St Nicholas Cole Abbey

There is that scene near the end of ET where the FBI arrive - big burly men shouldering in, the house taped up, a kind of tunnelled life within what had been the comfort of the home  - and this is what our life feels like at the moment except much, much smaller, with more dust and dirt and East European accents not American.  Our kitchen and bathroom are being replaced  ( which I keep reminding myself will be great ) but life is meant to carry on, everything dirty, everything boxed up, nothing where it should be, most things coated in plastic - still getting the boys off to school ironed and pack-lunched with homework done, me to work for a national newspaper smiling.  All of this living out of one tiny room with dust and dirt everywhere.  As if matter itself has been released - there is a pointlessness, a futility to the human endeavour of a dustpan and brush and something in me feels as if it is giving up, needs a flying bmx bike, to find a good and solid home.

The weekend before the work starts I am packing the kitchen into boxes I bought from Rymans with the boys away when it dawns on me - we are too stressed for this - how are we going to cope.

My eldest son did not get the secondary school choice he/we wanted (despite a slightly odd certainty he would.)  I did not get a Jerwood/ Arvon writers mentoring scheme award - though I was of six to be interviewed for three places.  I am waiting for the tax credit tribunal though bailiff letters still arrive.  I have got used to them but it is still frightening as I fold them away under an increasingly dusty pile of papers .  You are trying to bully me.  I think.

On the first day of the works - when every part of the kitchen and bathroom was ripped out - it is as if our family wounds are re opened -  anxiety is very high - the boys are angry that we live in a tiny flat - that the home that has been made has been trashed that something about our lives is broken.
I put up the camping table with a brightly coloured table cloth in the crowd of boxes and stacked furniture of the main room - and think of the invention and courage of the make shift shelters of disaster zones, refugee camps and at the edge of war.  Women making a kernel of home in the chaos.  I know I am lucky, that this is temporary, that we are safe but can see the trauma that being without home brings.

The results of both the school application and the mentoring award came through on the same day. I had hoped for good news.  ( after all the last post was so  bleak a friend texted support as if I was on suicide watch )  I had thought we have been through enough - this is the day the tide turns:   At about 4.30 I hear I haven't got the mentoring.  ( I knew by then I hadn't -  I just knew you would leave the bad luck calls to late )  An earnest and kind young woman keeps telling me all the positive things about why and how I haven't got it.  I just want to get her off the phone with her lingering good luck messages sticky as a boiled sweet found in a pocket.  Oh, oh.  I don't care I think  - bartering with who? - I need the school place most - I will settle for just that - though I am crazily confident he will get it.

That night I sit up keeping vigil to the secondary school application email.  The cutoff is midnight but at midnight no e mail has come.   I stay up - slightly manically but repeatedly hitting the refresh button - but nothing comes through.    Oh I keep thinking.  I need to know.  hit refresh nothing hit refresh nothing.

Eventually at 3am I think to try the edu site - where there is a note saying yahoo sites are not working and I obtain access with an old stored password to find out my son has got his third place school.  Out of the upset of the day and the confusion of the night it is like seeing the world through a tangle - not what I thought would happen at all.

I absolutely thought that this day our luck would change.

I have been reading a biography of the writer Penelope Fitzgerald.  I borrowed it from work - exhilerated to find the story of a woman who had her first book published at 60.   Clever, from a clever family,  she married a man who became an alcoholic then brought her children up in baffled but stoic poverty.   Though they lived on a boat and it sank.  My life has felt like that boat but it isn't literally true.   I start to read the novels and the writing is sly but perfect,  I don't always love it but I am always impressed by it - she just hangs characters a little bit out of reach, doesn't explain too much.   She also loved the writing of Samuel Beckett ( I used to struggle to get a character through a door then reading Beckett realised a reader will believe much much more than you think, that the narrative can be almost abstract, suspended in space - a mound of earth, one room with wind at the door.)
I have promised the woman I borrowed it from that I read fast/will bring it back but I thought I had read that PF believed you can't work off your bad chance - there isn't a finite amount - you have to just accept the load you are given but I can't find the quote.  I had marked the things I liked with tiny torn scraps of paper and copied them in my notebook but couldn't find this one.  I keep dipping to find it, then start to read the book again, what I do find is:
'The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in one's own independence and to do only what we are expected to do.  At the same time it is a mistake to expect anything  specific from life.  Life will not confirm.'
and 'Experiences aren't given to us to be 'got over', otherwise they would hardly be experiences.' is the nearerst I can find.


