Still writing this the day I snip the bare twigs off the Xmas tree - trying to fit the denuded trunk into a black bin liner and sweep panfuls of needles into the rubbish bag - the magic and petty concerns of Christmas are over. Though like concealing a dead body it takes ages to reduce the tree to a size that can be carried downstairs. So this - the isictt christmas special is out of date, almost redundant - though I hope like coconut Quality Street sweets and tiny cracker toys that sit in indecisive piles, it isn't just another unwanted leftover of Christmas for I did try for the back to back bonanza but just ran out of time.
The night before Christmas I walked out on everything I was meant to be doing. I had cooked and cleaned and wrapped and worried and yet nothing seemed cooked or cleaned or wrapped and I was still worried. I had cried the night before cooking a ham dinner. There are hundreds of mum's crying over a ham dinner the night before xmas eve I realise or hope, as exh and the boys lay curled up on the sofa watching telly. It is ludicrous what we invent for ourselves I think. Though when Exh remarks about the beautiful snowflake cookies that I have made with my eldest - you just try and do too much - I know he is right but I am furious. Can I say - you just try and do too little? Can I? I watch couples work alongside each other as teams and they are still sometimes tired or cross or infuriated and they are allowed to say it.
I walked out - knowing I would be up to the wee hours making stuffing and wrapping stocking fillers - got on a bb bike and cycled up to Mayfair. I just needed not to do all those things, just needed to have some space or a break. I worry that against this backdrop of anxiety at having lost my job and festive overwork I will end up in a ludicrously over the top lisping nativity with donkeys and heavenly choirs and that it will become like some Richard Curtis feelgood factor film moment when either I will have to believe something or I will shut my angry heart to a magical thing. But the wealthy church in Hanover Square that I imagine tempting me with all this on the late afternoon of christmas eve is dark and shut and not going to open it's doors again. Oh I think - I need a Catholic church now, they always provide a welcome. I wander over Regent Street, where everything is still bustling and shoppers are frantic and greedy like a Patricia Highsmith crowd lit in electric light. I know there is a church tucked away somewhere. I find it on dark side streets but the church is shut despite being Catholic. 'All the churches are shut on Christmas eve' I text UL. He is in a pub with a friend near the British Museum as I walk through Soho our paths getting nearer. 'I want to see you' he says. I try on a 'I heart xmas' red apron in an art upstairs/porn downstairs bookshop. Another one says 'ho bloody ho' and I wonder if I could alternate them throughout the day as an indication of how christmas is going but they are both too big. Shops are starting to shut now. I see a rail of sequin dresses being loaded into a van in a multi storey carpark. I see gay men packed into pubs. Walking past these bright lit windows with people jostling and laughing I feel lonely, nursing my petty but heartfelt grievances of too much to do and too much washing up and cleaning done. Then I head up grey streets to Soho Square where so much is shut it feels like even the street lights have been dimmed. I remember from my map that there is a church here but I have no recollection of ever seeing it. I used to work in restaurants in Soho when I first left college and can remember the sense of being on the edge of an adventure - that there were secrets all around - though really all that ever happened was being winked at by a popstar in the street or spotting a few famous drunks in pubs, or going to a few classy members clubs without membership and discovering delicious delis that sold great cheese and ham and pumpkin ravioli wrapped lovingly in cellophane and placed as gently as expensive and beautiful silk lingerie into boxes.
In the dark square a huge tower looms. If I could get this over with quickly I would just about have time to meet UL for a drink I think craning to see if the church is open. Golden light pours from an open door. It is a Catholic church. From the stone floored vestibule I can see that the church is empty apart from one man hunched kneeling and praying and a priest with a really genuine smile and a kind and good face descending the stairs from the tower. I think he is about to lock up. Is it ok to have a look - 'Of course' he says with a generous smile. 'Are you trying to close for the evening?' I ask. 'Oh you're fine - we have mass shortly' he says waving me inside. The church inside is clean and bright and really fresh. With that very brittle european catholic trapped air, as if sieved. In each niche at the sides of the long, narrow nave there are altars and statues and paintings - some of them really beautiful. Because it is Christmas, or because I want to feel something and no longer be cross I light a candle at a beautiful white statue of what I think to be the Virgin Mary though I discover later to be St Anne, her mother.
This church was built on the site of the town residence of Earl of Carisle - a grand house built in 1690. The square itself had first been developed in 1681 and was originally called King's Square after Charles II becoming one of London's most fashionable addresses. It later became Soho Square named after an ancient hunting cry akin to Tally Ho refering to the area's rural and hunting past. By the 18th century the square had become more a more 'colourful' area and a Mrs Cornelys rented the Earl of Carisle's town house in around 1760. And oh she was an adventuress - like a Jeanette Winterson heroine - born on the island of Venice - an opera singer and impresario - she had many lovers and husbands and children across Europe including a daughter from an affair with Casanova. At Carisle House she put on elaborate masked balls and concerts of great imagination, sumptious design, slightly dubious reputation and great popularity:
'It was at one of Mrs. Cornelys' masquerades that the beautiful daughter of a peer wore the costume of an Indian princess, three black girls bearing her train, a canopy held over her head by two negro boys, and her dress covered with jewels worth £100,000. It was at another that Adam, in fleshcoloured tights and an apron of fig-leaves, was to be seen in company with the Duchess of Bolton as Diana.'
These gatherings were so popular 'In February 1770, Parliament adjourned early to enable members to attend one of her masquerades.' Laurence Sterne called a visit to Mrs Cornelys' "the best assembly and the best concert I ever had the honour to be at." In Humphrey Clinker, published in 1771, Tobias Smollett writes of "Mrs. Cornelys' assembly, which for the rooms, the company, the dresses, and decorations, surpasses all description". In Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon the narrator recalls that "[a]ll the high and low demireps of the town gathered there". Dickens wrote in an article on Soho that "the world was dying to be on Mrs. Cornelys's list."
Though she was in and out of debtor's prison because she paid so much out for her ventures and by 1772 Carisle House was seized and it's contents auctioned off. Later out of prison she organised a Venetian regatta on the Thames and then returned to Carlisle House, this time as manager. She held two immensely successful seasons of 'rural masquerades', decorating the interiors of the reception rooms with fresh turf, hedges, exotic blooms, goldfish swimming in a fountain and pine trees in the concert room. However ( or because of ) she then slid back into bankruptcy and in 1779 was imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison. She escaped in June the next year when the prison was set on fire during the Gordon Riots, but was recaptured in Westminster in August.'
Again out of prison she renamed herself Mrs Smith selling asses milk in Knightsbridge and finally died in Newgate prison at the age of 74 apparently from breast cancer.
Though 18th century pleasure seems a fascinating and imaginative thing. Across the square at number 21 was a famous magic brothel, the White House - in which commercial sex was enhanced by dark, baroque special-effects and natural magic devices:
"The white house was a notorious place of ill fame," writes Mayhew in 1851 "Some of the apartments, it is said were funished in a style of costly luxury; while others were fitted up with springs, traps and other contrivances, so as to present no appearance other than that of an ordinary room, until the machinery was set in motion. In one room, into which some wretched girl might be introduced, on her drawing a curtain as she would be desired , a skeleton grinning horribly was precipitated forward and caught the terrified creature in his, to all appearence, bony arms. In another chamber the lights grew dim and then seemed gradually to go out. In some little time some candles, apparently self ingnited, revealed to a horror stricken woman, a black coffin on the lid of which might be seen in brass letters, Anne, or whatever name it had been ascertained the poor wretch was known by. A sofa, in another part of the mansion was made to descend into some place of utter darkness, or, it was alleged, into a room in which was store of soot or ashes."
I remember a friend telling me about a Japanese Love Hotel she took her girlfriend to in the 1980s and I text her for details. I walk to collect the children from school imagining beautiful, luxurious but erotic hotels. Mirrored mazes, silver swans, and silken rooms devoid of light. Peep holes, finger holes, flaming torches and showers of feathers. Tipping floors, tumbling tunnels, singing canaries and a brook bringing thimbles of dessert wine on trays. I couldn't afford what I would like, I think. And I am too shy anyhow, caught in the awkward bulk of self. She texts later to say there was a vibrating bed and you paid by the hour. Though another friend reported a scented bath on stilts.
Also in the square was a 'bazaar' set up in 1816 by John Trotter. A man who had ambitions to set up an universal language and had run the army stores for the Napoleonic wars he converted a warehouse in Soho Square no longer required for army provision as an encouragement for 'Female and Domesticity' being anxious to stop the country from pouring 'its happy and innocent virgins into the common sink of London'. The interior of the disused warehouse was laid out with stalls and counters arranged on two floors of the building in the manner of a closed market. The vendors hired their selling spaces by the day and there were stringent rules for the conduct of business, but everything was conducted on the 'fairest and most liberal plan'. The goods sold consisted chiefly of millinery, gloves, lace, jewellery and potted plants. Despite it's seemingly worthy beginning this fashionable and famous bazaar was copied across London, a precusor to the department stores of Oxford Street.
I dither about putting this in but the chance to write about sex AND shopping is too enticing. I have had my novel rejected a few times for just being too depressing so the chance to revel in the bones of the chick lit genre is just too much to miss.
The church was the first Catholic Church to be founded after the 1791 second Catholic Relief Act was passed by parliament. A group of eminent Irish Catholics formed the Confraternity of St. Patrick “to consider the most effectual means of establishing a chapel to be called St. Patrick’s, on a liberal and permanent foundation.” An ambition they achieved by taking a 62-year lease on Mrs. Cornelys’, by then vacant, Carlisle House. Nearby stretching from New Oxford St to Seven Dials was an area known as the Rookeries - where criminals, the drunken and destitute, and a large population of the Irish Catholic poor lived.
On this corner of Soho and Covent Garden it 'was somewhat like the wild west with the priests often rather sheriff-like as they tried to bring order to disorder, and establish Christian family values in the face of the evil elements that were destroying the dignity of the lower classes, namely alcohol, crime and exploitation.' And the priest Father Arthur O'Leary who raised the funds and drummed up support and directed the consecration of the chapel on September 29th 1792 continued his work for 10 years until as it says on his memorial stone in the porch of the church ‘he wore himself out by his labours’ in 1802.
Also celebrated in a plaque in the porch is the 1940 bomb that broke through the roof and embedded itself in the nave but did not go off.
While the entertainer Danny La Rue who was an altar server here for many years donated the two statues at the back of the church in the memory of his mother and aunt. And Tommy Steel was married here.
The church appears to have as an inspiring though as yet less careworn leader as it's founder. The Reverend Alexander Sherbrooke has overseen the recent 3.5 million renovation of the church and also the hosting of addiction counselling in it's crypt ( it is the only Catholic Church to do so). Each week under his lead St Patrick's with a team of volunteers feeds 80 to 90 local homeless people in conjunction with the Groucho club – a nearby private members' club - that supplys the puddings. He also runs an SOS prayer line manned by volunteers from 7pm to 11pm every night in the tower of the church. A light on at high window of the tower like a beacon to Soho proclaims the two telephone lines open and they take calls from across the world. I read that at the heart of his ministry is the new Evangelization in the Catholic Church and that he believes that beauty in a secular age is a privileged pathway to God making the Eucharist, the music and the church itself central to the worship.
Sherbrooke says: "You get a knock on the door and it can be someone who is successful in business, someone who wants a sandwich or someone caught up in the sex industry. We leave our SOS prayer line calling cards in telephone boxes – where you might see other services advertised.
I don't know - writing this blog I have witnessed how much good work is done by the London churches but this seems inspiring - his breadth of ambition and desire to help people in a simple but direct way. I pass him as I walk down the nave on my way out, the man who had welcomed me in, a man of obvious peace and energy. Unexpectedly behind him down the aisle comes a soppy eyed King Charles Spaniel, neat claws on the clean new marble, completely at home, obedient to his master. I think of a Christmas Day once when I went to a service with my Mum and Dad in my hometown and a butterfly flew in the church on the cold morning for it felt like a surprising gift of beauty.
As I leave the church, rushing now, for a quick guilty drink with UL before returning to my patched together family, a short man in a fawn anorak runs up the stairs. 'Is there someone, somewhere who will hear my confession now?' he pants. 'He is in there.' I say.
I think of the light on in the tower.
Saturday 24 December 2011
Sunday 11 December 2011
Christian Scientist Reading Room, Mayfair
It is the third time I have tried to get into the magnificently fronted Christian Scientist Church on Curzon Street. I have been refused politely but determinedly twice - no, I am sorry, you have to come to a service, no I am sorry, the service has started we cannot let you enter. The first time a man with dried spittle on his lip appeared from the back of the slightly smelly reading room ( opposite to the door of the church) looked suspiciously at me and turned me away. The second occasion a black man with an old weary face on guard at the doorway of the church ( though I was certain the service had not started. ) They both acted as if they have been guardians of the doorway for a long time and that I ( red tights, metallic red dance shoes, big fur hat/I wonder if I sound loathsome? ) am just who should be turned away.
This time I am determined, though dreading the encounter. I have decided to try the end of a service on a Sunday rather than the random weekday or the beginning of a service on a weekday evening that I have tried before and I know there is a bb docking bay opposite the grand, almost american college-like building so I have chanced split-hair-timing of when I think the service will finish.
I have lost my job. Even writing this down it shocks me. I have never lost a job. Those closed door meetings dragged on for 10 days, wounding the build up to xmas - how could I sit and order stocking fillers on line - when it seemed likely there would be no money coming in afterwards? Though I attempt to think golden positive thoughts when I wake, I attempt to think good can come out of change for a few minutes every morning. I don't know - it does seem to help. The opposite is helpless, hopeless worrying and a flailing 'it's not fair.' Finally on a Friday I am taken into a room and offered money and allowed to still work for the company. I think I will cry but I am bold to the two men who deliver the news 'I feel I have worked really hard and done a really good job' and they concur and say yes, it is very sad, they are sure they will see me back but I feel they resent my bitterly spoken pride. When I open the envelope they offer me I am much more pleased with the money than I can imagine. Though despite wanting to write a story of 'our time' and everything I can see from the corner I live on I feel like a method actor actually losing a leg. It was only just a level of pretending before.
On a day I wouldn't have worked anyhow I sit at the kitchen table and write careful lists in pale pencil. Under headings - christmas, writing, job hunting, money, children - the items range from the ambitious - contact Granta, to the life saving - phone about smoke alarm, the needy - e mail 3 work contacts a day and mundane slightly over fussy - check gravy boat and cutlery for Christmas. Listening to Radio 4 that morning as I start these chores I hear amazing accounts of:
A transexual's life and the apparent prediliction for electronic engineering.
Chinese migrant workers status and the hukou system which means that household registration cannot be moved from countryside to the cities despite modern China's dependence on this workforce - how such workers have to lead second class lives, unable to obtain healthcare, their children unable to attend state schools. "Wo shi nongmin [I am a peasant]," a fixed status, shown on ID.
Then a whole programme about a writer I had never heard of - Robert Aickman. 'He had the ability to invest the daylight world with all the terrors of the night, and specialised in subverting notions of safety and sunshine into something sinister and unforgiving. His work is best summed up by a wonderful German word, unheimlich, meaning "uncanny", which has the deeper connotation of suggesting the unease caused by being away from home, literally un-homelike.'
I think as I do the cleaning this is a rich life. Make it what you want.
In my attempt to get into the church I rush up the grand stairs from the street, pass a few stragglers of congregation in the atrium between the reading room and the church and I am at the door of the church in that furry hat and gold buttoned coat, pink cheeks from the cold and the rush and the bike ride and both the dried spittle man and the weary faced seated man are there. Both are shaking their head - they are just closing up, they say. They look at me as if I am loathsome. I say - I will only be 5 minutes - less than that even - I am doing a local history project - oh please, I plead. The two guardians exchange slightly fearful glances and say ok reluctantly. I bolt up the carpeted stairs, like the winding stairway of a well vacuumed bed and breakfast and reach the plain but beautiful airy room. Like a horror film DS man has followed me, lurking behind but I say truly - oh it is beautiful - and he smiles finally trusting that I do not want to harm whatever it is he protects.
'Christian Science, a new American religion based largely in both Puritan and Transcendental strains of theology, was formulated by New Englander Mary Baker Eddy and organized as a denomination in the 1880s and 1890s, based on her discovery of a radical method of Christian healing found through a spiritual interpretation of the Bible—a science of Christianity.
This room is airy and simple with lovely proportions and texts carved on the walls.
Christian Science came to Britain in 1890. Mrs. Eddy sent students to London, where fashionable West End women began to be attracted to it
'By 1907, the Christian Scientists had grown in influence enough to interest over 9000 people to attend a Christian Science lecture delivered by American Bicknell Young in London’s Albert Hall. The idea that the acoustically perfected lecture hall or theater provided the best vehicle for Christian Science churches in Britain was henceforth continually suggested in the architectural press and demonstrated in several branch church designs: Byzantine styled Second Church by Sir John Burnett (1924-25); Lanchester and Rickard’s monumental Baroque Third Church (1910) in Mayfair, which included a lamp of wisdom in its elaborate entry cartouche surmounted by a tower of Wren derivation.
Likewise the First Church, Manchester England, a striking expressionist Arts and Crafts design by Edgar Wood, was one of the most celebrated churches in Britain of any denomination.
Though a falling congregation meant this church was divided in 1980. The facade and front part of the building was kept - the rest developed as flats. I find a story of the magnificent oak case of the organ from the huge church being sold and shipped to Australia, 'the timber used in the case came from oak retrieved from English manor houses and shipwrecks, and was designed by L.F. Roslyn to incorporate biblical images, floral motifs, sheaves of wheat and doves.'
