Upwelling

So for now, consider yesterday.  (Leaving aside the glories of Florence, Domitian's astronomical villa, and Rome, and the joys of Buckinghamshire, the North York Moors, Durham, another household in Cambridge, and Hampstead Heath.)

I'm staying in my donnish friends' Wendy House.   Nothing shows from the street but a door with a lion's head between two brick garages.  That opens on a narrow hallway with ladderlike stairs and a ship's kitchen underneath; but the inner door is four feet broad and panelled.  And that opens on a lovely neo-Georgian room with grey-green panelling and huge windows on a little brick-walled secret garden.  In essence, a small Common Room.  There's an OED, of course, and an Art Nouveau cabinet with books and wineglasses, and an impressive portrait of Christopher Ricks's grandfather, abandoned in the English faculty. Upstairs there's a many-gabled attic bedroom.  The Wendy was built in someone's garden as an artist's studio, and then swallowed up in brick.  My friends keep it as a guest house.  

S (who taught me) had to be in London, poor thing, presiding over the Philological Society.

So in the morning I nipped round to St Edward's Passage, where the secondhand bookshops are.  G David has scholarly remainders and an imposingly glass-cased, leatherbound antiquarian section; the Haunted Bookshop has enchanting old children's books, from the sixpenny-now-collectibles to full Rackhams, and diversions:  old Penguin Wodehouses, and what not.  I can't afford (or carry) most of what I wanted.  I could look!

Then I came back for my camera.  (It was durham_rambler 's brilliant discovery that at least some American battery-chargers will charge in English shaver points; only mine keeps tumbling out of this particular one, so I've been sticking it to the wall with bandaids.  Bathroom improv at its best.)

J and I dropped S at the station (a pity on the first fine day in weeks), and wended to Ely.  Now Durham is founded on the rock, and rises like a sempiternal beech wood; Ely floats on the fen, with its spectacularly fractal octagon.  I love them both dearly.  Ely now has a most excellent stained-glass museum, with pieces from 12th-century Cistercian through Cromwellian heraldic, the Gothic revival, Arts and Crafts, and up to now.  I particuarly loved the angel dancing-master, clad in feathers as in Morris rags, and the leaping ladies from Isadora Duncan's bathroom, making high aesthetic whoopee; but the high-Victorian Duke of Clarence as Saint George is utterly hilarious.  I nearly fell off the clerestory.

Before we left, I walked their labyrinth, for pilgrimage and safe returning.

Then we set out on a quest for angel roofs.  Many years ago--twenty?--we'd been on a church-crawl, and had stumbled on one obscure and spectacular fenland church with angels you could walk among.  We thought it might have been Upwell, in Norfolk.  So we drove through the flatlands, by willow-fringed canals with narrow boats, over humpbacked bridges, past familiar names:  the Denver Sluice, the River Wissey.  The Hundred-Foot Drain was flooded, and we couldn't cross, so we just turned into the fens, and looked for roads going north.  A hare ran cross our path, flat out, ears streaming, long and low.  Magnificent!

St. Peter's Upwell, when we found it, was locked.  Emphatically, with spiders' webs across the iron gates of the porch.  However, a note at the side door told us to apply at the Post Office for the key.  (I love it when that happens:  I was once entrusted with the key to Ludlow Castle, as long as my forearm.)

And the angels are glorious.  Angels set between angels, leaning out on the air.  They are slanted so the light will catch their faces, palely gold, with their outstretched wings in shadow.   A passionless ecstasy.  They look, not heavenward, but down upon us shepherds in the stony dark below.  They bear tidings; they bear up the sky.  One tramples down a woman-headed dragon with a scorpion's tail.  You can indeed walk among them:  there are galleries.  You can touch the hammerbeams, hide emeralds there.  (I do wonder if Sayers knew this church.)   In one box pew in the north aisle, I saw a bobby's helmet.  Going over, I found--good lord!--a dismembered mannequin, head, torso, limbs as white as fungus, glowing queerly in the dark.  An eerie thing..

After our journeying, we got quite a good straightforward dinner at a Cambridge chophouse, and came out just in time to see the Chronophage strike eight.  A day of winged creatures.

Off now to Little Gidding.

Nine