Friday 5 July 2013

St Mary Le Strand

On the morning of Margaret Thatcher's funeral I cycle over Lambeth Bridge as three swans fly low overhead, their long necks following the river, heavy wings beating.  Backing up along the Embankment the re-directed traffic coming over Lambeth Bridge is at a standstill.   Policemen guard closed roads with traffic cone roadblocks like flimsy hurdle tracks.  I can see flags flying half mast at the MI5 building and the Houses of Parliament  though Lambeth Palace has opted strategically for no flag rather than lower one.

I had heard the news of her death on the radio on the Monday morning as I washed up and just made a little gasp.   We had returned the day before from a bank-breaking ski ing holiday.  If you have kept with me year in year out - my brother has a flat in France and I throw all the holiday money I have at teaching the boys to ski BUT this year exhausted by work I didn't check the passports until three days before and my eldest son's was only valid for the day we travelled out. It was the Easter weekend.  Panic, extraordinary stress and then determination set in.  A long story but I took my eldest son on a tightly-timed road trip - on a coach to Newport to get the passport, to Cardiff to get a flight to Paris and on the metro to the opposite side of Paris where we took a night train.  I have always had a romance about night trains but with a ten year old boy in a carriage with four strange slightly hobo men below us it was hard to get him to see it/ perhaps even believe it.  Though tucked in -  ridiculously high - across the small gap we smiled - we had done it.  We woke in our couchettes in the early morning as the train rumbled through the beauty of the mountains.  Then drank surprisingly and ridiculously good coffee and hot chocolate from a machine on the train and exh and my youngest met us on the rural platform and we drove for 15 minutes to join our friends.   We ski ed all day - so happy to be there.  Tipping on the edge of  tiredness and sanity and sense - glad to have our odd and separated family to make it work.

We have returned relaxed though it may be a thin veneer for the money I have spent was brave but foolhardy and I am trying to get all the washing done before going back to work the next day.   Perhaps I am holding my breath making all the calculations as the news comes in.   In our flat all sounds can be heard but are not always noticed.  I don't think the boys registered the sharp intake of breath.  And I am not sure how to describe to them my historic and instinctive dislike of Margaret Thatcher.   She must look as if from an old world to them/ ding dong pussy bow down the well.  I grew up with her, didn't  trust her and don't think I like the England she made though I notice these days I turn instantly and vehemently right wing in any post office establishment where the hopelessness and surliness of the strongly unionised staff and the 'do not attack the staff' signs seem the last and lousy bastion of the 70s so I wonder as others gather to say that they did - if I support what she did more than I think.  I also admire the clean, well painted England with cared for homes though increasingly I think there is a fetishism to the Fired Earth and Farrow and Ball middle class lifestyle fantasies and wonder how high the fence keeping out the have nots has become.  After all I peer over the wall on an extreme ladder between both worlds - I go on ski ing holidays and work for a national newspaper and then go home to find shit smeared down the stairs of our block and a homeless man stood motionless and vulnerable in the corner of the bin shed as if a naughty school boy had been told to turn to the wall.

On the day of Margaret Thatcher's election as conservative leader I was just a little girl but I can remember saying to my Mum while I was having a bath -  isn't it good to have a woman leader?  My Mum was unexpectedly and unusually vehement and angry  'She has done nothing for women and will do nothing for women.'  though her fierce off guard reaction was more surprising than anything -  something honest in the repressively dutiful face of motherhood.

Looking at pictures of MT published in newspapers - there is a certain charm to the textures of the age - the soft silks, hairspray halo, nubbed knits and masculine have-a-go photo opportunities of her certainty.  I read too that she made a Windsor Castle birthday cake for her children long before she became leader of anything and wonder if at her core was a strange narcissistic childhood mirror of the Queen.  I then spend quite a bit of time reading about their strained relationship - the queen hissing at a BBQ at Balmoral that MT should sit down -   though also described is a strangely touching scene when the Queen realises Mrs T's dementia and breaks with royal protocol to take her arm and gently walk and chat with her.   Though I wonder if this comes from the kindness of being the winner of a previously strong and despised adversary.   Also later when I am having a bath I think my Mum is from the same generation as both of them - just a few years younger - and there is some mirror to her sense of duty and hard work and perhaps there was an envy of these women's power.

