I am sick of my own whiny voice. Early on writing this blog Exh emailed a cartoon to me. Two dogs sat together, 'I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.'
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/60/6068/MIID100Z/posters/alex-gregory-i-had-my-own-blog-for-a-while-but-i-decided-to-go-back-to-just-pointless-new-yorker-cartoon.jpg
I thought it was his way of drily condoning what I was writing about though I think at that point he just hadn't read it. It seemed hilarious for it coincided exactly with how I saw the on and on yap of the compulsive and painful truth telling. I stuck the cartoon up, can see it now on the right hand side of the computer, the London map dense with the yellow and purple spots of churches visited and still to visit stretched out on the wall behind.
It seems a big debate at the moment - how the family is written about. I caught something on the radio whilst hurrying out to work, and read in the Guardian about the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard who has written a six-volume literary epic based on his famiy in particular his alcoholic father. Half of his family no longer speak to him though it is hailed as a masterpiece. In the article he says,
'As a person, I'm polite - I want to please. One of the reasons for that is my father; he had that grip on me. For 40 years I'd lived that tension between my inner and outer selves. Suddenly now the point was not to please, it was to speak the truth. To write reality."
Though he also realised it was:
''Just me and the computer in a room by myself. It never occured to me that it might cause problems - I was just telling the truth, wasn't I? But I was also being very naive. I sent a copy to everyone involved before the first volume was published, and then I discovered how difficult this was going to be. It was like hell."
On the radio ( Start the Week R4): I thought it suggested if it was good writing it was ok and if it wasn't it wasn't. But then I go back and find the podcast ( I have never done this before - and there is an excitement and a slight panic that I will spend my time just listening to back catalogues of R4) and hear Will Eaves express my own anxiety to these rules that there is no way of knowing while you do it that you are able to achieve this. He believes too that writing creates a 'Freestanding structure, whatever the origins maybe.' While AS Byatt countered 'Writing about people you know is always an exercise in power.' and that it is a dangerous thing to have a writer close'. 'an appalling thing' she says. I don't know. I wanted to describe good and bad things that have happened fairly. Though I may have failed. In the last blog I meant only to describe one more time exh's alcoholism to describe my own continuing reaction to it. The attachment I made to his behaviour. The trigger of hyper alertness it seemed to switch on. Though I do think - what else would or could you do? With children? A woman - a friend of exh said at a party, her arms heaved righteously under her bosom, but of course - you are the co dependent. A wagging slightly mean finger to her tongue. Oh yes, I said but I still don't think there is another way to behave once the shock of alcoholism takes hold. Though perhaps it is co dependent to take them on? Take a risk on dangerous things? Ignore the warning signals? I don't know, I do feel rebellious of the label given but understand I took part in a pattern, even hide my own drinking issues in the pockets of ex's own problems.
A voice coach that I had never heard of talks on desert island discs about the horror and pain of living with an alcoholic husband and how coming out of it she felt she fought every day for survival. How pleased she was not to have had children within that relationship and how damaging it was. Oh I thought, a catch of pain, as I heard her talk, that is what it was like, I didn't make it up. It really was that tough. She picked really beautiful music too, classical music that I jotted down.
The dusty smugness of DIDiscs seems to have been replaced by people talking quite honestly about the route and pain of their lives. But perhaps again that is how we speak now? I have heard John Prescott, James Corden and some rugby player discuss eloquently the difficulty at times of being themselves.
James Corden was very honest and charming ( is that compatible?) about his Salvation Army family, the love they gave him, his own ambition, and the loneliness and lost feelings induced by a party life style. His family arriving at his London flat to rescue him, only a lindt chocolate rabbit and some vitamin water in the fridge - no milk to make a cup of tea - but his Dad hugging and praying with him.
I hear too on the radio that before her death Angela Carter was asked to be on Desert Island discs then they put her recording slot back ( possibly for John Major ) and by the time the BBC could do the interview she was too ill. She organised her own funeral to be a Desert Island discs show and a final revelation was that she had chosen a zebra as her luxury. I laugh out loud at the beauty of a desert island with a zebra alongside. I love zebras for I always think that they make unicorns look possible, indeed almost anything possible.
I have been ill for bloody weeks. Just as I started the broadsheet work I was so excited about I got a cold. Then it knocked me sideways as it mutated from the normal sniff and splutter of a few days and I shivered and sweated and ached and it carried on and on and on, briefly ceasing, then returning with renewed vigour, evolving new symptoms. I sneezed and blew my nose raw in the hush of the civilised office where decorous journalists with principles, debated art and books. I couldn't not go, I needed to prove my reliability but I was soggy and sweating, barely able to cope and slightly wild-eyed to stress, though always trying to smile. It was a manic combination. I wanted to be asked back but in the circumstances it was hard to make a great impression. Luckily I get other work with other newspapers but I wait to know if they are going to book me for a long stint that was mooted.
Though UL now back to the acroynym of OL loses his Turkmenistan job because a client pulls out and then gets it back a week later because there are new clients.