 I had hoped that I would remain calm and pragmatic throughout secondary school applications - the finding what is best for my very bright, wild, creative, angry, enquiring son and obtaining it.   Though most children just want to be with their friends - he was adamant he didn't want to go the local and assured place comp.  So I started reasonably early with an application last year for a really exceptional public school - working with my son night after night on practise papers - though discovering on the internet that this preparation that I  started a month before the exam - should have been worked on for years with a tutor.   wa wa waaa I thought - though we did it together - enjoying the process - reaching a regular score of over 90% on the vr. It wasn't enough and i knew he cldnt alwys spell v well  and the phone call to interview never came.  Later I thought  about the braying parents and slightly odd staff -  the stooped and over-charming, the aneroxic and the florid and it made me think of the wounds of public schools, the damage done to boys and I didn't trust the process - though the facilities and ambition was incredible - I felt sheepish I had put my son through so much - after all we didn't just need a place but a 100% bursary too ( filling in forms of financial details that would have made the stooped and thin wince at the bravery and madness of my life.  )  What I really wanted and liked best was the access to the Thames - the freedom for a boy to explore the river, to feel free alongside the moorhens and strong currents.


I spent hours and hours and hours researching schools on the internet - though the truth was there was very little choice -  but at the last minute I found an across the border-borough-option with an art scholarship exam to take and my son went and took the exam.   That morning after dropping him off for the test I bumped into the Momdel - a beautiful Russian mother that I used to talk about Tolstoy and Dostoevesky in the playground after school though my certaintity that she had been a model had been confirmed when she took her daughters out of our school when she got a job presening ' Next top model' in Georgia.   She introduced me to her companion - a Russian artist that had been tutoring her daughter for the art exam. Oh I thought glumly I am so naive.   Then I found £15 pounds in the gutter and met a friend for breakfast.   I could see that this was the best option we ( it would mean my younger son could get in on sibling policy ) had by miles.

Afterwards when I met my son at the school gate in the hoards of tense parents ( I saw others I knew or had known - a girl I had waitressed with, a newspaper editor )  he was excited and confident - look he said as if bringing out a bag of brightly coloured sweets for a  greedy toddler - I took a picture on my phone - OH - I say - I am certain you are not allowed to do that - yes, but no one saw he said and look -  my hands clamouring he showed me a really beautiful drawing of his hand drawing on paper - the task he had been asked to do - the determination of the drawing, the confidence and variation of line - oh I thought - there is no way he won't get a place with that drawing.     All the art teachers came and stood behind me to look at the drawing he said then described a girl the only other one he thought  had done a good drawing - getting frustrated and scribbling over her work.  Maybe they will be able to see how good it was underneath her scribble he said with concern.

I can't really explain my certainty - though I do have an MA in fine art - but I thought he was sure to get a place, though I understood and indeed accepted that the test was to cook the books of a truly 'comprehensive intake' and to design the school to be middle class.  Somehow - our address?  being a single mother? we didn't add up.

Ironically the head teacher at my son's primary school tells me that it has been  'an astonishing year of 100% bursaries for private schools from this Y6' - she thinks it is because the charitable status of public schools is under attack - and the disadvantage of the children from our school is exactly what they want to look philanthropic - but children that do not get the results of my son have obtained them. I still don't think that this would have been necessarily the right option for my son but I feel sick that I have failed to obtain a secondary education that will suit him.

