I wear my I heart London hoodie with some leather-look shorts I got free from work and some sparkly tights and get the bus up to Soho on a Sunday morning. I love what I am wearing. I feel jaunty and perky and somehow witty. Though I probably look ridiculous. It has been a theme since the breakdown of my marriage that I have enjoyed clothes even more whilst trying to spend as little as I can. Bright clashing colours, a rainbow selection of tights, higher and higher heels, sequins, shorts, a jumpsuit - careful purchases made on ebay and at the sales, occasional ( but not many) grit the teeth full price purchases. The confidence of my clothes is like a disguise of who I am. Or just an illustration of the mad bravery with which I believe I conduct my life, all showy and ridiculous and based on almost nothing. Though sometimes I have thought the brighter the outfit the more invisible I am. For a while, age, circumstances, isolation it felt like no one noticed me anymore and despite the mad, garish waving, I started to enjoy my secret agent special mission- to become completely invisible in bright colours and hotpants. Though I could make myself laugh with the nuttiness, could make myself laugh with a crazy combination, could gain so much pleasure from the surprise of colours together and yet no one ever seemed to bat an eyelid. My mum was horrified by an exposed zip on a red dress but it was the zip that was worrying her not the red And yet it all seems so shallow. I wondered if I looked like someone obsessed by clothes ( though I am), someone who cared only about shopping ( which I am not), as if perhaps I dressed like someone I wouldn't perhaps like. Occasionally people talk to me as if I am an idiot or a child and I realise the disguise of my clothes have done their job.
When I walk off the street into St Anne's Church Soho, I haven't really thought through what I am doing. The outside of the church is flat to the street, more like the entrance to a church hall. It is Sunday so I imagine there is a good chance of getting in and indeed a sign on the pavement says 'Church Open' so I walk down a stone passageway to where I can hear singing. The paving stones are old. I think I can just loiter by the door until the service is over or peer through and sit at the back. I can see a room at the end of the passageway with chairs and tea cups laid out and a reception area - so it is a complete surprise to be ambushed from the side by a verger with a service sheet and ushered to a chair in a carpeted room, like a large lounge with an altar piece in it. Communion is just being blessed, and I am sat at the side of the room alongside the altar but not facing it, like a naughty step for late comers. The congregation of about 11 ( which seems large in this small room) all face the altar and the vicar, blessing the wine and wafers, all peer at me in my I heart London hoodie. I feel a bit of a fool. As if I look like the worst sort of tourist. Someone who just gapes and moves on.
Then a man appears at the doorway that I have just come through, that I am sat beside and beckons me out. I have been found out I think panicking. But of what!? I wonder later. I don't have to believe in God to be here. The man, about my own age, good looking starts saying talking intently to me - indicating we should go to a room at the back of the church. 'I have just walked in off the street.' I say. 'I just wanted to have a look.' 'You're not Karen?' He says. 'No.' ( so of all the names that I might, just might be called that is not it ) He apologises and leads me back to my seat. I am peered at again, but it is not unfriendly, just attentive to detail.
Once after exh had left but was still drinking I got him to babysit while I went to an Al anon meeting. They are the meetings for families and friends of alcoholics. I wanted help with the impact of exh's alcoholism on the boys. Or I just wanted help. In a forlorn church basement a similar mismatched group of 11 all sat, disciples arched around empty chairs. I did think oh bloody hell I never wanted to be here and I remembered a friend saying someone she knew had been and that AA met down the hall and it sounded much more fun. But just like writing this I thought - face it. You are in on this. You are involved. Every time you take a step to telling the truth it gets better. These meetings are secret but I wanted to say how warmly I was welcomed and how kind and considerate they were of each other - though it became apparent they were a sort of family - they had know each other for years. Go to a bigger group they told me, we are too comfortable here. I look back into that room in my mind and see a rather disparate group of people but they had become a true family for they told and accepted each others truth and understood the extreme velcro of their attachments. I remember a very damaged seeming woman saying, yes, good, get ok for the children and another ( very like me, indeed ) stood slightly reluctantly but then talked with passion about how she had become well and how she had first come to this group when she was pregnant with her second baby and that child was now in it's late twenties. Their encouragement was really valuable to me. Though I never went back. Something happened after that and exh no longer had unsupervised access for a while so there was no babysitting anymore and by the time he did again I thought I was ok. I remembered this suddenly in this carpeted room with people queueing for communion and in my anxieties to make a good relationship now, and my fears that I am only capable of making a bad one I think should I go back again. That I need some sort of family to watch me wisely.
Out of the church I wander home. I don't have the boys for the weekend and feel aimless. On a whim I go into the National Gallery - I just think I'll do a whistlestop tour of my favourite paintings, aiming for Courbet. There are such fantastic paintings there, Velazquez 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary', Titian 'The Death of Actaeon', a beautiful new Monet with sunset light and some fascinating Norwegian landscape painter Peder Balke that I have never heard of - almost japanese in his brush strokes - whose career as a painter foundered because of his lack of success though he privately continued with these intimate and passionate landscapes perhaps daring more. I end with 'Young Ladies on the Bank of the Seine' by Courbet with their disturbing trotter limbs. I feel connected and buzzing. How often I forget if you see or engage with great things you can feel better.
This summer I have felt very down. Almost despairing. I have been working too hard and I have felt exhausted. The balance of my life has felt wrong, in need of adjustment.
Though I have been meaning to boast for a while that I am reading War and Peace. After Jonathan Franzen - who seemed to refer to it a lot - and another friend with a fabulous child heart raved about it - I thought it best be done. I never cared for Anna Karenina though I think I read it twice - but this is the most amazing writing, most fantastic tale. I have always thought I was a I 'heart' Dostoyevsky girl with his dense psychological currents of the soul but here the writing is almost transparent, a clean camera eye, swivelling to describe a whole battlefield, turning to the petty conceits of a soiree, gathering together the trifling mistakes that can become a marriage. I am still less than half the way through ( I read it in short bursts on the tube ) but oh, I am pleased I have left it until now - when I was young I would have wolfed it down and not taken time to admire the immensity and beauty of it. I think when I have finished it I will just start again. Set myself to read it every year.
When I get home and read about the church I realise I haven't understood at all. The church is much much older than I imagined - consecrated in 1686 but bombed out during the blitz. It lay between Wardour St and Dean St and there is still a proper church facade and a churchyard on the Wardour Street side opened as St Anne's gardens. Though I hadn't seen this, have never noticed it. Built in the fields of Soho - Christopher Wren or William Talman are said to be the architects - though there seems to be difficulty in assigning authorship - later repairs in 1830 caused James Savage the architect and surveyor 'to criticize Talman's incapacity on the assumption that he was the designer of the roof, contrasting it with Wren's superficially similar 'Master piece of construction' at St. James's: for 'Mr Talman at St. Anne's has missed the proper Principle of constructing a roof of this form'.
During the war the church was hit twice during savage raids - 24th September 1940 and then again on May 10th 1941 ( an intense night of bombing. 300 german bombers arriving over London on a moonlit night, 110 killed and 385 seriously injured in the raids.) That night a bomb passed right through a block of flats opposite my son's school into the earth. It exploded on the clay of the ancient foundations of the old Millbank prison bringing down 24 flats. 24 died though 20 people trapped in a shelter were rescued after an hour and a half digging. Then in February 1944 ( which I include because it is such a poignant and revealing description) 'In the shadow of St Anne's sad but beautiful ruin' there was another bomb nearby. 'A gas main was alight opposite, a mound of brown earth steamed where a small club, fortunately unfilled at that time, had been accomodated: up Wardour Street firemen trailed their hoses among dress maker's dummies; on the trees in St Anne's churchyard hung a tattering of scarecrow garments blasted from a second hand clothiers. The Prime Minster arrived and talked with rescuers and rescued. It was a cold February night: firelight, water on the streets, a woman sobbing dark in a doorway, a great kernel of activity gradually decreasing as the incident was cleared and the night wore on.' The Blitz Westminster at War. William Sansom
Afterwards, between 1941 and 1958 the church promoted a link between the church and the literary world with the St Anne's Society meeting at St Anne's house - Agatha Christie and T.S. Elliott attended meetings and the ashes of Dorothy L Sayers ( a longtime church warden ) are buried deep beneath a brick chamber under the tower.
By 1953 it was thought the church would not be re built and the remains of the east wall were demolished, the site deconsecrated and prepared for sale. In the 60s as Piccadilly became a centre for drug addicts Ken Leech a priest on the staff of St Anne's opened a temporary night shelter for the homeless in the basement of St Anne's house. Soho had become a troubled place 'The site of the Church was a car park. The Parish School in Great Windmill Street was threatened with closure. The sex industry had taken over the area and the local authority was moving tenants out of Soho'. The Soho Society ( a group formed in the early 70s to stop the demoliton and redevelopment of Soho) restored the tower in 1979. 'Let people know that life and heart and hope are in Soho', wrote John Betjeman, patron of the fund raising appeal.
By 1990 the church was rebuilt with a community centre and flats. By 1999 it was a place of community focus for the grief connected to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan.
I go back just to look at the building I had not seen, to visit the churchyard. It is early evening in Soho. I can glimpse further down Wardour street throngs of people, bright lights and rainbow flags. The churchyard is gated - almost armed against intrusion - and I realise I have walked past hundreds of times and not noticed the garden or the chuchyard. I peer through the smell of piss and the mesh of the gate and the surprise of the church facade and tower. Hazlitt I see in huge lettering on a tomb. A couple argue rather theatrically about cigarettes by the wall of the churchyard. I don't know if they are friends or lovers but I think he is gay and she is kidding herself about something.
Amen.
Sunday, 28 August 2011
Thursday, 7 July 2011
St Paul's Covent Garden
The day before it was announced the News of The World would close I had to leave work - the story gathering momentum on the overhead tv in the office - and rush rush rush to the Wigmore Hall in a lunch break I rarely take to see my son in a school choir sing a song composed at school with musicians from Wigmore Hall about being evacuated from London during World War II.
It was beautiful and moving to be there in the middle of my working day - to see bright faces and young voices on a stage singing about war. Though there were choirs of old people singing too - watching the children with stoic kindness and patience to the unfeasibly cheerful interpretations of terrifying events some of them had witnessed.
Back under the telly I am slightly breathless from squeezing an hour lunch break into the hour and a half rush it took and the NOTW story gathers momentum. Each news bulletin reports advertisers refusing to advertise with a newspaper that hacked the phones of young girls who had been murdered and soldiers that had been killed. Remember I work for a rival Sunday tabloid magazine with a tiny budget. I sit at the end of the newspapers news desk underneath the tv attached high up to the ceiling and if it fell it would land on my head. Often I hear stories as they come in before anyone else notices, though I rarely crick my neck to turn to see it because I am usually too busy. Though sometimes I have watched while journalists start to notice or gather around the tv up to 10 minutes later, heads tilted, mouths slightly slack or sometimes chewing.
The day it was announced the NOTW would close I notice the ticker tape underneath the picture of the tv screen saying the last edition of the News of the World would be this coming Sunday. My eyebrows are Gromit-like with shock. Then furrowed as the men gather opposite the screen shouting 'Fuck fuck fuck.' Over and over. I fiddle with my phone daring myself to take a picture of them but I don't. Someone is shouting 'Who is she fucking?' as the report of Rebecca Brooks breaking the news to the workforce of over 200 comes in. It really looks like she had been saved while others thrown overboard. Indeed even to this day it seems if she had gone they might might have saved something. A couple of journalists who had worked briefly for the NOTW caw caw with glee. It was never a nice place to work. Though no one was surprised by the hacking accusations. I think we had always known enough to know it was probably true. How did they get the stories otherwise?
I start writing this post just after the NOTW closure. It's going to be a good one I think. I am an eye witness I think. But my computer starts behaving badly and I can't seem to save onto the blog, and I haven't been to a church and then like a tidal wave the knock on effect reaches me. The small cheap but densely worked on magazine doubles overnight. We work flat out until 10pm. The staff of about 6 people. We congratulate ourselves as the bumper issue goes to press. Then a day later a completely new bumper glossy fat magazine is demanded and we worked until 2am as the mice scamper in the office. I cycle back that night on a Boris Bike but it is a beautiful straight line out from the City of London to Westminter passing church after church and Christopher Wren's St Paul's is like a ghostly white whale passed in a dark ocean and I think oh it is beautiful - and despite my tiredness - briefly feel somehow I am in the right place.
The following lunchtime we are told we have done the wrong sort of magazine and another is produced in 2 hours. Later when the Murdochs are challenged by custard and questions we work flat out to produce this new glossy celebrity magazine week after week still with a staff of 6. The question to be asked is why did you not wonder why your newspaper was so outrageously better than the competitors? I don't think it was asked or answered.
Standing manning a stall at the school bazaar to throw wet sponges at teachers poking their heads through a painted board I get texts saying the office has been raided by the police searching the computer of an ex NOTW journo who sits near my desk at the weekend. It seems ludicrous though I wish I hadn't missed 'the action'.
Timing has become a blur but in the middle of all this my Indonesian friend leaves her husband appearing at my door sobbing with her son and they sleep in my bed as I drink wine guiltily at my small computer desk trying to get this written. Though they have gone by the time we wake up the next morning.
By the time school breaks up 2 issues of the new magazine have been completed and I have been working until 9 or 10 everynight, doing extra days too. Exh has looked after the boys as I come home late but preparations and cleaning for the holidays are behind. We go camping in a friend's ( huge ) garden in Norfolk and I organise fashion shoots by mobile phone while my sons make amazing shelters by the side of a dank smelling stream. I am near exhaustion. But I have become a strangely welcome person at social events. A talking head, our man on the ground - my slightly strange and reviled world, like insects under a stone, suddenly revealed, examined and interesting.
Then it is the annual camp to Dorset and I still haven't been to a church. I am missing the moment I think ruefully as I pack sleeping bags and folding kitchen cupboards, consulting my camping checklist, ticking corkscrew, washing up liquid, matches, first aid kit. I am organised in a disorganised way and when I write this I am not sure which way round the sentence should go. By the coast in Dorset the children are allowed idyllic freedom to play in hay bales, explore, fish in rockpools, walk dogs and we sit at campfires every night. Text reports start coming in that London is burning. It seem overdramatic and unlikely. But suddenly everyone is texting the same thing and everyone is scared. My friend in Notting Hills says that a crowd is rampaging down her street with baseball bats, burning a motorbike and breaking windows, and that a black girl she talked to said - 'We all just hate Cameron.' The riot police collect in a church at the end of her street. From the distance of the warmth of a campfire in a field and with no images I imagine it to be organised and political, those spidery violent bloc kids banging their staves down wealthy streets, an organised mob realising numbers are on their side. I know if I was young I would find it exciting but I would want to know what I was aiming for - to tip the world so dangerously. But when I come back and look at news reports it just looks really nasty, a hooded mob flexing it's muscles and the desire for desirable things itself burning capitalism down. I like Pauline Pearce who stood in a rioting crowd in Hackney 'We're not gathering together to fight for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker...if we are fighting for a cause let's fight for a fucking cause. You lot piss me off.' I don't know. Some people do have a lot more than others. Though a lot of us have the same sort of things. It is opportunity that is missing. And this was an opportunity for some. And just excitement too. I think that property has made the haves and the have no hope of having more extreme though really it would be possible for everyone to easily have enough. People with nothing are working really hard and people with lots are too. Both eye other's lives angrily.
The boys give me a 'I heart LONDON' hoodie for my birthday. I have always wanted one. But the day I get it is ironic.
