Up the cathedral spire

Text 1: Upon the Scaffold, by Nathaniel Crewe

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

It is one thing to admire a spire from the close, with one’s head tilted back and one’s hat in one’s hand; it is quite another to climb it. Last Tuesday, by the kindness of the master mason, I was permitted to do so, the scaffolding being still in place after the summer’s repairs, and I record my impressions while my hands are yet steady enough to hold a pen.

We went up by ladders lashed to the poles, forty feet at a time, the mason first and I after, clinging to every rung as though it owed me money. At the first stage the city still looked like itself: roofs, chimneys, the market cross, a carter whipping his horse along Broad Street. At the second, it had become a toy laid out upon a green cloth. At the third, the wind found us.

I had not reckoned on the wind. It came round the stone in sudden buffets, now from this side, now from that, pulling at my coat-tails with the malice of a schoolboy, and the whole frame of poles and planks shivered and sang like the rigging of a ship. The mason, I observed, paid it no attention whatever. He was a man of few words, and those mostly concerned with mortar.

Yet it was at the very top that I was most astonished, and not by the view. Close against my face, where no worshipper below could ever see them, the old carvers had cut leaves and flowers and small grinning faces into the stone, each as fine and careful as anything upon the great west door. A snail, no bigger than my thumbnail, crept along a stone vine. Six hundred years it had been crawling there, made for no eye but God’s.

I came down slowly, and in silence, and I have not looked at the spire in the same way since.

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