Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Few people I know have been called for jury service and vanishingly few have ever been called twice. Apart from myself, I’ve met just one other person summonsed for a second session and I only encountered him last week!  My two experiences couldn’t have been more different. The first, which must have been more than 20 years ago  was at Isleworth Crown Court and concerned cocaine smuggling through Heathrow Airport. Within the Isleworth Court building there were many individual courts (at least a dozen and possibly many more – proximity to Heathrow keeps the courts well supplied with every sort of human misbehaviour).  The large number of courts called for many prospective jurors and as there are always more called than are needed the jury room always felt full of sedentary people working out how to fill such enforced idleness. For a day or so the most significant thing I  did was to decide what book to read after I’d read as much of the daily newspaper as held my attention.  Then, suddenly, you hear your name called and it’s all go. Cirencester Crown Court (technically Gloucester Crown Court sitting at the Cirencester Courthouse) last week was a much more intimate affair. Fourteen jurors were summoned and 12 were chosen at random. The remaining two were sent home. By the afternoon of the first day we were taken down to the court, sworn in and were listening to the Crown Prosecutor set out the Crown’s case.

The case to be decided involved a Cheltenham couple who were accused of allowing their baby daughter to suffer broken bones during the first three weeks of  her life. The mother had taken the child, aged about 19 days to the doctor after the area around the her ankle appeared swollen and was painful when touched. At this point the parents were concerned that the injury had been caused when their boisterous son of 18 months had launched himself on the sofa and accidentally kicked the baby as she lay in her father’s arms. At the hospital, a paediatrician examined the baby, looked at an X ray of the ankle, found nothing untoward – no bruising and there was good movement –  and let the parents take the baby home. However, when the consultant radiologist reviewed the ankle X ray, she identified a loose shard of bone. Further X rays and scans were then taken and these revealed additional breaks to the collar bone and to each of nine ribs. Birth trauma and systemic bone disease were ruled out. All injuries would have required significant force beyond what was reasonable in handling a baby. A consultant paediatrician went further and described the force necessary to create the injuries to the chest to be similar to that of being involved in a car crash.

The father suggested the injuries to the chest could have occurred when he dropped his X box controller and games on the baby when she was in her Moses basket. Doctors ruled this out (no bruising, insufficient force).  Neither mother nor father offered any other explanation. No other adult had sole care of the baby during the time in question. We learned from the police interviews and text messages between the parents that their relationship was very fragile, verbally, and sometimes physically, aggressive. Both parents gave verbal testimonies to the court and when cross examined reiterated that they couldn’t think how their child had received the injuries. Apart from the mother sobbing when looking at the scans and X rays, they both were very composed and cool when cross examined  – to me, cool to the point of having disengaged themselves from what had happened to their tiny baby.

At the end of the cross examinations of witnesses and defendants, prosecution and defence put their cases and the judge gave his summing up. In addition, each member of the jury received an aide memoire from the judge, highlighting the salient points we must answer when making our judgement. (This he said was something judges were only comparatively recently allowed to do  but he thought it was a very good thing – and I was only too keen to agree, as the judge’s summing up at the first trial I’d been a juror at had been long, rambling and very unclear as to what his directions actually were.)

We were told by both judge and prosecution counsel that the cause of the baby’s injuries may never be known. However, the charge was that the parents had either caused the injuries or allowed them to occur.  After a short deliberation we found both mother and father guilty. The couple will be sentenced in a month’s time after the court has received impartial reports about them and their circumstances but custodial sentences are almost certain – ranging from 1 year to a possible 3.

We were happy to learn that the little girl, who will be 3 in June, has recovered completely from her injuries. All three of the defendants’ children have been kept together and are being fostered by the grandmother. Both parents have had access to them.

I decided I would attach no photographs of embroidery to this post as I felt it should stand alone.

