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Tucked in
the hills that roll to the Waveney, St
Cross is unusual among the Saints, in
that it is rather a pretty place. The
River Beck has cut down into a sweet
valley, and St George sits across a
meadow. If you are feeling romantic then
you can reach the church by a footpath
across a narrow bridge, which gets
marooned easily in winter. Otherwise,
there is a driveway to some houses which
also touches the churchyard. The south
side of the church is a grand, austere
sight, seeming taller than it is, like
neighbouring All Saints. The clerestory seems cut off by
the lack of an aisle. The tower is a bold
one of the 14th century, and the
clerestory dates from the renewal of the
roof a century later. The overall is of a
fat, comfortable, sleepy building at
peace on its slope. Among the modern
headstones to the north of the church is
one to the Canadian poet and writer
Elizabeth Smart, who spent her last years
in this village. Her By Grand Central
Station I Sat Down and Wept, a
thinly disguised account of her obsessive
love affair with the poet George Barker,
became one of the great cult classic
novels of the 1960s, and is surpassed
only by Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of
Honey as a source of inspiration for
lyrics by the 1980s cult pop group The
Smiths. As a result, this quiet graveyard
has become an unlikely place of
pilgrimage.
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Until recently, no pilgrims
of any kind would have been able to complete
their journey here with a prayer inside the
church, for it used to be kept locked. But now,
like all the churches in this wide, friendly
benefice, St George is open every day. This is a
big church, the biggest of all the Saints, and
you step into a somewhat austere nave. The
interior has been almost completely renewed, and
the sober Kempe glass adds to the feeling of
seriousness. As at St Michael a few miles off,
there is a reredos which reveals an
Anglo-catholic enthusiasm in the middle years of
last century, with St George and the Blessed
Virgin flanking a lamb and flag with the words
from the Latin Mass Ecce Agnus Dei qui tollis
peccator mundi ('Behold the Lamb of God
which takes away the sins of the world').
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organ attempts a note of jollity, and the
15th century font recalls late medieval
splendour, but in the wide open spaces of
this sombre church it is perhaps a little
difficult to feel the heart lifted.
Standing in the sanctuary and looking
west, however, I knew that this was quite
the grandest church I had been in all
day, in a part of Suffolk where small,
rustic and homely are the usual
standards. The great expanse of Victorian
floor tiles, as if we were in some north
London Anglo-catholic temple, seems
rather far from home. The parish includes
South Elmham Hall, once the country
retreat of the Bishops of Norwich. This
private house contains the ruins of the
former Bishop's chapel; even more
interesting, and open to the public, are
the ruins popularly called South Elmham Minster, a haunting place
half a mile out in the woods.
I don't
know why the village is called St Cross,
and the church St George. Some sources
claim that St Cross is a corruption of
the medieval St George Sancroft. But Holy
Cross is a dedication found across the
border in Norfolk. Bearing in mind that
the words 'holy' and 'saint' would have
been identical in meaning to the medieval
mind, this seems as likely. An even more
interesting theory is that Holy Cross was
the dedication of South Elmham Minster.
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Simon Knott, July 2008
See also a general introduction to the Saints
     
   
 
   
 
  
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