Thomas Hardy's heart ...

I've never read Thomas Hardy - in truth, all I've done is sigh over the cover of Tess of the d'Ubervilles, or nervously handle an icy volume of his poems, perhaps the 1998 Penguin Selected Poems - I just have the impression, whenever I think of the man, of implacable fate, of lives mangled by mischance, of icy sorrows -

As one of my former colleagues, a head of year, used to say - I can't be doing with that - I can see her now, sitting like Boudica with a lap top in her office -

I did once watch one episode of Jude the Obscure, serialised on BBC 2 in the 1970's - the young Robert Powell played Jude - that was enough - I'd only just got over Toby's death in Doom Watch - we all wore black arm bands in the sixth form common room -

That was worlds ago - I'm now a gaffer with a shock of white hair - true, I've prowled around Max Gate, glowered in Dortchester before a house allegedly used as the model for Henchard's in Mayor of Casterbridge - yet, still, I've never read Hardy -

This September, on a walk with Penny and Anne, I visited Stinsford Church - Pesvner says the church is mostly 13th Century - I was much taken by the lichened gargoyles, pulling open their mouths with lichened fists -

It was a warm afternoon - thin clouds moved across the blue sky - inside the church, it was full of light - I admired the organ pipes - they looked like blue cigars - there were many memorial tablets, upon which I could brood - I imagined the quiet privileged lives of the local gentry, the deferential peasantry, the arrack punch in crystal bowls -

But then I saw, set below a richly decorated stained glass window, a brass tablet, telling me Hardy's heart lies buried in this village -

I thought of the symbolism of this interment - the heart, plucked out from Hardy's opened torso - placed here, in this gentle earth, not amidst the tawdry pomp of Westminster Abbey -

I resolved to read some Hardy - perhaps it was time for me to hear some raw truths -