by Jan Morris
*
Almost at once, too, I met the Dean, actually in the shadow of the Porch. Eton, Oxford and the Welsh Guards, he was not hard to identify. In the cathedral, I later discovered, they call him ‘Father Mitchell’, a disconcerting usage to one of my purposes, but I certainly could not complain about his authenticity qua Dean. With a splendid concern his voice rang out, as we sat there on the beggars’ bench watching the citizenry pass by. ‘Good morning, good morning! Lovely day! What a success yesterday – what would we have done without you? Morning, Simon! Morning, Bert! Morning, John! (John Harvey, you know, our greatest authority on medieval church architecture …)’
The Dean of Wells is a very busy man indeed. He showed me his diary, and it was chock-a-block – even Thursday, resolutely marked as his day off, was nibbled into by a meeting of the Judge’s Lodgings Committee. It seemed more the life of an impresario than a cleric, and this is because a cathedral nowadays is far more than just a shrine, but is partly a social centre, partly a concert hall, partly a tourist attraction, and in the case of Wells, very largely a National Concern. A few years ago it was realized that the west front of Wells Cathedral, incorporating an unrivalled gallery of not very exciting but undeniably medieval statuary, was crumbling away: the consequent appeal, launched by an urbane firm of professional appealers, suddenly made Wells, like Venice, better-known for its decay than for its survival, and added a new dimension to the life of the Very Reverend the Dean.
It crossed my mind, indeed, so ubiquitous were the symptoms of restoration, that the cathedral’s chief function had become its own repair. The building itself, clouded with scaffolding, tap-taps with the hammers of the masons. One frequently sees the Dean, cassocked and umbrella’d, gazing with solicitous eyes at a leprous evangelist or precarious cornice. Outside the west doors there stands a superannuated Victorian pillar box, painted bright blue, for the acceptance of contributions, and hardly a week seems to pass without some fund-raising function beneath the bold inverted arches of the nave (themselves a restorative device, for they were hastily erected when, in 1338, the central tower lurched twelve feet out of true).
But no, the Dean reassured me over lunch, the true focus of cathedral life remained the daily services which, however infinitesimal the congregations, are held now as always in the panelled seclusion of the choir. Behind the scenes the immemorial functions of the cathedral continue, each with its titular chief: the Baron of the Exchequer, the Chancellor, the Master of the Fabric, the Communar, the Chief Steward. The Dean still presides over the Quinque Personae of his Chapter. The Priest-Vicars, the Lay-Vicars, the Canons Residentiary, the vergers, the twenty-one choristers, all are there to offer their gifts and energies to the daily affirmation of the faith.
I took him at his word, and went that afternoon to evensong: or rather, like nearly everybody else in sight, I loitered about the interior of the cathedral while evensong proceeded beyond the narrow entrance of the choir, allowing me, from the dimmer recesses of the nave, suggestive glimpses of surplices, shaded lamps, anthem sheets and musical motions within. It was magical. The rest of the great building lay in hush, haunted only by self-consciously shuffling groups of sightseers, and encapsulated there in their bright-lit chamber, as though in heavenly orbit, the Dean, his canons, the musicians and a handful of devoted worshippers performed their evening ritual.
The anthem was S. S. Wesley’s ‘Thou Wilt Keep Him’, among the most lyrical in the repertoire, and it was touching to see how many of the tourists leant in silence against pillars, or paused thoughtfully in their decipherment of epitaphs, as the sweet melody sounded through the half-light.
*
‘Can I go and meet Daddy now?’ I heard a voice say from the cathedral shop, near the west door. ‘He’s bound to be down from the loft by now.’ He was, the last note of the voluntary having faded away into the Lady Chapel, and presently the Organist and Choirmaster, his wife, his two daughters and I were comfortably before a fire in Vicars’ Close, the exquisite double row of fourteenth-century houses which runs away to the north of the Chapter House (and which is the only part of the Wells cathedral precinct properly called the Close). Here was Barchester all right! An Oxford print hung above the fireplace; a cat luxuriated on the hearth; books, musical instruments, edibles and Cinzano were all equally at hand. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ said the children. ‘Don’t we live in a lovely place? Isn’t this a lovely house? We tidied it all up specially for you!’
