The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral

by Robert Westall

  Keuper’s not so pretty and it’s stubborn work to carve; starts off yellowy-brown and then goes black wi’ the soot in the air. But it grows a hard black skin and then it’ll last for ever.

  But even Keuper will go if you bed it wrong. If you bed it with the layers vertical, the rain and frost will slice them off like a bacon-slicer. Bed the layers horizontal, and the frost will just slowly nibble at their ends over the centuries.

  We looked at the rotten stone around the gargoyle.

  ‘It’s Keuper OK; and bedded right. And it’s not that old, look at them stone-saw marks . . .’

  But I dug in my thumb-nail, and it came away in great chunks like cake, yellow under the black outer skin. ‘That’s not weatherin’ . . .’

  ‘I’ll tell you somethin’ else,’ said Billy. ‘It’s been renewed since the last War, cos there’s my Uncle Jim’s mark, clear as clear.’

  I looked at the little mark, a bit like a fish-hook. It was his Uncle Jim’s mark, all right. In the old days, every mason left his mark scratched on his handiwork. Some still do it.

  ‘Jim didn’t finish serving his time till 1957 . . .’

  ‘This stone’s thirty-three years old at the most, an’ no more use than fossilized shit.’

  ‘Look at the way the rot’s spread! Above, underneath, each side . . . how far do you think it’s gone? Inside?’

  We both took a little step back from that corner. Old towers are funny things. I remembered an old photograph I’d seen of the north-west tower of St John’s, Chester; whole one day, just fell in the night. Lucky there was no poor mason climbing the spiral stair at the time.

  We took a thoughtful walk all round the parapet.

  ‘Other three corners seem sound enough,’ said Billy. ‘An’ a hell of a lot older. Claw-chisel marks on some of it.’ He stamped on the stones beneath our feet, and made them ring with his hobnails. They sounded all right. No note like a cracked bell makes . . .

  ‘I’ll go and have a word with Taff Evans,’ I said. ‘ ’Sa bloody disgrace.’

  ‘Here’s Tommy Small wi’ the pick-up. Hasn’t he got another job at Ryland’s this afternoon?’

  ‘Aye, he’ll be in a hurry. We’d best get the gear up, then. I’ll see Taff when he’s gone.’

  We sent the sling of the hoist snaking down, and Tommy began fastening on the first load of scaffolding. He’s a good reliable lad, for an apprentice. Just as well. We didn’t want anything falling out of the sling. A nut-and-bolt falling from our height can smash a skull like a bullet smashes a pumpkin . . .

  ‘That stone’s your responsibility,’ I said. ‘It’s only at parapet level. It’s not steeplejack’s work.’

  Taff Evans shifted his bum on the block of stone he was sitting on in the sun, and stared at the remains of his ham sandwiches that lay beside him.

  ‘It’s just superficial damage,’ he muttered. ‘We’ll get round to it. Always caused trouble, that bit round the gargoyle. No matter how you bed it. Main structure’s sound enough . . .’

  ‘If you don’t watch it,’ I said, ‘that gargoyle will blow off one night, in a gale o’ wind, and cause no end of damage. You wouldn’t like it going through the nave roof . . .’

  ‘That beggar won’t shift. Weighs a ton. Never has shifted, all the time I’ve been here. The architect knows about it . . .’

  ‘Architect,’ I snorted. ‘What the hell does he know about it?’ I’ve no time for architects, who come up top wi’ their fancy two-hundred-guinea suits under their brand-new donkey jackets and hard hats. They don’t work wi’ stone; they work wi’ sheets o’ paper. They understand paper and money an’ that’s all.

  Anyway, I went off in a bit of a rage, and had to let meself cool down before we started hammering wedges into the stone steeple to take our ladders. The wedges went in all right, and yet there was an odd little sound in the middle of the ringing of the hammer. A bit like . . . you’ll think I’m mad, but it sounded to me a bit like a little kid crying out in pain, a little kid lost and frightened. It wasn’t a sound I’d ever heard before, in stone or brick. It got to me so much, I actually went so far as to knock one of the wedges out again, to see how firm a hold it had. It was in very very firm indeed. I had to belt it sideways so hard it got away from me, and I watched in horror as it went twisting down through space, getting smaller and smaller. My heart was in my mouth, I can tell you. It coulda been a death. But it struck the wooden walkway inside the parapet of the nave, and there were only a few splinters of wood flying.

