St John's Church

I think I may have to re name this - I don't get in the churches to think, or I try to sit in churches to think and am too chicken to get in them. Or in this case I try and sit in a church to think but it isn't a church anymore.

Wow!- though, this church that isn't a church anymore is beautiful. Like looking through the window of an expensive bakery at an elaborate tiered cake, the construction, how it stands, propped with pillars and fancy towers, slightly baffling.

Today it is very hot and the boys and I have worms. I am feeling mildly desperate about this, partly because it has made us all feel tired and weepy, but also because we have taken the tablets, I have washed all the towels and bedclothes again and again and we started feeling better and now they seem to have returned. I have spent another day cleaning and cleaning and washing and washing. Plus due to the weariness I went to bed at 11 o'clock last night - which I never do - and then woke to hear the phone ringing. I thought it was the early hours. I thought someone must have died. But exexDH ( have I explained this? ex drunk, ex husband) in his hostel room, down the street had put an ear plug in and somehow he said it had disappeared into his ear. At least it isn't an orange. I said. Could he come round and I tweezer it out? Bloody Hell I thought in the dark of the nighttime flat, the sound of the boys sleeping. Though sorry for him too, appearing scared, holding a pair of tweezers. Our not married life. Nothing I could do, he had to go to casualty. But I found it hard to go back to sleep and I am tired.

It is a complicated day too because one of my best mum friend's from the school, who lives one block down has asked if her and her son can come round this evening because her husband has five friends coming round and she doesn't want to be there when they come. She, her beautiful face, framed like the moon by shadow, in her headscarf is from Indonesia, her husband from Yemen. Me and her hang out quite a lot with the boys. She makes me laugh and is funny and kind, and we talk about politics and swop tips on two for one offers or cheap crumpets. I have never met him. Though I am now quite fascinated by the idea of him and his five friends in their small extraordinairly clean flat. Yes. I say. But I am worrying about the worms and also me and the boys and infact xxdh are all going to a friend's art school private view, and each bit makes the other more complicated. George Osbourne has been detailing his budget too on the radio as I clean and I feel what? anxious and frightened and then scared they are right, and then scared they are wrong. Though I think they are wrong. So perhaps just scared.

Anyhow, I think I will just run to St John's Smith Square Church on the way to pick the boys up from school. I have kept it as a bit of treat. A lift to the spirits. I felt certain I would be able to go in. I felt certain that it would be beautiful. I have occasionally looked up the music concerts on the weekends when the boys are away, but never been. It is a new thing, an age thing, hearing the beauty of classical music easily, like an aspiration of good, while some music I have always loved has gone powdery, to dust, like tinny transistor radio tunes in my ears. Walking down to the end of my street, past exexDH's hostel past the home office, then turning into this beautiful old street, a view of St John's Smith Square at the end. I have never been here before and houses I have never seen, but so near, are like a costume drama setting. Beautiful proportions, and a feeling of ease, of plushness, but more than that, sometimes old houses especially a whole street of them, have just that fortitude of time.

But here we go, possibly everyone knew this, it is now only a concert hall, not a church at all and there are notices on all the doors saying Private Property.

I actually think I won't write about St John's, I will have to go and sit in another church, but when I google it, I find out it was a church until the war, an English baroque masterpiece built by Thomas Archer 1713 - 28, Queen Anne likening it to a footstool because of it's tall corner towers, Charles Dickens describing it as 'resembling some petrified monster, frightful and gigantic, on its back with its legs in the air'. But it was really badly bombed in the blitz. Sold by the church and then restored to be a concert venue. Suddenly, oh suddenly, I realise here, these streets I walk everyday, were at the heart of incredible attack. I order a book on Amazon The Blitz, Westminster at War. It is like another lead, another layer, another fascination to this area.

Later, the out of control, tubby, muslim boy ( I think last time I mentioned him I said slightly out of control but it isn't true, I watch him and his brother and his mum and there is chaos there, I'm not sure what, though her boys flinch from her, and she is exhausted by whatever it is she can't control) escaped under the railings in the park, and danced with his pants down in a scrap of wilderness no one could get to, while the big kids roared with laughter and egged him on. I feel anxious to point out that it is rare to see an out of control muslim kid, mainly they are almost too beautifully behaved.
I got his mum, and then coaxed him squirming in the dust, his big beaming face appearing back under the fence.

