This subconscious preoccupation with the cathedral characterizes most of the natives of Salisbury. At any hour of the day, if a strange bird alights upon the spire, in a very few minutes a shopkeeper or two seems to have felt the impact of his perching. All over the city, men come to their doors and look up. Groups collect, arguing over the breed of the stranger. From this one can judge how lovingly the Salisbury people watch their spire.
Within The Close, the houses cast an almost equal spell upon their owners. And no wonder. There are in England other cathedrals: there is no other Salisbury Close. The whole story of English domestic architecture is told within its walls. The palace is a history in itself. Its park wall was built from the stones of the Norman cathedral at Old Sarum; and its vaulted crypt was the hall of the house of that Bishop Poore who founded the present cathedral in 1220. Successive bishops went on adding to the palace for six hundred years; and during all those centuries, houses were being built in The Close. There are the little early ones which were built by Elias the Clerk of the Works and Robert the Mason, as their own dwellings while they worked at the cathedral. There is the grand ‘ King’s House’ of the Middle Ages: Bishop Seth Ward’s ‘Matron’s College’ built in the days of Charles II; Wren’s ‘ Choristers’ Schoolroom’; and lastly that triumphant series of elaborate eighteenth-century houses which represent perhaps the highest peak ever reached by the builders of town houses in this country.
The people who lived in The Close presented a unique combination of elsewhere incompatible attitudes towards their houses. In the first place, they took them entirely as a matter of course. There seemed to them nothing remarkable in the fact that they had been chosen by Divine Decree to run in and out to their tea-parties through those supremely beautiful doorways. That—so it seemed to these scholarly canons and gentle old maids—is what the houses are like in which one lives. Then there was the other point of view. Their natural acquiescence in their good fortune never blinded them to the beauty of their surroundings. No one in The Close was surprised if a passing visitor asked permission to look inside the door and into the rooms. Such visits seemed as natural as the milkman’s daily call. The lot had fallen unto them in a fair ground and they knew it; but they were house-conscious rather than house-proud. This peculiar spirit of The Close is difficult to describe, but it is one of the first things which strikes one on coming to live there.
Our house, like several of the others, was of more than one date. It was mainly a small narrow eighteenth-century house with, on each floor, only two perfectly proportioned rooms. This lovely little building had been tacked on to the end of a medieval cottage and the two combined made the letter L. Some large rooms had been added to the back of the house in the nineteenth century, but as these could not be seen from The Close, their ugliness injured the house less than their convenience improved it. Our garden extended to the beautiful old Close wall which was, however, hidden from view by a row of greenhouses. Here my father was always happy with his roses and orchids.
Our time in The Close included the four war years, followed by my father’s long illness, and then his death. Perhaps that is why, when I try to remember that house, I think first of darkness. It was a dark house. We were overshadowed by the cathedral. We had a magnificent view of it, its whole length spread out before our windows. But it prevented any direct light from falling on to my needlework as I sat in the little white morning-room in the winter, except between the hours of twelve and two. Life there had always a shadow upon it—the shadow of the cathedral, of the war, of illness, or of death …
When my father died, my sister and I had to leave The Close. When as children we sometimes drove to parties at Fonthill, we always passed a most romantic house which I used to long to have for my own. This was Fitz House in Teffont, which many people call the prettiest of all the Wiltshire villages. Just beyond the end of its street, a tiny stream gushes out of the chalk down, to flow the whole length of the village in front of the houses, each of which has its own little bridge connecting it with the highway. This water is said to be the purest in Wiltshire: it is very clear, and it tinkles with a silver voice. Fitz House had lately been bought by our friend Lord Bledisloe and he now offered to let it to us. So this house of my childish dreams became the first in which Mildred and I were raised to the dignity of being householders.
Fitz House stands back from the village street, behind a stone wall, which then was lower than it is to-day, so that passers-by had an uninterrupted view of this charming old farm-house. Our wall edged the stream, and among its stones the golden wagtails nested every year. The house makes almost three sides of a square: the main building, a fifteenth-century farm-house, faces the road; a seventeenth-century wing joins it at right angles on one side, facing the long stone bam on the other. The wing had been built as a store, and was first made habitable by Lord Bledisloe when he acquired the house. My bedroom was in this part, a big room with five windows looking in three directions, and as I lay in bed, I could watch the moon pass all round the house, while owls flew over from barn to wing, hooting with lovely melancholy.
We were warned that Fitz House would be damp; and it is true that springs of the famous Teffont water bubble up under every room on the ground floor, and they keep the grass court outside perpetually green. But our two years there were y ears of drought, so the cool rippling sounds that all day filled the ear were exquisitely refreshing; and in those summers, when we wanted fresh air, we drove to the downs in the evening to dine on the edge of Great Ridge Wood, while we watched the Stars come out over the Dorset distance.