PSM says she chanted OM  every day for the 100% bursary place her son has received.
wa waaa

On our street, the dark cut through once known as Duck Lane, a camp of homeless guys has set up.   More organized than the normal sleeping-bag-solo-sleepers they have mattresses and layers of cardboard and somehow their structures remain even when they aren't there.  When I close my bedroom curtains one night I see them all tucked into sleeping bags but clamouring around a box of beer like a Daumier sketch, faces lit by street light, though in the morning when I walk past the sleeping forms I see a pair of shoes like slippers laid neatly at the side of the bed, a water bottle and a book nearby like items placed on a bedside table.

I also read that Penelope Fitzgerald writes notes of herself as a Becketian old woman called Mrs Thing 'Nietzsche complained of the 'smell of failed souls' in modern civilisation.' And yet is is all the same - so terribly the same, every morning one must get one's body up, consult it, wash it, somehow.....'
'When Mrs Thing was 47 years old a fairy appeared and said 'You need never do anything you hated doing again: you need never find on catching sight of yourself that your face is red and foolish, you need never not quite catch what is said, never try to keep up with things........'

I feel like Mrs Thing.   An old woman working hard, failing to quite pull off the normal things of life, a fool. Now squandering the assets of my son not just myself.

On the day I go to find a city church I catch myself thinking unexpectedly if I get into church today I will pray.   That morning I had run and caught up with a mum whose son already attended the school my son has a place for.  Her son too is bright, confident, slightly warrior and I thought her reaction would be a good gauge.   Her face distorts - it is a terrible school she said, terrible, there is trouble and bullying,  and fighting, they give no homework and they have all had letters to say year 7 is failing.   Oh I say not quite expecting this onslaught.  Oh. 

I cycle close to St Paul's Cathedral - there is a church close to the river I think - remembering yellow spots on the map I have by my computer marking the churches.   I find the austere Welsh Church dipped down from the road by steep steps but it is closed.   Back up to the dual carriageway I find a church further up on the side though it no longer seems to be a church but a cafe  - The Wren. I have to go I think, it is a Christopher Wren church - but I feel a bit disappointed - just today I was prepared to pray.   I think it would have been a quick fumble - an embarrassed crouch to the knees and some muttered words - but I was prepared to do it.    I walk up the steps - into a beautiful airy white space with wood pannelling and stained glass windows -  people milling around, tables and a wooden counter with coffee machine, and cakes on glass stands.   The room is beautiful - but but but - It all looks so 'lifestyled' - the fetishism of those bloody artisans I think grumpily, just walking round the edges looking at the original carved garlands left on the walls.  It isn't that I don't like nice things - I just want things to look insouciant - or more exactly - where they should be.   I don't even sit for a coffee though later I read the cafe has won an award for the best new cafe, that the coffee is very good.   But again - I like a casualness to excellence and there is something over done to the over-crafted modern intervention to the beautiful space.

Researching later I find out it is still a church  -  but it seems to be an experiment - a very good cafe that hosts talks about God at lunchtimes - like an instagram version of a church it looks good in pictures travels well by social media and via wedding pictures.

Though I also discover it has been a church that attempted ( and suceeded ) in obtaining huge congregations in the past by such radical moves.   In 1881 the congregation was down to one man and one woman but when Henry Shuttleworth, a Christian Socialist was appointed in 1883 - installing a bar, a huge music programme and making the church a centre of debate the number attending grew to 450 on a Sunday evening.


The first recorded mention of the church was in a letter from Pope Lucius II in 1144-5.   Named after St Nicholas of Myra the patron saint of children and fishermen, Cole Abbey was a derivation from Coldharbour - a traveller's shelter or shelter from the cold.  Deeds in the time of Richard I report a new fish market close by and during the 16th century several fishmongers were buried here.  John Stow reports during the reign of Elizabeth I that a lead and stone cistern, fed by the Thames was set up against the the north wall 'for the care and commodity of the Fishermongers in about Old Fish St'.

During the reformation protestant worship was decreed though when Mary I came to the throne returning Catholicism to England it was the first church to celebrate Mass.  The incumbent Rector Thomas Sowdley had in the meantime taken a wife in the reign of Edward VI and lost his job only to be reinstated under Elizabeth I.

