Return To Blankney - Part 4

Close to the walls at the back of the Hall there used to be lavender and other herbs growing in small beds, until the night of the fire when, I am afraid many were trampled underfoot in the urgency of the hour. Nearby was the sunken garden which used to be full of roses. On moonlight nights, when on guard duty, I have wandered around this garden amid the flowers and the shadows, and surrounded by the subtle fragrance of rose and herb in the cool atmosphere of the Lincolnshire countryside. In the distance a slow goods train chugging its way between Lincoln and Sleaford drawn by a heavily breathing steam locomotive.
Those were the pleasant nights when everything seemed good and peaceful. But there were other nights. Nights when I felt that someone else was in the garden, someone watching me. Such nights made me feel uneasy and I felt conscious of an evil or mischievous atmosphere surrounding the place. I used to call them 'evil nights' and I would hurry back to the doubtful seclusion of the sentry-box with occasional glimpses over my shoulder. I mentioned this experience to my friend Lindsay Costeloe on one occasion and he said that he also had similar feelings at times. But that was fifteen years ago: now I found no roses to scent the air, and the flower-beds and steps leading into the sunken garden were a mass of thistles, grasses and weeds.
There was ample accommodation for horses at Blankney, and it had been the stables, where we were billeted. Designed by E.J. Willson in 1825, for some of the finest bloodstock in England, they were well built and we made them quite comfortable. Today they were being used as poultry houses. Coming off a duty watch at midnight, the fact of not having to get up early the next morning often induced Lindsay, Jim, Mervyn and I to play billiards into the early hours of the morning until the moon came up over the trees and a ghostly mistiness stole in from the fens.
Blankney church tower rises above the stables only a few yards beyond the fence. On certain Sunday mornings, just as we climbed into bed to sleep after a night watch, the eight bells in the tower (given by farmers as a thank-offering after the First World War) would begin their morning peal: it was after the national ban on bell-ringing had been lifted. As they rang out on the morning air, poor Lindsay would lie fuming in his bed, trying to sleep against the clangour of what he described as 'those perishing bells'.
The church stands between two main drives to the Hall. The rector showed me round, pointing out the silver-gilt chalice and paten of the early 16th century and a strange effigy of one John de Glori about whom littlw seems to be known but is dated early 14th century. Perhaps the finest monument is the kneeling life-size figure in white marble by Sir Edgar Boehm of Lady Florence Chaplin wife of Henry Chaplin the famous Victorian squire. The marriage only lasted five years, as she died after a two day illness on 10th October 1981.
Returning to the Hall, I discovered that the demolishers had moved in. I felt that I had returned for the death of the Hall. One man told me that some of the stone was going to repair Lincoln Cathedral, but a lot of the rubble was being dumped down the lane. Before leaving I returned once more to the back of the Hall, and there I noticed something against the east wall-it was a spray of roses. So all the roses hadn't deserted the place, at least one link with the rose garden remained.