Martham
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| Martham lies ten miles north-west of
Great Yarmouth.
Martham Church
In his memoir Earlham (see
Earlham), Percy Lubbock
describes how his great-grandmother lived at Martham
Rectory and how, in her spare time, she wrote a novel
entitled Earthly Idols. This is how he records
it:
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| 'I think she did
not write more than one; but one novels makes a
novelist, after all, and a novelist she became, she was,
she remained. Earthly Idols, two volumes in pink cloth -
it was a story of a dreadfully (but justly) afflicted
heroine, who set her heart upon idols of clay, who saw
them torn from here one by one, and who perished at
last, she herself - with a heart, I hope and think,
finally chastened and purified - in a storm at sea.' |
In the book, Lubbock also provides a rather bleak
description of the village in his great-grandmother's
day:
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'The outer edges of Norfolk can be dreary, in the barer
regions towards the sea. You reach Martham after leaving
everything else behind, and only then; it is a cluster
of cottages round a straggling green, and the diminutive
parsonage stands under the morning shadow of a great
square church-tower. A gaunt and dilapidated old pile
the church must have been, when Earthly Idols was
composed in its shadow; and the village had no
picturesque attraction. The sea-wind whines, though the
sea is not in sight.' |
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Links:
More photographs of Martham
Read Earlham Online
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