The church was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666 and rebuilt by Christopher Wren between 1672- 1678.  Noted in the building accounts are 'Dinner for Dr Wren and other Company - £2 14s 0d and 'Half a pint of canary for Dr Wren's coachmen - 6d.'

Destroyed again on May 10th 1941 in the worst air raid of the war.    The church remained a shell until restored by Arthur Bailey in 1962.   Recently restored it opened as a coffee shop and lunchtime meeting place for office workers to hear the word of God through 'Nick's talks in 2014.



Weeks later  - I don't even remember how we hear about it but we go - on the last day - to Selfridges temporary skate park.  This is London I think!  This is amazing!  Watching one son skateboard and the other rollerblade down Oxford St then turn down Orchard Street at the side of the huge department store to find the entrance.   I skateboarded as a kid.   My childhood next door neighbours ( one dead, one a heroin addict, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh I miss them both so much though one was always absent ) and my younger brother skateboarded.  We bought skateboards through classified ads, started on a small slope infront of the next door neighbours house then graduated to a really steep street nearby.  We went to the empty multi story car park every Sunday.  It was just us  down the spiral curve.  We skateboarded and skateboarded - though it was surburban hills and carparks and the only time we came to London to Skate City we didn't know the basic flip turn to be allowed on the bowl.   All that money for the train and the skate park entrance and we just mooched round the periphery-  hicks from the sticks.  But here years later- just after 10 in the morning my sons and I go up some abandoned hotel stairs at the side of Selfridges and into a temporary but huge skate park on the first floor.  No rollerblades allowed though so my younger son  who is always sensibly defining himself as 'other' from my eldest can't skate.  Though they have skateboards to hire but not until after 12 when the lessons finish.  My eldest son skates and skates - he is very good - and it is a beautifully designed space and almost empty to begin with - though later it fills up.  My youngest son and I mooch around - go to Selfridges foodhall and have an ice cream, then back again.   At 12 we go back to the desk to rent a board for him. There isn't a queue but it feels like one because I am thinking - ask for one for yourself - go on, go on, go on, go on.   I get the board and helmet for my younger son, then just as I am about to turn away - funny mrs thing - I turn back to the pretty blonde girl and say - could I get another board - could I get another board for me.


On the smooth concrete I start to skate.   I can do a very old fashioned but I believe very elegant skateboarding - and when I start my heart is banging - I feel it is a performance  ( because there are dads watching from behind barriers and young people surprised as I weave around corners )  oh oh I am worrying I am de masculating my sons oh oh I think I am embarrassing them/myself  the funny Mrs Thing is now on a skateboard  oh oh - but then the music starts and the dj has put on I guess for me - old woman - when I'm 64 'When I get older losing my hair many years from now.....    I feel I am flying.  The park is beautiful -  the concrete so smooth that I can go fast, pick up speed lean into  the corners.    I say to my sons am I embarrassing and they say - you can skate a lot better than most of the kids here - then the eldest trys to teach me to drop-in and I fall - Mrs Thing without dignity and bashing my elbow.


It doesn't matter for a brief time I lose her - I  feel really free - really happy.


Things are about to get better I think.

My son gets a place at a newly opening Free School - I dust off my principals and accept the place.  I worry and worry that this post is boring that what I have to say is only the grouching of a failed pushy mum.   Then I think I wanted to write about London and the madness of education is part of it.  Something is wrong though I take part in it.


Amen

St Martins within Ludgate

I am squeezed on the wrong side of some railings alongside a dual carriageway on London Wall.   The pavement has just petered out and the cars are passing fast.  I am walking the perimeter of the old walled City of London.  I am approaching the Barbican/ Museum of London and I am certain there are some remains of the city wall here but I can't get to them.  I have a new smart phone and I have just checked a vintage pair of patent Prada wedges that I want to bid for on ebay pleased to discover I have 6 more hours to bid and that the price is stationary at £7.50.  I am increasingly anxious that I shouldn't be on this crazy mission, that I am going to run out of time to do all the back-to-school jobs I need to do while exh's mum is doing the last couple of days of school holiday childcare.  Then out of nowhere I remember my brother's unkind girlfriend saying years ago,  'You should get a boyfriend before you get too mad.'   I think - near to being run over - playing hookey on motherhood and domesticity - keen to bid money I don't have on second hand shoes and looking for traces of the City of London Wall on a solitary, slightly manic walk around the complete perimeter of where the wall once was -  that I have gone way beyond the point she meant then - way beyond a point I imagined for myself.

