The Buildings of England may have extolled the intellectual pleasures of ruins such as Netley, but few visit it with textbook in hand to be educated by these whalebone arches beached on Netley’s shore. Its lawns are usually quiet and for the most part undisturbed, save for wedding parties using the stones as a photographic backdrop, and theatre companies taking advantage of a ready-made medieval set. Yet on one day each year its sanctity is revived on the Feast of the Assumption, the day the Blessed Virgin Mary ascended to Heaven, the moon and stars at her feet. On a summer’s evening the ghostly procession of white-vestmented priests and altar-boys and the blue incense seem to retrieve the past, and placed on a pillar stump is a statue of its dedicatee, enshrined in flowers like a holy well.
A hundred years ago William Howitt could ignore the sight of discarded sardine cans: ‘The visitor, seated on a fallen stone, still feels a forest silence around him; and the neighbourhood of the Southampton Water seems to complete the feeling of the monastic tranquility which for ages brooded over the spot.’ It is still possible to access that spirit: the Cistercian monk’s austere regime, the aesthete’s rarefied contemplation, the Regency adolescent’s bosom heaving with delighted horror. Arches frame dark yews, crows caw in tall beeches, and an ancient, blowsy oak which survived the Commissioner of Works’ cull might still be modelling for Constable’s sketchbook. In dank chambers, cold clear water runs through the ferny channels which were once monks’ latrines. Above, buddleia sprouts in lofty cracks, and the red-brick traces of Paulet’s palace pock the grey stone like ruddy lesions, their manmade clay crumbling faster than the spiritual granite.
Like some coastal cliff, the strata of brick, tile and stone reveal the abbey as a gigantic fossil, a great gothic ammonite. The abbey’s story is carved on these walls, from its foundation stone cut with Henry III’s name to the initials of nineteenth-century tourists and now the hieroglyphic felt-tip of modern taggers. Walking in the grassy gap where the north transept once stood, my foot hits a piece of rubble: a fragment of encaustic floor tile which escaped those nineteenth-century robbers disguised as respectable-looking people. Decorated with a fleur-de-lys, its colours imbedded in the ceramic, it weighs heavy in my hand. How much longer will this building stand, these towering chunks of stone that seem only tentatively held together by medieval mortar? For all its tribulations, Netley’s abbey endures. Sanctified and plundered, hymned and neglected, it is still a mysterious, elusive place. Like some forgotten countess sequestered in a bosky lair, it draws the romantic past around itself, and leaves the modern world behind.
Never quite making up its mind to be a village, Netley spreads fitfully along the shore, shadowing the low cliffs buttressed by furze and pine. Hidden by rhododendron and laurel from the road, the fort built by Paulet also became a house,* gothicised by Sedding, the prolific nineteenth-century architect, for the Crichton family. Here they entertained their friends Robert Baden Powell – who spent his honeymoon at the castle – and Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter Princess Alice, whose lady-in-waiting married their son. But their genteel life of garden parties, yacht races and local munificence had long since faded by the 1970s, when Netley Castle became a nursing home where Peter and I visited our ailing deputy headmaster, attending his bedside in a dark-panelled room as he sipped his whisky, still fearful of his leather girlfriends.
On Friday nights, dressed up to look as old as we could, Peter and I would walk through the village, past its tiny, disused 1930s cinema, its working men’s club and its little garage and shops to the pub at the end, the Prince Consort, where, in our Oxford bags, we aspired to decadent sophistication by drinking acid-yellow Pernod and crimson Campari. A new subversion had arrived in my bedroom, a flame-haired alien in a red telephone box. I played Ziggy Stardust over and over again on my primitive one-speaker cassette recorder with the volume wheel pushed as far as it would go, headphones on, miming in the mirror to the apocalyptic fantasy of ‘Five Years’.
Alongside my pin-ups of Bowie, with his kohl’d eyes, ice-blue satin suit and lamé ties, were pictures of Roxy Music, fellow time travellers in an alternative universe of decadence. One morning Peter brought the first Roxy album to school, and before class we stood by our desks admiring the gatefold sleeve. Inside was Bryan Ferry in tigerskin bomber jacket and blue-black quiff, and Eno in leopardskin and eye-liner, denizens of a fantastic night club, while splayed on the front cover was a kitsch goddess in a white Fifties swim suit with pink and blue satin edging, all pout and décolletage, her teeth bared in a cerise come-on, an ironic gold disc at her silver-platformed feet.
It was this vision of Sodom and Gomorrah that our maths master saw as he marched past the corridor, looking in through his round NHS spectacles and over the half-glazed wall. He dashed into the classroom and knocked the record sleeve from our hands. ‘I’m a man’, he hissed like a pressure cooker, a characteristic of his desperate but doomed attempts to control his temper. ‘I don’t need to look at pictures of women.’ The irony, of which neither he nor we had been conscious, was that in fact our sin was much greater: the object of our admiration was a gallery of men in satin and mascara.
Three years later, we left school. Peter went to university for two terms, but was lured away by North Sea oil, diving in murky waters to earn thousands of pounds. I was steered away from art school to study for a proper degree at a college which my uncle had attended – yet another Catholic establishment, also called St Mary’s, and run by religious in the suburbs of London. It was surreal to attend seminars on Women in Love in which one’s fellow students were nuns in habits and wimples. But then, St Mary’s former owner would have appreciated this particular scene: the college occupied the building that had been Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.
At night, after the bar closed and emboldened by the decadent fumes of Pernod, I’d steal into the eighteenth-century house, which was connected to the halls of residence by a brown lino passageway. It was as though I’d emerged from a semi-detached villa into a bit of Windsor Castle. At one end of a great gilt and mirrored chamber, a curved door opened into a round turret room opulently hung in swags of blue velvet, where Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, Victorian chatelaine of Strawberry Hill, supposed mistress to Edward VII and a dabbler in the occult (like the Duchess of Devonshire before her) was said to have conducted seances. Lady Elizabeth had married her cousin, the 4th Earl Waldegrave, while her mother was the love child of Sir Edward Walpole, second son of the Earl of Orford, Horace Walpole’s heir. By strange synchronicity, her family had owned Mayfield, the Weston estate they had acquired in 1854 from the Chamberlaynes.
It wasn’t difficult to bring The Castle of Otranto to life here, in its birthplace. Even the men’s halls of residence, constructed when, like my old school, the house had become a Catholic seminary, had been built by the firm of Pugin and Pugin. The rooms were consequently narrow and cell-like, designed to contain the passions of a would-be priest, and across the corridor was a communal shower room with its thick dividing walls apparently made of dark, institutional stone, its taps dripping, the odd item of clothing – a pair of football shorts, socks or a towel – left behind on the benches.
Outside the window, wide lawns insulated Walpole’s fantastic creation from the suburbia beyond, and in my cubbyhole I read Gormenghast, conflating Peake’s 1940s gothic with the lapidiary prose of Denton Welch, whose Voice Through a Cloud I’d found in a jumble sale. Steerpike’s pinched cheekbones and Satanic stare anticipated another cult hero, Johnny Rotten, and in a world of three-day strikes and power-cuts, the present promised no future. Yet there was still the past to deal with. On visits home to Southampton – often coinciding with Peter’s return from Aberdeen, his pockets bulging with money – I’d return to Netley. Now it was not the abbey which preoccupied me, but the building which seemed