I find it very hard to switch off. Not to be on 'guard'. Even to sit still. I think since the first time I stood on the toilet lid to reach the toilet rolls on a Sunday morning and found a regiment of empty and full cans of stella, tucked behind the pack at the back of the shelf and in mid-tiptoe-stretch realised in a wash, a wave, a flood of stark understanding exactly what was happening within our family I have found it difficult not to concentrate on life with an almost magnified watchfulness. I was busy already with two young children, a long commute and a nearly full time job - but in that chilly downstairs toilet I stood aghast but alert, hyper-aware listening to the children playing with their seemingly exuberant but erratic dad.
That home was in a coastal town on the mouth of an estuary, a cowboy town with one road in and a lot of people who never left, never moved from it. I would hear the clunk of pile-driving on and on as the foundations of a big seafront development were attempted but they just couldn't reach solid ground on the estuary mud. It took months to get the foundations in and the austere, ugly flats with the beautiful view missed the certaintity of that seemingly never ending property boom just as I did.
Though I imagine that having lost my job and with weeks to spare I would be able to sit and write a blog a week, wrestle the first novel into a publishable package ( I even have an idea - ding! - how to do it!) then make sense of my ideas for the second. But I don't. I go ( slightly unsuccesfully ) homemaker crazy. I fill every second with manic effort - cleaning all the cupboards, driving to ikea twice ( boys beds, a wardrobe for me, underbed drawers ( more later) ), pasting a forest photo mural on a wall in the boys room, buying storage on ebay and nice sheets for all. I have a plan that if I can hold back the tide of dressing up box, airfix, lego. that we will all feel well, and that with a mere flick of my wrist I will scoot the vacuum cleaner/ duster around and then sit to read a book/ write. And yet all this unceasing effort creates a tidal scurf - there is a dismantled platform bed in the hall, child stained mattresses, jigsaws for charity shops, even a playmobil ark ( though I am too fond of the animals to give them away, so it is a shell of a toy, almost useless) and all this tidying feels like it has created only more havoc. I need Exh to move the stuff, need him to help me. But ( and this is indeed a celebration ) Exh has a new home too. He is moving from the hostel on our street to a live/work unit in nearby south london with some friends. The boys are so excited. Though exh has always struggled with change ( as perhaps I do ) so he dips badly before getting back into his stride but a little bit edgy and anxious.
I think when I am lost on one of these lone, obsessive trips to Ikea, this time to the Edmonton one which I have never been to before, because it is the only branch that says underbed storage is 'instock', though because I have left the directions on the kitchen table and then confused right and left from the snatched instructions my kind brother relays over the mobile phone in a layby, I am parked up off a dimly lit roundabout - this is a fantasy - I am chasing something impossible to obtain from flat pack furniture. Can enough Billy bookshelves, a Pax wardrobe and some brightly coloured children's bedroom accessories give peace? And yet the boys new room coincides with many things to achieve it. Though the anger has already mainly blown out of my eldest son - and if this is a brief boast I will still thank every day it is true. Often he puts his hand in mine to walk to school and conceals blown kisses behind his hand in the school line. A boy who used to wake and shout 'Mum! I hate you! The grave things he has had to face in his 9 years make him thoughtful, passionate and generous. In an argument with his brother he occasionally shouts 'I want to hurt you' but he keeps his hands by his side. We have come a long way.
Though I am writing all this late at night and then start to look up on the internet about Nietzsche. I can't remember now the path of this thought though I know it went via Foucault's sado masochism at one point. I start copying and pasting details of Nietzsche's ideas to use later. Only in the morning do I discover a part has been pasted in the middle of my description of the journey to ikea:
I think when I am lost "Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." I am sure you think I am staging this but I am not - it has made me laugh so much for somehow there is something hilarious or true there. Myself parked just off the north circular pondering the lack of god. Though I think I almost did feel that, I just couldn't have said it. I felt spectacularly bleak. Once a long time ago I wrote a story about myself - like a detective story about a teenage romance I had ( though it included an erotic tale of shaving ul's head) the nearest thing to this scrapbook style of confessional writing that I seem to employ now - and in the relatively early days of home computers and temperamental printers it once chewed a whole page spitting out a short piece of text "!@£E$%^^&make a point to all this me me me !@£$TGJNBjnc". I kept it for ages because I thought it was so funny. ( though I have lost that story somehow - though oh, I wish hadn't.)
I wonder too if I need to keep so busy as ul and I have finished our relationship. We intend to see each other but not attempt a reunion. I wish wish wish this wasn't true but it seems necessary. He is a drowned man, though still kicking, white flesh submerged in murky water, too far to get to, his stored anger like heavy stones stiched into his pockets, a current dragging him distorted and grey too far away. I wait in the few quiet, still moments of the day to be hit by grief. But it doesn't come. I am not sure if I am hiding out treading water in my homemaking or nearing dry land. Though I am back to a life alone without the cheer of a supporter.
The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory formerly The Bavarian Chapel is a flat-faced dark brick building on a dark back street behind Regent St with an open side door. I find later a description - 'In its humble guise of eighteenth-century domesticity (it) seems to shrink from attracting the notice of the passers-by' W.de l'Hopital. Then I read more and more and see it was hiding out. As indeed it feels this day as I go through the dark rather depressing door a bit reluctantly and then open another side door into the body of the church discovering a wonderful place, small and elegant, almost like a private chapel . Oh I think. This peaceful space has just been sat here as if waiting. I feel I can breathe for the first time in weeks. I am always rushing to get to a church, always rushing to find the scrap of time to write and here I am, here where I rushed to be and just for a few minutes I can enjoy it. There are a couple of people devoutly praying and a few people moving round. I stand at the back and think anxiously - I am going to end up needing this. This feeling of the devout. I pause writing this and look up the word - it means a pious regard of religion but also geniune and sincere.
The Church was initially a Catholic chapel attached to the Portugese embassy on Golden Square, though there is a whiff of an idea it may even have existed as a clandestine chapel for secret worship prior to the Embassy's cloak of permitted Catholicism. I grasp fully from the 'Warwick Street Church' A short history and guide' what the historic restrictions on Catholics were in the 18th century:
'The penal laws by excluding Catholics from both houses of Parliament made it impossible for them to take part in public life. If a catholic was a land-owner he was threatened with financial ruin, for not only was he subject to the double land tax, but his family estates might pass to his Protestant next-of-kin should they choose to dispossess him. He was forbidden to keep arms and was liable to be deprived of any horse above the value of five pounds. He was incapable of holding any office in the army or navy , or practising as barrister, doctor or school-master. He could not send his children to be educated abroad without a fine and in order that due check might be kept on him and his property he was bound to register his name and estate under penalty of forfeiture, and to enrol all deeds. Some of these laws were, it is true, rarely enforced, but on occasion the individual Catholic was made to bear the full force of them so that the threat of their being put into operation still had to be reckoned with.'
Only in these chapels of diplomatic immunity could mass be heard and here in an invisible and probably smaller building than the present one, squeezed between 23 and 24 Golden Square with an entrance through the stables at the back on Warwick St the Catholics of London could make their furtive worship. Golden Square itself had been developed from 1670 on land where horses grazed. Warwick St was then the highway to Tyburn ( a tiny village at Marble Arch, a place where criminals were hung/there was no Regent Street then ) and particular attention had to be taken of the drainage because the route became impassable in winter when market people travelling that way were in danger of being lost in 'the great waters perpetually lying there all the Winter Season.' Though the development, surrounded by the land of former plague pits and the stench of breweries was only fashionable for a short time. By 1747 the Portugese embassy had moved west to a grander location and the Bavarian embassy moved in keeping the chapel's immunity.
In 1778 the necessity of finding extra men to fight in The American War of Independence ( soldiers had not been allowed to join the armed forces without taking an oath of being a Protestant) meant Parliament passed a piecmeal Catholic Relief Bill. But anti catholic feeling was high in England and Scotland and Protestant Associations were formed nationwide to defend the heritage of Englishmen. The Pope was seen as the bogeyman, Catholic France the enemy, Papists themselves disloyal and dangerous. 'Wild stories began to circulate as, for example, that twenty thousand Jesuits were concealed a network of underground tunnels near the Thames, waiting for orders from Rome to blow up the banks and so flood London.' Lord George Gordon fanned this hatred with speeches in parliament attempting to have the Bill repealed. As the leader of London Protestant Association he presented the Protestant Petition on 2nd June 1780 with a big demonstration gathered outside Parliament. By early evening the petition was turned down because of the circumstances of it's presentation, and the mob grew restless. Troops were called out to move the people from the vicinity of Parliament. Once dispersed, groups of men, some of them drunk, armed with lighted torches and weapons began to move against known Catholic targets - chapels and the residences of well known Catholics. One group burned down the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador in Lincoln's Inn Fields while another set upon The Bavarian Chapel. The rioters broke in, windows were smashed, and the contents of the chapel burnt in the street - books, the altar piece, the organ, balastrades and pews. An old German blacksmith called Bund saved what valuables he could including discovering the Bavarian minister's stash of contraband tea and commodities that he sold to supplement his income. The military arrived and stayed to protect the chapel, sleeping out on straw in the shell of the building. The riots went on for a week, gathering momentum until the anti catholic sentiments were replaced by anti authority of any sort. Prisons were broken into, prisoners released and gaols burnt down.
A subscription was launched in 1788 to rebuild the damaged Warwick St Chapel under the control of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District whilst preserving its links with the Bavarian Legation. Indeed memories of the Gordon Riots inform their decision to build on the same site and the design of the church too:
'It will be in every respect more eligible than to build in another place as it will probably pass unobserved by the Public in general".
'The walls of the new chapel were made of great solidity, being almost a yard thick; there were no windows at all at ground level in Warwick Street and the solid wooden doors were lined with sheet metal on the inside.'
Though despite the riots many Catholics began to push for increased freedom - for it was seen that the reform bill of 1778 had been passed easily by Parliament. There was division within the church as this second relief bill was prepared, even talk of a schism between more conservative and liberal elements of the Church about the oath that must be taken to receive these new privileges - but in June 1791 the Catholic Relief Act was passed allowing Catholics to live without persecution and to be able to worship freely and to be able to build their own churches or chapels. ( Though without bells or steeples)
The Warwick St chapel was opened on 12th March 1790, the feast of St Gregory the Great, to whom it was dedicated. It was the first church erected by native-born Catholics to take advantage of the new liberty accorded to them a few months later by the Relief Act of 1791 whilst keeping its heritage in the penal times of Catholic history and the umbrella of an embassy.
The French revolution which started in 1789 brought large numbers of the French clergy and aristocracy to London where they were well received. The Bavarian Chapel became one of the most fashionable of the Catholic Chapels and it is even believed that a Requiem for Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette may have been sung there in 1793.
Though by 1840 Charles Dickens described Golden Square in Nicholas Nickleby:
'Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere. It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee- singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.'
Here in the church it is quiet. I sit for a minute in a simple wooden pew. Then walk around the small church. Above is the gallery, an intimate audience to the chapel. There are beautiful things - a shrine to Our Lady Immaculate with columns of silver hearts and charms behind glass. I am not sure what these are but discover they were medals brought in thanksgiving for favours received by prayer and that the walls of Warwick St had in previous times been covered by them. A custom brought from the continent they were derided by the architect John Francis Bentley who had been given the task to restore the now unfashionable church 'It is a poor, shapeless and unsightly edifice built after the commonest type of non-Conformist chapels of the time with heavy galleries'. But the priest Monsignor Talbot remonstrated for the practice to continue and here, they are combined in the altarpice. Though the architect ( who later designed Westminster Cathedral) did not succeed in many of his plans - he intended to build a Minor Roman basilica of marble and mosaic which he started with the present apse behind the altar - which would have have left nothing of the old church except the four walls - though money ran out preserving most of the rest of the only remaining Embassy chapel of the 18th century. I discover later I miss the jewel of the church - The Assumption that brought the chapel it's name in 1854 - a bas-relief by the sculptor John Edwards Carew. It has been placed high up somewhere that I didn't see. As the guide says 'Its position over the door is unworthy of it but no better site is now possible.'
At the side just before I leave I see a door ajar to a cupboard like confessional. I am not completely certain you are going to stay with me on this but I have had a thing about small cupboards for as long as I can remember. I always want to know if they will 'fit'. I have scared boyfriends in European cities, not being able to resist just climbing into check a hotel wardrobe, thinking they will be a while in a shower down a creaky lino floored halls. Forgotten soap finds me curled up in the thin floored space, the door pulled to. In my novel I have the heroine crying in such a cupbord in a hut in the middle of a forest:
'The cupboard is somewhere between a wardrobe and a chest and I open the door to find one tweed jacket hanging from a rail. I step inside. My scalp pressing to the splinters of the roof, my back curved, the thin floor bending at the unexpected weight. I pull the door to. I am in the dark, in warm still air and the scratchy smell of male and tweed. Amazed by my own actions I just sit there listening to my breath fill the shape. Sat quiet, it is a surprise to hear crying. Gulping, rattling sobs. The sound comes from a very long way a way and when I hold my breath to listen to them they stop. I touch my face in the pitch black and find tears. Wet and salt like blood. Shocked. I haven't cried like this since I was a little girl and it feels like discovering an unknown muscle, somethin flexing its strength. I don't immediately hear the door of the hut open but I become aware of footfalls and the slam of it close. I am squatting in a shut cupboard in a stranger's place.'
Here in the church I am tempted by this dark and secret space just to try. But I pull myself together and leave the church.