It was by no means the only musical house in the neighbourhood, for the cathedral precinct of Wells, if it sometimes suggests showbusiness, and often package tours, sometimes feels like one gigantic conservatoire. Muffled from within the cathedral walls, any hour of the day, one may hear the organ rumbling. Celestial through the open doors come snatches of ‘Thou Wilt Keep Him’. From old grey houses around the green sound snatches of string quartet, trombonic arpeggios or tinkles of Czerny. Hardly has the Organist and Choirmaster finished one performance than he is up there again with his choristers, high in their medieval practice room behind Penniless Porch, rehearsing Wood in C Minor for the following day.
If faith is the reason for Wells, music is its most obvious diligence. Wells Cathedral School is one of the three schools in England offering specialist education for musically gifted children, tracing its origins to a Song School of the thirteenth century, while the music of the cathedral itself is intensely professional. I much enjoyed this feeling of disinterested technique, so remote from commercial competition or union claim. I saw something truly noble to the spectacle of that daily choral celebration, performed to the last degree of excellence, attended by almost nobody but the celebrants themselves: a practice more generous, more frank, more English (I ventured to suppose) than monasticism or meditation – and more acceptable actually, one might think, to the sort of gods I myself cherish, the gods of the stones and the lavender, than to the Christian divinity to whom it has, for a thousand years, uninterruptedly been offered.
Before I left Vicars’ Close, the children invited me to write something in their autograph books. Visitors always did, they said. I looked with interest at the previous entries, expecting to find there, as one would in a Barchester book, the names of visiting politicians, magnates or men of law: but no, they were musicians almost to a scrawl – the composers, the instrumentalists, the teachers who pass in a constant stream these days through the busy precincts of Wells. (When I saw what witty things they had written there, I could think of nothing comparably pithy to say myself, so I drew a couple of pictures of the cathedral instead. ‘Thought you said you couldn’t draw,’ the children kindly said. ‘We think you’re jolly good.’)
*
The loyalty essential to the myth of Englishness is of course embodied in Wells in the fabric of the cathedral itself, and the enclosure of grass, garden and old stone that surrounds it. For a millennium there have been people in Wells who have devoted themselves to this structure, and it seemed to me that this corporate possession of the little town, like some grand totem or fetish, must powerfully augment the citizenry’s sense of community or comradeship.
How easy it would be, I thought, to fall in love with such a building, and to spend one’s life getting to know it, or more usefully perhaps, keeping it there! In the shadow of such permanence, surely life’s transient miseries would pass one by? The Master-Mason of the cathedral smiled enigmatically, when I expressed this thought. He is a very practical man. He first fell victim himself to the enthralment of the cathedral when as a small boy he wriggled through a prohibited aperture somewhere in the masonry, and so discovered for himself the infinite complexity of the place. Now he knows it all, its unsuspected corridors and hidden galleries, its vaults and its cloisters, and through his yards and offices pass all the architects, the restorers, the masons, the accountants, the surveyors and the builders’ merchants perpetually engaged, as they have been for so many centuries, in maintaining the holy structure. He was like the Master-at-Arms on a warship, I th
ought, beneath whose experienced eye the workaday life of the vessel goes on, leaving the men on the bridge above, like those priests and choristers at evensong, free to attend to the navigation.
Then there is the Horologist. The most beloved single artefact in Wells Cathedral, I would say, is the medieval Great Clock in the north transept. It is claimed to possess the oldest working clock in Europe: whenever it strikes the hour four little horsemen, whirring round and round, knock each other off their wooden horses with lances, while a dead-pan character called Jack Blandiver, sitting stiffly on his seat high on a wall near by, nods his head, hits one bell with a hammer, and kicks two more with his heels.
