William Golding's Wiltshire roots

By Tim Kendall
University of Exeter

Author William Golding is closely associated with Wiltshire

William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies and Nobel Laureate, is closely associated with the county in which he spent most of his life.

Explaining in the 1960s why he continued to live in Wiltshire, he referred to the 'particularly ancient and mysterious history that has left its mark in every corner'.

Golding did not wish to make his county 'sound like a graveyard', but he remained fascinated by the unreachable nearness of its ancient history.

Nameless people, Golding tells us, were rebuilding Stonehenge around 1400 BC — an antiquity 'on a time scale to compete with Egypt'.

Although he was born at his grandparents' house in Newquay, Golding's own history as a Wiltshireman began in early childhood, because his father taught science at Marlborough Grammar School.

Memories of the family home on The Green stayed with Golding all his life. The back garden adjoined a churchyard, leaving the young boy terrified at the thought that it had once been part of a medieval burial ground.

His elder brother's reports that their father had dug up human bones while gardening only increased his fears.

Even in his seventies, Golding would suffer nightmares about the house and especially its cellars, which appear, barely disguised, in scenes from several of his novels.

Golding's family home on The Green on Marlborough held strong memories

Golding could never bring himself to love Marlborough. Unkindly renamed as Stilbourne, it becomes the setting for his 1967 novel The Pyramid, beset with class distinctions and repressed desires.

After university and a number of short-lived teaching posts, in 1940 Golding accepted a job at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury.

The school has the dubious honour of having helped to inspire Lord of the Flies: with a break for war service, Golding taught there until 1961.

Its location next to the cathedral also gave him the idea for The Spire (1964), a brilliantly imaginative re-telling of the decision to add the highest spire in the country to a cathedral built in a swamp.

Professing his love of Salisbury Cathedral, Golding would later call its spire 'a perpetual delight, a perpetual wonder, with the whole of our little body politic shrugged into shape around it.'

In 1958, he and his family moved to Bowerchalke, a village on the downs 10 miles south-west of Salisbury.

He came to speak harshly of it in later years, yet he stayed for nearly three decades, and wrote most of his novels there.

Golding is buried in Bowerchalke where he and his family once lived

Among his neighbours was the scientist James Lovelock, with whom he would spend long hours chatting about environmental issues.

It was Golding who christened Lovelock's idea that the Earth is a single organism, the 'Gaia hypothesis'.

Golding won the Booker Prize in 1980 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. These successes brought his life in Wiltshire to an end.

With increasing regularity, literary tourists made the journey from London to observe the famous novelist at home. They would stand in the road outside his house and peer over his hedge.

Fed up with the unwanted attention, in 1985 Golding and his wife retreated to Cornwall, the county of his birth, where he died eight years later.

He was buried at Bowerchalke on Midsummer's Day 1993, thereby adding his own plot to those of the ancient kings scattered across his county's landscape.

'The whole land', he had once written in an essay on Wiltshire, 'is seamed and furrowed with ditches, erupts with grassy forts and is scattered with the mounds of enigmatic graves.'

When he spoke of 'We Wiltshiremen', he had in mind 5000 years of human history.