I curl around the railings into a side street and then see a concrete staircase under the concrete walkway I have been trying to reach.   As I climb the piss-smelling stairs to an abandoned and boarded mini shopping precinct that looks like a 70s cowboy town I think quite clearly - oh I am going to be murdered now - for this place just seems so abandoned, so desolate, so unsafe.  In a cutaway from the walkway a flint arch rises through the curve of paving slabs and it is possible to look down over the ruins of a medieval church alongside brown-dog coloured dug earth, with building machinery littered around.    There appears to be a plan for this area but it isn't apparent what it could be.  Nor is the wall I think, though I am certain I am near.

I woke up this morning a bit hungover ( PSM came to dinner the night before / it's in the name first time readers / a joke when she became a SM too and we shared a bottle of wine, discussing our children and our woes and became The Pissed Single Mothers Club though occasionally we are disturbingly good to our name )  I sat and wrote a list - make chicken pie, wash and iron sheets, sort out cupboard under the sink, clean bathroom, buy boy's socks from John Lewis, type up changes to novel, walk perimeter of City of London wall.   Then  I made a cup of tea, found some paper and just wrote for 5 hours solidly.  I kept thinking - I have to stop and do one of the other things on the list - watching helplessly as the day evolved into a completely different one than I had planned and the things I needed to do gathered behind as if crooked fingers wagging disapproval.


At 3.30 I cycled out.    I had dithered about where to start my 'London Wall'  walk - near to Newgate where I would approach it from Westminster - or from the Tower of London ( so I can find a chuch to enter near to the end of my walk? )  It is solved by Peter Ackroyd who describes exactly the walk I want to make - from Tower Hill to the river by Blackfriars.   On the bike the journey to Tower Hill is ridiculously quick.  Passing through the City I can see churches tucked everywhere though St Pauls is like a white cliff face, a whale, an enormous thing, and all I can think is how am I ever going to find time to write about that? I circle around at Tower Hill looking for a docking bay for the bike.  Unexpectedly through the glass grand foyer of a hotel I see a section of the wall sandwiched into a back carpark - like a zoo animal too big for it's enclosure. I don't have a map and though I have brought the Peter Ackroyd book - the huge tome is in a backpack with some apples and some chocolate - I am trying just to work it out.    I remember vaguely there is a section right near to the Tower of London itself - and follow tourists down a walkway starting to doubt myself.   But there under the 1970s concrete bridge is the ruins of a gateway and on the wall alongside a plaque numbered one, with the history of the wall  and a numbered map on how to complete the walk.   Oh I think breezily with the confidence of the hangover I will just follow the plaques.  My plan is to trace the boundaries of the city before visiting the churches within the City.   I notice a bird with a really bright eye sitting on the railings as if talking to me and realise a slight mania to my thoughts - I am overwhelmed by this trail of history - overwhelmed by everything I am meant to be doing.
http://www.london-footprints.co.uk/wklondonwallroute.htm
The journey starts well - number two - a huge slab of wall by Tower Hill tube station - where the layers - roman, medieval are clear and the ditch the other side still exists.   Then the section behind the hotel - a cut through alongside the valet parking.   Here behind the facades of buildings I can see an untidy route, scraps of overgrown waste ground squeezed and then stunted by office blocks then set off to find the next part of wall.   I lose my way.   I find myself in a dead end thinking there is an alleyway only to find the backdoor to a pub.  The route becomes hazy - I find a scrap of wall by Aldgate roundabout, then a part alongside a church with gravestones flush to the bricks of the wall.


