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The First Dazzling Chill of Winter

Collected Stories

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

PART ONE

The First Dazzling Chill of Winter

The First Dazzling Chill of Winter (Or: 'Pilgrims' and a Rose-Window)

In Chaucer's day men went on pilgrimages to Walsingham, Canterbury, Durham or Beverley in East Yorkshire in the spring. Pippa and I joined a chartered trainload of four hundred 'pilgrims', all in the first chill of winter, to Beverley minster. We caught the train at Potters Bar.

As we waited at the entrance an elderly couple spoke to us and the husband, a thin, balding man with wispy grey hair, described their previous rail excursion. He said, "I wanted to leave early, but my wife said there was plenty of time, and there was an accident. The M25 was blocked. We got to the station when the train was nearly due. I told my wife to hold the train up while I put our car in the car park. I was in such a state that I forgot to put my ticket by the windscreen. I remembered as I approached the station, and I had to go back. Then on my way back I dropped my keys and had to turn back and find them. My wife did hold the train up, but I had to run the last two hundred yards, and I was so out of breath that she thought I was having a heart attack. The staff bundled me on to the train. The train was full and there were no seats near the door so staff opened the toilet door and sat me on the toilet until I recovered my breath."

Pippa and I caught the train. We sat facing each other in a quaint, wood-panelled coach that looked 1930s but may have been 1960s in style, with 'Royal Scot' on the outside. Between us was a table laid with a white tablecloth and the plates, cutlery and glasses for our Great British breakfast. In the 'four' seats the other side of the aisle sat an elderly couple. The balding husband had coffee poured into his cup. He turned and said to me very politely, "I'm really looking forward to enjoying this." At Stevenage the peaceful atmosphere was suddenly invaded. A party of a dozen couples piled in, and there was a hubbub, indeed a commotion, as they identified their seats. Two couples stood over the man who was enjoying his coffee and unceremoniously established that he should be in coach C, not coach D. The couple had to vacate their seats and were bundled off into the next coach leaving their undrunk coffee – white cups and saucers – behind.

All through the Great British breakfast there was a hubbub as couples within the party called to each other. Two lots of four produced cards and shuffled and dealt. A large portly quizmaster with a moustache and beard and a red santa's hat with a bobble on the end that twinkled and a twinkling tie, who looked like Father Christmas, organised them, handing out sheets of his quiz and calling them "girls and boys" and commenting, "There seems to be strip poker going on here." There was raucous laughter. Couples peered at the sheets of questions and there was a lot of banter. More packs of cards were produced, and the couples next to us, who had turfed out the polite man who was enjoying his coffee, played a number game. All four had boards with numbers up to 10 in different colours which they had drawn from a central black bag, and they compiled lines of numbers as in Scrabble. It looked like a number scrabble. They played the game very intently with repeated cries of joy or disappointment, and there was a lot of loud laughter from all the tables of 'fours'.

Breakfast was served: muesli, fried egg and sausage and much else, bread, butter and marmalade with lashings of coffee. The train carried us across flooded Lincolnshire to Doncaster and Hull, and then turned towards Beverley station. A voice instructed us, "When you get off at Bridlington, those in coaches A, B, C, D and E should go down to F as these coaches will be outside the short platform at Bridlington." The voice repeated 'Bridlington' several times and then corrected itself to 'Beverley'. Rain was forecast for the whole day, and we walked through a steady drizzle to the Gothic minster for a carol concert.

Eventually the four hundred of us were seated under the towering arches of the nave. At the apex of each were stone figures playing medieval musical instruments: lutes, bagpipes, horns and tambourines. Gazing up at the architecture and reading a leaflet as I waited I grasped that the minster originated in a monastery founded c.700 in Anglo-Saxon times, and had been rebuilt between 1220 and 1420. It had been restored in the 18th century by Nicholas Hawksmoor, who added the twin towers. The inside did not seem to have changed since the medieval time, and had survived the Reformation and the Puritan iconoclasm.

After a procession of choristers in red and a welcome from the bald vicar, the local choir sang ancient carols, which were applauded, interspersed with hymns sung by the congregation. At one point an angelic chorister sang 'Walking in the air' from The Snowman.

At the end of the carol concert we headed for the front, and having consulted one of the local helpers who were in red sweaters I found the tomb of Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland and the mid-14th-century Gothic Percy canopy, an elaborately decorated stone arch that led from the 14th-century high altar to the small chapel that contained the 15th-century Percy tomb. Shakespeare's Hotspur, Harry Percy, who appears in Richard II and Henry IV Part One, would have known this canopy and chapel, but not the tomb which was for one of his descendants. I took in the "frith stool", which may have been a bishop's or abbot's throne and gave the minster a right of sanctuary (frithu being 'peace' in Anglo-Saxon).

