Untold Stories (68 page)

Now if the assumptions – I would not call them a philosophy – that have informed government and public life over the last fifteen years are true, I would not set much store by the paintings I saw here, the books I read next door, the music I heard over the road, or the education I had up at Lawnswood. I had not had them to pay for and nor had my parents, so
because they were free I am assumed to have taken them for granted. Only if I had to pay my way would I really appreciate them. Or so the libertarian argument goes.

Nothing is further from the truth.

I valued then as I value now what I was given in Leeds, as I'm sure most of my generation did and do.

But what am I on about, you say? The Art Gallery is still free, and though the suburban branches have been cut back the libraries are still free. Which is true. But they are not free, as once they were, because they are every citizen's birthright. I am not even sure we have a birthright now. No, they are only free because the government has not been able to devise a legal method of stealing them from the public for short-term financial gain and putting them out to private tender. If, as seems likely, we are now going to have to pay to die, why should we not also have to pay to look and to read?

Here is a picture of a boy looking up at a Barbara Hepworth.
*
I see myself fifty years ago and I know that through no fault of his own he is going to have a harder time of it than I had. And I think that is wrong.

It is a morning in May and York Minster is already thronged with visitors. In the vast octagon of ancient glass that is the chapterhouse we sidestep the crowds gazing up at the windows and slip unnoticed behind one of the great iron-bound thirteenth-century doors.

Here there is another door set in the thickness of the wall and a narrow spiral staircase that takes us high up above the vestibule of the chapterhouse to the door of what is in effect an attic. It's a cold, dark, dusty loft and as I scramble thankfully across the threshold and look around the dim interior it appears as if we have come into some sort of cloakroom, with racks and racks of what seem to be stiffened remnants hanging in bundles from the rails. Or, with no two pieces the same, the shapes could almost be pelts and this a kind of curing place.

It is tall and narrow with windows set low in the wall and above them an elaborately beamed roof, the timbers so fresh and sharp they recall Philip Larkin's lines in
Church Going
:

The someone who does know is my companion, Louise Hampson, the cathedral archivist, who tells me it's a scissor-beam roof, dating like the rest of the room from the fourteenth century, and that this is the masons' loft, put up almost as an afterthought on top of the chapterhouse vestibule to serve in effect as the drawing office of the medieval Minster.
Like the vestibule, it's L-shaped, with the long arm of the L taken up with racks not of remnants, still less pelts, but shapes of wood and blackened zinc, the patterns for some of the countless architectural features of this vast building.

At first glance the other half of the room seems empty; it's just a long stretch of dusty grey floor covered in a layer of crumbling plaster. Only when you scrutinise the floor more carefully do you see that there are shapes in this dust, outlines of mouldings, arches even, and that it is not a floor at all but a vast drawing board.

It was on this floor, thinly washed with lime plaster or gesso, that were traced the designs for crucial pieces of construction in the building of the Minster, the earliest of the designs still detectable that of some window tracery in the retro-choir, known to have been put up in 1356. The loft itself was probably constructed thirty years or so earlier as a drawing space needed for the rebuilding of the Minster's west end.

Not all features would need to be traced out here. A standard arch, for instance, that presented no difficulties could be put up on the spot. It was more complex constructions, two or three arches springing from the same pillar at different angles, for instance, that would need preparatory drawings and a tracing on the floor that could be made into a templet. This would then be taken down to the site, either in one piece or in sections, and used when shaping the stone. I would have called it a template but as John David, the current master mason, points out, this is a nineteenth-century spelling; templet is what the medieval masons would have called it. So the spelling (along with the templets themselves) is here preserved.

This is not just out of piety. The templets that remain are mostly from the early nineteenth century, when the master mason was William Shout, and are still used, or at least referred to, when some tricky design problem has to be sorted out. There is information in these scraps of wood and discoloured zinc that could not be stored on a computer. The fabric of a centuries-old cathedral is more like a body than a building, odd, asymmetrical, hunched, sometimes awkwardly, into the place it has occupied for over a thousand years and thus resistant to computerised plan
ning or adjustment. The job of the master mason now does not differ in essentials from the job of William of Colchester, say, master mason in 1404, and though John David's 8-by-13-foot drawing table may have replaced this lime-washed floor its function is the same.

With a pair of medieval dividers, which are still in use in the Minster, John David demonstrates on a piece of modern concrete how simple it is to score out a design so when the floor became overcrowded with old material it would only need the thinnest wash of lime or gesso to provide a clean unbroken surface. It would be as easy as cleaning a blackboard.

How many men worked on the fabric of the Minster would presumably depend on what work was being done, but the records of their names, the hours they put in and how much they earned are preserved in the master masons' rolls in the Minster archives. The tracing floor itself is undocumented and in England only one other, at Wells, has survived. There are similar installations, though, on the Continent, and there must once have been many more here. A building of the size and complexity of Fountains Abbey, for instance, must have had some sort of drawing office; one only has to think of the fan vaulting at Gloucester or Westminster Abbey to realise that they couldn't have been put up simply by rule of thumb. Such installations as there were may have been more provisional than this at York, and once they had served their purpose there was likely to be no reason to preserve them. But even had their function and historical significance been recognised, the evidence for such drawing floors would have been easy to overlook, as they must often have seemed, as this one does, just like a crumbling surface crying out for renewal.