Finally, returning home one night from the Southbank after a night out with ul I turn into the dark closed huts of the christmas Thameside market. The gingerbread twinkly fairytale world has flipped it's artifice to the slightly sinister grey tones of garden sheds and cheap magic shut away and out of reach. Oh I suddenly realise - I don't want this to be the ISICTT xmas special - I need to get to another church. Of course posting this on xmas day I have missed my own ambitious deadlines - but I aiming for two this week! I don't know! Let's see!
This time I am determined, though dreading the encounter. I have decided to try the end of a service on a Sunday rather than the random weekday or the beginning of a service on a weekday evening that I have tried before and I know there is a bb docking bay opposite the grand, almost american college-like building so I have chanced split-hair-timing of when I think the service will finish.
I have lost my job. Even writing this down it shocks me. I have never lost a job. Those closed door meetings dragged on for 10 days, wounding the build up to xmas - how could I sit and order stocking fillers on line - when it seemed likely there would be no money coming in afterwards? Though I attempt to think golden positive thoughts when I wake, I attempt to think good can come out of change for a few minutes every morning. I don't know - it does seem to help. The opposite is helpless, hopeless worrying and a flailing 'it's not fair.' Finally on a Friday I am taken into a room and offered money and allowed to still work for the company. I think I will cry but I am bold to the two men who deliver the news 'I feel I have worked really hard and done a really good job' and they concur and say yes, it is very sad, they are sure they will see me back but I feel they resent my bitterly spoken pride. When I open the envelope they offer me I am much more pleased with the money than I can imagine. Though despite wanting to write a story of 'our time' and everything I can see from the corner I live on I feel like a method actor actually losing a leg. It was only just a level of pretending before.
On a day I wouldn't have worked anyhow I sit at the kitchen table and write careful lists in pale pencil. Under headings - christmas, writing, job hunting, money, children - the items range from the ambitious - contact Granta, to the life saving - phone about smoke alarm, the needy - e mail 3 work contacts a day and mundane slightly over fussy - check gravy boat and cutlery for Christmas. Listening to Radio 4 that morning as I start these chores I hear amazing accounts of:
A transexual's life and the apparent prediliction for electronic engineering.
Chinese migrant workers status and the hukou system which means that household registration cannot be moved from countryside to the cities despite modern China's dependence on this workforce - how such workers have to lead second class lives, unable to obtain healthcare, their children unable to attend state schools. "Wo shi nongmin [I am a peasant]," a fixed status, shown on ID.
Then a whole programme about a writer I had never heard of - Robert Aickman. 'He had the ability to invest the daylight world with all the terrors of the night, and specialised in subverting notions of safety and sunshine into something sinister and unforgiving. His work is best summed up by a wonderful German word, unheimlich, meaning "uncanny", which has the deeper connotation of suggesting the unease caused by being away from home, literally un-homelike.'
I think as I do the cleaning this is a rich life. Make it what you want.
In my attempt to get into the church I rush up the grand stairs from the street, pass a few stragglers of congregation in the atrium between the reading room and the church and I am at the door of the church in that furry hat and gold buttoned coat, pink cheeks from the cold and the rush and the bike ride and both the dried spittle man and the weary faced seated man are there. Both are shaking their head - they are just closing up, they say. They look at me as if I am loathsome. I say - I will only be 5 minutes - less than that even - I am doing a local history project - oh please, I plead. The two guardians exchange slightly fearful glances and say ok reluctantly. I bolt up the carpeted stairs, like the winding stairway of a well vacuumed bed and breakfast and reach the plain but beautiful airy room. Like a horror film DS man has followed me, lurking behind but I say truly - oh it is beautiful - and he smiles finally trusting that I do not want to harm whatever it is he protects.
'Christian Science, a new American religion based largely in both Puritan and Transcendental strains of theology, was formulated by New Englander Mary Baker Eddy and organized as a denomination in the 1880s and 1890s, based on her discovery of a radical method of Christian healing found through a spiritual interpretation of the Bible—a science of Christianity.
This room is airy and simple with lovely proportions and texts carved on the walls.
Christian Science came to Britain in 1890. Mrs. Eddy sent students to London, where fashionable West End women began to be attracted to it
'By 1907, the Christian Scientists had grown in influence enough to interest over 9000 people to attend a Christian Science lecture delivered by American Bicknell Young in London’s Albert Hall. The idea that the acoustically perfected lecture hall or theater provided the best vehicle for Christian Science churches in Britain was henceforth continually suggested in the architectural press and demonstrated in several branch church designs: Byzantine styled Second Church by Sir John Burnett (1924-25); Lanchester and Rickard’s monumental Baroque Third Church (1910) in Mayfair, which included a lamp of wisdom in its elaborate entry cartouche surmounted by a tower of Wren derivation.
Likewise the First Church, Manchester England, a striking expressionist Arts and Crafts design by Edgar Wood, was one of the most celebrated churches in Britain of any denomination.
Though a falling congregation meant this church was divided in 1980. The facade and front part of the building was kept - the rest developed as flats. I find a story of the magnificent oak case of the organ from the huge church being sold and shipped to Australia, 'the timber used in the case came from oak retrieved from English manor houses and shipwrecks, and was designed by L.F. Roslyn to incorporate biblical images, floral motifs, sheaves of wheat and doves.'
Finally, returning home one night from the Southbank after a night out with ul I turn into the dark closed huts of the christmas Thameside market. The gingerbread twinkly fairytale world has flipped it's artifice to the slightly sinister grey tones of garden sheds and cheap magic shut away and out of reach. Oh I suddenly realise - I don't want this to be the ISICTT xmas special - I need to get to another church. Of course posting this on xmas day I have missed my own ambitious deadlines - but I aiming for two this week! I don't know! Let's see!
Sunday 13 November 2011
Christchurch Mayfair
I feel that I am a walking advert for a Kindle as I read War and Peace on the tube. The book that I have been reading since July was initially just heavy, then it got wet on our camping holiday, lost it's cover and grew flabby. Since then it has become increasingly battered alongside the junk in my bag - the notebooks, the toy guns, stray sweets, flat shoes, favourite lip gloss, child gloves, church leaflets, pta meeting announcements and now the spine has weakened and pages flutter loose. I carry it almost everywhere, a big heavy brick in my bag, just in case, just in case, there are a snatched five minutes to spare - too early for the library after dropping the boys off to school, sitting in the doctors surgery waiting for my name to be called, on the tube to work making the 15 minute journey ( that I kid myself to be only 10, shaving time in the morning to vacuum the flat, hang a load of washing out - finding myself late day after day, slightly sheepish but smiling as I arrive at my desk) and here sitting in a cafe ordering coffee and toast in a smart but 'artisan' cafe in Mayfair waiting for a church service to finish. I open the book, happy, almost exalted to be back in this other crystal sharp world. I have become someone who folds the pages rather than use a bookmark though with this wreck of a book it hardly matters - but I like the tiny increments of folded pages - the tick of time it has taken me to read it. I have always been a fast reader but this slow, increasingly loose paged read has become an almost physical relationship with the book - a passionate, time taken at any opportunity, absorbing thing.
This morning I have already done the dithering in a porch but the church looked packed and they were singing a hymm. I darted out and back down the narrow street. Behind me I heard the door open and the shuffle of someone coming out and looking both ways down the street, looking for whoever had just departed, as if I had played knock down ginger on God's door. Instinctively, I slink into the wall not wanting to be caught and there is a slight kink in the road so it is easy to remain undetected. I think I hear a small shrug and then the door closing.
The cafe is lovely, like being in San Franciso, as the smiley waitress takes my order and brings really good coffee. I am in Shepherd Market, a tucked away historic 'village' - like a toy model of some other time but with boutiques and lots of restaurants including a polish mexican restaurant (now there is a heady combination of seemingly physical opposites.) Corralled by the grand streets nearby this area has the dolls house charm and scaled down period details of narrow alleyways and old lamp posts. Though the toast takes ages and I feel agitated by having finished my coffee before it appears. A couple nearby read tabloid sunday newspapers but not the one I work for. I feel somehow cheated. I want to observe people turn the pages of the magazine and watch to see where their eye's rest. Instead I read 'War and Peace' and it is wonderful.
This whole area - Mayfair - but specifically the site this market was built on was the home of the annual fifteen day May Fairs set up in the 1680s by James II as a cattle market. The haunt of soldiers and women of loose morals it grew too rowdy, and was closed down in the 18th century:
The last Mayfair was remembered by Pennant as "covered with booths, temporary theatres, and every enticement to low pleasure."
Including a fashion for puppet beheading shows with the explanation, "After the Scottish rebellion of 1745," writes Chambers, in his "Book of Days," "the beheading of puppets formed one of the most regular and attractive parts of the exhibitions at the 'May Fair,' and was continued for several years.”
The May Fair, which had long been falling into disrepute, ceased to be held in the reign of George I. It was "presented by the grand jury of Middlesex for four years successively as a public scandal; and the county magistrates then presented an address to the Crown, praying for its suppression by royal proclamation." Its abolition was brought about mainly through the influence of the Earl of Coventry, to whose house in Piccadilly it was an annual nuisance.
Edward Shepherd was commissioned to develop the site and built the paved alleys, a duck pond and a two storey market topped with a theatre between 1735-46. A better clientele attended the entertainments here than the boisterous May Fairs - though the relationship between high money and sex seems to have kept the area's dubious reputation - indeed in the 1980s Jeffrey Archer's ( then the chairman of the conservative party) met with prostitute Monica Coghlan in a flat in Shepherd Market and the subsequent cover up led to his imprisonment.
I walk into the church. The service is finished but the church is packed and noisy - families with cradled, crawling, feeding, tottering, shouting, running tots like a Ahlberg children's book illustration, and exhausted but smiley looking parents drinking cups of tea. There is amplification and presentation equipment where the altar is, and the chairs laid out for the congregation are in an almost untidy arrangement. Though maybe it is just without the pews the layout seems to lack order and be almost too roomy for itself.
Alongside a pretty girl sidles close. Hello' she welcomes. 'I haven't seen you here before?'
I have just come to have a quick look at the church, I say, looking up at the huge stained glass windows.
She keeps talking, asking what would I like to find. I surprise myself by talking very truthfully. I say I just like visiting these spaces and thinking about history and belief and faith but that I don't have any. I imagine suddenly Rachel Whiteread's 'House' and the imprint of space filled with something, the space itself described by matter. I can see her 'inner' angler hold her expression steady as if watching the fish just nibbling the bait. We talk about the congregation and my surprise at how young everyone is. 'We are a group that came together and now we are blessed with all these children' - she waves her hands around as if surveying the many offspring of rabbits but with a slight wrinkling of her pretty nose to the din. We talk about the location of the church and she says it makes it easy to invite friends to come because they can go shopping afterwards. She says the church was an Ethopian church before, and now Church of England but evangelical. She does not leave my side as I go to look at leaflets by strange phone box style cupboards with big headings pinned above. 'Investigating Christianity' says one. She doesn't leave my side as I pick out a few leaflets but we shake hands and I thank her as I leave.
I find very little about the history of Christchuch, Down St. Errected in 1865 by F and H Francis as a subdivision of St George's of Hanover Square there seems to have been a fire at the beginning of the 20th century and the only other scrap of architectural information is that the multicoloured interior brick work was painted over in 1955. Apparently Mary, Princess Royal, daughter of George V worshipped here at the beginning of her married life. But that is all I find though I fish and fish and fish for history for hours.
I do discover details of nearby Keith's Chapel where clergyman Alexander Keith conducted clandestine ( with an element of secrecy to them: perhaps they took place away from a home parish, and without either banns or marriage licence and at any hour of the day or night) marriages and I wonder if I am onto something. Though there is no connection between the churches. He appears to be entreuperunarial in his marriage business placing adverts of great detail
Daily Post of July 20th, 1744:
"To prevent mistakes, the little new chapel in May Fair, near Hyde Park corner, is in the corner house, opposite to the city side of the great chapel, and within ten yards of it, and the minister and clerk live in the same corner house where the little chapel is; and the licence on a crown stamp, minister and clerk's fees, together with the certificate, amount to one guinea, as heretofore, at any hour till four in the afternoon. And that it may be the better known, there is a porch at the door like a country church porch."
While in prison, Keith seems to have had a keen eye to business. During his incarceration his wife died, and he kept her corpse embalmed and unburied for many months, but he used the unfortunate circumstances as a pr exercise - Daily Advertiser of January 30, 1750:—"We are informed that Mrs. Keith's corpse was removed from her husband's house in May Fair the middle of October last, to an apothecary's in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there till Mr. Keith can attend the funeral. The way to Mr. Keith's chapel is through Piccadilly, by the end of St. James's Street, and down Clarges Street, and turn on the left hand." Then follows the announcement that the marriages are still carried on as usual by "another regular clergyman," as quoted above.
Some 60.000 marriages seemed to have taken place with neat and ordered records, so at a guinea a pop it must have been a lucrative trade.
Also while looking for details of Christchurch I find John Gay's 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London,' which appeared in 1716 - a poem in three books. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/skilton/poetry/gay01a.html
It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of walking in the London of that period. Read the poem! But here to give an idea of the content is fragments from the index:
Alley, the pleasure of walking in one,
Barber, by whom to be shunned,
Butchers, to be avoided,
Cane, the convenience of one.
Coat, how to chuse one for the winter,
Countryman, perplexed to find the way,
Coachman, his whip dangerous,
Crowd parted by a coach,
Cellar, the misfortunes of falling into one.
Dustman, to whom offensive,
Fop, the ill consequence of passing too near one,
Father, the happiness of a child who knows his own,
Ladies dress neither by reason nor instinct,
Milkman of the city unlike a rural one.
Oyster, the courage of him that first ate one,
Periwigs, how stolen off the head,
Playhouse, a caution when you lead a lady out of it,
Shoes, what most proper for walkers.
Stockings, how to prevent their being spattered,
Schoolboys mischievous in frosty weather.
Umbrella, its use,
Wig, what to be worn in a mist,
Way, of whom to be inquired,
On my way to work - what I have been dreading happens - I turn the page 936 and find no 937 of War and Peace. At work, unexpectedly the owner of the paper I work for announces that he doesn't like the magazine. It is like a tantrum but it escalates and the work is taken off us, these people that have worked so hard, and we believed so well, and given to a special projects team. We wait days for news, as doors close for meetings around us but none comes. Coming up to Christmas it seems the wrong time to lose a job. What will I do I want to wail but I think oh something will have to turn up and what I want to do is write.
Relieved I find the missing page of the book in the flotsam of my bag and carry on reading.
This morning I have already done the dithering in a porch but the church looked packed and they were singing a hymm. I darted out and back down the narrow street. Behind me I heard the door open and the shuffle of someone coming out and looking both ways down the street, looking for whoever had just departed, as if I had played knock down ginger on God's door. Instinctively, I slink into the wall not wanting to be caught and there is a slight kink in the road so it is easy to remain undetected. I think I hear a small shrug and then the door closing.
The cafe is lovely, like being in San Franciso, as the smiley waitress takes my order and brings really good coffee. I am in Shepherd Market, a tucked away historic 'village' - like a toy model of some other time but with boutiques and lots of restaurants including a polish mexican restaurant (now there is a heady combination of seemingly physical opposites.) Corralled by the grand streets nearby this area has the dolls house charm and scaled down period details of narrow alleyways and old lamp posts. Though the toast takes ages and I feel agitated by having finished my coffee before it appears. A couple nearby read tabloid sunday newspapers but not the one I work for. I feel somehow cheated. I want to observe people turn the pages of the magazine and watch to see where their eye's rest. Instead I read 'War and Peace' and it is wonderful.
This whole area - Mayfair - but specifically the site this market was built on was the home of the annual fifteen day May Fairs set up in the 1680s by James II as a cattle market. The haunt of soldiers and women of loose morals it grew too rowdy, and was closed down in the 18th century:
The last Mayfair was remembered by Pennant as "covered with booths, temporary theatres, and every enticement to low pleasure."
Including a fashion for puppet beheading shows with the explanation, "After the Scottish rebellion of 1745," writes Chambers, in his "Book of Days," "the beheading of puppets formed one of the most regular and attractive parts of the exhibitions at the 'May Fair,' and was continued for several years.”
The May Fair, which had long been falling into disrepute, ceased to be held in the reign of George I. It was "presented by the grand jury of Middlesex for four years successively as a public scandal; and the county magistrates then presented an address to the Crown, praying for its suppression by royal proclamation." Its abolition was brought about mainly through the influence of the Earl of Coventry, to whose house in Piccadilly it was an annual nuisance.
Edward Shepherd was commissioned to develop the site and built the paved alleys, a duck pond and a two storey market topped with a theatre between 1735-46. A better clientele attended the entertainments here than the boisterous May Fairs - though the relationship between high money and sex seems to have kept the area's dubious reputation - indeed in the 1980s Jeffrey Archer's ( then the chairman of the conservative party) met with prostitute Monica Coghlan in a flat in Shepherd Market and the subsequent cover up led to his imprisonment.
I walk into the church. The service is finished but the church is packed and noisy - families with cradled, crawling, feeding, tottering, shouting, running tots like a Ahlberg children's book illustration, and exhausted but smiley looking parents drinking cups of tea. There is amplification and presentation equipment where the altar is, and the chairs laid out for the congregation are in an almost untidy arrangement. Though maybe it is just without the pews the layout seems to lack order and be almost too roomy for itself.
Alongside a pretty girl sidles close. Hello' she welcomes. 'I haven't seen you here before?'
I have just come to have a quick look at the church, I say, looking up at the huge stained glass windows.
