Between two worlds, by distinguished author Philip Temple
The talisman on my keyring is a piece of oak, a pendant six centimetres long and one and a half wide. It is 750 years old. It has no engraving or symbol to indicate magical, protective powers. Yet it is magical. Like an ancient piece of pounamu, it lies in my pocket as a touchstone to my ancestry, my tribe, my birthplace. I do not live there now and will not live there again; but in that small piece of oak, I carry all of those with me and it reminds me that, every so often, I should go back to tread the ground, look up into its vaulted heavens.
*
I first went there when I was 14 years old, riding pillion with my older cousin Charlie on his BSA Bantam motorbike. But it had always been part of my imagination because it gave its name to the place I proudly declared I came from whenever anyone asked. When I was a small child, my mother assured me that anyone of genuine importance came from Yorkshire. These included Len Hutton, the England cricket captain, Captain Cook and even Dick Whittington, the country lad who became Lord Mayor of London. Robin Hood originally came from Yorkshire, too, she said.
It was not far from Castleford to York, 24 miles, but the 4 h.p. Bantam, going flat out with one light rider, could go no faster than 45 m.p.h. There were no motorways and the ‘A’ roads were busy so I was glad it took us only about an hour. I was most interested in the Roman walls and walked along the battlements, imagining the centurions looking out at threatening bands of Celts.
When I turned around to look the other way, it seemed as if the walls had been kept, long after any invaders had gone, to shelter York Minster which lay like a giant, divine ship of the line, drydocked, a reminder of time itself.
Charlie did not want to go in. "Don’t be daft," he said. "Why does tha’ want to look at all that mumbo-jumbo? The money spent on all that’d be better spent on new council ‘ousing." I could not argue with that. It had taken years for my parents to get a house. But I said, "I won’t be a minute" and ran inside before he could answer.
I did not know what to think. It was not a moment for thinking but just looking and feeling. Above my head, the Rose of Yorkshire window glowed with the midday sun and when I walked in further I could look down the gigantic nave to the west window, Heart of Yorkshire. That seemed to be true, to somehow mark the spot that was the heart of the biggest county; but I could not say why. At school I had been taught about the different styles of cathedral architecture, flying buttresses and all, but no-one had explained what they supported other than the religious purpose, and I was not religious. There was something else.
I began to wrestle with what it meant for me to be standing on islands a world apart and how I might bring them together
Then Charlie found me and told me it was time to go back before the traffic became too heavy. I did not return to York before I emigrated to New Zealand four years later (1957).
*
I did not return to England for 22 years. By then I had worshipped among cathedrals of nature, all the way to the summit altar of Aoraki/Mount Cook. When I first met the kauri forest giant Tāne Mahuta in 1977, I was compelled to embrace him. Here was the oldest living being in New Zealand, reputedly 1200 years old, a singular cathedral of nature that tied me to the history and heritage of the country like nothing had before. It was a tangible symbol of belonging. It prompted a part of me to rise up, from suppressed wells of feeling, that had been ignored in the excitement and busyness of finding a life, adventure, a career, a family and home in a new country. New Zealand was empty of structures that embodied deep age and memory. Māori had treasured items of pounamu, a taonga that pre-dated European settlement; but their chief structures of belonging were whakapapa and a knowledge of turangawaewae. Embracing Tāne Mahuta prompted my first recognition that I had left behind my own whakapapa, my first tūrangawaewae. Over the next decade or more I began to wrestle with what it meant for me to be standing on islands a world apart and how I might bring them together.
*
In 1979, as part of a year-long trip, I took my children to Yorkshire with my wife to meet relatives and to visit my childhood places. I found my biological father whom I had not seen since I was about three and did not remember. I took the family to York and the Minster and began to understand its history with the Roman settlement at its foundations; its accreting construction over centuries; the meaning of its windows and treasures. I was especially taken by the wooden screen between the main nave and the Quire which was surmounted with the carved heads of the kings of England from William the Conqueror to the end of the Plantagenet line. But the House of York line ended with Henry VI. There was no trace anywhere in the Minster of the notorious Richard III. Shakespeare had done a good hatchet job on him to suit the current Tudor version of how they gained the throne.
I was beginning to feel that, despite distances in space and time, York Minster was my place. Perhaps I had been influenced by Kenneth Clark in his television series and book Civilisation (1969) which told of the building of Chartres Cathedral that had involved every class of the community. Like Chartres, York Minster had been the culmination of the local people’s reaching for heaven and spiritual enlightenment: a place of light, hope and sanctuary in dark ages.
