Word: vicars
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Spring Cleaning. It began in 1928 with a series of anonymous letters attacking the vicar, then Canon Desmond Lloyd Wilson, for shooting at birds. Within a few months the letters had driven him from Robin Hood's Bay. His successor, too, resigned under a barrage of anonymous scurrility. One later incumbent of Saint Stephen's got more peace of mind; his wife, without his knowledge, intercepted anonymous letters which arrived for him each week...
...Brensham, all the thieves and poachers are lovable rogues, all the women quiver with massive bursts of laughter, all the intellectuals are wise, all the drunkards poetic. Natural eccentricity and tolerance leave no place for nasty gossip and nagging. The vicar keeps live bait in the church font and nesting-boxes over the porch ("My dear fellows," says he to his wardens, "can you think of anything less sacrilegious than a pair of spotted flycatchers...
...vicar's wife told me a little owl fell down her chimney, and that he was as black as a sweep; she picked him up and he fainted. She fetched brandy and gave him some in a spoon and he revived. She put him out of doors and his mother flew down and collected him. I once picked up a tawny owl after a gale; he was apparently dead, but he came round after some time spent on hot pipes. It is surprising what warmth will...
After his ordination in 1932 he was assigned to a mission in western Kansas. As an unmarried vicar he was often asked to board paroled reform-school boys. The boys' response to his decent treatment kept Minister Mize pondering the problems of "exceptional children," as he likes to call delinquents. In 1945, when he learned that the vacant Poor People's Home at Ellsworth could be rented cheaply, "Father Bob" seized the opportunity to put some pet theories into practice...
These, who might have come straight from the vicar's garden party or a charity bazaar, wore the rapt expression of idolaters as their hero spoke. Behind them and around them stood the thousands of the crowd-the voting public. They wore the garb and they had the faces of the working class; they came from the motorcar factories of Cowley, near Oxford, from the shops of Banbury, from the farms of Oxfordshire...