She keeps talking, asking what would I like to find. I surprise myself by talking very truthfully. I say I just like visiting these spaces and thinking about history and belief and faith but that I don't have any. I imagine suddenly Rachel Whiteread's 'House' and the imprint of space filled with something, the space itself described by matter. I can see her 'inner' angler hold her expression steady as if watching the fish just nibbling the bait. We talk about the congregation and my surprise at how young everyone is. 'We are a group that came together and now we are blessed with all these children' - she waves her hands around as if surveying the many offspring of rabbits but with a slight wrinkling of her pretty nose to the din. We talk about the location of the church and she says it makes it easy to invite friends to come because they can go shopping afterwards. She says the church was an Ethopian church before, and now Church of England but evangelical. She does not leave my side as I go to look at leaflets by strange phone box style cupboards with big headings pinned above. 'Investigating Christianity' says one. She doesn't leave my side as I pick out a few leaflets but we shake hands and I thank her as I leave.
I find very little about the history of Christchuch, Down St. Errected in 1865 by F and H Francis as a subdivision of St George's of Hanover Square there seems to have been a fire at the beginning of the 20th century and the only other scrap of architectural information is that the multicoloured interior brick work was painted over in 1955. Apparently Mary, Princess Royal, daughter of George V worshipped here at the beginning of her married life. But that is all I find though I fish and fish and fish for history for hours.
I do discover details of nearby Keith's Chapel where clergyman Alexander Keith conducted clandestine ( with an element of secrecy to them: perhaps they took place away from a home parish, and without either banns or marriage licence and at any hour of the day or night) marriages and I wonder if I am onto something. Though there is no connection between the churches. He appears to be entreuperunarial in his marriage business placing adverts of great detail
Daily Post of July 20th, 1744:
"To prevent mistakes, the little new chapel in May Fair, near Hyde Park corner, is in the corner house, opposite to the city side of the great chapel, and within ten yards of it, and the minister and clerk live in the same corner house where the little chapel is; and the licence on a crown stamp, minister and clerk's fees, together with the certificate, amount to one guinea, as heretofore, at any hour till four in the afternoon. And that it may be the better known, there is a porch at the door like a country church porch."
While in prison, Keith seems to have had a keen eye to business. During his incarceration his wife died, and he kept her corpse embalmed and unburied for many months, but he used the unfortunate circumstances as a pr exercise - Daily Advertiser of January 30, 1750:—"We are informed that Mrs. Keith's corpse was removed from her husband's house in May Fair the middle of October last, to an apothecary's in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there till Mr. Keith can attend the funeral. The way to Mr. Keith's chapel is through Piccadilly, by the end of St. James's Street, and down Clarges Street, and turn on the left hand." Then follows the announcement that the marriages are still carried on as usual by "another regular clergyman," as quoted above.
Some 60.000 marriages seemed to have taken place with neat and ordered records, so at a guinea a pop it must have been a lucrative trade.
Also while looking for details of Christchurch I find John Gay's 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London,' which appeared in 1716 - a poem in three books. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/skilton/poetry/gay01a.html
It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of walking in the London of that period. Read the poem! But here to give an idea of the content is fragments from the index:
Alley, the pleasure of walking in one,
Barber, by whom to be shunned,
Butchers, to be avoided,
Cane, the convenience of one.
Coat, how to chuse one for the winter,
Countryman, perplexed to find the way,
Coachman, his whip dangerous,
Crowd parted by a coach,
Cellar, the misfortunes of falling into one.
Dustman, to whom offensive,
Fop, the ill consequence of passing too near one,
Father, the happiness of a child who knows his own,
Ladies dress neither by reason nor instinct,
Milkman of the city unlike a rural one.
Oyster, the courage of him that first ate one,
Periwigs, how stolen off the head,
Playhouse, a caution when you lead a lady out of it,
Shoes, what most proper for walkers.
Stockings, how to prevent their being spattered,
Schoolboys mischievous in frosty weather.
Umbrella, its use,
Wig, what to be worn in a mist,
Way, of whom to be inquired,
On my way to work - what I have been dreading happens - I turn the page 936 and find no 937 of War and Peace. At work, unexpectedly the owner of the paper I work for announces that he doesn't like the magazine. It is like a tantrum but it escalates and the work is taken off us, these people that have worked so hard, and we believed so well, and given to a special projects team. We wait days for news, as doors close for meetings around us but none comes. Coming up to Christmas it seems the wrong time to lose a job. What will I do I want to wail but I think oh something will have to turn up and what I want to do is write.
Relieved I find the missing page of the book in the flotsam of my bag and carry on reading.
Sunday 30 October 2011
St Mary's Bourne Street
I stand in porches to peer I think, squinting through the reflected light of the glass door into the dark church. I can see the backs of heads of a few worshippers and hear the beautiful soaring high voices of a choir. It is the sunday morning after the clocks turned back and I just didn't get it together to be on time for the service. I don't know what to do. I dither. I can't enter now, it would be rude or just a bit dramatic. I'll have to wait until everyone comes out I think, annoyed with myself for being late. I feel like I have a lot to do though I am slightly lonely and the boys are away. Then I sit in a coffee shop to wait. At the cafe I overhear a pretty very young woman say she lost 20 million recently - though I am straining to hear 2O million what? Shares? Pounds? What else could it possibly be? Over the next few days I wonder what else she could have meant but can't think of anything. Try it. Stamps? Sweets? er Kilograms? Handkerchiefs? I don't know. The church service still hasn't finished when I finish my coffee so I walk round the block a couple of times. In the peace of Sunday morning posh streets, well heeled people walk dogs or children and I peer into luxe lives.
I see immaculately tidy, plush rooms and search for stray details of life - a ginger cat still as an ornament in the corner of a window, a doll tipped up face down on a toy high chair, a family slightly squashed around a table eating a meal in a basement with the window open and some really beautiful yolk yellow cast iron cooking pots on a window shelf. Each time round the block I come again to the long view of the church. I have never seen this chuch before today - had no idea what to expect. It is a fairly ordinary dark red brick with a pitched roof and a solitary bell in a cote, a church from a northern town not a parish church of this wealthy hushed neighbourhood. But the doors at the side are locked and I have to turn the corner to the entrance set back from the street sandwiched between houses.
The night before I came back over Westminster Bridge on a night bus with UL and looked up to see Big Ben dark orange from reflected light, dimmed as if eclipsed, the hands of the clock straight up to twelve o'clock. Oh, I say. Oh. Big Ben has become to me a lighthouse, a beacon - the boom of hundreds of new years eves and new resolutions made - a big bright licked dinner plate of light. I live here! I am nearly home! I live here! I am nearly home! But this night it is dull, shut down, as if resting and no bell rings out. Oh I think - the time is being changed on the clock but the bus sails past and I don't think to watch. I am fiddling with this image in my mind for days - lost time, limbo time, time travel, time turned back - there seems a gap in normal time at least. I imagine unexpectedly seeing the hands go backwards and the shock of seeing it. ( Once long ago I lived in a flat in White City overlooking the Westway and opened the blinds one morning to see all the traffic go backwards - what seemed like the world tipping, something, possibly just me, having fallen off an axis of sense was infact a road accident and traffic reversing to exit a slip road.) I google changing the clocks on Big Ben and find out that the clock would have been stopped the following midday - and worked on since then, checked over, then restarted exactly at 12 o'clock in the new time. So what I see is not midnight but held onto midday. Is it literally time stood still I wonder? Thinking of UL and me. Though perhaps it is just limbo. A place pretending to have no time, not recognising time has moved on. Later I mention seeing the shut down clock to my eldest son who explains the process I had only just discovered in great detail. How did you know that? I say amazed. 'It was on Newsround Mum.' He says nonchalantly.
Another night with the boys away I cycle up into Bloomsbury on a Boris Bike to meet a friend and talk about an art project. He works at the university of London. Cycling along the dark damp beautiful streets I feel suddenly and rather unexpectedly that I am in a dream. I pass earnestly happy young people deep in discussion, as if passing my own ambitions and ideals through the light drizzle. In the bright electric light of his university office we sit and talk about recording nearly extinct languages around the world and the hand gestures that accompany them as exactly as possible with as little 'surface' or manipulation to the representation. There is something here I want badly I think. Though it isn't an envious reaction. Just a realisation.
I want the pursuit of knowledge. Time to do what interests me.
On the third lap around the streets alongside the church elegant, elderly, made-up women come around the corner sparrow fawn, pearls and gold chokered at their neck. The church service is finished, the congregation departing. At the door an effusive handsome vicar in a black robe like a friendly wolf talks flamboyantly of a church in europe that he had visited. Worshippers are coming out, queueing to talk to him. Against the tide I stand near, waiting. Can I just go in to see your church? I ask. He waves me in ebulliently.
I'll just whizz in and I will have done it I think. But the bit of the church I could see when I peered in from the porch is just a side chapel, and the organ music is loud and passionate. Wow. I think. turning into the main body of the church. Dense grey clouds of strong smelling incense fill the space like special effects. People stand heads turned up to the organ playing triumphantly high in a gallery up at the back of the church. Two men absorbed - one playing, one stood close turning the pages. Just for one minute I feel, I feel what? The power and the glory? Mystery? Absolute wonder? It is exhilarating. The organ stops, everyone claps. The two men nod from the balcony.
I think later, of all the churches I have been to and all the tall pipes and ornate details of church organs I have turned my head to see without perhaps realising the impact of the actual music had on the service. I google 'organ music' and discover that the first organ ( a water hydraulis) was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria in the third century bc and described later in latin in the late 4th century by the poet Claudian - Magna levi detrudens murmura tactu....intonet 'let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch.' Used as a musical accompaniment to gladiatorial combat ( blimey - history - a dip into the gladiatorial games is the most fascinatingly brutal display of human cruelty I have read:
http://legvi.tripod.com/gladiators/id1.html)
But by the 8th century the organ is prominent in the liturgy of the Catholic Church for it's ability to 'simultaneously provide a musical foundation below the vocal register, support in the vocal register, and increased brightness above the vocal register.' compliment the human voice and the human voices of a choir. Though during the renaissance the hydraulic organ was used in magical grottos and gardens - run only by water (often waterfalls) whilst the air generated in the pipes were used to make automata figurines dance and birds fly. Other times hidden to simulate the music played by statues in mythological scenes.
But today - something - the frequency, the passion, the immensity of the sound - like a soaring dramatic sound track has unexpectedly transported me from mild lurking depression to joy.
The initially humble chapel was designed by a little known church architect RJ Withers and consecrated in 1874. Built over the underground railway on land where houses had been demolished, it was still an area of slums.
'The chapel as a whole is remarkably effective and has a solid and substantial look which is highly satisfactory. It is, in a word, an excellent specimen of an inexpensive chuch, the cost of the whole, not counting special gifts such as the reredos, altar, font etc, being about £4,500.' The Church Times 1874
It is another Trachaterian church ( as near as dammit catholic whilst still being allowed to be in the Church of England ) set up by Friar WJE Bennett of St Paul's Wilton St and then St Barnabus, Pimlico then taken over by Rev the hon Robert Liddell when he resigned. I have written already of this resignation and the riots that were caused by the high catholic rituals of the movement at St Barnabus.
http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html
Less controversial St Mary's is described in The Chuch Times 1874. 'The service at eleven o'clock was well attended by people from the neighbourhood, and we were glad to notice a good sprinkling of poor women. Mr Eyton, the Curate-in-Charge, was the clebrant, and an unconscionably long sermon was preached by Mr Knox-Little ( curate of St Thomas, Regent Street) which, considering the broiling weather, was little better than cruelty.'
For halloween I tell the boys I have prepared a 'mystery'. There is great excitement as we bob apples and play the game where you cut a cake of flour and have to fish out the fallen sweet with your mouth. In my bedroom I have adapted the huge child sized cardboard box that was has been their 'tank' and hung crepe paper streamers inside like cobwebs. Each child ( there are five boys who take it in turns) sits inside the box. PSM ( under my nervous instruction ) and I wail into a tube, drop cobwebs on their heads, blow through straws onto the back of their necks, put icy fingers on their arms and hang a skull with red shining eyes to a peep hole.
But the room isn't quite dark enough and I forget my lines and indeed my props for I am just too nervy to be a natural performer. 'Lame' each boy says. 'Was that a mystery?' says my eldest in disgust.
I keep remembering Graham Greene's conversion to Catholicism - I read it in his early autobiography 'A sort of Life' and loved the mix of mystery and mundanity. I look for the book on my book shelf and can't find it but here, oh it is worth the read.
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/greenesconversion.htm
Finally, I find a part time local history course that can be done on the internet that I can apply for in January. It will be a start I think excitedly.
Amen
I see immaculately tidy, plush rooms and search for stray details of life - a ginger cat still as an ornament in the corner of a window, a doll tipped up face down on a toy high chair, a family slightly squashed around a table eating a meal in a basement with the window open and some really beautiful yolk yellow cast iron cooking pots on a window shelf. Each time round the block I come again to the long view of the church. I have never seen this chuch before today - had no idea what to expect. It is a fairly ordinary dark red brick with a pitched roof and a solitary bell in a cote, a church from a northern town not a parish church of this wealthy hushed neighbourhood. But the doors at the side are locked and I have to turn the corner to the entrance set back from the street sandwiched between houses.
The night before I came back over Westminster Bridge on a night bus with UL and looked up to see Big Ben dark orange from reflected light, dimmed as if eclipsed, the hands of the clock straight up to twelve o'clock. Oh, I say. Oh. Big Ben has become to me a lighthouse, a beacon - the boom of hundreds of new years eves and new resolutions made - a big bright licked dinner plate of light. I live here! I am nearly home! I live here! I am nearly home! But this night it is dull, shut down, as if resting and no bell rings out. Oh I think - the time is being changed on the clock but the bus sails past and I don't think to watch. I am fiddling with this image in my mind for days - lost time, limbo time, time travel, time turned back - there seems a gap in normal time at least. I imagine unexpectedly seeing the hands go backwards and the shock of seeing it. ( Once long ago I lived in a flat in White City overlooking the Westway and opened the blinds one morning to see all the traffic go backwards - what seemed like the world tipping, something, possibly just me, having fallen off an axis of sense was infact a road accident and traffic reversing to exit a slip road.) I google changing the clocks on Big Ben and find out that the clock would have been stopped the following midday - and worked on since then, checked over, then restarted exactly at 12 o'clock in the new time. So what I see is not midnight but held onto midday. Is it literally time stood still I wonder? Thinking of UL and me. Though perhaps it is just limbo. A place pretending to have no time, not recognising time has moved on. Later I mention seeing the shut down clock to my eldest son who explains the process I had only just discovered in great detail. How did you know that? I say amazed. 'It was on Newsround Mum.' He says nonchalantly.
Another night with the boys away I cycle up into Bloomsbury on a Boris Bike to meet a friend and talk about an art project. He works at the university of London. Cycling along the dark damp beautiful streets I feel suddenly and rather unexpectedly that I am in a dream. I pass earnestly happy young people deep in discussion, as if passing my own ambitions and ideals through the light drizzle. In the bright electric light of his university office we sit and talk about recording nearly extinct languages around the world and the hand gestures that accompany them as exactly as possible with as little 'surface' or manipulation to the representation. There is something here I want badly I think. Though it isn't an envious reaction. Just a realisation.
I want the pursuit of knowledge. Time to do what interests me.
On the third lap around the streets alongside the church elegant, elderly, made-up women come around the corner sparrow fawn, pearls and gold chokered at their neck. The church service is finished, the congregation departing. At the door an effusive handsome vicar in a black robe like a friendly wolf talks flamboyantly of a church in europe that he had visited. Worshippers are coming out, queueing to talk to him. Against the tide I stand near, waiting. Can I just go in to see your church? I ask. He waves me in ebulliently.
I'll just whizz in and I will have done it I think. But the bit of the church I could see when I peered in from the porch is just a side chapel, and the organ music is loud and passionate. Wow. I think. turning into the main body of the church. Dense grey clouds of strong smelling incense fill the space like special effects. People stand heads turned up to the organ playing triumphantly high in a gallery up at the back of the church. Two men absorbed - one playing, one stood close turning the pages. Just for one minute I feel, I feel what? The power and the glory? Mystery? Absolute wonder? It is exhilarating. The organ stops, everyone claps. The two men nod from the balcony.
I think later, of all the churches I have been to and all the tall pipes and ornate details of church organs I have turned my head to see without perhaps realising the impact of the actual music had on the service. I google 'organ music' and discover that the first organ ( a water hydraulis) was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria in the third century bc and described later in latin in the late 4th century by the poet Claudian - Magna levi detrudens murmura tactu....intonet 'let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch.' Used as a musical accompaniment to gladiatorial combat ( blimey - history - a dip into the gladiatorial games is the most fascinatingly brutal display of human cruelty I have read:
http://legvi.tripod.com/gladiators/id1.html)
But by the 8th century the organ is prominent in the liturgy of the Catholic Church for it's ability to 'simultaneously provide a musical foundation below the vocal register, support in the vocal register, and increased brightness above the vocal register.' compliment the human voice and the human voices of a choir. Though during the renaissance the hydraulic organ was used in magical grottos and gardens - run only by water (often waterfalls) whilst the air generated in the pipes were used to make automata figurines dance and birds fly. Other times hidden to simulate the music played by statues in mythological scenes.
But today - something - the frequency, the passion, the immensity of the sound - like a soaring dramatic sound track has unexpectedly transported me from mild lurking depression to joy.
The initially humble chapel was designed by a little known church architect RJ Withers and consecrated in 1874. Built over the underground railway on land where houses had been demolished, it was still an area of slums.
'The chapel as a whole is remarkably effective and has a solid and substantial look which is highly satisfactory. It is, in a word, an excellent specimen of an inexpensive chuch, the cost of the whole, not counting special gifts such as the reredos, altar, font etc, being about £4,500.' The Church Times 1874
It is another Trachaterian church ( as near as dammit catholic whilst still being allowed to be in the Church of England ) set up by Friar WJE Bennett of St Paul's Wilton St and then St Barnabus, Pimlico then taken over by Rev the hon Robert Liddell when he resigned. I have written already of this resignation and the riots that were caused by the high catholic rituals of the movement at St Barnabus.
http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html
Less controversial St Mary's is described in The Chuch Times 1874. 'The service at eleven o'clock was well attended by people from the neighbourhood, and we were glad to notice a good sprinkling of poor women. Mr Eyton, the Curate-in-Charge, was the clebrant, and an unconscionably long sermon was preached by Mr Knox-Little ( curate of St Thomas, Regent Street) which, considering the broiling weather, was little better than cruelty.'