I looked at some of the sixty-eight 16th-century misericords – many different carvings of domestic and farmyard animals – on the choir seats, and then looked at the 13th-century medieval stained glass in the east window within the retro-choir, where tens of thousands of pilgrims had knelt and which had been used as a school for a while. The lower glass had scenes from the lives of St Martin, St Nicholas and perhaps St Leonard.

It had been announced that there would be a couple of tours of the roof, and I saw the stragglers of the second group heading for the staircase. I paid and tagged along and found myself climbing a very narrow winding stair of 113 steep steps. It had been built around 1220 and was so narrow my shoulders brushed the curved wall on either side as I ascended.

At the top, slightly breathless, I found a huge wooden treadwheel. A guide gave us a talk and then stepped inside the wheel and trod it. As the wheel turned, a rope raised a circular serrated boss above the nave altar. He explained that the treadwheel, acting as a crane, worked as a hoist for the ten-metre-long oak trusses that were used as the roof's timbers. From seventy metres up I looked down at the nave altar (or communion table) below.

We were led through a door and found ourselves in a dimly-lit part of the roof space with a wooden floor. There was a round clear-glassed rose-window at the end (a wheel with ten spokes). We were directly behind the rose-window that can be seen from the town.

Twenty of us came out of the dingy light towards the large round window and looked down on Beverley two hundred feet below. My fellow pilgrims were holding back, blinking and squinting in the bright light and straining to see down without going too close to the window. They all seemed older than me. They all had the first chill of winter in their looks.

We were all dazzled by the light coming in through the round window, and by the new knowledge we had acquired. We were all still learning, finding out about new things, which is why we had climbed the spiral stair to this window. We were still dazzled by what is new and full of wonder at what we had not known until now. Though I was getting old I was still dazzled by the brilliance of the universe. It did not matter that the backs of my legs, my haunches and my lower back would ache from using rarely-used muscles in climbing the winding stair.

In the first dazzling chill of winter we had climbed the spiral stair to reach this eagle's view over the lands the minster had received from Athelstan in the 10th century and over the social life of the town which, two hundred feet below, could have still been medieval and of the time these sturdy walls were built across two streams. Despite being wintry in our skin, we were all dazzled by the construction of this towering edifice that had endured unchanged for seven or eight hundred years. Although we had begun to grow old we were still curious enough to take the ancient 1220 winding stair, whose side walls brushed against our shoulders. Up here we felt premonitions of eternity as we looked down in wonder on the world of social houses with our new perspective on the tiny world of time, and life was good.

To see the roof at close quarters we had to climb nearly-perpendicular iron steps thirty feet up to a higher level, and in due course we walked along a raised gantry between the 60-degree sloping wooden roof on either side. The roof was all 1220–1420, and some of the trusses had been dated by dendrochronology as 1140. They had been reused or recycled. Other trusses had been dated as 1330. We were shown the carpenters' marks. A corpulent bespectacled academic who was writing about the minster said that the whole building looked as "one build" even though it had been built over two hundred years after 1220 and had gone through three styles: from Early English to Decorated and then to Perpendicular. Having walked the full length of the roof above the minster, we had to climb more perpendicular steps, this time about twenty feet.

We descended down another narrow winding staircase. Pippa was waiting for me as I emerged on the ground floor.

We walked to find the Christmas market through drizzle. It was in a square with awnings, but it was really an ordinary market that sold fish and flowers, and one or two Christmassy items. Pippa bought some fudge. We then walked back to the station and as the train was too long for the platform we had to walk through a couple of coaches to return to our seats. The tables were laid for Christmas dinner.

The 'pilgrims' in the fours were even more noisy now. They called across the tops of seats to each other and made joking remarks. Between courses – soup and turkey and Christmas pudding, followed by cheese, biscuits, mince pies, coffee and chocolate – they resumed their games. The quizmaster, "Father Christmas", came and stood next to me to reveal the quiz answers.

He was a massive man. His bobble and tie twinkled, and he was taking sips from a hip-flask he held in one hand. I saw him as a Chaucerian figure. He was in the tradition of the Summoner who had made light of the pilgrimage. "What have we here," he boomed, noisily – drunkenly? – referring to a booklet I was reading. "That looks interesting, I must borrow that." I ignored the intrusion into my privacy. "No intellectuals here," he said, "everyone happy?" There was a chorus of "Yes" from the group. "Right. Well, the answer to question 1, how many miles from London to Beverley. The answer is 201.5 and I have awarded the points to the team that had 203."

