The Whole Day Through (20 page)

Winchester is a watery city and once had a network of brooks and streams usefully
cutting across it. Most of these have long since been channelled underground, leaving only street names to show where they run, but on this side of the city all the way out to the hospital at St Cross, water rules and you’ll walk through scenery typical of Hampshire’s south – water meadows rich in trout, herons and other wildlife. The footpath leads you alongside some of the College’s playing fields.

The path crosses Garnier Road by the old pumping station and winds on, past moist gardens and allotments, to another stretch of water meadows beyond a kissing gate. Beyond you now lies St Cross Hospital. Well worth a visit for the partly Norman church (where Ben and Bobby attend Shirley’s memorial service) and the lovely complex of old buildings surrounding it. You can spot the permanent residents by the red or black robes they’re supposed to wear at all times. Traditionally any visitor can claim the Traveller’s Dole – a chunk of bread and a glass of beer served free at the gate – but last time I checked this had been replaced by less frugal, non-charitable refreshments served in the outer courtyard.

At the end of your visit, walk almost straight ahead out of the outer gate, around a white fire barrier and on to Back Street. This will lead you past some delightful old houses, including a half-timbered one on a right-hand corner said to be one of the oldest in the city, past St Faith’s Primary School (where I imagined Ben and Bobby’s mother worked) and out on to Kingsgate Road. This seamlessly becomes Kingsgate Street, which you follow for its entire length. As the road progresses you’ll see the cathedral’s nave looming up ahead like a stone battleship. If you feel in need of sustenance, lunch can be found at the Queen’s Head, which has a pleasant garden, or the extremely atmospheric and much older Wykeham Arms.

From the Wykeham Arms pass directly beneath the old gateway ahead of you. This houses St Swithun’s, one of the city’s tiniest but most atmospheric churches, reached by a steep flight of stairs. Turning right then brings you through the fifteenth-century Prior’s Gate into the cathedral close and up against some of the oldest domestic buildings in it, including the Prior’s Lodge. Just around the corner to the right lies Pilgrims’ School, which educates the choristers for the cathedral and the quiristers for the College. To the left of the school’s front door stands the Pilgrims’ Hall, all that remains of the old medieval priory’s guesthouse, well worth a peek if it’s unlocked, for one of the earliest examples of a hammer-beam roof in the country.

Following the road on through the close will bring you past the handsome deanery, much improved for one of Charles II’s visits. Beyond that, keeping to the right, you will come to the Gothic arches that are all that remain of the eleventh-century chapter house. If it’s a sunny day, slip through here to visit Dean Garnier’s garden, which grants magnificent views of the cathedral exterior, as does the well-concealed path you can pick up by passing through the broad tunnel known as the Slype just beyond it.

Please don’t follow Professor Jellicoe’s disgraceful example by trying to slip in through the secure door in the Slype’s middle – the code I give in the book is NOT the right one! Rather, retrace your steps and walk under the long line of flying buttresses along the cathedral nave and enter through the west end. This may be the tourists’ entrance but it also confronts you with one of the most dramatic interior views the country can offer.

Leaving the cathedral by the way you came in, follow the lime avenue out of the close to The Square. Here you’ll find one of the city’s well-kept architectural secrets, the sister church to St Swithun’s – St Lawrence-in-the-Square. Once a chapel royal for Norman kings, it’s now principally a fifteenth-century building, crammed with earlier details, which charms for the Narnian fashion in which it seems to open out from a cupboard-like entrance between adjoining shops.

To return to the station, turn right as you come out of St Lawrence’s, pause to admire
the pinnacled splendour of the fifteenth-century Butter Cross, then head up the high street, past Elizabeth Frink’s fetching horse and rider, as far as the Westgate, then cross the road beyond County Hall and its bronze hog and follow Station Road. The curious who still have the energy can visit the little Westgate Museum, then turn left to visit the splendid Great Hall and the long-since-disproved Arthurian Round Table…

Gifted artist Rachel Kelly is a whirlwind of creative highs and anguished, crippling lows. She’s also something of an enigma to her husband and four children. So when she is found dead in her Penzance studio, leaving behind some extraordinary new paintings, there’s a painful need for answers. Her Quaker husband appeals for information on the internet. The fragments of a shattered life slowly come to light, and it becomes clear that bohemian Rachel has left her children not only a gift for art, but also her haunting demons.

‘Thought-provoking, sensitive, humane…by the end I had laughed and cried and put all his other books on my wish list’

Daily Telegraph

‘Poised and pitch-perfect throughout, this is an engrossing portrait of a troubled and remarkable character. A fine writer at the top of his game’

Mail on Sunday

As a small boy, Julian is taken on what seems to be the perfect Cornish summer holiday. It is only when he becomes a man – seemingly at ease with love, with his sexuality, with his ghosts – that the traumatic effects of that distant summer rise up to challenge his defiant assertion that he is happy and always has been.