For halloween I tell the boys I have prepared a 'mystery'. There is great excitement as we bob apples and play the game where you cut a cake of flour and have to fish out the fallen sweet with your mouth. In my bedroom I have adapted the huge child sized cardboard box that was has been their 'tank' and hung crepe paper streamers inside like cobwebs. Each child ( there are five boys who take it in turns) sits inside the box. PSM ( under my nervous instruction ) and I wail into a tube, drop cobwebs on their heads, blow through straws onto the back of their necks, put icy fingers on their arms and hang a skull with red shining eyes to a peep hole.
But the room isn't quite dark enough and I forget my lines and indeed my props for I am just too nervy to be a natural performer. 'Lame' each boy says. 'Was that a mystery?' says my eldest in disgust.
I keep remembering Graham Greene's conversion to Catholicism - I read it in his early autobiography 'A sort of Life' and loved the mix of mystery and mundanity. I look for the book on my book shelf and can't find it but here, oh it is worth the read.
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/greenesconversion.htm
Finally, I find a part time local history course that can be done on the internet that I can apply for in January. It will be a start I think excitedly.
Amen
Sunday 25 September 2011
Church of Holy Apostles
Sitting in my kitchen late at night texting a quite nice girl from The Only Way is Essex about pictures of her as a little girl I think, really, something has got to change. Increasingly I just feel really, really stressed. Since the closure of the News of the World my part-time job share - like an unnoticed gas leak has invisibly filled every nook and crany of my life. I wake in the morning worrying that a car I have booked will not have picked up a celebrity, that a shot that the editor would like will not get taken, that I will not possibly get everything done. I work long hours at incredible speed and with great concentration, then take the paperwork home. I have gone to work the last three Sundays because I didn't know how the work would get done if I didn't. I have always worked hard but this is different. I don't know what to do. Of course I need the money but I have started to make mistakes and the amount of work I am getting through is impossible to maintain. All I really want to do is write. Sometimes I think if I only I stopped doing some of the things I don't really want to do, don't believe in maybe things would get better. Though I deliberately flatter the TOWIE girl to get the results I want and it works. She calls me babe as she agrees to send the pictures.
I slip into the Holy Apostles Catholic Church on a Sunday morning, parking the Boris Bike round the back of nearby St Gabriel's church. I can see on the surrounding Pimlico skyline the spires of three churches. Almost a year ago I signed up for a BB, almost a year ago I visited this church, almost a year ago I met UL after an absence of 12 years. It is a kind of anniversary. Though he is still in his very bad marriage despite declarations of separation that were made in the summer and I feel caught by the twine of their unhealthy life. After escaping an alcoholic relationship I am anxious this can only be another trap. Perhaps we are both just too damaged I think. Or am I just better at spotting unhealthy patterns? Did we have a bad relationship before? All I have remembered was our fascination with each other. But oh oh oh I feel sad.
I used to attend a mother and toddler group in the church hall of Holy Apostles with my youngest son - little girls in sparkly-heeled cinderella slippers doggedly shuffling dolls in buggies as he donned a policeman outfit and a batman mask before driving a plastic hooded car around the hall. Mothers resigned to the display of these apparently intrinsic roles. The church hall has a beautiful, nicely-planted, mediterreanean 50s style sunny courtyard and I assume the entrance of the church is there. But it isn't and I have to walk around to the next street to find the door. Up some steps, the door is open, I can hear singing, there is a service. I stand in the porch, like a phone box dense with cards - advertising religious services including counselling for those who have suffered from the abuse of priests.
The church is quite long and narrow and plain though busy. The congregation are queueing for communion. Vaulted like the interior bones of a whale the room has neutral colours that make the colours of people's sunday best vibrant.
The old Holy Apostles Church (then on Claverton Street - on the site of an old rather grand columned Wesleyen chapel) was bombed out in the war on 16th April 1941. The attack on Pimlico that night was ferocious. In nearby Sutherland Terrace the whole terrace of thirty odd houses was obliterated apart from three dwellings:
'But here, in the night, in a place ringed with fires, the devastation seemed endless, a wide earthern space swelling with mounds and pitted with hole. In all the noise, in all the urgency of the moment there was felt in the air that shroud of emptiness that hangs over a battlefield.'
'When rescue and first aid parties were already engaged on this field, engaged in what one heavy rescue man could only describe as digging, digging, digging', wardens away at a post in Glasgow Terrace saw through the flared and spitting skyscape the drifting pale glint of another parachute. It was coming from the south of the river.'
As this new blast hit Sutherland Terrace:
'Over two thousand kilos of high explosive split over vehicles, men, wounded. Excavations made were filled in, men were killed and lorries blown up. A stretcher bearer remembers that 'it was just as though a huge orange flare had gone up under your throat. A hell of a bang. Then it was like a sandpapered ramrod down your throat, and your lungs puffing out like a pouter pigeon. Then dead dead silence. Then, as though some time afterwards. a slow shower of bricks everywhere.'
'The Blitz. Westminster at War' William Sansom
That night in London 450 bombers were used. In Westminster there were 148 dead. 564 injured seriously. It was called 'The Wednesday'
'Keep calm and carry' on is not just a tea towel.
Missionaries sheltering under the porch were left unscathed when the Church of Holy Apostles was hit and the parish priest Canon Hadfield clambered through the smoking debris to rescue the Blessed Sacrament, and then carry it on his bike through the blackout and continued bombing and fires of the night to Westminster Cathedral.
The Monster Tavern was also bombed out that night, a relic of the bygone more pastoral past of Pimlico - it had set up as a rival to 'Jenny's whim' - a tea garden and drinking house on the pimlico side of Ebury Bridge in the then fields between Chelsea and Westminster. Among the ponds and flower beds, clever spring devices released effigies of grotesque animals and theatrical characters to surprise patrons. The Monster tavern gained it's name by adopting similiar terrifying displays but kept going into the 20th century. In the book I have 'Blitz over Westminster' - photographs showing bombed out sites with casualty numbers and reference numbers to the reports made of bombs dropped - even the remains of the Monster Tavern just looks like a pub not the dark dreamlike place of entertainment I imagined.
With no home the Holy Apostles Church continued to hold services in another bombed site, and after the war in a prefab hut on their old site. This was then requisitioned for the Churchill Garden estate and the future of the Holy Apostles Church looked very uncertain. Canon Hadfield again cycled around at night planting 'miraculous medals' on bombed sites to demand to build a new church. I spend ages trying to find out about this character, consulting the Catholic Herald Archive, trawling through a whole history of catholic ramblers, even phoning the Holy Apostles Church for a copy of their history. The lady on the phone says they have run out, she has even given her own copy away and gives me a few numbers to try. No one rings me back.
All I find is that this Yorkshire man Canon Hadfield 'was Pimlico' and it was his determination that obtained the Cumberland/Winchester St site. He then got his architect father's Sheffield based firm to design the new church. It opened in 1957. Described by a more recent friar as a false tooth in the orderly splendour of Winchester and Cumberland Streets - 'But in our case it is a beautiful false tooth especially when viewed from Cumberland St.'
In the playground I am able to talk about War and Peace with the Russian mum that exh and I christened momdel. She is beautiful. I am certain she has been a model at some point but since our eldest children started school together she has been studying english literature. She finished her MA in the summer. She said her mother who is staying now to help with the children is horrified by the dirt on her crockery because she puts a book on the taps to read whilst washing up. I said maybe we should buy those transparent recipe book holders and read through most of the housework.
But oh, it is so good:
'Sometimes Pierre remembered what he had been told about soldiers in a shelter under fire with nothing to do, trying their best to keep busy and thus make the danger easier to bear. and Pierre pictured all men as soldiers like these, escaping from life through ambition, cards, law-making, women, little playthings, horses, politics, sport, wine, even government service. 'Everything matters, nothing matters, it's all the same. If I can only escape, one way or another!' Thought Pierre . 'And not see it, the terrible it.'
On the way back from school the children find a huge clean empty cardboard box on the street. They plead with me to be allowed to take it home, they want to build a tank. We take it in turns to carry it though it is a big as me and double the size of the youngest. Civil servants smile as with arms spread wide he manages to walk it along the pavement. Huge in our tiny flat, they play in it for days, muffled games overheard, friends coming to play disappearing into it's well armoured depths.
Another day on our way back from St James's park climbing trees my eldest son tells me that his class had to write what they would like to be when they grow up. He says his best friend wrote down artist and that he wrote he would like to be a soldier or an explorer. I wince. A friend's son who has always wanted to be a soldier is now 15. She is an artist, a brilliant single mum. I have watched at her sidelines as he escalates his once childish obsession to nearly become a career. Once I said ridiculously, hopelessly, ludicrously - I couldn't bear him to go to war. Another friend - formerly known as FB quite rightly snapped at me reminding me to think how she felt. I thought I had. But I couldn't. But my son says his friend Rami says he would like to be a pilot so that when the 'mighty war' does come he can fly his family to safety.
oh, I think, with fear. oh.
I slip into the Holy Apostles Catholic Church on a Sunday morning, parking the Boris Bike round the back of nearby St Gabriel's church. I can see on the surrounding Pimlico skyline the spires of three churches. Almost a year ago I signed up for a BB, almost a year ago I visited this church, almost a year ago I met UL after an absence of 12 years. It is a kind of anniversary. Though he is still in his very bad marriage despite declarations of separation that were made in the summer and I feel caught by the twine of their unhealthy life. After escaping an alcoholic relationship I am anxious this can only be another trap. Perhaps we are both just too damaged I think. Or am I just better at spotting unhealthy patterns? Did we have a bad relationship before? All I have remembered was our fascination with each other. But oh oh oh I feel sad.
I used to attend a mother and toddler group in the church hall of Holy Apostles with my youngest son - little girls in sparkly-heeled cinderella slippers doggedly shuffling dolls in buggies as he donned a policeman outfit and a batman mask before driving a plastic hooded car around the hall. Mothers resigned to the display of these apparently intrinsic roles. The church hall has a beautiful, nicely-planted, mediterreanean 50s style sunny courtyard and I assume the entrance of the church is there. But it isn't and I have to walk around to the next street to find the door. Up some steps, the door is open, I can hear singing, there is a service. I stand in the porch, like a phone box dense with cards - advertising religious services including counselling for those who have suffered from the abuse of priests.
The church is quite long and narrow and plain though busy. The congregation are queueing for communion. Vaulted like the interior bones of a whale the room has neutral colours that make the colours of people's sunday best vibrant.
The old Holy Apostles Church (then on Claverton Street - on the site of an old rather grand columned Wesleyen chapel) was bombed out in the war on 16th April 1941. The attack on Pimlico that night was ferocious. In nearby Sutherland Terrace the whole terrace of thirty odd houses was obliterated apart from three dwellings:
'But here, in the night, in a place ringed with fires, the devastation seemed endless, a wide earthern space swelling with mounds and pitted with hole. In all the noise, in all the urgency of the moment there was felt in the air that shroud of emptiness that hangs over a battlefield.'
'When rescue and first aid parties were already engaged on this field, engaged in what one heavy rescue man could only describe as digging, digging, digging', wardens away at a post in Glasgow Terrace saw through the flared and spitting skyscape the drifting pale glint of another parachute. It was coming from the south of the river.'
As this new blast hit Sutherland Terrace:
'Over two thousand kilos of high explosive split over vehicles, men, wounded. Excavations made were filled in, men were killed and lorries blown up. A stretcher bearer remembers that 'it was just as though a huge orange flare had gone up under your throat. A hell of a bang. Then it was like a sandpapered ramrod down your throat, and your lungs puffing out like a pouter pigeon. Then dead dead silence. Then, as though some time afterwards. a slow shower of bricks everywhere.'
'The Blitz. Westminster at War' William Sansom
That night in London 450 bombers were used. In Westminster there were 148 dead. 564 injured seriously. It was called 'The Wednesday'
'Keep calm and carry' on is not just a tea towel.
Missionaries sheltering under the porch were left unscathed when the Church of Holy Apostles was hit and the parish priest Canon Hadfield clambered through the smoking debris to rescue the Blessed Sacrament, and then carry it on his bike through the blackout and continued bombing and fires of the night to Westminster Cathedral.
The Monster Tavern was also bombed out that night, a relic of the bygone more pastoral past of Pimlico - it had set up as a rival to 'Jenny's whim' - a tea garden and drinking house on the pimlico side of Ebury Bridge in the then fields between Chelsea and Westminster. Among the ponds and flower beds, clever spring devices released effigies of grotesque animals and theatrical characters to surprise patrons. The Monster tavern gained it's name by adopting similiar terrifying displays but kept going into the 20th century. In the book I have 'Blitz over Westminster' - photographs showing bombed out sites with casualty numbers and reference numbers to the reports made of bombs dropped - even the remains of the Monster Tavern just looks like a pub not the dark dreamlike place of entertainment I imagined.
With no home the Holy Apostles Church continued to hold services in another bombed site, and after the war in a prefab hut on their old site. This was then requisitioned for the Churchill Garden estate and the future of the Holy Apostles Church looked very uncertain. Canon Hadfield again cycled around at night planting 'miraculous medals' on bombed sites to demand to build a new church. I spend ages trying to find out about this character, consulting the Catholic Herald Archive, trawling through a whole history of catholic ramblers, even phoning the Holy Apostles Church for a copy of their history. The lady on the phone says they have run out, she has even given her own copy away and gives me a few numbers to try. No one rings me back.
All I find is that this Yorkshire man Canon Hadfield 'was Pimlico' and it was his determination that obtained the Cumberland/Winchester St site. He then got his architect father's Sheffield based firm to design the new church. It opened in 1957. Described by a more recent friar as a false tooth in the orderly splendour of Winchester and Cumberland Streets - 'But in our case it is a beautiful false tooth especially when viewed from Cumberland St.'
In the playground I am able to talk about War and Peace with the Russian mum that exh and I christened momdel. She is beautiful. I am certain she has been a model at some point but since our eldest children started school together she has been studying english literature. She finished her MA in the summer. She said her mother who is staying now to help with the children is horrified by the dirt on her crockery because she puts a book on the taps to read whilst washing up. I said maybe we should buy those transparent recipe book holders and read through most of the housework.
But oh, it is so good:
'Sometimes Pierre remembered what he had been told about soldiers in a shelter under fire with nothing to do, trying their best to keep busy and thus make the danger easier to bear. and Pierre pictured all men as soldiers like these, escaping from life through ambition, cards, law-making, women, little playthings, horses, politics, sport, wine, even government service. 'Everything matters, nothing matters, it's all the same. If I can only escape, one way or another!' Thought Pierre . 'And not see it, the terrible it.'
On the way back from school the children find a huge clean empty cardboard box on the street. They plead with me to be allowed to take it home, they want to build a tank. We take it in turns to carry it though it is a big as me and double the size of the youngest. Civil servants smile as with arms spread wide he manages to walk it along the pavement. Huge in our tiny flat, they play in it for days, muffled games overheard, friends coming to play disappearing into it's well armoured depths.
Another day on our way back from St James's park climbing trees my eldest son tells me that his class had to write what they would like to be when they grow up. He says his best friend wrote down artist and that he wrote he would like to be a soldier or an explorer. I wince. A friend's son who has always wanted to be a soldier is now 15. She is an artist, a brilliant single mum. I have watched at her sidelines as he escalates his once childish obsession to nearly become a career. Once I said ridiculously, hopelessly, ludicrously - I couldn't bear him to go to war. Another friend - formerly known as FB quite rightly snapped at me reminding me to think how she felt. I thought I had. But I couldn't. But my son says his friend Rami says he would like to be a pilot so that when the 'mighty war' does come he can fly his family to safety.
oh, I think, with fear. oh.
Sunday 28 August 2011
St Anne's Soho
I wear my I heart London hoodie with some leather-look shorts I got free from work and some sparkly tights and get the bus up to Soho on a Sunday morning. I love what I am wearing. I feel jaunty and perky and somehow witty. Though I probably look ridiculous. It has been a theme since the breakdown of my marriage that I have enjoyed clothes even more whilst trying to spend as little as I can. Bright clashing colours, a rainbow selection of tights, higher and higher heels, sequins, shorts, a jumpsuit - careful purchases made on ebay and at the sales, occasional ( but not many) grit the teeth full price purchases. The confidence of my clothes is like a disguise of who I am. Or just an illustration of the mad bravery with which I believe I conduct my life, all showy and ridiculous and based on almost nothing. Though sometimes I have thought the brighter the outfit the more invisible I am. For a while, age, circumstances, isolation it felt like no one noticed me anymore and despite the mad, garish waving, I started to enjoy my secret agent special mission- to become completely invisible in bright colours and hotpants. Though I could make myself laugh with the nuttiness, could make myself laugh with a crazy combination, could gain so much pleasure from the surprise of colours together and yet no one ever seemed to bat an eyelid. My mum was horrified by an exposed zip on a red dress but it was the zip that was worrying her not the red And yet it all seems so shallow. I wondered if I looked like someone obsessed by clothes ( though I am), someone who cared only about shopping ( which I am not), as if perhaps I dressed like someone I wouldn't perhaps like. Occasionally people talk to me as if I am an idiot or a child and I realise the disguise of my clothes have done their job.
