A Day in Salisbury

The city with a spire that haunts the landscape.

As we drive over the Plain, that great expanse of high grassland now mostly given over to birds and the Army, we see the spire hanging low on the horizon. As we approach, we pass the great mound of Old Sarum, where Eleanor of Aquitaine was imprisoned in the castle. The castle itself was eventually destroyed, but the mound remains, huge and brooding over the ancient city below.

We walked along the river bank, long ago channelled into a straight furrow, but still full of flowers and water birds, and then through the narrow streets to the great gateway and into the Cathedral Close.

The cathedral stands sublimely in its great sweep of trees and grassland. Unlike its more ancient neighbour at Winchester, built upon its Saxon forebear, Salisbury was created almost entirely anew in the 13th century. The Close slides gently down towards the water meadows and water is, in fact, an ever-present problem here: the water table lies only a few feet beneath the cathedral.

Once through the great ancient gate, all is grace and light.

There were only a few tourists that morning, including some serious-looking Germans, as we crossed the grass towards the museum, where its café beckoned.

The museum is always good value. John Constable spent a great deal of time in Salisbury, where his friend Bishop John Fisher lived, particularly during the difficult years surrounding the death of his beloved wife Maria. He painted some of his most important landscapes here.

Today, however, the exhibition honoured a rather different school of artists and writers, also devotees of Wiltshire: the Bloomsbury Group.

A godless lot, I thought as we entered, with their ridiculous love lives, but interesting and very English in their semi-serious way.

Lytton Strachey featured largely. There was a great oil painting of him by Dora Carrington, who loved him deeply, although her love could never really be returned in the way she wanted. His huge, rather lugubrious figure, slumped in a chair, suddenly reminded me of Alan, a gay friend I had at Cambridge. The word gay, incidentally, seems rather inappropriate for both of them.

And Salisbury suddenly took me back more than sixty years.

I had returned to college early in the spring of my first year at Cambridge, after spending two weeks at an Anglican retreat centre on the romantic North Devon coast. I had a wonderful time there and met two people who were to change my life.

Arriving back in Cambridge two weeks before Full Term, when the lectures began, I found the spring quite intoxicating. In Africa, where I had grown up, spring is quite different. There it comes as the winter drought eventually ends, by which time everything has become very hot and dusty.

One morning after breakfast I went to the bookshop, grandly situated on the corner of King's Parade with a fine view across one of the most beautiful parts of the ancient city. I bought an armful of books, poetry, philosophy and religion, and found my way into a huge cavernous pub, long since demolished.

I didn't know that it was a haunt of communists, gays and the more bohemian side of Cambridge, the complete opposite of the would-be aristocratic Pitt Club.

I sat down in a window seat with my package of books and got out my cigarettes. As usual, I didn't have a light, so I casually asked the man sitting next to me for one.

As I did so, I remember noting to myself that he looked like a homosexual, the word we used then for gay men. What I didn't realise was that asking for a light was also a fairly standard pick-up line in the gay world.

Normally I might not have started chatting to him. He looked distinctly shabby and, at that time, homosexuality was still illegal and it could be dangerous to be openly gay. Not long before, Alan Turing had been prosecuted and subjected to chemical castration.

My new acquaintance worked in the bookshop as a French and Arabic expert and seemed wonderfully literary and exotic, so we became friends. I brushed off his amatory approaches, as I already had two ladies in my life, but we remained friendly for many years and he became a great influence on me.

Perhaps one of the things that has lasted longest is my love of French. Now, all these decades later, I rely on French poetry, prayers and psalms to see me through the long watches of the night.

And so began a rather Bloomsbury period in my own life, from which I eventually emerged some thirty years later.

Those thirty years were full of interest and emotion, triumphs and disasters, friendships, passions and mistakes. Looking back now, I sometimes see them almost as another life. Much later, when I met the woman who became my wife, something changed. The restless years gave way to something steadier: love, companionship and, eventually, the possibility of peace.

I tried to describe that journey in a poem written in Glenshee in 2014. It looks back at the recklessness and darkness of those earlier years, and at the extraordinary difference one person can make to a life.

How I found you

The river gleams like glass

and glistens silver in the gloaming

in the late night light

as the midges settle

and the wind lifts

I look down the long ladder of silence

into my early life

my reckless easy days

and perfumed nights

before the darkness came

and drowned

the light

left me too cold for crying

too broken for despair

too lost and lonely

empty

of all that I held dear

so cold to life and laughter

to love and care

so empty lost and lonely

I could not shed a tear

so deep in sorrow slept I

when at last I found you

held my arms about you

too tender then for fearso held in hope

so fresh and fearless trod I

and held you in my heart