The Crystal Stars that Bind

 

marble hallway ceiling at Mount Stuart House

This is a tale of how beautiful architecture can connect humans across time and space.

After my father died, I felt my sister, my Mum and I should still go on family outings. My sister had pulled the plug early on with driving lessons, and my Mum had stopped driving on the day I went off to university. In the throws of empty nest syndrome, she had driven into the family home's gatepost, and never drove again. I like to think of it as an unfakable sign that I was truely loved. :-)

I have clipped my gatepost many times, and I am still driving! :-)

Anyhow, it was up-to-me to do the driving for the trip  and I suggested they might like to visit Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute off the west coast of Scotland, as splendid architecture (as we have subsequently found out) is what will get me out of my armchair.

This trip was all agreed. We had some distant relatives on the Isle of Bute, so a visit to them was planned on the afternoon of the day trip. The ferry leaves from Wemyss Bay which is about an hour's drive from my home town of Prestwick.

As we drove there I surprised myself by overtaking much of the traffic. In England I am a slow and cautious driver, but coming to Scotland I was just not used to the much slower pace. I apologised to my family.

Mount Stuart House was magical. I have never liked the outside from photographs - rather blocky Venetian Gothic - but the inside is full of colour and decorative art, drawing on myth and paganism. William Burges is responsible for much of this work under the patronage of the Third Marquess of Bute, who was the richest man in Victorian Britain. I rate Burges in the same category of genius as the better known Augustus Welby Pugin.

I loved the stained glass windows depicting the nine muses of Ancient Greece (Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomeni, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania, and Calliope), and I was bowled over by the central marble staircase.

The 80 foot high ceiling above the staircase is inset with 6 pointed star-shaped crystal prisms, arranged in the shape of the northern night sky constellations. The sun shining through the stars produces rainbows on the floor of the hallway. The 12 stained glass windows of the clerestory represent the signs of the zodiac. The overall effect is magical.

Jump forward many years to 2015 and I am attending a school reunion in my home town of Prestwick.

My parents were long dead by then, but I was determined on this trip to catch up with some of my parents' close friends that were still around, and the day after the reunion, I did precisely this. My first stop was a couple (Mary and Ian) whose connection to my parents went back to WWII, and I drove round to their house.

It was that nightmare scenario: the house was locked up and looked deserted. Were they still with us? I talked to the neighbours who informed me that they were now in different nursing homes in the next town of Ayr, but they couldn't quite recall the exact name of the nursing homes, but they knew a vague location. So, I drove to the area and was literally asking stranger after stranger on the street, if they knew of a nursing home nearby.

It took me all day but eventually I tracked the nursing home down where Mary was residing. I was very nervous about the meeting. Would there be recognition after so long and even then what would we talk about? I needn't have worried, I fetched a lot of names out of my childhood memory and we chatted away. Mary and Ian and my parents had worked together in the same office. It was just as much of a comfort for me, as it was for Mary, to chat about old times. Mary was now in a wheelchair and had to be wheeled around, but she had all her marbles.

I mentioned the last family trip to Mount Stuart House as I knew Mary came from Bute. I described the joy of the 6 pointed star-shaped prisms. Mary suddenly jolted, and became very animated. Her grandfather had been an upholsterer at Mount Stuart House, and when she was a little girl, he had given her one of these crystal prisms. She had kept it at the back of a drawer, but did not have any idea where it was now.

There was a little bit of indefinable magic about the unexpected coincidence in the almost random turn in the conversation. It is a piece of stellar magic that I will always treasure.