Word: churchyard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Some in the village wanted to erect a plaque in the churchyard to their distant benefactors, financed by the first $40 from everyone's dividend check. Later they decided that $8 a head should be plenty. Other villagers argued that instead they should rename the village Saturno. "It's a great honor" said one, adding slyly: "And it costs nothing...
...verse is filled with an engaging shorthand of brand names -Austin cars, Craven A cigarettes, Heinz's Ketchup, Post Toasties. In one poem he used the names of real people to ironic effect ("T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells and Edith Sitwell lie in Mell-stock Churchyard now"), but added the thoughtful note: "The names are put in not out of malice or satire but merely for their euphony...
When a Communist dies in Italy's heavily Red region of Emilia, the funeral cortege, decked out with red banners, slogan-bearing streamers and a brass band, looks like a political rally. Prohibited by law from parading across holy ground, the procession stops at the churchyard fence-but not necessarily the propaganda. Not long ago the priest of Ruina Ferrarese (pop. 800) found that at least one gravestone in the cemetery behind his tiny church was decorated not with a cross but with hammer and sickle...
...along with four other members of an auto-stealing gang, one Roberto Borsetti explained that Father Jacques had financed the new parish school by selling stolen cars. The cars, 17 in all, were snatched by Borsetti's crooks at night, driven into a palm-thatched workshop in the churchyard, repainted and turned over, complete with forged license plates and bills of sale, to Father Jacques, who admitted accepting some of them "as gifts for the church charities...
London's oldest parish church is All Hallows By the Tower, founded as a convent by Erkenwald, Bishop of London, about 675. Richard the Lionhearted built a chapel in its churchyard; Edward the Confessor gave it a statue of the Virgin. The Great Seal of England was once guarded from William the Conqueror on All Hallows' altar; erring Knights Templar were tried there for heresy in the 14th century, and the headless body of many a wrong-guessing notable was brought there from the nearby Tower of London for burial. In the Great Fire of 1666, Samuel Pepys...