On a boris bike in Piccadilly circus I look up to the neon to see a huge hand play repeated and random rock, paper, scissors. It is a Macdonalds ad. It seems like a big, gaudy, lonely thing. I imagine a lost place late at night, a face lit by a computer screen swaying, gulping another drink, repeatedly counting one two, three, a hand making simple shapes in rhythm, the nearest thing to companionship. Like the touch of a hairdresser when you have been single for a long time, a guilt that this is the nearest thing to intimacy or human warmth. a simple child's game taken over by a computer.
I discover too on the internet 'The Soho Masses Pastoral Council welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered Catholics, their parents, families and friends to Masses at 5.00 pm, on the 1st & 3rd Sundays of every month, at the Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London'. Though I also find some internet outrage to this. I think this church has been brave in the 'home' it has made, it's plain facade, still hiding its worshippers.
Monday, 6 February 2012
Thursday, 12 January 2012
St George's Hanover Square
I feel briefly that I am living in a black and white film.
At Christmas the boys received Laurel and Hardy and Marx brother dvds as well as pocket-sized sound effect machines as stocking fillers. Though they were reluctant at first to enter an old fashioned world of a fat man and his thin kick, and a man with a moustache and glasses that talked too much, the perfect physical timing and impetuous violence presented drew them in and caused them to rock with laughter and slap the floor with mirth.
Then my youngest son started tap dancing. Mainly because his new back-to-school trainers have heavy soles and he is fascinated by the sound they make. On the school run he stood and danced, listening to the thick tread make a rhythm as he kicked and flipped his feet. Later, on the way home he indicated he no longer wanted to talk. He found the sound machine - wah wah wah waaaaa ( bad news ) and a whiteboard and wipe pen - ding! ( good idea/light bulb) and made physical gestures and wrote messages, illuminated by sound effects.
He is of course ( my son!) physically perfect to me - but his little intense body making slapstick mime routines is mesmerizing. Though there is a slight dread that this seemingly amusing anecdote will become the new reality, and that in some recent future I will be in a quiet room discussing this with a box of tissues and a sound effect machine, a white board and a still silent son.
Walking to school the first day after the christmas holidays I notice glumly the boarded up buildings and closed down businesses - Horseferry Magistrates Court previously so busy with riot offenders has closed and it's windows are boarded up, and just around the corner a local pub that always seemed packed with after work drinkers is also closed and sealed. Perhaps the pub was dependent on the court I think. Though I can't believe the court has gone - there has always been a tv crew parked round the corner and a draggle of journalists or wellwishers outside and it was as overworked as I was in the late summer. I google to find it has been moved to Marylebone. Also I have noticed sadly The Westminster Bookshop, the lovely local bookshop and the London Map shop where UL bought me my mapping book have both closed. Though the first day back to school for the boys is also the first day of obvious unemployment for me and here I am walking through a plyboard lined landscape of economic gloom - and this after all is Westminster! I discovered recently that despite the repeated bombing of the Houses of Parliament during the Blitz, Winston Churchill ordered that broken glass in the windows should be replaced immediately. He understood the impact on morale would be severe if the seat of power was seen to be damaged and glaziers were kept in steady employment. It feels like the thing these Conservatives shake and shake and shake at - a sense of pride or buoyancy or putting on a good front.
With the children back to school I face the normal housework chores and time finally to feel whatever it is I should feel losing a job and the uncertaintity of my future. I e mail people I haven't seen for years asking about the possibilities of work and feel embarrassed by my neediness and brittle jovial tone. If people answer at all they say there isn't much around. Wa wa waaaha I think. But in the late afternoon the phone rings and I am asked to come in to an establishment broadsheet to talk. Like a flipped coin, I am excited and optimistic, shiny, high as a kite.
Funnily enough UL has had new work for a while. I can't believe I haven't mentioned it. It is so perfectly Jonathan Franzenean. He has become a part-time media monitor of Turkmenistan for a consultancy that reports to the gas industry - which he combines with being the carer for disabled children on a daycare bus. I suspect that our fascination with each other is our complicated minds or is it lives? Our slight outsider vantage points? Though it is a circus tent mirror at times distorting what is wrong and right between us.
Where? I said when he first got the job. And he sent me links, maps, a blog, youtube snippets of the crazy president. It has the fourth largest reserves of natural gas in the world though mainly the country is black sand desert. Until now I haven't really had time to look these things up or follow them, I just thought an almost unknown, ex soviet, repressive republic rich in natural resources - oh I will definitely be able to use that in my writing . When I finally open a map to find out where it is, I just feel worried. It is in the middle of everything I think. Slap bang in the middle of everything. Bordering Afghanistan and Iran and already supplying a huge percentage of China's gas with a direct pipe. Russia is a bossy elder sibling to its trade and America and Europe are now negotiating pipelines. The increments of shift and movement that UL tells me about seem to reflect the transition of the world and the adjustments of power taking place.
Over Christmas late night conversations turned to world politics and sometimes to war. Nursing that final glass of red wine with my elder brother as our families slept we touched on it briefly. He lives in Dubai and until recently worked in Damascus. I tell him that a muslim boy in the playground said 'when I grow up I am going to kill christians' and that a few of the mums (though not many) snub my smiles. Another time in a pub with an art school friend married to an American we had the same sort of hushed, fearful conversation. As we were talking I realised suddenly this is how things build - conversations after the children have gone to bed, hints and whispers in the corner of pubs, just a feeling things are brewing. This is what has always happened I think. Until the currents form whatever it is that is going to happen next there is just a sense that there is trouble on the horizon. When I was young and frightened ( walking home at night through the dark woods to our house for example ) - I learnt to dissapate fear with the idea it is very rare for bad things to happen but my fascination for history has meant I have lost this comfort for it seems more certain that bad things happen fairly regularly, even cyclically. The sense 'it would always be someone else, someone you didn't know' mantra also failed when a girl in the block of flats I lived in for years, went missing and was then discovered buried at the side of a road, murdered. This girl with her beautiful smile and a roguish cheerfulness not unlike my own - had been carried past my front door by a two timing boyfriend, her dead body wrapped in sheets and then hidden in bins by my kitchen while he hatched a plan to depose of the body. This is a long time ago now but it still makes me feel sad and shocked and angry.
I read too an interview in the Financial Times with american/polish political scientist Brzezinski 'Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global power.' Blimey! It is better than reading TOWIE girl interviews.
'The book offers a bracing portrait of a 'receding west' with one half, Europe turning into a 'comfortable retirement home', and the other, the US, beset by relative economic decline and a dsyfunctional politics. In this rapidly changing new world, America's growing 'strategic isolation' is matched only by China's 'strategic patience' in a challenge likely to strain the electoral horizons of US policymakers'
'We ( Americans) are too obsessed with today.' Brzezinski continues. 'If we slide into a pattern of just thinking about today, we'll end up reacting to yesterday instead of shaping something more constructive in the world' By contrast, he says, the Chinese are thinking decades ahead.
Brzezinski quotes a senior Chinese official who reportedly said of America: 'Please don't decline too quickly'.
I was also struck by how well informed the top Chinese leaders are about the world,' he says 'And then you watch one of our Republican presidential debates....' he trails away.
I get given quite a lot of work on the establishment broadsheet - on the Arts and Books pages. It feels like perfect work for me, like getting my life back on a ship I would like to be sailing on. My sails puffed up briefly with pride and contentment though the work doesn't start until February.
With time on my hands and still drumming up work I meet an editor friend who works in Soho. The picture editor that works with her comes to meet us too - a nice woman who tells me there is no work anywhere. We eat lavender and pear cake and order coffee that would put hairs on your chest, presented by a young man with a jesus beard and a holy expression of artistic endeavour as he proffers the cup. Everything seems to be closing apart from cake shops and sandwich bars and artisan food seems to be an economic almost political movement.
Afterwards I go and look at velvet for cushions in the beautiful shops on Berwick St. Oh I love these caves of bright fabric and people. Show girls draped in feathered-net stand sandwiched between rolls and rolls of material, assistants like starlings pecking and pulling the cloth around them admiringly. Peacock prints, shot silks, heavy brocades and velvet like peach plush flesh, in muted tones. But I don't buy anything. I need to check the measurements, check my sewing machine is working, plus I am in a cash limbo, not sure if I can use some of my redundancy to sort the flat out/ pay for the crown on my teeth, replace my glasses or if I just need to baton down and inch every penny.
I get on a bike back over Regent St and weave my way to find St George's - because I have been there before on Christmas Eve I think I know roughly what I will find. But I approach from a different direction and there is this church carved into the road, a short old pavement, a corner of London that looks secret, the back entrance to the church, much more ordinairy than the columns and steps of the grand entrance but somehow fascinating. The church is open and I park the bike by an old print shop that has beautiful old maps of London in the window.
Up the steps, into the plain but beautiful church, the names of church wardens, year on year since the opening of the church in 1725 surround the stalls on wooden plaques. Above, in this gallery is the whistle and chat of workmen and suddenly I notice that the upper stalls are packed with huge grey pipes, that the organ is being renovated. I wonder at the career route that means you become an organ renovater. The specialism this must involve especially as it becomes apparent that Handel worshipped and played here. He moved to nearby Brook Street in 1724, just as the church was nearing completion, and became involved in the affairs of the new parish. His opinion was sought on the suitability of the organ, and when candidates for the post of organist were being tested, he supplied a theme for extemporisation. From then onwards he had his pew in the church and was a regular worshipper.
St George's was built as result of the rapid growth of population in the prosperity of the late 17th Century. As the new and elegant 'suburbs' began to cover the open countryside Parliament passed the Queen Anne's Act in 1711 for the erection of fifty new churches in and about the Cities of London and Westminster.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=38871 ( if you have time - have a look - there are lovely details!)
Ten years later the building of St. George's was begun on a plot of ground given by General William Steuart. The architect chosen was John James, one of Sir Christopher Wren's assistants. The new Parish covered an area stretching from Regent Street (then called Swallow Street) westward to the Serpentine, and southward from Oxford Street to include the whole of what is now Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico. The countryside then came in close to the Church and in 1725 it was still possible to shoot woodcock in the Conduit Mead a few hundred yards from St. George Street and snipe at the western end of Brook Street.
By 1726 a workhouse was built too:
'The 2 first Churchwardens, being Persons of Distinction and Compassion took an early Care, with the Consent of the Vestry, to provide for the Poor; and in 1726, erected a large, plain, commodious Edifice in Mount-street near the Burying Ground, fit for the reception of several hundred Persons, which being on a Model worthy of the Imitation of other Places, a Plan of it was afterwards engraven on Copper, and printed for the Service of the Publick.'
'ALL that are able, both old and young, are employed in spinning Mop Yarn, or picking Ockam, and being helpful to each other under the Direction of the Steward and Matron; and the frugality of their Management, under the Honourable Persons, their present Churchwardens, and Overseers, is such, that at a Medium of their Expences for 1730, 154 Poor were lodged and dieted 4 Weeks at 55l. 1s. 7d. which is 1s. 9d. ½ a Week for each Person.'
By 1777 it was recorded that the St George Hanover Square workhouse could accommodate 700 people, making it one of the largest in the country.
I find too that the new organ was built in Chattanooga USA and that the work reconstructing it on site has only just began. I happened to visit just as the team began to put it together.
"No London church has ever purchased an organ from an American company. Never in history," said organ builder and company co-owner Ralph Richards.'
'Over the past 21 years Richards Fowkes and Company have built 17 pipe organs for churches and universities in the United States. With the completion of Opus 18, their most recent creation, they will become the first American organ builders to sell "the king of instruments" to a London church.
'They found a slightly more historical flavor to our organs. They wanted something 'interesting' and not generic," Richards said.
Richards and Fowkes' team of master pipe organ builders, cabinet makers, pipe builders, and wood carvers took approximately 30,000 man hours to build nearly every part and piece of the mechanical-action organ from scratch in their shop.
Up to 12,000 individual parts were made by hand by less than 10 craftsman, most of whom have been working for the company for nearly 20 years. Nearly every construction method used is an old-world technique.
The organ contains 2,851 hand-built metal and wooden pipes, and 174 hand-carved keys made from the shinbones of cows. All of the wood used to encase the swell boxes, make the mechanical trackers, and house the guts of the organ are made from raw milled lumber.
Custom alloys for pipes are made in the shop from tin and lead, which are cast into sheets on a stone table, then planed, soldered and rolled by hand.
From that point, Richards expects his team to be working at the church for up to 6 months putting it all back together and completing the sometimes very slow task of "voicing," or tuning, the nearly 3,000 pipes one by one.'
This is where I walked in. Though I wonder if it would be worth visting again in a few months and just sit and listen to the tuning process.
Though like towns in tv murder mystery series emotions must run high in such small worlds of extreme expertise for there is a bitchy remark on the site that I find all this information:
"Pity it's such a neoclassical instrument - an organ built in Chattanooga ought to have a Wurlitzer-style train effect labelled 'Choo Choo'
And an apology from the forum administrators:
'Whilst humour is an important spice of life and some bantering can always be a bit of fun even in a more serious context, this of AnOrganCornucopia's posts is of a quality of intellect demonstrative of being engaged at 4am at which the posting was timed.'
As I walk out of the street into the sunlight I see a familiar woman walking to me - pretty, beautifully dressed, with a slight hunch and droop as if her clothes are too heavy for her frame. It is Sam Cam but she stoops her gaze from mine.
Amen. I think. Amen.
