Bill Bryson lives in an old rectory, in 1851 home of Reverend Thomas Marsham. Funny, that. We spent most of last year noticing that in virtually every parish in England there is a large impressive-looking house in its own substantial grounds called The Old Rectory, and somewhere tucked away in the corner of a modern housing estate is a cheap and cheerful – and strangely laid out – new vicarage. And so, here in Lydford the Old Rectory sits on the slopes beneath us, massively extended by the Rev. W. K. Chafy Chafy, curate in charge of the parish 1875-76, and future Bishop of Southwark. Its gothic spires and turrets fit the Dartmoor scene in which it sits (that is, if your version of Dartmoor is of the brooding mysterious sort championed by another celebrated local Victorian cleric Sabine Baring Gould, known as the author of twisted ghost stories, odd werewolf theories and Onward Christian Soldiers). It looks impressive, certainly in size. And we came to Lydford and all we got was this lousy bungalow.
But there is another side to this little dose of status anxiety. It's notable that the rectors and curates who followed the monied Chafy Chafy struggled with the upkeep of his grand old place. It brings some solace to see in his book At Home, a Short History of Private Life that Bill Bryson describes his old rectory in Norfolk as creaky, draughty, horribly expensive to heat and very oddly designed. And this sounds very like all those cheap houses which the dioceses built in the 1960s with part of the proceeds of the sales of the big old homes like Thomas Marsham's and Chafy Chafy's. The C of E architects clearly never learned from the experiences of centuries of uncomfortable clerics. The mildly compensatory conclusion is that maybe the grass isn't that much greener (though there are a few acres more of it) in that big place over the hedge, after all.