As paper became cheaper and more readily available, the floor as a draughtsman's board must have fallen into disuse. There was a disastrous fire at York in 1829 and it was perhaps then that the loft became a storeroom and its original purpose forgotten. The templets were piled in heaps across the floor, thus preserving the traces of the original drawings. It was only in the sixties, when they were cleared out and catalogued, that the diagrams were rediscovered and the function of the room recalled.

There are other treasures here besides the floor. Since the loft was built
on top of the vestibule and a little later than the main building, it abutted on and obscured part of what had been the external wall, thus taking in the top of one of the windows. Protected from the elements for more than six centuries, the moulding and the two heads that form the capitals are as crisp and unweathered as when they were first put up. I'm disconcerted, though, that their very freshness makes me not care for them; they look crude and sentimental and not all that different from the Victorian Gothic that abounds in the churches and chapels of the West Riding. The Tadcaster stone of which York is built is so luminously white it adds to this effect, though when they were put up these carvings, like the rest of the Minster, were likely to have been boldly painted (and so might have seemed crude in a different way).

As a workplace the loft can never have been cosy. Today is warm but it's chilly up here under the roof, and it would once have been chillier as the windows were only glazed in the nineteenth century, what protection there was against the wind and cold coming from crude wooden shutters which, 600 years on, are still hanging here. But there is a fireplace and a loo, a one-seater that, primitive though it is, hardly looks to have seen the bottoms of centuries and which debouches down the outside of the vestibule wall.

Always fastidious in this respect, I ask Louise Hampson if the cubicle had a door. She thinks not, a curtain more likely (which wouldn't have suited me at all). Already empathising with some shy fourteenth-century apprentice with the squits, I am absurdly pleased as I run my hand round the door opening to discover the iron staples on which must once have hung the door that would have saved his blushes. 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.

Thinking about the loo, though, I wonder that there are no graffiti here, but I suppose it's less surprising when one reflects that the masons who sat here were making their mark elsewhere in the building where some of their signatures do survive, carved in the stone in the form of mason's marks.

I have known York Minster since I was a boy, when in the late forties I toiled over here from Leeds on my bike. York and Ripon were the only cathedrals I had seen until I was sixteen, both of them, I used to think then, plain no-nonsense places. This was only partly because the glass had yet to be put back after the war; I didn't go much for glass in those days. Anyway what I was really missing was any mystery or romance. In our school library was a copy of an early Thames & Hudson book,
English
Cathedrals
, with magnificent photographs by Martin Hürlimann. I used to pore over this book, marvelling at Wells with its branching chapterhouse staircase, the massive incised columns of the nave at Durham and the cloisters of Westminster and Gloucester. So York, for all its soaring splendour, seemed to me pretty basic as cathedrals go. And in a sense I was right. Not being a monastic foundation it has no cloisters, the chantries have gone, and what you see is what you get. So what this extraordinary mason's loft does for me on this bright May morning is reinvest the Minster with magic, and confounds that precociously disenchanted boy who came here fifty-five years ago and was not impressed.

Nor is the magic quite over. The loft is still a bit of a junk room; the window sill, for instance, piled with old plaster casts made when delicate bits of moulding needed to be replaced, a boss, a shard of a vault … and there is more history here than one realises. Leaning against the wall by the door are some odd bits of wood, and as we're going out Louise Hampson idly sorts through them. One she picks out, recognising it from some eighteenth-century drawings she's been studying that morning. It's a fragment of Gothic tracery from behind the medieval shrine of St William. Though the saint's bones are in the crypt, the shrine itself was looted and demolished by Henry VIII's commissioners in 1538. But lacking any religious imagery the doors were suffered to remain and weren't taken down until the eighteenth century, and here is some of their medieval tracery, a relic of the ancient shrine just gathering dust in the mason's loft. Suddenly I envy Louise her job.

When in my early twenties I first went to Italy to Venice and Florence, I didn't at first understand why it all seemed so familiar. I had the feeling I had seen these buildings before, as indeed I had. I knew them because I'd been brought up in Leeds where so many nineteenth-century banks and commercial premises were modelled on and reproduced the palaces, baptisteries and bell towers of Renaissance Italy.

When in the sixties Leeds, like all the northern cities, was sacked by property developers much of its nineteenth-century inheritance was lost and what remained was cleaned. You can always tell when there's been some act of architectural murder because the surviving witnesses to it are all washed in dubious expiation. Lady Macbeth was probably an architect.

Among the happier survivors, though, are the arcades. There are some half a dozen arcades in Leeds. Thornton's Arcade was always the most exciting to me as a child because it had (and still has) a clock with moving figures. County Arcade was the poshest, though it never looked quite as posh as it does today when it has been nicely restored.