I cycle up to the corner of Oxford St/Tottenham Court Rd/Covent Garden on a strangely warm saturday early evening, looking for a church to visit. I realise in the throng of Soho that there is no way that a church will be open now at this time. But still I steer the bike round the options. I feel slightly weary of my task, I want to get to the City churches not be weaving around the dust and I heart london tat of this end of Oxford St. Not really surprisingly The French Protestant church on Soho Square, The Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, St Giles in The Field and the Swiss Church are all closed but partly because I am against the tide of people in couples and groups out to bars and restaurants and theatres with what feels like a forlorn task set and I don't have anything else to do on a Saturday evening I keep moving round. I'll find something I think but the nearest I get to a church is two men coming out of a side door of a monumental grand building at the end of Covent Garden which I see is the Freemasons Hall, the headquaters of the United Grand Lodge of England. I am resentful sometimes of my obedience to the task - the spiral around of the purple dots - but if I didn't stick to my plan I would miss out the ones I didn't like the look of and would already have missed some of the best stories. Though increasingly I think that I will continue this arc of the spiral that I am on, which is going to take me round the cusp of south london shortly but use Oxford Street as a rough boundary for a while, then make a bit of a dash east. When I say 'dash' I am probably talking about a year away really. Blimey! I seem resigned to the long haul. I don't seem to get more than one a month done these days. Anyhow, I am not sure what I am saying makes sense! Unless you are such an isictt fan that you have your own map and sticker system at home! Oh go on! Tell me you are!
For some reason though I think St Giles in the Field is a Hawksmoor church and I feel excited as I cycle up again on a Tuesday lunchtime. I am going into Peter Ackroyd territory I think, though I have never read Hawksmoor only tried. I think oh good - I will have to try harder, try again. I read his TS Eliot biography which I loved and I used to waitress in a small restaurant where he had a regular table. He seemed a good man. The church flanks the north end of Covent Garden, the east of Charing Cross Rd, a scruffy, confusing patch of one way streets made dusty by the Crossrail building work consuming the area, a huge crater behind hoardings. The church is a large slab of a building, elegant but huge, set back from the road, resting in gardens surrounded by railings. There is a coffee stall to one side of the entrance and a cluster of dirty comrades in overcoats sat on benches, cans of beer tucked at their legs, Inside the church it is completely empty and quiet. Later I find a leaflet that describes the church as a representation of the journey of Christianity, the font near the doorway signifying baptism as the start of a Christian life, the clear sweep of the nave from the back of the church to the east end past the word of God of the pulpit and lectern through to the sanctuary of the altar where the sacraments were given all the way to the image of Jesus. I only really saw a plain space, galleries either side, plain glass windows apart from behind the altar where there is stained glass. To the left is a large architectural model of the church as it is. I peer in through the windows. I want to see a representation of my own solitary figure in a cape stooping to look at a tiny model of the same church within the wooden interior but of course it is empty. Known as the Poet's church, Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning married here, John Milton's daughter was baptized here and Andrew Marvell buried in 1678.
It appears there has been a place of worship on this site since Saxon times. I write this and then start looking up about Saxon beliefs and feel swamped. Though there is very little solid information just lots of gods and ritual sacrifice ( animals).
Though I find Pope Gregory the Great instructing Abbot Mellitus that:
'I have come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols in England should not on any account be destroyed. Augustine must smash the idols, but the temples themselves should be sprinkled with holy water, and altars set up in them in which relics are to be enclosed. For we ought to take advantage of well-built temples by purifying them from devil-worship and dedicating them to the service of the true God.'
In 1120 Henry 1's wife Matilda founded a christian leper hospital called St Giles here in the countryside, out of the city and away from Westminster, in a place of marshy land that would seperate the diseased from the able bodied. St. Giles was the patron saint of woodland, of lepers, beggars, cripples, and of those struck by sudden misery, and driven into solitude. Years ago when post modernism seemed a complicated thing that needed studying, not just the scrapbook of our lives I tried to read french philosophy though most of it was just too dense for me to understand. I recorded myself reading Blanchot believing that I would be able to decode the layered text if I did. OL then just my boyfriend, was caught on the tape in the background just coming round, the door opening, the shuffle of his step in the hall before the cassette is switched off. When he went to Russia and disappeared I used to play the scrap of recorded time and listen to the mundane moment of our life together, the assumption of the here and now fluttering and observed like something trapped in a jar. Anyhow, in Foucault's 'Madness and Civilisation' ( frankly a page turner in comparison to Blanchot) I can remember with fascination the suggestion that lepers existed in the place later consigned to the mad - literally outside of the city walls. Though I discover now some medieval sources suggest that those suffering from leprosy were considered to be going through Purgatory on Earth, and for this reason their suffering was considered holier than the ordinary person's. More frequently, lepers were seen to exist in a place between life and death. Though leprosy mainly disappeared in the mid sixteenth century and the 'outsider' position - the 'not us' - was taken by poverty, poor vagabonds, criminals and ‘dangerous minds.' Indeed after the reformation a post catholic church was built at St Giles in the Field in 1632 and the poor flocked to the area - vagrants expelled from the City, irish, french refugees and the 'st giles blackbirds' - the poor and black who had escaped from slavery or the army. At the crossroads of Oxford St, Charing Cross Rd and Tottenham Court Rd there was a gallows and a 'cage' for miscreants and even after the 15th century when the gallows was moved further to the edge of the developing city, the condemned would stop on their journey at the Resurrection gate of St Giles in the Fields and be given a bowl of ale.
In this 'damp and unwholesome' parish of St Giles the great plague of 1664 started and the first victim was buried in the churchyard. By the end 3,216 plague deaths were recorded in this parish of 2,000 households. Indeed so many were buried that the ground of the churchyard rose, the land got soggier and the application for a new, the present church was passed in 1730.
