Our art teacher had the habit of gripping his gown in both hands – at chest-level, like a Victorian making a speech, his thumbs in his lapels – and staring out through the classroom window, smiling at the memory of all the fine things he had seen. “Boys,” he might say after a minute or two’s silence, “the Wembley Exhibition had the most marvellous pavilions.” More often, it was cathedrals he remembered: those that lined the route of the London-to-Edinburgh train, a progress that started in Peterborough and ran via York Minster to its magnificent climax at Durham, with Lincoln sometimes mentioned too, because when he was an art student in the 1920s the occasional express to the north still went that way.
Each had its different beauty. He
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