Free The Pritchett Century by V.S. Pritchett

brought home the news that the dying Cousin Dick had been suddenly and miraculously cured by Christian Science.
    It was on one of these stays in York that my grandfather took me along the walls to the Minster and showed me the Lincoln green glass. I had already had many pernickety tours with Uncle Arthur, who pointed out bits of joinery and stone masonry, and explained every historical detail. He was a connoisseur of carving and especially of tombs. His was a craftsman’s attitude. It was a sight to see him standing, bandy, threatening and bearded in the aisle, with bicycle clips on his trousers—for he rarely took them off—and looking up to the vault of the aisles with an appraising eye. He often had a ruler sticking out of his jacket pocket and on my first visit I really thought he was going to pull it out and start measuring up. He didn’t go so far as to say he could have built the place himself, but once we got to the choir stalls and started on the hinges and dove-tailing, he looked dangerously near getting to work on them. The choir stalls appealed to him because there are often pot-bellied and impish bits of lewd carving under a seat or on the curl of an arm, and he always gave me a pagan wink or nudge when he found one. Once he said “That’d vex t’minister.” Uncle Arthur behaved as if he owned the place and would get into arguments with vergers and even bewilder a clergyman by a technical question.
    My grandfather’s attitude was different. The grandeur, height and spaciousness of the place moved him. He was enraptured by it. But, pointing down at the choir, he said that it was sad to know that this lovely place was in the possession of the rich and ungodly and a witness not to the Truth but to a corrupt and irrelevant theology.
    The Minster was scarcely the house of God any more but the house of a class.
    “And you cannot,” he said severely, “worship God freely here. You have to pay for your pews.” The clergy, he said, were like the Pharisees in the Bible.
    We left the cathedral and went up to the steps to the walls oncemore at the point where the railway runs under an arch into the old York station where Stephenson’s Rocket stands; and we sat in one of the niches of the battlements and looked down on the shunting trains, the express to Edinburgh coming in, the Flying Scotsman moving out to London, under their boiling white smoke. And there he told me about the wrongs of England and of a great man like Carlyle and of another, John Ruskin, who had hated the railways.
    “Great men,” he said. “God-fearing men.”
    The granite walls, the overpowering weight of English history seemed to weigh on us. To choose to be a great man was necessary; but to be one one must take on an enormous burden of labour and goodness. He seemed to convey that I would be a poor thing if I didn’t set to work at once, and although the idea appealed to me, the labour of becoming one was too much. I wasn’t born for it. How could I get out of it? In the south fortunately we were feebler and did not have to take on these tasks. I loved the north but I was nervous of its frown; and even of the kindly laughter I heard there.
    After York we used to take the train to see the remaining sister of my grandmother, the third heiress. She lived upon the edge of the moors above Kirbymoorside where my grandmother came from, in a hamlet called Appleton. This was wild and lonely country. You drove up five or six miles in the carrier’s gig; if it was raining, the passengers all sat under one enormous umbrella. There was a long climb to the common, with the horse snorting and puffing, and then you were in the wide single street of the hamlet, with wide grass verges on either side and you were escorted in by platoons of the fine Appleton geese. You passed the half-dozen pumps where girls were getting water for the cottages and arrived at a low flint cottage where my Great Aunt Lax lived.
    The frown went off Grandfather’s face when