I wonder how many people have spent five minutes today thinking about the Incarnation.’ The speaker was Father Vincent McNabb. It was during the first world war and the Rosary had just been said in the Gills’ living-room kitchen on Ditchling Common. In default of a chapel, Compline was sung nightly in this long low candle-lit room. At one end two candles burned beside a crucifix on the mantel-shelf, at the other a stone niche flush with the whitewashed wall enshrined a small figure of Our Lady suckling the Divine Child; lights and shadows flickered around their feet from a wick floating in a bowl hollowed out of the same stone. Between these two focal points of light, members of the families and of the workshops, guests and friends, stood on either side of the refectory table so as to form two choirs. Eric acted as cantor or maybe one of the girls; more often Betty whose voice was as plumb in the middle of the note, as English-sweet as her father’s.

Later on, Compline came to be chanted in one of the new workshops and finally in the Guild Chapel. But neither the shadowy resonance of the lofty shop nor the quietude of the white chapel ever recaptured quite the same spontaneity of intimate absorption in the Church s twilight prayer as transfigured nightly that cottage kitchen.

Hopkins’ Crank was at that time a neat square toy of a house on the western fringe of the Common, an untouched Georgian squatter’s cottage, preceded by a porch and diminutive fenced garden. Here amid sweet william, honesty and marigolds there grew two rose-bushes of the kind which, on stems furry with prickles, bears amid many deep-grooved leaves large flat single blooms, white or magenta.