At Christmas the boys received Laurel and Hardy and Marx brother dvds as well as pocket-sized sound effect machines as stocking fillers. Though they were reluctant at first to enter an old fashioned world of a fat man and his thin kick, and a man with a moustache and glasses that talked too much, the perfect physical timing and impetuous violence presented drew them in and caused them to rock with laughter and slap the floor with mirth.
Then my youngest son started tap dancing. Mainly because his new back-to-school trainers have heavy soles and he is fascinated by the sound they make. On the school run he stood and danced, listening to the thick tread make a rhythm as he kicked and flipped his feet. Later, on the way home he indicated he no longer wanted to talk. He found the sound machine - wah wah wah waaaaa ( bad news ) and a whiteboard and wipe pen - ding! ( good idea/light bulb) and made physical gestures and wrote messages, illuminated by sound effects.
He is of course ( my son!) physically perfect to me - but his little intense body making slapstick mime routines is mesmerizing. Though there is a slight dread that this seemingly amusing anecdote will become the new reality, and that in some recent future I will be in a quiet room discussing this with a box of tissues and a sound effect machine, a white board and a still silent son.
Walking to school the first day after the christmas holidays I notice glumly the boarded up buildings and closed down businesses - Horseferry Magistrates Court previously so busy with riot offenders has closed and it's windows are boarded up, and just around the corner a local pub that always seemed packed with after work drinkers is also closed and sealed. Perhaps the pub was dependent on the court I think. Though I can't believe the court has gone - there has always been a tv crew parked round the corner and a draggle of journalists or wellwishers outside and it was as overworked as I was in the late summer. I google to find it has been moved to Marylebone. Also I have noticed sadly The Westminster Bookshop, the lovely local bookshop and the London Map shop where UL bought me my mapping book have both closed. Though the first day back to school for the boys is also the first day of obvious unemployment for me and here I am walking through a plyboard lined landscape of economic gloom - and this after all is Westminster! I discovered recently that despite the repeated bombing of the Houses of Parliament during the Blitz, Winston Churchill ordered that broken glass in the windows should be replaced immediately. He understood the impact on morale would be severe if the seat of power was seen to be damaged and glaziers were kept in steady employment. It feels like the thing these Conservatives shake and shake and shake at - a sense of pride or buoyancy or putting on a good front.
With the children back to school I face the normal housework chores and time finally to feel whatever it is I should feel losing a job and the uncertaintity of my future. I e mail people I haven't seen for years asking about the possibilities of work and feel embarrassed by my neediness and brittle jovial tone. If people answer at all they say there isn't much around. Wa wa waaaha I think. But in the late afternoon the phone rings and I am asked to come in to an establishment broadsheet to talk. Like a flipped coin, I am excited and optimistic, shiny, high as a kite.
Funnily enough UL has had new work for a while. I can't believe I haven't mentioned it. It is so perfectly Jonathan Franzenean. He has become a part-time media monitor of Turkmenistan for a consultancy that reports to the gas industry - which he combines with being the carer for disabled children on a daycare bus. I suspect that our fascination with each other is our complicated minds or is it lives? Our slight outsider vantage points? Though it is a circus tent mirror at times distorting what is wrong and right between us.
Where? I said when he first got the job. And he sent me links, maps, a blog, youtube snippets of the crazy president. It has the fourth largest reserves of natural gas in the world though mainly the country is black sand desert. Until now I haven't really had time to look these things up or follow them, I just thought an almost unknown, ex soviet, repressive republic rich in natural resources - oh I will definitely be able to use that in my writing . When I finally open a map to find out where it is, I just feel worried. It is in the middle of everything I think. Slap bang in the middle of everything. Bordering Afghanistan and Iran and already supplying a huge percentage of China's gas with a direct pipe. Russia is a bossy elder sibling to its trade and America and Europe are now negotiating pipelines. The increments of shift and movement that UL tells me about seem to reflect the transition of the world and the adjustments of power taking place.
Over Christmas late night conversations turned to world politics and sometimes to war. Nursing that final glass of red wine with my elder brother as our families slept we touched on it briefly. He lives in Dubai and until recently worked in Damascus. I tell him that a muslim boy in the playground said 'when I grow up I am going to kill christians' and that a few of the mums (though not many) snub my smiles. Another time in a pub with an art school friend married to an American we had the same sort of hushed, fearful conversation. As we were talking I realised suddenly this is how things build - conversations after the children have gone to bed, hints and whispers in the corner of pubs, just a feeling things are brewing. This is what has always happened I think. Until the currents form whatever it is that is going to happen next there is just a sense that there is trouble on the horizon. When I was young and frightened ( walking home at night through the dark woods to our house for example ) - I learnt to dissapate fear with the idea it is very rare for bad things to happen but my fascination for history has meant I have lost this comfort for it seems more certain that bad things happen fairly regularly, even cyclically. The sense 'it would always be someone else, someone you didn't know' mantra also failed when a girl in the block of flats I lived in for years, went missing and was then discovered buried at the side of a road, murdered. This girl with her beautiful smile and a roguish cheerfulness not unlike my own - had been carried past my front door by a two timing boyfriend, her dead body wrapped in sheets and then hidden in bins by my kitchen while he hatched a plan to depose of the body. This is a long time ago now but it still makes me feel sad and shocked and angry.
I read too an interview in the Financial Times with american/polish political scientist Brzezinski 'Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global power.' Blimey! It is better than reading TOWIE girl interviews.
'The book offers a bracing portrait of a 'receding west' with one half, Europe turning into a 'comfortable retirement home', and the other, the US, beset by relative economic decline and a dsyfunctional politics. In this rapidly changing new world, America's growing 'strategic isolation' is matched only by China's 'strategic patience' in a challenge likely to strain the electoral horizons of US policymakers'
'We ( Americans) are too obsessed with today.' Brzezinski continues. 'If we slide into a pattern of just thinking about today, we'll end up reacting to yesterday instead of shaping something more constructive in the world' By contrast, he says, the Chinese are thinking decades ahead.
Brzezinski quotes a senior Chinese official who reportedly said of America: 'Please don't decline too quickly'.
I was also struck by how well informed the top Chinese leaders are about the world,' he says 'And then you watch one of our Republican presidential debates....' he trails away.
I get given quite a lot of work on the establishment broadsheet - on the Arts and Books pages. It feels like perfect work for me, like getting my life back on a ship I would like to be sailing on. My sails puffed up briefly with pride and contentment though the work doesn't start until February.
With time on my hands and still drumming up work I meet an editor friend who works in Soho. The picture editor that works with her comes to meet us too - a nice woman who tells me there is no work anywhere. We eat lavender and pear cake and order coffee that would put hairs on your chest, presented by a young man with a jesus beard and a holy expression of artistic endeavour as he proffers the cup. Everything seems to be closing apart from cake shops and sandwich bars and artisan food seems to be an economic almost political movement.
Afterwards I go and look at velvet for cushions in the beautiful shops on Berwick St. Oh I love these caves of bright fabric and people. Show girls draped in feathered-net stand sandwiched between rolls and rolls of material, assistants like starlings pecking and pulling the cloth around them admiringly. Peacock prints, shot silks, heavy brocades and velvet like peach plush flesh, in muted tones. But I don't buy anything. I need to check the measurements, check my sewing machine is working, plus I am in a cash limbo, not sure if I can use some of my redundancy to sort the flat out/ pay for the crown on my teeth, replace my glasses or if I just need to baton down and inch every penny.
I get on a bike back over Regent St and weave my way to find St George's - because I have been there before on Christmas Eve I think I know roughly what I will find. But I approach from a different direction and there is this church carved into the road, a short old pavement, a corner of London that looks secret, the back entrance to the church, much more ordinairy than the columns and steps of the grand entrance but somehow fascinating. The church is open and I park the bike by an old print shop that has beautiful old maps of London in the window.
Up the steps, into the plain but beautiful church, the names of church wardens, year on year since the opening of the church in 1725 surround the stalls on wooden plaques. Above, in this gallery is the whistle and chat of workmen and suddenly I notice that the upper stalls are packed with huge grey pipes, that the organ is being renovated. I wonder at the career route that means you become an organ renovater. The specialism this must involve especially as it becomes apparent that Handel worshipped and played here. He moved to nearby Brook Street in 1724, just as the church was nearing completion, and became involved in the affairs of the new parish. His opinion was sought on the suitability of the organ, and when candidates for the post of organist were being tested, he supplied a theme for extemporisation. From then onwards he had his pew in the church and was a regular worshipper.
St George's was built as result of the rapid growth of population in the prosperity of the late 17th Century. As the new and elegant 'suburbs' began to cover the open countryside Parliament passed the Queen Anne's Act in 1711 for the erection of fifty new churches in and about the Cities of London and Westminster.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=38871 ( if you have time - have a look - there are lovely details!)
Ten years later the building of St. George's was begun on a plot of ground given by General William Steuart. The architect chosen was John James, one of Sir Christopher Wren's assistants. The new Parish covered an area stretching from Regent Street (then called Swallow Street) westward to the Serpentine, and southward from Oxford Street to include the whole of what is now Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico. The countryside then came in close to the Church and in 1725 it was still possible to shoot woodcock in the Conduit Mead a few hundred yards from St. George Street and snipe at the western end of Brook Street.
By 1726 a workhouse was built too:
'The 2 first Churchwardens, being Persons of Distinction and Compassion took an early Care, with the Consent of the Vestry, to provide for the Poor; and in 1726, erected a large, plain, commodious Edifice in Mount-street near the Burying Ground, fit for the reception of several hundred Persons, which being on a Model worthy of the Imitation of other Places, a Plan of it was afterwards engraven on Copper, and printed for the Service of the Publick.'
'ALL that are able, both old and young, are employed in spinning Mop Yarn, or picking Ockam, and being helpful to each other under the Direction of the Steward and Matron; and the frugality of their Management, under the Honourable Persons, their present Churchwardens, and Overseers, is such, that at a Medium of their Expences for 1730, 154 Poor were lodged and dieted 4 Weeks at 55l. 1s. 7d. which is 1s. 9d. ½ a Week for each Person.'
By 1777 it was recorded that the St George Hanover Square workhouse could accommodate 700 people, making it one of the largest in the country.
I find too that the new organ was built in Chattanooga USA and that the work reconstructing it on site has only just began. I happened to visit just as the team began to put it together.
"No London church has ever purchased an organ from an American company. Never in history," said organ builder and company co-owner Ralph Richards.'
'Over the past 21 years Richards Fowkes and Company have built 17 pipe organs for churches and universities in the United States. With the completion of Opus 18, their most recent creation, they will become the first American organ builders to sell "the king of instruments" to a London church.
'They found a slightly more historical flavor to our organs. They wanted something 'interesting' and not generic," Richards said.
Richards and Fowkes' team of master pipe organ builders, cabinet makers, pipe builders, and wood carvers took approximately 30,000 man hours to build nearly every part and piece of the mechanical-action organ from scratch in their shop.
Up to 12,000 individual parts were made by hand by less than 10 craftsman, most of whom have been working for the company for nearly 20 years. Nearly every construction method used is an old-world technique.
The organ contains 2,851 hand-built metal and wooden pipes, and 174 hand-carved keys made from the shinbones of cows. All of the wood used to encase the swell boxes, make the mechanical trackers, and house the guts of the organ are made from raw milled lumber.
Custom alloys for pipes are made in the shop from tin and lead, which are cast into sheets on a stone table, then planed, soldered and rolled by hand.
From that point, Richards expects his team to be working at the church for up to 6 months putting it all back together and completing the sometimes very slow task of "voicing," or tuning, the nearly 3,000 pipes one by one.'
This is where I walked in. Though I wonder if it would be worth visting again in a few months and just sit and listen to the tuning process.
Though like towns in tv murder mystery series emotions must run high in such small worlds of extreme expertise for there is a bitchy remark on the site that I find all this information:
"Pity it's such a neoclassical instrument - an organ built in Chattanooga ought to have a Wurlitzer-style train effect labelled 'Choo Choo'
And an apology from the forum administrators:
'Whilst humour is an important spice of life and some bantering can always be a bit of fun even in a more serious context, this of AnOrganCornucopia's posts is of a quality of intellect demonstrative of being engaged at 4am at which the posting was timed.'
As I walk out of the street into the sunlight I see a familiar woman walking to me - pretty, beautifully dressed, with a slight hunch and droop as if her clothes are too heavy for her frame. It is Sam Cam but she stoops her gaze from mine.
Amen. I think. Amen.
Saturday, 24 December 2011
St Patrick's, Soho Square. The ( belated ) Christmas Special
Still writing this the day I snip the bare twigs off the Xmas tree - trying to fit the denuded trunk into a black bin liner and sweep panfuls of needles into the rubbish bag - the magic and petty concerns of Christmas are over. Though like concealing a dead body it takes ages to reduce the tree to a size that can be carried downstairs. So this - the isictt christmas special is out of date, almost redundant - though I hope like coconut Quality Street sweets and tiny cracker toys that sit in indecisive piles, it isn't just another unwanted leftover of Christmas for I did try for the back to back bonanza but just ran out of time.
The night before Christmas I walked out on everything I was meant to be doing. I had cooked and cleaned and wrapped and worried and yet nothing seemed cooked or cleaned or wrapped and I was still worried. I had cried the night before cooking a ham dinner. There are hundreds of mum's crying over a ham dinner the night before xmas eve I realise or hope, as exh and the boys lay curled up on the sofa watching telly. It is ludicrous what we invent for ourselves I think. Though when Exh remarks about the beautiful snowflake cookies that I have made with my eldest - you just try and do too much - I know he is right but I am furious. Can I say - you just try and do too little? Can I? I watch couples work alongside each other as teams and they are still sometimes tired or cross or infuriated and they are allowed to say it.
