The Essex salt marshes around the Rivers Blackwater and Crouch have a timeless character.

Sail lofts, withies, Thames barges under full sail, oyster beds, continue to stand, move across the water, be replenished, as they have done for centuries, and the terns, waders, and pipits go about their business as the tide ebbs and flows into the labyrinthine mudflats uninterrupted by industrialisation, urbanisation, modernisation and all the social changes that have so transformed coastal landscapes elsewhere in the United Kingdom. On Saturday you could have filmed a Dickens novel around these parts with little or no need to deconstruct or amend the location.

The Neap tide was at its lowest point when we arrived in the ancient harbour town of Maldon and consequently boats, barges, swans and cygnets rested on, or sank softly into, the variety of colours and textures of mud. We made our way towards Hythe Quay and found the vessel, Glenway, without any difficulty. It was moored just behind the old outdoor seawater swimming pool. The dull autumn evening and the fading light offered little by way of contrast or colour. We boarded the barge and sought to imagine ourselves back nearly fifty years to the time when this boat and two of its sisters were active in the Thames and Eastern rivers.

Diane (I have changed her name) had come over from Australia to stay with us at Mill Grove, to meet members of her extended family, and to retrace her steps physically, emotionally and spiritually. Her father had worked on this very barge throughout her childhood, and it was on one of its sisters that he was fatally wounded when the steering jammed and the mast of the barge collapsed on hitting Battersea Bridge. Her younger brother was on board at the time, and their father had thrown himself on top of his son to save his life. Diane pondered the boat, its bulk and lines, while trying to imagine a mast and wheelhouse together with the accompanying rigging. She placed a flower near the centre of the barge at the request of her brother. He has understandably never fully recovered from the shock triggered by this personal tragedy.

Later we looked at a photo of her father standing on one of these barges, holding the rigging beside the wheelhouse. The whole of Diane’s life and history had come alive (“now”) and after nearly forty years in Australia this living moment was in “England”. The poem came to me for all sorts of reasons, too numerous and intertwined to list or unravel, but I can guarantee that if you read or re-read Section Five of Little Gidding you will immediately see the deep resonances between what Eliot is describing and what Diane and I were experiencing as the light failed and the saltmarshes and barges awaiting the strangely delayed return of the tide.

Diane, David (also a changed name) and I grew up together at Mill Grove around the mid twentieth century. We had shared many half-remembered experiences, people and places, and I had a dim recollection of the tragic accident on the Thames at Battersea Bridge. Now we were together trying to fit the selective pieces of our memories and feelings together, to re-imagine the past, and to continue the process of coming to terms with it in order to make sense of the present and to inform future priorities and plans.

It was only a few days earlier that I had driven around the M25 to meet Diane at Heathrow after her flight from Sydney. We wondered whether we would recognise each other after all this time, but we needed not to have worried. Hair, figures and skin may have changed but there was no doubting the eyes. And from that moment of that initial embrace Diane has been thinking and working through feelings and emotions, sometimes alone, sometimes at the meal table or kitchen sink. Significantly she has come back to Mill Grove as her base for her three-month stay. Whatever her experiences while there (and they were a rare mixture of ups and downs) she knew that it was a place for her, that would always be there, always accepting: a setting and context in which her inner healing would be given time, space and appropriate support and nurture.

Over the past twelve months or so I have been trying in these columns to distil something of the essence of Mill Grove, to indicate what happens in daily life, and to describe the underlying faith and principles that inform the patterns of our life together. It may be that this brief and allusive description of a Saturday afternoon will assist this process.

In case you haven’t gathered, Ruth and I consider it a great privilege to be part of a place where so much rich history and biography have intersected, where we have lived alongside people from different cultures and traditions, and where we have witnessed the growth and development of so many young people who have, in their own ways and time, come to terms with tragedy and suffering, and are able and willing like Dibs (Dibs: In Search of Self, by Virginia Axline) to share some of their most precious and intimate thoughts and feelings with us.

One of my personal routines is a regular visit to Little Gidding at autumn time where I read aloud the section of Eliot’s Four Quartets, named after this residential community, church and village. I sign the visitors’ book, sit on a pew and wait for the light to fail so that the words of the poem come alive in time and particular space. The poem and these visits are, of course, unforgettable because of their deep personal significance.

Saturday 25 September 2004 will be equally unforgettable with the grey sky, the saltings, a cygnet waddling below the barge deep in mud, forever enfolded into a single memory whose centre is the single flower sitting on the barge, placed by the hand of Diane, and inseparable from the virtually infinite insights and associations of Little Gidding.