When I walk off the street into St Anne's Church Soho, I haven't really thought through what I am doing. The outside of the church is flat to the street, more like the entrance to a church hall. It is Sunday so I imagine there is a good chance of getting in and indeed a sign on the pavement says 'Church Open' so I walk down a stone passageway to where I can hear singing. The paving stones are old. I think I can just loiter by the door until the service is over or peer through and sit at the back. I can see a room at the end of the passageway with chairs and tea cups laid out and a reception area - so it is a complete surprise to be ambushed from the side by a verger with a service sheet and ushered to a chair in a carpeted room, like a large lounge with an altar piece in it. Communion is just being blessed, and I am sat at the side of the room alongside the altar but not facing it, like a naughty step for late comers. The congregation of about 11 ( which seems large in this small room) all face the altar and the vicar, blessing the wine and wafers, all peer at me in my I heart London hoodie. I feel a bit of a fool. As if I look like the worst sort of tourist. Someone who just gapes and moves on.
Then a man appears at the doorway that I have just come through, that I am sat beside and beckons me out. I have been found out I think panicking. But of what!? I wonder later. I don't have to believe in God to be here. The man, about my own age, good looking starts saying talking intently to me - indicating we should go to a room at the back of the church. 'I have just walked in off the street.' I say. 'I just wanted to have a look.' 'You're not Karen?' He says. 'No.' ( so of all the names that I might, just might be called that is not it ) He apologises and leads me back to my seat. I am peered at again, but it is not unfriendly, just attentive to detail.
Once after exh had left but was still drinking I got him to babysit while I went to an Al anon meeting. They are the meetings for families and friends of alcoholics. I wanted help with the impact of exh's alcoholism on the boys. Or I just wanted help. In a forlorn church basement a similar mismatched group of 11 all sat, disciples arched around empty chairs. I did think oh bloody hell I never wanted to be here and I remembered a friend saying someone she knew had been and that AA met down the hall and it sounded much more fun. But just like writing this I thought - face it. You are in on this. You are involved. Every time you take a step to telling the truth it gets better. These meetings are secret but I wanted to say how warmly I was welcomed and how kind and considerate they were of each other - though it became apparent they were a sort of family - they had know each other for years. Go to a bigger group they told me, we are too comfortable here. I look back into that room in my mind and see a rather disparate group of people but they had become a true family for they told and accepted each others truth and understood the extreme velcro of their attachments. I remember a very damaged seeming woman saying, yes, good, get ok for the children and another ( very like me, indeed ) stood slightly reluctantly but then talked with passion about how she had become well and how she had first come to this group when she was pregnant with her second baby and that child was now in it's late twenties. Their encouragement was really valuable to me. Though I never went back. Something happened after that and exh no longer had unsupervised access for a while so there was no babysitting anymore and by the time he did again I thought I was ok. I remembered this suddenly in this carpeted room with people queueing for communion and in my anxieties to make a good relationship now, and my fears that I am only capable of making a bad one I think should I go back again. That I need some sort of family to watch me wisely.
Out of the church I wander home. I don't have the boys for the weekend and feel aimless. On a whim I go into the National Gallery - I just think I'll do a whistlestop tour of my favourite paintings, aiming for Courbet. There are such fantastic paintings there, Velazquez 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary', Titian 'The Death of Actaeon', a beautiful new Monet with sunset light and some fascinating Norwegian landscape painter Peder Balke that I have never heard of - almost japanese in his brush strokes - whose career as a painter foundered because of his lack of success though he privately continued with these intimate and passionate landscapes perhaps daring more. I end with 'Young Ladies on the Bank of the Seine' by Courbet with their disturbing trotter limbs. I feel connected and buzzing. How often I forget if you see or engage with great things you can feel better.
This summer I have felt very down. Almost despairing. I have been working too hard and I have felt exhausted. The balance of my life has felt wrong, in need of adjustment.
Though I have been meaning to boast for a while that I am reading War and Peace. After Jonathan Franzen - who seemed to refer to it a lot - and another friend with a fabulous child heart raved about it - I thought it best be done. I never cared for Anna Karenina though I think I read it twice - but this is the most amazing writing, most fantastic tale. I have always thought I was a I 'heart' Dostoyevsky girl with his dense psychological currents of the soul but here the writing is almost transparent, a clean camera eye, swivelling to describe a whole battlefield, turning to the petty conceits of a soiree, gathering together the trifling mistakes that can become a marriage. I am still less than half the way through ( I read it in short bursts on the tube ) but oh, I am pleased I have left it until now - when I was young I would have wolfed it down and not taken time to admire the immensity and beauty of it. I think when I have finished it I will just start again. Set myself to read it every year.
When I get home and read about the church I realise I haven't understood at all. The church is much much older than I imagined - consecrated in 1686 but bombed out during the blitz. It lay between Wardour St and Dean St and there is still a proper church facade and a churchyard on the Wardour Street side opened as St Anne's gardens. Though I hadn't seen this, have never noticed it. Built in the fields of Soho - Christopher Wren or William Talman are said to be the architects - though there seems to be difficulty in assigning authorship - later repairs in 1830 caused James Savage the architect and surveyor 'to criticize Talman's incapacity on the assumption that he was the designer of the roof, contrasting it with Wren's superficially similar 'Master piece of construction' at St. James's: for 'Mr Talman at St. Anne's has missed the proper Principle of constructing a roof of this form'.
During the war the church was hit twice during savage raids - 24th September 1940 and then again on May 10th 1941 ( an intense night of bombing. 300 german bombers arriving over London on a moonlit night, 110 killed and 385 seriously injured in the raids.) That night a bomb passed right through a block of flats opposite my son's school into the earth. It exploded on the clay of the ancient foundations of the old Millbank prison bringing down 24 flats. 24 died though 20 people trapped in a shelter were rescued after an hour and a half digging. Then in February 1944 ( which I include because it is such a poignant and revealing description) 'In the shadow of St Anne's sad but beautiful ruin' there was another bomb nearby. 'A gas main was alight opposite, a mound of brown earth steamed where a small club, fortunately unfilled at that time, had been accomodated: up Wardour Street firemen trailed their hoses among dress maker's dummies; on the trees in St Anne's churchyard hung a tattering of scarecrow garments blasted from a second hand clothiers. The Prime Minster arrived and talked with rescuers and rescued. It was a cold February night: firelight, water on the streets, a woman sobbing dark in a doorway, a great kernel of activity gradually decreasing as the incident was cleared and the night wore on.' The Blitz Westminster at War. William Sansom
Afterwards, between 1941 and 1958 the church promoted a link between the church and the literary world with the St Anne's Society meeting at St Anne's house - Agatha Christie and T.S. Elliott attended meetings and the ashes of Dorothy L Sayers ( a longtime church warden ) are buried deep beneath a brick chamber under the tower.
By 1953 it was thought the church would not be re built and the remains of the east wall were demolished, the site deconsecrated and prepared for sale. In the 60s as Piccadilly became a centre for drug addicts Ken Leech a priest on the staff of St Anne's opened a temporary night shelter for the homeless in the basement of St Anne's house. Soho had become a troubled place 'The site of the Church was a car park. The Parish School in Great Windmill Street was threatened with closure. The sex industry had taken over the area and the local authority was moving tenants out of Soho'. The Soho Society ( a group formed in the early 70s to stop the demoliton and redevelopment of Soho) restored the tower in 1979. 'Let people know that life and heart and hope are in Soho', wrote John Betjeman, patron of the fund raising appeal.
By 1990 the church was rebuilt with a community centre and flats. By 1999 it was a place of community focus for the grief connected to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan.
I go back just to look at the building I had not seen, to visit the churchyard. It is early evening in Soho. I can glimpse further down Wardour street throngs of people, bright lights and rainbow flags. The churchyard is gated - almost armed against intrusion - and I realise I have walked past hundreds of times and not noticed the garden or the chuchyard. I peer through the smell of piss and the mesh of the gate and the surprise of the church facade and tower. Hazlitt I see in huge lettering on a tomb. A couple argue rather theatrically about cigarettes by the wall of the churchyard. I don't know if they are friends or lovers but I think he is gay and she is kidding herself about something.
Amen.
When I walk off the street into St Anne's Church Soho, I haven't really thought through what I am doing. The outside of the church is flat to the street, more like the entrance to a church hall. It is Sunday so I imagine there is a good chance of getting in and indeed a sign on the pavement says 'Church Open' so I walk down a stone passageway to where I can hear singing. The paving stones are old. I think I can just loiter by the door until the service is over or peer through and sit at the back. I can see a room at the end of the passageway with chairs and tea cups laid out and a reception area - so it is a complete surprise to be ambushed from the side by a verger with a service sheet and ushered to a chair in a carpeted room, like a large lounge with an altar piece in it. Communion is just being blessed, and I am sat at the side of the room alongside the altar but not facing it, like a naughty step for late comers. The congregation of about 11 ( which seems large in this small room) all face the altar and the vicar, blessing the wine and wafers, all peer at me in my I heart London hoodie. I feel a bit of a fool. As if I look like the worst sort of tourist. Someone who just gapes and moves on.
Then a man appears at the doorway that I have just come through, that I am sat beside and beckons me out. I have been found out I think panicking. But of what!? I wonder later. I don't have to believe in God to be here. The man, about my own age, good looking starts saying talking intently to me - indicating we should go to a room at the back of the church. 'I have just walked in off the street.' I say. 'I just wanted to have a look.' 'You're not Karen?' He says. 'No.' ( so of all the names that I might, just might be called that is not it ) He apologises and leads me back to my seat. I am peered at again, but it is not unfriendly, just attentive to detail.
Once after exh had left but was still drinking I got him to babysit while I went to an Al anon meeting. They are the meetings for families and friends of alcoholics. I wanted help with the impact of exh's alcoholism on the boys. Or I just wanted help. In a forlorn church basement a similar mismatched group of 11 all sat, disciples arched around empty chairs. I did think oh bloody hell I never wanted to be here and I remembered a friend saying someone she knew had been and that AA met down the hall and it sounded much more fun. But just like writing this I thought - face it. You are in on this. You are involved. Every time you take a step to telling the truth it gets better. These meetings are secret but I wanted to say how warmly I was welcomed and how kind and considerate they were of each other - though it became apparent they were a sort of family - they had know each other for years. Go to a bigger group they told me, we are too comfortable here. I look back into that room in my mind and see a rather disparate group of people but they had become a true family for they told and accepted each others truth and understood the extreme velcro of their attachments. I remember a very damaged seeming woman saying, yes, good, get ok for the children and another ( very like me, indeed ) stood slightly reluctantly but then talked with passion about how she had become well and how she had first come to this group when she was pregnant with her second baby and that child was now in it's late twenties. Their encouragement was really valuable to me. Though I never went back. Something happened after that and exh no longer had unsupervised access for a while so there was no babysitting anymore and by the time he did again I thought I was ok. I remembered this suddenly in this carpeted room with people queueing for communion and in my anxieties to make a good relationship now, and my fears that I am only capable of making a bad one I think should I go back again. That I need some sort of family to watch me wisely.
Out of the church I wander home. I don't have the boys for the weekend and feel aimless. On a whim I go into the National Gallery - I just think I'll do a whistlestop tour of my favourite paintings, aiming for Courbet. There are such fantastic paintings there, Velazquez 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary', Titian 'The Death of Actaeon', a beautiful new Monet with sunset light and some fascinating Norwegian landscape painter Peder Balke that I have never heard of - almost japanese in his brush strokes - whose career as a painter foundered because of his lack of success though he privately continued with these intimate and passionate landscapes perhaps daring more. I end with 'Young Ladies on the Bank of the Seine' by Courbet with their disturbing trotter limbs. I feel connected and buzzing. How often I forget if you see or engage with great things you can feel better.
This summer I have felt very down. Almost despairing. I have been working too hard and I have felt exhausted. The balance of my life has felt wrong, in need of adjustment.
Though I have been meaning to boast for a while that I am reading War and Peace. After Jonathan Franzen - who seemed to refer to it a lot - and another friend with a fabulous child heart raved about it - I thought it best be done. I never cared for Anna Karenina though I think I read it twice - but this is the most amazing writing, most fantastic tale. I have always thought I was a I 'heart' Dostoyevsky girl with his dense psychological currents of the soul but here the writing is almost transparent, a clean camera eye, swivelling to describe a whole battlefield, turning to the petty conceits of a soiree, gathering together the trifling mistakes that can become a marriage. I am still less than half the way through ( I read it in short bursts on the tube ) but oh, I am pleased I have left it until now - when I was young I would have wolfed it down and not taken time to admire the immensity and beauty of it. I think when I have finished it I will just start again. Set myself to read it every year.
When I get home and read about the church I realise I haven't understood at all. The church is much much older than I imagined - consecrated in 1686 but bombed out during the blitz. It lay between Wardour St and Dean St and there is still a proper church facade and a churchyard on the Wardour Street side opened as St Anne's gardens. Though I hadn't seen this, have never noticed it. Built in the fields of Soho - Christopher Wren or William Talman are said to be the architects - though there seems to be difficulty in assigning authorship - later repairs in 1830 caused James Savage the architect and surveyor 'to criticize Talman's incapacity on the assumption that he was the designer of the roof, contrasting it with Wren's superficially similar 'Master piece of construction' at St. James's: for 'Mr Talman at St. Anne's has missed the proper Principle of constructing a roof of this form'.
During the war the church was hit twice during savage raids - 24th September 1940 and then again on May 10th 1941 ( an intense night of bombing. 300 german bombers arriving over London on a moonlit night, 110 killed and 385 seriously injured in the raids.) That night a bomb passed right through a block of flats opposite my son's school into the earth. It exploded on the clay of the ancient foundations of the old Millbank prison bringing down 24 flats. 24 died though 20 people trapped in a shelter were rescued after an hour and a half digging. Then in February 1944 ( which I include because it is such a poignant and revealing description) 'In the shadow of St Anne's sad but beautiful ruin' there was another bomb nearby. 'A gas main was alight opposite, a mound of brown earth steamed where a small club, fortunately unfilled at that time, had been accomodated: up Wardour Street firemen trailed their hoses among dress maker's dummies; on the trees in St Anne's churchyard hung a tattering of scarecrow garments blasted from a second hand clothiers. The Prime Minster arrived and talked with rescuers and rescued. It was a cold February night: firelight, water on the streets, a woman sobbing dark in a doorway, a great kernel of activity gradually decreasing as the incident was cleared and the night wore on.' The Blitz Westminster at War. William Sansom
Afterwards, between 1941 and 1958 the church promoted a link between the church and the literary world with the St Anne's Society meeting at St Anne's house - Agatha Christie and T.S. Elliott attended meetings and the ashes of Dorothy L Sayers ( a longtime church warden ) are buried deep beneath a brick chamber under the tower.
By 1953 it was thought the church would not be re built and the remains of the east wall were demolished, the site deconsecrated and prepared for sale. In the 60s as Piccadilly became a centre for drug addicts Ken Leech a priest on the staff of St Anne's opened a temporary night shelter for the homeless in the basement of St Anne's house. Soho had become a troubled place 'The site of the Church was a car park. The Parish School in Great Windmill Street was threatened with closure. The sex industry had taken over the area and the local authority was moving tenants out of Soho'. The Soho Society ( a group formed in the early 70s to stop the demoliton and redevelopment of Soho) restored the tower in 1979. 'Let people know that life and heart and hope are in Soho', wrote John Betjeman, patron of the fund raising appeal.
By 1990 the church was rebuilt with a community centre and flats. By 1999 it was a place of community focus for the grief connected to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan.
I go back just to look at the building I had not seen, to visit the churchyard. It is early evening in Soho. I can glimpse further down Wardour street throngs of people, bright lights and rainbow flags. The churchyard is gated - almost armed against intrusion - and I realise I have walked past hundreds of times and not noticed the garden or the chuchyard. I peer through the smell of piss and the mesh of the gate and the surprise of the church facade and tower. Hazlitt I see in huge lettering on a tomb. A couple argue rather theatrically about cigarettes by the wall of the churchyard. I don't know if they are friends or lovers but I think he is gay and she is kidding herself about something.
Amen.
Thursday 7 July 2011
St Paul's Covent Garden
The day before it was announced the News of The World would close I had to leave work - the story gathering momentum on the overhead tv in the office - and rush rush rush to the Wigmore Hall in a lunch break I rarely take to see my son in a school choir sing a song composed at school with musicians from Wigmore Hall about being evacuated from London during World War II.
It was beautiful and moving to be there in the middle of my working day - to see bright faces and young voices on a stage singing about war. Though there were choirs of old people singing too - watching the children with stoic kindness and patience to the unfeasibly cheerful interpretations of terrifying events some of them had witnessed.
Back under the telly I am slightly breathless from squeezing an hour lunch break into the hour and a half rush it took and the NOTW story gathers momentum. Each news bulletin reports advertisers refusing to advertise with a newspaper that hacked the phones of young girls who had been murdered and soldiers that had been killed. Remember I work for a rival Sunday tabloid magazine with a tiny budget. I sit at the end of the newspapers news desk underneath the tv attached high up to the ceiling and if it fell it would land on my head. Often I hear stories as they come in before anyone else notices, though I rarely crick my neck to turn to see it because I am usually too busy. Though sometimes I have watched while journalists start to notice or gather around the tv up to 10 minutes later, heads tilted, mouths slightly slack or sometimes chewing.
The day it was announced the NOTW would close I notice the ticker tape underneath the picture of the tv screen saying the last edition of the News of the World would be this coming Sunday. My eyebrows are Gromit-like with shock. Then furrowed as the men gather opposite the screen shouting 'Fuck fuck fuck.' Over and over. I fiddle with my phone daring myself to take a picture of them but I don't. Someone is shouting 'Who is she fucking?' as the report of Rebecca Brooks breaking the news to the workforce of over 200 comes in. It really looks like she had been saved while others thrown overboard. Indeed even to this day it seems if she had gone they might might have saved something. A couple of journalists who had worked briefly for the NOTW caw caw with glee. It was never a nice place to work. Though no one was surprised by the hacking accusations. I think we had always known enough to know it was probably true. How did they get the stories otherwise?
