We were warned that Fitz House would be damp; and it is true that springs of the famous Teffont water bubble up under every room on the ground floor, and they keep the grass court outside perpetually green. But our two years there were y ears of drought, so the cool rippling sounds that all day filled the ear were exquisitely refreshing; and in those summers, when we wanted fresh air, we drove to the downs in the evening to dine on the edge of Great Ridge Wood, while we watched the Stars come out over the Dorset distance.
Our Teffont gardener was Cull, a man from the neighboring village of Chilmark, where the quarries have been worked since the days of the Romans. He was therefore as handy with stones as he was with flowers, so he laid out a pretty little paved garden of Mildred’s designing and she planted her roses in its beds. Our garden was small—only the paved piece, with beside it a tiny mountain on which wild cherries grew, the kitchen garden behind the house, and the grass court in front. The fields came so near to the house that we could almost lean out of the windows to pick blackberries and mushrooms, primroses and cowslips.
At Fitz House we first learnt what it meant to have a house full of children; for Mildred and I had come at the end of the Wilton family, looking on our brothers as rather grand young men, who came home from school or from Oxford for the holidays, and who played games which were too serious for us to share. Now there were three, families of nephews and nieces; and if Salisbury memories are chiefly memories of shadows, those of Teffont are full of noise and laughter and children’s games. All this fun was inspired and led by Mildred, now the perfect aunt as she had ever been the perfect sister.
We lived in Fitz House for two years.
Chapter Thirteen
FLOODS
One morning we looked out from our windows in the Close to see the walls of the Cathedral rising out of the waters of a great lake, which covered the whole of the lawn. The effect was magical. The level grass in Salisbury Close has a far-famed beauty, but this was like something seen in a dream, or read of in a poem. No cathedral built of solid stone could be thus isolated: this must be ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie’ rising from the waters.
It was the month of January 1915, and the unceasing rain of that first autumn of the war had turned the five chalk streams which meet at Salisbury into five raging torrents which no hatches could control. At the same time, an exceptionally high spring-tide rushed up the Avon from the sea. The water could not get away. It broadened out upon the city.
The interior of the cathedral was even more lovely than the Close outside. All through the night the water had been silently coming up through the floor, and by morning the nave was a large still pool, from which the pillars rose and into which they threw their reflections. The medieval glass in the west window made a tangled pattern of light and colour in the water. The nave was quickly emptied of chairs and nothing broke the beauty of its proportions.
The water did not reach the choir, and services were held there throughout the flood, the congregations reaching them upon perilous bridges made of planks. There were none of these on that first morning when my father and Dr. Bourne, another very old canon, arrived for the service, having somehow made their way across the Close. These intrepid veterans were not deterred by the sight of that lake of cold-looking water. They were bent for the vestry which lay beyond it and they meant to get there. Each mounted a chair and armed himself with a second, which he planted in the water in front of him. On to this he now stepped, and then swung into position in front of it the chair he had just vacated. By repeating this manœuvre the two fearless canons made stepping-stones for themselves from west to east of the cathedral.
The second day of the flood was the Festival of the Epiphany. At eight o’clock that morning, the Communion was celebrated in the Lady Chapel behind the choir. It was like the scene of a legendary shipwreck. The cathedral was almost in darkness, though here and there a gas jet threw a light which quivered in the water. As we crossed the plank bridges the faint reflections of the pillars swayed a little beneath us. The cathedral looked much larger than usual—empty, dark, and filled with water; and as Bishop Ridgeway came to the altar, the candlelight fell upon him in his shining cope and mitre, with the Pastoral Staff carried before him. He looked like some little elfin being.
For some time after the floods had gone down, the nave was too damp to be used, so it remained empty of chairs. All through that time we revelled in its lovely spaciousness. Miss Townsend, who has lived all her life in the most distinguished of the close houses, has a memory for beautiful things, which never seems to fail her. She now recalled the days when all the cathedral services were held in the choir, and one Sunday as she watched her niece leading her little girl down the empty nave, she said: ‘It reminds me of what I used to see.’ One thinks at once of Trollope or of Bishop Moberly, who wrote in his diary that on the afternoon of his first Advent Sunday at Salisbury, there were only ‘a few ladies in the boxes, ill-lighted by candles, attending prayers without a sermon’. The following year, in Advent 1870, he recorded that he had preached ‘to a very large congregation in the nave lighted for the first time
