Incidentally, or ‘lack-of-incidentally’, one thing you won’t find, and which in contrast to most other graveyards in the area the one at St Luke’s lacks, is any trace of a plague pit. Despite Mr Wells’s rhetoric at the idiot elections and his talk of ‘war and famine, flood and plague’, both the most famous manifestations of plague miraculously bypassed us. That’s not to say we’ve been immune from infectious diseases; far from it. But our village was, if you’ll forgive the clichéd metaphor, a lake of water in the midst of the fire of those two great pandemics. We seem to have got off lightly in wartime as well. Gatshire was not targeted during either of the two World Wars; it seems that the Luftwaffe did not deem our county worth bombing. Other conflicts too failed to exact their tribute from this humble hamlet. The Wars of the Roses meant nothing to us, except for the embarrassing episode, vehemently disputed by local historians, when some poor sap from here turned up at Bosworth Field with his horse several weeks late wondering where King Richard was. Some claim this person was the then village idiot; others say it was not until December of that same year that he became idiot, a post, they postulate, he attained unchallenged thanks to this optimistic venture. The only time we were involved in the spat between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads was when a shoemaker found himself sheltering two important personages, one of whom was for Parliament, the other for the Crown, in adjacent secret chambers simultaneously. (Hiding was common then; historians have estimated that participants in the conflict ‘occupied’ supposedly empty cupboards in a frankly incredible sixty per cent of houses in England at one time or another during it. The practice was later all but perfected by that master hider himself, Bonnie Prince Charlie, who might have hid in Gatshire, but probably didn’t. More recently, World War One combatants proved adept at hiding in trenches (and a lot of carnage might have been avoided had they not been forced by their misguided superiors to come out of hiding), and hiding was also a factor in the defeat of the Nazis.) However no one from this village offered to serve as a soldier in the Civil War and neither side sought reinforcements from around here.