Angels in the Architecture (8 page)

‘Yay!’ Jillie interrupted. ‘Can I come? I like it there.’

‘Okay, that’ll work,’
said Alicia.

The Watsons
packed picnic remains into their car. Timmy continued to utter the odd
Wa’
or
Swa’
to general amazement and all-round delight.

Alicia
took Orchard Street past the City of Lincoln Council, behind the wharf and the narrow winding streets to Drury Lane and the castle and cathedral on the hill. The cathedral presented one of the finest sights in England, sitting atop the hill and old town of Lincoln, and could be seen for miles around. It had an extraordinary architectural history being built and rebuilt, in part or in whole, several times.

Turning past the tourist centre
into Castle Square, a short way from the Cathedral, Alicia pulled over by
The Magna Carta
pub.

‘And don’t even think about getting stuck in there!’ Alicia smiled at her husband.

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Pete leant over and kissed his wife. ‘See you back here at three?’

‘Sure. Have fun.’

‘Okay, you two, let’s pile out then.’ Pete climbed out and opened the back door for his children. ‘Timmy, did you undo your seat belt?’

‘It’s all
right, Dad, he just undid it just then.’

‘Okay, good. C’mon then. Bye
, hun.’ Pete and Jillie waved to Alicia as she turned back around to go back down the way she’d come.

‘Can we go down the steep street,
Daddy?’ Jillie pointed down Steep Hill, the cobbled, handrailed lane leading down the hill.

‘Maybe later
, sweetie. It’s pretty hard work getting up again.’

‘You won’t have to carry me.’

‘I think I heard you say that last time, and I think I did carry you some of the way, and Timmy. Let’s go see the Cathedral and we’ll see about it after, shall we?’

‘Okay, let’s go.
’ Jillie took her father’s hand as they turned right at the corner of the pub and under the medieval archway of the cathedral’s Exchequer Gate.

Pete never ceased to be in awe of the incredible facades of
the Cathedral, no matter from which angle he approached it. The extent of the stonework was something to marvel, in the sheer size of single stones, but mostly in the height of the whole structure. The cathedral had been the tallest building in the world until the sixteenth century when its spires collapsed. Up close, both inside and out, the stones told a story to the touch – warm or cold, some more smooth, some older, some newer – and in their detailed work. There were thousands of stories within and without he knew. Each stone told a tale.

Pete headed to
the South Door in the West Front of the cathedral, a child holding each hand. The stone threshold was worn into a smooth concave. Jillie skipped inside the small foyer, and they turned left into the main cathedral.

‘See this bit of
wall, Jillie?’ Pete indicated the outside wall. ‘It’s nearly a thousand years old. It’s a part of the original cathedral. There was a big earthquake hundreds of years ago and most of it fell down.’

‘Is it going to fall down now?’

‘No, darling, it’s not.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Well, it’s a lot stronger now than it was then.’

‘What if there’s another earthquake?’

Pete regretted this particular attempt at a history lesson. ‘I’m sure it won’t happen today, sweetie. See this?’ He indicated a clear change in the stonework, where two different types of stone met, one a little darker in colour than the other. ‘See, this is where new stones were put on top of old ones when they were rebuilding the cathedral.’ The story the diagonal change told never ceased to overwhelm Pete, as he imagined stonemasons smoothing the old to make way for a well-fitting new. The craftsmanship he knew was little known now, and that medieval understanding of the weights and balances and engineering could rival much of contemporary expertise.

He walked over to the large square black font. It resembled marble
but Pete knew, from his reading of the Cathedral’s history, that it was polished and waxed limestone brought from France in the mid-twelfth century. ‘This is a font. Do you know what it’s for?’

‘To wash your hands?’

‘No, it’s for baptising new babies. The priest puts water over their head and...’

‘What’s baptising?’

‘Well, it’s a thing parents do to say we want our baby to believe in God and we’re going to teach her about God as she grows up.’

‘Did you do that about me?’

‘Let’s look around, shall we? Oh, look at this...’

‘Okay.’

Pete turned towards the Nave, still holding his children’s hands. They were relaxed and in no hurry. Pete revelled in this element of his children and parenting more than any other. There was no hurry, no deadlines, no copy to get to the editor, no coffee date appointment to meet, no traffic to battle, and no dinner to cook by a certain time. It was the weekend, and for Pete, even weekdays now afforded much of that peacefulness. He appreciated the opportunity to guide his children through the beauty of this place, not because he needed them to understand God – he wasn’t so sure about God himself – but to show them the power of a people and a history, and even an empire for all its strengths and weaknesses, and how the Church and its buildings fostered a nation. Not a religious education, but an education just the same. Not a celebration of the power of a state, but an observation of the labours and devotions of hundreds of thousands of people across hundreds of years. That was Lincoln Cathedral to Pete, and he immersed himself in it.

The Cathedral
was enormous, not dark but not light, afternoon sun pouring in just the same, through the high northern windows and stained glasses. The effect was appropriately celestial. The size of the space he was in, up, across and looking the long distance towards the eastern end, still staggered him.

The high,
lengthy Nave was neatly laid out with moveable seating, and several people were dotted about – some obviously locals and in prayer, others tourists quietly taking in their surrounds. A large pulpit with a spiralling staircase stood empty. A few obvious church officials were about – some busying themselves with administrative tasks; another middle-aged woman in cassock speaking with a visitor or parishioner.

Jillie was happy to walk slowly beside her father. Holding hands had been openly agreed as their favourite thing. Pete observed the relative quiet of the enormous building
, oddly without much echo. Jillie had a sense of the place and had made an assumption that it was a place of whispers. Tim was compliant, for now. Had he thought it in so many words, he would also recognise that holding his father’s hand was one of his favourite things.