Back in London I am given a couple of hours to buy my son's birthday present. London is full of exhausted coppers from all across the country. I have a quick drink with UL and walk through the beautiful and sweet smelling rose garden into St Paul's Church in Covent Garden. In a big airy space there are singers practising for a concert. Pure voices singing Agnus Dei 'The Lamb of God.' Known as the Actor's Church there are tablets and inscriptions to many famous names. Just glancing around I see engraved plaques to Noel Coward and Vivian Leigh and then sit at a pew not thinking anything very much apart from it is nice just to sit and not rush, not wash up in a field, not be cross with children, not be cross, just not do anything. The church was designed by Inigo Jones as part of the development on the site of an old walled garden belonging to Westminster Abbey commisioned by Francis Russell 4th Earl of Bedford to build a square for the gentry. Inigo based his designs on what he had seen on his Italian travels and the vast square became a template for town planning. The first victim of the plague was buried here - Margaret Ponteous 1665 and J. M. W. Turner baptised here too.
I discover that Thomas Manton, the first minister was a puritan who had to leave under the Great Ejection of 1662 when 2.000 members of the clergy refused to sign the Act of Uniformity oath agreeing to use only the Book of Common Prayer. Only repreived in 1872 by the Act of Uniformity Amendment the efforts to outlaw non conformists left many clergy out of service and out of society. I want to cover this and read this. But I just don't have time.
http://www.archive.org/details/nonconformistsm00calagoog
Samuel Pepys notes the first 'Italian puppet play' seen under the portico of St Paul's on 9 May 1662 - the first recorded performance of 'Punch and Judy' commorated by the annual MayFayre service in May.
When I walk out of the church to the front of the portico there is a shouting escapologist in chains surrounded by a large cheering crowd.
My Indonesian friend shyly borrows the boy's disco light. Her husband wants to go clubbing with her like they used to do before they were married. It would mean she had to take the scarf from her hair and she is frightened. She thinks the disco light is a start. That evening I try to imagine their small flat with the coloured lights revolving, then hesitate from intruding on their lives. Though I do by writing about them.
Amen.
It was beautiful and moving to be there in the middle of my working day - to see bright faces and young voices on a stage singing about war. Though there were choirs of old people singing too - watching the children with stoic kindness and patience to the unfeasibly cheerful interpretations of terrifying events some of them had witnessed.
Back under the telly I am slightly breathless from squeezing an hour lunch break into the hour and a half rush it took and the NOTW story gathers momentum. Each news bulletin reports advertisers refusing to advertise with a newspaper that hacked the phones of young girls who had been murdered and soldiers that had been killed. Remember I work for a rival Sunday tabloid magazine with a tiny budget. I sit at the end of the newspapers news desk underneath the tv attached high up to the ceiling and if it fell it would land on my head. Often I hear stories as they come in before anyone else notices, though I rarely crick my neck to turn to see it because I am usually too busy. Though sometimes I have watched while journalists start to notice or gather around the tv up to 10 minutes later, heads tilted, mouths slightly slack or sometimes chewing.
The day it was announced the NOTW would close I notice the ticker tape underneath the picture of the tv screen saying the last edition of the News of the World would be this coming Sunday. My eyebrows are Gromit-like with shock. Then furrowed as the men gather opposite the screen shouting 'Fuck fuck fuck.' Over and over. I fiddle with my phone daring myself to take a picture of them but I don't. Someone is shouting 'Who is she fucking?' as the report of Rebecca Brooks breaking the news to the workforce of over 200 comes in. It really looks like she had been saved while others thrown overboard. Indeed even to this day it seems if she had gone they might might have saved something. A couple of journalists who had worked briefly for the NOTW caw caw with glee. It was never a nice place to work. Though no one was surprised by the hacking accusations. I think we had always known enough to know it was probably true. How did they get the stories otherwise?
I start writing this post just after the NOTW closure. It's going to be a good one I think. I am an eye witness I think. But my computer starts behaving badly and I can't seem to save onto the blog, and I haven't been to a church and then like a tidal wave the knock on effect reaches me. The small cheap but densely worked on magazine doubles overnight. We work flat out until 10pm. The staff of about 6 people. We congratulate ourselves as the bumper issue goes to press. Then a day later a completely new bumper glossy fat magazine is demanded and we worked until 2am as the mice scamper in the office. I cycle back that night on a Boris Bike but it is a beautiful straight line out from the City of London to Westminter passing church after church and Christopher Wren's St Paul's is like a ghostly white whale passed in a dark ocean and I think oh it is beautiful - and despite my tiredness - briefly feel somehow I am in the right place.
The following lunchtime we are told we have done the wrong sort of magazine and another is produced in 2 hours. Later when the Murdochs are challenged by custard and questions we work flat out to produce this new glossy celebrity magazine week after week still with a staff of 6. The question to be asked is why did you not wonder why your newspaper was so outrageously better than the competitors? I don't think it was asked or answered.
Standing manning a stall at the school bazaar to throw wet sponges at teachers poking their heads through a painted board I get texts saying the office has been raided by the police searching the computer of an ex NOTW journo who sits near my desk at the weekend. It seems ludicrous though I wish I hadn't missed 'the action'.
Timing has become a blur but in the middle of all this my Indonesian friend leaves her husband appearing at my door sobbing with her son and they sleep in my bed as I drink wine guiltily at my small computer desk trying to get this written. Though they have gone by the time we wake up the next morning.
By the time school breaks up 2 issues of the new magazine have been completed and I have been working until 9 or 10 everynight, doing extra days too. Exh has looked after the boys as I come home late but preparations and cleaning for the holidays are behind. We go camping in a friend's ( huge ) garden in Norfolk and I organise fashion shoots by mobile phone while my sons make amazing shelters by the side of a dank smelling stream. I am near exhaustion. But I have become a strangely welcome person at social events. A talking head, our man on the ground - my slightly strange and reviled world, like insects under a stone, suddenly revealed, examined and interesting.
Then it is the annual camp to Dorset and I still haven't been to a church. I am missing the moment I think ruefully as I pack sleeping bags and folding kitchen cupboards, consulting my camping checklist, ticking corkscrew, washing up liquid, matches, first aid kit. I am organised in a disorganised way and when I write this I am not sure which way round the sentence should go. By the coast in Dorset the children are allowed idyllic freedom to play in hay bales, explore, fish in rockpools, walk dogs and we sit at campfires every night. Text reports start coming in that London is burning. It seem overdramatic and unlikely. But suddenly everyone is texting the same thing and everyone is scared. My friend in Notting Hills says that a crowd is rampaging down her street with baseball bats, burning a motorbike and breaking windows, and that a black girl she talked to said - 'We all just hate Cameron.' The riot police collect in a church at the end of her street. From the distance of the warmth of a campfire in a field and with no images I imagine it to be organised and political, those spidery violent bloc kids banging their staves down wealthy streets, an organised mob realising numbers are on their side. I know if I was young I would find it exciting but I would want to know what I was aiming for - to tip the world so dangerously. But when I come back and look at news reports it just looks really nasty, a hooded mob flexing it's muscles and the desire for desirable things itself burning capitalism down. I like Pauline Pearce who stood in a rioting crowd in Hackney 'We're not gathering together to fight for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker...if we are fighting for a cause let's fight for a fucking cause. You lot piss me off.' I don't know. Some people do have a lot more than others. Though a lot of us have the same sort of things. It is opportunity that is missing. And this was an opportunity for some. And just excitement too. I think that property has made the haves and the have no hope of having more extreme though really it would be possible for everyone to easily have enough. People with nothing are working really hard and people with lots are too. Both eye other's lives angrily.
The boys give me a 'I heart LONDON' hoodie for my birthday. I have always wanted one. But the day I get it is ironic.
Back in London I am given a couple of hours to buy my son's birthday present. London is full of exhausted coppers from all across the country. I have a quick drink with UL and walk through the beautiful and sweet smelling rose garden into St Paul's Church in Covent Garden. In a big airy space there are singers practising for a concert. Pure voices singing Agnus Dei 'The Lamb of God.' Known as the Actor's Church there are tablets and inscriptions to many famous names. Just glancing around I see engraved plaques to Noel Coward and Vivian Leigh and then sit at a pew not thinking anything very much apart from it is nice just to sit and not rush, not wash up in a field, not be cross with children, not be cross, just not do anything. The church was designed by Inigo Jones as part of the development on the site of an old walled garden belonging to Westminster Abbey commisioned by Francis Russell 4th Earl of Bedford to build a square for the gentry. Inigo based his designs on what he had seen on his Italian travels and the vast square became a template for town planning. The first victim of the plague was buried here - Margaret Ponteous 1665 and J. M. W. Turner baptised here too.
I discover that Thomas Manton, the first minister was a puritan who had to leave under the Great Ejection of 1662 when 2.000 members of the clergy refused to sign the Act of Uniformity oath agreeing to use only the Book of Common Prayer. Only repreived in 1872 by the Act of Uniformity Amendment the efforts to outlaw non conformists left many clergy out of service and out of society. I want to cover this and read this. But I just don't have time.
http://www.archive.org/details/nonconformistsm00calagoog
Samuel Pepys notes the first 'Italian puppet play' seen under the portico of St Paul's on 9 May 1662 - the first recorded performance of 'Punch and Judy' commorated by the annual MayFayre service in May.
When I walk out of the church to the front of the portico there is a shouting escapologist in chains surrounded by a large cheering crowd.
My Indonesian friend shyly borrows the boy's disco light. Her husband wants to go clubbing with her like they used to do before they were married. It would mean she had to take the scarf from her hair and she is frightened. She thinks the disco light is a start. That evening I try to imagine their small flat with the coloured lights revolving, then hesitate from intruding on their lives. Though I do by writing about them.
Amen.
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Queen's Chapel, St James's
I go back to Rymans and buy purple stickers then stick them on the map to mark the churches I have been to. Dark dots radiating out from Westminster Abbey, clustering near the centre then broadening out into Pimlico, Chelsea, Mayfair and two stray dots south of the river. The only yellow dot ( marking churches I haven't been to on this street map of London) surrounded by purple ones still is the Queen's Chapel at St James's. I have tried a couple of times to get in, but it is only open on Sundays for services and is only open certain months of the year.
I try again when the boys are away with exh and his mum, though I haven't finished writing Corpus Christi. I think oh good I am going to speed the whole project up, go back to visiting a church a week, mainly write about the churches IT IS GOING TO BE GREAT I THINK.
The night before UL and I drink too much, argue, cry and then walk through London in the middle of the night, holding hands. It feels way too dramatic for the sort of people we are really. When we were together we never spoke much of love or ourselves - we just were. We did things side by side and we allowed each other enormous personal freedom. By the end I wanted to talk about love, I wanted a plan. I probably sat like a slightly intense puppy waiting for that ball - but it never came. Now and completely unexpectedly it has been dropped at my feet.
I wake that sunday morning way too early feeling delicate and slightly desperate. The flat is quiet. This would be my life without the children I think and it feels unbearable. All that myself. All that not them. For they are so completely and utterly fascinating to me. I am not sure if at the core of me is depression or joy sometimes but having limitations to being me - all that thinking about myself - the worry and energy and slight paranoia and over bearing generosity - seems more manageable spread out and focussed on two clever bright and funny boys. I wonder how I will suffer when they've had enough, grown out of it completely - and it is a title for something - all that me. Though - and possibly because so much of myself has been provided - they are nonchalent and rebellious of it already. But adapting at each age from the tiny dry and nervous papery nappies of new borns and the beat of their sparrow hearts under soft baby gros to the seemingly endless school uniform trousers growing too short and feet too big for trainers and vivid moments when I turn to watch them, sometimes just briefly, with absolute wonder and pride and laughter. I hope when the time comes it will just be a new stage. Somedays I shout at them. ' You NEED to grow up to be smart, clever, funny, kind young men.' YOU CAN DO IT!' And oh oh oh I hope they do.
I walk through St James's Park on a sunday morning and it is packed. There is a royal wedding knock on to tourism. The crowds are thronging. Enthusiastic about where they are. Though all the flags are gone and the flesh of the pink tarmac where that beautiful and jaunty navy Aston Martin drove is slightly naked without them.
The Queen's Chapel is tucked at the side of the little street alongside St James's Palace on the opposite side. A white house flat to the street - nicely proportioned, a simple gable roof, large windows like wide-opened eyes and a high forehead. There is a verger standing outside the chapel and when I nod to her and ask if it is ok to come in, she takes me in and seats me. It is hushed and wealthy, though less secret than the dark surprise of the packed Chapel Royal which is it's sister church. This Chapel is open in the summer the other - the Chapel Royal in the winter. Here light pours in from huge windows of blurry old leaded glass, and the ceiling though strangely only half gilded is oppulent. There is rich gold plates at the altar and a painting. I spend ages looking at this picture trying to work out what it is before realising I should put my glasses on. When I do I see a mother and baby with another child and I can't remember what I thought it was before I could see it. It had just seemed a mystery. The organ is playing majestically. A woman on her own, of roughly the same age and reassuringly not grand is seated next to me. I think wouldn't it be funny if we were doing the same thing. Then I think what if she were a 'mystery worshipper'. You would probably need to be a dedicated reader to know who 'Mystery worshipper' is? But there is a site
http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/specials/london_05/index.html
that reviews church services and early on, when I first went very fearfully into churches, avoiding services, barely getting into them at all I seemed to be in their wake. Early on my friend even said if your life was a film - mystery worshipper would be the romantic interest. Though at that point I didn't know I needed one.
At the back I can see the choir and clergy gather in the sunshine of the pavement before the procession down the aisle. I recognise some of them from before, the little mice boys, the man with the black folded and pleated sleeves but it is less surprising, less Alice in Wonderland. The establishment of establishment is more open here because it is daylight and also because we face forwards towards the altar not each other watching the procession. Maybe too the trappings of establishment have had a resurgence, even since I wrote the Chapel Royal - standing alongside a ladder at the Royal Wedding watching golden coaches and soldiers I was moved by the continuity of history and the acceptance of it even if I didn't really believe what I was being moved by or tacitly accepting.
Next to this other woman - strangely more like me than I anticipate in this church - and someone who also declines the communion offered when the congregation rises and queues at the altar. I sense a relief from both of us - I am pleased not to be the only outsider and she must be pleased I don't need to clamber past her to get to the altar. Or both.
As communion is taken the choir sing Tallis. Thomas Tallis was part of the Chapel Royal ( living within St James's Palace) from 1543 and composed and performed for Henry V111, Edward V1, Mary 1 and Elizabeth 1 (1558 until he died in 1585). As composer and organist under the royal wing he managed to avoid the religious controversies of the times though he remained an unreformed roman catholic. It was a difficult and suspicious position to be. Early in his career he was part of the monastery at Holy Cross in Waltham until the abbey was dissovled in 1540. There he acquired a volume of treatises by Leonel Power at this dissolution and preserved it - one of the treatise prohibited consecutive unisons, fifths, and octaves. Later Queen Elizabeth granted him and Byrd 21 years sole rights to compose polyphonic music from 1575 and a patent to print and publish music too, which was one of the first arrangements of that type in the country. I struggle to understand this. The restrictions sound very tight. UL is a muscian and when I ask him he sends me a thoughtful essay explaining the central ideas of of sacred proportion, of chiming simple notes perfectly.
In the service with the beautiful music and the choir's voices building one of those boys - not much older than my son and with reassuringly scruffy hair and a thoughtful but not goody goody expression, opens his mouth, and this sound of gold and heaven and height soars out - his eyes slightly baffled by the voice he posseses.
I think the personal restriction of having a family has made me happier, more fulfilled, more open to people, more keen on joy.