I stand in Foyles bookshop on the Southbank reading Peter Ackroyd's London biography. I am struggling a bit with Ackroyd envy, his work is so good and I am worried that it means mine is pointless, these tales have been told already. I have discovered already the design of the present church is not a Hawksmoor though he did submit designs for the Church under the commission of 50 churches but it was turned down in favour of the Palladian scheme by Flitcroft but also that Peter Ackroyd has written a whole chapter on the St Giles area. A crossroads of time and eternity, he calls it. He seems to believe like I do that a place holds an imprint of history, that the homeless and drunken and derranged gather like migrating souls, to an old nest. Though perhaps it is just that aid is given in these historical areas of poverty. I live on the corner of what was once the slum known as Devil's Acre and there are at least two hostels nearby. The homeless fold themselves into boxes and bins in our courtyard and sleep in snagged nylon sleeping bags outside office blocks. Recently I saw a man in a hospital gown and bare feet, his toes clenched like pigeon claws to the pavement and when it was really cold earlier in the year I saw a figure crouched over an army stove, sheltering down our thin dark street as if it were an ancient ditch.
Hogarth the master of detail of such depraved squalor used the St Giles parish as the backdrop for 'Gin Lane' 1751.
'Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin. Desperation, death and decay pervade the scene. The only businesses that flourish are those which serve the gin industry: gin sellers; distillers (the aptly named Kilman); the pawnbroker where the avaricious Mr. Gripe greedily takes the vital possessions (the carpenter offers his saw and the housewife her cooking utensils) of the alcoholic residents of the street in return for a few pennies to feed their habit; and the undertaker, for whom Hogarth implies at least a handful of new customers from this scene alone. Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit —as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs— lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff.[a] This mother was not such an exaggeration as she might appear: in 1734, Judith Dufour reclaimed her two-year-old child from the workhouse where it had been given a new set of clothes; she then strangled it and left the infant's body in a ditch so that she could sell the clothes (for 1s. 4d.) to buy gin.[10] In another case, an elderly woman, Mary Estwick, let a toddler burn to death while she slept in a gin-induced stupor.'
Round here the worst casualties are the crack addicts, the yellow-faced lost souls with their tatoos pale on the nicotine stain of liver damaged skin. I saw near Victoria station a man, barely human, stopping a bus. He was in the middle of the road with two fingers up. his clothes barely covering his body, just a blur of hair and flesh, his back arched like a snarling kicked dog, more a hound than a man. Another howled down our street, his arms gibbering his own body in comfort.
I discover too that attempts in the nineteenth century to clear the slums of St Giles to make way for sanitation and transport systems meant that the evicted just moved into near by slums, such as 'Devil's Acre and Church Lane making them more overcrowded still'. So this corner I live on holds the trace of St Giles's history.
It is Spring now and I see a heavily bearded man sat in a doorway, in a corner with the most sun, he has taken his shoes and socks off, undone the layers of his coats, and sits stretched out and smiling into the warmth, his large gnarled feet bare. If I ever have time or money I would pay for or push a foot health trolley round for the homeless. It seems the thing most needed. Socks on demand, new boots if needed, antiseptic cream, a foot massage and toe nail clippers.
Amen
Showing posts with label Foucault. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foucault. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Monday, 6 February 2012
Church of Our Lady of The Assumption and St Gregory ( formerly The Royal Bavarian Chapel )
I find it very hard to switch off. Not to be on 'guard'. Even to sit still. I think since the first time I stood on the toilet lid to reach the toilet rolls on a Sunday morning and found a regiment of empty and full cans of stella, tucked behind the pack at the back of the shelf and in mid-tiptoe-stretch realised in a wash, a wave, a flood of stark understanding exactly what was happening within our family I have found it difficult not to concentrate on life with an almost magnified watchfulness. I was busy already with two young children, a long commute and a nearly full time job - but in that chilly downstairs toilet I stood aghast but alert, hyper-aware listening to the children playing with their seemingly exuberant but erratic dad.
That home was in a coastal town on the mouth of an estuary, a cowboy town with one road in and a lot of people who never left, never moved from it. I would hear the clunk of pile-driving on and on as the foundations of a big seafront development were attempted but they just couldn't reach solid ground on the estuary mud. It took months to get the foundations in and the austere, ugly flats with the beautiful view missed the certaintity of that seemingly never ending property boom just as I did.
Though I imagine that having lost my job and with weeks to spare I would be able to sit and write a blog a week, wrestle the first novel into a publishable package ( I even have an idea - ding! - how to do it!) then make sense of my ideas for the second. But I don't. I go ( slightly unsuccesfully ) homemaker crazy. I fill every second with manic effort - cleaning all the cupboards, driving to ikea twice ( boys beds, a wardrobe for me, underbed drawers ( more later) ), pasting a forest photo mural on a wall in the boys room, buying storage on ebay and nice sheets for all. I have a plan that if I can hold back the tide of dressing up box, airfix, lego. that we will all feel well, and that with a mere flick of my wrist I will scoot the vacuum cleaner/ duster around and then sit to read a book/ write. And yet all this unceasing effort creates a tidal scurf - there is a dismantled platform bed in the hall, child stained mattresses, jigsaws for charity shops, even a playmobil ark ( though I am too fond of the animals to give them away, so it is a shell of a toy, almost useless) and all this tidying feels like it has created only more havoc. I need Exh to move the stuff, need him to help me. But ( and this is indeed a celebration ) Exh has a new home too. He is moving from the hostel on our street to a live/work unit in nearby south london with some friends. The boys are so excited. Though exh has always struggled with change ( as perhaps I do ) so he dips badly before getting back into his stride but a little bit edgy and anxious.
