S0302 The Earlier Service by Margaret Irwin

The Earlier Service by Margaret Irwin The Earlier Service is a tale of what happens in a remote English church late at night. A Listener suggested I record The Earlier Service by Margaret Irwin. I hunted it down via the internet and found it in an anthology called Bloodstock, published in 1978 by Ian Henry Publications in 1978. I believe the collection was initially published in 1953. Bloodstock is split into three sections: Stories From Ireland (five stories here); Uncanny Stories (four stories) and two ungrouped stories: Mrs Oliver Cromwell and Where Beauty Lies. Margaret Irwin doesn’t include any biographical information in this book so I had to go looking elsewhere. As usual, Wikipedia came up trumps and I gave them $2 for their great work.  Margaret Irwin was born in Highgate, London in 1889, and she died in 1967 in London also.  Her father was an Australian from Perth and her mother was English and her mother’s father was a colonel in the 16th Lancers, a British Cavalry regiment. She was brought up by her uncle in Bristol after her father died. She started writing professionally in the 1920s and specialised in historical fiction, particularly the Elizabeth and early Stuart periods. As well as historical novels she did ghost stories and two fantasy novels, one about a time slip and the other about a wizard’s daughter. She married a book illustrator who did the covers for some of her books.   The Earlier Service The story seems to hark back to a different England: a rural England of evensong and churchgoing that no longer exists. We have examples from the work of R H Malden and M R James of country vicars going about their business in rural parishes where they and the doctor and the solicitor are the only educated and literary people but where they service and minister to the illiterate throng. Most country churches now in England are dead or dying and this therefore is a picture of a world that once was and is no longer. The story begins with the rec