They walked along the south wall, stopping at each giant window, in part looking at what each tableau contained, in part simply taking in the beauty of the colours and light plays of each. This particular craftsmanship was never lost
on Pete either and his appreciation never became saturated. Jillie could not seem to get enough either and had remarked once ‘it’s so beautiful, Daddy – can we come and live here in the Church’, to the bemusement of bystanders.

They p
assed the cassocked woman chatting to another visitor. Pete saw that her name tag read ‘Duty Chaplain’, as she introduced herself to the person she was with as ‘Jane’. She spoke softly and kindly in a well educated accent, and Pete wondered about a lifetime of devotion to the Church.

He said quietly
to Jillie, ‘Is there anything you’d particularly like to see, sweetie? Mummy’ll be a wee while.’

‘No, I like all the parts. Look, there’s a picture of a swan in that glass up there.’

‘It is too. Do you think that’s the swan we saw today?’

‘Don’t be
silly, Daddy.’

‘But it could be the great
-great grandfather of the one that talked to Timmy. Probably ten times that number of
greats
. Probably infinity
greats
.’

‘Wow
!’ Jillie continued to stare up at the window.

Pete wallowed a moment in her delight
.

At the other end of the nave, across
the West Transept, the Choir screen marked the midpoint of the Cathedral.

Pete turned and looked back down
the Nave with its twin lines of great columns. There was surprisingly little noise, even with people milling about. To his left now, the afternoon sun poured down into the southern end of the transept through an enormous round stained glass window, the
Bishop’s Eye,
set high in the wall.

Tim was standing, head back, blinking up through the central tower rising directly above them. The perfect symmetry of the many vaulted and arched lines in this view was like one section
through a kaleidoscope. Tim was mesmerised, until Jillie stood right in front of him, looking up too, and his attention was broken and he giggled at his sister.

They wandered along the southern choir aisle
, and Tim pulled away towards a black stone resembling a seat built into the surrounding internal Cathedral wall. He meandered over, moving his head left and right as he walked, keeping his eyes though on the seat. He stopped in front of it and stood, a little tentatively, the fingers of one hand lightly brushing the edge of the structure. Then he sat down on the floor, rested his head, and stared along the edge of the metre-long seat.

Tired,
thought Pete.

A shuffle to one side
drew Pete’s attention to a stout red-haired cassocked woman emerging around the Choir Screen with a small stack of books. She walked towards them and, as she got close, slowed to consider the view of the boy perched on the stone floor.

‘Sorry,’
said Pete. ‘He’s just plopped himself down there. A bit tired, I think.’

‘Oh no, not at all. He looks very sweet. Quite at home,’ said the woman, smiling.

Tim leant further on to the seat and put his hand on it, as though listening for something inside the box.

The woman also cocked her head to one side,
studying Tim. ‘Do you know what’s in there?’

‘Ah, no. I don’t. What is in there?’

The woman was clearly pleased with the small spectacle. She turned to Pete. ‘Actually, it’s a shrine.’

Pete’s eyebrows rose.

‘It used to be a lot bigger and more ornate but was destroyed during a war once. It’s known as the Shrine of Little Hugh.’ She looked back to Tim. ‘A young boy from the Middle Ages. Quite a horrendous story. Supposedly he was crucified and then tossed down a well. His death was blamed on the Jews, although undoubtedly that wasn’t the case. Some were executed though for the crime. The boy was considered a martyr and was interred here. No one knows now, of course, who he really was or what really happened.’ She stared still at Tim and then turned back to Pete. ‘But perhaps your wee boy does.’

Pete stared at her.

‘But never mind me, I like to imagine these things.’ She laughed a little, at herself it seemed.

Pete looked
to Tim and back. She was rather jolly, this woman, and open, as she smiled at them all. ‘Tim ... he knows ... some things we don’t know, for sure.’

‘Well
, I find most small children do have some wisdom about them, I have to say.’

‘Tim’s autistic
,’ Pete explained.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh. Well.’ She looked intriguingly
at Tim. ‘I’m Rose Draper. I’m a deaconess here.’ She turned back to Pete and extended her hand.

‘
Pete Watson.’ Pete shook her hand. ‘This is Jillie. We live at Nocton Fen. Jillie and I’ve been a few times to the Cathedral, haven’t we?’

‘Yes, I like it.’ Jillie stepped forward
.

‘Well
, I’m glad.’ She seemed genuinely delighted.

‘Mmm,’ Jillie responded shyly.

‘Well, it’s a curious attachment your Tim has to our Little Hugh.’

‘Oh, you know, he’s just tired really. We’ve had quite a day. And he does this thing looking along vertical and horizontal lines like this, especially when he’s tired. It’s called local coherence – when things are getting a bit much, if there’s too much going on – autistic kids will activate some little habitual behaviour they have, and it keeps anxieties and uncertainties about their environment at bay. So that’s one of the things he does.’ Pete looked at his son. ‘Looks like he’s on
to something else though now,’ he said.

Tim was smiling,
wide-mouthed and wide-eyed.

Jillie was holding her father’s hand again and also watching her brother. She could see the light again, that had come before
when Tim talked to the Swan.

‘You know, he smiles like this – at nothing seemingly – all the time. Sometimes I swear it’s to the same vacant spot in
mid-air, completely as though there’s something there that no one else can see. We’ve just been down to the lake, and he’s been having the most unbelievable little chat with one enormous swan. My wife was just about beside herself. He practically walked off with it.’