Our Teffont gardener was Cull, a man from the neighboring village of Chilmark, where the quarries have been worked since the days of the Romans. He was therefore as handy with stones as he was with flowers, so he laid out a pretty little paved garden of Mildred’s designing and she planted her roses in its beds. Our garden was small—only the paved piece, with beside it a tiny mountain on which wild cherries grew, the kitchen garden behind the house, and the grass court in front. The fields came so near to the house that we could almost lean out of the windows to pick blackberries and mushrooms, primroses and cowslips.
At Fitz House we first learnt what it meant to have a house full of children; for Mildred and I had come at the end of the Wilton family, looking on our brothers as rather grand young men, who came home from school or from Oxford for the holidays, and who played games which were too serious for us to share. Now there were three, families of nephews and nieces; and if Salisbury memories are chiefly memories of shadows, those of Teffont are full of noise and laughter and children’s games. All this fun was inspired and led by Mildred, now the perfect aunt as she had ever been the perfect sister.
We lived in Fitz House for two years.
Chapter Thirteen
FLOODS
One morning we looked out from our windows in the Close to see the walls of the Cathedral rising out of the waters of a great lake, which covered the whole of the lawn. The effect was magical. The level grass in Salisbury Close has a far-famed beauty, but this was like something seen in a dream, or read of in a poem. No cathedral built of solid stone could be thus isolated: this must be ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie’ rising from the waters.
It was the month of January 1915, and the unceasing rain of that first autumn of the war had turned the five chalk streams which meet at Salisbury into five raging torrents which no hatches could control. At the same time, an exceptionally high spring-tide rushed up the Avon from the sea. The water could not get away. It broadened out upon the city.
The interior of the cathedral was even more lovely than the Close outside. All through the night the water had been silently coming up through the floor, and by morning the nave was a large still pool, from which the pillars rose and into which they threw their reflections. The medieval glass in the west window made a tangled pattern of light and colour in the water. The nave was quickly emptied of chairs and nothing broke the beauty of its proportions.
The water did not reach the choir, and services were held there throughout the flood, the congregations reaching them upon perilous bridges made of planks. There were none of these on that first morning when my father and Dr. Bourne, another very old canon, arrived for the service, having somehow made their way across the Close. These intrepid veterans were not deterred by the sight of that lake of cold-looking water. They were bent for the vestry which lay beyond it and they meant to get there. Each mounted a chair and armed himself with a second, which he planted in the water in front of him. On to this he now stepped, and then swung into position in front of it the chair he had just vacated. By repeating this manœuvre the two fearless canons made stepping-stones for themselves from west to east of the cathedral.
The second day of the flood was the Festival of the Epiphany. At eight o’clock that morning, the Communion was celebrated in the Lady Chapel behind the choir. It was like the scene of a legendary shipwreck. The cathedral was almost in darkness, though here and there a gas jet threw a light which quivered in the water. As we crossed the plank bridges the faint reflections of the pillars swayed a little beneath us. The cathedral looked much larger than usual—empty, dark, and filled with water; and as Bishop Ridgeway came to the altar, the candlelight fell upon him in his shining cope and mitre, with the Pastoral Staff carried before him. He looked like some little elfin being.
For some time after the floods had gone down, the nave was too damp to be used, so it remained empty of chairs. All through that time we revelled in its lovely spaciousness. Miss Townsend, who has lived all her life in the most distinguished of the close houses, has a memory for beautiful things, which never seems to fail her. She now recalled the days when all the cathedral services were held in the choir, and one Sunday as she watched her niece leading her little girl down the empty nave, she said: ‘It reminds me of what I used to see.’ One thinks at once of Trollope or of Bishop Moberly, who wrote in his diary that on the afternoon of his first Advent Sunday at Salisbury, there were only ‘a few ladies in the boxes, ill-lighted by candles, attending prayers without a sermon’. The following year, in Advent 1870, he recorded that he had preached ‘to a very large congregation in the nave lighted for the first time with gas’.
During this flood of 1915, several of the Salisbury streets were flooded and people went about them by boat. Gina Fisher and I decided that it would be a historic feat to be rowed down Fisherton Street, so we set off for the starting-point, each accompanied by a scoffing sister to watch. I blush to say that our hearts failed us at the crucial moment. We found that there was a considerable gap between the last dry spot where it was possible to walk, and the point where the water was deep enough to float a boat. Stout policemen carried the would-be passengers across this no-man’s-land—a most ridiculous sight, which all day attracted a large and hilarious crowd. But this was not the worst. The boat itself was so wet and dirty that no one dared to sit down in it. Everyone had to stand, each man clutching at his nearest neighbour when the boat lurched suddenly. An unexpectedly big lurch always sent two or three people into the water, so that the lookers-on had plenty of fun for their money. We watched the scene for some time and then we agreed that although we had been right to think that this would be a historic occasion, yet it was better to watch history in the making than to make it ourselves.