I think when I am lost on one of these lone, obsessive trips to Ikea, this time to the Edmonton one which I have never been to before, because it is the only branch that says underbed storage is 'instock', though because I have left the directions on the kitchen table and then confused right and left from the snatched instructions my kind brother relays over the mobile phone in a layby, I am parked up off a dimly lit roundabout - this is a fantasy - I am chasing something impossible to obtain from flat pack furniture. Can enough Billy bookshelves, a Pax wardrobe and some brightly coloured children's bedroom accessories give peace? And yet the boys new room coincides with many things to achieve it. Though the anger has already mainly blown out of my eldest son - and if this is a brief boast I will still thank every day it is true. Often he puts his hand in mine to walk to school and conceals blown kisses behind his hand in the school line. A boy who used to wake and shout 'Mum! I hate you! The grave things he has had to face in his 9 years make him thoughtful, passionate and generous. In an argument with his brother he occasionally shouts 'I want to hurt you' but he keeps his hands by his side. We have come a long way.
Though I am writing all this late at night and then start to look up on the internet about Nietzsche. I can't remember now the path of this thought though I know it went via Foucault's sado masochism at one point. I start copying and pasting details of Nietzsche's ideas to use later. Only in the morning do I discover a part has been pasted in the middle of my description of the journey to ikea:
I think when I am lost "Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." I am sure you think I am staging this but I am not - it has made me laugh so much for somehow there is something hilarious or true there. Myself parked just off the north circular pondering the lack of god. Though I think I almost did feel that, I just couldn't have said it. I felt spectacularly bleak. Once a long time ago I wrote a story about myself - like a detective story about a teenage romance I had ( though it included an erotic tale of shaving ul's head) the nearest thing to this scrapbook style of confessional writing that I seem to employ now - and in the relatively early days of home computers and temperamental printers it once chewed a whole page spitting out a short piece of text "!@£E$%^^&make a point to all this me me me !@£$TGJNBjnc". I kept it for ages because I thought it was so funny. ( though I have lost that story somehow - though oh, I wish hadn't.)
I wonder too if I need to keep so busy as ul and I have finished our relationship. We intend to see each other but not attempt a reunion. I wish wish wish this wasn't true but it seems necessary. He is a drowned man, though still kicking, white flesh submerged in murky water, too far to get to, his stored anger like heavy stones stiched into his pockets, a current dragging him distorted and grey too far away. I wait in the few quiet, still moments of the day to be hit by grief. But it doesn't come. I am not sure if I am hiding out treading water in my homemaking or nearing dry land. Though I am back to a life alone without the cheer of a supporter.
The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory formerly The Bavarian Chapel is a flat-faced dark brick building on a dark back street behind Regent St with an open side door. I find later a description - 'In its humble guise of eighteenth-century domesticity (it) seems to shrink from attracting the notice of the passers-by' W.de l'Hopital. Then I read more and more and see it was hiding out. As indeed it feels this day as I go through the dark rather depressing door a bit reluctantly and then open another side door into the body of the church discovering a wonderful place, small and elegant, almost like a private chapel . Oh I think. This peaceful space has just been sat here as if waiting. I feel I can breathe for the first time in weeks. I am always rushing to get to a church, always rushing to find the scrap of time to write and here I am, here where I rushed to be and just for a few minutes I can enjoy it. There are a couple of people devoutly praying and a few people moving round. I stand at the back and think anxiously - I am going to end up needing this. This feeling of the devout. I pause writing this and look up the word - it means a pious regard of religion but also geniune and sincere.
The Church was initially a Catholic chapel attached to the Portugese embassy on Golden Square, though there is a whiff of an idea it may even have existed as a clandestine chapel for secret worship prior to the Embassy's cloak of permitted Catholicism. I grasp fully from the 'Warwick Street Church' A short history and guide' what the historic restrictions on Catholics were in the 18th century:
'The penal laws by excluding Catholics from both houses of Parliament made it impossible for them to take part in public life. If a catholic was a land-owner he was threatened with financial ruin, for not only was he subject to the double land tax, but his family estates might pass to his Protestant next-of-kin should they choose to dispossess him. He was forbidden to keep arms and was liable to be deprived of any horse above the value of five pounds. He was incapable of holding any office in the army or navy , or practising as barrister, doctor or school-master. He could not send his children to be educated abroad without a fine and in order that due check might be kept on him and his property he was bound to register his name and estate under penalty of forfeiture, and to enrol all deeds. Some of these laws were, it is true, rarely enforced, but on occasion the individual Catholic was made to bear the full force of them so that the threat of their being put into operation still had to be reckoned with.'
