Yesterday being Easter Sunday and a gloriously sunny day, the wife, dog and I went for a lovely run out in the motor, braving the somewhat winter chill to go topless up the M5 to Tewkesbury. It was the first time we’d had the roof off the MG since the summer and by golly it was fresh! Gertrude is not a natural classic car fan, the wind and cold plays havoc with her ears, so I wrapped her in a blanket and she sulked between my legs looking like a babushka resigned to a pogrom.
By the time we arrived in the car park in Tewkesbury we were all a little chilled and glad to get out and flex our cold muscles and use the loo. We crossed the road and found ourselves in the “Bloody Meadow” – a slightly boggy field beside the abbey, bisected by a little river and, reputedly, the site of the bloodiest slaughter during the 1471 Lancastrian defeat at Tewkesbury. In 2013 Easter dog walkers deposited their little plastic bags of faeces in the council provided bins, teenagers kicked their footballs and rode their bikes across landscaped paths. Five hundred years ago indescribable acts of brutality and desperation were carried out here. Amongst the thousands of dead, a young Prince of Wales cut down and killed, ending the opposing claim to the English throne, allowing the Yorkist clans to mop up the enemy and restate their superiority. Here on this field a young Richard Duke of Gloucester showed his capability again and fought for his brother, the handsome Edward IV. Their other surviving brother, George, also has links with this place as the story goes that, after his execution in the Tower – whether in a butt of Malmsey or no – his body was interred with that of his wife, Isabel Neville, eldest daughter of the old Kingmaker, Warwick – in a vault beneath the abbey. Poor George , guilty of treason perhaps, certainly guilty of vacillating politically and without the wit to cover his own arse; even in death nothing is certain. Are the bones in his tomb actually his? Apparently the jury
(at least there is one this time, unlike at the time of his conviction) is still out. Rumour has it that there are three femurs to be found in his casket, and plans are afoot to exhume him and check his DNA against that of his younger brother, Richard, recently discovered in a Leicester car park. How the world turns and the great events and players of history are reduced to forensic mysteries. Somewhere beneath the wheels of Sunday drivers and the feet of Easter traipsers, the dead hold onto their very real life stories and the River Avon flows on.
Chemical Soup 