In Grantchester, In Grantchester

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

This afternoon I walked across the meadows to Grantchester. Famous for its association with Rupert Brooke who,by that time a young graduate of King's College, took up residence. The lines above are the last two lines of his poem "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" which was one of the places he lived, and is now the home of Jeffrey Archer, politician and novelist.

I went to have tea in The Orchard famous as the place where the glitterati of British science, letters, politics all went in their student days at Cambridge. "The Grantchester Group" comprised E M Forster, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, Maynard Keynes and Ludwige Wittgenstein.

Brooke and Woolf swam naked by moonlight in Byron's Pool. Keynes visited Brooke at Grantchester in November 1909 and found him "sitting in the midst of admiring females with nothing on but an embroidered sweater".

But this group was only a selection of scores of the famous who came here. Included were also Burgess, McLean, Philby, Blunt, Black and Fuchs! (For Cambridge was famous for producing spies!)

On the way back I met this bunch who stubbornly refused to budge!