Carol Thatcher recalls 'My mother was prone to calling me by her secretaries names and working through each of them until she got to Carol.'  though she also said that Margaret Thatcher had told her 'I think my place in history is assured.'  I imagine the emphasis on 'my'.  Perhaps that is why I resent the stacked up traffic and dipped flags that this vain boast is being honoured.  I do not feel represented at all by this state fanfare though when I get to work and voice my badly thought out resentment I am surprised and horrified that a girl I work with has gone to stand and watch the coffin go by.  Though I shouldn't be surprised - not by where I work  - not by the nice, bright, young woman in sloaney gear - for I imagine she must find the semblance of certainty comforting.



When I visit St Mary le Strand it must only be a day later and the metal fences still line the route.  I park the bike on Kingsway  I have tried so many times to get here but still I go all the way around Aldwych, - I don't even cut through by India House just doggedly walking round the whole half moon traffic island though it is the first hot lunchtime and I am dressed warmly in tights and jumpers and layers as  for so long it has been cold.   I am convinced the church sits at the mouth of the Strand and Waterloo Bridge but it doesn't, it forms it's own thin traffic island in heavy traffic further back like a rock in a stream, the cars moving around.   The thin pavement is hooped by railings with a tumble of pretty garden and a magnolia like a fecund wedding bouquet in a high spray over the entry to the church. Blooming and dropping there is a snow globe of blossom skiddy on the thin steep steps.  I enter the church to find a much much smaller space than I imagined.  This is a church that I thought ( possibly because it  has  taken me so long to get into ) that I think will be really important- a link between Westminster and the City - but in it - I think - oh it doesn't seem that important just an incidental place -  a waiting room - like an ornate bedsit room for God.

Inside, gazing at the ceiling is a couple with a very chatty guide at their side.   I am trying to hear what he has to say but not get embroiled.   Walking around the church I notice a strangely cluttered corner near the altar - glasses case and books all just tumbled on a chair - then a mirror by the hymn books.  I imagine the guide to be strangely vain before meeting his captive audience then realize it is to view the  intricately painted and modelled ceiling carved with white and gold flowers.

This church was one of the 50 New Churches of 1711 known as the Queen Anne Churches built mainly for the fast expanding suburbs of London that included the Hawksmoor chuches in East London and the spread of the disciple named churches to the South.   St Mary Le Strand ( to replace a church pulled down much earlier -  more later ) was designed by the secretly Catholic architect James Gibb who was trained under the Papal architect Carlos Fontana in Italy.   His building is seen to reflect the Italian and Catholic Baroque influences apparently combining elements from the  Palazzo Branconio dell'Aquila designed by Raphael, Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence the church of SS Luca e Martina in Rome and the Cortona's St Maria della Place in Rome.   Though complaints of traffic noise from the Strand even in the eighteenth century meant Gibbs designed the walls of the main church with no low windows.

It is a place where high handed decisions knocked things down and took them away - the early church ( first mentioned in 1222 called St Mary and the Innocents ) was pulled down by the unpopular Edward Seymour 1st Duke of Somerset in 1549 so that he could use the stone to build Somerset House.  Later a maypole that existed on this site for hundreds of years was taken down by the Puritans in 1644 when all Maypoles were banned  though erected again in 1661 after the restoration.

'The Maypole, to which we have already referred as formerly standing on the site of the church of St. Mary-le-Strand, was called by the Puritans one of the "last remnants of vile heathenism, round which people in holiday times used to dance, quite ignorant of its original intent and meaning." Each May morning, as our readers are doubtless aware, it was customary to deck these poles with wreaths of flowers, round which the people danced pretty nearly the whole day. A severe blow was given to these merry-makings by the Puritans, and in 1644 a Parliamentary ordinance swept them all away, including this very famous one, which, according to old Stow, stood 100 feet high. On the Restoration, however, a new and loftier one was set up amid much ceremony and rejoicing. From a tract printed at the time, entitled "The Citie's Loyaltie Displayed," we learn that this Maypole was 134 feet high, and was erected upon the cost of the parishioners there adjacent, and the gracious consent of his sacred Majesty, with the illustrious Prince the Duke of York. "This tree was a most choice and remarkable piece; 'twas made below bridge and brought in two parts up to Scotland Yard, near the king's palace, and from thence it was conveyed, April 14, 1661, to the Strand, to be erected. It was brought with a streamer flourishing before it, drums beating all the way, and other sorts of musick. It was supposed to be so long that landsmen could not possibly raise it. Prince James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral of England, commanded twelve seamen off aboard ship to come and officiate the business; whereupon they came, and brought their cables, pullies, and other tackling, and six great anchors. After these were brought three crowns, borne by three men bareheaded, and a streamer displaying all the way before them, drums beating and other musick playing, numerous multitudes of people thronging the streets, with great shouts and acclamations, all day long. The Maypole then being joined together and looped about with bands of iron, the crown and cane, with the king's arms richly gilded, was placed on the head of it; a large hoop, like a balcony, was about the middle of it. Then, amid sounds of trumpets and drums, and loud cheerings, and the shouts of the people, the Maypole, 'far more glorious, bigger, and higher than ever any one that stood before it,' was raised upright, which highly did please the Merrie Monarch and the illustrious Prince, Duke of York; and the little children did much rejoice, and ancient people did clap their hands, saying golden days began to appear." A party of morris-dancers now came forward, "finely decked with purple scarfs, in their half-shirts, with a tabor and a pipe, the ancient music, and danced round about the Maypole." 
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45135

