Fires Burn Blue

It is doubtful whether you would call Telmington a village or a small country town. Until 1849 it had boasted a weekly cattle market; but after completion of the Daven Valley railway this was transferred to Shallowford, some four miles distant. An annual Hilary Fair survived until its site was usurped by the Jubilee clock-tower, the gift (as a marble tablet bears record) of Edmund Giles Touchwood, J. P., of Telming Hall in this Parish. Shorn thus of its market and fair Telmington attracted but few visitors; its seven shops and two inns catering almost solely for its thousand or so inhabitants. In this stagnancy it remained until the inauguration, in 1907, of a motor-bus service to and from Shallowford station twice daily.
Edmund Touchwood having died a widower and without male issue, Telming Hall in the autumn of 1910 was the home of his only daughter, Mrs Parlington. Her Christian name, Letitia, she ascribed to an apocryphal sneeze by a godmother at her baptism. She much disliked it; but, as such names will, it stuck to her like a burr; and Letitia she was called, though not to her face, by all and sundry in the neighbourhood. An energetic, capable and kindly, if rather managing woman, she gardened, beagled, cycled, served on the Rural District Council and Board of Guardians, sketched in water-colour, and played the organ in church. Dr Holmbush described her intellectual interests as middle-brow. Although of general good temper she could on certain subjects, music for instance, be argumentative and touchy. Indeed, her seat at the church organ was occupied on the express understanding that, while the choice of hymns lay with the rector, it was for her to determine the tunes. Her language on this point had been blunt. 'The words of half your hymns, Rector, are tosh. That's your lookout, of course; but I refuse to play toshy tunes.' In a matter of months she had the choir on her side, and within a year or two the congregation also; the rector being left in lonely lament for rejected 'old favourites'.