*
After we returned to New Zealand, I could not find the right focus and energy for my writing. My immensely popular anthropomorphic kea novel, Beak of the Moon, was published in 1981. In essence it was my celebration of the natural world of the Southern Alps. But this had been completed before my journey back to Yorkshire and, when I tried to continue work on a sequel, I could not find the flow.
What kind of New Zealander was I? Where did I truly belong? Did it matter?
About 18 months after my return, a voice in my head told me to stop work on the sequel and write about my childhood. It was insistent and over six weeks my novel Sam was dictated to me by this androgynous voice with the kind of Yorkshire character and nuance that I had long lost. Who I was and where I came from could not be set aside. Finding my birth father and visiting communal ancestral tūrangawaewae such as York Minster and Fountains Abbey had forced me to examine my roots and thrown up doubts and questions that became more and more insistent. Who was I? I was a New Zealand citizen but I also carried a British passport, so what kind of New Zealander was I? Where did I truly belong? Did it matter?
*
I returned to York Minster again in 1987 and in the Minster shop I found key rings attached to small pieces of oak. In 1984 the fire in the roof of the south transept had prompted the firefighters to collapse it on to the floor of the transept to prevent the fire’s spread to the main body of the cathedral. The glass of the Rose Window had been fractured by the heat but held together by the lead framing. The south transept was still under repair and, to meet the cost of more than £2 million, various avenues were explored for fund raising. For one pound I bought a small oak key ring made from roof beams that had survived the fire. The oak was more than 700 years old.
My visits to York Minster became almost regular, every two, three or four years as a side journey to see to my father near Thirsk, or from further afield: from London; from the south coast where my mother and stepfather lived; even from Berlin. It became a kind of essential pilgrimage and each time I learned more about the Minster’s fabric and history.
I was drawn to the Five Sisters window above the north transept. The oldest in the cathedral, the largest lancet window in the world, it was completed in 1260 and yet is curiously modern. The grisaille painted glass set into geometric designs with points of coloured glass create patterns that seem to owe less to Christian faith than to 13th century abstract artists expressing themselves in the sheer joy of creative work. York Minster’s great east window may be the largest reach of medieval stained glass in the world, but Five Sisters has a grace, simplicity and soft ambient light that is more other-worldly than colourful depictions of Biblical stories.
*
My mother died in 2007 and with my stepfather, my brother and both our sons, I travelled north to Yorkshire with her ashes. She had wanted part of them scattered at Fountains Abbey. I wrote about a visit there alone in my novel To Each His Own (1999), recounting my feelings on encountering a heritage worker restoring stone arches over the River Skell: "The man spoke with earnest enthusiasm about the intricacies of his work … the range of his ambition was nothing more, and nothing less, than the maintenance of the evidence of people’s lives. His knowledge of the steps over each turn of hill and wood, and the layers of bones and dressed stones beneath the quiet skin of the soil, restored to Martin a measure of the weight of being in the land that he had lost from living in a country where there was less a sense of living with history than being a part of its making."
As part of the journey with my mother’s ashes, we made an excursion to York but the others did not want to visit the Minster. My stepfather, a reserved, undemonstrative man, was unusually vehement about not going in. He gave no reason and his manner did not invite questions. I went in alone and in the north transept saw again the Royal Air Force Memorial Astronomical Clock and the book beneath that listed the names of 18,000 men and women who died while serving with the RAF in Yorkshire, Northumberland and Durham during World War II. Perhaps that was the reason my stepfather did not want to visit the Minster. He had flown as a rear gunner in Halifax bombers from the RAF base at Pocklington just a few miles from York. Many of his squadron never returned from raids over Germany and he did not return either, but survived as a prisoner of war. He had never spoken much about all of that and when I mentioned the Minster memorial to him as we drove away, he did not respond. Who was there among those 18,000 names of the dead?
*
On one visit to the Minster I went to the cleric at the information desk and asked him why Richard III’s head was missing from the Quire screen and why there was no reference to him anywhere in the cathedral. "Ah", he said in a lowered voice. "The church community is still quite divided over that question." He looked about to see if he was being observed and then stood up and said, "Come with me." I found it hard to keep up as he strode down the entire south Quire aisle to the east end of the Minster. As we walked into All Saints Chapel he pointed to a window on its south wall: "There." Above a scroll with Richard III were two boars, representing his dukedom of Gloucester, supporting a crown and the royal coat of arms. At the boars' feet were the white rose of Yorkshire and the Sun in Splendour. The motto above read Loyaulte me tie - Loyalty binds me. But it had not bound together the Minster community for 500 years and the cleric told me that this small acknowledgement had been placed in the window by the Richard III Society only a few years before: "There was much debate." Old clans, old enmities, old traditions, twisted whakapapa.