At Wilton people went to their work in farm wagons which plied busily up and down the streets in the early hours, and the curate was pushed to church in a wheel barrow. One morning, while it was still almost dark, the people in West Street looked out of their windows and saw an unreal and fairy-story figure looming through the twilight. A giant seemed to have risen from the waters and was now making his way from the outskirts of the town. There was no doubt as to his alarming proportions, for his head was level with the upper windows, and when he came nearer it was seen that the water splashed on each side as though Leviathan himself were churning it up. This super-man turned out to be Frank Haines, the Wilton House carpenter, who had got up early to make himself an enormous pair of stilts. As long as the flood lasted he walked on these the mile which separated his house from his work.
All sorts of horse vehicles were pressed into the service of the marooned inhabitants. The Herbert children filled their pony-carriage with stores which they took to the flooded houses and then cords were dropped from the upper windows to fish up the provender. Fred Rawlence then possessed that now-forgotten thing a double dog-cart, and to this he harnessed his old grey horse. He took with him a ladder and many cans of hot soup. His quarry was any old person who was too feeble to get out of bed to fish for himself. Fred drove his dog-cart against the wall of the house he was visiting and planted his ladder on the seat of his dog-cart. Up it he climbed and into the window with his can of soup.
A Canadian Regiment which was stationed near-by sent its ambulance to rescue two old people who were too ill to be left in their flooded house. It was a very difficult feat to get them through the window and down the ladder on stretchers, but this was brilliantly done; and then arose an unexpected complication. The two old things refused to be saved without their cocks and hens which were shivering on a beam in a shed near the house. The gallant Canadians were ready for this rescue too. They waded into the shed, and made grab after grafe at the squawking, fluttering, frightened birds, who violently objected to being saved. They made a good fight for it amid the shouts and laughter of the soldiers, who finally captured them all and triumphantly conveyed their clucking captives through the streets to Fred Rawlence’s dry chicken-run at Bulbridge.
Such floods never arose entirely without warning. The water-keepers (Drowners as they call them in Wiltshire) controlled the rivers as well as they could raising and lowering the hatches so as to allow the water to pass through by degrees. Then they sent warnings to the various villages on the banks to say at what hour the flood was likely to reach each place. When these messages came, people who lived in houses near the stream began carrying upstairs the furniture from their lower rooms. Having done this, they generally refused to leave their houses, preferring to remain encamped on their upper floors, for they always hoped that the flood would not be so deep as it had been last time.
Two women lived alone in a cottage standing some way back from the main Wilton Street. They received the customary flood warning and they decided to stay on in their house, as the mother, a very old woman, was ill in bed. The daughter carried upstairs as many of their possessions as she could manage, and she stacked them in a little unused bedroom. They lit a fire in the only other room on the first floor, and there they awaited events. They heard the water rush into the house. It gurgled and swished round the kitchen table. It poured out of the downstairs windows. It began coming up the stairs, and from it an icy draught came under the door into the room where the two women were listening. The old mother grew worse. Bronchitis set in. When it began to grow dark, a policeman waded to their door and asked whether they needed help. They said they only wanted a bottle of medicine from the doctor. This had always made the old woman better before and they were sure it would do so again. The policeman brought it and handed it up. Thus they faced the night.
Miss Turner built up the fire and gave her mother some of the doctor’s medicine. They were now completely cut off from human kind. From the window it was possible now and again to see a faint gleam upon the wilderness of black water which heaved round the walls outside; and the chill air mounted relentlessly into the room in spite of the fire which burnt in the grate. An hour or two was enough to kill the old woman. Her breathing became more and more difficult. She struggled—and then she struggled no more. The room became absolutely still, but for the unending sound of the water outside and for the occasional fall of a cinder in the grate.
Miss Turner laid a sheet over the face of her dead mother and waited hour after hour for morning. She dared not plunge into the water outside because it was so dark that she could not judge its depth, and there was no house near enough for her to call an
yone to help her with the last offices. Thus they stayed till morning —the living woman watching beside the dead.
When dawn began to break, Miss Turner went down stairs into the flooded room. She could not open the door for the weight of water against it, but she managed to get through the window and she plunged into the flood outside. The water was above her waist and it was cruelly cold. Physically, she had hardly the strength to battle with it, but her resolution enabled her to struggle to the nearest house. That ‘little mother’, of whose delicate beauty she had been so proud, must be decently laid out for the grave, and she had not the skill to do this herself. Each hour that passed would make the task more difficult, so she would not wait till morning had really come before she went for help.
That day it was not possible to bring a coffin to the house, and when night came no persuasion could prevail upon Miss Turner to leave her mother’s body there alone. The dead woman lay uncoffined on her bed and her daughter watched beside her. From time to time she made herself a cup of tea, boiling the water on the fire in that one room. Friends fought through the flood to sit with her and to beg her to come away with them. She welcomed their sympathy, but she would not leave the house. Calm with the dignity of love and of grief, she waited alone through the hours; for ‘many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it’.
Chapter Fourteen
WAR
When King George V was crowned in 1911, Sidney, my sailor brother, brought a contingent of bluejackets to London for the Coronation. They acted as Guard of Honour to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. During that week, Sidney said to one of my other brothers:
Without Knowing Mr Walkley Page 14