The wall was initially built by the Romans circa AD 200 the second largest construction in Britain after Hadrian's wall, made from Kentish ragstone, brought by water from Maidstone.  It has been  calculated that some 1,300 barge journeys would have been made to transport the thousands of tons of stone necessary to build the wall that stretched for 2miles and incorporated an existing Roman fort at the NW corner.   The wall had many 'gates' that opened to important Roman roads leading to other towns in the country.   Initially: Aldgate, Bishopgate, Cripplegate, Newgate and Ludgate though Aldersgate was added later  and Moorgate an even later medieval addition.  In Saxon times some of the wall decayed but was built up again in medieval and tudor times though as London grew, its defensive role became no longer necessary and much of the wall was demolished or disappeared beneath shops and warehouses.  By 1760 parliament chose to remove the city gates and much of the structure disappeared through the evolution and building of the City.  Like a historic tide the wall has been built and disappeared: during WW2 when London was bombed and some remains were demolished in other places great chunks of the wall were unearthed under flattened buildings.

Alongside the abandoned concrete shops at the edge of the Barbican I haven't found a plaque since number 6 and I am tired and frightened.   I can't explain exactly the feeling of real dread - though perhaps it is just 'cutting myself off'  the feeling of walking further and further into an empty dead end.  On another piss smelling staircase but going back down now I notice a strange growth on the floor of a landing - a small smooth mound in the shape of a small foot like a scrap of ice.   A drip, a repetitive leak of water has formed the base of a stalagmite on the 1970s staircase.  By the side of a children's protection service office I find a patch of park with a plaque and the wall.   A church had been built here to venerate the murdered archbishop St Alphage.  The word murdered confirms the fear I feel.   I am forcing myself to explore the wall, to look round the park I can hear running water from the overgrown corner of the park, through a gateway, cutting myself off further and further as I go deeper into the small park.   It is a fountain, an innocent babbling magical thing  only spied through undergrowth but I am relieved to be able to leave the area, leave this place behind.   I have friends who live in the Barbican and I make myself laugh by imagining them looking out of their window to see me rooting around the undergrowth of a scabby park on my own.  I look up to the flats and see on a walkway a trendy group - a pretty girl flanked by two men and see that they are taking a picture of me.   I am not sure what the picture they are taking means to them but I feel very alone though very observed.  I feel I am too far out of reach.  Perhaps she is who I would like to be, taking a picture of who she doesn't want to be I think and see them laughing.

Further into the Barbican ( along concrete walkways marked by bike tracks like sand erosion, and squeezing past Pizza Express where the walkway is nearly cut off )  there is a huge part of the wall.   I am still completely alone in a garden walking the perimeter, still scared but overlooked by luxury flats and alongside another water feature - much more modern with sprinkling fountains.    The wall has alcoves in the exterior like sentry posts, thickly covered in ivy.   On the interior side it is richly planted and in a wooden box like a bird hut there is a leaflet about the bishop's garden with a sign saying 'please return after use'.

Above a muslim family are taking pictures of the wall with me in their picture for some reason they make me feel anchored, in their pictures, in history.   Perhaps I think when I am writing this the whole journey is about being inside or outside of the wall.   It is an odd historic concept - the included and the excluded - and the city wall is the line that denotes it - I feel I am moving between both.  Much later I am surprised to find this on wikipedia:

The suffix words "Without" and "Within" denote whether an area of the City – and usually applied to the wards – fell outside or within the London Wall, though only Farringdon and (formerly) Bridge have been split into separate wards this way (Bridge Without falling beyond the gates on London Bridge). Some wards – Aldersgate, Bishopsgate and Cripplegate – cover an area that was both within and outside the wall and, although not split into separate wards, often the part (or "division") within the Wall is denoted (on maps, in documents, etc.) as being "within" and the part outside the Wall as being "without". Archaically "Infra" (within) and "Extra" (without) were also used^[12] and the terms "intramural" and "extramural"^[13][14] are also used to describe being within or outside the walled part of the city.