I walked out - knowing I would be up to the wee hours making stuffing and wrapping stocking fillers - got on a bb bike and cycled up to Mayfair. I just needed not to do all those things, just needed to have some space or a break. I worry that against this backdrop of anxiety at having lost my job and festive overwork I will end up in a ludicrously over the top lisping nativity with donkeys and heavenly choirs and that it will become like some Richard Curtis feelgood factor film moment when either I will have to believe something or I will shut my angry heart to a magical thing. But the wealthy church in Hanover Square that I imagine tempting me with all this on the late afternoon of christmas eve is dark and shut and not going to open it's doors again. Oh I think - I need a Catholic church now, they always provide a welcome. I wander over Regent Street, where everything is still bustling and shoppers are frantic and greedy like a Patricia Highsmith crowd lit in electric light. I know there is a church tucked away somewhere. I find it on dark side streets but the church is shut despite being Catholic. 'All the churches are shut on Christmas eve' I text UL. He is in a pub with a friend near the British Museum as I walk through Soho our paths getting nearer. 'I want to see you' he says. I try on a 'I heart xmas' red apron in an art upstairs/porn downstairs bookshop. Another one says 'ho bloody ho' and I wonder if I could alternate them throughout the day as an indication of how christmas is going but they are both too big. Shops are starting to shut now. I see a rail of sequin dresses being loaded into a van in a multi storey carpark. I see gay men packed into pubs. Walking past these bright lit windows with people jostling and laughing I feel lonely, nursing my petty but heartfelt grievances of too much to do and too much washing up and cleaning done. Then I head up grey streets to Soho Square where so much is shut it feels like even the street lights have been dimmed. I remember from my map that there is a church here but I have no recollection of ever seeing it. I used to work in restaurants in Soho when I first left college and can remember the sense of being on the edge of an adventure - that there were secrets all around - though really all that ever happened was being winked at by a popstar in the street or spotting a few famous drunks in pubs, or going to a few classy members clubs without membership and discovering delicious delis that sold great cheese and ham and pumpkin ravioli wrapped lovingly in cellophane and placed as gently as expensive and beautiful silk lingerie into boxes.
In the dark square a huge tower looms. If I could get this over with quickly I would just about have time to meet UL for a drink I think craning to see if the church is open. Golden light pours from an open door. It is a Catholic church. From the stone floored vestibule I can see that the church is empty apart from one man hunched kneeling and praying and a priest with a really genuine smile and a kind and good face descending the stairs from the tower. I think he is about to lock up. Is it ok to have a look - 'Of course' he says with a generous smile. 'Are you trying to close for the evening?' I ask. 'Oh you're fine - we have mass shortly' he says waving me inside. The church inside is clean and bright and really fresh. With that very brittle european catholic trapped air, as if sieved. In each niche at the sides of the long, narrow nave there are altars and statues and paintings - some of them really beautiful. Because it is Christmas, or because I want to feel something and no longer be cross I light a candle at a beautiful white statue of what I think to be the Virgin Mary though I discover later to be St Anne, her mother.
This church was built on the site of the town residence of Earl of Carisle - a grand house built in 1690. The square itself had first been developed in 1681 and was originally called King's Square after Charles II becoming one of London's most fashionable addresses. It later became Soho Square named after an ancient hunting cry akin to Tally Ho refering to the area's rural and hunting past. By the 18th century the square had become more a more 'colourful' area and a Mrs Cornelys rented the Earl of Carisle's town house in around 1760. And oh she was an adventuress - like a Jeanette Winterson heroine - born on the island of Venice - an opera singer and impresario - she had many lovers and husbands and children across Europe including a daughter from an affair with Casanova. At Carisle House she put on elaborate masked balls and concerts of great imagination, sumptious design, slightly dubious reputation and great popularity:
'It was at one of Mrs. Cornelys' masquerades that the beautiful daughter of a peer wore the costume of an Indian princess, three black girls bearing her train, a canopy held over her head by two negro boys, and her dress covered with jewels worth £100,000. It was at another that Adam, in fleshcoloured tights and an apron of fig-leaves, was to be seen in company with the Duchess of Bolton as Diana.'
These gatherings were so popular 'In February 1770, Parliament adjourned early to enable members to attend one of her masquerades.' Laurence Sterne called a visit to Mrs Cornelys' "the best assembly and the best concert I ever had the honour to be at." In Humphrey Clinker, published in 1771, Tobias Smollett writes of "Mrs. Cornelys' assembly, which for the rooms, the company, the dresses, and decorations, surpasses all description". In Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon the narrator recalls that "[a]ll the high and low demireps of the town gathered there". Dickens wrote in an article on Soho that "the world was dying to be on Mrs. Cornelys's list."
Though she was in and out of debtor's prison because she paid so much out for her ventures and by 1772 Carisle House was seized and it's contents auctioned off. Later out of prison she organised a Venetian regatta on the Thames and then returned to Carlisle House, this time as manager. She held two immensely successful seasons of 'rural masquerades', decorating the interiors of the reception rooms with fresh turf, hedges, exotic blooms, goldfish swimming in a fountain and pine trees in the concert room. However ( or because of ) she then slid back into bankruptcy and in 1779 was imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison. She escaped in June the next year when the prison was set on fire during the Gordon Riots, but was recaptured in Westminster in August.'
Again out of prison she renamed herself Mrs Smith selling asses milk in Knightsbridge and finally died in Newgate prison at the age of 74 apparently from breast cancer.
Though 18th century pleasure seems a fascinating and imaginative thing. Across the square at number 21 was a famous magic brothel, the White House - in which commercial sex was enhanced by dark, baroque special-effects and natural magic devices:
"The white house was a notorious place of ill fame," writes Mayhew in 1851 "Some of the apartments, it is said were funished in a style of costly luxury; while others were fitted up with springs, traps and other contrivances, so as to present no appearance other than that of an ordinary room, until the machinery was set in motion. In one room, into which some wretched girl might be introduced, on her drawing a curtain as she would be desired , a skeleton grinning horribly was precipitated forward and caught the terrified creature in his, to all appearence, bony arms. In another chamber the lights grew dim and then seemed gradually to go out. In some little time some candles, apparently self ingnited, revealed to a horror stricken woman, a black coffin on the lid of which might be seen in brass letters, Anne, or whatever name it had been ascertained the poor wretch was known by. A sofa, in another part of the mansion was made to descend into some place of utter darkness, or, it was alleged, into a room in which was store of soot or ashes."
I remember a friend telling me about a Japanese Love Hotel she took her girlfriend to in the 1980s and I text her for details. I walk to collect the children from school imagining beautiful, luxurious but erotic hotels. Mirrored mazes, silver swans, and silken rooms devoid of light. Peep holes, finger holes, flaming torches and showers of feathers. Tipping floors, tumbling tunnels, singing canaries and a brook bringing thimbles of dessert wine on trays. I couldn't afford what I would like, I think. And I am too shy anyhow, caught in the awkward bulk of self. She texts later to say there was a vibrating bed and you paid by the hour. Though another friend reported a scented bath on stilts.
Also in the square was a 'bazaar' set up in 1816 by John Trotter. A man who had ambitions to set up an universal language and had run the army stores for the Napoleonic wars he converted a warehouse in Soho Square no longer required for army provision as an encouragement for 'Female and Domesticity' being anxious to stop the country from pouring 'its happy and innocent virgins into the common sink of London'. The interior of the disused warehouse was laid out with stalls and counters arranged on two floors of the building in the manner of a closed market. The vendors hired their selling spaces by the day and there were stringent rules for the conduct of business, but everything was conducted on the 'fairest and most liberal plan'. The goods sold consisted chiefly of millinery, gloves, lace, jewellery and potted plants. Despite it's seemingly worthy beginning this fashionable and famous bazaar was copied across London, a precusor to the department stores of Oxford Street.
I dither about putting this in but the chance to write about sex AND shopping is too enticing. I have had my novel rejected a few times for just being too depressing so the chance to revel in the bones of the chick lit genre is just too much to miss.
The church was the first Catholic Church to be founded after the 1791 second Catholic Relief Act was passed by parliament. A group of eminent Irish Catholics formed the Confraternity of St. Patrick “to consider the most effectual means of establishing a chapel to be called St. Patrick’s, on a liberal and permanent foundation.” An ambition they achieved by taking a 62-year lease on Mrs. Cornelys’, by then vacant, Carlisle House. Nearby stretching from New Oxford St to Seven Dials was an area known as the Rookeries - where criminals, the drunken and destitute, and a large population of the Irish Catholic poor lived.
On this corner of Soho and Covent Garden it 'was somewhat like the wild west with the priests often rather sheriff-like as they tried to bring order to disorder, and establish Christian family values in the face of the evil elements that were destroying the dignity of the lower classes, namely alcohol, crime and exploitation.' And the priest Father Arthur O'Leary who raised the funds and drummed up support and directed the consecration of the chapel on September 29th 1792 continued his work for 10 years until as it says on his memorial stone in the porch of the church ‘he wore himself out by his labours’ in 1802.
Also celebrated in a plaque in the porch is the 1940 bomb that broke through the roof and embedded itself in the nave but did not go off.
While the entertainer Danny La Rue who was an altar server here for many years donated the two statues at the back of the church in the memory of his mother and aunt. And Tommy Steel was married here.
The church appears to have as an inspiring though as yet less careworn leader as it's founder. The Reverend Alexander Sherbrooke has overseen the recent 3.5 million renovation of the church and also the hosting of addiction counselling in it's crypt ( it is the only Catholic Church to do so). Each week under his lead St Patrick's with a team of volunteers feeds 80 to 90 local homeless people in conjunction with the Groucho club – a nearby private members' club - that supplys the puddings. He also runs an SOS prayer line manned by volunteers from 7pm to 11pm every night in the tower of the church. A light on at high window of the tower like a beacon to Soho proclaims the two telephone lines open and they take calls from across the world. I read that at the heart of his ministry is the new Evangelization in the Catholic Church and that he believes that beauty in a secular age is a privileged pathway to God making the Eucharist, the music and the church itself central to the worship.
Sherbrooke says: "You get a knock on the door and it can be someone who is successful in business, someone who wants a sandwich or someone caught up in the sex industry. We leave our SOS prayer line calling cards in telephone boxes – where you might see other services advertised.
I don't know - writing this blog I have witnessed how much good work is done by the London churches but this seems inspiring - his breadth of ambition and desire to help people in a simple but direct way. I pass him as I walk down the nave on my way out, the man who had welcomed me in, a man of obvious peace and energy. Unexpectedly behind him down the aisle comes a soppy eyed King Charles Spaniel, neat claws on the clean new marble, completely at home, obedient to his master. I think of a Christmas Day once when I went to a service with my Mum and Dad in my hometown and a butterfly flew in the church on the cold morning for it felt like a surprising gift of beauty.
As I leave the church, rushing now, for a quick guilty drink with UL before returning to my patched together family, a short man in a fawn anorak runs up the stairs. 'Is there someone, somewhere who will hear my confession now?' he pants. 'He is in there.' I say.
I think of the light on in the tower.
The night before Christmas I walked out on everything I was meant to be doing. I had cooked and cleaned and wrapped and worried and yet nothing seemed cooked or cleaned or wrapped and I was still worried. I had cried the night before cooking a ham dinner. There are hundreds of mum's crying over a ham dinner the night before xmas eve I realise or hope, as exh and the boys lay curled up on the sofa watching telly. It is ludicrous what we invent for ourselves I think. Though when Exh remarks about the beautiful snowflake cookies that I have made with my eldest - you just try and do too much - I know he is right but I am furious. Can I say - you just try and do too little? Can I? I watch couples work alongside each other as teams and they are still sometimes tired or cross or infuriated and they are allowed to say it.
I walked out - knowing I would be up to the wee hours making stuffing and wrapping stocking fillers - got on a bb bike and cycled up to Mayfair. I just needed not to do all those things, just needed to have some space or a break. I worry that against this backdrop of anxiety at having lost my job and festive overwork I will end up in a ludicrously over the top lisping nativity with donkeys and heavenly choirs and that it will become like some Richard Curtis feelgood factor film moment when either I will have to believe something or I will shut my angry heart to a magical thing. But the wealthy church in Hanover Square that I imagine tempting me with all this on the late afternoon of christmas eve is dark and shut and not going to open it's doors again. Oh I think - I need a Catholic church now, they always provide a welcome. I wander over Regent Street, where everything is still bustling and shoppers are frantic and greedy like a Patricia Highsmith crowd lit in electric light. I know there is a church tucked away somewhere. I find it on dark side streets but the church is shut despite being Catholic. 'All the churches are shut on Christmas eve' I text UL. He is in a pub with a friend near the British Museum as I walk through Soho our paths getting nearer. 'I want to see you' he says. I try on a 'I heart xmas' red apron in an art upstairs/porn downstairs bookshop. Another one says 'ho bloody ho' and I wonder if I could alternate them throughout the day as an indication of how christmas is going but they are both too big. Shops are starting to shut now. I see a rail of sequin dresses being loaded into a van in a multi storey carpark. I see gay men packed into pubs. Walking past these bright lit windows with people jostling and laughing I feel lonely, nursing my petty but heartfelt grievances of too much to do and too much washing up and cleaning done. Then I head up grey streets to Soho Square where so much is shut it feels like even the street lights have been dimmed. I remember from my map that there is a church here but I have no recollection of ever seeing it. I used to work in restaurants in Soho when I first left college and can remember the sense of being on the edge of an adventure - that there were secrets all around - though really all that ever happened was being winked at by a popstar in the street or spotting a few famous drunks in pubs, or going to a few classy members clubs without membership and discovering delicious delis that sold great cheese and ham and pumpkin ravioli wrapped lovingly in cellophane and placed as gently as expensive and beautiful silk lingerie into boxes.