Their voices lifted, as voices had been lifting in plaintive call and chant for almost a thousand years, rising into the great Gothic arches reaching to heaven above them
The final twist to the story came in 2012 when Richard III’s remains were discovered under a Leicester city parking lot. Then came the grand argument about where he should be buried. Richard III had given many gifts to the Minster, had planned to endow a great chantry chapel and wished to be buried there. Yorkshire people wanted the last king of the House of York ‘brought home’ and I signed a petition, along with thousands of others. But Richard had been buried by Leicester Franciscans in their friary church and the licence for the archaeological excavation of the Greyfriars site specifically designated Leicester Cathedral for his tomb.
*
In more recent years, my wife and I have arranged our visits so that we may attend Evensong; York Minster is not a museum but an active working church. Everyday visitors pay an admission fee to help fund the Minster’s maintenance, but worshippers may attend services. I am not religious, and unfamiliar with high Church of England liturgy, although I had grown up with grammar school services and hymns. But I had come to worship here in my own way; and one occasion will remain with me forever.
On a late afternoon in January the cold Minster was empty. The pews in the 80-metre long nave had been removed for the winter and I was able to stand there entirely alone, beneath the exaltation of time’s architecture. Cathedrals are said to have been built as a reaching for heaven, places of enlightenment above the temporal, above harsh worldly realities. In medieval times there had been no pews, and worshippers would have stood, knelt or sat on the great marble flagstones of the nave’s floor. They seemed to be all around me; at that moment I felt that I could touch the hands of all my ancestors. Was this another enlightenment intended by its builders?
At evensong, tenuous sunset light loomed through the high windows above the Quire as a choir of men and girls processed to their places. Soon their voices lifted, as voices had been lifting in plaintive call and chant for almost a thousand years, rising into the great Gothic arches reaching to heaven above them. Here was the ritual of belonging; and there was a kind of heaven just being there.
*
My attachment to York and its Minster was deepened when a relative undertaking research into family genealogy sent me the table he had assembled on my father’s side. There he was, the grandfather I had scarcely known, remembered from infancy in the shadows of a room where a chiming clock resonated; where, on its mantelpiece, there was a trio of three carved monkeys. "Grandad. Why is one covering its eyes, the other one covering its ears and that one covering its mouth?" I did not understand what ‘evil’ meant but whenever I try to remember my grandfather, the words ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ always come to mind.
The genealogical chart, with added information, showed that he had been born just 10 minutes’ walk from York Minster. In the twenty years he grew up there, how many times had he heard the Minster bells, how many times had he visited, worshipped in this living church? Now I could walk there with him.
*
Alan Bennett often writes about visiting churches and cathedrals for their architecture and history. Maybe it is something in the water between Leeds and Bradford; he was born in Armley and I was born in Stanningley a few miles away. He wrote about visiting the York Minster Chapter House and being taken up to the loft above where the stone masons did their work in the late 13th century. Their set squares and patterns were still lying around as if they had knocked off the day before. He saw evidence in an alcove of what appeared to have been an open privy for the masons. The thought of that caused him to comment, "Oh that would never do me." But then he discovered the remains of hinges: "In a previous life I was a medieval historian, but the discovery of these door hooks is more of a contribution than I ever made through my study of the archives."
Forty-two canopied chairs for Yorkshire clergy ring the Chapter House’s octagonal space. The house is filled with light from the traceried stained glass windows that fill almost all the upper wall space. On the canopy bosses above the chairs are about 100 carvings of heads, animals, birds and foliage. The heads seem to represent citizens of the day, from bishop to merchant, from pious noble to simpering idiot, from the mythical Green Man to roaring drunk.
It is possible to buy replicas of some of these in the Minster shop. Now, above the windows of our sun room in Dunedin, the jester, the merchant’s wife, the bishop, the brewer and the knight look on, reminding me of all that they witnessed of passing humanity. Like the pendant on my key ring, they represent 750 years of my heritage, my whakapapa. The oak pendant is small, almost nothing; but it is taonga as much as the old argillite flax scraper, kaitapahi harakeke, that was gifted to me many years ago on Banks Peninsula/Horomaka. Just as the oak keyring pendant sits comfortably in my pocket, the stone scraper fits perfectly in my palm, passports to both lives.
Tomorrow in ReadingRoom: We celebrate Whiti Hereaka's birthday with a review of her stunning new novel Kurangaituku