I start writing this post just after the NOTW closure. It's going to be a good one I think. I am an eye witness I think. But my computer starts behaving badly and I can't seem to save onto the blog, and I haven't been to a church and then like a tidal wave the knock on effect reaches me. The small cheap but densely worked on magazine doubles overnight. We work flat out until 10pm. The staff of about 6 people. We congratulate ourselves as the bumper issue goes to press. Then a day later a completely new bumper glossy fat magazine is demanded and we worked until 2am as the mice scamper in the office. I cycle back that night on a Boris Bike but it is a beautiful straight line out from the City of London to Westminter passing church after church and Christopher Wren's St Paul's is like a ghostly white whale passed in a dark ocean and I think oh it is beautiful - and despite my tiredness - briefly feel somehow I am in the right place.
The following lunchtime we are told we have done the wrong sort of magazine and another is produced in 2 hours. Later when the Murdochs are challenged by custard and questions we work flat out to produce this new glossy celebrity magazine week after week still with a staff of 6. The question to be asked is why did you not wonder why your newspaper was so outrageously better than the competitors? I don't think it was asked or answered.
Standing manning a stall at the school bazaar to throw wet sponges at teachers poking their heads through a painted board I get texts saying the office has been raided by the police searching the computer of an ex NOTW journo who sits near my desk at the weekend. It seems ludicrous though I wish I hadn't missed 'the action'.
Timing has become a blur but in the middle of all this my Indonesian friend leaves her husband appearing at my door sobbing with her son and they sleep in my bed as I drink wine guiltily at my small computer desk trying to get this written. Though they have gone by the time we wake up the next morning.
By the time school breaks up 2 issues of the new magazine have been completed and I have been working until 9 or 10 everynight, doing extra days too. Exh has looked after the boys as I come home late but preparations and cleaning for the holidays are behind. We go camping in a friend's ( huge ) garden in Norfolk and I organise fashion shoots by mobile phone while my sons make amazing shelters by the side of a dank smelling stream. I am near exhaustion. But I have become a strangely welcome person at social events. A talking head, our man on the ground - my slightly strange and reviled world, like insects under a stone, suddenly revealed, examined and interesting.
Then it is the annual camp to Dorset and I still haven't been to a church. I am missing the moment I think ruefully as I pack sleeping bags and folding kitchen cupboards, consulting my camping checklist, ticking corkscrew, washing up liquid, matches, first aid kit. I am organised in a disorganised way and when I write this I am not sure which way round the sentence should go. By the coast in Dorset the children are allowed idyllic freedom to play in hay bales, explore, fish in rockpools, walk dogs and we sit at campfires every night. Text reports start coming in that London is burning. It seem overdramatic and unlikely. But suddenly everyone is texting the same thing and everyone is scared. My friend in Notting Hills says that a crowd is rampaging down her street with baseball bats, burning a motorbike and breaking windows, and that a black girl she talked to said - 'We all just hate Cameron.' The riot police collect in a church at the end of her street. From the distance of the warmth of a campfire in a field and with no images I imagine it to be organised and political, those spidery violent bloc kids banging their staves down wealthy streets, an organised mob realising numbers are on their side. I know if I was young I would find it exciting but I would want to know what I was aiming for - to tip the world so dangerously. But when I come back and look at news reports it just looks really nasty, a hooded mob flexing it's muscles and the desire for desirable things itself burning capitalism down. I like Pauline Pearce who stood in a rioting crowd in Hackney 'We're not gathering together to fight for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker...if we are fighting for a cause let's fight for a fucking cause. You lot piss me off.' I don't know. Some people do have a lot more than others. Though a lot of us have the same sort of things. It is opportunity that is missing. And this was an opportunity for some. And just excitement too. I think that property has made the haves and the have no hope of having more extreme though really it would be possible for everyone to easily have enough. People with nothing are working really hard and people with lots are too. Both eye other's lives angrily.
The boys give me a 'I heart LONDON' hoodie for my birthday. I have always wanted one. But the day I get it is ironic.
Back in London I am given a couple of hours to buy my son's birthday present. London is full of exhausted coppers from all across the country. I have a quick drink with UL and walk through the beautiful and sweet smelling rose garden into St Paul's Church in Covent Garden. In a big airy space there are singers practising for a concert. Pure voices singing Agnus Dei 'The Lamb of God.' Known as the Actor's Church there are tablets and inscriptions to many famous names. Just glancing around I see engraved plaques to Noel Coward and Vivian Leigh and then sit at a pew not thinking anything very much apart from it is nice just to sit and not rush, not wash up in a field, not be cross with children, not be cross, just not do anything. The church was designed by Inigo Jones as part of the development on the site of an old walled garden belonging to Westminster Abbey commisioned by Francis Russell 4th Earl of Bedford to build a square for the gentry. Inigo based his designs on what he had seen on his Italian travels and the vast square became a template for town planning. The first victim of the plague was buried here - Margaret Ponteous 1665 and J. M. W. Turner baptised here too.
I discover that Thomas Manton, the first minister was a puritan who had to leave under the Great Ejection of 1662 when 2.000 members of the clergy refused to sign the Act of Uniformity oath agreeing to use only the Book of Common Prayer. Only repreived in 1872 by the Act of Uniformity Amendment the efforts to outlaw non conformists left many clergy out of service and out of society. I want to cover this and read this. But I just don't have time.
http://www.archive.org/details/nonconformistsm00calagoog
Samuel Pepys notes the first 'Italian puppet play' seen under the portico of St Paul's on 9 May 1662 - the first recorded performance of 'Punch and Judy' commorated by the annual MayFayre service in May.
When I walk out of the church to the front of the portico there is a shouting escapologist in chains surrounded by a large cheering crowd.
My Indonesian friend shyly borrows the boy's disco light. Her husband wants to go clubbing with her like they used to do before they were married. It would mean she had to take the scarf from her hair and she is frightened. She thinks the disco light is a start. That evening I try to imagine their small flat with the coloured lights revolving, then hesitate from intruding on their lives. Though I do by writing about them.
Amen.
It was beautiful and moving to be there in the middle of my working day - to see bright faces and young voices on a stage singing about war. Though there were choirs of old people singing too - watching the children with stoic kindness and patience to the unfeasibly cheerful interpretations of terrifying events some of them had witnessed.
Back under the telly I am slightly breathless from squeezing an hour lunch break into the hour and a half rush it took and the NOTW story gathers momentum. Each news bulletin reports advertisers refusing to advertise with a newspaper that hacked the phones of young girls who had been murdered and soldiers that had been killed. Remember I work for a rival Sunday tabloid magazine with a tiny budget. I sit at the end of the newspapers news desk underneath the tv attached high up to the ceiling and if it fell it would land on my head. Often I hear stories as they come in before anyone else notices, though I rarely crick my neck to turn to see it because I am usually too busy. Though sometimes I have watched while journalists start to notice or gather around the tv up to 10 minutes later, heads tilted, mouths slightly slack or sometimes chewing.
The day it was announced the NOTW would close I notice the ticker tape underneath the picture of the tv screen saying the last edition of the News of the World would be this coming Sunday. My eyebrows are Gromit-like with shock. Then furrowed as the men gather opposite the screen shouting 'Fuck fuck fuck.' Over and over. I fiddle with my phone daring myself to take a picture of them but I don't. Someone is shouting 'Who is she fucking?' as the report of Rebecca Brooks breaking the news to the workforce of over 200 comes in. It really looks like she had been saved while others thrown overboard. Indeed even to this day it seems if she had gone they might might have saved something. A couple of journalists who had worked briefly for the NOTW caw caw with glee. It was never a nice place to work. Though no one was surprised by the hacking accusations. I think we had always known enough to know it was probably true. How did they get the stories otherwise?
I start writing this post just after the NOTW closure. It's going to be a good one I think. I am an eye witness I think. But my computer starts behaving badly and I can't seem to save onto the blog, and I haven't been to a church and then like a tidal wave the knock on effect reaches me. The small cheap but densely worked on magazine doubles overnight. We work flat out until 10pm. The staff of about 6 people. We congratulate ourselves as the bumper issue goes to press. Then a day later a completely new bumper glossy fat magazine is demanded and we worked until 2am as the mice scamper in the office. I cycle back that night on a Boris Bike but it is a beautiful straight line out from the City of London to Westminter passing church after church and Christopher Wren's St Paul's is like a ghostly white whale passed in a dark ocean and I think oh it is beautiful - and despite my tiredness - briefly feel somehow I am in the right place.
The following lunchtime we are told we have done the wrong sort of magazine and another is produced in 2 hours. Later when the Murdochs are challenged by custard and questions we work flat out to produce this new glossy celebrity magazine week after week still with a staff of 6. The question to be asked is why did you not wonder why your newspaper was so outrageously better than the competitors? I don't think it was asked or answered.
Standing manning a stall at the school bazaar to throw wet sponges at teachers poking their heads through a painted board I get texts saying the office has been raided by the police searching the computer of an ex NOTW journo who sits near my desk at the weekend. It seems ludicrous though I wish I hadn't missed 'the action'.
Timing has become a blur but in the middle of all this my Indonesian friend leaves her husband appearing at my door sobbing with her son and they sleep in my bed as I drink wine guiltily at my small computer desk trying to get this written. Though they have gone by the time we wake up the next morning.
By the time school breaks up 2 issues of the new magazine have been completed and I have been working until 9 or 10 everynight, doing extra days too. Exh has looked after the boys as I come home late but preparations and cleaning for the holidays are behind. We go camping in a friend's ( huge ) garden in Norfolk and I organise fashion shoots by mobile phone while my sons make amazing shelters by the side of a dank smelling stream. I am near exhaustion. But I have become a strangely welcome person at social events. A talking head, our man on the ground - my slightly strange and reviled world, like insects under a stone, suddenly revealed, examined and interesting.
Then it is the annual camp to Dorset and I still haven't been to a church. I am missing the moment I think ruefully as I pack sleeping bags and folding kitchen cupboards, consulting my camping checklist, ticking corkscrew, washing up liquid, matches, first aid kit. I am organised in a disorganised way and when I write this I am not sure which way round the sentence should go. By the coast in Dorset the children are allowed idyllic freedom to play in hay bales, explore, fish in rockpools, walk dogs and we sit at campfires every night. Text reports start coming in that London is burning. It seem overdramatic and unlikely. But suddenly everyone is texting the same thing and everyone is scared. My friend in Notting Hills says that a crowd is rampaging down her street with baseball bats, burning a motorbike and breaking windows, and that a black girl she talked to said - 'We all just hate Cameron.' The riot police collect in a church at the end of her street. From the distance of the warmth of a campfire in a field and with no images I imagine it to be organised and political, those spidery violent bloc kids banging their staves down wealthy streets, an organised mob realising numbers are on their side. I know if I was young I would find it exciting but I would want to know what I was aiming for - to tip the world so dangerously. But when I come back and look at news reports it just looks really nasty, a hooded mob flexing it's muscles and the desire for desirable things itself burning capitalism down. I like Pauline Pearce who stood in a rioting crowd in Hackney 'We're not gathering together to fight for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker...if we are fighting for a cause let's fight for a fucking cause. You lot piss me off.' I don't know. Some people do have a lot more than others. Though a lot of us have the same sort of things. It is opportunity that is missing. And this was an opportunity for some. And just excitement too. I think that property has made the haves and the have no hope of having more extreme though really it would be possible for everyone to easily have enough. People with nothing are working really hard and people with lots are too. Both eye other's lives angrily.
The boys give me a 'I heart LONDON' hoodie for my birthday. I have always wanted one. But the day I get it is ironic.
Back in London I am given a couple of hours to buy my son's birthday present. London is full of exhausted coppers from all across the country. I have a quick drink with UL and walk through the beautiful and sweet smelling rose garden into St Paul's Church in Covent Garden. In a big airy space there are singers practising for a concert. Pure voices singing Agnus Dei 'The Lamb of God.' Known as the Actor's Church there are tablets and inscriptions to many famous names. Just glancing around I see engraved plaques to Noel Coward and Vivian Leigh and then sit at a pew not thinking anything very much apart from it is nice just to sit and not rush, not wash up in a field, not be cross with children, not be cross, just not do anything. The church was designed by Inigo Jones as part of the development on the site of an old walled garden belonging to Westminster Abbey commisioned by Francis Russell 4th Earl of Bedford to build a square for the gentry. Inigo based his designs on what he had seen on his Italian travels and the vast square became a template for town planning. The first victim of the plague was buried here - Margaret Ponteous 1665 and J. M. W. Turner baptised here too.
I discover that Thomas Manton, the first minister was a puritan who had to leave under the Great Ejection of 1662 when 2.000 members of the clergy refused to sign the Act of Uniformity oath agreeing to use only the Book of Common Prayer. Only repreived in 1872 by the Act of Uniformity Amendment the efforts to outlaw non conformists left many clergy out of service and out of society. I want to cover this and read this. But I just don't have time.
http://www.archive.org/details/nonconformistsm00calagoog
Samuel Pepys notes the first 'Italian puppet play' seen under the portico of St Paul's on 9 May 1662 - the first recorded performance of 'Punch and Judy' commorated by the annual MayFayre service in May.
When I walk out of the church to the front of the portico there is a shouting escapologist in chains surrounded by a large cheering crowd.
My Indonesian friend shyly borrows the boy's disco light. Her husband wants to go clubbing with her like they used to do before they were married. It would mean she had to take the scarf from her hair and she is frightened. She thinks the disco light is a start. That evening I try to imagine their small flat with the coloured lights revolving, then hesitate from intruding on their lives. Though I do by writing about them.
Amen.
Sunday 19 June 2011
Queen's Chapel, St James's
I go back to Rymans and buy purple stickers then stick them on the map to mark the churches I have been to. Dark dots radiating out from Westminster Abbey, clustering near the centre then broadening out into Pimlico, Chelsea, Mayfair and two stray dots south of the river. The only yellow dot ( marking churches I haven't been to on this street map of London) surrounded by purple ones still is the Queen's Chapel at St James's. I have tried a couple of times to get in, but it is only open on Sundays for services and is only open certain months of the year.
I try again when the boys are away with exh and his mum, though I haven't finished writing Corpus Christi. I think oh good I am going to speed the whole project up, go back to visiting a church a week, mainly write about the churches IT IS GOING TO BE GREAT I THINK.
The night before UL and I drink too much, argue, cry and then walk through London in the middle of the night, holding hands. It feels way too dramatic for the sort of people we are really. When we were together we never spoke much of love or ourselves - we just were. We did things side by side and we allowed each other enormous personal freedom. By the end I wanted to talk about love, I wanted a plan. I probably sat like a slightly intense puppy waiting for that ball - but it never came. Now and completely unexpectedly it has been dropped at my feet.
I wake that sunday morning way too early feeling delicate and slightly desperate. The flat is quiet. This would be my life without the children I think and it feels unbearable. All that myself. All that not them. For they are so completely and utterly fascinating to me. I am not sure if at the core of me is depression or joy sometimes but having limitations to being me - all that thinking about myself - the worry and energy and slight paranoia and over bearing generosity - seems more manageable spread out and focussed on two clever bright and funny boys. I wonder how I will suffer when they've had enough, grown out of it completely - and it is a title for something - all that me. Though - and possibly because so much of myself has been provided - they are nonchalent and rebellious of it already. But adapting at each age from the tiny dry and nervous papery nappies of new borns and the beat of their sparrow hearts under soft baby gros to the seemingly endless school uniform trousers growing too short and feet too big for trainers and vivid moments when I turn to watch them, sometimes just briefly, with absolute wonder and pride and laughter. I hope when the time comes it will just be a new stage. Somedays I shout at them. ' You NEED to grow up to be smart, clever, funny, kind young men.' YOU CAN DO IT!' And oh oh oh I hope they do.
I walk through St James's Park on a sunday morning and it is packed. There is a royal wedding knock on to tourism. The crowds are thronging. Enthusiastic about where they are. Though all the flags are gone and the flesh of the pink tarmac where that beautiful and jaunty navy Aston Martin drove is slightly naked without them.
The Queen's Chapel is tucked at the side of the little street alongside St James's Palace on the opposite side. A white house flat to the street - nicely proportioned, a simple gable roof, large windows like wide-opened eyes and a high forehead. There is a verger standing outside the chapel and when I nod to her and ask if it is ok to come in, she takes me in and seats me. It is hushed and wealthy, though less secret than the dark surprise of the packed Chapel Royal which is it's sister church. This Chapel is open in the summer the other - the Chapel Royal in the winter. Here light pours in from huge windows of blurry old leaded glass, and the ceiling though strangely only half gilded is oppulent. There is rich gold plates at the altar and a painting. I spend ages looking at this picture trying to work out what it is before realising I should put my glasses on. When I do I see a mother and baby with another child and I can't remember what I thought it was before I could see it. It had just seemed a mystery. The organ is playing majestically. A woman on her own, of roughly the same age and reassuringly not grand is seated next to me. I think wouldn't it be funny if we were doing the same thing. Then I think what if she were a 'mystery worshipper'. You would probably need to be a dedicated reader to know who 'Mystery worshipper' is? But there is a site
http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/specials/london_05/index.html
that reviews church services and early on, when I first went very fearfully into churches, avoiding services, barely getting into them at all I seemed to be in their wake. Early on my friend even said if your life was a film - mystery worshipper would be the romantic interest. Though at that point I didn't know I needed one.