At a time when Catholic worship was illegal in England The Queen's Chapel was built as a roman catholic place of worship for the Spanish Infanta to aid negotiations in a potential marriage with Charles 1 that fell through. Though it was then used for the wife he married - the french catholic Henrietta Maria. The beautiful building was completed in 1629 causing resentment and suspicion, indeed it's plain exterior was meant to deflect this outcry. But in troubled times it contributed to the conflict that eventually erupted between Charles and Parliament into the English Civil War and Charles 1's eventual execution infront of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall.
Both the Queen's Chapel and the Banqueting house were designed by Inigo Jones - a welsh catholic cloth makers son who travelled in Italy studying architecture with 'Collector' Earl of Arundel. He brought a version of the Italian architect Palladio's work home and translated it into early Palladianism here in England. Based on the proportion and symmetry of formal classical temples of the Ancient Greeks and Romans Inigo Jones fascination even led him to our own ancient structures - he was the first to measure Stonehenge. I don't know why - I find the scene, those old stones on a windswept plain being studied by a man in the thrall of classical mathematics beautiful and mysterious.
Walking back from dropping the boys off at school one morning I hear and then see a horse drawn cart move across the traffic lights crossroads of Horseferry Road and Marsham Street, I have been deep in thought about the boys, about writing this, about all the things that make my life. I look up and laugh as if there is a tear in modern life and some old bit of history is coming towards me, two beautiful horses pulling this open carriage with two men in top hats perched high. On our street, on the thin dark street that Charles Dickens called 'Devil's Acre' the street where my sons have said that they are scared by something - it feels dark to them - a building oppposite has been taken over by a pack of youth. I wonder if they are squattting. They sit and smoke at the huge windows and watch people pass below though my brother who is a surveyer came to dinner one night ( roast chicken, gratin dauphinoise and salad) and texted me as he left to say that he forgot to tell me his company surveyed a brothel down here. I think how funny, the ground is the same, this dark street has not changed.
Amen
I try again when the boys are away with exh and his mum, though I haven't finished writing Corpus Christi. I think oh good I am going to speed the whole project up, go back to visiting a church a week, mainly write about the churches IT IS GOING TO BE GREAT I THINK.
The night before UL and I drink too much, argue, cry and then walk through London in the middle of the night, holding hands. It feels way too dramatic for the sort of people we are really. When we were together we never spoke much of love or ourselves - we just were. We did things side by side and we allowed each other enormous personal freedom. By the end I wanted to talk about love, I wanted a plan. I probably sat like a slightly intense puppy waiting for that ball - but it never came. Now and completely unexpectedly it has been dropped at my feet.
I wake that sunday morning way too early feeling delicate and slightly desperate. The flat is quiet. This would be my life without the children I think and it feels unbearable. All that myself. All that not them. For they are so completely and utterly fascinating to me. I am not sure if at the core of me is depression or joy sometimes but having limitations to being me - all that thinking about myself - the worry and energy and slight paranoia and over bearing generosity - seems more manageable spread out and focussed on two clever bright and funny boys. I wonder how I will suffer when they've had enough, grown out of it completely - and it is a title for something - all that me. Though - and possibly because so much of myself has been provided - they are nonchalent and rebellious of it already. But adapting at each age from the tiny dry and nervous papery nappies of new borns and the beat of their sparrow hearts under soft baby gros to the seemingly endless school uniform trousers growing too short and feet too big for trainers and vivid moments when I turn to watch them, sometimes just briefly, with absolute wonder and pride and laughter. I hope when the time comes it will just be a new stage. Somedays I shout at them. ' You NEED to grow up to be smart, clever, funny, kind young men.' YOU CAN DO IT!' And oh oh oh I hope they do.
I walk through St James's Park on a sunday morning and it is packed. There is a royal wedding knock on to tourism. The crowds are thronging. Enthusiastic about where they are. Though all the flags are gone and the flesh of the pink tarmac where that beautiful and jaunty navy Aston Martin drove is slightly naked without them.
The Queen's Chapel is tucked at the side of the little street alongside St James's Palace on the opposite side. A white house flat to the street - nicely proportioned, a simple gable roof, large windows like wide-opened eyes and a high forehead. There is a verger standing outside the chapel and when I nod to her and ask if it is ok to come in, she takes me in and seats me. It is hushed and wealthy, though less secret than the dark surprise of the packed Chapel Royal which is it's sister church. This Chapel is open in the summer the other - the Chapel Royal in the winter. Here light pours in from huge windows of blurry old leaded glass, and the ceiling though strangely only half gilded is oppulent. There is rich gold plates at the altar and a painting. I spend ages looking at this picture trying to work out what it is before realising I should put my glasses on. When I do I see a mother and baby with another child and I can't remember what I thought it was before I could see it. It had just seemed a mystery. The organ is playing majestically. A woman on her own, of roughly the same age and reassuringly not grand is seated next to me. I think wouldn't it be funny if we were doing the same thing. Then I think what if she were a 'mystery worshipper'. You would probably need to be a dedicated reader to know who 'Mystery worshipper' is? But there is a site
http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/specials/london_05/index.html
that reviews church services and early on, when I first went very fearfully into churches, avoiding services, barely getting into them at all I seemed to be in their wake. Early on my friend even said if your life was a film - mystery worshipper would be the romantic interest. Though at that point I didn't know I needed one.
At the back I can see the choir and clergy gather in the sunshine of the pavement before the procession down the aisle. I recognise some of them from before, the little mice boys, the man with the black folded and pleated sleeves but it is less surprising, less Alice in Wonderland. The establishment of establishment is more open here because it is daylight and also because we face forwards towards the altar not each other watching the procession. Maybe too the trappings of establishment have had a resurgence, even since I wrote the Chapel Royal - standing alongside a ladder at the Royal Wedding watching golden coaches and soldiers I was moved by the continuity of history and the acceptance of it even if I didn't really believe what I was being moved by or tacitly accepting.
Next to this other woman - strangely more like me than I anticipate in this church - and someone who also declines the communion offered when the congregation rises and queues at the altar. I sense a relief from both of us - I am pleased not to be the only outsider and she must be pleased I don't need to clamber past her to get to the altar. Or both.
As communion is taken the choir sing Tallis. Thomas Tallis was part of the Chapel Royal ( living within St James's Palace) from 1543 and composed and performed for Henry V111, Edward V1, Mary 1 and Elizabeth 1 (1558 until he died in 1585). As composer and organist under the royal wing he managed to avoid the religious controversies of the times though he remained an unreformed roman catholic. It was a difficult and suspicious position to be. Early in his career he was part of the monastery at Holy Cross in Waltham until the abbey was dissovled in 1540. There he acquired a volume of treatises by Leonel Power at this dissolution and preserved it - one of the treatise prohibited consecutive unisons, fifths, and octaves. Later Queen Elizabeth granted him and Byrd 21 years sole rights to compose polyphonic music from 1575 and a patent to print and publish music too, which was one of the first arrangements of that type in the country. I struggle to understand this. The restrictions sound very tight. UL is a muscian and when I ask him he sends me a thoughtful essay explaining the central ideas of of sacred proportion, of chiming simple notes perfectly.
In the service with the beautiful music and the choir's voices building one of those boys - not much older than my son and with reassuringly scruffy hair and a thoughtful but not goody goody expression, opens his mouth, and this sound of gold and heaven and height soars out - his eyes slightly baffled by the voice he posseses.
I think the personal restriction of having a family has made me happier, more fulfilled, more open to people, more keen on joy.
At a time when Catholic worship was illegal in England The Queen's Chapel was built as a roman catholic place of worship for the Spanish Infanta to aid negotiations in a potential marriage with Charles 1 that fell through. Though it was then used for the wife he married - the french catholic Henrietta Maria. The beautiful building was completed in 1629 causing resentment and suspicion, indeed it's plain exterior was meant to deflect this outcry. But in troubled times it contributed to the conflict that eventually erupted between Charles and Parliament into the English Civil War and Charles 1's eventual execution infront of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall.
Both the Queen's Chapel and the Banqueting house were designed by Inigo Jones - a welsh catholic cloth makers son who travelled in Italy studying architecture with 'Collector' Earl of Arundel. He brought a version of the Italian architect Palladio's work home and translated it into early Palladianism here in England. Based on the proportion and symmetry of formal classical temples of the Ancient Greeks and Romans Inigo Jones fascination even led him to our own ancient structures - he was the first to measure Stonehenge. I don't know why - I find the scene, those old stones on a windswept plain being studied by a man in the thrall of classical mathematics beautiful and mysterious.
Walking back from dropping the boys off at school one morning I hear and then see a horse drawn cart move across the traffic lights crossroads of Horseferry Road and Marsham Street, I have been deep in thought about the boys, about writing this, about all the things that make my life. I look up and laugh as if there is a tear in modern life and some old bit of history is coming towards me, two beautiful horses pulling this open carriage with two men in top hats perched high. On our street, on the thin dark street that Charles Dickens called 'Devil's Acre' the street where my sons have said that they are scared by something - it feels dark to them - a building oppposite has been taken over by a pack of youth. I wonder if they are squattting. They sit and smoke at the huge windows and watch people pass below though my brother who is a surveyer came to dinner one night ( roast chicken, gratin dauphinoise and salad) and texted me as he left to say that he forgot to tell me his company surveyed a brothel down here. I think how funny, the ground is the same, this dark street has not changed.
Amen
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Corpus Christi Covent Garden
I buy a street map of London and a pack of fluorescent yellow dot stickers. The boys and I lay the map out on the kitchen table and 'spot' the cross symbols of churches dotted across London. I don't ask them to help but they want to. I am trying to sort out a plan. Where to go to next, how far to go. We take it in turns to laugh uproariously at the amount of stickers used, the amount of churches found, the amount of yellow circles covering the map. There are over a 150 churches that I haven't visited in a central London area stretching from St John's Wood in the North and Kennington in the South then Earl's Court in the West to Whitchapel in the East. Even later when all of us are doing other things, the map is still laid out and we take it in turns
to chuckle as we pass by the table at mum's crazy plan, at the exhausting look of it, at the density of churches in this city. These children have barely ever been to a church, do not really understand what I am up to, but are almost giddy with the madness of the challenge laid out. 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Maddox Ford is one of my favourite novels - the surface tension of the story as tight as a stretched balloon, the bleakness written with an ominous lilting charm, the structure held by spokes of taut engineering - and in it a description of a man lining up a polo shot, an affair, the sidelong squint of concentration and determination - the 'it might just be done' glance. I feel like that now. I am washing up, tidying up, but when I see the map, I stop briefly, suck in my breath and think that 'it might' a pause, 'just be done'.
Since the Royal Wedding I have been suffering a kind of 'low' about my own project. I sort of wished I had stopped then - it would have been roughly a year and would have been a decent ending - a bit of a fanfare finale. I would have been able to hold my head up high that I had the discipline to carry it out and that I had learnt so much by doing it. Though as soon as I left Rymans I realised I should have bought another colour sticker for the churches I have visited and mark them too. But even without I am impressed by the shape made in the midst of the constellation of bright dots for with very little research or plan, just a nosing around, I seem to have caught almost all the local churches in this spiralling net. There is just one Pimlico church left out, left to do, right out towards the river.
I regret now I haven't taken pictures of each church, I regret sometimes too that I haven't just written dry descriptions of each building not muddled myself within their stories. I have become sick of my own slightly melodic moaning - for my rage with exh seems quietly and unexpectedly to have passed. Initially I shocked myself by my own repeated and public telling of the events within our family for what started a quiet painful whisper when I didn't know anyone would read it became a strident and public banging of pots and pans as I knew they were. I hoped and imagined it could help someone else in the same situation - someone struggling with a drunken partner, someone stuck in something they knew they had to escape from - and I still hope this is true. But I woke up one morning recently and thought I am not angry any more, I am repeating myself, it has to stop, the story has to shift, move on, become a better one. I apologise to exh for telling it, but I also wonder if it has been the shortest and cheapest way for me to recover from what happened. I needed to tell it. I needed to come back from the isolation of survival to some sort of acceptance.
At my friend's birthday party standing in a beautiful room in towering high heels and a glass of white wine in my hand with many beautiful women wearing party dresses and handsome urbane men chatting I suddenly realise with humour and horror that some of them know about the fat that hung over my knickers but I am not certain which ones. It makes it hard for me to look people in the eye, worrying that they can only pity me. A failed marriage, a single mum, breadline existence AND the detailed description of that hanging fat. Like those puzzles I had as a child where you searched for faces hidden within the picture there is a shifting searching of their expressions to try and spot who knows. Mainly I feel proud, really proud of what I have achieved by our family's recovery but interested too by my attempt to describe what Diane Arbus called 'What's left after what one isn't is taken is what one is'.
Now I feel I am tipping into a new madness, I want to go to ALL these churches - I want to discover their stories, I am fascinated by the history they tell. Even sometimes passing churches at the edges of surburban London travelling somewhere in the car I think - hmm interesting, how long will it take me to get there? I should get on with my second novel, should try and make more money, Even fiddle with the first one again. But something about being obedient to the task set is attractive. I would like to visit all of them.
Though when I write that I feel exhausted.
In my mapping London book there is a large and beautiful watercolour drawing showing a bird's eye view of the City of London circa 1810 - called the Rhinebeck Panorama - it shows opulent boats crowded on the Thames alongside the Tower of London and infront of the many many spired City. Behind this dense cluster of towers and spires the dome of St Pauls can be seen, even Westminster Abbey in the distance, then London petering out to fields and gentle hills. Ever since I've seen this picture I have thought I would love to match the spires and towers of this old City of London to the churches that still exist today. So maybe that is my plan. The extent of my ambition. I work in the City and look around some days going up to Waterstone's to buy a new book to read to the boys, or a quick look in New Look and there are churches tucked in corners everywhere, squeezed amidst the glass and steel and concrete of the modern buildings. But though it is completely obvious it takes a while for the simple truth to dawn on me the steeples and turrets are hidden now in the height of office blocks, nuzzled alongside banks, an occasional scrap of view appearing overhead. Here in this panaroma the churches that reach up to the sky from low lying buildings are the awe of the skyline. I wonder about the history of London's horizon- of the first spire to The Shard. Man's ambition and attempts at glory. Initially a symbol of the heavenly aspirations of pious medieval men the word is derived from the Old English word spir, meaning a sprout, shoot, or stalk of grass. Though surely a phallic possession of the sky, a boast of power too.
http://www.artfund.org/artwork/7179/the-rhinebeck-panorama-of-london
I discover that the Rhinebeck Panorama is at the Museum of London. That the four sheets were found in the barrel of a pistol in 1941 in America and sold to the museum in 1998. UL and I go to see it. We don't have much time. We never have much time. And sometimes we squander the time we have with misunderstandings and the savagery of old hurts. At the Museum of London we are almost shy in the public light of day but race alongside through the exhibits looking for the picture - ignoring the prehistoric remains, the romans ruins, the medieval section- we miss a whole floor of history, much of the history before there were churches at all until I spot the Panorama up high. Initially I am disappointed. It isn't as sharp as the reproduction I have in the book or as big as somehow I hoped and it is hard to see, with a lot of reflected light. We look slowly, there are tiny soldiers training, a fire has burst out in a South London building and with a 'Where's Wally' instruction the label says can you find a man flying a kite - though we don't. Then I discover magnifying sheets at the side of the picture and with these angled carefully towards the picture it becomes a minature world, almost 3D, the tone and detailed shadows of the architecture like stage sets, the churches like the weft of the fabric of the city. It is fantastic and the pair of us are animated and exuberant by our curiousity and sense of discovery.
I am onto something I think and I feel excited to be on route to the churches of the City to have a map of what is possible, what is there.