In the dark square a huge tower looms. If I could get this over with quickly I would just about have time to meet UL for a drink I think craning to see if the church is open. Golden light pours from an open door. It is a Catholic church. From the stone floored vestibule I can see that the church is empty apart from one man hunched kneeling and praying and a priest with a really genuine smile and a kind and good face descending the stairs from the tower. I think he is about to lock up. Is it ok to have a look - 'Of course' he says with a generous smile. 'Are you trying to close for the evening?' I ask. 'Oh you're fine - we have mass shortly' he says waving me inside. The church inside is clean and bright and really fresh. With that very brittle european catholic trapped air, as if sieved. In each niche at the sides of the long, narrow nave there are altars and statues and paintings - some of them really beautiful. Because it is Christmas, or because I want to feel something and no longer be cross I light a candle at a beautiful white statue of what I think to be the Virgin Mary though I discover later to be St Anne, her mother.
This church was built on the site of the town residence of Earl of Carisle - a grand house built in 1690. The square itself had first been developed in 1681 and was originally called King's Square after Charles II becoming one of London's most fashionable addresses. It later became Soho Square named after an ancient hunting cry akin to Tally Ho refering to the area's rural and hunting past. By the 18th century the square had become more a more 'colourful' area and a Mrs Cornelys rented the Earl of Carisle's town house in around 1760. And oh she was an adventuress - like a Jeanette Winterson heroine - born on the island of Venice - an opera singer and impresario - she had many lovers and husbands and children across Europe including a daughter from an affair with Casanova. At Carisle House she put on elaborate masked balls and concerts of great imagination, sumptious design, slightly dubious reputation and great popularity:
'It was at one of Mrs. Cornelys' masquerades that the beautiful daughter of a peer wore the costume of an Indian princess, three black girls bearing her train, a canopy held over her head by two negro boys, and her dress covered with jewels worth £100,000. It was at another that Adam, in fleshcoloured tights and an apron of fig-leaves, was to be seen in company with the Duchess of Bolton as Diana.'
These gatherings were so popular 'In February 1770, Parliament adjourned early to enable members to attend one of her masquerades.' Laurence Sterne called a visit to Mrs Cornelys' "the best assembly and the best concert I ever had the honour to be at." In Humphrey Clinker, published in 1771, Tobias Smollett writes of "Mrs. Cornelys' assembly, which for the rooms, the company, the dresses, and decorations, surpasses all description". In Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon the narrator recalls that "[a]ll the high and low demireps of the town gathered there". Dickens wrote in an article on Soho that "the world was dying to be on Mrs. Cornelys's list."
Though she was in and out of debtor's prison because she paid so much out for her ventures and by 1772 Carisle House was seized and it's contents auctioned off. Later out of prison she organised a Venetian regatta on the Thames and then returned to Carlisle House, this time as manager. She held two immensely successful seasons of 'rural masquerades', decorating the interiors of the reception rooms with fresh turf, hedges, exotic blooms, goldfish swimming in a fountain and pine trees in the concert room. However ( or because of ) she then slid back into bankruptcy and in 1779 was imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison. She escaped in June the next year when the prison was set on fire during the Gordon Riots, but was recaptured in Westminster in August.'
Again out of prison she renamed herself Mrs Smith selling asses milk in Knightsbridge and finally died in Newgate prison at the age of 74 apparently from breast cancer.
Though 18th century pleasure seems a fascinating and imaginative thing. Across the square at number 21 was a famous magic brothel, the White House - in which commercial sex was enhanced by dark, baroque special-effects and natural magic devices:
"The white house was a notorious place of ill fame," writes Mayhew in 1851 "Some of the apartments, it is said were funished in a style of costly luxury; while others were fitted up with springs, traps and other contrivances, so as to present no appearance other than that of an ordinary room, until the machinery was set in motion. In one room, into which some wretched girl might be introduced, on her drawing a curtain as she would be desired , a skeleton grinning horribly was precipitated forward and caught the terrified creature in his, to all appearence, bony arms. In another chamber the lights grew dim and then seemed gradually to go out. In some little time some candles, apparently self ingnited, revealed to a horror stricken woman, a black coffin on the lid of which might be seen in brass letters, Anne, or whatever name it had been ascertained the poor wretch was known by. A sofa, in another part of the mansion was made to descend into some place of utter darkness, or, it was alleged, into a room in which was store of soot or ashes."
I remember a friend telling me about a Japanese Love Hotel she took her girlfriend to in the 1980s and I text her for details. I walk to collect the children from school imagining beautiful, luxurious but erotic hotels. Mirrored mazes, silver swans, and silken rooms devoid of light. Peep holes, finger holes, flaming torches and showers of feathers. Tipping floors, tumbling tunnels, singing canaries and a brook bringing thimbles of dessert wine on trays. I couldn't afford what I would like, I think. And I am too shy anyhow, caught in the awkward bulk of self. She texts later to say there was a vibrating bed and you paid by the hour. Though another friend reported a scented bath on stilts.
Also in the square was a 'bazaar' set up in 1816 by John Trotter. A man who had ambitions to set up an universal language and had run the army stores for the Napoleonic wars he converted a warehouse in Soho Square no longer required for army provision as an encouragement for 'Female and Domesticity' being anxious to stop the country from pouring 'its happy and innocent virgins into the common sink of London'. The interior of the disused warehouse was laid out with stalls and counters arranged on two floors of the building in the manner of a closed market. The vendors hired their selling spaces by the day and there were stringent rules for the conduct of business, but everything was conducted on the 'fairest and most liberal plan'. The goods sold consisted chiefly of millinery, gloves, lace, jewellery and potted plants. Despite it's seemingly worthy beginning this fashionable and famous bazaar was copied across London, a precusor to the department stores of Oxford Street.
I dither about putting this in but the chance to write about sex AND shopping is too enticing. I have had my novel rejected a few times for just being too depressing so the chance to revel in the bones of the chick lit genre is just too much to miss.
The church was the first Catholic Church to be founded after the 1791 second Catholic Relief Act was passed by parliament. A group of eminent Irish Catholics formed the Confraternity of St. Patrick “to consider the most effectual means of establishing a chapel to be called St. Patrick’s, on a liberal and permanent foundation.” An ambition they achieved by taking a 62-year lease on Mrs. Cornelys’, by then vacant, Carlisle House. Nearby stretching from New Oxford St to Seven Dials was an area known as the Rookeries - where criminals, the drunken and destitute, and a large population of the Irish Catholic poor lived.
On this corner of Soho and Covent Garden it 'was somewhat like the wild west with the priests often rather sheriff-like as they tried to bring order to disorder, and establish Christian family values in the face of the evil elements that were destroying the dignity of the lower classes, namely alcohol, crime and exploitation.' And the priest Father Arthur O'Leary who raised the funds and drummed up support and directed the consecration of the chapel on September 29th 1792 continued his work for 10 years until as it says on his memorial stone in the porch of the church ‘he wore himself out by his labours’ in 1802.
Also celebrated in a plaque in the porch is the 1940 bomb that broke through the roof and embedded itself in the nave but did not go off.
While the entertainer Danny La Rue who was an altar server here for many years donated the two statues at the back of the church in the memory of his mother and aunt. And Tommy Steel was married here.
The church appears to have as an inspiring though as yet less careworn leader as it's founder. The Reverend Alexander Sherbrooke has overseen the recent 3.5 million renovation of the church and also the hosting of addiction counselling in it's crypt ( it is the only Catholic Church to do so). Each week under his lead St Patrick's with a team of volunteers feeds 80 to 90 local homeless people in conjunction with the Groucho club – a nearby private members' club - that supplys the puddings. He also runs an SOS prayer line manned by volunteers from 7pm to 11pm every night in the tower of the church. A light on at high window of the tower like a beacon to Soho proclaims the two telephone lines open and they take calls from across the world. I read that at the heart of his ministry is the new Evangelization in the Catholic Church and that he believes that beauty in a secular age is a privileged pathway to God making the Eucharist, the music and the church itself central to the worship.
Sherbrooke says: "You get a knock on the door and it can be someone who is successful in business, someone who wants a sandwich or someone caught up in the sex industry. We leave our SOS prayer line calling cards in telephone boxes – where you might see other services advertised.
I don't know - writing this blog I have witnessed how much good work is done by the London churches but this seems inspiring - his breadth of ambition and desire to help people in a simple but direct way. I pass him as I walk down the nave on my way out, the man who had welcomed me in, a man of obvious peace and energy. Unexpectedly behind him down the aisle comes a soppy eyed King Charles Spaniel, neat claws on the clean new marble, completely at home, obedient to his master. I think of a Christmas Day once when I went to a service with my Mum and Dad in my hometown and a butterfly flew in the church on the cold morning for it felt like a surprising gift of beauty.
As I leave the church, rushing now, for a quick guilty drink with UL before returning to my patched together family, a short man in a fawn anorak runs up the stairs. 'Is there someone, somewhere who will hear my confession now?' he pants. 'He is in there.' I say.
I think of the light on in the tower.
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Christian Scientist Reading Room, Mayfair
It is the third time I have tried to get into the magnificently fronted Christian Scientist Church on Curzon Street. I have been refused politely but determinedly twice - no, I am sorry, you have to come to a service, no I am sorry, the service has started we cannot let you enter. The first time a man with dried spittle on his lip appeared from the back of the slightly smelly reading room ( opposite to the door of the church) looked suspiciously at me and turned me away. The second occasion a black man with an old weary face on guard at the doorway of the church ( though I was certain the service had not started. ) They both acted as if they have been guardians of the doorway for a long time and that I ( red tights, metallic red dance shoes, big fur hat/I wonder if I sound loathsome? ) am just who should be turned away.
This time I am determined, though dreading the encounter. I have decided to try the end of a service on a Sunday rather than the random weekday or the beginning of a service on a weekday evening that I have tried before and I know there is a bb docking bay opposite the grand, almost american college-like building so I have chanced split-hair-timing of when I think the service will finish.
I have lost my job. Even writing this down it shocks me. I have never lost a job. Those closed door meetings dragged on for 10 days, wounding the build up to xmas - how could I sit and order stocking fillers on line - when it seemed likely there would be no money coming in afterwards? Though I attempt to think golden positive thoughts when I wake, I attempt to think good can come out of change for a few minutes every morning. I don't know - it does seem to help. The opposite is helpless, hopeless worrying and a flailing 'it's not fair.' Finally on a Friday I am taken into a room and offered money and allowed to still work for the company. I think I will cry but I am bold to the two men who deliver the news 'I feel I have worked really hard and done a really good job' and they concur and say yes, it is very sad, they are sure they will see me back but I feel they resent my bitterly spoken pride. When I open the envelope they offer me I am much more pleased with the money than I can imagine. Though despite wanting to write a story of 'our time' and everything I can see from the corner I live on I feel like a method actor actually losing a leg. It was only just a level of pretending before.
On a day I wouldn't have worked anyhow I sit at the kitchen table and write careful lists in pale pencil. Under headings - christmas, writing, job hunting, money, children - the items range from the ambitious - contact Granta, to the life saving - phone about smoke alarm, the needy - e mail 3 work contacts a day and mundane slightly over fussy - check gravy boat and cutlery for Christmas. Listening to Radio 4 that morning as I start these chores I hear amazing accounts of:
A transexual's life and the apparent prediliction for electronic engineering.
Chinese migrant workers status and the hukou system which means that household registration cannot be moved from countryside to the cities despite modern China's dependence on this workforce - how such workers have to lead second class lives, unable to obtain healthcare, their children unable to attend state schools. "Wo shi nongmin [I am a peasant]," a fixed status, shown on ID.
Then a whole programme about a writer I had never heard of - Robert Aickman. 'He had the ability to invest the daylight world with all the terrors of the night, and specialised in subverting notions of safety and sunshine into something sinister and unforgiving. His work is best summed up by a wonderful German word, unheimlich, meaning "uncanny", which has the deeper connotation of suggesting the unease caused by being away from home, literally un-homelike.'
I think as I do the cleaning this is a rich life. Make it what you want.
In my attempt to get into the church I rush up the grand stairs from the street, pass a few stragglers of congregation in the atrium between the reading room and the church and I am at the door of the church in that furry hat and gold buttoned coat, pink cheeks from the cold and the rush and the bike ride and both the dried spittle man and the weary faced seated man are there. Both are shaking their head - they are just closing up, they say. They look at me as if I am loathsome. I say - I will only be 5 minutes - less than that even - I am doing a local history project - oh please, I plead. The two guardians exchange slightly fearful glances and say ok reluctantly. I bolt up the carpeted stairs, like the winding stairway of a well vacuumed bed and breakfast and reach the plain but beautiful airy room. Like a horror film DS man has followed me, lurking behind but I say truly - oh it is beautiful - and he smiles finally trusting that I do not want to harm whatever it is he protects.