‘Hugely compelling.
Rough Music
is an astute, sensitive and at times tragically uncomfortable meditation on sex, lies and family…a fabulously unnerving book’

Independent on Sunday

‘More vivid and revealing than any snapshot, faithfully illuminating the vicissitudes of the heart, memory’s fragility and the wear and tear of habit on desire’

Sunday Times

Lawrence Frost has neither father nor siblings, and fits so awkwardly into his worldly mother’s life he might have dropped from the sky. Like many such heroes, he grows up happier with plants than people. Waking one morning to find himself branded a wife-beater and under suspicion of murder, his small world falls apart as he loses wife, daughter, liberty, livelihood and, almost, his mind. A darkly comic fairy tale for grown-ups.

‘The book is one of [Gale’s] best: a fluently constructed narrative underpinned by excellent characterisation. Running through it all is the theme of redemption; and the hero’s journey from despair to hope makes a stirring odyssey for the reader’

Sunday Telegraph

‘An adventurous but confidently handled book, which shows the wisdom of straying from the straight and narrow’

The Times

A young composer exiled from Germany during World War II finds love and safety in rural East Anglia only for tragedy to erupt into his life. In prosperous and esteemed old age, he must then watch as his wilful grandchildren fall in love with the same enigmatic and perhaps dangerous young man – and learn life’s harder lessons in their turn.

‘Gale is both a shameless romantic and hip enough to get away with it. His moralised narrative has as its counterpart a rigorous underpinning of craft’

New Statesman

‘It is impossible to put
The Facts of Life
down. A rural English blockbuster. It is beautifully done’

Daily Telegraph

At nine years old, Dido has never known what it is like to be part of a proper family. Eliza, the clever but hopeless aunt who has brought her up, can’t give her the normal childhood she craves. Eliza’s ex, Giles, wants Dido back in his life, but his girlfriend has other ideas. Then an unexpected new love interest for Eliza causes all four to re-evaluate everything and sets in motion a chain of events which threatens to change all their lives.

‘Gale’s most questioning, ambitious work. It amuses and startles.
A Sweet Obscurity
is worth every minute of your time’

Independent

‘Intriguing and impressive…A memorable study of a child forced cruelly, even tragically, to grow up too soon’

Sunday Times

Torn apart by a traumatic childhood, sisters Deborah and Judith are thrown back together again when Deborah’s diplomat husband is accidentally assassinated. Judith’s lover Joanna, the instigator of this awkward reunion, finds that as the sisters’ murky past is raked up, so too is her own, and the three women become embroiled in a tangle of passion and recrimination.

‘
The Cat Sanctuary
is a book with claws. It has a soft surface – a story set in sloping Cornish countryside, touching on love, families and forgiveness, delivered in a gentle, straightforward prose – but from time to time it catches you unawares. Scratch the surface, suggests Gale, and you draw blood’

The Times

‘Engrossing…Gale is a charmingly idiosyncratic writer who could not write a cliché if he tried’

Daily Telegraph

Other novels about love and/or marriage suggested by Patrick Gale:

Along with Noël Coward’s
Brief Encounter
, this was lurking at the back of my mind while writing
The Whole Day Through
. Deftly funny and sad by turns, it packs the history of a troubled marriage into a tiny space. It was marvellously filmed with a young Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft, but read the novel first.

Charming Olivia comes to London to find work and falls into a love affair with a gorgeous older man, who just happens to be married. Glorious, tear-jerking, this little miracle of a novel has barely dated in its clear-eyed mapping-out of a still familiar emotional battlefield.

Published at the outbreak of World War II, Smart’s spare, lucid narrative of a brief, doomed affair is based on her eighteen years of on/off anguish with the poet George Baker. Ideal reading when recovering from betrayal, on the basis that someone else’s
heartbreak will make your heart seem only slightly chipped by comparison…

Penniless in Paris and separated from his pushy girlfriend, David is drawn into the darkly alluring orbit of Giovanni and a love that will change his life for ever. Along with E. M. Forster’s
Maurice
, this is the grandparent of much gay fiction and a fascinating window on a vanished bohemian world.

A psychiatrist who understands all too well the allure of death finds his certainties shaken as he struggles to bring a female patient back from suicidal despair. A deeply moving love story and an exercise in psychological detective-work, this immensely subtle novel deals with the transforming power of love and art with a self-effacing grace.

www.galewarning.org

Patrick Gale’s own website in which you can find out about his other books, read review coverage, post your own reviews, leave messages and contact other readers. There are also diary listings to alert you to Patrick’s broadcasts or appearances and a mailing list you can join.

www.nos.org.uk

The National Osteoporosis Society website.

www.downs-syndrome.org.uk

The Down’s Syndrome Association website.

www.visitwinchester.co.uk/site/tourist-information

All you need to retrace Ben and Laura’s steps.

PATRICK GALE
was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962. He spent his infancy at Wandsworth Prison, which his father governed, then grew up in Winchester. He now lives on a farm near Land’s End. As well as writing and reviewing fiction, he has published a biography of Armistead Maupin, a short history of the Dorchester Hotel and chapters on Mozart’s piano and mechanical music for H.C. Robbin Landon’s
The Mozart Compendium
.

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