I take a Boris Bike up Whitehall, past Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden. It is hot and beautiful. I want to visit St Paul's Covent Garden and also find out about the opening times for the Savoy chapel I know! A church with a hotel! I wouldn't have known about it without my map. But I have placed yellow spots on both. I nose the bike around the cobbled streets of Covent Garden glimpsing St Paul's church initially set back from the road, through a gate with a garden infront of it. I have never ever noticed it before, As I cycle round I realise it's other entrance is on the palazzo of Covent Garden behind a cheering crowd for a clowning acrobat. I go to park the bike, passing a church I didn't know was there, hadn't spotted on my map.
There is a heavy bodied helicopter hovering stationary just a bit further on but almost over head. I like seeing helicopters just above I like the sensation of changed perspective, of being in aquarium, of layers of air above, of something heavy being held still. The docking bay is full. I weave the bike further up, even nearer to the helicopter, almost to Waterloo Bridge, the helicopter is straight overhead now, giving the air a density and the distance of the sky a scale, and again the docking bay is full. I start out again then realise that the Strand has been completely taped off, that there are fire engines and ambulances everywhere and police at every junction, some still taping the roads off. It looks like a newspaper picture of a bomb attack. But there is little urgency to the movements of the emergency services. I check a map but can't see where else to leave the bike, I have to wait until someone ( a Spanish women fiddling with her credit card) takes one. A young american man, just behind me pulls up on a bike and says, I hate this city and we laugh. l go to explore around the Savoy Chapel to keep an eye on whatever is happening here. Then worry I will be caught up in an explosion because I am nosy. The Savoy Chapel, tucked behind the Savoy in a garden should be open but isn't. I cross the Strand again to walk up to St Paul's and the road is now taped off back to Trafalgar Square, policemen loitering on traffic islands. I can see light grey smoke above a high building in the centre of Aldwych that looks like a building site and as I watch the dove grey talc gives way to billows of black smoke. But I think it is just a fire not a terrorist attack though I am unable to catch a policeman's eye to ask.
At St Pauls there are alcoholics gathered in the courtyard and a sign up saying the church is closed for a memorial service. Oh I think I will have to go to the church, I just glimpsed, the one I know I haven't put a yellow dot on. How strange to have a map and a plan, even options and be left still just finding my way about, to find something unknown, unsupposed. The road has been closed for roadworks with those high metal grilles protecting the pavement and as I walk past a drill shakes the soles of my feet and my teeth and the helicopter is still grinding away overhead. But the church is open, I have to step down to a stone floored vestibule and then open a door and into the quiet grey air of a catholic church. It doesn't feel like being in London, it feels as if I am in Spain or Italy. An american woman accosts me, 'Is there about to be a mass here?' 'I don't know.' I say. Slightly alarmed that there might be.
Later I discover that the architect Pownall dropped the church three feet below street level to mollify critics about the height of the church. Built in 1873 nestled between the then Market and the Strand. Maiden Lane was originally a path running along the southern edge of the ‘Covent Garden’ (i.e. Convent Garden) belonging to the monks of Westminster Abbey though later Louis Napoleon, Benjamin Disraeli and Voltaire all lived here, the artist J.M.W. Turner was born here, Edward V11 and Lily Langtry dined here, and the celebrated actor of his day, William Terriss was murdered here by a crazed understudy in 1897. Before all this but discovered only fairly recently in excavations from 1985 and 2005 ( for King Alfred's London had been a shifting legend and a mystery ) it seems King Alfred had built a settlement called Lundenwic, a port and town stretching from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. Later it looks likely he moved back into the more fortified abandoned roman town of Londinium ( The City), Lundenwic just left, ploughed over reverting to fields.
On wooden pews there are a few bent heads in prayer. I sit. There is a rustling at the altar, bright lights being switched on, an attractive asian woman fiddling with flowers and a bible. It starts to look likely that yes, a service is about to start. Outside the helicopter and the roadworks are loud then muffled to a drone as the door of the church is closed. then wide to the noise as it is opened again, then closed like hands over ears.
Catholic worship was made legal in 1791 and here in Covent Garden there had been a huge presence of open and closet Catholics including such names as St Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, the Jesuit missioner St Robert Southwell, Mary Ward, foundress of the ISBVM’s, St Claude la Colombiere (who introduced devotion to the Sacred Heart to England), Charles I’s architect Inigo Jones, the poet John Dryden and the composer of ‘Rule Britannia’, Thomas Arne ( Rule Britannia coincidentally written for a musical called Alfred about Alfred the Great ) as well as vast numbers of poor Catholics including large Irish colonies swelled by the Potato Famine - many of them working in the market of Covent Garden and living mainly in Drury Lane or the slums of St Giles’, Holborn and Saffron Hill. Initially the London Oratory was opened for Catholic worship in a former dance hall in King William St Charing Cross in 1849- but moved out to the 'village' of Brompton in 1854. By 1872 the land for Corpus Christi was leased though within a few years slum clearance drove out many of the poorer families, reducing parishioner numbers. Later international guests from the nearby grand hotels brought new visitors and congregations.
The church is narrow, as if crammed into an awkward space, thin arches reaching high and spindly to the light of top windows. There is a gentle shabby quietness and slightly yellowing icing sugar walls. Behind me the asian lady has gone into a dark cupboard and I can see the dirty string of a mop and cleaning materials on shelves. At shrines there are candles flickering infront of camp lurid statues. I think about Graham Greene. I feel really really peaceful here. For a minute I think I will stay for the mass but then dither. Stand up. Move across the church, sit again infront of a smaller chapel, the statues skin like pink plastic though plaster, the asian lady eyeing my jumpiness uneasily.
I leave. Back on a Boris Bike, weaving around the Strand still ineffectually taped off, back to the Mall. The flags are still draped triumphantly but I realise there is a cherry picker crane taking the huge heavy draped union jacks down. The Royal Family's grand bunting. Their street party over. Two men working together stowing the flags carefully in a van marked Enterprise - Maintaining the Infrastructure of England. As if this infrastructure was the very fabric of englishness created. I imagine the same van turning up around the country checking on scones and jam and clotted cream and roast beefs and victoria sponges and putting deckchairs out in the rain.
Amen.
to chuckle as we pass by the table at mum's crazy plan, at the exhausting look of it, at the density of churches in this city. These children have barely ever been to a church, do not really understand what I am up to, but are almost giddy with the madness of the challenge laid out. 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Maddox Ford is one of my favourite novels - the surface tension of the story as tight as a stretched balloon, the bleakness written with an ominous lilting charm, the structure held by spokes of taut engineering - and in it a description of a man lining up a polo shot, an affair, the sidelong squint of concentration and determination - the 'it might just be done' glance. I feel like that now. I am washing up, tidying up, but when I see the map, I stop briefly, suck in my breath and think that 'it might' a pause, 'just be done'.
Since the Royal Wedding I have been suffering a kind of 'low' about my own project. I sort of wished I had stopped then - it would have been roughly a year and would have been a decent ending - a bit of a fanfare finale. I would have been able to hold my head up high that I had the discipline to carry it out and that I had learnt so much by doing it. Though as soon as I left Rymans I realised I should have bought another colour sticker for the churches I have visited and mark them too. But even without I am impressed by the shape made in the midst of the constellation of bright dots for with very little research or plan, just a nosing around, I seem to have caught almost all the local churches in this spiralling net. There is just one Pimlico church left out, left to do, right out towards the river.
I regret now I haven't taken pictures of each church, I regret sometimes too that I haven't just written dry descriptions of each building not muddled myself within their stories. I have become sick of my own slightly melodic moaning - for my rage with exh seems quietly and unexpectedly to have passed. Initially I shocked myself by my own repeated and public telling of the events within our family for what started a quiet painful whisper when I didn't know anyone would read it became a strident and public banging of pots and pans as I knew they were. I hoped and imagined it could help someone else in the same situation - someone struggling with a drunken partner, someone stuck in something they knew they had to escape from - and I still hope this is true. But I woke up one morning recently and thought I am not angry any more, I am repeating myself, it has to stop, the story has to shift, move on, become a better one. I apologise to exh for telling it, but I also wonder if it has been the shortest and cheapest way for me to recover from what happened. I needed to tell it. I needed to come back from the isolation of survival to some sort of acceptance.
At my friend's birthday party standing in a beautiful room in towering high heels and a glass of white wine in my hand with many beautiful women wearing party dresses and handsome urbane men chatting I suddenly realise with humour and horror that some of them know about the fat that hung over my knickers but I am not certain which ones. It makes it hard for me to look people in the eye, worrying that they can only pity me. A failed marriage, a single mum, breadline existence AND the detailed description of that hanging fat. Like those puzzles I had as a child where you searched for faces hidden within the picture there is a shifting searching of their expressions to try and spot who knows. Mainly I feel proud, really proud of what I have achieved by our family's recovery but interested too by my attempt to describe what Diane Arbus called 'What's left after what one isn't is taken is what one is'.
Now I feel I am tipping into a new madness, I want to go to ALL these churches - I want to discover their stories, I am fascinated by the history they tell. Even sometimes passing churches at the edges of surburban London travelling somewhere in the car I think - hmm interesting, how long will it take me to get there? I should get on with my second novel, should try and make more money, Even fiddle with the first one again. But something about being obedient to the task set is attractive. I would like to visit all of them.
Though when I write that I feel exhausted.
In my mapping London book there is a large and beautiful watercolour drawing showing a bird's eye view of the City of London circa 1810 - called the Rhinebeck Panorama - it shows opulent boats crowded on the Thames alongside the Tower of London and infront of the many many spired City. Behind this dense cluster of towers and spires the dome of St Pauls can be seen, even Westminster Abbey in the distance, then London petering out to fields and gentle hills. Ever since I've seen this picture I have thought I would love to match the spires and towers of this old City of London to the churches that still exist today. So maybe that is my plan. The extent of my ambition. I work in the City and look around some days going up to Waterstone's to buy a new book to read to the boys, or a quick look in New Look and there are churches tucked in corners everywhere, squeezed amidst the glass and steel and concrete of the modern buildings. But though it is completely obvious it takes a while for the simple truth to dawn on me the steeples and turrets are hidden now in the height of office blocks, nuzzled alongside banks, an occasional scrap of view appearing overhead. Here in this panaroma the churches that reach up to the sky from low lying buildings are the awe of the skyline. I wonder about the history of London's horizon- of the first spire to The Shard. Man's ambition and attempts at glory. Initially a symbol of the heavenly aspirations of pious medieval men the word is derived from the Old English word spir, meaning a sprout, shoot, or stalk of grass. Though surely a phallic possession of the sky, a boast of power too.
http://www.artfund.org/artwork/7179/the-rhinebeck-panorama-of-london
I discover that the Rhinebeck Panorama is at the Museum of London. That the four sheets were found in the barrel of a pistol in 1941 in America and sold to the museum in 1998. UL and I go to see it. We don't have much time. We never have much time. And sometimes we squander the time we have with misunderstandings and the savagery of old hurts. At the Museum of London we are almost shy in the public light of day but race alongside through the exhibits looking for the picture - ignoring the prehistoric remains, the romans ruins, the medieval section- we miss a whole floor of history, much of the history before there were churches at all until I spot the Panorama up high. Initially I am disappointed. It isn't as sharp as the reproduction I have in the book or as big as somehow I hoped and it is hard to see, with a lot of reflected light. We look slowly, there are tiny soldiers training, a fire has burst out in a South London building and with a 'Where's Wally' instruction the label says can you find a man flying a kite - though we don't. Then I discover magnifying sheets at the side of the picture and with these angled carefully towards the picture it becomes a minature world, almost 3D, the tone and detailed shadows of the architecture like stage sets, the churches like the weft of the fabric of the city. It is fantastic and the pair of us are animated and exuberant by our curiousity and sense of discovery.
I am onto something I think and I feel excited to be on route to the churches of the City to have a map of what is possible, what is there.
I take a Boris Bike up Whitehall, past Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden. It is hot and beautiful. I want to visit St Paul's Covent Garden and also find out about the opening times for the Savoy chapel I know! A church with a hotel! I wouldn't have known about it without my map. But I have placed yellow spots on both. I nose the bike around the cobbled streets of Covent Garden glimpsing St Paul's church initially set back from the road, through a gate with a garden infront of it. I have never ever noticed it before, As I cycle round I realise it's other entrance is on the palazzo of Covent Garden behind a cheering crowd for a clowning acrobat. I go to park the bike, passing a church I didn't know was there, hadn't spotted on my map.
There is a heavy bodied helicopter hovering stationary just a bit further on but almost over head. I like seeing helicopters just above I like the sensation of changed perspective, of being in aquarium, of layers of air above, of something heavy being held still. The docking bay is full. I weave the bike further up, even nearer to the helicopter, almost to Waterloo Bridge, the helicopter is straight overhead now, giving the air a density and the distance of the sky a scale, and again the docking bay is full. I start out again then realise that the Strand has been completely taped off, that there are fire engines and ambulances everywhere and police at every junction, some still taping the roads off. It looks like a newspaper picture of a bomb attack. But there is little urgency to the movements of the emergency services. I check a map but can't see where else to leave the bike, I have to wait until someone ( a Spanish women fiddling with her credit card) takes one. A young american man, just behind me pulls up on a bike and says, I hate this city and we laugh. l go to explore around the Savoy Chapel to keep an eye on whatever is happening here. Then worry I will be caught up in an explosion because I am nosy. The Savoy Chapel, tucked behind the Savoy in a garden should be open but isn't. I cross the Strand again to walk up to St Paul's and the road is now taped off back to Trafalgar Square, policemen loitering on traffic islands. I can see light grey smoke above a high building in the centre of Aldwych that looks like a building site and as I watch the dove grey talc gives way to billows of black smoke. But I think it is just a fire not a terrorist attack though I am unable to catch a policeman's eye to ask.
At St Pauls there are alcoholics gathered in the courtyard and a sign up saying the church is closed for a memorial service. Oh I think I will have to go to the church, I just glimpsed, the one I know I haven't put a yellow dot on. How strange to have a map and a plan, even options and be left still just finding my way about, to find something unknown, unsupposed. The road has been closed for roadworks with those high metal grilles protecting the pavement and as I walk past a drill shakes the soles of my feet and my teeth and the helicopter is still grinding away overhead. But the church is open, I have to step down to a stone floored vestibule and then open a door and into the quiet grey air of a catholic church. It doesn't feel like being in London, it feels as if I am in Spain or Italy. An american woman accosts me, 'Is there about to be a mass here?' 'I don't know.' I say. Slightly alarmed that there might be.
Later I discover that the architect Pownall dropped the church three feet below street level to mollify critics about the height of the church. Built in 1873 nestled between the then Market and the Strand. Maiden Lane was originally a path running along the southern edge of the ‘Covent Garden’ (i.e. Convent Garden) belonging to the monks of Westminster Abbey though later Louis Napoleon, Benjamin Disraeli and Voltaire all lived here, the artist J.M.W. Turner was born here, Edward V11 and Lily Langtry dined here, and the celebrated actor of his day, William Terriss was murdered here by a crazed understudy in 1897. Before all this but discovered only fairly recently in excavations from 1985 and 2005 ( for King Alfred's London had been a shifting legend and a mystery ) it seems King Alfred had built a settlement called Lundenwic, a port and town stretching from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. Later it looks likely he moved back into the more fortified abandoned roman town of Londinium ( The City), Lundenwic just left, ploughed over reverting to fields.
On wooden pews there are a few bent heads in prayer. I sit. There is a rustling at the altar, bright lights being switched on, an attractive asian woman fiddling with flowers and a bible. It starts to look likely that yes, a service is about to start. Outside the helicopter and the roadworks are loud then muffled to a drone as the door of the church is closed. then wide to the noise as it is opened again, then closed like hands over ears.
