I WAS stopped going through airport security to the United States last week, the shadow in my luggage causing unease. “Why are you carrying a brick?” “Ah,” I said. “It is a very special brick. . .” This is not the first time that it has caused consternation at the scanners: the last time, I was trying to get it through security at St James’s Palace.
It started life in the walls of Squibb House, at Westminster Boarding School, in Connecticut. I was there for six months on an English-Speaking Union scholarship, before I went to university. When they demolished it 20 years later, they offered alumni a memorial brick. It seemed crazy to send a brick to the UK; so I declined the offer.
But, when I became chair of Gordonstoun, I had to make a speech at a fund-raising dinner at St James’s, and I needed that brick as a prop. The school immediately Fedexed it over, but Palace security were unimpressed. “You are sitting right next to the Princess Royal. With a brick?” We compromised, and I left it in its packaging until the speech, while they looked on, very alert. I wanted to talk about what that brick had witnessed. Me: a homesick teenager, there on scholarship, yearning to belong, but also so many others, feeling so many things, over so many years. It is a storied brick.
I was in the US to thank the school for the gift of the scholarship. They were presenting me with an alumni award, and we were celebrating the career of my philosophy teacher, Mr Eckerson. During lockdown, he started a philosophy class for alumni; five years on, it is still meeting faithfully every week. In the first lockdown, we read Plato; by the second, we were on to Homer. On the day of the 6 January Capitol attack, we studied the Bible. When Queen Elizabeth II died, we read Epictetus. At the Coronation, we were on to Confucius, and, as the US presidential election was held, we studied Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins, an exhortation in the face of societal collapse to bequeath “good ruins” to the next generation. What will these be?
IT IS Monday 14 April. I am standing in Harvard Yard, which is alive with sunshine and birdsong. The air smells of woodchip, where they have painted the threadbare lawns with green UV protection to get them through the winter.
As I stand there, the university is making its public statement, refusing to comply with demands from the US government to cancel its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda, forfeiting £2.2 billion in federal funding and risking its status as a tax-exempt charity, and its visa status, because of its commitment to its motto, “Veritas”, which is written into the stonework everywhere you look.
I look at the famous Harvard bricks. They were supplied locally by the New England Brick Company, in North Cambridge, which operated between 1854 and 1923. They are made from local clay, the very fibre of New England, fired into permanence here. I recalled the Gospel reading from the previous day, as Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey. The Pharisees ask him to rebuke the disciples for their hosannas. He says: “I tell you, if they keep silent, the very stones will cry out” (Luke 19.40). On this campus, the stones cry “Veritas”.
It feels precarious, being in the US these days. What is it safe to say? Citizens are being incentivised in bitcoin to report their neighbours for immigration infringements, in a throwback to the McCarthyism of the Cold War, and students are already being sent home.
On the Harvard campus, there is a Natural History Museum. It holds a famous collection of 4300 extraordinarily realistic glass flowers, made in Dresden by the Blaschkas between 1886 and 1936, to show botany students the detail of 780 global plant species. They are exquisite and fragile. If they break, they cannot be replaced; and the Blaschka factory itself was destroyed in the Dresden bombings in the Second World War. What a metaphor for the fragility of democracy!
But stone endures. It was a stone that was Jacob’s pillow, when he dreamt of the angelic ladder that is rendered in the stonework on the west front of Bath Abbey. An even grander host of the faithful is to be found in the 300 remaining figures on the west front at Wells Cathedral — a Te Deum originally composed of 400 saints and angels. I have always wanted to borrow Professor McGonagall and have her shout “Piertotum Locomotor!” to get all the statues to come down and join the Easter procession. In 800 years, they have surely seen it all. What would they have to say about our current age?
BACK in Boston, on the other side of Cambridge from Harvard, you will find MIT: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A few years ago, they developed an algorithm that can spy on conversation by reading the vibrations on a crisp packet. They have not yet expanded this technology to make these statues speak to us. Perhaps developments in quantum entanglement will one day make this possible.
But, inside, the stones in our churches are smeared with worship, by years of incense and candles carrying our hopes and fears to heaven, hallowing the very walls. It was Winston Churchill who said that “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
I was stopped again, trying to get my brick home from Boston. “It is too heavy,” they said. “I need it,” I said. “I need it as a prop.” Jacob anointed his stone with oil and set it up as a pillar. Harvard’s stones remind them every day of who they really are.
The stones of our churches and cathedrals bear witness to all the faithful who went before us, through all kinds of political storms, in good times and in bad. My brick reminds me that our buildings will be strong for us when we are not: the stones will always cry out.
Dr Eve Poole is Executive Chair of the Woodard Corporation and writes in a personal capacity.