  ‘Christ, Joe!’ said Billy looking up at me, very pale. ‘Steady on, will you?’

  ‘Sorry. Won’t happen again.’

  ‘Bloody well hope not. We don’t want this turning into one of them jobs . . .’

  We both knew what he meant. The jobs when nothing goes right, no matter how careful you are. The jobs that try to kill somebody.

  You do get them; we’d both had them.

  Still, we made a nice job of the laddering-up. Of course, the ladders will always vibrate at the end of their iron stays. But that doesn’t bother you, unless you lose your nerve and get the shakes and just stand there juddering the metal. Had a mate once who lost his nerve up there; took me three hours to get him down. Crying like a baby, he was – had to stay below him and nigh cuddle him, all the way down. He had to buy a bungalow, after that. Couldn’t even stand a flight of stairs. Once your nerve’s gone, it’s gone.

  But if you keep your nerve it’s great up there, in your little nest of scaffold and planks at the top of the spire, just below the weather-vane. Two levels of planks, one to give you access to the weathercock, and one for your mate when you lift the much heavier weather-vane out of its socket – the thing marking north, south, east and west, that the weathercock turns on. We give ourselves handrails and all, of course – snug as a bug in a rug.

  Course, once you’re up at that height, you have to keep an eye on the clouds. Just as John Constable the painter had to, when he was a miller’s son. That’s why he came to paint clouds so well, they reckon. Bad weather, not spotted in time, could ruin a miller, make his mill run so fast it caught fire or blew to bits. That’s our enemy, too. Not rain, but wind. A sudden squall, out of nowhere without warning, can tear you off the ladders. Rain – it doesn’t matter, though it’s not pleasant. Makes the stone slippery, especially where there’s been pigeons roosting. That’s why I wear hobnails, where some young fools wear trainers – trainers won’t save you if you step in a pool of pigeon-shit, whereas hobnails is always the same.

  You’re in a different world up there. You hear what the wind brings you. If there’s no wind, you might hear, faint and far off, the choir at evensong. Very sweet, though I can’t see how they help some folk believe in God. They’d sound just as sweet singing dirty songs. Then a breeze comes, and the choir’s gone, and you can hear the cows mooing in a field a mile away. That’s even sweeter music to me – I’m a country boy at heart. After a week working in the smoke of the town, it’s nice to get back to the country.

  You don’t get a lot of butterflies at that height; but towards dusk, you’re on the same level as the swifts hunting insects. Screaming fit to deafen you, and whizzing past the back of your neck so you can feel the draught of them passing. Never come to earth, swifts, except to lay their eggs and raise their young. Ugly dark things, close-to. Devil-birds, us country lads used to call them.

  We got the old weathercock out of its socket that night, so the lads could be setting it to rights in the workshop, while we were working on the spire. The spike it turned on was corroded and rough – bit of smoothing, good whack o’ grease would see it right. I looked forward to putting it back regilded – a proud thing. When you see a weather­cock shining bright gold in the sun, you know there’s a church and a steeplejack that’s on top of their affairs. Billy took it all the way down in a rope-sling on his back. It was heavy, but he wanted to do it that way. If we’d let it down on a rope we’d have risked damaging it. We like to carry everything up
and down ourselves. When something you’re lifting on the end of a rope hits against the building by accident, that’s an ugly sound and has an ugly feel to it. That weathercock was a good piece of workmanship – three hundred years old and very simple – the body and the head round and solid, the rest cut from the flat plate. I don’t care nowt for all this architects’ prattling on about Gothic and Early English, but I respect a bit of good craftsmanship.

  I was tidying up my things, preparatory to following Billy down for the night when I heard feet on the ladders and I thought, ‘Hallo, what’s he come back for?’ Except the sound’s wrong – the feet’s too light for Billy.

  Afore I can look to see who it is, a voice calls, ‘Hallo Dad,’ and our Kevin’s face comes into view; grinning like a Cheshire cat. ‘Mum’s come,’ he says. ‘She’s goin’ to buy me some new trainers. She wants some shopping money.’

  ‘Doesn’t she always?’ I say, and grin back at him, cos I’m proud of him.