Only in these chapels of diplomatic immunity could mass be heard and here in an invisible and probably smaller building than the present one, squeezed between 23 and 24 Golden Square with an entrance through the stables at the back on Warwick St the Catholics of London could make their furtive worship. Golden Square itself had been developed from 1670 on land where horses grazed. Warwick St was then the highway to Tyburn ( a tiny village at Marble Arch, a place where criminals were hung/there was no Regent Street then ) and particular attention had to be taken of the drainage because the route became impassable in winter when market people travelling that way were in danger of being lost in 'the great waters perpetually lying there all the Winter Season.' Though the development, surrounded by the land of former plague pits and the stench of breweries was only fashionable for a short time. By 1747 the Portugese embassy had moved west to a grander location and the Bavarian embassy moved in keeping the chapel's immunity.
In 1778 the necessity of finding extra men to fight in The American War of Independence ( soldiers had not been allowed to join the armed forces without taking an oath of being a Protestant) meant Parliament passed a piecmeal Catholic Relief Bill. But anti catholic feeling was high in England and Scotland and Protestant Associations were formed nationwide to defend the heritage of Englishmen. The Pope was seen as the bogeyman, Catholic France the enemy, Papists themselves disloyal and dangerous. 'Wild stories began to circulate as, for example, that twenty thousand Jesuits were concealed a network of underground tunnels near the Thames, waiting for orders from Rome to blow up the banks and so flood London.' Lord George Gordon fanned this hatred with speeches in parliament attempting to have the Bill repealed. As the leader of London Protestant Association he presented the Protestant Petition on 2nd June 1780 with a big demonstration gathered outside Parliament. By early evening the petition was turned down because of the circumstances of it's presentation, and the mob grew restless. Troops were called out to move the people from the vicinity of Parliament. Once dispersed, groups of men, some of them drunk, armed with lighted torches and weapons began to move against known Catholic targets - chapels and the residences of well known Catholics. One group burned down the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador in Lincoln's Inn Fields while another set upon The Bavarian Chapel. The rioters broke in, windows were smashed, and the contents of the chapel burnt in the street - books, the altar piece, the organ, balastrades and pews. An old German blacksmith called Bund saved what valuables he could including discovering the Bavarian minister's stash of contraband tea and commodities that he sold to supplement his income. The military arrived and stayed to protect the chapel, sleeping out on straw in the shell of the building. The riots went on for a week, gathering momentum until the anti catholic sentiments were replaced by anti authority of any sort. Prisons were broken into, prisoners released and gaols burnt down.
A subscription was launched in 1788 to rebuild the damaged Warwick St Chapel under the control of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District whilst preserving its links with the Bavarian Legation. Indeed memories of the Gordon Riots inform their decision to build on the same site and the design of the church too:
'It will be in every respect more eligible than to build in another place as it will probably pass unobserved by the Public in general".
'The walls of the new chapel were made of great solidity, being almost a yard thick; there were no windows at all at ground level in Warwick Street and the solid wooden doors were lined with sheet metal on the inside.'
Though despite the riots many Catholics began to push for increased freedom - for it was seen that the reform bill of 1778 had been passed easily by Parliament. There was division within the church as this second relief bill was prepared, even talk of a schism between more conservative and liberal elements of the Church about the oath that must be taken to receive these new privileges - but in June 1791 the Catholic Relief Act was passed allowing Catholics to live without persecution and to be able to worship freely and to be able to build their own churches or chapels. ( Though without bells or steeples)
The Warwick St chapel was opened on 12th March 1790, the feast of St Gregory the Great, to whom it was dedicated. It was the first church erected by native-born Catholics to take advantage of the new liberty accorded to them a few months later by the Relief Act of 1791 whilst keeping its heritage in the penal times of Catholic history and the umbrella of an embassy.
The French revolution which started in 1789 brought large numbers of the French clergy and aristocracy to London where they were well received. The Bavarian Chapel became one of the most fashionable of the Catholic Chapels and it is even believed that a Requiem for Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette may have been sung there in 1793.
Though by 1840 Charles Dickens described Golden Square in Nicholas Nickleby:
'Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere. It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee- singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.'
Here in the church it is quiet. I sit for a minute in a simple wooden pew. Then walk around the small church. Above is the gallery, an intimate audience to the chapel. There are beautiful things - a shrine to Our Lady Immaculate with columns of silver hearts and charms behind glass. I am not sure what these are but discover they were medals brought in thanksgiving for favours received by prayer and that the walls of Warwick St had in previous times been covered by them. A custom brought from the continent they were derided by the architect John Francis Bentley who had been given the task to restore the now unfashionable church 'It is a poor, shapeless and unsightly edifice built after the commonest type of non-Conformist chapels of the time with heavy galleries'. But the priest Monsignor Talbot remonstrated for the practice to continue and here, they are combined in the altarpice. Though the architect ( who later designed Westminster Cathedral) did not succeed in many of his plans - he intended to build a Minor Roman basilica of marble and mosaic which he started with the present apse behind the altar - which would have have left nothing of the old church except the four walls - though money ran out preserving most of the rest of the only remaining Embassy chapel of the 18th century. I discover later I miss the jewel of the church - The Assumption that brought the chapel it's name in 1854 - a bas-relief by the sculptor John Edwards Carew. It has been placed high up somewhere that I didn't see. As the guide says 'Its position over the door is unworthy of it but no better site is now possible.'