Every morning at half past eight or so, if you hang around High Street, you may see the Horologist on his way to wind this endearing timepiece. His father did it before him, his son will doubtless follow, and never was a labour more cherished. ‘There’s old Jack,’ he says affectionately as he unlocks the door to the clock gantry, and looks up at the quaint old figure on the wall: and when you have climbed the narrow winding steps, looking through the inverted arches to the empty nave beyond, then he opens the big glass doors of the mechanism as one might open a cabinet of treasures. The works are Victorian, the originals being in the Science Museum at South Kensington, and the Horologist admires them enormously. What workmanship! What precision! Look at those cogs! Feel how easily the handle turns! I caught his mood at once. Everything felt wonderfully handmade up there, so rich in old wood and dressed stone, with that elaborate gleaming mechanism slowly ticking, and the beautiful cool space of the cathedral beneath one’s feet.
‘Wouldn’t it be good,’ I said, ‘if everything in life felt like this?’ ‘Ah wouldn’t it,’ said he, resuming his coat after the exertion of the clock-winding. ‘But you have to work for it, you see. It doesn’t look after itself! Come here now, look down here,’ – and he showed me down a little shaft to the circular platform on which the four knights of the Great Clock, relieved from their eternal joust until the next quarter-hour, were resting woodenly on their arms. ‘Now those fellows down there take a lot of looking after. They break so easily, you see. Well they would, wouldn’t they, hitting each other with their lances every quarter of an hour? You can’t expect them to last for ever, knocking each other about like that!’
*
In a curious way, I felt, the cathedral was more the property of the Town than of the Close. Bishops, Deans and Canons come and go, but the shopkeepers and the businessmen, the farmers, even the traders who bring their vans and stalls to Wells Market every week – these people live all their lives in the presence of the great building, and must feel it to be part of their very selves. Wells has its own magnificent parish church of St Cuthbert, often mistaken by the tourists for the cathedral itself. It has a substantial landed interest and some thriving small industries. But still every street seems to look, every alley seems to lead, almost every conversation seems somehow to turn, to that ancient presence beyond Penniless Porch.
To discover how jealously Wellensians, as citizens of Wells complicatedly call themselves, regard the affairs of the Close, I went to see the newspaper editor. Like nearly everything in Wells, his office is only a step or two from the cathedral, almost opposite the Star (and just up the road from the King’s Head which has been unnervingly metamorphosed into a Chinese restaurant). The paper is shortly to move to more modern premises, but for the moment its funny old gimcrack buildings are in High Street, all ramshackle and disjointed, like the kitchen quarters of some dilapidated mansion. How knowingly, I thought, those Linotypes chattered! What intrigues, vendettas and innuendos had found their way through those presses, during the 128 years in which the Wells Journal has kept its eye impartially on precinct and marketplace!
Ah yes, said the editor wryly. There was never a shortage of gossip in Wells, or controversy either. They were an independent sort, the Wellensians. Why, I should have heard the fuss when the Bishop took to culling the wild duck in his moat by shooting them out of his window! Or when they built those dreadful new canons’ houses, all trendy streaked concrete, behind the Old Deanery! Oh, yes, Wellensians often resented the airs of the clergymen Up There: though it was not strictly true that the precinct was walled in defence against the assaults of the townspeople, often enough it felt like it.
The Alderman vehemently agreed – the controversial Alderman, everyone called him, who turned out to be a fiery Welshman, bred by the Parachute Regiment out of the Swansea valleys, whose passionately conservationist views during his period as Mayor had led him into bitter conflict with the cathedral. Vividly he recalled those old affrays for me. Had he not threatened to take the Dean to court when he chopped down the Mulberry Tree? Was it not he who instructed his Council, when the Bishop was late for a civic function, to take their seats without his Lordship? The Alderman clearly loves a fight, and I rather wished he was engaged in one just then, so that I could see the sparks fly for myself. But no, though he spoke to me movingly of an erroneous new sewage scheme, all was quiet in Wells just then. He sounded rather disappointed, and so was I; for Barchester is not Barchester, after all, without a battle on its hands.
