This subconscious preoccupation with the cathedral characterizes most of the natives of Salisbury. At any hour of the day, if a strange bird alights upon the spire, in a very few minutes a shopkeeper or two seems to have felt the impact of his perching. All over the city, men come to their doors and look up. Groups collect, arguing over the breed of the stranger. From this one can judge how lovingly the Salisbury people watch their spire.
Within The Close, the houses cast an almost equal spell upon their owners. And no wonder. There are in England other cathedrals: there is no other Salisbury Close. The whole story of English domestic architecture is told within its walls. The palace is a history in itself. Its park wall was built from the stones of the Norman cathedral at Old Sarum; and its vaulted crypt was the hall of the house of that Bishop Poore who founded the present cathedral in 1220. Successive bishops went on adding to the palace for six hundred years; and during all those centuries, houses were being built in The Close. There are the little early ones which were built by Elias the Clerk of the Works and Robert the Mason, as their own dwellings while they worked at the cathedral. There is the grand ‘ King’s House’ of the Middle Ages: Bishop Seth Ward’s ‘Matron’s College’ built in the days of Charles II; Wren’s ‘ Choristers’ Schoolroom’; and lastly that triumphant series of elaborate eighteenth-century houses which represent perhaps the highest peak ever reached by the builders of town houses in this country.
The people who lived in The Close presented a unique combination of elsewhere incompatible attitudes towards their houses. In the first place, they took them entirely as a matter of course. There seemed to them nothing remarkable in the fact that they had been chosen by Divine Decree to run in and out to their tea-parties through those supremely beautiful doorways. That—so it seemed to these scholarly canons and gentle old maids—is what the houses are like in which one lives. Then there was the other point of view. Their natural acquiescence in their good fortune never blinded them to the beauty of their surroundings. No one in The Close was surprised if a passing visitor asked permission to look inside the door and into the rooms. Such visits seemed as natural as the milkman’s daily call. The lot had fallen unto them in a fair ground and they knew it; but they were house-conscious rather than house-proud. This peculiar spirit of The Close is difficult to describe, but it is one of the first things which strikes one on coming to live there.
Our house, like several of the others, was of more than one date. It was mainly a small narrow eighteenth-century house with, on each floor, only two perfectly proportioned rooms. This lovely little building had been tacked on to the end of a medieval cottage and the two combined made the letter L. Some large rooms had been added to the back of the house in the nineteenth century, but as these could not be seen from The Close, their ugliness injured the house less than their convenience improved it. Our garden extended to the beautiful old Close wall which was, however, hidden from view by a row of greenhouses. Here my father was always happy with his roses and orchids.
Our time in The Close included the four war years, followed by my father’s long illness, and then his death. Perhaps that is why, when I try to remember that house, I think first of darkness. It was a dark house. We were overshadowed by the cathedral. We had a magnificent view of it, its whole length spread out before our windows. But it prevented any direct light from falling on to my needlework as I sat in the little white morning-room in the winter, except between the hours of twelve and two. Life there had always a shadow upon it—the shadow of the cathedral, of the war, of illness, or of death …
When my father died, my sister and I had to leave The Close. When as children we sometimes drove to parties at Fonthill, we always passed a most romantic house which I used to long to have for my own. This was Fitz House in Teffont, which many people call the prettiest of all the Wiltshire villages. Just beyond the end of its street, a tiny stream gushes out of the chalk down, to flow the whole length of the village in front of the houses, each of which has its own little bridge connecting it with the highway. This water is said to be the purest in Wiltshire: it is very clear, and it tinkles with a silver voice. Fitz House had lately been bought by our friend Lord Bledisloe and he now offered to let it to us. So this house of my childish dreams became the first in which Mildred and I were raised to the dignity of being householders.
Fitz House stands back from the village street, behind a stone wall, which then was lower than it is to-day, so that passers-by had an uninterrupted view of this charming old farm-house. Our wall edged the stream, and among its stones the golden wagtails nested every year. The house makes almost three sides of a square: the main building, a fifteenth-century farm-house, faces the road; a seventeenth-century wing joins it at right angles on one side, facing the long stone bam on the other. The wing had been built as a store, and was first made habitable by Lord Bledisloe when he acquired the house. My bedroom was in this part, a big room with five windows looking in three directions, and as I lay in bed, I could watch the moon pass all round the house, while owls flew over from barn