At the side just before I leave I see a door ajar to a cupboard like confessional. I am not completely certain you are going to stay with me on this but I have had a thing about small cupboards for as long as I can remember. I always want to know if they will 'fit'. I have scared boyfriends in European cities, not being able to resist just climbing into check a hotel wardrobe, thinking they will be a while in a shower down a creaky lino floored halls. Forgotten soap finds me curled up in the thin floored space, the door pulled to. In my novel I have the heroine crying in such a cupbord in a hut in the middle of a forest:
'The cupboard is somewhere between a wardrobe and a chest and I open the door to find one tweed jacket hanging from a rail. I step inside. My scalp pressing to the splinters of the roof, my back curved, the thin floor bending at the unexpected weight. I pull the door to. I am in the dark, in warm still air and the scratchy smell of male and tweed. Amazed by my own actions I just sit there listening to my breath fill the shape. Sat quiet, it is a surprise to hear crying. Gulping, rattling sobs. The sound comes from a very long way a way and when I hold my breath to listen to them they stop. I touch my face in the pitch black and find tears. Wet and salt like blood. Shocked. I haven't cried like this since I was a little girl and it feels like discovering an unknown muscle, somethin flexing its strength. I don't immediately hear the door of the hut open but I become aware of footfalls and the slam of it close. I am squatting in a shut cupboard in a stranger's place.'
Here in the church I am tempted by this dark and secret space just to try. But I pull myself together and leave the church.
On a boris bike in Piccadilly circus I look up to the neon to see a huge hand play repeated and random rock, paper, scissors. It is a Macdonalds ad. It seems like a big, gaudy, lonely thing. I imagine a lost place late at night, a face lit by a computer screen swaying, gulping another drink, repeatedly counting one two, three, a hand making simple shapes in rhythm, the nearest thing to companionship. Like the touch of a hairdresser when you have been single for a long time, a guilt that this is the nearest thing to intimacy or human warmth. a simple child's game taken over by a computer.
I discover too on the internet 'The Soho Masses Pastoral Council welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered Catholics, their parents, families and friends to Masses at 5.00 pm, on the 1st & 3rd Sundays of every month, at the Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London'. Though I also find some internet outrage to this. I think this church has been brave in the 'home' it has made, it's plain facade, still hiding its worshippers.
That home was in a coastal town on the mouth of an estuary, a cowboy town with one road in and a lot of people who never left, never moved from it. I would hear the clunk of pile-driving on and on as the foundations of a big seafront development were attempted but they just couldn't reach solid ground on the estuary mud. It took months to get the foundations in and the austere, ugly flats with the beautiful view missed the certaintity of that seemingly never ending property boom just as I did.
Though I imagine that having lost my job and with weeks to spare I would be able to sit and write a blog a week, wrestle the first novel into a publishable package ( I even have an idea - ding! - how to do it!) then make sense of my ideas for the second. But I don't. I go ( slightly unsuccesfully ) homemaker crazy. I fill every second with manic effort - cleaning all the cupboards, driving to ikea twice ( boys beds, a wardrobe for me, underbed drawers ( more later) ), pasting a forest photo mural on a wall in the boys room, buying storage on ebay and nice sheets for all. I have a plan that if I can hold back the tide of dressing up box, airfix, lego. that we will all feel well, and that with a mere flick of my wrist I will scoot the vacuum cleaner/ duster around and then sit to read a book/ write. And yet all this unceasing effort creates a tidal scurf - there is a dismantled platform bed in the hall, child stained mattresses, jigsaws for charity shops, even a playmobil ark ( though I am too fond of the animals to give them away, so it is a shell of a toy, almost useless) and all this tidying feels like it has created only more havoc. I need Exh to move the stuff, need him to help me. But ( and this is indeed a celebration ) Exh has a new home too. He is moving from the hostel on our street to a live/work unit in nearby south london with some friends. The boys are so excited. Though exh has always struggled with change ( as perhaps I do ) so he dips badly before getting back into his stride but a little bit edgy and anxious.
I think when I am lost on one of these lone, obsessive trips to Ikea, this time to the Edmonton one which I have never been to before, because it is the only branch that says underbed storage is 'instock', though because I have left the directions on the kitchen table and then confused right and left from the snatched instructions my kind brother relays over the mobile phone in a layby, I am parked up off a dimly lit roundabout - this is a fantasy - I am chasing something impossible to obtain from flat pack furniture. Can enough Billy bookshelves, a Pax wardrobe and some brightly coloured children's bedroom accessories give peace? And yet the boys new room coincides with many things to achieve it. Though the anger has already mainly blown out of my eldest son - and if this is a brief boast I will still thank every day it is true. Often he puts his hand in mine to walk to school and conceals blown kisses behind his hand in the school line. A boy who used to wake and shout 'Mum! I hate you! The grave things he has had to face in his 9 years make him thoughtful, passionate and generous. In an argument with his brother he occasionally shouts 'I want to hurt you' but he keeps his hands by his side. We have come a long way.
Though I am writing all this late at night and then start to look up on the internet about Nietzsche. I can't remember now the path of this thought though I know it went via Foucault's sado masochism at one point. I start copying and pasting details of Nietzsche's ideas to use later. Only in the morning do I discover a part has been pasted in the middle of my description of the journey to ikea:
I think when I am lost "Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." I am sure you think I am staging this but I am not - it has made me laugh so much for somehow there is something hilarious or true there. Myself parked just off the north circular pondering the lack of god. Though I think I almost did feel that, I just couldn't have said it. I felt spectacularly bleak. Once a long time ago I wrote a story about myself - like a detective story about a teenage romance I had ( though it included an erotic tale of shaving ul's head) the nearest thing to this scrapbook style of confessional writing that I seem to employ now - and in the relatively early days of home computers and temperamental printers it once chewed a whole page spitting out a short piece of text "!@£E$%^^&make a point to all this me me me !@£$TGJNBjnc". I kept it for ages because I thought it was so funny. ( though I have lost that story somehow - though oh, I wish hadn't.)