Navy T shirt for a 10 year old with roses (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Last week I ended my blog with the slightly panicky realisation that my jury service had been changed from Gloucester to Cirencester. With no time for another dry run I trusted to Bus No 51’s online timetable and waited at the bus stop outside Montpellier Gardens and opposite the rotunda (formerly where the spa waters could be taken but now occupied by a branch of The Ivy restaurant where we’d had such a good time in last weekend) – a very pleasant place to start one’s journey into the unknown. The bus arrived on time, I got on and settled myself down with my newspaper. At first I was curious to know the route the bus would take out of the town and my paper hung half open but unread as we did a big sweep round the town and passed in front of Cheltenham’s splendid General Hospital with its pedimented and pillared stone frontage and on to the London Road. We soon left this for a brief meander through the built up village/suburb of Charlton Kings and then, in no time at all we were up a hill and out of the bowl of land in which Cheltenham sits. By now my newspaper was limp and I gave up trying to read altogether as our journey had become far too interesting. Within minutes, skeletal forms of winter trees rising on either side of the road offered tantalising glimpses of the countryside beyond  – a view invisible for most of the year. On my left, to the east, the land sloped down to stone farmhouses and fields flecked green by the first hint of spring growth. To my right, the hillside rose dotted with intermittent banks of snowdrops,  a few crocuses and the odd patch of daffodills.

Detail: Navy T shirt for a 10 year old with roses (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Then came a brief blip in delightfulness where the A 435 to Cirencester meets the A 436 to Gloucester at Seven Springs, a busy junction with several lorry-filled lay-bys which felt  just a little incongruous in this rural setting. Quickly through the traffic though, the A435  resumed its quieter tree line route, zigzagging along  the western slope of the valley of the River Churn, whose course we then followed almost all the way to Cirencester. On a spring morning, with or without low morning sun (one day it was raining heavily) it’s utterly gorgeous. Almost every building is in weathered stone – not the very yellow honey coloured limestone of further north in the Cotswolds but its much more workaday relative which looks slightly darker and greyer. At this time of year the leafless trees tantalise with glimpses of substantial  buildings – fine farms, little manor houses, mills and rows of stone cottages. It seems such a sleepy rural route, it’s easy to forget that this area has a long history of human settlement.  Coberley, near Seven Springs has 2 long barrows from the Early Neolithic period and the remains of a Roman villa complex. Another Roman villa was sited to the south of the next village, Colesbourne, near Ermin Street (aka Ermin Way linking Gloucester and Cirencester and not to be confused with Ermine Street which was the Old North Road out of London to Lincoln.)   Most villages get a mention in the Domesday book of 1085. My favourite houses are the little C17 farm and manor houses, though it’s true not many have survived without alteration. In North Cerney a fine row of recently built stone semidetached houses in vernacular style promise to age well and show what can be done to increase housing in rural places – although I suspect they’re too expensive for locals and will be owned by those working elsewhere, especially as this little valley of paradise is such a short distance from the centre Cirencester.  Happily for me, the bus stop in the centre of town was a gratifyingly short distance from the court. When I spoke on the phone to the Court Usher last Friday he said he could see my bus as he spoke to me and now I know he wasn’t exaggerating (though that was the bus stop for the return journey). So far all much easier and more pleasant than a trip to Gloucester with the bonus of  being able wander round a  pretty town I hardly know at all during my lunch break.

Detail: Navy T shirt for a 10 year old with roses (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

But, let me go back to Seven Springs for a minute which I was pretty rude about above.  Once home, a bit of an internet search revealed it’s actually somewhere really very special. Off one of those maligned lay-bys, a flight of stone steps descends into a little wooded dell where the eponymous and very real seven springs bubble up out of the earth to begin a journey down through the River Churn, on to Thames and in the end out to the North Sea, for  these  springs are one of the two acknowledged headwaters of the River Thames. The other source of the river, known as Thames Head, near Malmesbury is now dry ( although a small seasonal spring has appeared elsewhere nearby) and has lost its statue of Neptune to a site near a lock in Lechlade, so perhaps Seven Springs should now be regarded as the main source of the river. Seven Springs adds 14 miles to the length of the Thames compared to the Malmesbury site, which, at about 230 miles, puts it The Thames neck and neck with the River Severn for the title longest river in England. Now that should teach me about not being disparaging about an innocent lay by!

Still boring on with my Christmas T shirts! And aren’t I glad  I have this stock of finished garments to blog about! The papers for jury service suggested we weren’t to take knitting needles to use during waiting times. I rather threw the usher by asking if that meant sewing needles too – obviously no one had ever asked that before. He hummed and haaed and I think I could have pushed him to permit my embroidery in the jury room but by then I’d set myself up to read the paper instead and anyway hadn’t managed to prepare something ready to sew after a hectic weekend.  Maybe for my second week.