There was always something festive about County Arcade, an air of holiday and theatrical exuberance, but it wasn't until I was asked to compile this programme that I found out why. County Arcade is one of the few, as it were, lay buildings by an architect whose reputation rests on his design of Victorian and Edwardian theatres, Frank Matcham. Fifty years ago there was scarcely a town of any size in the United Kingdom that didn't boast one of Matcham's theatres and though scores have since been
lost enough remain to testify to the achievement of someone who was undoubtedly this country's greatest theatrical architect.

Though this is not a theatre, it was built as part of a scheme involving one, the Leeds Empire lower down Briggate, which Matcham had designed – and which I remember as a child if only because it used to advertise some of its stalls as ‘Fauteuils', a word both mysterious and unpronounceable. The Empire is long gone but here is County Arcade, which still somehow smacks to me of the seaside. I think it's because it's built in a material (glazed brick and terracotta tile) which is also the stuff of the grander hotels and boarding houses that line the front at Morecambe and Cleveleys.

As a child I was in this arcade more often than most (and I don't apologise that its charm has as much to do with memory as with architectural merit). I can remember the shops that used to be here and in particular a toy shop. At the start of the war toys were in short supply, and my dad had invested in a fretsaw and took to making toy animals. His speciality was penguins, which he mounted on a little four-wheeled cart. On his afternoon off he hawked them around the toy shops of Leeds without much success until one day he called here at a toy shop run by a Mr Baildon. ‘Old Baildon', as Dad always called him, offered to take his entire output, though at a very modest rate. So, week by week, we would come down here with two dozen or so penguins and the occasional giraffe. They seemed to my brother and me a very dull toy, but did we ever see a child trailing one we would follow behind hoping to overhear some expression of pleasure, Dad presumably experiencing much the same frisson as an author does when he catches someone reading one of his books.

Many years after I saw one of these penguins in a shop window now elevated to the status of an antique. But the shop was closed and when I came back it had gone. One of the memories of my childhood is of rows and rows of penguins ranged on top of the wringing machine, uniform and without personality until Dad painted in the eye and suddenly they acquired a face.

Here used to be the Mecca Ballroom, which imparted a degree of
whoopee to the arcade. It was thought, by me at any rate, to be a place of great wickedness, and boys in my class at school would sometimes go dancing there and come back swearing they had seen a prostitute, the cast-iron proof a chain worn round the ankle. Opposite the Mecca was Redman's the grocers, a grander version of the Maypole or Gallons, branches of which you found all over Leeds.

The window would be filled with great boxes of raisins and prunes and candied peel and you could buy homemade oatcakes here, Thompson's barley kernels and Allinson's brown bread – health food even then, though with none of the ideology that nowadays goes with it. And here, at the Vicar Lane end, was Cashdisia, the gents' outfitters where we got our school blazers but didn't get those great class indicators, the Cash's name tapes that better-class boys had sewn into all their clothes.

There are some surprising survivals: little milliner's shops, shops selling babies' knitwear, which somehow seem to cling on in the teeth of the fiercest economic gale. There was a
corsetières
here in the forties and the same
corsetières
is here now. It's a curious profession and not one I associate with the present day.
Corsetières
seldom had premises as it was a profession taken up by single ladies of a certain age, who did fittings in the home. My Aunt Eveline was briefly a
corsetière
, herself an ample lady and, like many of them, a model for the product she was marketing.

County Arcade runs between Briggate and Vicar Lane. In my day it marked the border of respectability because on the far side of Vicar Lane is Kirkgate and that other splendid survival, the covered market, and beyond the market is the slaughterhouse, or ‘the yard' as my father called it. This is where the city began to be slightly disreputable and so here had lodged the less orthodox retail establishments: herbalists, shops selling surgical appliances, rubber goods, remedies for haemorrhoids or hair, wanted or unwanted, and remedies for babies too, wanted and unwanted.

Happy though I am to see this arcade so splendidly restored, if I'm honest it's just a bit too smart for me now – too done up, and the painted leaves make it look like Christmas all year round – but that's a small price to pay to keep it from the bulldozer. Oh that the financial institutions
which rule our lives and which have helped to restore this arcade had learned the lessons of conservation twenty years earlier, in which case England would be a pleasanter place to live. As it is, I'd like to come back here in a few years' time when this particular restoration won't seem quite so synthetic. Time will have weathered it a bit, distressed these slightly too twee shopfronts, faded the lettering, and maybe some of those seedier backstreet establishments will have begun to creep back – a second-hand bookshop perhaps, a herbalist, shops for what people really want rather than what they can be persuaded to want. But I imagine babies' knitwear will still be hanging on like grim death.

Nowadays we live to shop. It's the only thing that holds us together. There's no such thing as society, said the Blessed Margaret, just shoppers. And if we can't shop we get depressed and feel oppressed, the deliverance of Eastern Europe not so much the restoration of freedom as the restoration of freedom to shop.

Small specialised shops selling chocolates, pot-pourri and scented candles, card shops with messages for all sorts of occasion, grave and gay, and straight, kitchen shops selling jams in esoteric combinations, rhubarb and ginger, apricot and almond, out-of-the-way mustards, pedigree vinegars – lovely, lovely shopping.