I wonder too if I need to keep so busy as ul and I have finished our relationship. We intend to see each other but not attempt a reunion. I wish wish wish this wasn't true but it seems necessary. He is a drowned man, though still kicking, white flesh submerged in murky water, too far to get to, his stored anger like heavy stones stiched into his pockets, a current dragging him distorted and grey too far away. I wait in the few quiet, still moments of the day to be hit by grief. But it doesn't come. I am not sure if I am hiding out treading water in my homemaking or nearing dry land. Though I am back to a life alone without the cheer of a supporter.
The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory formerly The Bavarian Chapel is a flat-faced dark brick building on a dark back street behind Regent St with an open side door. I find later a description - 'In its humble guise of eighteenth-century domesticity (it) seems to shrink from attracting the notice of the passers-by' W.de l'Hopital. Then I read more and more and see it was hiding out. As indeed it feels this day as I go through the dark rather depressing door a bit reluctantly and then open another side door into the body of the church discovering a wonderful place, small and elegant, almost like a private chapel . Oh I think. This peaceful space has just been sat here as if waiting. I feel I can breathe for the first time in weeks. I am always rushing to get to a church, always rushing to find the scrap of time to write and here I am, here where I rushed to be and just for a few minutes I can enjoy it. There are a couple of people devoutly praying and a few people moving round. I stand at the back and think anxiously - I am going to end up needing this. This feeling of the devout. I pause writing this and look up the word - it means a pious regard of religion but also geniune and sincere.
The Church was initially a Catholic chapel attached to the Portugese embassy on Golden Square, though there is a whiff of an idea it may even have existed as a clandestine chapel for secret worship prior to the Embassy's cloak of permitted Catholicism. I grasp fully from the 'Warwick Street Church' A short history and guide' what the historic restrictions on Catholics were in the 18th century:
'The penal laws by excluding Catholics from both houses of Parliament made it impossible for them to take part in public life. If a catholic was a land-owner he was threatened with financial ruin, for not only was he subject to the double land tax, but his family estates might pass to his Protestant next-of-kin should they choose to dispossess him. He was forbidden to keep arms and was liable to be deprived of any horse above the value of five pounds. He was incapable of holding any office in the army or navy , or practising as barrister, doctor or school-master. He could not send his children to be educated abroad without a fine and in order that due check might be kept on him and his property he was bound to register his name and estate under penalty of forfeiture, and to enrol all deeds. Some of these laws were, it is true, rarely enforced, but on occasion the individual Catholic was made to bear the full force of them so that the threat of their being put into operation still had to be reckoned with.'
Only in these chapels of diplomatic immunity could mass be heard and here in an invisible and probably smaller building than the present one, squeezed between 23 and 24 Golden Square with an entrance through the stables at the back on Warwick St the Catholics of London could make their furtive worship. Golden Square itself had been developed from 1670 on land where horses grazed. Warwick St was then the highway to Tyburn ( a tiny village at Marble Arch, a place where criminals were hung/there was no Regent Street then ) and particular attention had to be taken of the drainage because the route became impassable in winter when market people travelling that way were in danger of being lost in 'the great waters perpetually lying there all the Winter Season.' Though the development, surrounded by the land of former plague pits and the stench of breweries was only fashionable for a short time. By 1747 the Portugese embassy had moved west to a grander location and the Bavarian embassy moved in keeping the chapel's immunity.
In 1778 the necessity of finding extra men to fight in The American War of Independence ( soldiers had not been allowed to join the armed forces without taking an oath of being a Protestant) meant Parliament passed a piecmeal Catholic Relief Bill. But anti catholic feeling was high in England and Scotland and Protestant Associations were formed nationwide to defend the heritage of Englishmen. The Pope was seen as the bogeyman, Catholic France the enemy, Papists themselves disloyal and dangerous. 'Wild stories began to circulate as, for example, that twenty thousand Jesuits were concealed a network of underground tunnels near the Thames, waiting for orders from Rome to blow up the banks and so flood London.' Lord George Gordon fanned this hatred with speeches in parliament attempting to have the Bill repealed. As the leader of London Protestant Association he presented the Protestant Petition on 2nd June 1780 with a big demonstration gathered outside Parliament. By early evening the petition was turned down because of the circumstances of it's presentation, and the mob grew restless. Troops were called out to move the people from the vicinity of Parliament. Once dispersed, groups of men, some of them drunk, armed with lighted torches and weapons began to move against known Catholic targets - chapels and the residences of well known Catholics. One group burned down the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador in Lincoln's Inn Fields while another set upon The Bavarian Chapel. The rioters broke in, windows were smashed, and the contents of the chapel burnt in the street - books, the altar piece, the organ, balastrades and pews. An old German blacksmith called Bund saved what valuables he could including discovering the Bavarian minister's stash of contraband tea and commodities that he sold to supplement his income. The military arrived and stayed to protect the chapel, sleeping out on straw in the shell of the building. The riots went on for a week, gathering momentum until the anti catholic sentiments were replaced by anti authority of any sort. Prisons were broken into, prisoners released and gaols burnt down.
