The Stockholm Shelf

Salisbury Cathedral’s 404 foot spire was visible from Golding’s window at the Bishop Wentworth school where he taught for twenty years before his success with LORD OF THE FLIES. In “An Affection for Cathedrals”, he wrote: “Round about the year 1200, Bishop Poore was standing on a hill overlooking the confluence of the local rivers, according to legend, when the mother of Jesus appeared tohim, told him to shoot an arrow and build her a church where the arrow fell. The arrow flew more than a mile and fell in the middle of a swamp. There, with complete indifference to such things as health, foundations, access and general practicablility, the cathedral was build. Eighty years later, with a techonological gamble which makes space travel seem child’s play, the builders erected the highest spire in the country on top of it, thousands of tons of lead and iron and wood and stone. Yet the whole building still stands. It leans, It totters. It bends. But it still stands…a perpetual delight, a perpetual wonder.”