By 1713 it had rotted so much it was removed to make way for the new church  and another set up opposite what is now Somerset House.  This one didn't last long - being bought by Sir Isaac Newton and sent to Wanstead Park where it supported Huygens 37 metre long telescope.

In 1802 three people were killed when a man standing on the roof of the church during a procession of royalty to St Paul's on the proclamation of peace with France lent on part of the parapet and it crashed down on the crowd below.   In 1809 Charles Dicken's parents were married here.


And here in beautiful copperplate writing are the details of an enquiry into the conduct of the St Mary Le Strand temporary watchman to a robbery in 1822
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/history-from-police-archives/Met6Kt/MetHistory/mhDocsPpStMary.html

History seems like so many things a matter of scale - nearly 200 years ago can be concertinaed by some small human detail - 'and the window of his Kitchen having no fastening'  I feel my ears whistling with the speed of the journey just as when my eldest son says as I kiss him goodnight  'Mum do you know there is a hurricane on the planet Jupiter that is big enough to contain three planet earths?'    'IT IS JUST TOO BIG TO COMPREHEND.'   I want to shout though of course I don't, my lips just press the warmth of boy skin and I say 'Get to sleep now.  I love you.'

This post seems to finish on a coach trip back from Wales through the pouring rain - when it started after a completely different coach trip to Wales to get the passsport.  A whole half term has elapsed - and I am now on my own on the way back from a camping trip leaving the boys with exh and friends still camping in a forest.   I have had to come back early to get back to work though a little sneaky part of me feels lucky to be warm and guilty to have left them in the cold and wet.   My spirits are truly low for I am going back to many difficult things - a bitter battle with work about how much I should be paid for the job they want to give me.  What should have been a celebration has turned unpleasant and savagely unfair - they say I am lucky to get a job but want to pay me much less than anyone else is getting.   I also received a letter the night before going camping saying I am under investigation by the tax credit office because they think exh lives here - I don't even get very much money from them - but for some reason this has floored me - I have worked so hard to keep everyone going and reasonably stable and they have suspended my payments and my mobile phone bill and the water rates have bounced.

I didn't think I would find room to describe the shock of Newport city centre on a Sunday night when I arrived with my young son in April - the boarded up, closed down town where a shop we went into for a sandwich just had a few chocolate bars spread out on the shelves.   But coming back this time on the dawdle of a National Express coach, through exhausted and deprived Welsh towns, the houses somehow familiar from tv murder investigations and last seen missing children I feel I need to report it.   It makes the have not where I live look really comfortable but perhaps it is just the cheek by jowl of opportunity - by living in a vibrant city anything seems possible.

Then in a tesco supermarket in Swansea I watch a large white seagull with the raw and bloody headless carcass of a pigeon.  Sharp beaked and impassively bright-eyed it repeatedly bangs the squirm of pigeon guts from the grey splayed feathered body against the wet tarmac.

I see too in a place called Cross Hands a man stood still at the thin edge of a demolished church - his boots at the tip of a black hole left at the side of the building  It is such a strange sight - like a french realist painting  - a Millet or Courbet - and I am not even certain I have described it well enough for anyone to understand.I text exh and another friend to say that I am going through a dark journey of the soul.

Finally moving the computer screen to dust the little alcove where I sit and write I notice the dense cloud of purple spots that mark the churches I have visited on the map behind - how many of them there are for the shape of my chiefly Westminster endeavours are tucked behind the screen - wow I think - briefly impressed by my own commitment to the project - and then I see that St Mary Le Strand is the belt of the figure of eight between Westminster and The City - just one more and I am through to the City churches.

Amen.








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