I had been thinking about the excluded that historically lived outside the wall - the lepers and cripples though I also find mention  of 'The tenement of the Hermit of Crepelgate' and a suggestion there was a structure there for a hermit even before Roman times.

Still dithering around I find a long section of wall  on Noble St -  though I have got to plaque 20 unexpectedly - the last one I found was 13.  I don't really understand either how I could have wandered in such a huge area around the Barbican and then find a long intact piece here but I have to accept what I can see.  Later I realise this is where the Roman Fort was so the route does kind of bulge and then fall back into a line.    Though  I also discover that the wall walk - created in the 1980s  hasn't been maintained, that the plaques do indeed peter out in places like the crumbling battlements of the wall itself - the tide of time has swept away some of the jaunty typeface plaques of the walk.  Indeed an IRA bomb in 1993 took both the plaque 8 and the remains of the wall it described.   I order a London Wall Walk 1985 vintage guide book on ebay and also Walking London Wall by Ed Harris - published in 2009, who introduces his book with dismay at the historic marginal interest the wall generates and the trouble of writing a guide when buildings change and disappear leaving co ordinates like sand. 

I am feeling increasingly melancholy - I can't seem to fit the day, can't find what I thought I wanted.  Though walking alongside the low wall of what seems to be a public park I can see graves.  I once heard on the radio about a park in London with a memorial to citizens who lost their life helping others.   I always imagined it in East London but for some unknown reason - I think - looking through the railings - oh it is here.   At the gate there is a simple sign - fascinating enough - saying 'Postman's Park  A Christian Open Air Meeting is held here Monday 1.15pm from May - Sept by kind permission of the church.'   I walk in - there are a few people milling around but I keep walking. I am  not sure how I knew - but there - under a wooden roofed structure - are the tiled memorials to 'Heroic Self Sacrifice'.   Conceived of by George Frederic Watts in 1887 to celebrate ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, there are beautiful arts and crafts memorial tablets with messages, almost like haikus of heroic acts and consequent deaths.  Each is a short story:  'Thomas Griffin Fitters Labourer April 12 1899 in a boiler explosion at a Battersea Sugar Refinery was fatally scalded in returning to search for his mate.'   'George Stephen Funnell Police Constable Dec 22 1899   In a fire at the Elephant and Castle Wick Road, Hackney Wick after rescuing two lives went back into the flames, saving a barmaid at the risk of his own life.'   'David Selves aged 12 Off Woolwich supported his drowning playfellow and sank with him clasped in his arms.'   'September 1886, Ernest Benning Compositor aged 22  Upset from a boat one dark night off Pimlico Pier   Grasped an oar with one hand supporting a woman with the other but sank as she was rescued.'     Inflammable dresses, unmanageable horses, the dangerous entanglement of river weed - the dangers of mortality are vivid and selfless.   Later I  discover that a mobile app has recently been launched with detailed accounts of the 54 dramatic incidents and intend to take my sons.

I fiddle around now passed the bombed remains of the tower of Christ Church Greyfriars, round the back of the Old Bailey, then out to St Sepulchre where a plaque claims there is a ghost of a black dog that stalks the churchyard.  I am trying to find a church that is open now - there is barely any trace of the wall left  - finish up and get home and on with those chores stacked up behind me still to do.

On Ludgate, I find the church of St Martin's at Ludgate and the door is open.  I climb the stairs but a Chinese couple are locking up and won't let me in.   I walk around the back searching for the last traces of the wall.  At a locked gateway a black dog sat flat like a shadow bays dolefully and I do actually think for a second that I am through some doorway of sense or time everything just seems so heightened though the Chinese couple who wouldn't let me in the church calm the dog and myself to reality.   Finally I find a scrap of wall packed between office blocks then straggle the last vanished outline of the wall to the Thames and I have finished.

At home I wash my hands and make the pastry -  then sit with a cup of tea and write a list of this journey - I am still slightly manic - but I can't actually write the blog until the pie is made and the under sink cupboard cleaned.