'Christian Science, a new American religion based largely in both Puritan and Transcendental strains of theology, was formulated by New Englander Mary Baker Eddy and organized as a denomination in the 1880s and 1890s, based on her discovery of a radical method of Christian healing found through a spiritual interpretation of the Bible—a science of Christianity.
This room is airy and simple with lovely proportions and texts carved on the walls.
Christian Science came to Britain in 1890. Mrs. Eddy sent students to London, where fashionable West End women began to be attracted to it
'By 1907, the Christian Scientists had grown in influence enough to interest over 9000 people to attend a Christian Science lecture delivered by American Bicknell Young in London’s Albert Hall. The idea that the acoustically perfected lecture hall or theater provided the best vehicle for Christian Science churches in Britain was henceforth continually suggested in the architectural press and demonstrated in several branch church designs: Byzantine styled Second Church by Sir John Burnett (1924-25); Lanchester and Rickard’s monumental Baroque Third Church (1910) in Mayfair, which included a lamp of wisdom in its elaborate entry cartouche surmounted by a tower of Wren derivation.
Likewise the First Church, Manchester England, a striking expressionist Arts and Crafts design by Edgar Wood, was one of the most celebrated churches in Britain of any denomination.
Though a falling congregation meant this church was divided in 1980. The facade and front part of the building was kept - the rest developed as flats. I find a story of the magnificent oak case of the organ from the huge church being sold and shipped to Australia, 'the timber used in the case came from oak retrieved from English manor houses and shipwrecks, and was designed by L.F. Roslyn to incorporate biblical images, floral motifs, sheaves of wheat and doves.'
Finally, returning home one night from the Southbank after a night out with ul I turn into the dark closed huts of the christmas Thameside market. The gingerbread twinkly fairytale world has flipped it's artifice to the slightly sinister grey tones of garden sheds and cheap magic shut away and out of reach. Oh I suddenly realise - I don't want this to be the ISICTT xmas special - I need to get to another church. Of course posting this on xmas day I have missed my own ambitious deadlines - but I aiming for two this week! I don't know! Let's see!
This time I am determined, though dreading the encounter. I have decided to try the end of a service on a Sunday rather than the random weekday or the beginning of a service on a weekday evening that I have tried before and I know there is a bb docking bay opposite the grand, almost american college-like building so I have chanced split-hair-timing of when I think the service will finish.
I have lost my job. Even writing this down it shocks me. I have never lost a job. Those closed door meetings dragged on for 10 days, wounding the build up to xmas - how could I sit and order stocking fillers on line - when it seemed likely there would be no money coming in afterwards? Though I attempt to think golden positive thoughts when I wake, I attempt to think good can come out of change for a few minutes every morning. I don't know - it does seem to help. The opposite is helpless, hopeless worrying and a flailing 'it's not fair.' Finally on a Friday I am taken into a room and offered money and allowed to still work for the company. I think I will cry but I am bold to the two men who deliver the news 'I feel I have worked really hard and done a really good job' and they concur and say yes, it is very sad, they are sure they will see me back but I feel they resent my bitterly spoken pride. When I open the envelope they offer me I am much more pleased with the money than I can imagine. Though despite wanting to write a story of 'our time' and everything I can see from the corner I live on I feel like a method actor actually losing a leg. It was only just a level of pretending before.
On a day I wouldn't have worked anyhow I sit at the kitchen table and write careful lists in pale pencil. Under headings - christmas, writing, job hunting, money, children - the items range from the ambitious - contact Granta, to the life saving - phone about smoke alarm, the needy - e mail 3 work contacts a day and mundane slightly over fussy - check gravy boat and cutlery for Christmas. Listening to Radio 4 that morning as I start these chores I hear amazing accounts of:
A transexual's life and the apparent prediliction for electronic engineering.
Chinese migrant workers status and the hukou system which means that household registration cannot be moved from countryside to the cities despite modern China's dependence on this workforce - how such workers have to lead second class lives, unable to obtain healthcare, their children unable to attend state schools. "Wo shi nongmin [I am a peasant]," a fixed status, shown on ID.
Then a whole programme about a writer I had never heard of - Robert Aickman. 'He had the ability to invest the daylight world with all the terrors of the night, and specialised in subverting notions of safety and sunshine into something sinister and unforgiving. His work is best summed up by a wonderful German word, unheimlich, meaning "uncanny", which has the deeper connotation of suggesting the unease caused by being away from home, literally un-homelike.'
I think as I do the cleaning this is a rich life. Make it what you want.
In my attempt to get into the church I rush up the grand stairs from the street, pass a few stragglers of congregation in the atrium between the reading room and the church and I am at the door of the church in that furry hat and gold buttoned coat, pink cheeks from the cold and the rush and the bike ride and both the dried spittle man and the weary faced seated man are there. Both are shaking their head - they are just closing up, they say. They look at me as if I am loathsome. I say - I will only be 5 minutes - less than that even - I am doing a local history project - oh please, I plead. The two guardians exchange slightly fearful glances and say ok reluctantly. I bolt up the carpeted stairs, like the winding stairway of a well vacuumed bed and breakfast and reach the plain but beautiful airy room. Like a horror film DS man has followed me, lurking behind but I say truly - oh it is beautiful - and he smiles finally trusting that I do not want to harm whatever it is he protects.
'Christian Science, a new American religion based largely in both Puritan and Transcendental strains of theology, was formulated by New Englander Mary Baker Eddy and organized as a denomination in the 1880s and 1890s, based on her discovery of a radical method of Christian healing found through a spiritual interpretation of the Bible—a science of Christianity.
This room is airy and simple with lovely proportions and texts carved on the walls.
Christian Science came to Britain in 1890. Mrs. Eddy sent students to London, where fashionable West End women began to be attracted to it
'By 1907, the Christian Scientists had grown in influence enough to interest over 9000 people to attend a Christian Science lecture delivered by American Bicknell Young in London’s Albert Hall. The idea that the acoustically perfected lecture hall or theater provided the best vehicle for Christian Science churches in Britain was henceforth continually suggested in the architectural press and demonstrated in several branch church designs: Byzantine styled Second Church by Sir John Burnett (1924-25); Lanchester and Rickard’s monumental Baroque Third Church (1910) in Mayfair, which included a lamp of wisdom in its elaborate entry cartouche surmounted by a tower of Wren derivation.
Likewise the First Church, Manchester England, a striking expressionist Arts and Crafts design by Edgar Wood, was one of the most celebrated churches in Britain of any denomination.
Though a falling congregation meant this church was divided in 1980. The facade and front part of the building was kept - the rest developed as flats. I find a story of the magnificent oak case of the organ from the huge church being sold and shipped to Australia, 'the timber used in the case came from oak retrieved from English manor houses and shipwrecks, and was designed by L.F. Roslyn to incorporate biblical images, floral motifs, sheaves of wheat and doves.'
Finally, returning home one night from the Southbank after a night out with ul I turn into the dark closed huts of the christmas Thameside market. The gingerbread twinkly fairytale world has flipped it's artifice to the slightly sinister grey tones of garden sheds and cheap magic shut away and out of reach. Oh I suddenly realise - I don't want this to be the ISICTT xmas special - I need to get to another church. Of course posting this on xmas day I have missed my own ambitious deadlines - but I aiming for two this week! I don't know! Let's see!
Sunday, 13 November 2011
Christchurch Mayfair
I feel that I am a walking advert for a Kindle as I read War and Peace on the tube. The book that I have been reading since July was initially just heavy, then it got wet on our camping holiday, lost it's cover and grew flabby. Since then it has become increasingly battered alongside the junk in my bag - the notebooks, the toy guns, stray sweets, flat shoes, favourite lip gloss, child gloves, church leaflets, pta meeting announcements and now the spine has weakened and pages flutter loose. I carry it almost everywhere, a big heavy brick in my bag, just in case, just in case, there are a snatched five minutes to spare - too early for the library after dropping the boys off to school, sitting in the doctors surgery waiting for my name to be called, on the tube to work making the 15 minute journey ( that I kid myself to be only 10, shaving time in the morning to vacuum the flat, hang a load of washing out - finding myself late day after day, slightly sheepish but smiling as I arrive at my desk) and here sitting in a cafe ordering coffee and toast in a smart but 'artisan' cafe in Mayfair waiting for a church service to finish. I open the book, happy, almost exalted to be back in this other crystal sharp world. I have become someone who folds the pages rather than use a bookmark though with this wreck of a book it hardly matters - but I like the tiny increments of folded pages - the tick of time it has taken me to read it. I have always been a fast reader but this slow, increasingly loose paged read has become an almost physical relationship with the book - a passionate, time taken at any opportunity, absorbing thing.
This morning I have already done the dithering in a porch but the church looked packed and they were singing a hymm. I darted out and back down the narrow street. Behind me I heard the door open and the shuffle of someone coming out and looking both ways down the street, looking for whoever had just departed, as if I had played knock down ginger on God's door. Instinctively, I slink into the wall not wanting to be caught and there is a slight kink in the road so it is easy to remain undetected. I think I hear a small shrug and then the door closing.
The cafe is lovely, like being in San Franciso, as the smiley waitress takes my order and brings really good coffee. I am in Shepherd Market, a tucked away historic 'village' - like a toy model of some other time but with boutiques and lots of restaurants including a polish mexican restaurant (now there is a heady combination of seemingly physical opposites.) Corralled by the grand streets nearby this area has the dolls house charm and scaled down period details of narrow alleyways and old lamp posts. Though the toast takes ages and I feel agitated by having finished my coffee before it appears. A couple nearby read tabloid sunday newspapers but not the one I work for. I feel somehow cheated. I want to observe people turn the pages of the magazine and watch to see where their eye's rest. Instead I read 'War and Peace' and it is wonderful.
This whole area - Mayfair - but specifically the site this market was built on was the home of the annual fifteen day May Fairs set up in the 1680s by James II as a cattle market. The haunt of soldiers and women of loose morals it grew too rowdy, and was closed down in the 18th century:
The last Mayfair was remembered by Pennant as "covered with booths, temporary theatres, and every enticement to low pleasure."
Including a fashion for puppet beheading shows with the explanation, "After the Scottish rebellion of 1745," writes Chambers, in his "Book of Days," "the beheading of puppets formed one of the most regular and attractive parts of the exhibitions at the 'May Fair,' and was continued for several years.”
The May Fair, which had long been falling into disrepute, ceased to be held in the reign of George I. It was "presented by the grand jury of Middlesex for four years successively as a public scandal; and the county magistrates then presented an address to the Crown, praying for its suppression by royal proclamation." Its abolition was brought about mainly through the influence of the Earl of Coventry, to whose house in Piccadilly it was an annual nuisance.
Edward Shepherd was commissioned to develop the site and built the paved alleys, a duck pond and a two storey market topped with a theatre between 1735-46. A better clientele attended the entertainments here than the boisterous May Fairs - though the relationship between high money and sex seems to have kept the area's dubious reputation - indeed in the 1980s Jeffrey Archer's ( then the chairman of the conservative party) met with prostitute Monica Coghlan in a flat in Shepherd Market and the subsequent cover up led to his imprisonment.
I walk into the church. The service is finished but the church is packed and noisy - families with cradled, crawling, feeding, tottering, shouting, running tots like a Ahlberg children's book illustration, and exhausted but smiley looking parents drinking cups of tea. There is amplification and presentation equipment where the altar is, and the chairs laid out for the congregation are in an almost untidy arrangement. Though maybe it is just without the pews the layout seems to lack order and be almost too roomy for itself.
Alongside a pretty girl sidles close. Hello' she welcomes. 'I haven't seen you here before?'
I have just come to have a quick look at the church, I say, looking up at the huge stained glass windows.
She keeps talking, asking what would I like to find. I surprise myself by talking very truthfully. I say I just like visiting these spaces and thinking about history and belief and faith but that I don't have any. I imagine suddenly Rachel Whiteread's 'House' and the imprint of space filled with something, the space itself described by matter. I can see her 'inner' angler hold her expression steady as if watching the fish just nibbling the bait. We talk about the congregation and my surprise at how young everyone is. 'We are a group that came together and now we are blessed with all these children' - she waves her hands around as if surveying the many offspring of rabbits but with a slight wrinkling of her pretty nose to the din. We talk about the location of the church and she says it makes it easy to invite friends to come because they can go shopping afterwards. She says the church was an Ethopian church before, and now Church of England but evangelical. She does not leave my side as I go to look at leaflets by strange phone box style cupboards with big headings pinned above. 'Investigating Christianity' says one. She doesn't leave my side as I pick out a few leaflets but we shake hands and I thank her as I leave.
I find very little about the history of Christchuch, Down St. Errected in 1865 by F and H Francis as a subdivision of St George's of Hanover Square there seems to have been a fire at the beginning of the 20th century and the only other scrap of architectural information is that the multicoloured interior brick work was painted over in 1955. Apparently Mary, Princess Royal, daughter of George V worshipped here at the beginning of her married life. But that is all I find though I fish and fish and fish for history for hours.
I do discover details of nearby Keith's Chapel where clergyman Alexander Keith conducted clandestine ( with an element of secrecy to them: perhaps they took place away from a home parish, and without either banns or marriage licence and at any hour of the day or night) marriages and I wonder if I am onto something. Though there is no connection between the churches. He appears to be entreuperunarial in his marriage business placing adverts of great detail
Daily Post of July 20th, 1744:
"To prevent mistakes, the little new chapel in May Fair, near Hyde Park corner, is in the corner house, opposite to the city side of the great chapel, and within ten yards of it, and the minister and clerk live in the same corner house where the little chapel is; and the licence on a crown stamp, minister and clerk's fees, together with the certificate, amount to one guinea, as heretofore, at any hour till four in the afternoon. And that it may be the better known, there is a porch at the door like a country church porch."
