable decline of Haileybury slang I was quite pleased to hear that new words are developing after all.

Where is Bobs? Scroll down for the answer.

Not sure whether Bobs should have an apostrophe… 

Bobs "Back of Big School."

Garden House

When Dr Henley, first Principal of the East India College, retired the Company refused to 'buy in' his effects. Despite his stipend of £1,000 Henley was hard up and he sold some of his things. Specifically he sold a 'Garden House' to Professor Malthus, who erected it in the Hailey Garden. The garden is described in a letter quoted by Patricia James in her biography of Malthus, and maybe as the weather gets colder again now we can take heart from the beautiful description of Spring in the Hailey Garden:

The House is in a cluster of tall shrubs and young trees, with a little bit of smooth lawn sloping to a bright pond, in which old weeping willows are dipping their hair, and rows of young pear trees admiring their blooming faces… There are young horse-chestnuts with flowers half a yard long, fresh full-clustered white lilacs, tall Guelder roses, broad spreading pear and cherry trees, low thickets off blooming sloe, and crowds of juicy looking detached thorns, quite covered with their blooming May flowers, half open like ivory filigree, and half shut like Indian pears… and resounding with nightingales, and thrushes, and sky-larks, shrilling high up, overhead, among dazzling slow sailing clouds.

No wonder Malthus liked to be outside, and the tradition is that in the 'garden house' he worked through his great theories of population.

Generations of Haileybury swimmers will know the garden house as the "Wings Hut" at the shallow end of the old pool. There it still stands, sadly dilapidated. There is talk of trying to get it fixed up, which would be a good thing. But where then to put it? The Hailey Garden is now mainly lawn and the ponds are gone. Maybe it should go back to the Master and be placed near the Moorhen Pond where still the willows dip their hair in the still waters.

Cloaca

The eldest son having to go to the orthodontist this morning and the Council meeting on Friday together with an ordinary pick up on Saturday means that I feel as though I have been living on the A10 over the last few days. I was pleased at the Haileybury end of one of the trips that the Bradby was open so that I could answer the call of nature.

Not the least shock of going round the new Hailey after the refurbishment to make the House ready for girls was to discover that my former study has been turned into a toilet. I always thought that the infamous White City (demolished in 1961) was just a well intentioned Edwardian mistake. It was built during the rule of Wynne Wilson to remove the need for earth closets in the dormitories. It seems however that even Old Haileybury brought communality to what we moderns think of as a private activity. There were twelve water closets in Wilkin's design, as accepted. The architect had provided for thirty - in three rows of ten. This was positively Roman. I learnt about Roman toilets from a splendid book I was persuaded to buy by my scatological sons (well, it did not take much persuasion in fact) on a trip to Verulamium this year. Latrinae et Foricae, Toilets in the Roman World by Barry Hobson. (See here.)

Latrine on Hadrian's Wall: a Roman White City?