There I find the ice cream boxes kept for paint mixing, the out-of-control but wrong-sized tupperware,  slightly dirty jam jars that I am scared to thow out in case I need to make jam (though I have never made jam), old school trousers torn to make dusters, paintbrushes, cleaning products in classified boxes,  and redundant water bottles (it is the holy grail of motherhood - a water bottle that doesn't leak or get smelly.)   I have had an-end-of-school-holidays epiphany that if I could sort out this crap I could have clean wiped kitchen surfaces and spend less time fighting the madness of disorganisation. I am trying to move the detergent box, the fabric conditioner and the chemistry set off the surface by the sink and into this cupboard.


Afterwards I make a roux sauce - and cook the bacon garlic and onions - roll the pastry.   Briefly I feel really, really annoyed that the thing I want to do - just write this - is on hold for this pie that I have to make.  But I can't waste the meat leftover from a roasted chicken and want to prepare this meal for my sons for the night before they go back to school.


Later, much much later when my life has swamped me I look back to this day like the shore I have departed from.   Late that night - the cupboard clean, the pie cooked I sat and wrote most of the city wall journey.  Then like a tidal wave as the new term starts -  fighting the tax credit people, secondary school applications for my eldest son and just worrying takes over my time late at night. This is the slot, the tiny part for saved for me, saved for writing and I feel it vanish like the glitter of salt in water.   As I watch it disappear, then recede to a memory I run out of the confidence in the blog, in my writing, in my own fun and optimism. Secondary school research takes all the diligent fiddly-fingered late night internet investigations that this blog takes.  Fighting the tax credit people takes the sense that things can be fair, that one day everything will get better, that we will be alright.  Though at a crazy point I send the tax credit people pages from this blog - for it details so exactly what has happened - that exh does not live here,  has been housed in a hostel then moved to illegal commercial properties - all so hard to prove when it is true.  I imagine them stuck up in an office in Preston as an example of the loony lengths benefit cheats will go to though a lawyer friend I tell looks horrified at my madness.   A letter threatening me with the bailiffs arrives though I am still in appeal.  It is a mistake they say coolly when I ring to remonstrate.  Yes they say they are targeting single mums when I ask if they have targets to reach.

Oh. oh.  I think I don't deserve this.  No single mum deserves this.  Every bit of surviving, of bringing up those two boys with little money and little support, of holding back the flood of chaos that all these things brought has been done with determination and fun and dedication.  Now I am exhausted.   I find myself unable to talk or even think about it without crying.  Friend's turn their faces kind to my tears and tales of misfortune though I am embarrassed that it doesn't seem to end.  Being a working single mum is tough - hard work and sometimes lonely - and yet the worst of it is that however hard you work or try you do a bad job of almost everything.  That despite the relentless good cheer and dogged work - everything is only tidy for a second, the children only well-behaved briefly and one son is angry and the other one anxious.

Sitting down now five months later to write about visiting St Martin's within Ludgate I realise I remember very little of the visit.  Rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire, in the shade of St Paul's he designed it to sit against the city wall, designed it in juxtoposition to the Cathedral.  I went in a lunchtime a few days after my perimeter walk, climbing the steps up and into the church from the flat-facade that sits tight to the pavement.  There was a man just infront of me going up the steps, both of us in a hurry both gazing around the dark interior together though he then sits to pray.  I sense we are both slightly annoyed that the other is ruining the peace of the place for the other.   I remember a really lovely quietness and some old wooden racks that were used for bread to be left for the poor.  Though I discover that St Martin of Tours was the patron saint of travellers and that churches dedicated to him always stand just within city gates.   The earliest mention of a church on the site is from 1174  though the legend is that "Cadwallo King of the Britons is said to have been buried here in 677".   Cadwallo's image was allegedly placed on Ludgate, to frighten away the Saxons.   I remember I still want to see the statue of Lud that decorated a later Ludgate and now sits in a dark arch within the churchyard of St Dunstan's of the West and I think briefly I should go back to see St Martin's and then cycle out of the reach of these old city walls  to see the statue now 'without /extra'.    But I don't.  I still have very little time though I am writing again which makes me feel happy.