Catholic worship was made legal in 1791 and here in Covent Garden there had been a huge presence of open and closet Catholics including such names as St Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, the Jesuit missioner St Robert Southwell, Mary Ward, foundress of the ISBVM’s, St Claude la Colombiere (who introduced devotion to the Sacred Heart to England), Charles I’s architect Inigo Jones, the poet John Dryden and the composer of ‘Rule Britannia’, Thomas Arne ( Rule Britannia coincidentally written for a musical called Alfred about Alfred the Great ) as well as vast numbers of poor Catholics including large Irish colonies swelled by the Potato Famine - many of them working in the market of Covent Garden and living mainly in Drury Lane or the slums of St Giles’, Holborn and Saffron Hill. Initially the London Oratory was opened for Catholic worship in a former dance hall in King William St Charing Cross in 1849- but moved out to the 'village' of Brompton in 1854. By 1872 the land for Corpus Christi was leased though within a few years slum clearance drove out many of the poorer families, reducing parishioner numbers. Later international guests from the nearby grand hotels brought new visitors and congregations.
The church is narrow, as if crammed into an awkward space, thin arches reaching high and spindly to the light of top windows. There is a gentle shabby quietness and slightly yellowing icing sugar walls. Behind me the asian lady has gone into a dark cupboard and I can see the dirty string of a mop and cleaning materials on shelves. At shrines there are candles flickering infront of camp lurid statues. I think about Graham Greene. I feel really really peaceful here. For a minute I think I will stay for the mass but then dither. Stand up. Move across the church, sit again infront of a smaller chapel, the statues skin like pink plastic though plaster, the asian lady eyeing my jumpiness uneasily.
I leave. Back on a Boris Bike, weaving around the Strand still ineffectually taped off, back to the Mall. The flags are still draped triumphantly but I realise there is a cherry picker crane taking the huge heavy draped union jacks down. The Royal Family's grand bunting. Their street party over. Two men working together stowing the flags carefully in a van marked Enterprise - Maintaining the Infrastructure of England. As if this infrastructure was the very fabric of englishness created. I imagine the same van turning up around the country checking on scones and jam and clotted cream and roast beefs and victoria sponges and putting deckchairs out in the rain.
Amen.
Sunday, 15 May 2011
St Barnabus Pimlico
Anybody who knows me would know that I am the least likely person to put the words Fun and Run together. And yet somehow, I have been volunteered by work to do exactly that - a 5km Fun Run. If only I could write the words as I would say them. Fun Run, the short syllables dragged into sarcasm and withering wonder mixed with fear.
For a few weeks I just dreaded it. Then I bought a pair of trainers and a sports bra. Dithered for another week. Finally I looked up 'how to train for a 5km fun run' on the internet and followed the 7 week plan in just over 3 weeks. I run and walk around the lake in St James's Park. Starting at 15 seconds running 40 seconds walking and building to the heady 20 seconds running - 30 seconds walking for 5km. Not really a run more of a run walk but still I have amazed myself - gaining my first exercise high ever and despite aching knees, sticking to the project.
Late spring/ early summer in St James's park is beautiful. I feel free. Allowed out. Not at work. Not with children. At certain points I feel strong and connected to myself and my breath. Fearless. Ducks with ducklings, moorhens with chicks and pelicans folded like origami onto rocks. Feet the tick of the circumference. In beautiful planted flower beds tulips drop their petals, their colour textured by wallflowers and the gash of poppies alongside the spires of delphiniums. Young love, office affairs and arguments sit in couples on park benches. A weeping woman says ' I just want to be loved' to a man who eyes the floor. There are many, many different languages. And Buckingham Palace stands cock a hoop with flags and the surprised air of success. At dusk rats in the gloaming slink from view under the refreshment kiosk and at the side of the path as if testing their visibility in the grey furred light. I wonder how evolution has worked that the squirrels can sit on the railings eating a nut being photographed with Britney Spears-dark-eyes-cute to the camera and the rats know to keep cover, out of sight only daring just a little bit more as the park empties. The homeless gather too on benches and under trees, staking a pitch, carrying their careful systems of survival. One man whiskered and brown skinned from extreme outdoors arrives on a bike, plastic bags like swollen ballons packed like panniers, a bucket slung on the handlebars. He parks his bike and sits on a bench and waits. For dark, I assume. A black woman with dusty croc shoes, sits her head bowed into her lap a bag at her side. Not long now.
Another evening I see a police car alongside a still prone figure under a tree. In the two laps around the lake it is never clear if it is just a body or still a person.
The magazine I work for is full of 'Real Life' stories- plastic surgery, weight loss and weddings ( in any combination really - plastic surgery and weight loss weddings would be ideal.) When I first started working part time on this magazine I was living with an alcoholic husband and angry children, I had left my full time job and our house to try sort out the chaos within our family. Sometimes I wonder now if I tipped up our lives too hastily, if I did more damage with my nutty idealism of happiness and balance. The boys still accuse me 'You made dad leave.' But coming out the other side - I don't know. We could still be there within that madness of alcohol and rage. But I'm not sure how. My little children may have been less damaged by mum and dad splitting up and by the final spiral into alcoholic behaviour but the battles of mum and dad would have been awful. And I'm not sure I would have coped. That hostile and unsafe world was really poisonous to me. I was part of it but I didn't actually create it.
Initially I sneered at the magazine, at the stories of simple fat people making their lives better. Oh my harsh soul. Each week I would ring the people up from the case studies persuading them to send pictures of their hospital trips, fat holidays and weddings - before and after, before and after a refrain. I am reasonably slim, of small frame, bigger boobs than I would like, but in the many secrets I had then possibly the final one and who knows - least important - was that my post children tummy sagged as if I was a drugs mule for bags and bags of wet flour. I am not sure I was completely conscious of this but I couldn't see my knickers because they were covered by these drooping rolls of fat. And yet, and yet, I was someone who people assumed to be skinny at least slim. I thought it was just how it was after children, I am not even sure I was aware it was fat.
I sat in that office - on a desk which was oddly perched on the end of another department's - like an island, as isolated at work as at home, just observing men putting together a tabloid newspaper - a fascinating, obscenely witty, sometimes disturbing thing. My marriage was on the very brink of being over and I never knew what I would return home to. I worked really hard in that office but somedays I hid tears behind the computer screen and in the brief minutes of freedom between home and work I would always always walk back from the tube crying, it was like I had time quickly to feel what I really felt, before I was back to reading bed time stories and the mayhem of trying to smile at someone who wanted to pick an argument so they could go and get drunk.
One day I clicked a link for an internet 'lose your tummy' diet - paid for the download - printed it out, read that I needed to get hold of almost 'pure' not pasturized milk and put it in a drawer. Later, quite a lot later, after we seperated, after we moved from the tiny flat to this one and things were already starting to get better I got it out again and realised these were just guide lines - I could try and make it work with less 'pure' things. Porridge and nuts in the morning, hardly any carbohydrates, no processed food, lots of eggs and avocados, a day off from the diet once a week. Everything was food I liked eating anyhow. The fat slowly retreated. Though I have been on that diet over 2 years now and my tummy is still not perfect but every month it gets a bit better. It has taken so long that I doubt I will every reach a flat tummy but I am proud to have turned it around. To be a simple fat person who made their life better. Alongside everything else there is a physical proof and pride that things can be changed.
This morning the beautiful mum that I sometimes walk to school alongside ( clever, funny, elegant and very charming) who once sported the worst black eye I have ever seen on someone at 8 months pregnant ( how does that sentence make sense? how could any bit of the sentence make sense?) said to me ' I feel well. A small window has finally opened.' Her beautiful face lit up. I look at her. She smiles with her eyes. Good I said. Good. A long time ago she confessed some of her homelife to me in the time it took to cross road with the green man flashing. That her husband lay in bed depressed ( she didn't say he hit her, she assumed I knew, for she had averted her eyes with a proud tilt to her chin when I saw that black eye ) that the social services said she was too good a mum to take the children. Get as much help as you can I said. But shortly after she reverted to her smiles and waves and charm. Today we both smiled with our eyes to each other. That is really good news. I said. Yes. She said. I feel like a weight has gone. He has left. Though I wonder why everyone I know round here has some dramatic tale. Are we somehow adrift. Or just poor. Or do I spy it easily? Somehow my observant sympathy attracts only trauma? It seems I have told quite a few versions of the same tale.
Oh but all these bank holidays plus extra days at work and very long hours has tipped up our family routine and left me exhausted and behind on everything. Have you noticed? This post must be the longest coming. And the dates are all wrong. I have done the fun run! I have tipped from the high of doing it to a low of not running and my knees feeling buggered. I am frankly ratty.
In a state of permanent ineffectual skidding on the surface of tasks needing to be done I fail to ring back the phone company in time to get the fault fixed on the home line to be told I will need to start the process again. I need the phone to ring the tax office because I know I will be left on hold for hours and don't want to do it from my mobile. I need to ring the tax office to see if I qualify for a tax rebate and to find out why my working tax credit has been slashed. I feel caught and trapped in my ineffectualness. Even UL becomes something on a list to be squeezed between other things. And when I see him I am not happy. I feel I should be doing something else on the list and I doubt him.
But I make time to visit St Barnabas church between dropping off PSM's youngest son's swimming stuff to school, buying a toilet seat, paying library fines on 'Mill on the Floss' ( oh oh, I was so excited reading the introduction, for I loved Middlemarch when I read it years ago and I could see George Elliot was exactly what I needed to read, and here I am paying £3.25 to bring it back unread), buying birthday presents and picking my eldest son up early for a hospital dentistry trip. The flat is a tip and Barrack Obama is in town. I had tried to see him the day before. Another trip to Westminster Abbey! A detour on the way to pick the boys up from school. I put the tv on to time my departure - as I leave the flat the motorbikes are getting ready at Buckingham Palace gates. I walk fast. Nearing the Abbey door I can see a calvacade of cars and a glimpse of 'The Beast' through a splinter gap in the small crowd and stand on tip toe to see. I don't see anything and a young policewoman asks me to move on. I can hear a cheer and then people move away. I am slightly late to pick the boys up but strangely high that I nearly saw the President of the USA on my school run.
This day, the day I visit the church I cycle around parliament square on a BB between chores and realise the crowds are lining up again, that Obama must be about to pass by. Even though I would love to see him I don't have time to stop. Opposite the Houses of Parliament, there are hooded and bound/chained men, heads stooped, in orange jumpsuits protesting silently on top of the stop the war hut. Almost christ like in their quiet vigil. But I keep cycling round keen to get to the church.
St Barnabas is open. I have been lucky. This tiny bit of time I have found is exactly the right piece of time because it is the one lunchtime of the week that there is a service and I am here twenty minutes before it starts. I walk through a pretty courtyard to the porch on the left and open the heavy door with a bull ring handle into the gloom and chatter of two old women preparing the church for the service. Is it ok to look around I ask and an old, rather fragile man nods and follows behind me as I move around the church. 'I never wear polish' I hear one woman say to the other as they put out prayer books 'I find it damages my nails' then they are into a conversation about the quality of the candles. The church is lovely, it's decoration is beautiful - really fine stained glass, mosaics, and an amazing chancel and altarpiece. The richness of the ceiling in the chancel is like a tapestry, ornately detailed, awe inspiring. I am surprised, I had assumed it would be another plain, slightly lacking in authenticity Pimlico church - indeed Thomas Cundy junior, the builder of those other pattern book churches was the architect here although this work is so different from his other churches that I find in my research a whiff of a rumour that the gothic architect Pugin was consulted too.
I start to read the history. It was the first church built in England where the ideals and beliefs of what came to be known as Anglo-catholic movement were embodied in its architecture and liturgy. My heart sinks as I try to make sense of this Oxford Movement/The Tracterians that seems to result in rioting here at St Barnabus church. I have been here before with St Paul's, Wilton Place and found it hard to fathom, to understand the tiny details of belief that result in such outrage. Central seem to be two premises - that the Church of England is more Catholic than Protestant and that the most effective expression of giving worship to heaven is as it is described in the Book of Revelation in which the use of white robes and incense in a setting of considerable beauty is described;
This time I have an amazing breakthrough I find on the internet:
http://anglicanhistory.org/england/bennett/bio/
It is the history of the founding Reverend of St Barnabus - W.J.E. Bennett written by his son in 1909. Initially the vicar of the wealthy St Paul's, Wilton Place he describes the area before the church was built.
'THERE had arisen in the lower portion of the district assigned to S. Paul's, amid the marshes of Pimlico, near the Hospital and to the east of Ebury Street, a series of deplorable slums, which extended down to the river. From 1742 to 1803 those gardens, which in still earlier times had belonged to the Earl of Ranelagh, attracted to their nightly shows, amid fashionable sin and frivolity, the princes and nobles of the land. But in that neighbourhood most unfashionable sin and brutal degradation reigned in 1850. There the streets were rugged and but half made, undrained, unpaved. The houses were not old but already ruinous. The foul sewer, which drained half of Western London, and had been originally "The Serpentine River," ran, open and uncovered, full of filth of every sort down to the Thames, between starved, half-decayed trees whose branches produced leaves that could be numbered. The appropriately named "Nell Gwynn's Court" looked down, in defiance of cholera, upon this flowing tide of abomination, and delighted in filth and foulness both of body and soul, which neither the Sanitary nor the Ecclesiastical Commissioners had been cruel enough to put to flight.
The inhabitants matched, naturally enough, their surroundings. Men, women and children were half clad, without shoes, dirty, ragged, reckless. Their lot seemed so low and miserable that they were careless with despair and without power to desire to be otherwise than they were. The low lodging-houses were dens for profligates and thieves. The small beer-shops were receptacles for the veriest dregs of society. Street rows were incessant. Drink and gambling flourished. Dirty, disorderly, ill-conditioned children filled the streets. Blasphemy met the ear at every turn. The district presented an aspect of degradation and darkness scarcely to be exceeded in London.'
All this resulted in his determination to build a church there. He lists the detailed mathematics of how the rich could pay for the church and the school that was to be built. Then joy that his high church architectural plans are approved by the Bishop.
"I hardly dared to entertain the thought that" he would consecrate such a church. "I could not expect, I did not expect, in my own mind, that a rood screen, a chancel highly decorated, an altar of stone, diapered work and panelling throughout, painted glass in every window and gilded capitals" (what a terrible list of enormities!)--"I hardly thought that all this would pass without censure, or at least without some expression of unwillingness to stamp it with Episcopal sanction. I hardly thought that a piscina, a credence, an aumbry, sedilia, and all the furniture appertaining could pass without some words of remonstrance. I wished the Bishop personally to inspect it. Accordingly on May 2 he came. He did not like the screen as a matter of private taste, but made no objection 'as long as there was no rood (i.e. crucifix) on it.'"
On May 17 Mr. Bennett pleaded for a "rood cross," i.e. without the Figure, and though the Bishop at first strongly objected, he "ultimately gave me my way." The only point to which the Bishop permanently objected was--the placing flowers on the altar. One is glad to reflect that flowers have now purged themselves from the charge of being of Romish proclivities, that the Pope is no longer supposed to lie concealed in a rosebud, that indulgences and papal bulls are no longer looked for among the petals of a lily, and that we now realize that we might have searched in vain for the Jesuit College even amidst the florets of the then newly evolved double dahlia.'
When the building was finally finished in 1850 it is praised.
"It is a noble work," said Archdeacon Manning in his sermon, "nobly conceived, and as nobly carried to its end; a work for God and for His poor wrought out of the costliest gifts, and with the most skilful art, in splendour and symmetry, in stateliness and beauty."
