Farewell to Yorkshire

My parents used to tell me that when I was small I’d tell them that York Minster was, in my opinion, the best building in the world.  Of course, I’d not seen much of the world then, just bits of Yorkshire and Scotland. But I didn’t let that shake my boyish confidence.  After all, I already knew the building well.  My father would drive us to York from time to time, and usually we’d walk to the Minster, and sometimes stroll around the inside. 

By now I’ve seen travelled a good deal further. But I’d still give the Minster a high ranking among the buildings of the globe.

This week, on Christmas Eve, C and I found ourselves on the top floor of a hotel on the south bank of the Ouse, with a fine lateral view of the Minster in the fading afternoon light.  A little later we joined a queue outside the west entrance to see if we could get seats for the Christmas carol service.  Allowed in, we sat with other latecomers in the north aisle of the nave, to listen to the carols and hymns, and to the lessons or Biblical readings prophesying or describing the birth of Christ.  I’ve little nostalgia for carols, but found myself pondering the lessons – the grim misogyny, for example, of the author of Genesis, who pins all human sin on Eve, deluded by the guileful serpent in Eden, and his contempt for animals, like the serpent, as creatures inferior to man.  Or the cunning storytelling of Matthew, who has the Magi refusing to report, as instructed, Christ’s birth to king Herod, the Bible’s first pantomime villain.

As we sat, we peered upward, to the impossibly tall Gothic columns of the nave – the tallest of any church in England – and above them the triforium and clerestory, and, up again, to the wooden, fake-stone vault of the ceiling, with its golden bosses.  At the end of the service, the choristers processed past us on their way back to the choir, their clear voices buying them reductions on fees at St Peter’s School, and after them a parade of prim Minster officials (minus the Archbishop, under pressure to resign over the Church’s child abuse scandal).

Back in the hotel, unable to sleep, I listened to the bells announce midnight mass and the coming of Christmas Day.  I recognised their chimes from my childhood, falling through the intricate stonework of the two great west towers and radiating out across the city.  At three o’clock, still awake, I rose from bed and padded across to the uncurtained window to watch the Minster, silent but still clear, like a long grey ocean liner, in the darkness of the city centre.

What I most liked most, as a child, about the outside of the building was one of its latest features, the central tower.  The first version of it collapsed in a storm in 1405.  William of Colchester, Henry IV’s master mason, supervised its rebuilding, and the result, finished in 1465, is a masterpiece, combining the utmost, Bauhaus simplicity, a double cube, with the subtlest of decorative schemes, including paired tall windows topped with ogees, and a trim battlement crown at the top.  Alec Clifton-Taylor, the historian of English cathedrals, was very rude about the central tower, but his taste isn’t always to be trusted.

In the morning we left York and headed south for home.  My brother’s death has brought to an end a long family history of living in all three Ridings of Yorkshire, in Howden (the family home for many generations), Bridlington, Hoylandswaine, Wakefield, Sheffield and Kilburn.  I came to live in the county when I was three years old, but departed when I left school, only returning for three or four years in the 1990s.  I’ve never thought of myself as much of a Yorkshireman.  But I’m conscious that an ancestral link has now been broken for good.