He went through ten questions relating to Beverley. There was a dispute about the meaning of Beverley, which he pronounced to be "Bever's stream" ("ley" – "stream") and he then announced the results of the three teams in reverse order. The third and second teams noisily barracked: "Cheats", "Unfair". The winners cheered and put their thumbs up, and there was considerable crowing.

Chaucer's pilgrims had passed the time before and after the pilgrimage telling stories. This lot had passed the time doing a quiz on Beverley and playing games, but the spirit was just the same. No one on the train, I reckoned, expected their visit to the Beverley carol concert to change their lives or win them entry into Heaven. But their camaraderie and banter had not been unlike that of Chaucer's secular pilgrims, egged on by 'my Host', who was not in the Tabard Inn but a Father Christmas with a twinkling bobble and a hip-flask. All on the train were in the first chill of winter but they were too engrossed in their entertainment to be dazzled by new learning or knowledge, or by a simple, child-like wonder at the universe.

I was in my eighth decade and despite my hermit's urge to withdraw from the world [which Pippa, wanting him to retire, actively cooperated with and reflected in her smokescreen Epilogue to Collected Stories – ed.] my quest for order, pattern and the One had not abated, and I still relished understanding my experience, my life and its place in the universe. And so, in the first dazzling chill of winter, I pondered what I had observed in my advancing old age, encouraged by my continuing good health and, despite the deaths of so many of my contemporaries, reassured by the unflagging energy I continued to bring to my projects.

A Dapper Man (Or: The Man who Pea-ed on a Platform)

I saw a well-dressed gentleman standing outside the small hospital as I parked early on a Saturday morning. He was between seventy and eighty, and looked dapper in a jacket, collar and tie. He went in through the doors and I followed and signed the form. We sat down on either side of the aisle, the only outpatients at 8.15am.

About 8.30am my consultant strode through between us and said, "Good morning, gentlemen," and to him, "I'll only be two minutes." He wore a dark suit and went into his room.

"Are you seeing Mr Holmwood?" the dapper man asked.

"Yes," I said.

"I like him very much, I get on with him very well. I won't keep you long, I only want to ask him a question."

I wondered why he had not asked it over the telephone.

"I just want to show him something."

Mr Holmwood returned and the dapper gentleman went in. He came out ten minutes later and beamed at me as he passed me, waved me towards the room to indicate it was all mine now.

A nurse came out carrying a sheet of paper and called out my name.

"Yes," I said.

I sat with Mr Holmwood in his room and he told me that the biopsy he had taken was non-cancerous and non-pre-cancerous. I had a chronically inflamed prostate – a double whammy, the inflammation and then an operation – and it would take me six weeks to get back to normal.

"You're going to Paris," he said. "You may find you need to go to the lavatory urgently."

"I'll be on Eurostar," I said. "It'll be all right, so long as the lavatories are nearby. I'll go before I get on the train, there's bound to be somewhere on the platform."

Mr Holmwood smiled. "I was just talking to somebody," he said of the dapper man, "and he told me he'd been on a platform and he was bursting to go and there wasn't a lavatory and so he went where he was. There was a jet of water within his trousers, a stone came out in the middle of the jet and lay in a puddle on the platform. He bent down and picked the stone up. It was the size of a pea."

So that was what the dapper man wanted to show him.

"No damage done?" I asked.

"No. The body's very resilient. It came up the water-pipe, a stone the size of a pea." He shook his head.

"It brings a new dimension to having a pee," I said. "The man who peaed on a platform."

The consultant smiled.

Later I reflected on how courteous and friendly the dapper man had been. He was such a gentleman, dressed immaculately, and I found it hard to visualise his wetting himself on a crowded platform, looking down at the puddle round his shoes and picking up a stone and putting it in his pocket. So failing body functions make the most gentlemanly cringe with embarrassment – and recount their horrors with good humour.

A Corpulent Barber and an Angry Son

"I visited Jack Marney, the MP, twice," said the corpulent barber, his belly hanging out above his trousers as he bent and snipped my hair. "The first time he didn't help much. A fellow came by and said all shopkeepers must be put on a water meter. I thought no, I'm not doing that. Then someone came round and said they're targeting certain shops, like hairdressers' which wash hair but not estate agents' where they make continual cups of tea and pull their chain. I went to Marney and he said, 'That's wrong. I'll do something about that.' Three weeks later he wrote back saying he'd investigated and they were within their rights under some Water Act, which he disagreed with.

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Excerpted from The First Dazzling Chill of Winter by Nicholas Hagger. Copyright © 2016 Nicholas Hagger. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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