  But it’s not much of a grin that night. Because I suddenly realize very much that I don’t want him there. Not on that site. If it had’ve been some old chimney, I might have sat and talked with him on top for a bit, making the most of the sunshine, and yarning about his granda’s days.

  But I suddenly wanted him off that old steeple more than anything else in the world.

  ‘Run down and tell yer Mam I’m just coming,’ I says to him, calm and easy as I could.

  Then I followed him down, quick as I could.

  But he was younger and quicker, and reached the parapet ahead o’ me. And I found him doing the very thing I didn’t want to find him doing.

  Staring at that bloody gargoyle, sitting in its bed of rotting stone. And the damned thing’s sitting staring back, with its lichen-mottled face and blind, hollow eyes.

  Now they were in the same world; now they knew each other, and I’d a given anything not to have it so.

  ‘C’mon, Kevin,’ I said joking. ‘Get down them bloody stairs. You afraid of the dark or something?’

  He didn’t even answer me; he was that busy staring at the bloody thing, like a rabbit stares at the stoat that’s going to kill it.

  ‘Get on with yer, Kevin,’ I said, giving him a push towards the little wooden door of the spiral staircase.

  He seemed to come out of a day-dream. ‘OK, Dad.’

  That night, after we’d had our tea, Kevin and I went bird-watching. Not the usual sort, plodding round the fields with great binoculars round your neck (though I did take my work binoculars). No, we go up in the big trees in the wood, where the birds live. Right to the tops we go, where the branches sway and swing like a comfy bed, and you can look along the green billows of the tree-tops. In spring, we take the eggs out of the nests, handling them gentle, like, and putting them back afterwards of course. An’ getting away quickly, so the hen-bird can come back and sit on them again. That’s a wonder of life to me, to hold a speckled egg in the palm of your hand, and think what a marvellous thing it’s going to become, a bird that flies and feeds and takes its chance with the cats, and breeds its own young and dies back into the dust in the end. Why does anyone need those crazy Christian dreams of Heaven, wi’ angels playin’ their harps on fleecy clouds, when they can have a wood at sunset, when you can look down from a low branch and see young rabbits playing, or even young foxes tumbling over and over and squeaking when they nip each other with their sharp little teeth?

  Up there, Kevin an’ I get real close to each other, as my dad and me did long before he was born. I’m that proud to teach him them same things, which egg belongs to which bird. And I’m that proud of him, the safe careful way he climbs, as fearless of heights as a cat. Even a full-grown horse-chestnut is no more to him than playing hopscotch on a pavement. I’d think what a grand steeplejack he’d make, when I’m gone, teaching his son an’ grandson the same good old things.

  And he’s a different lad when he’s up there; you get none of that stroppiness you get when his little mates are around and he’s inclined to play up his mam, just like lads always do. We sit on some high branch, in the green shade, and we talk.

  Only tonight, to spoil everything, he wanted to talk about that bloody gargoyle.

  ‘What are gargoyles, Dad?’ He swung his feet and looked at me expectantly.

  ‘Waterspouts,’ I said shortly. ‘They throw the rainwater from the roof well clear, so it doesn’t rot the foundations of the walls. Just old waterspouts.’

  ‘Well . . . why do they carve them like that?’

  ‘Well, they’re just a bit of fun, like. Reckon the old masons got pretty bored, just carving bits of windowsill, or squaring up blocks of stone all day. One or two in every masons’ gang must have been real artists, like sculptors are today. So when they got the chance, when work was slack and there wasn’t no hurry, they’d carve a gargoyle for a bit of fun. There’s one on Hapsham tower that’s the spitting image of a stingy vicar, who wouldn’t give the masons any beer-money when they’d done well. They carved his face real ugly, and his little hand holding his bag o’ money tight, and they put him up on his own church tower, and showed him, and he never even recognized himself.’

  He laughed then, the loveliest sound in the world to me, a sound as pretty as a bird’s song, of pure joy. Then he went solemn again, and said, ‘But they weren’t all of stingy vicars?’

  ‘No, son. Some reckoned they were made so ugly to frighten real devils away from the church. That’s when people believed in devils, not like now. But most o’ them . . . just the masons getting their own back, against the powers that be. People were very downtrodden then, even masons, though masons were always a proud, bloody-minded lot.’

