It is a right handsome church, St John’s, here in Underhill, and as the child of one of its employed I came to know it with some intimacy. I did not like the fresh, slick tombstones – their cold blankness frightened me, and seemed like a hard stark statement about what was waiting for me in the great beyond – but the old stones, with their dimpled lichen tales etched all over them, always gave me comfort. When nobody was around, in the autumn evenings, and the air was smeechy from bonfires, I would sometimes get close and give them a proper big cuddle. I don’t know why I favoured this activity more on those autumn evenings with a new chill in the air but that was the way it happened. The building itself has a heavy appearance, even more so than most other churches in the area, a wider rim of granite being used close to its foundations, and it is said that this was a deliberate measure taken so the Devil did not carry it off to higher ground, as he had done with the little-visited St Constantine’s, whose ruins stand halfway up Underhill Tor. Over on the west side of the church is a yew tree of some 1,400 years in age and, for the first decade of my life, and the century preceding it, carcasses of the badgers and foxes that had been killed in the parish were left on the trunk, five shillings being paid to the successful hunter for a fox, half a crown for a cub, and a shilling for a badger. Mercifully I have no actual memory of this.