I worry that I know about chaos, I recognise it.


Amen.

Westminster Chapel

Sunday. The boys with their Dad at his mum's for the weekend. A day of rest indeed. The flat so quiet that I hear the neighbours wake up. Sandwiched between single mums of single girls I know we are the noisy ones in our block but the quiet of the area at the weekend, with no passing traffic is like an island. I think we must drive the neighbours crazy. Those boys shout MUM! when they wake up. They shout when they go to bed. I miss them though. I wish we'd watched the football together last night. Instead I went to a party to watch it. Missed the goal walking down Seven Sisters lane without an AZ.

But today I have written and worked and read. Then I miss them again. Panic that they will have a car crash and die. That in my heartbreak I will start smoking after eight years abstinence ( I worry there is some sneaky desire to do this here - almost like the bonus.) Sometimes I can even imagine dragging on the cigarette. Perhaps I have to explain that their Dad did drive them home from his mum's once so drunk that they went missing for a couple of hours, finally appearing, Dad's face bloated, swaying, falling like a felled tree in the boys bedroom. I shouted and threatened to call the police, and then realised I couldn't do it infront of the boys. Though later, I called the social services. I don't know how many of the rest of you have done that but it didn't feel good. He has stopped drinking now, but still, it is hard to lose the fears.

As it is a Sunday, I think I should get out there and try and and get in a church that always seems closed. But then a whole new area of dread opens, does that mean actually going to a service? I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want to. Though since I have started this project I have discovered this fascinating site - mystery worshipper/ ship of fools - http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/. When I first found it, after visiting St Matthews, not sure exactly what my plan was, I thought I had a rival, or even that the task I had set myself had been done. But Mystery worshipper is a detailed account of pew comfort, biscuit count and the unquantifiable measure of worship, of the feeling of god. Oh, oh, I am always pleased after visiting a church if I find mystery worshipper has been before. I love the tiny details of their undercover mission. I feel we are in each other's footsteps. I laugh that I could indeed be wrongly unmasked as mystery worshipper if I got to close to service time. Or spot them myself. Apparently they leave a calling card in the font. Should I do something similar?

I have been skirting Westminster Chapel for weeks. It is a huge church, almost half way between our flat and Buckingham Palace. I can't work out from the outside exactly what denomination it is. I can barely describe it. Dull brown brick, Italianate arches, a church from a Hitchcock film, but less interesting. I know the afternoon service is at 5.30 and try to go at 4pm. I can't get in. I go back at about 5.10. The automatic glass sliding doors open. There are two men at the front desk, like cloakroom attendants. I have braced myself. 'I know your service is about to start but I would love to have a quick look inside the church.' They wave me in. At that moment, briefly, I think maybe I can just go ahead with it.

I can't explain my own reticence to be visible, to take a stand, to stand out, but walking through those doors into a huge room, like a theatre in tiers, with people dotted around chatting - I have taken on way too much for myself. In the centre stage is the kit for a band, and a huge tv display screen, with bad graphics procaiming their message for the Lord. Behind this ugly paraphernalia is a beautiful huge organ, another wizard of oz prop. I can't explain my reaction but I can't stay. I find it creepy, I don't want to smile and be welcomed. I bolt. An old lady at the door misunderstands my movement out, and for ages we are both left holding the door, welcoming each other into the church. I feel like a comedy baddie on the run.

I have to go with how it is. But I don't have much description. Though, when I return home, and google the church, the history is riveting. It is probably the earliest church I have been to. Initially the chapel started in 1840, in what was 'one of London's poorest slums- rife with prostitution, squalor and drug addiction. Alms houses and schools were built, orphans were cared for and work schemes were organised for unemployed men. Rev Martin's gospel-preaching and Biblical authority made Westminster Chapel stand out as a light of hope. Even influential leaders of that time like Lord Shaftesbury and Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey began to hear of the Chapel's impact in the area.' So popular was the chapel that by 1860 a 1,500 seater building, the building I went into today was designed and built opening in 1864. Between 1904 with Dr George Campbell Morgan and then his even more celebrated successor Dr Lloyd Jones until 1968, they had queues round the block. People queueing to hear the friday evening lectures and the sunday sermons. Their words travelling the world, big in USA, even Korea.