While in prison, Keith seems to have had a keen eye to business. During his incarceration his wife died, and he kept her corpse embalmed and unburied for many months, but he used the unfortunate circumstances as a pr exercise - Daily Advertiser of January 30, 1750:—"We are informed that Mrs. Keith's corpse was removed from her husband's house in May Fair the middle of October last, to an apothecary's in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there till Mr. Keith can attend the funeral. The way to Mr. Keith's chapel is through Piccadilly, by the end of St. James's Street, and down Clarges Street, and turn on the left hand." Then follows the announcement that the marriages are still carried on as usual by "another regular clergyman," as quoted above.
Some 60.000 marriages seemed to have taken place with neat and ordered records, so at a guinea a pop it must have been a lucrative trade.
Also while looking for details of Christchurch I find John Gay's 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London,' which appeared in 1716 - a poem in three books. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/skilton/poetry/gay01a.html
It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of walking in the London of that period. Read the poem! But here to give an idea of the content is fragments from the index:
Alley, the pleasure of walking in one,
Barber, by whom to be shunned,
Butchers, to be avoided,
Cane, the convenience of one.
Coat, how to chuse one for the winter,
Countryman, perplexed to find the way,
Coachman, his whip dangerous,
Crowd parted by a coach,
Cellar, the misfortunes of falling into one.
Dustman, to whom offensive,
Fop, the ill consequence of passing too near one,
Father, the happiness of a child who knows his own,
Ladies dress neither by reason nor instinct,
Milkman of the city unlike a rural one.
Oyster, the courage of him that first ate one,
Periwigs, how stolen off the head,
Playhouse, a caution when you lead a lady out of it,
Shoes, what most proper for walkers.
Stockings, how to prevent their being spattered,
Schoolboys mischievous in frosty weather.
Umbrella, its use,
Wig, what to be worn in a mist,
Way, of whom to be inquired,
On my way to work - what I have been dreading happens - I turn the page 936 and find no 937 of War and Peace. At work, unexpectedly the owner of the paper I work for announces that he doesn't like the magazine. It is like a tantrum but it escalates and the work is taken off us, these people that have worked so hard, and we believed so well, and given to a special projects team. We wait days for news, as doors close for meetings around us but none comes. Coming up to Christmas it seems the wrong time to lose a job. What will I do I want to wail but I think oh something will have to turn up and what I want to do is write.
Relieved I find the missing page of the book in the flotsam of my bag and carry on reading.
This morning I have already done the dithering in a porch but the church looked packed and they were singing a hymm. I darted out and back down the narrow street. Behind me I heard the door open and the shuffle of someone coming out and looking both ways down the street, looking for whoever had just departed, as if I had played knock down ginger on God's door. Instinctively, I slink into the wall not wanting to be caught and there is a slight kink in the road so it is easy to remain undetected. I think I hear a small shrug and then the door closing.
The cafe is lovely, like being in San Franciso, as the smiley waitress takes my order and brings really good coffee. I am in Shepherd Market, a tucked away historic 'village' - like a toy model of some other time but with boutiques and lots of restaurants including a polish mexican restaurant (now there is a heady combination of seemingly physical opposites.) Corralled by the grand streets nearby this area has the dolls house charm and scaled down period details of narrow alleyways and old lamp posts. Though the toast takes ages and I feel agitated by having finished my coffee before it appears. A couple nearby read tabloid sunday newspapers but not the one I work for. I feel somehow cheated. I want to observe people turn the pages of the magazine and watch to see where their eye's rest. Instead I read 'War and Peace' and it is wonderful.
This whole area - Mayfair - but specifically the site this market was built on was the home of the annual fifteen day May Fairs set up in the 1680s by James II as a cattle market. The haunt of soldiers and women of loose morals it grew too rowdy, and was closed down in the 18th century:
The last Mayfair was remembered by Pennant as "covered with booths, temporary theatres, and every enticement to low pleasure."
Including a fashion for puppet beheading shows with the explanation, "After the Scottish rebellion of 1745," writes Chambers, in his "Book of Days," "the beheading of puppets formed one of the most regular and attractive parts of the exhibitions at the 'May Fair,' and was continued for several years.”
The May Fair, which had long been falling into disrepute, ceased to be held in the reign of George I. It was "presented by the grand jury of Middlesex for four years successively as a public scandal; and the county magistrates then presented an address to the Crown, praying for its suppression by royal proclamation." Its abolition was brought about mainly through the influence of the Earl of Coventry, to whose house in Piccadilly it was an annual nuisance.
Edward Shepherd was commissioned to develop the site and built the paved alleys, a duck pond and a two storey market topped with a theatre between 1735-46. A better clientele attended the entertainments here than the boisterous May Fairs - though the relationship between high money and sex seems to have kept the area's dubious reputation - indeed in the 1980s Jeffrey Archer's ( then the chairman of the conservative party) met with prostitute Monica Coghlan in a flat in Shepherd Market and the subsequent cover up led to his imprisonment.
I walk into the church. The service is finished but the church is packed and noisy - families with cradled, crawling, feeding, tottering, shouting, running tots like a Ahlberg children's book illustration, and exhausted but smiley looking parents drinking cups of tea. There is amplification and presentation equipment where the altar is, and the chairs laid out for the congregation are in an almost untidy arrangement. Though maybe it is just without the pews the layout seems to lack order and be almost too roomy for itself.
Alongside a pretty girl sidles close. Hello' she welcomes. 'I haven't seen you here before?'
I have just come to have a quick look at the church, I say, looking up at the huge stained glass windows.
She keeps talking, asking what would I like to find. I surprise myself by talking very truthfully. I say I just like visiting these spaces and thinking about history and belief and faith but that I don't have any. I imagine suddenly Rachel Whiteread's 'House' and the imprint of space filled with something, the space itself described by matter. I can see her 'inner' angler hold her expression steady as if watching the fish just nibbling the bait. We talk about the congregation and my surprise at how young everyone is. 'We are a group that came together and now we are blessed with all these children' - she waves her hands around as if surveying the many offspring of rabbits but with a slight wrinkling of her pretty nose to the din. We talk about the location of the church and she says it makes it easy to invite friends to come because they can go shopping afterwards. She says the church was an Ethopian church before, and now Church of England but evangelical. She does not leave my side as I go to look at leaflets by strange phone box style cupboards with big headings pinned above. 'Investigating Christianity' says one. She doesn't leave my side as I pick out a few leaflets but we shake hands and I thank her as I leave.
I find very little about the history of Christchuch, Down St. Errected in 1865 by F and H Francis as a subdivision of St George's of Hanover Square there seems to have been a fire at the beginning of the 20th century and the only other scrap of architectural information is that the multicoloured interior brick work was painted over in 1955. Apparently Mary, Princess Royal, daughter of George V worshipped here at the beginning of her married life. But that is all I find though I fish and fish and fish for history for hours.
I do discover details of nearby Keith's Chapel where clergyman Alexander Keith conducted clandestine ( with an element of secrecy to them: perhaps they took place away from a home parish, and without either banns or marriage licence and at any hour of the day or night) marriages and I wonder if I am onto something. Though there is no connection between the churches. He appears to be entreuperunarial in his marriage business placing adverts of great detail
Daily Post of July 20th, 1744:
"To prevent mistakes, the little new chapel in May Fair, near Hyde Park corner, is in the corner house, opposite to the city side of the great chapel, and within ten yards of it, and the minister and clerk live in the same corner house where the little chapel is; and the licence on a crown stamp, minister and clerk's fees, together with the certificate, amount to one guinea, as heretofore, at any hour till four in the afternoon. And that it may be the better known, there is a porch at the door like a country church porch."
While in prison, Keith seems to have had a keen eye to business. During his incarceration his wife died, and he kept her corpse embalmed and unburied for many months, but he used the unfortunate circumstances as a pr exercise - Daily Advertiser of January 30, 1750:—"We are informed that Mrs. Keith's corpse was removed from her husband's house in May Fair the middle of October last, to an apothecary's in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there till Mr. Keith can attend the funeral. The way to Mr. Keith's chapel is through Piccadilly, by the end of St. James's Street, and down Clarges Street, and turn on the left hand." Then follows the announcement that the marriages are still carried on as usual by "another regular clergyman," as quoted above.
Some 60.000 marriages seemed to have taken place with neat and ordered records, so at a guinea a pop it must have been a lucrative trade.
Also while looking for details of Christchurch I find John Gay's 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London,' which appeared in 1716 - a poem in three books. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/skilton/poetry/gay01a.html
It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of walking in the London of that period. Read the poem! But here to give an idea of the content is fragments from the index:
Alley, the pleasure of walking in one,
Barber, by whom to be shunned,
Butchers, to be avoided,
Cane, the convenience of one.
Coat, how to chuse one for the winter,
Countryman, perplexed to find the way,
Coachman, his whip dangerous,
Crowd parted by a coach,
Cellar, the misfortunes of falling into one.
Dustman, to whom offensive,
Fop, the ill consequence of passing too near one,
Father, the happiness of a child who knows his own,
Ladies dress neither by reason nor instinct,
Milkman of the city unlike a rural one.
Oyster, the courage of him that first ate one,
Periwigs, how stolen off the head,
Playhouse, a caution when you lead a lady out of it,
Shoes, what most proper for walkers.
Stockings, how to prevent their being spattered,
Schoolboys mischievous in frosty weather.
Umbrella, its use,
Wig, what to be worn in a mist,
Way, of whom to be inquired,
On my way to work - what I have been dreading happens - I turn the page 936 and find no 937 of War and Peace. At work, unexpectedly the owner of the paper I work for announces that he doesn't like the magazine. It is like a tantrum but it escalates and the work is taken off us, these people that have worked so hard, and we believed so well, and given to a special projects team. We wait days for news, as doors close for meetings around us but none comes. Coming up to Christmas it seems the wrong time to lose a job. What will I do I want to wail but I think oh something will have to turn up and what I want to do is write.
Relieved I find the missing page of the book in the flotsam of my bag and carry on reading.
Sunday, 30 October 2011
St Mary's Bourne Street
I stand in porches to peer I think, squinting through the reflected light of the glass door into the dark church. I can see the backs of heads of a few worshippers and hear the beautiful soaring high voices of a choir. It is the sunday morning after the clocks turned back and I just didn't get it together to be on time for the service. I don't know what to do. I dither. I can't enter now, it would be rude or just a bit dramatic. I'll have to wait until everyone comes out I think, annoyed with myself for being late. I feel like I have a lot to do though I am slightly lonely and the boys are away. Then I sit in a coffee shop to wait. At the cafe I overhear a pretty very young woman say she lost 20 million recently - though I am straining to hear 2O million what? Shares? Pounds? What else could it possibly be? Over the next few days I wonder what else she could have meant but can't think of anything. Try it. Stamps? Sweets? er Kilograms? Handkerchiefs? I don't know. The church service still hasn't finished when I finish my coffee so I walk round the block a couple of times. In the peace of Sunday morning posh streets, well heeled people walk dogs or children and I peer into luxe lives.
I see immaculately tidy, plush rooms and search for stray details of life - a ginger cat still as an ornament in the corner of a window, a doll tipped up face down on a toy high chair, a family slightly squashed around a table eating a meal in a basement with the window open and some really beautiful yolk yellow cast iron cooking pots on a window shelf. Each time round the block I come again to the long view of the church. I have never seen this chuch before today - had no idea what to expect. It is a fairly ordinary dark red brick with a pitched roof and a solitary bell in a cote, a church from a northern town not a parish church of this wealthy hushed neighbourhood. But the doors at the side are locked and I have to turn the corner to the entrance set back from the street sandwiched between houses.
The night before I came back over Westminster Bridge on a night bus with UL and looked up to see Big Ben dark orange from reflected light, dimmed as if eclipsed, the hands of the clock straight up to twelve o'clock. Oh, I say. Oh. Big Ben has become to me a lighthouse, a beacon - the boom of hundreds of new years eves and new resolutions made - a big bright licked dinner plate of light. I live here! I am nearly home! I live here! I am nearly home! But this night it is dull, shut down, as if resting and no bell rings out. Oh I think - the time is being changed on the clock but the bus sails past and I don't think to watch. I am fiddling with this image in my mind for days - lost time, limbo time, time travel, time turned back - there seems a gap in normal time at least. I imagine unexpectedly seeing the hands go backwards and the shock of seeing it. ( Once long ago I lived in a flat in White City overlooking the Westway and opened the blinds one morning to see all the traffic go backwards - what seemed like the world tipping, something, possibly just me, having fallen off an axis of sense was infact a road accident and traffic reversing to exit a slip road.) I google changing the clocks on Big Ben and find out that the clock would have been stopped the following midday - and worked on since then, checked over, then restarted exactly at 12 o'clock in the new time. So what I see is not midnight but held onto midday. Is it literally time stood still I wonder? Thinking of UL and me. Though perhaps it is just limbo. A place pretending to have no time, not recognising time has moved on. Later I mention seeing the shut down clock to my eldest son who explains the process I had only just discovered in great detail. How did you know that? I say amazed. 'It was on Newsround Mum.' He says nonchalantly.
