Getting locked into Salisbury Cathedral one night may have moved me to write “Power of a Woman” decades later. The experience was freezing, dark, vast, medieval, and animated by slight sounds amplified by echoes under vaulted stone. Then came morning, when the sun burst through the (former) eastern windows in the Lady Chapel, bringing mental relief before someone unlocked the vault to bring spatial release and return to the 1950s.
At the time I was a chorister in Salisbury Cathedral, an unwitting model for William Golding, who wrote “Lord of the Flies” (1956) about a choir school, while he taught at the school next door. Those threads twine in a partially-causative strand that started me channeling the character of Eleanor of Aquitaine decades later in order to write her memoirs. Another strand: Salisbury Cathedral School was founded in 1091 and its first known graduate (Class of 1129) was John of Salisbury, a leading twelfth century theologian and a presence at Henry II’s and Eleanor of Aquitaine’s courts in England. John disapproved of Eleanor. Later, John would witness Thomas Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral.
Ghosts. Many ghosts. But, in the south of England, where eight thousand years of settlement are graven into the land, the deeds and misdeeds of Henry II, Thomas Becket, King John, Richard Lionheart and their mother Eleanor almost call for the present tense. They are close, even intimate.
Novelist John Fowles, who wrote the foreword for my book “Let There Be Life” (Amazon.com), remarked in his novel “Daniel Martin” that a man writes best who is not afraid to restrain the feminine part of his brain (yin), but aspires to park his gender beside his name on the title page. Hence my take on Eleanor of Aquitaine. Reader Lani Lila of Chico, California, writes of “Power of a Woman” that, “[It is] so vividly expressed from the mouth of a wise and passionate woman. Reading Fripp’s words, and a man’s at that, I am amazed at his stunning ability to bring to life this woman.”
Ah, but what is the minor chasm of gender when set against the great gorge of time and events that separates us: eight lost centuries and a wholly different mindset divide us from the anxieties, terrors and joys inflicting the life-span and life-space of our magnificent Eleanor.
Photo: Salisbury Cathedral, by Andrew Foster, via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0