reached for her hand as if her presence were the one familiar landmark in an alien world.
The choir stopped. I could hear the choir master talking faintly. The air of unreality evaporated and I felt better.
‘Tell me about it – the Cathedral – everything you know,’ I said, automatically checking my pocket to make sure I had my medication, and she started to talk about the number of years it had taken to build the Cathedral and how some of the great pillars were different from the others because the earlier ones had been unfinished. I concentrated on her information and conscientiously noted the features of the chancel, clerestory, nave and choir. We walked around the cloisters, we admired the stonework, and soon I had even recovered enough to smile at my swooningly romantic visions of travelling sideways in time.
Given the chance my good hard Yankee common sense will always triumph over my sloppy Victorian romanticism.
‘Why are you smiling?’ said Dinah curiously.
‘I must have been remembering my far-off foolish youth when I was a romantic idealist … My God, what’s this?’
It was a memorial stone, very old, set in the wall. Below an engraving of a skull ran the morbid rhyme:
All you that do this place pass bye
Remember death for you must dye
As you are now then so was I
And as I am so that you be.
Thomas Gooding here do staye
Wayting for God’s judgement daye.
‘Can’t you just imagine,’ said Dinah laughing, ‘what a beastly old kill-joy he must have been?’
I turned aside, saw the past, turned back, saw the future, turned aside again and began to stumble away.
‘Paul—’
‘I’ve got to get out.’
I felt better outside. I stood in the sunshine in the Cathedral Close and death seemed a long way away.
‘Sorry,’ I said to Dinah. ‘I’m not usually so disturbed by medieval morbidity. I must have been to too many funerals lately.’
She asked no questions but simply slipped her arm through mine. ‘Let’s go on to Mallingham.’
We left the city and after crossing the river and crawling through the suburbs we emerged once more on to the open road.
I did not speak and Dinah too was quiet. The countryside, pastoral and unremarkable, began to flatten and suddenly I felt the better mood of the Cathedral returning, the sense of time being displaced and bent to form adifferent world. Crossing the bridge at Wroxham I saw the hubbub of life on the water, the yachts and cruisers, dinghies and rowboats, and although Dinah said indifferently: ‘This is the commercial part of the Broads. Wroxham is a holiday centre,’ the magic had begun again. This time I made no effort to be hard-headed and practical. I turned to embrace my romantic vision of time, and as the road curved through the marshland I saw the sails across the fields although the water was hidden from my eyes. It was as though the boats were travelling on land, and as I stared at this mysterious mirage I sensed a land where the water was king, and waters where the land was encircled to become a hundred private fiefdoms. We streamed through Horning (‘
Quite
lost its character since the war,’ snorted Dinah), and crossed the River Ant at Ludham Bridge where two windmills, one a skeleton, pointed ghostly fingers to the sky.
We drove on to Potter Heigham.
Somewhere south of Hickling we lost touch with modern times. The reeds swayed on the marshes, the white sails shimmered in distant dykes and enormous clouds dotted the unending sky.
‘More windmills!’ I was sitting on the edge of my seat and speaking for the first time for half an hour.
‘Drainage mills. They keep the land from flooding.’
I stared at the slowly revolving sails of the nearest mill. The sun was still shining. The cattle browsed tranquilly in the fields. Wattle-and-daub cottages basked beneath roofs of an unusually dark thatch.
Beyond Hickling the road ran due north to Palling, Waxham and Horsey but a mile before we reached the coast we found the
The choir stopped. I could hear the choir master talking faintly. The air of unreality evaporated and I felt better.
‘Tell me about it – the Cathedral – everything you know,’ I said, automatically checking my pocket to make sure I had my medication, and she started to talk about the number of years it had taken to build the Cathedral and how some of the great pillars were different from the others because the earlier ones had been unfinished. I concentrated on her information and conscientiously noted the features of the chancel, clerestory, nave and choir. We walked around the cloisters, we admired the stonework, and soon I had even recovered enough to smile at my swooningly romantic visions of travelling sideways in time.
Given the chance my good hard Yankee common sense will always triumph over my sloppy Victorian romanticism.
‘Why are you smiling?’ said Dinah curiously.
‘I must have been remembering my far-off foolish youth when I was a romantic idealist … My God, what’s this?’
It was a memorial stone, very old, set in the wall. Below an engraving of a skull ran the morbid rhyme:
All you that do this place pass bye
Remember death for you must dye
As you are now then so was I
And as I am so that you be.
Thomas Gooding here do staye
Wayting for God’s judgement daye.
‘Can’t you just imagine,’ said Dinah laughing, ‘what a beastly old kill-joy he must have been?’
I turned aside, saw the past, turned back, saw the future, turned aside again and began to stumble away.
‘Paul—’
‘I’ve got to get out.’
I felt better outside. I stood in the sunshine in the Cathedral Close and death seemed a long way away.
‘Sorry,’ I said to Dinah. ‘I’m not usually so disturbed by medieval morbidity. I must have been to too many funerals lately.’
She asked no questions but simply slipped her arm through mine. ‘Let’s go on to Mallingham.’
We left the city and after crossing the river and crawling through the suburbs we emerged once more on to the open road.
I did not speak and Dinah too was quiet. The countryside, pastoral and unremarkable, began to flatten and suddenly I felt the better mood of the Cathedral returning, the sense of time being displaced and bent to form adifferent world. Crossing the bridge at Wroxham I saw the hubbub of life on the water, the yachts and cruisers, dinghies and rowboats, and although Dinah said indifferently: ‘This is the commercial part of the Broads. Wroxham is a holiday centre,’ the magic had begun again. This time I made no effort to be hard-headed and practical. I turned to embrace my romantic vision of time, and as the road curved through the marshland I saw the sails across the fields although the water was hidden from my eyes. It was as though the boats were travelling on land, and as I stared at this mysterious mirage I sensed a land where the water was king, and waters where the land was encircled to become a hundred private fiefdoms. We streamed through Horning (‘
Quite
lost its character since the war,’ snorted Dinah), and crossed the River Ant at Ludham Bridge where two windmills, one a skeleton, pointed ghostly fingers to the sky.
We drove on to Potter Heigham.
Somewhere south of Hickling we lost touch with modern times. The reeds swayed on the marshes, the white sails shimmered in distant dykes and enormous clouds dotted the unending sky.
‘More windmills!’ I was sitting on the edge of my seat and speaking for the first time for half an hour.
‘Drainage mills. They keep the land from flooding.’
I stared at the slowly revolving sails of the nearest mill. The sun was still shining. The cattle browsed tranquilly in the fields. Wattle-and-daub cottages basked beneath roofs of an unusually dark thatch.
Beyond Hickling the road ran due north to Palling, Waxham and Horsey but a mile before we reached the coast we found the
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