Remembrance Sunday 2018 sees commemorations across the world, remembering the end of the First World War 100 years ago. I’ve been involved in a community project at St Cyriac’s Lacock, ‘In Remembrance and Hope: Lacock Remembers’. The project saw local leaders Rachael McHenry and Jane Wheeler (Wiltshire Scrapstore) coordinate and cajole hundreds of contributors into making poppies, over 4,000 of them. Each and every member of our parish was invited to create a poppy using recycled/reusable materials. Some chose to create poppies from foam, felt, or wool – whether sewing, sticking, crochet, knitting and more. The poppies were used to create a number of installations around the village and can be seen as a cascade from the bell tower in the church, withy arches weaved with poppies along the church aisle, wreathes and a string of poppies around the market cross, a large cross of poppies at the war memorial and wreathes of poppies on Lacock Abbey’s gates. More poppy installations are also to be found in the form of wreathes on the pew ends at Lacock parish’s sister church St Anne’s Bowden Hill.
The groups involved have, for me, shown the face of community here in Lacock. Under the umbrella of the church’s hospitality and spirit, those joining in include the Lacock History group, pre-schoolers’ Little Lambs and Wise Owls, Lacock Primary School, The Evergreens and WI, Green Cafe, Wiltshire Scrapstore, The Open Blue Bus, Knit and Natter, the over 50’s group, Lacock Cubs and Beavers, and the Junior Church group. Local businesses and the National Trust held coincident poppy trails around the village too. Apart from joining in the poppy-making, my personal project was originally intended as another installation, one for the transept in St Cyriac’s, where I planned a photographic wall-mounted artwork. I had wanted to bring to life the stories of those individuals and families who had memories of the war, those names on our memorial church plaque and elsewhere. But the amount of material I received, and the interviews I’d been able to do, soon gathered pace and generated ideas for a piece that outgrew the available time. Above all, the sense of history has percolated in my thinking and feeling about Lacock, such that the project now demands a deeper reflection from me, a deeper wrestling with what community here means.
For the church’s vision is ‘Loving Lacock, besotted with Bowden Hill, weak at the knees for the world who visits us – just as Jesus loved us first’. It’s extraordinary how much reach this place has, from the depth of history with the Abbey (and its indefatigable Abbess Ela 1239-1257), with William Henry Fox Talbot and his profoundly transforming invention of the first paper photographic process, to the international attraction of the village to tourists and Harry Potter/period-drama fans. Somehow that dimension reverberates in the personal stories of people here, catching us all up in celebration and purpose. We’ve got a bigger story to tell, and in my planned work, I hope to bring it together with the church’s focus on love. I wrote once about what Remembrance meant to me in terms of engaging with it through art (and Paul Cummins’ poppy) – something along the lines of truth and beauty, rather more than facts and sentimentality. There’s a qualitative difference, and somehow I’ve now got to work to create more than another local history guide – which in fact our group has done to outstanding depth already. So I’m sitting with it for now, still collating material, turning it over. And planning an exhibition at some point in 2019, thanks to the gracious generosity and enthusiasm of the PCC. Watch this space…
Header image: Lacock Remembers poppy installation, 2018. Photograph by Sheona Beaumont.