At the back I can see the choir and clergy gather in the sunshine of the pavement before the procession down the aisle. I recognise some of them from before, the little mice boys, the man with the black folded and pleated sleeves but it is less surprising, less Alice in Wonderland. The establishment of establishment is more open here because it is daylight and also because we face forwards towards the altar not each other watching the procession. Maybe too the trappings of establishment have had a resurgence, even since I wrote the Chapel Royal - standing alongside a ladder at the Royal Wedding watching golden coaches and soldiers I was moved by the continuity of history and the acceptance of it even if I didn't really believe what I was being moved by or tacitly accepting.
Next to this other woman - strangely more like me than I anticipate in this church - and someone who also declines the communion offered when the congregation rises and queues at the altar. I sense a relief from both of us - I am pleased not to be the only outsider and she must be pleased I don't need to clamber past her to get to the altar. Or both.
As communion is taken the choir sing Tallis. Thomas Tallis was part of the Chapel Royal ( living within St James's Palace) from 1543 and composed and performed for Henry V111, Edward V1, Mary 1 and Elizabeth 1 (1558 until he died in 1585). As composer and organist under the royal wing he managed to avoid the religious controversies of the times though he remained an unreformed roman catholic. It was a difficult and suspicious position to be. Early in his career he was part of the monastery at Holy Cross in Waltham until the abbey was dissovled in 1540. There he acquired a volume of treatises by Leonel Power at this dissolution and preserved it - one of the treatise prohibited consecutive unisons, fifths, and octaves. Later Queen Elizabeth granted him and Byrd 21 years sole rights to compose polyphonic music from 1575 and a patent to print and publish music too, which was one of the first arrangements of that type in the country. I struggle to understand this. The restrictions sound very tight. UL is a muscian and when I ask him he sends me a thoughtful essay explaining the central ideas of of sacred proportion, of chiming simple notes perfectly.
In the service with the beautiful music and the choir's voices building one of those boys - not much older than my son and with reassuringly scruffy hair and a thoughtful but not goody goody expression, opens his mouth, and this sound of gold and heaven and height soars out - his eyes slightly baffled by the voice he posseses.
I think the personal restriction of having a family has made me happier, more fulfilled, more open to people, more keen on joy.
At a time when Catholic worship was illegal in England The Queen's Chapel was built as a roman catholic place of worship for the Spanish Infanta to aid negotiations in a potential marriage with Charles 1 that fell through. Though it was then used for the wife he married - the french catholic Henrietta Maria. The beautiful building was completed in 1629 causing resentment and suspicion, indeed it's plain exterior was meant to deflect this outcry. But in troubled times it contributed to the conflict that eventually erupted between Charles and Parliament into the English Civil War and Charles 1's eventual execution infront of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall.
Both the Queen's Chapel and the Banqueting house were designed by Inigo Jones - a welsh catholic cloth makers son who travelled in Italy studying architecture with 'Collector' Earl of Arundel. He brought a version of the Italian architect Palladio's work home and translated it into early Palladianism here in England. Based on the proportion and symmetry of formal classical temples of the Ancient Greeks and Romans Inigo Jones fascination even led him to our own ancient structures - he was the first to measure Stonehenge. I don't know why - I find the scene, those old stones on a windswept plain being studied by a man in the thrall of classical mathematics beautiful and mysterious.
Walking back from dropping the boys off at school one morning I hear and then see a horse drawn cart move across the traffic lights crossroads of Horseferry Road and Marsham Street, I have been deep in thought about the boys, about writing this, about all the things that make my life. I look up and laugh as if there is a tear in modern life and some old bit of history is coming towards me, two beautiful horses pulling this open carriage with two men in top hats perched high. On our street, on the thin dark street that Charles Dickens called 'Devil's Acre' the street where my sons have said that they are scared by something - it feels dark to them - a building oppposite has been taken over by a pack of youth. I wonder if they are squattting. They sit and smoke at the huge windows and watch people pass below though my brother who is a surveyer came to dinner one night ( roast chicken, gratin dauphinoise and salad) and texted me as he left to say that he forgot to tell me his company surveyed a brothel down here. I think how funny, the ground is the same, this dark street has not changed.
Amen
I try again when the boys are away with exh and his mum, though I haven't finished writing Corpus Christi. I think oh good I am going to speed the whole project up, go back to visiting a church a week, mainly write about the churches IT IS GOING TO BE GREAT I THINK.
The night before UL and I drink too much, argue, cry and then walk through London in the middle of the night, holding hands. It feels way too dramatic for the sort of people we are really. When we were together we never spoke much of love or ourselves - we just were. We did things side by side and we allowed each other enormous personal freedom. By the end I wanted to talk about love, I wanted a plan. I probably sat like a slightly intense puppy waiting for that ball - but it never came. Now and completely unexpectedly it has been dropped at my feet.
I wake that sunday morning way too early feeling delicate and slightly desperate. The flat is quiet. This would be my life without the children I think and it feels unbearable. All that myself. All that not them. For they are so completely and utterly fascinating to me. I am not sure if at the core of me is depression or joy sometimes but having limitations to being me - all that thinking about myself - the worry and energy and slight paranoia and over bearing generosity - seems more manageable spread out and focussed on two clever bright and funny boys. I wonder how I will suffer when they've had enough, grown out of it completely - and it is a title for something - all that me. Though - and possibly because so much of myself has been provided - they are nonchalent and rebellious of it already. But adapting at each age from the tiny dry and nervous papery nappies of new borns and the beat of their sparrow hearts under soft baby gros to the seemingly endless school uniform trousers growing too short and feet too big for trainers and vivid moments when I turn to watch them, sometimes just briefly, with absolute wonder and pride and laughter. I hope when the time comes it will just be a new stage. Somedays I shout at them. ' You NEED to grow up to be smart, clever, funny, kind young men.' YOU CAN DO IT!' And oh oh oh I hope they do.
I walk through St James's Park on a sunday morning and it is packed. There is a royal wedding knock on to tourism. The crowds are thronging. Enthusiastic about where they are. Though all the flags are gone and the flesh of the pink tarmac where that beautiful and jaunty navy Aston Martin drove is slightly naked without them.
The Queen's Chapel is tucked at the side of the little street alongside St James's Palace on the opposite side. A white house flat to the street - nicely proportioned, a simple gable roof, large windows like wide-opened eyes and a high forehead. There is a verger standing outside the chapel and when I nod to her and ask if it is ok to come in, she takes me in and seats me. It is hushed and wealthy, though less secret than the dark surprise of the packed Chapel Royal which is it's sister church. This Chapel is open in the summer the other - the Chapel Royal in the winter. Here light pours in from huge windows of blurry old leaded glass, and the ceiling though strangely only half gilded is oppulent. There is rich gold plates at the altar and a painting. I spend ages looking at this picture trying to work out what it is before realising I should put my glasses on. When I do I see a mother and baby with another child and I can't remember what I thought it was before I could see it. It had just seemed a mystery. The organ is playing majestically. A woman on her own, of roughly the same age and reassuringly not grand is seated next to me. I think wouldn't it be funny if we were doing the same thing. Then I think what if she were a 'mystery worshipper'. You would probably need to be a dedicated reader to know who 'Mystery worshipper' is? But there is a site
http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/specials/london_05/index.html
that reviews church services and early on, when I first went very fearfully into churches, avoiding services, barely getting into them at all I seemed to be in their wake. Early on my friend even said if your life was a film - mystery worshipper would be the romantic interest. Though at that point I didn't know I needed one.
At the back I can see the choir and clergy gather in the sunshine of the pavement before the procession down the aisle. I recognise some of them from before, the little mice boys, the man with the black folded and pleated sleeves but it is less surprising, less Alice in Wonderland. The establishment of establishment is more open here because it is daylight and also because we face forwards towards the altar not each other watching the procession. Maybe too the trappings of establishment have had a resurgence, even since I wrote the Chapel Royal - standing alongside a ladder at the Royal Wedding watching golden coaches and soldiers I was moved by the continuity of history and the acceptance of it even if I didn't really believe what I was being moved by or tacitly accepting.
Next to this other woman - strangely more like me than I anticipate in this church - and someone who also declines the communion offered when the congregation rises and queues at the altar. I sense a relief from both of us - I am pleased not to be the only outsider and she must be pleased I don't need to clamber past her to get to the altar. Or both.
As communion is taken the choir sing Tallis. Thomas Tallis was part of the Chapel Royal ( living within St James's Palace) from 1543 and composed and performed for Henry V111, Edward V1, Mary 1 and Elizabeth 1 (1558 until he died in 1585). As composer and organist under the royal wing he managed to avoid the religious controversies of the times though he remained an unreformed roman catholic. It was a difficult and suspicious position to be. Early in his career he was part of the monastery at Holy Cross in Waltham until the abbey was dissovled in 1540. There he acquired a volume of treatises by Leonel Power at this dissolution and preserved it - one of the treatise prohibited consecutive unisons, fifths, and octaves. Later Queen Elizabeth granted him and Byrd 21 years sole rights to compose polyphonic music from 1575 and a patent to print and publish music too, which was one of the first arrangements of that type in the country. I struggle to understand this. The restrictions sound very tight. UL is a muscian and when I ask him he sends me a thoughtful essay explaining the central ideas of of sacred proportion, of chiming simple notes perfectly.
In the service with the beautiful music and the choir's voices building one of those boys - not much older than my son and with reassuringly scruffy hair and a thoughtful but not goody goody expression, opens his mouth, and this sound of gold and heaven and height soars out - his eyes slightly baffled by the voice he posseses.
I think the personal restriction of having a family has made me happier, more fulfilled, more open to people, more keen on joy.
At a time when Catholic worship was illegal in England The Queen's Chapel was built as a roman catholic place of worship for the Spanish Infanta to aid negotiations in a potential marriage with Charles 1 that fell through. Though it was then used for the wife he married - the french catholic Henrietta Maria. The beautiful building was completed in 1629 causing resentment and suspicion, indeed it's plain exterior was meant to deflect this outcry. But in troubled times it contributed to the conflict that eventually erupted between Charles and Parliament into the English Civil War and Charles 1's eventual execution infront of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall.
Both the Queen's Chapel and the Banqueting house were designed by Inigo Jones - a welsh catholic cloth makers son who travelled in Italy studying architecture with 'Collector' Earl of Arundel. He brought a version of the Italian architect Palladio's work home and translated it into early Palladianism here in England. Based on the proportion and symmetry of formal classical temples of the Ancient Greeks and Romans Inigo Jones fascination even led him to our own ancient structures - he was the first to measure Stonehenge. I don't know why - I find the scene, those old stones on a windswept plain being studied by a man in the thrall of classical mathematics beautiful and mysterious.
Walking back from dropping the boys off at school one morning I hear and then see a horse drawn cart move across the traffic lights crossroads of Horseferry Road and Marsham Street, I have been deep in thought about the boys, about writing this, about all the things that make my life. I look up and laugh as if there is a tear in modern life and some old bit of history is coming towards me, two beautiful horses pulling this open carriage with two men in top hats perched high. On our street, on the thin dark street that Charles Dickens called 'Devil's Acre' the street where my sons have said that they are scared by something - it feels dark to them - a building oppposite has been taken over by a pack of youth. I wonder if they are squattting. They sit and smoke at the huge windows and watch people pass below though my brother who is a surveyer came to dinner one night ( roast chicken, gratin dauphinoise and salad) and texted me as he left to say that he forgot to tell me his company surveyed a brothel down here. I think how funny, the ground is the same, this dark street has not changed.
Amen
Saturday 11 June 2011
Corpus Christi Covent Garden
I buy a street map of London and a pack of fluorescent yellow dot stickers. The boys and I lay the map out on the kitchen table and 'spot' the cross symbols of churches dotted across London. I don't ask them to help but they want to. I am trying to sort out a plan. Where to go to next, how far to go. We take it in turns to laugh uproariously at the amount of stickers used, the amount of churches found, the amount of yellow circles covering the map. There are over a 150 churches that I haven't visited in a central London area stretching from St John's Wood in the North and Kennington in the South then Earl's Court in the West to Whitchapel in the East. Even later when all of us are doing other things, the map is still laid out and we take it in turns
to chuckle as we pass by the table at mum's crazy plan, at the exhausting look of it, at the density of churches in this city. These children have barely ever been to a church, do not really understand what I am up to, but are almost giddy with the madness of the challenge laid out. 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Maddox Ford is one of my favourite novels - the surface tension of the story as tight as a stretched balloon, the bleakness written with an ominous lilting charm, the structure held by spokes of taut engineering - and in it a description of a man lining up a polo shot, an affair, the sidelong squint of concentration and determination - the 'it might just be done' glance. I feel like that now. I am washing up, tidying up, but when I see the map, I stop briefly, suck in my breath and think that 'it might' a pause, 'just be done'.
Since the Royal Wedding I have been suffering a kind of 'low' about my own project. I sort of wished I had stopped then - it would have been roughly a year and would have been a decent ending - a bit of a fanfare finale. I would have been able to hold my head up high that I had the discipline to carry it out and that I had learnt so much by doing it. Though as soon as I left Rymans I realised I should have bought another colour sticker for the churches I have visited and mark them too. But even without I am impressed by the shape made in the midst of the constellation of bright dots for with very little research or plan, just a nosing around, I seem to have caught almost all the local churches in this spiralling net. There is just one Pimlico church left out, left to do, right out towards the river.
I regret now I haven't taken pictures of each church, I regret sometimes too that I haven't just written dry descriptions of each building not muddled myself within their stories. I have become sick of my own slightly melodic moaning - for my rage with exh seems quietly and unexpectedly to have passed. Initially I shocked myself by my own repeated and public telling of the events within our family for what started a quiet painful whisper when I didn't know anyone would read it became a strident and public banging of pots and pans as I knew they were. I hoped and imagined it could help someone else in the same situation - someone struggling with a drunken partner, someone stuck in something they knew they had to escape from - and I still hope this is true. But I woke up one morning recently and thought I am not angry any more, I am repeating myself, it has to stop, the story has to shift, move on, become a better one. I apologise to exh for telling it, but I also wonder if it has been the shortest and cheapest way for me to recover from what happened. I needed to tell it. I needed to come back from the isolation of survival to some sort of acceptance.
At my friend's birthday party standing in a beautiful room in towering high heels and a glass of white wine in my hand with many beautiful women wearing party dresses and handsome urbane men chatting I suddenly realise with humour and horror that some of them know about the fat that hung over my knickers but I am not certain which ones. It makes it hard for me to look people in the eye, worrying that they can only pity me. A failed marriage, a single mum, breadline existence AND the detailed description of that hanging fat. Like those puzzles I had as a child where you searched for faces hidden within the picture there is a shifting searching of their expressions to try and spot who knows. Mainly I feel proud, really proud of what I have achieved by our family's recovery but interested too by my attempt to describe what Diane Arbus called 'What's left after what one isn't is taken is what one is'.
Now I feel I am tipping into a new madness, I want to go to ALL these churches - I want to discover their stories, I am fascinated by the history they tell. Even sometimes passing churches at the edges of surburban London travelling somewhere in the car I think - hmm interesting, how long will it take me to get there? I should get on with my second novel, should try and make more money, Even fiddle with the first one again. But something about being obedient to the task set is attractive. I would like to visit all of them.
Though when I write that I feel exhausted.
In my mapping London book there is a large and beautiful watercolour drawing showing a bird's eye view of the City of London circa 1810 - called the Rhinebeck Panorama - it shows opulent boats crowded on the Thames alongside the Tower of London and infront of the many many spired City. Behind this dense cluster of towers and spires the dome of St Pauls can be seen, even Westminster Abbey in the distance, then London petering out to fields and gentle hills. Ever since I've seen this picture I have thought I would love to match the spires and towers of this old City of London to the churches that still exist today. So maybe that is my plan. The extent of my ambition. I work in the City and look around some days going up to Waterstone's to buy a new book to read to the boys, or a quick look in New Look and there are churches tucked in corners everywhere, squeezed amidst the glass and steel and concrete of the modern buildings. But though it is completely obvious it takes a while for the simple truth to dawn on me the steeples and turrets are hidden now in the height of office blocks, nuzzled alongside banks, an occasional scrap of view appearing overhead. Here in this panaroma the churches that reach up to the sky from low lying buildings are the awe of the skyline. I wonder about the history of London's horizon- of the first spire to The Shard. Man's ambition and attempts at glory. Initially a symbol of the heavenly aspirations of pious medieval men the word is derived from the Old English word spir, meaning a sprout, shoot, or stalk of grass. Though surely a phallic possession of the sky, a boast of power too.
http://www.artfund.org/artwork/7179/the-rhinebeck-panorama-of-london
I discover that the Rhinebeck Panorama is at the Museum of London. That the four sheets were found in the barrel of a pistol in 1941 in America and sold to the museum in 1998. UL and I go to see it. We don't have much time. We never have much time. And sometimes we squander the time we have with misunderstandings and the savagery of old hurts. At the Museum of London we are almost shy in the public light of day but race alongside through the exhibits looking for the picture - ignoring the prehistoric remains, the romans ruins, the medieval section- we miss a whole floor of history, much of the history before there were churches at all until I spot the Panorama up high. Initially I am disappointed. It isn't as sharp as the reproduction I have in the book or as big as somehow I hoped and it is hard to see, with a lot of reflected light. We look slowly, there are tiny soldiers training, a fire has burst out in a South London building and with a 'Where's Wally' instruction the label says can you find a man flying a kite - though we don't. Then I discover magnifying sheets at the side of the picture and with these angled carefully towards the picture it becomes a minature world, almost 3D, the tone and detailed shadows of the architecture like stage sets, the churches like the weft of the fabric of the city. It is fantastic and the pair of us are animated and exuberant by our curiousity and sense of discovery.
I am onto something I think and I feel excited to be on route to the churches of the City to have a map of what is possible, what is there.