But the Bishop of London, leaning increasingly to the Protestant side of the church and Mr Bennett's beliefs become increasingly divergent. Differences about which way the vicar faces at communion, the disputed rood cross ( later it is nailed to the altar to attempt to make it part of the building after one church warden would take it away and another put it out again) and tiny details that align St Barnabus to Catholiscism are exchanged in heated letters. Important to this row is the central idea that Mr Bennett should be obedient to the Bishop as part of the Apostolical Succession for indeed within his faith it is impossible for him to disobey a Bishop. The row gathers momentum, the Bishop of London not listening to the well formed and heart felt arguments of obedience. The Prime Minister - a recent worshipper at the Oxford movement St Paul's denounces St Barnabus for it's popery, and the bishop sends the exchange of letters between himself and Bennett to be published in the Times 'proving' St Barnabus's Catholic allegiance. A mob gathers, gaining momentum Sunday after Sunday.
"I wish to inform you that on Sunday, November 17, a very large mob of most tumultuous and disorderly persons collected together a second time round the church, and this with a much greater demonstration of force than on the preceding Sunday--that a force of one hundred constables was required to keep the mob from overt acts of violence; that notwithstanding the exertions of the police much violence was committed, and a leader of the rioters taken into custody; that the mob again assembled at the evening service at three o'clock, and were guilty again of violent cries, yells, and other noises, battering at the doors of the church and disturbing the whole congregation--that similar scenes occurred again on Sunday, the 24th of November, when I was interrupted in my sermon by outcries and other signs of disaffection as before; all this tumult, your Lordship will please to remember, arising from persons collected from all parts of London--non-parishioners.
"NO VIRGIN MARY."
"NO WAFER GODS."
"NO BISHOPS."
"NO CREED WORSHIP."
"NO FORGIVENESS OF SINS.
is chalked on walls in surrounding streets.
It gives dramatic details of the sermon Mr Bennett preached from his heart as the mob breaks into the church and how they turn tail and retreat.
Then Mr Bennett's resignation to the Bishop of London with his stated belief that 'The Church is superior to any individual bishop.'
Despite the working men's presentation which the Bishop will not hear.
"We beseech your Lordship to let Mr. Bennett remain with us; but, if not, we do hope your Lordship will see that our church, which was built expressly for us, is still a poor man's church.'
But he leaves. The church packed hours early service after service before he departs. A last meal when he is presented with a silver inkwell, candlesticks and from the "Committee of the Poor " a silver teapot.
All this in this little beautiful and peaceful church. The principles fought for seem so unimportant to me, so minute in the details of faith but the bravery and intelligent honesty and honour seem really moving.
Amen
For a few weeks I just dreaded it. Then I bought a pair of trainers and a sports bra. Dithered for another week. Finally I looked up 'how to train for a 5km fun run' on the internet and followed the 7 week plan in just over 3 weeks. I run and walk around the lake in St James's Park. Starting at 15 seconds running 40 seconds walking and building to the heady 20 seconds running - 30 seconds walking for 5km. Not really a run more of a run walk but still I have amazed myself - gaining my first exercise high ever and despite aching knees, sticking to the project.
Late spring/ early summer in St James's park is beautiful. I feel free. Allowed out. Not at work. Not with children. At certain points I feel strong and connected to myself and my breath. Fearless. Ducks with ducklings, moorhens with chicks and pelicans folded like origami onto rocks. Feet the tick of the circumference. In beautiful planted flower beds tulips drop their petals, their colour textured by wallflowers and the gash of poppies alongside the spires of delphiniums. Young love, office affairs and arguments sit in couples on park benches. A weeping woman says ' I just want to be loved' to a man who eyes the floor. There are many, many different languages. And Buckingham Palace stands cock a hoop with flags and the surprised air of success. At dusk rats in the gloaming slink from view under the refreshment kiosk and at the side of the path as if testing their visibility in the grey furred light. I wonder how evolution has worked that the squirrels can sit on the railings eating a nut being photographed with Britney Spears-dark-eyes-cute to the camera and the rats know to keep cover, out of sight only daring just a little bit more as the park empties. The homeless gather too on benches and under trees, staking a pitch, carrying their careful systems of survival. One man whiskered and brown skinned from extreme outdoors arrives on a bike, plastic bags like swollen ballons packed like panniers, a bucket slung on the handlebars. He parks his bike and sits on a bench and waits. For dark, I assume. A black woman with dusty croc shoes, sits her head bowed into her lap a bag at her side. Not long now.
Another evening I see a police car alongside a still prone figure under a tree. In the two laps around the lake it is never clear if it is just a body or still a person.
The magazine I work for is full of 'Real Life' stories- plastic surgery, weight loss and weddings ( in any combination really - plastic surgery and weight loss weddings would be ideal.) When I first started working part time on this magazine I was living with an alcoholic husband and angry children, I had left my full time job and our house to try sort out the chaos within our family. Sometimes I wonder now if I tipped up our lives too hastily, if I did more damage with my nutty idealism of happiness and balance. The boys still accuse me 'You made dad leave.' But coming out the other side - I don't know. We could still be there within that madness of alcohol and rage. But I'm not sure how. My little children may have been less damaged by mum and dad splitting up and by the final spiral into alcoholic behaviour but the battles of mum and dad would have been awful. And I'm not sure I would have coped. That hostile and unsafe world was really poisonous to me. I was part of it but I didn't actually create it.
Initially I sneered at the magazine, at the stories of simple fat people making their lives better. Oh my harsh soul. Each week I would ring the people up from the case studies persuading them to send pictures of their hospital trips, fat holidays and weddings - before and after, before and after a refrain. I am reasonably slim, of small frame, bigger boobs than I would like, but in the many secrets I had then possibly the final one and who knows - least important - was that my post children tummy sagged as if I was a drugs mule for bags and bags of wet flour. I am not sure I was completely conscious of this but I couldn't see my knickers because they were covered by these drooping rolls of fat. And yet, and yet, I was someone who people assumed to be skinny at least slim. I thought it was just how it was after children, I am not even sure I was aware it was fat.
I sat in that office - on a desk which was oddly perched on the end of another department's - like an island, as isolated at work as at home, just observing men putting together a tabloid newspaper - a fascinating, obscenely witty, sometimes disturbing thing. My marriage was on the very brink of being over and I never knew what I would return home to. I worked really hard in that office but somedays I hid tears behind the computer screen and in the brief minutes of freedom between home and work I would always always walk back from the tube crying, it was like I had time quickly to feel what I really felt, before I was back to reading bed time stories and the mayhem of trying to smile at someone who wanted to pick an argument so they could go and get drunk.
One day I clicked a link for an internet 'lose your tummy' diet - paid for the download - printed it out, read that I needed to get hold of almost 'pure' not pasturized milk and put it in a drawer. Later, quite a lot later, after we seperated, after we moved from the tiny flat to this one and things were already starting to get better I got it out again and realised these were just guide lines - I could try and make it work with less 'pure' things. Porridge and nuts in the morning, hardly any carbohydrates, no processed food, lots of eggs and avocados, a day off from the diet once a week. Everything was food I liked eating anyhow. The fat slowly retreated. Though I have been on that diet over 2 years now and my tummy is still not perfect but every month it gets a bit better. It has taken so long that I doubt I will every reach a flat tummy but I am proud to have turned it around. To be a simple fat person who made their life better. Alongside everything else there is a physical proof and pride that things can be changed.
This morning the beautiful mum that I sometimes walk to school alongside ( clever, funny, elegant and very charming) who once sported the worst black eye I have ever seen on someone at 8 months pregnant ( how does that sentence make sense? how could any bit of the sentence make sense?) said to me ' I feel well. A small window has finally opened.' Her beautiful face lit up. I look at her. She smiles with her eyes. Good I said. Good. A long time ago she confessed some of her homelife to me in the time it took to cross road with the green man flashing. That her husband lay in bed depressed ( she didn't say he hit her, she assumed I knew, for she had averted her eyes with a proud tilt to her chin when I saw that black eye ) that the social services said she was too good a mum to take the children. Get as much help as you can I said. But shortly after she reverted to her smiles and waves and charm. Today we both smiled with our eyes to each other. That is really good news. I said. Yes. She said. I feel like a weight has gone. He has left. Though I wonder why everyone I know round here has some dramatic tale. Are we somehow adrift. Or just poor. Or do I spy it easily? Somehow my observant sympathy attracts only trauma? It seems I have told quite a few versions of the same tale.
Oh but all these bank holidays plus extra days at work and very long hours has tipped up our family routine and left me exhausted and behind on everything. Have you noticed? This post must be the longest coming. And the dates are all wrong. I have done the fun run! I have tipped from the high of doing it to a low of not running and my knees feeling buggered. I am frankly ratty.
In a state of permanent ineffectual skidding on the surface of tasks needing to be done I fail to ring back the phone company in time to get the fault fixed on the home line to be told I will need to start the process again. I need the phone to ring the tax office because I know I will be left on hold for hours and don't want to do it from my mobile. I need to ring the tax office to see if I qualify for a tax rebate and to find out why my working tax credit has been slashed. I feel caught and trapped in my ineffectualness. Even UL becomes something on a list to be squeezed between other things. And when I see him I am not happy. I feel I should be doing something else on the list and I doubt him.
But I make time to visit St Barnabas church between dropping off PSM's youngest son's swimming stuff to school, buying a toilet seat, paying library fines on 'Mill on the Floss' ( oh oh, I was so excited reading the introduction, for I loved Middlemarch when I read it years ago and I could see George Elliot was exactly what I needed to read, and here I am paying £3.25 to bring it back unread), buying birthday presents and picking my eldest son up early for a hospital dentistry trip. The flat is a tip and Barrack Obama is in town. I had tried to see him the day before. Another trip to Westminster Abbey! A detour on the way to pick the boys up from school. I put the tv on to time my departure - as I leave the flat the motorbikes are getting ready at Buckingham Palace gates. I walk fast. Nearing the Abbey door I can see a calvacade of cars and a glimpse of 'The Beast' through a splinter gap in the small crowd and stand on tip toe to see. I don't see anything and a young policewoman asks me to move on. I can hear a cheer and then people move away. I am slightly late to pick the boys up but strangely high that I nearly saw the President of the USA on my school run.
This day, the day I visit the church I cycle around parliament square on a BB between chores and realise the crowds are lining up again, that Obama must be about to pass by. Even though I would love to see him I don't have time to stop. Opposite the Houses of Parliament, there are hooded and bound/chained men, heads stooped, in orange jumpsuits protesting silently on top of the stop the war hut. Almost christ like in their quiet vigil. But I keep cycling round keen to get to the church.
St Barnabas is open. I have been lucky. This tiny bit of time I have found is exactly the right piece of time because it is the one lunchtime of the week that there is a service and I am here twenty minutes before it starts. I walk through a pretty courtyard to the porch on the left and open the heavy door with a bull ring handle into the gloom and chatter of two old women preparing the church for the service. Is it ok to look around I ask and an old, rather fragile man nods and follows behind me as I move around the church. 'I never wear polish' I hear one woman say to the other as they put out prayer books 'I find it damages my nails' then they are into a conversation about the quality of the candles. The church is lovely, it's decoration is beautiful - really fine stained glass, mosaics, and an amazing chancel and altarpiece. The richness of the ceiling in the chancel is like a tapestry, ornately detailed, awe inspiring. I am surprised, I had assumed it would be another plain, slightly lacking in authenticity Pimlico church - indeed Thomas Cundy junior, the builder of those other pattern book churches was the architect here although this work is so different from his other churches that I find in my research a whiff of a rumour that the gothic architect Pugin was consulted too.
I start to read the history. It was the first church built in England where the ideals and beliefs of what came to be known as Anglo-catholic movement were embodied in its architecture and liturgy. My heart sinks as I try to make sense of this Oxford Movement/The Tracterians that seems to result in rioting here at St Barnabus church. I have been here before with St Paul's, Wilton Place and found it hard to fathom, to understand the tiny details of belief that result in such outrage. Central seem to be two premises - that the Church of England is more Catholic than Protestant and that the most effective expression of giving worship to heaven is as it is described in the Book of Revelation in which the use of white robes and incense in a setting of considerable beauty is described;
This time I have an amazing breakthrough I find on the internet:
http://anglicanhistory.org/england/bennett/bio/
It is the history of the founding Reverend of St Barnabus - W.J.E. Bennett written by his son in 1909. Initially the vicar of the wealthy St Paul's, Wilton Place he describes the area before the church was built.
'THERE had arisen in the lower portion of the district assigned to S. Paul's, amid the marshes of Pimlico, near the Hospital and to the east of Ebury Street, a series of deplorable slums, which extended down to the river. From 1742 to 1803 those gardens, which in still earlier times had belonged to the Earl of Ranelagh, attracted to their nightly shows, amid fashionable sin and frivolity, the princes and nobles of the land. But in that neighbourhood most unfashionable sin and brutal degradation reigned in 1850. There the streets were rugged and but half made, undrained, unpaved. The houses were not old but already ruinous. The foul sewer, which drained half of Western London, and had been originally "The Serpentine River," ran, open and uncovered, full of filth of every sort down to the Thames, between starved, half-decayed trees whose branches produced leaves that could be numbered. The appropriately named "Nell Gwynn's Court" looked down, in defiance of cholera, upon this flowing tide of abomination, and delighted in filth and foulness both of body and soul, which neither the Sanitary nor the Ecclesiastical Commissioners had been cruel enough to put to flight.
The inhabitants matched, naturally enough, their surroundings. Men, women and children were half clad, without shoes, dirty, ragged, reckless. Their lot seemed so low and miserable that they were careless with despair and without power to desire to be otherwise than they were. The low lodging-houses were dens for profligates and thieves. The small beer-shops were receptacles for the veriest dregs of society. Street rows were incessant. Drink and gambling flourished. Dirty, disorderly, ill-conditioned children filled the streets. Blasphemy met the ear at every turn. The district presented an aspect of degradation and darkness scarcely to be exceeded in London.'
All this resulted in his determination to build a church there. He lists the detailed mathematics of how the rich could pay for the church and the school that was to be built. Then joy that his high church architectural plans are approved by the Bishop.
"I hardly dared to entertain the thought that" he would consecrate such a church. "I could not expect, I did not expect, in my own mind, that a rood screen, a chancel highly decorated, an altar of stone, diapered work and panelling throughout, painted glass in every window and gilded capitals" (what a terrible list of enormities!)--"I hardly thought that all this would pass without censure, or at least without some expression of unwillingness to stamp it with Episcopal sanction. I hardly thought that a piscina, a credence, an aumbry, sedilia, and all the furniture appertaining could pass without some words of remonstrance. I wished the Bishop personally to inspect it. Accordingly on May 2 he came. He did not like the screen as a matter of private taste, but made no objection 'as long as there was no rood (i.e. crucifix) on it.'"
On May 17 Mr. Bennett pleaded for a "rood cross," i.e. without the Figure, and though the Bishop at first strongly objected, he "ultimately gave me my way." The only point to which the Bishop permanently objected was--the placing flowers on the altar. One is glad to reflect that flowers have now purged themselves from the charge of being of Romish proclivities, that the Pope is no longer supposed to lie concealed in a rosebud, that indulgences and papal bulls are no longer looked for among the petals of a lily, and that we now realize that we might have searched in vain for the Jesuit College even amidst the florets of the then newly evolved double dahlia.'
When the building was finally finished in 1850 it is praised.
"It is a noble work," said Archdeacon Manning in his sermon, "nobly conceived, and as nobly carried to its end; a work for God and for His poor wrought out of the costliest gifts, and with the most skilful art, in splendour and symmetry, in stateliness and beauty."
