In our drawing-room you could hear the booming of the organ. I was
always watching the canons crossing the cathedral green, counting the
strokes of the cathedral bell, listening to the cawing of the
cathedral rooks, smelling the cathedral smell of cold stone, wet
umbrellas and dusty hassocks, looking up at the high tower and
wondering whether anywhere in the world there was anything so grand
and fine. My moral world, too, was built on the cathedral--on the
cathedral 'don'ts' and 'musts,' on the cathedral hours and the
cathedral prayers, and the cathedral ambitions and disappointments. My
father's great passion was golf. He was not a religious man. But my
mother believed in the cathedral with a passion that was almost a
disease. She died looking at it. Her spirit is somewhere round it now,
I do believe."
He paused, then went on:
"It was the cathedral that made me so unpractical, I suppose. I who am
an only child--I believed implicitly in what I was told and it always
was my mother who told me everything.
Pages:
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41