  I wished I hadn’t said all that to him, afterwards. It made me think of the old masons’ gangs, that roamed the country quarrying their own stone and building churches. Funny old lot they were, living too close to each other, the master mason and the time-served journeymen, and the boy apprentices, living close on the road, without their womenfolk all summer, and their damned pride because they were the best, and their damned secrecy and odd beliefs. And the jealousy . . . there’s a church up in Scotland got something called the Prentice Pillar. The most marvellous bit of stone-carving you ever did see. Carved by a genius of an apprentice while his master was away. And when the master got back, he was seized with such jealousy he took a big hammer and smashed the lad’s skull in like an egg.

  You may think modern Freemasons are an odd lot, with their secret oaths and little aprons; but they are nothing to what the old masons were like.

  That night, I wakened up screaming, sitting up soaked wi’ sweat. I think I frightened our Barbara out of her wits.

  ‘Joe, Joe,’ she gabbled, grabbing me like she was trying to strangle me. ‘What’s the matter, whatever’s the matter? Are you ill?’

  ‘Just a dream,’ I said slowly, so as not to frighten her. ‘Just a stupid old dream.’ I think I said it more to comfort myself, for I never usually dream at all, and this one was bloody slow to fade.

  ‘That’s not like you,’ she said. ‘It’s not like you at all. You’re in a muck-sweat. I’ll have to get you a change of pyjamas. You’ve got the sheets soaked an’ all. And my nightie. Look.’ She switched the light on. ‘What were you dreaming about?’

  ‘Work,’ I said, raising my eyebrows and forcing a half-grin and trying to make a joke of it for her sake.

  ‘You’re not losing your nerve, are you? Your head for heights?’

  That made me angry, which helped. ‘Don’t talk wet, woman. I’m a Clarke.’ And it’s true. I wasn’t losing my nerve or my head for heights. It was nothing about that.

  Anyway, I changed my pyjamas, after towelling myself down. And lay back down again, but not to sleep. I didn’t sleep a wink till it was time to get up, just lay and held her and listened to her breathing.

  And thinking about that dream. Which was why I didn’t dare go back to sleep again.

  Cos I dreamt that I was standing in the dark, lo
oking up at the south-west tower of Muncaster cathedral. And our Kevin was up there on top, in the dark, and screaming as if some wild beast was eating him. And the door to the tower was locked and I didn’t have the key. I remember that I was so desperate that I tried to climb up the outside of the tower, up the buttress. But I knew I’d never get there in time to save Kevin. And when I was less than half-way up, the tower began to crack open in front of my very eyes . . .

  Which is why I wakened up screaming.

  The next morning, I felt dog-rough. Rougher than I’d ever felt in my life. That dream was inside my brain, and I couldn’t get it out. It kept coming back and making me do stupid things, like putting jam on my toast before I’d put any butter on.

  I knew I shouldn’t go up that day. It wasn’t that I was scared; I felt too dull and weary to be scared for myself. But I owed it to Billy. And to Barbara, and young Kevin. Better to lose a day’s work than to . . .

  Anyway, it was raining; pissing down whole rods. I rang up Billy and gave him a fiddling list of little jobs to do round the workshops, things so unimportant they’d been waiting for months. And then I drove down to the cathedral . . .

  Then I went up an’ faced the gargoyle. It looked an even uglier bugger in the rain. The rotten stone that I’d crumbled away with my finger-nail yesterday had dissolved into yellow puddles.

  I looked at the gargoyle, and I said to it, ‘I’ll settle your bloody hash, you see if I don’t.’ Then I laid a spare plank across the parapet at that corner, to fence it off, like you might pen up a mad bull.

  That made me feel better at first; then I realized I was talking out loud to the bloody thing, and that made me feel worse, as if it had won the first round.

  So I went down to take it out on Taffy Evans, who hadn’t a lot to do either, in the rain. He’s a hard man to have a row with, Taffy Evans. Not a typical Welshman, cos he’s fair, flaxen-haired, while most of them are dark. And he’s tall and thin, where a lot of them are small. And he’s got a long head, and a long nose with gold-rimmed spectacles, where most Welshmen I’ve met are round-headed, with little snub noses. I reckon one of his ancestors must have been a raping, pillaging Saxon. He’s got the Welsh Nonconformist stubbornness though; always in the right is Taffy, and he’ll argue all day to prove it. Chapel preacher, Bible-puncher, which is funny in the foreman-mason of an Anglican cathedral.