I have begun to be inspired by the history of this area's transition, the frantic building of churches in the late 19th century and I have bought a series of local maps, Westminster and Victoria 1869, 1894, 1916. I feel that I am onto something, as I colour in the churches on the b/w maps, noticing the increase of feltpenned rectangles as time passes. I'm not sure what yet. But just a fascinating movement of change. Of intention for good.

And yes, mystery worshipper had been before. Reporting on the plentiful digestive biscuits, and a 52 minute sermon! MW horrified by such length. Though my concerns about hanging around at the back of the church are validated by this short report:
'What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?
Nothing much. Few spoke to me and I spent some time sitting alone on a chair by the wall. One man in full camouflage gear came and spoke to me. He offered me his phone number and said I should visit him and see his neighbour's cat. He also said if I ever needed prayer I could phone him and he would come and pray with me, since he liked prayer. Oddly enough, I declined the invite.'

My boys came home safe and sound.

amen

Bardsey Chapel

Not Westminster at all. Bardsey. An island off the coast of Wales. No cars, no electricity, about a mile long, a mountain one end, a lighthouse the other, sea views everywhere. We went with some friends for half term. We went for a week.

Writing this blog I think I am trying to describe, perhaps even understand my life in Westminster in the small social housing flat in the big, old, tenement block, overlooking other big, old tenement blocks. All around, glimpses of other squashed lives. Last summer when Michael Jackson died people from different nationalities and different religions told each other quietly from window to window, leaning across in the hot dark above the street lights.
On our school run we join the pack of civil servants marching to work in the morning, and pass the grey shadow faces of the drug addicts and alcoholics from the hostels. 'You be good now for your mum,' they sometimes say to the boys. I think they see the waste of themselves in the energy and vibrancy of my mischievous sons. I have seen civil servants shout angrily as a child on a bike careers close by on the pavement and I have seen a ghost faced man with broken bad teeth and tatoos on his fingers grab a small, tubby, slightly out of control muslim boy, the brother of a boy at our school, as his scooter spun into the busy road, his mum, in full burka and me running down the street trying to reach him. Though probably both incidents are interchangeable.

I am this poor by surprise. By a spiral of circumstance. I love my life but I don't always feel I quite fit. I look quite posh, sound quite posh, work for a national newspaper and yet, I can't quite understand it, here I am. At a friend's book launch once a woman I didn't know shouted at me when I said I lived in a peabody flat. She said they weren't for an educated, presentable middle class person like me. I agreed with her in many ways and yet, I haven't found the way out.

In the end I have had to accept this is how it is. How it is for us now. I will keep working to change our circumstance. But I truly believe not living with a bullying alcoholic man is the battle I won for myself and if I keep going the rest will be ok.

The privilege of my poverty is that it is not the life I expect, not the life of my friends and family, that I see many other lives, many other things. Perhaps this is the difference between our family being here and the others around us. When the mums at school had to pick the children up over the bridge at Vauxhall station after they had been to a play, many parents looked around in wonder and one mum, young, white, glam, who shouts and shouts at her three small children, said she hadn't been there for years. I am not mocking, I know I am lucky.

So here, this beautiful island. It is a place of pilgrimage. A place where thousands of saints are meant to be buried. A legend that it is Merlins/Arthurs final resting place. A place of peace. The children run through fields of buttercups, picking up caterpillars and noticing birds. Seals like periscopes, watching us. The eldest two boys make a friend with a boy that lives on the island. The same age, he tells them his best friend is a cockerel. The house we are staying in is next to the chapel. I tell the friends we are with that I need to go in. I tell them about this project. But I bake cakes and beachcomb and paint my toe nails and wash up, wash up, wash up with a view of the sea and the sheep and the ruins of a thirteenth century abbey and celtic crosses. And funnily enough I become almost accustomed to the wonder of the view. I walk up the hill with the children, then walk it on my own. Sitting to think in the sunshine, in the beauty. Then reluctantly, before I am ready, I have to go into the small simple chapel to shout and stop the children playing, my son having stolen matches from the church.