*
Or, for that matter, without a Mrs Proudie. It was when I reached the Bishopric at last that I felt my pilgrimage had failed. Faith I had certainly found in Wells, diligence, loyalty, pride: but the sense of authority, of an established order unbreakable and supreme, which is essential to the Romantic view of England, is lost with the winds of social change and historical necessity. In Trollope’s allegories that old discipline was represented if not by the person, at least by the office of the Bishop, splendidly identified by his accoutrements, his circumstances and his privileges; but the Anglican Bishop of tradition, gloriously fortified by material well-being and spiritual complacency – that grand figure of fancy has long gone the way of the Empire-builder and the top-hatted Station Master.
As it happens the Bishop’s Palace at Wells is perhaps the most splendid Bishop’s Palace of all. Surrounded by its own moat, its own castellated walls, its own parkland beyond, it stands on the edge of Wells, in the flank of the cathedral, looking across green fields into the depths of Somerset. It is like a fortress, and though the enormous banqueting hall is now only a picturesque ruin, still the palace is a terrific spectacle. Duck of many varieties paddle its moat, and swans deftly ring the gatehouse bell for their victuals. The palace itself stands grandly around its yard, with a huge pillared refectory, and a fine library, and a private chapel in which, within living memory, daily choral services were held for the Bishop, his family and his servants.
But no majestically awful Mrs Proudie greeted me at the palace door. Nobody greeted me at the main door at all, for the Bishop of Bath and Wells now lives only in the north wing of the structure, the rest being devoted to conferences and other useful activities. Gone are the days when the Bishop and his family ate all alone in splendour in the centre of the vast undercroft, surveyed by a gigantic gilded mitre above the fireplace. Gone are those daily services in the private chapel – nowadays the Bishop prays there alone. Gone is the daunting approach to the episcopal presence, never to be forgotten by curates of long ago, when after treading the long stately corridors of the palace, through the dark gallery lined with portraits of earlier prelates, they timidly opened the door of the great study to discover his Lordship, against a serried background of theological treatises, tremendously at his labours.
The Bishop himself recalled that vanished consequence for me. Now he and his distinctly un-Proudean wife live more modestly, more sensibly no doubt, more Christianly I suppose, but undeniably less impressively in their nicely done-up wing. His new study, furnished in pale woodwork by the Church Commissioners, is unexpectedly emblazoned, around the tops of its bookcases, with a text not from Leviticus or the Sermon on the Mount, but from King Alfred. His visitors’ book, when I signed it, contained on the previous page the signature of the actor Peter O’Toole. His car is a Rover – ‘such a bl
essing when you’re overtaking on our narrow Somerset roads’. This is a very modern, very functional bishopric.
Here at the core the times have overtaken Barchester. The majesty has left the palace. Crowds of people throng to those conference rooms, taking their cafeteria luncheons on canteen tables in the undercroft (where the gilded mitre looms large as ever, but anomalous). Often the gardens are open to the public, and at any time of day sightseers are to be observed hanging over the gate which, inside the great gatehouse above the moat, inadequately (to my mind) asserts the privacy of the bishopric.
Nobody could represent these changes more persuasively than the present Bishop and his wife, who sit in their modest private corner of the gardens as a Bishop and his lady should, relishing the green and the grey of it all, the long mellow line of their ancient wall, the sweep of the trees and the droop of the trumpet vine, the Turneresque pile of the ruined banqueting hall, the silent towers of the cathedral beyond. But it is not the same. Atavist that I am, yearning sometimes from the austerity of Wales for some of the gorgeous and heedless assurance that used to characterize our magnificent neighbour – nostalgic in this way for the England I am just old enough to remember, I missed the purple swagger and the swank.
For it was partly the conceit of it, Trollope’s hubris of the cloth, that captured our imaginations once – now gone it seems, for better or for worse, as utterly from Barchester as from Simla or Singapore.
San Francisco
My second virtual place was San Francisco, which for many years I had seen as a kind of ideal city. I spent some time there in the 1980s as a guest of the San Francisco Examiner, which had started a programme of Writers-in-Residence, rather like a university. My only duty was to write a weekly essay for the paper about the city – or as San Franciscans like to say, the City – but I had to admit that this dream was half empty …
