A few years ago, I went on what I still call “the worst trip in the world” to England, my partner’s home country. The worst trip in the world because the princess that I am was not accustomed to hotels that offered rooms with only a shower, and no bath in which to relax after a hard day spent visiting ruined castles, two-thousand-year-old Roman remains, ancient stones still stubbornly standing despite everything… And whose idea was it to drive somewhere different every single day? Madness. Couldn’t we just settle in one place and explore it properly for a week? A few hours here and there is simply too short.
This worst trip in the world came back to mind recently when someone mentioned that St Mark’s Basilica is sinking. Because, at the beginning of the twentieth century, an English cathedral was sinking too. And one man managed to save it, working alone underwater, in darkness, wearing a diving suit, armed with nothing more than bags of cement and bricks.
We left Lewes and travelled down to Brighton, then westwards: the usual classics, Stonehenge, Old Sarum, and other stones made precious by time. Afterwards we headed north towards Dorchester, or perhaps Winchester; I no longer remember which came first.
But once we arrived in Winchester, the cathedral imposed itself upon us first thing in the morning. Imposed is exactly the right word. Seen from outside, its sheer scale is overwhelming. You turn a corner and there it is: immense, long, rooted in the earth for centuries.
Inside, the nave stretches farther than any church interior I had ever seen. The vaulted ceiling, the stone ribs meeting high overhead. Delicate carvings everywhere. Nothing like the Catholic churches back home, smaller and laden with gold. Here, stone reigns supreme.
The reredos is an entire wall of limestone, rising from floor to ceiling. No gilding, no colour. Just stone, and within the stone a lacework so finely carved that it seems almost impossible. Human hands made this. One cannot quite understand how.
To visit the Morley Library, you must climb up into the triforium. There, parchment manuscripts are preserved, made from animal skins scraped and dried. The Winchester Bible alone required the hides of some two hundred and fifty calves. You do not think about that at first glance. Then you do. It is rather terrible.
There were also two globes, one terrestrial and one celestial, purchased in 1685 from a Dutch cartographer. America appeared tiny and approximate, barely sketched in, complete with the mythical Island of California. It was the world as people knew it then.
On the way back down, I noticed the grave slabs set into the floor. You walk over them without really thinking, and then suddenly you see the names engraved there: kings, queens, nobles. The thought of what lay directly beneath, bones and human dust under our feet, unsettled me.
That was when I saw the name Jane Austen. I had not known that she had lived here, nor that she had died here. Her name was there among all the others.
We joined a group following a guide. He was talking about a diver. I struggled to understand what possible connection there could be between a diver and a cathedral. Then he explained that one side of the cathedral had begun to sink, and that a single man had managed to stabilise this enormous structure by placing bricks and bags of cement beneath it, unable to see what he was doing, guided only by his hands and, I suspect, by his faith. Who but a believer could undertake such a task with the technology available at the beginning of the century?
That man was called William Walker.
Winchester stands on the floodplain of the River Itchen. The ground is peaty and the water table is high. The Normans who began building the cathedral in 1079 knew this, but the site was considered too prestigious to abandon. They laid the foundations on a raft of beech logs floating upon the peat. Seven hundred years later, the logs had rotted. The walls had begun to crack and lean. The cathedral was sinking.
By 1905, cracks had appeared in the walls, some wide enough for a child to crawl through. The authorities called in Francis Fox, a civil engineer renowned for his work on tunnels and bridges. He initially attempted to excavate trenches beneath the walls, but every time the peat was pierced, water flooded in and the pumps proved inadequate. Fox then conceived the opposite solution: send someone to work underwater.
Walker was the finest diver of his generation and chief diver for the Siebe Gorman company. That is why he was chosen.
His diving suit weighed nearly ninety kilograms. The water was so muddy that no light could penetrate it. It was also contaminated by the bodies and bones of those buried there over the centuries, making it septic. He worked in complete darkness, guided solely by touch. During breaks he would remove his helmet to eat and smoke his pipe before descending once more. Every weekend he cycled more than a hundred kilometres home to his family and returned by train on Monday morning.
When King George V honoured him at Buckingham Palace, Walker reportedly remarked that it made him uncomfortable to be spoken about from the dais in front of so many people.
He died on 30 October 1918, carried off by the Spanish flu, just twelve days before the Armistice. His gravestone bears the inscription:
The diver who with his own hands saved Winchester Cathedral.
Venice, too, is sinking. St Mark’s Basilica, resting upon wooden piles driven into the lagoon, has resisted rising waters and unstable ground for centuries. No one has resigned themselves to its fate. Mobile flood barriers have been installed at the entrance to the lagoon, glass barriers protect the basilica from minor floods, and concrete is injected beneath St Mark’s Square. Inside, salt slowly and relentlessly eats away at the mosaics, and restoration never truly ends.
When one considers that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a single diver feeling his way through black water managed to stabilise an entire cathedral with bricks and cement, it becomes difficult to believe that we are powerless before Venice.
And yet Winchester’s foundations are still moving.
And Venice continues to sink.
