Powys Society Newsletter 88

But the spirit which presided predominantly was that of the novel. The tensions in
that scene when the will is read were as vivid to me as the ghosts of Canon Crow and
his “long-dead wife” are in the book; and the encounter triggered my awareness of
yet another plane, a sixth: that of the writer in 1930-31 at Phudd Bottom, NY, 5,000
miles from Northwold but actively present there in his keenly engaged imagination,
mediating those other planes and layers to bear out with extraordinary power the
truth of Wordsworth’s notion of “emotion recollected in tranquillity”.
A Tale of a Postcard
Kevin Taylor is a recent new member of the Powys Society. In this note he describes
how he became obsessed with A Glastonbury Romance. Kevin also describes his
visit to Northwold, prompted by the chance discovery, on the internet, of an old
contemporary postcard of Northwold rectory.
The postcard, posted in Northwold, and sent to a certain Emma Lloyd at 67
St Georges Street, Norwich, is dated 20 June 1910. This gave Kevin the idea of
visiting Northwold exactly 100 years later, on 20 June 2010. In an e-mail to me
Kevin speculated that the sender of the card, Mabel, was probably a domestic
servant, who was employed at the rectory, and was writing to her sister in Norwich.
It occurred to me that theoretically in fact it should be entirely possible to trace
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