But the Bishop of London, leaning increasingly to the Protestant side of the church and Mr Bennett's beliefs become increasingly divergent. Differences about which way the vicar faces at communion, the disputed rood cross ( later it is nailed to the altar to attempt to make it part of the building after one church warden would take it away and another put it out again) and tiny details that align St Barnabus to Catholiscism are exchanged in heated letters. Important to this row is the central idea that Mr Bennett should be obedient to the Bishop as part of the Apostolical Succession for indeed within his faith it is impossible for him to disobey a Bishop. The row gathers momentum, the Bishop of London not listening to the well formed and heart felt arguments of obedience. The Prime Minister - a recent worshipper at the Oxford movement St Paul's denounces St Barnabus for it's popery, and the bishop sends the exchange of letters between himself and Bennett to be published in the Times 'proving' St Barnabus's Catholic allegiance. A mob gathers, gaining momentum Sunday after Sunday.
"I wish to inform you that on Sunday, November 17, a very large mob of most tumultuous and disorderly persons collected together a second time round the church, and this with a much greater demonstration of force than on the preceding Sunday--that a force of one hundred constables was required to keep the mob from overt acts of violence; that notwithstanding the exertions of the police much violence was committed, and a leader of the rioters taken into custody; that the mob again assembled at the evening service at three o'clock, and were guilty again of violent cries, yells, and other noises, battering at the doors of the church and disturbing the whole congregation--that similar scenes occurred again on Sunday, the 24th of November, when I was interrupted in my sermon by outcries and other signs of disaffection as before; all this tumult, your Lordship will please to remember, arising from persons collected from all parts of London--non-parishioners.
"NO VIRGIN MARY."
"NO WAFER GODS."
"NO BISHOPS."
"NO CREED WORSHIP."
"NO FORGIVENESS OF SINS.
is chalked on walls in surrounding streets.
It gives dramatic details of the sermon Mr Bennett preached from his heart as the mob breaks into the church and how they turn tail and retreat.
Then Mr Bennett's resignation to the Bishop of London with his stated belief that 'The Church is superior to any individual bishop.'
Despite the working men's presentation which the Bishop will not hear.
"We beseech your Lordship to let Mr. Bennett remain with us; but, if not, we do hope your Lordship will see that our church, which was built expressly for us, is still a poor man's church.'
But he leaves. The church packed hours early service after service before he departs. A last meal when he is presented with a silver inkwell, candlesticks and from the "Committee of the Poor " a silver teapot.
All this in this little beautiful and peaceful church. The principles fought for seem so unimportant to me, so minute in the details of faith but the bravery and intelligent honesty and honour seem really moving.
Amen
Friday, 29 April 2011
Westminster Abbey (Reprise) The Royal Wedding
Of course I went. I took my sons. We took a step ladder!
We went down our street, turned right, turned left and turned right again and walked a few metres to stand opposite Westminster Abbey door. I had good intentions of getting up early to bag a space but somehow ( I made two Victoria Sponges and washed the kitchen floor before leaving) it was 10.30 when we left and the wedding started at 11am. It was crowded by the Abbey but we could get near. We stood in almost exactly the same place I had seen the pope and just a bit further back from where at the edge of parliament square I had seen the thick black wall of policemen kettle protestors but this was the busiest. This was packed. Today I was with my friend that I have known since school, her girlfriend, her girlfriend's pretty niece, the boys and at the last minute exh had rung the bell and said could he come with us too - so we all walked down there together. Though there was only one real royalist among us and it was my friend's girlfriend. Exh had made royal wedding badges to sell and he carried them on a make shift tray slung round his neck - dressed like the guest of a big fat wedding. A rogue hat and a button hole. People kept taking his picture though not many bought badges.
There was a time early on writing this blog when I found the task of describing Westminster Abbey too daunting and thought about leaving it until last. Then as soon as I had been and learnt the history of an Abbey built on an island in the marshes by the Thames over a thousand years ago I wished I had started there. It was where Westminster began. This history radiating out from the boggy island as the surrounding land was drained and built on. Researching or writing this I have often been surprised at who lived here - then it dawned on me that early on there was only Westminster or The City of London - the rest of London wasn't here. Though I was excited to find out recently that Caxton brought his press here from Bruges in 1473 the first printing press in England. I discover the shop was here, adjacent to the Abbey and that he rented tenements and a loft over the gate to the Almonry (near the west end). It wasn't just London radiating from Westminster Abbey but our language too.
When the Royal Wedding was announced I thought oh wow if I had waited that would have been a perfect ending to ISICTT - it would have been going for just over a year AND it would end with a wedding! What a perfect and traditional way to end a story I think and I am tempted.
The royalist in our party has brough a mini tv and spare batteries and lots of people cluster around to work out what is happening. There is a debate in the crowd whether to climb on top of a bus stop to get a better view and for a while no one dares. Eventually a man gets up and he is then asked by the police to get down. Which he does. Another man asks exh the price of his badges and then whips out a trading licensing id. 'Either give them away or I'll confiscate them' he hisses as exh bundles badges into his pockets. The children squabble about turns on the ladder. Then fight. I worry that this will be what the crowd remember. It will be what I remember. Though as the bride arrives I hold the ladder for one son and put the other on my shoulders, slightly stooped, eyeing the pavement with a wobbly gaze. The crowds surge holding periscopes, cameras and phones aloft. I am pleased I am not a royalist, that I don't really mind missing it. Though I am not sure anyone sees much. Or even that we mind.
At some point a couple push buggies, one each, through the dense mass of people. It looks hard work and there isn't much further they can get. The crowd advise them to stay put, it gets more crowded further down, they won't see much more. The couple stop to take breath. Then start, ' I'd rather be anywhere but here today.' They say. 'Who'd come here.' They say. 'What a big fuss.' They say before pushing on. This is not a cut through. This is a dead end. I don't understand their effort.
After the arrivals the crowd thins and we are able to inch our ladder down the street. A policewoman only a fraction away from obesity ( I only mention it because I have never seen it before) says we mustn't use our ladder. My friend says - we've been using it just down the street and she says, well, I would have stopped you, if I'd seen you. 'It's a by law.' Though there is a lack of conviction and I doubt it. How can it be a by law to set up a ladder? It is how things are built. But just a bit further down we find a good angle to the Abbey door against a wall ( still with the ladder ) and my eldest son becomes a tripod to the royalist friend. Everyone is happy.
The crowd cheer when the couple are pronounced man and wife and we hear Jerusalem sung from within the church itself.
A group of pretty girls push a young woman in a wheelchair into the crowded throng. We need to get to Trafalgar Square. They announce. The crowd takes charge. It is impossible, now, from here, they say. Even with a wheelchair? Even with a wheelchair is the verdict. The pretty girl in the wheelchair says 'I suffer from claustrophobia' but it is a quiet, low down voice and I feel only me and my friend from school holding the ladder hear her. They all keep pushing on. Again, there is only a dead end to reach.
Three women in black robes, but not full face burkahs stand alongside us. They have slightly masculine faces and whitening make up - creamy, a little bit oily, like floating chalk on their skin I think of Michael Jackson. They are smiley with me and my grumpy, bickering sons. We are all here. I think. Celebrating something. Love or tradition. Or history. Or just living round the corner. The carriages and horses and soldiers line up alongside us, ludicrously fairy tale, a historic toy box come to life.
The bride and groom appear at the door of the Abbey. I am still holding child legs steady as the crowd cheers. Though later I am pleased because our royalist friend gets perfect pictures of the pair smiling at the doorway.
After the carriages and soldiers and finally the mini buses for the guests have all disappeared we meet PSM and her two sons on parliament square. The peace tents are still parked tight on the edge of pavement by railings. But just for this day the green lawn of the square has been opened. We walk down The Mall as the flypast flies past, and then cut through horse guards parade and into the park. A huge royal standard billows over Buckingham Palace. Crowds of people are clustered, picnicking, wearing flags and hats like old fashioned scenes in modern colours.
Then back for tea. By now there is quite a throng - 5 boys, 6 women ( my Indonesian friend comes with her son) and exh. I have said there will be an English tea. ( Remember the Victoria Sponges? ) I serve tea and Cava and make egg and cucumber sandwiches but there isn't really enough. I put pizza out for the children but unexpectedly they go for cucumber sandwiches and everytime I slice the crusts off another round and put them out on a fancy cake stand they have gone. I worry that my friend's girlfriend is hungry. I worry that I have told my Indonesian friend that there will be alcohol but not that there will be lesbians. Though I need her to accept us as we are. Then hold my breath when PSM asks me about UL - for an adulterous relationship is almost too much to ask anyone to accept. But she takes everything in her stride, smiling, kind and funny. And the cakes save the day - they are delicious.
Trying to piece this together I find that nearby 'Caxton Hall' near St James's tube station was a registery office popular with famous people.
http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2009/06/caxton-hall-in-westminster-and-the-marriage-of-diana-dors-to-dennis-hamilton/ ( the description of Diana Dors wedding is hilarious and terrifying )
Two days later we wake to find Bin Laden is dead.
I don't think this will be the last post. I think my ambition is to reach The City.
Amen.
We went down our street, turned right, turned left and turned right again and walked a few metres to stand opposite Westminster Abbey door. I had good intentions of getting up early to bag a space but somehow ( I made two Victoria Sponges and washed the kitchen floor before leaving) it was 10.30 when we left and the wedding started at 11am. It was crowded by the Abbey but we could get near. We stood in almost exactly the same place I had seen the pope and just a bit further back from where at the edge of parliament square I had seen the thick black wall of policemen kettle protestors but this was the busiest. This was packed. Today I was with my friend that I have known since school, her girlfriend, her girlfriend's pretty niece, the boys and at the last minute exh had rung the bell and said could he come with us too - so we all walked down there together. Though there was only one real royalist among us and it was my friend's girlfriend. Exh had made royal wedding badges to sell and he carried them on a make shift tray slung round his neck - dressed like the guest of a big fat wedding. A rogue hat and a button hole. People kept taking his picture though not many bought badges.
There was a time early on writing this blog when I found the task of describing Westminster Abbey too daunting and thought about leaving it until last. Then as soon as I had been and learnt the history of an Abbey built on an island in the marshes by the Thames over a thousand years ago I wished I had started there. It was where Westminster began. This history radiating out from the boggy island as the surrounding land was drained and built on. Researching or writing this I have often been surprised at who lived here - then it dawned on me that early on there was only Westminster or The City of London - the rest of London wasn't here. Though I was excited to find out recently that Caxton brought his press here from Bruges in 1473 the first printing press in England. I discover the shop was here, adjacent to the Abbey and that he rented tenements and a loft over the gate to the Almonry (near the west end). It wasn't just London radiating from Westminster Abbey but our language too.
When the Royal Wedding was announced I thought oh wow if I had waited that would have been a perfect ending to ISICTT - it would have been going for just over a year AND it would end with a wedding! What a perfect and traditional way to end a story I think and I am tempted.
The royalist in our party has brough a mini tv and spare batteries and lots of people cluster around to work out what is happening. There is a debate in the crowd whether to climb on top of a bus stop to get a better view and for a while no one dares. Eventually a man gets up and he is then asked by the police to get down. Which he does. Another man asks exh the price of his badges and then whips out a trading licensing id. 'Either give them away or I'll confiscate them' he hisses as exh bundles badges into his pockets. The children squabble about turns on the ladder. Then fight. I worry that this will be what the crowd remember. It will be what I remember. Though as the bride arrives I hold the ladder for one son and put the other on my shoulders, slightly stooped, eyeing the pavement with a wobbly gaze. The crowds surge holding periscopes, cameras and phones aloft. I am pleased I am not a royalist, that I don't really mind missing it. Though I am not sure anyone sees much. Or even that we mind.
At some point a couple push buggies, one each, through the dense mass of people. It looks hard work and there isn't much further they can get. The crowd advise them to stay put, it gets more crowded further down, they won't see much more. The couple stop to take breath. Then start, ' I'd rather be anywhere but here today.' They say. 'Who'd come here.' They say. 'What a big fuss.' They say before pushing on. This is not a cut through. This is a dead end. I don't understand their effort.
After the arrivals the crowd thins and we are able to inch our ladder down the street. A policewoman only a fraction away from obesity ( I only mention it because I have never seen it before) says we mustn't use our ladder. My friend says - we've been using it just down the street and she says, well, I would have stopped you, if I'd seen you. 'It's a by law.' Though there is a lack of conviction and I doubt it. How can it be a by law to set up a ladder? It is how things are built. But just a bit further down we find a good angle to the Abbey door against a wall ( still with the ladder ) and my eldest son becomes a tripod to the royalist friend. Everyone is happy.
The crowd cheer when the couple are pronounced man and wife and we hear Jerusalem sung from within the church itself.
A group of pretty girls push a young woman in a wheelchair into the crowded throng. We need to get to Trafalgar Square. They announce. The crowd takes charge. It is impossible, now, from here, they say. Even with a wheelchair? Even with a wheelchair is the verdict. The pretty girl in the wheelchair says 'I suffer from claustrophobia' but it is a quiet, low down voice and I feel only me and my friend from school holding the ladder hear her. They all keep pushing on. Again, there is only a dead end to reach.
Three women in black robes, but not full face burkahs stand alongside us. They have slightly masculine faces and whitening make up - creamy, a little bit oily, like floating chalk on their skin I think of Michael Jackson. They are smiley with me and my grumpy, bickering sons. We are all here. I think. Celebrating something. Love or tradition. Or history. Or just living round the corner. The carriages and horses and soldiers line up alongside us, ludicrously fairy tale, a historic toy box come to life.
The bride and groom appear at the door of the Abbey. I am still holding child legs steady as the crowd cheers. Though later I am pleased because our royalist friend gets perfect pictures of the pair smiling at the doorway.
After the carriages and soldiers and finally the mini buses for the guests have all disappeared we meet PSM and her two sons on parliament square. The peace tents are still parked tight on the edge of pavement by railings. But just for this day the green lawn of the square has been opened. We walk down The Mall as the flypast flies past, and then cut through horse guards parade and into the park. A huge royal standard billows over Buckingham Palace. Crowds of people are clustered, picnicking, wearing flags and hats like old fashioned scenes in modern colours.
Then back for tea. By now there is quite a throng - 5 boys, 6 women ( my Indonesian friend comes with her son) and exh. I have said there will be an English tea. ( Remember the Victoria Sponges? ) I serve tea and Cava and make egg and cucumber sandwiches but there isn't really enough. I put pizza out for the children but unexpectedly they go for cucumber sandwiches and everytime I slice the crusts off another round and put them out on a fancy cake stand they have gone. I worry that my friend's girlfriend is hungry. I worry that I have told my Indonesian friend that there will be alcohol but not that there will be lesbians. Though I need her to accept us as we are. Then hold my breath when PSM asks me about UL - for an adulterous relationship is almost too much to ask anyone to accept. But she takes everything in her stride, smiling, kind and funny. And the cakes save the day - they are delicious.
Trying to piece this together I find that nearby 'Caxton Hall' near St James's tube station was a registery office popular with famous people.
http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2009/06/caxton-hall-in-westminster-and-the-marriage-of-diana-dors-to-dennis-hamilton/ ( the description of Diana Dors wedding is hilarious and terrifying )
Two days later we wake to find Bin Laden is dead.
I don't think this will be the last post. I think my ambition is to reach The City.
Amen.
Monday, 18 April 2011
Saint Etienne, Vallouise, France
I feel like I am in a Pixar film. We have two hamsters in the flat. One in a cage in the kitchen, one in a cage in the living room. Both gnawing at the bars. If I didn't keep closing the door between the rooms they would be able to see the mirror of their solitary bent-on-escape lives. Which seems cruel to both though I have been told that two male hamsters would fight to the death if put together.
