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

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.