Wiltshire
Thomas Hardy chose Stonehenge for Tess d’urberville’s capture, and wrote of Salisbury as Melchester, epicentre of his doom-drenched last novel, Jude the Obscure. Hardy, an architect by training and pessimist by profession, visited the cathedral and its adjacent Close in 1897. ‘Upon the whole the Close of Salisbury,’ he wrote, ‘under the full summer moon on a windless midnight, is as beautiful a scene as any I know in England — or for the matter of that elsewhere.’
In June 1668 Samuel Pepys, en route to Stonehenge, found himself ‘guided all over the Plain by the sight of the steeple’, and stayed at the George Inn ‘where [I] lay in silk bed; and very good diet’. In April 1913, Edward Thomas pedalled by, on his formative cycling trip from London to the West Country, In Pursuit of Spring. He found the city pleasingly asleep: ‘There were more birds than men in Salisbury. Never had I seen the cathedral more beautiful.’ For the young EM Forster, Salisbury was the very epicentre of England, and he holidayed there several times in his twenties.
William Golding’s The Spire was the first in a series of novels tethered to the cathedral’s crowning glory, a study in obsession, or is it creative genius, from which it took shape. Similarly inspired by spire and city has been Ken Follett, in
The Pillars of The Earth and World Without End. Somehow it should be of little surprise that Dorothy L Sayers knew Salisbury well, having been sent to its Godolphin School as a boarder in 1909 and enduring an Anglican confirmation at the cathedral, against her will. Her sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey turns up in Salisbury in her first detective work, Whose Body?
But of all the writers who have distilled degrees of darkness from Salisbury, it is, for me, one of the least likely of the lot, the late Leslie ‘Virgin Soldiers’ Thomas, who produced the definitive summation of the spirit of the place. Thomas and his wife moved into a fine old house on the Close, by the cathedral – an accumulation of beautiful historic buildings that induced ecstasy in the usually sanguine Pevsner – and became friendly with the Close’s most famous resident, one Edward Heath.
‘Ted Heath was the first person to ask us over when we moved to the Close,’ Thomas recalled. ‘Heath would take walks, accompanied by a minder, armed and unspeaking, and was often to be found in the inns and pubs around Salisbury, sitting silently in the corner. On the evening of the day his knighthood was announced we met him sitting wordlessly with his security men in a pub.’
There it is again. Brooding, ancient, remote Salisbury, stalked by the past. No better place to write, or be written about.