Another world

England, 1924...

A light warm rain fell upon the old-world streets. The houses, with their casement windows, timbered upper stories and overhanging eaves, still kept the air as of an older world. The gateways, with their battlements and low archways through which the mediæval traffic once had flowed, with men-at-arms and archers, strings of packhorses, monks, nuns, and pilgrims come to worship at the shrine of Becket, were now mere monuments.

Time had but mellowed without defacing them, although the damp had made the stone peel off in flakes, giving it a look of scales. Long stretches of the city wall still stood, covered with a growth of wallflowers and of valerian, loved of cats. Houses and yet more houses crowded in upon the cathedral, usurping what by rights should have been a grassy close, guarded by elm trees or by limes, with nests for rooks, who with their cawing supplemented the murmuring masses in the adjacent choir, for surely rooks in a cathedral close must ever praise the Lord for their quiet, sheltered lives. Grouped round its dominating church the city huddled as if it sought protection against progress and modernity. Bell Harry in his beauty seemed a giant lighthouse pointing heavenwards. It was indeed a haven where a man who had his fill of this world’s din might well retire to and find rest, for the incoming cricketers were evidently but birds of passage, and when they all departed once more the town would sink back to repose. Although the streets were decorated with flags and floral arches and filled with sun-burned athletes, and the companions of their beds and bats, with cohorts of the clergy come up from their parsonages, greeting effusively Old Brown of Brasenose or Smith of Wadham, whom they met annually at this, the week of weeks – for cricket is a sport that clergymen can attend without offence – nothing could take away the air of mediæval quiet that broods upon the town. The peaceful landscape, with the slow Medway winding through its fields of lush, green grass, full of contemplative cows, its apple orchards, its rubble churches, with their truncated spires and air of immortality, is restful to the eye. The town itself, resting from its long strife with time, brings quiet to the soul.

—R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ‘Inveni Portum’