A subscription was launched in 1788 to rebuild the damaged Warwick St Chapel under the control of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District whilst preserving its links with the Bavarian Legation. Indeed memories of the Gordon Riots inform their decision to build on the same site and the design of the church too:
'It will be in every respect more eligible than to build in another place as it will probably pass unobserved by the Public in general".
'The walls of the new chapel were made of great solidity, being almost a yard thick; there were no windows at all at ground level in Warwick Street and the solid wooden doors were lined with sheet metal on the inside.'
Though despite the riots many Catholics began to push for increased freedom - for it was seen that the reform bill of 1778 had been passed easily by Parliament. There was division within the church as this second relief bill was prepared, even talk of a schism between more conservative and liberal elements of the Church about the oath that must be taken to receive these new privileges - but in June 1791 the Catholic Relief Act was passed allowing Catholics to live without persecution and to be able to worship freely and to be able to build their own churches or chapels. ( Though without bells or steeples)
The Warwick St chapel was opened on 12th March 1790, the feast of St Gregory the Great, to whom it was dedicated. It was the first church erected by native-born Catholics to take advantage of the new liberty accorded to them a few months later by the Relief Act of 1791 whilst keeping its heritage in the penal times of Catholic history and the umbrella of an embassy.
The French revolution which started in 1789 brought large numbers of the French clergy and aristocracy to London where they were well received. The Bavarian Chapel became one of the most fashionable of the Catholic Chapels and it is even believed that a Requiem for Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette may have been sung there in 1793.
Though by 1840 Charles Dickens described Golden Square in Nicholas Nickleby:
'Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere. It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee- singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.'
Here in the church it is quiet. I sit for a minute in a simple wooden pew. Then walk around the small church. Above is the gallery, an intimate audience to the chapel. There are beautiful things - a shrine to Our Lady Immaculate with columns of silver hearts and charms behind glass. I am not sure what these are but discover they were medals brought in thanksgiving for favours received by prayer and that the walls of Warwick St had in previous times been covered by them. A custom brought from the continent they were derided by the architect John Francis Bentley who had been given the task to restore the now unfashionable church 'It is a poor, shapeless and unsightly edifice built after the commonest type of non-Conformist chapels of the time with heavy galleries'. But the priest Monsignor Talbot remonstrated for the practice to continue and here, they are combined in the altarpice. Though the architect ( who later designed Westminster Cathedral) did not succeed in many of his plans - he intended to build a Minor Roman basilica of marble and mosaic which he started with the present apse behind the altar - which would have have left nothing of the old church except the four walls - though money ran out preserving most of the rest of the only remaining Embassy chapel of the 18th century. I discover later I miss the jewel of the church - The Assumption that brought the chapel it's name in 1854 - a bas-relief by the sculptor John Edwards Carew. It has been placed high up somewhere that I didn't see. As the guide says 'Its position over the door is unworthy of it but no better site is now possible.'
At the side just before I leave I see a door ajar to a cupboard like confessional. I am not completely certain you are going to stay with me on this but I have had a thing about small cupboards for as long as I can remember. I always want to know if they will 'fit'. I have scared boyfriends in European cities, not being able to resist just climbing into check a hotel wardrobe, thinking they will be a while in a shower down a creaky lino floored halls. Forgotten soap finds me curled up in the thin floored space, the door pulled to. In my novel I have the heroine crying in such a cupbord in a hut in the middle of a forest:
'The cupboard is somewhere between a wardrobe and a chest and I open the door to find one tweed jacket hanging from a rail. I step inside. My scalp pressing to the splinters of the roof, my back curved, the thin floor bending at the unexpected weight. I pull the door to. I am in the dark, in warm still air and the scratchy smell of male and tweed. Amazed by my own actions I just sit there listening to my breath fill the shape. Sat quiet, it is a surprise to hear crying. Gulping, rattling sobs. The sound comes from a very long way a way and when I hold my breath to listen to them they stop. I touch my face in the pitch black and find tears. Wet and salt like blood. Shocked. I haven't cried like this since I was a little girl and it feels like discovering an unknown muscle, somethin flexing its strength. I don't immediately hear the door of the hut open but I become aware of footfalls and the slam of it close. I am squatting in a shut cupboard in a stranger's place.'
Here in the church I am tempted by this dark and secret space just to try. But I pull myself together and leave the church.
On a boris bike in Piccadilly circus I look up to the neon to see a huge hand play repeated and random rock, paper, scissors. It is a Macdonalds ad. It seems like a big, gaudy, lonely thing. I imagine a lost place late at night, a face lit by a computer screen swaying, gulping another drink, repeatedly counting one two, three, a hand making simple shapes in rhythm, the nearest thing to companionship. Like the touch of a hairdresser when you have been single for a long time, a guilt that this is the nearest thing to intimacy or human warmth. a simple child's game taken over by a computer.
I discover too on the internet 'The Soho Masses Pastoral Council welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered Catholics, their parents, families and friends to Masses at 5.00 pm, on the 1st & 3rd Sundays of every month, at the Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London'. Though I also find some internet outrage to this. I think this church has been brave in the 'home' it has made, it's plain facade, still hiding its worshippers.
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