Round the Corner: Being the Life and Death of Francis Christopher Folyat, Bachelor of Divinity, and Father of a Large FamilyCannan, Gilbert
General
Round the Corner: Being the Life and Death of Francis Christopher Folyat, Bachelor of Divinity, and Father of a Large Family
Cannan, Gilbert
Clergy -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; English fiction -- 20th century; Families -- Fiction
Humphrey Clay, for all the grimness of his words and works, must have
been a joyous man, for his spirit was very powerful and roused many
men to action. True, their actions were all ugly, but that came from
their stupidity and the squalor of their surroundings. There is no
country on the north of our town for thirty miles--only smoked bricks
and mortar and tall chimneys and colliery stacks. On the south you
must go seven miles before you will find a truly green field, and most
of us are quite old before we can make such a pilgrimage, and then
clear air and trees and streams and sky and the song of birds are
things as separate from our lives as our dreams. They are almost a
show to us. Our great holiday is Whitsun-week, and then each church
takes its children in wagonettes and char-à-bancs out into the nearest
semblance of green country, where they wander and play and laugh and
squabble and are fed until they can hardly stand. It is called a
"treat," and it gives them a new zest for the streets and their
adventurous, strangely independent life.
The Roman Catholic churches organise processions which meet in the
centre of the town and wind through the streets, the little girls in
white and the little boys in the best they can muster.
In his fourth article Flynn exhorted Francis to be an honest man and
take his flock to join them. In the meanwhile there had been appeals
to the bishop, who refused to move in the matter, being convinced,
from what he had seen, that there was nothing uncanonical in the
conduct of the services at St. Paul's. He liked Francis, and if he
could not altogether approve of the means, the result was eminently
satisfactory. As a result of Flynn's campaign there was hardly ever a
seat to be had in St. Paul's on Sundays, and some of the most noted
preachers in our town and the surrounding district were glad to appear
in the pulpit.
Flynn's paper was doing very well out of it. All sorts of people
rushed into the fray and filled his columns for nothing, and when his
supporters took to interrupting the services at St. Paul's with
vehement protests the other papers took the matter up, and Francis
found a sort of greatness thrust upon him. He refused to see
reporters, and told one persistent Scotsman that it was Flynn's
affair, not his, and that he had no intention of moving against Flynn.
He received many letters denouncing him as Anti-Christ, and many more
proclaiming him the one Spiritual Hope of the North of England. More
than one of his correspondents enclosed poems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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