I take a Boris Bike up Whitehall, past Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden. It is hot and beautiful. I want to visit St Paul's Covent Garden and also find out about the opening times for the Savoy chapel I know! A church with a hotel! I wouldn't have known about it without my map. But I have placed yellow spots on both. I nose the bike around the cobbled streets of Covent Garden glimpsing St Paul's church initially set back from the road, through a gate with a garden infront of it. I have never ever noticed it before, As I cycle round I realise it's other entrance is on the palazzo of Covent Garden behind a cheering crowd for a clowning acrobat. I go to park the bike, passing a church I didn't know was there, hadn't spotted on my map.
There is a heavy bodied helicopter hovering stationary just a bit further on but almost over head. I like seeing helicopters just above I like the sensation of changed perspective, of being in aquarium, of layers of air above, of something heavy being held still. The docking bay is full. I weave the bike further up, even nearer to the helicopter, almost to Waterloo Bridge, the helicopter is straight overhead now, giving the air a density and the distance of the sky a scale, and again the docking bay is full. I start out again then realise that the Strand has been completely taped off, that there are fire engines and ambulances everywhere and police at every junction, some still taping the roads off. It looks like a newspaper picture of a bomb attack. But there is little urgency to the movements of the emergency services. I check a map but can't see where else to leave the bike, I have to wait until someone ( a Spanish women fiddling with her credit card) takes one. A young american man, just behind me pulls up on a bike and says, I hate this city and we laugh. l go to explore around the Savoy Chapel to keep an eye on whatever is happening here. Then worry I will be caught up in an explosion because I am nosy. The Savoy Chapel, tucked behind the Savoy in a garden should be open but isn't. I cross the Strand again to walk up to St Paul's and the road is now taped off back to Trafalgar Square, policemen loitering on traffic islands. I can see light grey smoke above a high building in the centre of Aldwych that looks like a building site and as I watch the dove grey talc gives way to billows of black smoke. But I think it is just a fire not a terrorist attack though I am unable to catch a policeman's eye to ask.
At St Pauls there are alcoholics gathered in the courtyard and a sign up saying the church is closed for a memorial service. Oh I think I will have to go to the church, I just glimpsed, the one I know I haven't put a yellow dot on. How strange to have a map and a plan, even options and be left still just finding my way about, to find something unknown, unsupposed. The road has been closed for roadworks with those high metal grilles protecting the pavement and as I walk past a drill shakes the soles of my feet and my teeth and the helicopter is still grinding away overhead. But the church is open, I have to step down to a stone floored vestibule and then open a door and into the quiet grey air of a catholic church. It doesn't feel like being in London, it feels as if I am in Spain or Italy. An american woman accosts me, 'Is there about to be a mass here?' 'I don't know.' I say. Slightly alarmed that there might be.
Later I discover that the architect Pownall dropped the church three feet below street level to mollify critics about the height of the church. Built in 1873 nestled between the then Market and the Strand. Maiden Lane was originally a path running along the southern edge of the ‘Covent Garden’ (i.e. Convent Garden) belonging to the monks of Westminster Abbey though later Louis Napoleon, Benjamin Disraeli and Voltaire all lived here, the artist J.M.W. Turner was born here, Edward V11 and Lily Langtry dined here, and the celebrated actor of his day, William Terriss was murdered here by a crazed understudy in 1897. Before all this but discovered only fairly recently in excavations from 1985 and 2005 ( for King Alfred's London had been a shifting legend and a mystery ) it seems King Alfred had built a settlement called Lundenwic, a port and town stretching from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. Later it looks likely he moved back into the more fortified abandoned roman town of Londinium ( The City), Lundenwic just left, ploughed over reverting to fields.
On wooden pews there are a few bent heads in prayer. I sit. There is a rustling at the altar, bright lights being switched on, an attractive asian woman fiddling with flowers and a bible. It starts to look likely that yes, a service is about to start. Outside the helicopter and the roadworks are loud then muffled to a drone as the door of the church is closed. then wide to the noise as it is opened again, then closed like hands over ears.
Catholic worship was made legal in 1791 and here in Covent Garden there had been a huge presence of open and closet Catholics including such names as St Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, the Jesuit missioner St Robert Southwell, Mary Ward, foundress of the ISBVM’s, St Claude la Colombiere (who introduced devotion to the Sacred Heart to England), Charles I’s architect Inigo Jones, the poet John Dryden and the composer of ‘Rule Britannia’, Thomas Arne ( Rule Britannia coincidentally written for a musical called Alfred about Alfred the Great ) as well as vast numbers of poor Catholics including large Irish colonies swelled by the Potato Famine - many of them working in the market of Covent Garden and living mainly in Drury Lane or the slums of St Giles’, Holborn and Saffron Hill. Initially the London Oratory was opened for Catholic worship in a former dance hall in King William St Charing Cross in 1849- but moved out to the 'village' of Brompton in 1854. By 1872 the land for Corpus Christi was leased though within a few years slum clearance drove out many of the poorer families, reducing parishioner numbers. Later international guests from the nearby grand hotels brought new visitors and congregations.
The church is narrow, as if crammed into an awkward space, thin arches reaching high and spindly to the light of top windows. There is a gentle shabby quietness and slightly yellowing icing sugar walls. Behind me the asian lady has gone into a dark cupboard and I can see the dirty string of a mop and cleaning materials on shelves. At shrines there are candles flickering infront of camp lurid statues. I think about Graham Greene. I feel really really peaceful here. For a minute I think I will stay for the mass but then dither. Stand up. Move across the church, sit again infront of a smaller chapel, the statues skin like pink plastic though plaster, the asian lady eyeing my jumpiness uneasily.
I leave. Back on a Boris Bike, weaving around the Strand still ineffectually taped off, back to the Mall. The flags are still draped triumphantly but I realise there is a cherry picker crane taking the huge heavy draped union jacks down. The Royal Family's grand bunting. Their street party over. Two men working together stowing the flags carefully in a van marked Enterprise - Maintaining the Infrastructure of England. As if this infrastructure was the very fabric of englishness created. I imagine the same van turning up around the country checking on scones and jam and clotted cream and roast beefs and victoria sponges and putting deckchairs out in the rain.
Amen.
to chuckle as we pass by the table at mum's crazy plan, at the exhausting look of it, at the density of churches in this city. These children have barely ever been to a church, do not really understand what I am up to, but are almost giddy with the madness of the challenge laid out. 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Maddox Ford is one of my favourite novels - the surface tension of the story as tight as a stretched balloon, the bleakness written with an ominous lilting charm, the structure held by spokes of taut engineering - and in it a description of a man lining up a polo shot, an affair, the sidelong squint of concentration and determination - the 'it might just be done' glance. I feel like that now. I am washing up, tidying up, but when I see the map, I stop briefly, suck in my breath and think that 'it might' a pause, 'just be done'.
Since the Royal Wedding I have been suffering a kind of 'low' about my own project. I sort of wished I had stopped then - it would have been roughly a year and would have been a decent ending - a bit of a fanfare finale. I would have been able to hold my head up high that I had the discipline to carry it out and that I had learnt so much by doing it. Though as soon as I left Rymans I realised I should have bought another colour sticker for the churches I have visited and mark them too. But even without I am impressed by the shape made in the midst of the constellation of bright dots for with very little research or plan, just a nosing around, I seem to have caught almost all the local churches in this spiralling net. There is just one Pimlico church left out, left to do, right out towards the river.
I regret now I haven't taken pictures of each church, I regret sometimes too that I haven't just written dry descriptions of each building not muddled myself within their stories. I have become sick of my own slightly melodic moaning - for my rage with exh seems quietly and unexpectedly to have passed. Initially I shocked myself by my own repeated and public telling of the events within our family for what started a quiet painful whisper when I didn't know anyone would read it became a strident and public banging of pots and pans as I knew they were. I hoped and imagined it could help someone else in the same situation - someone struggling with a drunken partner, someone stuck in something they knew they had to escape from - and I still hope this is true. But I woke up one morning recently and thought I am not angry any more, I am repeating myself, it has to stop, the story has to shift, move on, become a better one. I apologise to exh for telling it, but I also wonder if it has been the shortest and cheapest way for me to recover from what happened. I needed to tell it. I needed to come back from the isolation of survival to some sort of acceptance.
At my friend's birthday party standing in a beautiful room in towering high heels and a glass of white wine in my hand with many beautiful women wearing party dresses and handsome urbane men chatting I suddenly realise with humour and horror that some of them know about the fat that hung over my knickers but I am not certain which ones. It makes it hard for me to look people in the eye, worrying that they can only pity me. A failed marriage, a single mum, breadline existence AND the detailed description of that hanging fat. Like those puzzles I had as a child where you searched for faces hidden within the picture there is a shifting searching of their expressions to try and spot who knows. Mainly I feel proud, really proud of what I have achieved by our family's recovery but interested too by my attempt to describe what Diane Arbus called 'What's left after what one isn't is taken is what one is'.
Now I feel I am tipping into a new madness, I want to go to ALL these churches - I want to discover their stories, I am fascinated by the history they tell. Even sometimes passing churches at the edges of surburban London travelling somewhere in the car I think - hmm interesting, how long will it take me to get there? I should get on with my second novel, should try and make more money, Even fiddle with the first one again. But something about being obedient to the task set is attractive. I would like to visit all of them.
Though when I write that I feel exhausted.
In my mapping London book there is a large and beautiful watercolour drawing showing a bird's eye view of the City of London circa 1810 - called the Rhinebeck Panorama - it shows opulent boats crowded on the Thames alongside the Tower of London and infront of the many many spired City. Behind this dense cluster of towers and spires the dome of St Pauls can be seen, even Westminster Abbey in the distance, then London petering out to fields and gentle hills. Ever since I've seen this picture I have thought I would love to match the spires and towers of this old City of London to the churches that still exist today. So maybe that is my plan. The extent of my ambition. I work in the City and look around some days going up to Waterstone's to buy a new book to read to the boys, or a quick look in New Look and there are churches tucked in corners everywhere, squeezed amidst the glass and steel and concrete of the modern buildings. But though it is completely obvious it takes a while for the simple truth to dawn on me the steeples and turrets are hidden now in the height of office blocks, nuzzled alongside banks, an occasional scrap of view appearing overhead. Here in this panaroma the churches that reach up to the sky from low lying buildings are the awe of the skyline. I wonder about the history of London's horizon- of the first spire to The Shard. Man's ambition and attempts at glory. Initially a symbol of the heavenly aspirations of pious medieval men the word is derived from the Old English word spir, meaning a sprout, shoot, or stalk of grass. Though surely a phallic possession of the sky, a boast of power too.
http://www.artfund.org/artwork/7179/the-rhinebeck-panorama-of-london
I discover that the Rhinebeck Panorama is at the Museum of London. That the four sheets were found in the barrel of a pistol in 1941 in America and sold to the museum in 1998. UL and I go to see it. We don't have much time. We never have much time. And sometimes we squander the time we have with misunderstandings and the savagery of old hurts. At the Museum of London we are almost shy in the public light of day but race alongside through the exhibits looking for the picture - ignoring the prehistoric remains, the romans ruins, the medieval section- we miss a whole floor of history, much of the history before there were churches at all until I spot the Panorama up high. Initially I am disappointed. It isn't as sharp as the reproduction I have in the book or as big as somehow I hoped and it is hard to see, with a lot of reflected light. We look slowly, there are tiny soldiers training, a fire has burst out in a South London building and with a 'Where's Wally' instruction the label says can you find a man flying a kite - though we don't. Then I discover magnifying sheets at the side of the picture and with these angled carefully towards the picture it becomes a minature world, almost 3D, the tone and detailed shadows of the architecture like stage sets, the churches like the weft of the fabric of the city. It is fantastic and the pair of us are animated and exuberant by our curiousity and sense of discovery.
I am onto something I think and I feel excited to be on route to the churches of the City to have a map of what is possible, what is there.
I take a Boris Bike up Whitehall, past Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden. It is hot and beautiful. I want to visit St Paul's Covent Garden and also find out about the opening times for the Savoy chapel I know! A church with a hotel! I wouldn't have known about it without my map. But I have placed yellow spots on both. I nose the bike around the cobbled streets of Covent Garden glimpsing St Paul's church initially set back from the road, through a gate with a garden infront of it. I have never ever noticed it before, As I cycle round I realise it's other entrance is on the palazzo of Covent Garden behind a cheering crowd for a clowning acrobat. I go to park the bike, passing a church I didn't know was there, hadn't spotted on my map.
There is a heavy bodied helicopter hovering stationary just a bit further on but almost over head. I like seeing helicopters just above I like the sensation of changed perspective, of being in aquarium, of layers of air above, of something heavy being held still. The docking bay is full. I weave the bike further up, even nearer to the helicopter, almost to Waterloo Bridge, the helicopter is straight overhead now, giving the air a density and the distance of the sky a scale, and again the docking bay is full. I start out again then realise that the Strand has been completely taped off, that there are fire engines and ambulances everywhere and police at every junction, some still taping the roads off. It looks like a newspaper picture of a bomb attack. But there is little urgency to the movements of the emergency services. I check a map but can't see where else to leave the bike, I have to wait until someone ( a Spanish women fiddling with her credit card) takes one. A young american man, just behind me pulls up on a bike and says, I hate this city and we laugh. l go to explore around the Savoy Chapel to keep an eye on whatever is happening here. Then worry I will be caught up in an explosion because I am nosy. The Savoy Chapel, tucked behind the Savoy in a garden should be open but isn't. I cross the Strand again to walk up to St Paul's and the road is now taped off back to Trafalgar Square, policemen loitering on traffic islands. I can see light grey smoke above a high building in the centre of Aldwych that looks like a building site and as I watch the dove grey talc gives way to billows of black smoke. But I think it is just a fire not a terrorist attack though I am unable to catch a policeman's eye to ask.
At St Pauls there are alcoholics gathered in the courtyard and a sign up saying the church is closed for a memorial service. Oh I think I will have to go to the church, I just glimpsed, the one I know I haven't put a yellow dot on. How strange to have a map and a plan, even options and be left still just finding my way about, to find something unknown, unsupposed. The road has been closed for roadworks with those high metal grilles protecting the pavement and as I walk past a drill shakes the soles of my feet and my teeth and the helicopter is still grinding away overhead. But the church is open, I have to step down to a stone floored vestibule and then open a door and into the quiet grey air of a catholic church. It doesn't feel like being in London, it feels as if I am in Spain or Italy. An american woman accosts me, 'Is there about to be a mass here?' 'I don't know.' I say. Slightly alarmed that there might be.
Later I discover that the architect Pownall dropped the church three feet below street level to mollify critics about the height of the church. Built in 1873 nestled between the then Market and the Strand. Maiden Lane was originally a path running along the southern edge of the ‘Covent Garden’ (i.e. Convent Garden) belonging to the monks of Westminster Abbey though later Louis Napoleon, Benjamin Disraeli and Voltaire all lived here, the artist J.M.W. Turner was born here, Edward V11 and Lily Langtry dined here, and the celebrated actor of his day, William Terriss was murdered here by a crazed understudy in 1897. Before all this but discovered only fairly recently in excavations from 1985 and 2005 ( for King Alfred's London had been a shifting legend and a mystery ) it seems King Alfred had built a settlement called Lundenwic, a port and town stretching from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. Later it looks likely he moved back into the more fortified abandoned roman town of Londinium ( The City), Lundenwic just left, ploughed over reverting to fields.
On wooden pews there are a few bent heads in prayer. I sit. There is a rustling at the altar, bright lights being switched on, an attractive asian woman fiddling with flowers and a bible. It starts to look likely that yes, a service is about to start. Outside the helicopter and the roadworks are loud then muffled to a drone as the door of the church is closed. then wide to the noise as it is opened again, then closed like hands over ears.
Catholic worship was made legal in 1791 and here in Covent Garden there had been a huge presence of open and closet Catholics including such names as St Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, the Jesuit missioner St Robert Southwell, Mary Ward, foundress of the ISBVM’s, St Claude la Colombiere (who introduced devotion to the Sacred Heart to England), Charles I’s architect Inigo Jones, the poet John Dryden and the composer of ‘Rule Britannia’, Thomas Arne ( Rule Britannia coincidentally written for a musical called Alfred about Alfred the Great ) as well as vast numbers of poor Catholics including large Irish colonies swelled by the Potato Famine - many of them working in the market of Covent Garden and living mainly in Drury Lane or the slums of St Giles’, Holborn and Saffron Hill. Initially the London Oratory was opened for Catholic worship in a former dance hall in King William St Charing Cross in 1849- but moved out to the 'village' of Brompton in 1854. By 1872 the land for Corpus Christi was leased though within a few years slum clearance drove out many of the poorer families, reducing parishioner numbers. Later international guests from the nearby grand hotels brought new visitors and congregations.
The church is narrow, as if crammed into an awkward space, thin arches reaching high and spindly to the light of top windows. There is a gentle shabby quietness and slightly yellowing icing sugar walls. Behind me the asian lady has gone into a dark cupboard and I can see the dirty string of a mop and cleaning materials on shelves. At shrines there are candles flickering infront of camp lurid statues. I think about Graham Greene. I feel really really peaceful here. For a minute I think I will stay for the mass but then dither. Stand up. Move across the church, sit again infront of a smaller chapel, the statues skin like pink plastic though plaster, the asian lady eyeing my jumpiness uneasily.
I leave. Back on a Boris Bike, weaving around the Strand still ineffectually taped off, back to the Mall. The flags are still draped triumphantly but I realise there is a cherry picker crane taking the huge heavy draped union jacks down. The Royal Family's grand bunting. Their street party over. Two men working together stowing the flags carefully in a van marked Enterprise - Maintaining the Infrastructure of England. As if this infrastructure was the very fabric of englishness created. I imagine the same van turning up around the country checking on scones and jam and clotted cream and roast beefs and victoria sponges and putting deckchairs out in the rain.
Amen.
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