We are looking after PSM's eldest son's hamster while they are on holiday. Mush Mush. A golden hamster with gentle eyes and inquisitivie whiskers. Everytime I mention the fight to the death the boys look fascinated, even sly, certain Sparky would win. Though Sparky - who has entertained us by building structures out of his sawdust to get nearer to the bars, mixing water from his bottle to the sawdust to make a firmer mixture to build those slopes and spires, and eventually a kind of condensation heating system out of these water/sawdust mixtures, all the time maintaining his fierce stare and wild determination seems to have a new ploy. He has become a 'pet'. My youngest son plucked up courage to handle him with gloves and within a couple of holiday hours both boys were bare hand handling, even putting him in their pockets and on their shoulders. I worry that my own fear has blighted the little furry fellows life. Or he has pulled off his best stunt yet, swopping himself with another more biddable but look-a-like pet.
It is the Easter holidays. In my surprising life we went ski ing for the first five days. My brother has a flat in the Alps and I would beg, steal or borrow to ski, to teach my young sons to ski. Infact of course I mainly borrowed. But it always costs more than I think and I come back with shaky financial nerves, not enough money left to buy the beds for them that I had also borrowed money for and a sense that my strategy, this brave but foolhardy sailing into the wind, trying to give them a good life, a life off the breadline I have put myself on will tumble. I should get a proper job. Spend less on ebay shoes. Spend less. I don't know. I feel shaky and wrong with my illusions of grandeur. Defeated. At one point I let them watch tv on a beautiful sunny afternoon so that I can cry while I tidy up their bedroom. I berate myself that other mother's are managing better and indeed facebook proves it. Sunny smiling children mix perfume in perfumed gardens.
Later ( and all of it behind scenes ) I pull myself together and we have fish and chips in St James's park and play catch. It is magical. All three of us happy.
My answer ( if anyone ever asked ) to 'What is the most surprising thing about you?' Would be that I can ski. That I can ski well.
I go with exh and two other Dads and their sons. I forget to be alarmed at the exclusively male company until just before going. My plan is that each adult takes responsibility for one days food and I get a bit bossy just before we go about how to do it. I want us to save money, I want us to be fed well. But it is good for me to lay down the law for I would have adopted annoying martyr tendencies if I hadn't and everyone sticks to the arrangement with good grace.
This holiday my youngest son cracks it - he learns to ski. I feel like a lioness watching as he is joined by his brother and the two other boys coming down the mountain, his cheeky face beaming - the three older boys at his side, caring for him, praising him, standing by him when he falls until I swoop from high to lift him onto his feet. In the time between speeding down the mountain, dusting snow out of small children's gloves and necks, strapping small feet into ski boots and persuading boys to put suncream on or sitting on chair lifts both exh and his friend keep drily suggesting I find time to visit a church. This blog has caused so much trouble in this group, and I am not really forgiven, certainly not by exh so I say, no I don't think so. I enjoy just the speed, the angle my body can make coming down a mountain fast, the swoop and elegance of a turn. Of not thinking of anything, anybody, but doing this, being here now. And the mountains are magnificent, beautiful, breathtaking. Oh it is a good thing.
During an evening meal the two other dad's charm me with a tale of themselves as young men paying a prostitute to play table tennis with an imaginary ball in ( I think ) Poland. They said when their hour was up, she stopped on the minute but that she played well.
On the last day it is necessary to do a supermarket shop to replace things we have used in the flat and me and one of the dads drive down the mountain to do it. He has injured his knee and has not been able to ski the last few days and has already explored some of the valley. I keep saying nervously how brilliant the holiday has been and then remembering about his knee and feeling guilty. Can we just go back to a church in the village, he has left his camera case he says. I think he is teasing me, wonder if he is testing me but can only say yes. He parks the car like in a car advert, just flung by a water trough that serves as a roundabout in an old stone, fairy tale village. We enter the church through a beautiful old grained wood carved door. The church is lovely, of basillica design, arches like the structure of internal organs .
I am paranoid that he has engineered this and determined as I look round not to write about it. He finds his camera case quickly and easily - did he just have it in his pocket I wonder? There are lovely statues and frescos. A rich gold altarpiece with floral decorations painted on the vaulted ceiling above. A fresco of dead christ, his rib cage exposed and puny and some absolutely lovely figures of saints - Saint Pancrace, Saint Roc, Saint Jacques de Compostelle, Sainte Barbe, Saint Antoine and another of a pious but sinister looking priest. I am grateful to come here, see this lovely church built in the 14th century - tucked in a dead end valley with a glacier like that hitchcock ship in Marnie at the end of their 'street' - it must have been a remote place for most of history.
Back in London I think I am going to have to describe the French church after all for the Easter holdiday means I have no time to visit anywhere but adventure playgrounds and pet shops. Also I want to be straight about my Marie Antoinette lifestyle. I am poor but I have assumptions of middle class life which are tricky to balance with where I am and what I describe.
Round here preparations are under way for the Royal Wedding - shop facades are being steam cleaned on Victoria Street to a certain height as if getting rid of old grime to eye level. Though I check the route and it doesn't look like the royal couple will come this way so I not sure what it is about. Though there will be thousands of people pouring down these streets maybe they just want their brand names to look good. I discover too more historic grime of where I live. On my street corner I find a description of badger baiting:
'In 1792 one William Ebberfield ( probably the same individual as a well-known local criminal called Slender Billy, later hanged for forgery) was prosecuted by his neighbours for the nuisance caused by dog- and badger baiting in a house in Great Peter St. In another ( or perhaps the same ) 'pit' said to be Duck Lane, the the heart of the Westminster slums, a dog-fighting African monkey attracted the fashionable West End to rub shoulders with more local low life.'
Also the overcrowding,
'Under parliamentary powers obtained in 1845, Victoria Street was cut through the Almonry, Dacre Street, and the northern ends of Duck Lane and Strutton Ground. The slums, however, did not go away. Indeed the vicar of St John's estimated that the work displaced five thousand of the poor from their homes. Although three quarters of these left the district, mostly crossing the river to other poor districts, the remainder croweded into the courts and cottages that were left, living three or four families to a house built for one. A local missionary estimated in 1855 that in one of the areas's 24 common lodging houses an average occupancy might be one hundred and twenty people a night. 72 lived in one of the twelve six-roomed houses in one court. From another in the course of three months, 69 young people had been sentenced to transportation, and one hanged at Newgate.'
'Westminster And Pimlico Past.' Isobel Watson.
The imprint of desperation still exists. I have seen a young man in shabby shoes and a grey face his fingers shaking, his eyes ashamed but determined, neck methadone in one gulp at the counter in Boots, a gentle girl like a soft Disney animal, kindly holding out the plastic measured cup. We'll see you tomorrow she said. He waved. An acrid aftertaste in the air. A homeless man ran bleeding through our courtyard recently but followed by a well dressed man who stubbornly kept on his trail organising help. Another destitute man sits on the corner sometimes with his arm around a life sized toy Alasatian Dog. But Westminster Council are trying to pass by laws to make street sleeping illegal and helping or feeding homeless people prosecutable with heavy fines.
http://www.westminster.gov.uk/press-releases/2011-02/soup-runs-and-rough-sleeping-could-be-banned-at-we/
http://london.indymedia.org/articles/7920
My youngest son, has only just started to read but he understood immediately the flier that came through the door - 'Do not feed the homeless' it said, drumming up support for a demonstration against the measures and he wrote in his still big, wavery letters. NOT RITE.
Finally and this was before school broke up my Indonesian friend came unexpectedly one morning to drop her son off so I could take him to school. His beautiful face anxious as she ushered him in. I need to tell you something privately she said and I pulled the door to and stood with her in the stairwell hearing the boys all laughing slightly manically inside. Her husband had been set upon by three men, somewhere just outside of London. His face had been smashed, his cheekbone broken. I have to go to him she said. Yes, I said let me know what I can do to help. But I don't think there is anything I can do. They are trapped in something terrible and I don't even know what it is.
Amen.
We are looking after PSM's eldest son's hamster while they are on holiday. Mush Mush. A golden hamster with gentle eyes and inquisitivie whiskers. Everytime I mention the fight to the death the boys look fascinated, even sly, certain Sparky would win. Though Sparky - who has entertained us by building structures out of his sawdust to get nearer to the bars, mixing water from his bottle to the sawdust to make a firmer mixture to build those slopes and spires, and eventually a kind of condensation heating system out of these water/sawdust mixtures, all the time maintaining his fierce stare and wild determination seems to have a new ploy. He has become a 'pet'. My youngest son plucked up courage to handle him with gloves and within a couple of holiday hours both boys were bare hand handling, even putting him in their pockets and on their shoulders. I worry that my own fear has blighted the little furry fellows life. Or he has pulled off his best stunt yet, swopping himself with another more biddable but look-a-like pet.
It is the Easter holidays. In my surprising life we went ski ing for the first five days. My brother has a flat in the Alps and I would beg, steal or borrow to ski, to teach my young sons to ski. Infact of course I mainly borrowed. But it always costs more than I think and I come back with shaky financial nerves, not enough money left to buy the beds for them that I had also borrowed money for and a sense that my strategy, this brave but foolhardy sailing into the wind, trying to give them a good life, a life off the breadline I have put myself on will tumble. I should get a proper job. Spend less on ebay shoes. Spend less. I don't know. I feel shaky and wrong with my illusions of grandeur. Defeated. At one point I let them watch tv on a beautiful sunny afternoon so that I can cry while I tidy up their bedroom. I berate myself that other mother's are managing better and indeed facebook proves it. Sunny smiling children mix perfume in perfumed gardens.
Later ( and all of it behind scenes ) I pull myself together and we have fish and chips in St James's park and play catch. It is magical. All three of us happy.
My answer ( if anyone ever asked ) to 'What is the most surprising thing about you?' Would be that I can ski. That I can ski well.
I go with exh and two other Dads and their sons. I forget to be alarmed at the exclusively male company until just before going. My plan is that each adult takes responsibility for one days food and I get a bit bossy just before we go about how to do it. I want us to save money, I want us to be fed well. But it is good for me to lay down the law for I would have adopted annoying martyr tendencies if I hadn't and everyone sticks to the arrangement with good grace.
This holiday my youngest son cracks it - he learns to ski. I feel like a lioness watching as he is joined by his brother and the two other boys coming down the mountain, his cheeky face beaming - the three older boys at his side, caring for him, praising him, standing by him when he falls until I swoop from high to lift him onto his feet. In the time between speeding down the mountain, dusting snow out of small children's gloves and necks, strapping small feet into ski boots and persuading boys to put suncream on or sitting on chair lifts both exh and his friend keep drily suggesting I find time to visit a church. This blog has caused so much trouble in this group, and I am not really forgiven, certainly not by exh so I say, no I don't think so. I enjoy just the speed, the angle my body can make coming down a mountain fast, the swoop and elegance of a turn. Of not thinking of anything, anybody, but doing this, being here now. And the mountains are magnificent, beautiful, breathtaking. Oh it is a good thing.
During an evening meal the two other dad's charm me with a tale of themselves as young men paying a prostitute to play table tennis with an imaginary ball in ( I think ) Poland. They said when their hour was up, she stopped on the minute but that she played well.
On the last day it is necessary to do a supermarket shop to replace things we have used in the flat and me and one of the dads drive down the mountain to do it. He has injured his knee and has not been able to ski the last few days and has already explored some of the valley. I keep saying nervously how brilliant the holiday has been and then remembering about his knee and feeling guilty. Can we just go back to a church in the village, he has left his camera case he says. I think he is teasing me, wonder if he is testing me but can only say yes. He parks the car like in a car advert, just flung by a water trough that serves as a roundabout in an old stone, fairy tale village. We enter the church through a beautiful old grained wood carved door. The church is lovely, of basillica design, arches like the structure of internal organs .
I am paranoid that he has engineered this and determined as I look round not to write about it. He finds his camera case quickly and easily - did he just have it in his pocket I wonder? There are lovely statues and frescos. A rich gold altarpiece with floral decorations painted on the vaulted ceiling above. A fresco of dead christ, his rib cage exposed and puny and some absolutely lovely figures of saints - Saint Pancrace, Saint Roc, Saint Jacques de Compostelle, Sainte Barbe, Saint Antoine and another of a pious but sinister looking priest. I am grateful to come here, see this lovely church built in the 14th century - tucked in a dead end valley with a glacier like that hitchcock ship in Marnie at the end of their 'street' - it must have been a remote place for most of history.
Back in London I think I am going to have to describe the French church after all for the Easter holdiday means I have no time to visit anywhere but adventure playgrounds and pet shops. Also I want to be straight about my Marie Antoinette lifestyle. I am poor but I have assumptions of middle class life which are tricky to balance with where I am and what I describe.
Round here preparations are under way for the Royal Wedding - shop facades are being steam cleaned on Victoria Street to a certain height as if getting rid of old grime to eye level. Though I check the route and it doesn't look like the royal couple will come this way so I not sure what it is about. Though there will be thousands of people pouring down these streets maybe they just want their brand names to look good. I discover too more historic grime of where I live. On my street corner I find a description of badger baiting:
'In 1792 one William Ebberfield ( probably the same individual as a well-known local criminal called Slender Billy, later hanged for forgery) was prosecuted by his neighbours for the nuisance caused by dog- and badger baiting in a house in Great Peter St. In another ( or perhaps the same ) 'pit' said to be Duck Lane, the the heart of the Westminster slums, a dog-fighting African monkey attracted the fashionable West End to rub shoulders with more local low life.'
Also the overcrowding,
'Under parliamentary powers obtained in 1845, Victoria Street was cut through the Almonry, Dacre Street, and the northern ends of Duck Lane and Strutton Ground. The slums, however, did not go away. Indeed the vicar of St John's estimated that the work displaced five thousand of the poor from their homes. Although three quarters of these left the district, mostly crossing the river to other poor districts, the remainder croweded into the courts and cottages that were left, living three or four families to a house built for one. A local missionary estimated in 1855 that in one of the areas's 24 common lodging houses an average occupancy might be one hundred and twenty people a night. 72 lived in one of the twelve six-roomed houses in one court. From another in the course of three months, 69 young people had been sentenced to transportation, and one hanged at Newgate.'
'Westminster And Pimlico Past.' Isobel Watson.
The imprint of desperation still exists. I have seen a young man in shabby shoes and a grey face his fingers shaking, his eyes ashamed but determined, neck methadone in one gulp at the counter in Boots, a gentle girl like a soft Disney animal, kindly holding out the plastic measured cup. We'll see you tomorrow she said. He waved. An acrid aftertaste in the air. A homeless man ran bleeding through our courtyard recently but followed by a well dressed man who stubbornly kept on his trail organising help. Another destitute man sits on the corner sometimes with his arm around a life sized toy Alasatian Dog. But Westminster Council are trying to pass by laws to make street sleeping illegal and helping or feeding homeless people prosecutable with heavy fines.
http://www.westminster.gov.uk/press-releases/2011-02/soup-runs-and-rough-sleeping-could-be-banned-at-we/
http://london.indymedia.org/articles/7920
My youngest son, has only just started to read but he understood immediately the flier that came through the door - 'Do not feed the homeless' it said, drumming up support for a demonstration against the measures and he wrote in his still big, wavery letters. NOT RITE.
Finally and this was before school broke up my Indonesian friend came unexpectedly one morning to drop her son off so I could take him to school. His beautiful face anxious as she ushered him in. I need to tell you something privately she said and I pulled the door to and stood with her in the stairwell hearing the boys all laughing slightly manically inside. Her husband had been set upon by three men, somewhere just outside of London. His face had been smashed, his cheekbone broken. I have to go to him she said. Yes, I said let me know what I can do to help. But I don't think there is anything I can do. They are trapped in something terrible and I don't even know what it is.
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)