Another night with the boys away I cycle up into Bloomsbury on a Boris Bike to meet a friend and talk about an art project. He works at the university of London. Cycling along the dark damp beautiful streets I feel suddenly and rather unexpectedly that I am in a dream. I pass earnestly happy young people deep in discussion, as if passing my own ambitions and ideals through the light drizzle. In the bright electric light of his university office we sit and talk about recording nearly extinct languages around the world and the hand gestures that accompany them as exactly as possible with as little 'surface' or manipulation to the representation. There is something here I want badly I think. Though it isn't an envious reaction. Just a realisation.
I want the pursuit of knowledge. Time to do what interests me.
On the third lap around the streets alongside the church elegant, elderly, made-up women come around the corner sparrow fawn, pearls and gold chokered at their neck. The church service is finished, the congregation departing. At the door an effusive handsome vicar in a black robe like a friendly wolf talks flamboyantly of a church in europe that he had visited. Worshippers are coming out, queueing to talk to him. Against the tide I stand near, waiting. Can I just go in to see your church? I ask. He waves me in ebulliently.
I'll just whizz in and I will have done it I think. But the bit of the church I could see when I peered in from the porch is just a side chapel, and the organ music is loud and passionate. Wow. I think. turning into the main body of the church. Dense grey clouds of strong smelling incense fill the space like special effects. People stand heads turned up to the organ playing triumphantly high in a gallery up at the back of the church. Two men absorbed - one playing, one stood close turning the pages. Just for one minute I feel, I feel what? The power and the glory? Mystery? Absolute wonder? It is exhilarating. The organ stops, everyone claps. The two men nod from the balcony.
I think later, of all the churches I have been to and all the tall pipes and ornate details of church organs I have turned my head to see without perhaps realising the impact of the actual music had on the service. I google 'organ music' and discover that the first organ ( a water hydraulis) was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria in the third century bc and described later in latin in the late 4th century by the poet Claudian - Magna levi detrudens murmura tactu....intonet 'let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch.' Used as a musical accompaniment to gladiatorial combat ( blimey - history - a dip into the gladiatorial games is the most fascinatingly brutal display of human cruelty I have read:
http://legvi.tripod.com/gladiators/id1.html)
But by the 8th century the organ is prominent in the liturgy of the Catholic Church for it's ability to 'simultaneously provide a musical foundation below the vocal register, support in the vocal register, and increased brightness above the vocal register.' compliment the human voice and the human voices of a choir. Though during the renaissance the hydraulic organ was used in magical grottos and gardens - run only by water (often waterfalls) whilst the air generated in the pipes were used to make automata figurines dance and birds fly. Other times hidden to simulate the music played by statues in mythological scenes.
But today - something - the frequency, the passion, the immensity of the sound - like a soaring dramatic sound track has unexpectedly transported me from mild lurking depression to joy.
The initially humble chapel was designed by a little known church architect RJ Withers and consecrated in 1874. Built over the underground railway on land where houses had been demolished, it was still an area of slums.
'The chapel as a whole is remarkably effective and has a solid and substantial look which is highly satisfactory. It is, in a word, an excellent specimen of an inexpensive chuch, the cost of the whole, not counting special gifts such as the reredos, altar, font etc, being about £4,500.' The Church Times 1874
It is another Trachaterian church ( as near as dammit catholic whilst still being allowed to be in the Church of England ) set up by Friar WJE Bennett of St Paul's Wilton St and then St Barnabus, Pimlico then taken over by Rev the hon Robert Liddell when he resigned. I have written already of this resignation and the riots that were caused by the high catholic rituals of the movement at St Barnabus.
http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html
Less controversial St Mary's is described in The Chuch Times 1874. 'The service at eleven o'clock was well attended by people from the neighbourhood, and we were glad to notice a good sprinkling of poor women. Mr Eyton, the Curate-in-Charge, was the clebrant, and an unconscionably long sermon was preached by Mr Knox-Little ( curate of St Thomas, Regent Street) which, considering the broiling weather, was little better than cruelty.'
For halloween I tell the boys I have prepared a 'mystery'. There is great excitement as we bob apples and play the game where you cut a cake of flour and have to fish out the fallen sweet with your mouth. In my bedroom I have adapted the huge child sized cardboard box that was has been their 'tank' and hung crepe paper streamers inside like cobwebs. Each child ( there are five boys who take it in turns) sits inside the box. PSM ( under my nervous instruction ) and I wail into a tube, drop cobwebs on their heads, blow through straws onto the back of their necks, put icy fingers on their arms and hang a skull with red shining eyes to a peep hole.
But the room isn't quite dark enough and I forget my lines and indeed my props for I am just too nervy to be a natural performer. 'Lame' each boy says. 'Was that a mystery?' says my eldest in disgust.
I keep remembering Graham Greene's conversion to Catholicism - I read it in his early autobiography 'A sort of Life' and loved the mix of mystery and mundanity. I look for the book on my book shelf and can't find it but here, oh it is worth the read.
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/greenesconversion.htm
Finally, I find a part time local history course that can be done on the internet that I can apply for in January. It will be a start I think excitedly.
Amen
I see immaculately tidy, plush rooms and search for stray details of life - a ginger cat still as an ornament in the corner of a window, a doll tipped up face down on a toy high chair, a family slightly squashed around a table eating a meal in a basement with the window open and some really beautiful yolk yellow cast iron cooking pots on a window shelf. Each time round the block I come again to the long view of the church. I have never seen this chuch before today - had no idea what to expect. It is a fairly ordinary dark red brick with a pitched roof and a solitary bell in a cote, a church from a northern town not a parish church of this wealthy hushed neighbourhood. But the doors at the side are locked and I have to turn the corner to the entrance set back from the street sandwiched between houses.
The night before I came back over Westminster Bridge on a night bus with UL and looked up to see Big Ben dark orange from reflected light, dimmed as if eclipsed, the hands of the clock straight up to twelve o'clock. Oh, I say. Oh. Big Ben has become to me a lighthouse, a beacon - the boom of hundreds of new years eves and new resolutions made - a big bright licked dinner plate of light. I live here! I am nearly home! I live here! I am nearly home! But this night it is dull, shut down, as if resting and no bell rings out. Oh I think - the time is being changed on the clock but the bus sails past and I don't think to watch. I am fiddling with this image in my mind for days - lost time, limbo time, time travel, time turned back - there seems a gap in normal time at least. I imagine unexpectedly seeing the hands go backwards and the shock of seeing it. ( Once long ago I lived in a flat in White City overlooking the Westway and opened the blinds one morning to see all the traffic go backwards - what seemed like the world tipping, something, possibly just me, having fallen off an axis of sense was infact a road accident and traffic reversing to exit a slip road.) I google changing the clocks on Big Ben and find out that the clock would have been stopped the following midday - and worked on since then, checked over, then restarted exactly at 12 o'clock in the new time. So what I see is not midnight but held onto midday. Is it literally time stood still I wonder? Thinking of UL and me. Though perhaps it is just limbo. A place pretending to have no time, not recognising time has moved on. Later I mention seeing the shut down clock to my eldest son who explains the process I had only just discovered in great detail. How did you know that? I say amazed. 'It was on Newsround Mum.' He says nonchalantly.
Another night with the boys away I cycle up into Bloomsbury on a Boris Bike to meet a friend and talk about an art project. He works at the university of London. Cycling along the dark damp beautiful streets I feel suddenly and rather unexpectedly that I am in a dream. I pass earnestly happy young people deep in discussion, as if passing my own ambitions and ideals through the light drizzle. In the bright electric light of his university office we sit and talk about recording nearly extinct languages around the world and the hand gestures that accompany them as exactly as possible with as little 'surface' or manipulation to the representation. There is something here I want badly I think. Though it isn't an envious reaction. Just a realisation.
I want the pursuit of knowledge. Time to do what interests me.
On the third lap around the streets alongside the church elegant, elderly, made-up women come around the corner sparrow fawn, pearls and gold chokered at their neck. The church service is finished, the congregation departing. At the door an effusive handsome vicar in a black robe like a friendly wolf talks flamboyantly of a church in europe that he had visited. Worshippers are coming out, queueing to talk to him. Against the tide I stand near, waiting. Can I just go in to see your church? I ask. He waves me in ebulliently.
I'll just whizz in and I will have done it I think. But the bit of the church I could see when I peered in from the porch is just a side chapel, and the organ music is loud and passionate. Wow. I think. turning into the main body of the church. Dense grey clouds of strong smelling incense fill the space like special effects. People stand heads turned up to the organ playing triumphantly high in a gallery up at the back of the church. Two men absorbed - one playing, one stood close turning the pages. Just for one minute I feel, I feel what? The power and the glory? Mystery? Absolute wonder? It is exhilarating. The organ stops, everyone claps. The two men nod from the balcony.
I think later, of all the churches I have been to and all the tall pipes and ornate details of church organs I have turned my head to see without perhaps realising the impact of the actual music had on the service. I google 'organ music' and discover that the first organ ( a water hydraulis) was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria in the third century bc and described later in latin in the late 4th century by the poet Claudian - Magna levi detrudens murmura tactu....intonet 'let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch.' Used as a musical accompaniment to gladiatorial combat ( blimey - history - a dip into the gladiatorial games is the most fascinatingly brutal display of human cruelty I have read:
http://legvi.tripod.com/gladiators/id1.html)
But by the 8th century the organ is prominent in the liturgy of the Catholic Church for it's ability to 'simultaneously provide a musical foundation below the vocal register, support in the vocal register, and increased brightness above the vocal register.' compliment the human voice and the human voices of a choir. Though during the renaissance the hydraulic organ was used in magical grottos and gardens - run only by water (often waterfalls) whilst the air generated in the pipes were used to make automata figurines dance and birds fly. Other times hidden to simulate the music played by statues in mythological scenes.
But today - something - the frequency, the passion, the immensity of the sound - like a soaring dramatic sound track has unexpectedly transported me from mild lurking depression to joy.
The initially humble chapel was designed by a little known church architect RJ Withers and consecrated in 1874. Built over the underground railway on land where houses had been demolished, it was still an area of slums.
'The chapel as a whole is remarkably effective and has a solid and substantial look which is highly satisfactory. It is, in a word, an excellent specimen of an inexpensive chuch, the cost of the whole, not counting special gifts such as the reredos, altar, font etc, being about £4,500.' The Church Times 1874
It is another Trachaterian church ( as near as dammit catholic whilst still being allowed to be in the Church of England ) set up by Friar WJE Bennett of St Paul's Wilton St and then St Barnabus, Pimlico then taken over by Rev the hon Robert Liddell when he resigned. I have written already of this resignation and the riots that were caused by the high catholic rituals of the movement at St Barnabus.
http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html
Less controversial St Mary's is described in The Chuch Times 1874. 'The service at eleven o'clock was well attended by people from the neighbourhood, and we were glad to notice a good sprinkling of poor women. Mr Eyton, the Curate-in-Charge, was the clebrant, and an unconscionably long sermon was preached by Mr Knox-Little ( curate of St Thomas, Regent Street) which, considering the broiling weather, was little better than cruelty.'
For halloween I tell the boys I have prepared a 'mystery'. There is great excitement as we bob apples and play the game where you cut a cake of flour and have to fish out the fallen sweet with your mouth. In my bedroom I have adapted the huge child sized cardboard box that was has been their 'tank' and hung crepe paper streamers inside like cobwebs. Each child ( there are five boys who take it in turns) sits inside the box. PSM ( under my nervous instruction ) and I wail into a tube, drop cobwebs on their heads, blow through straws onto the back of their necks, put icy fingers on their arms and hang a skull with red shining eyes to a peep hole.
But the room isn't quite dark enough and I forget my lines and indeed my props for I am just too nervy to be a natural performer. 'Lame' each boy says. 'Was that a mystery?' says my eldest in disgust.
I keep remembering Graham Greene's conversion to Catholicism - I read it in his early autobiography 'A sort of Life' and loved the mix of mystery and mundanity. I look for the book on my book shelf and can't find it but here, oh it is worth the read.
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/greenesconversion.htm
Finally, I find a part time local history course that can be done on the internet that I can apply for in January. It will be a start I think excitedly.
Amen
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Church of Holy Apostles
Sitting in my kitchen late at night texting a quite nice girl from The Only Way is Essex about pictures of her as a little girl I think, really, something has got to change. Increasingly I just feel really, really stressed. Since the closure of the News of the World my part-time job share - like an unnoticed gas leak has invisibly filled every nook and crany of my life. I wake in the morning worrying that a car I have booked will not have picked up a celebrity, that a shot that the editor would like will not get taken, that I will not possibly get everything done. I work long hours at incredible speed and with great concentration, then take the paperwork home. I have gone to work the last three Sundays because I didn't know how the work would get done if I didn't. I have always worked hard but this is different. I don't know what to do. Of course I need the money but I have started to make mistakes and the amount of work I am getting through is impossible to maintain. All I really want to do is write. Sometimes I think if I only I stopped doing some of the things I don't really want to do, don't believe in maybe things would get better. Though I deliberately flatter the TOWIE girl to get the results I want and it works. She calls me babe as she agrees to send the pictures.
I slip into the Holy Apostles Catholic Church on a Sunday morning, parking the Boris Bike round the back of nearby St Gabriel's church. I can see on the surrounding Pimlico skyline the spires of three churches. Almost a year ago I signed up for a BB, almost a year ago I visited this church, almost a year ago I met UL after an absence of 12 years. It is a kind of anniversary. Though he is still in his very bad marriage despite declarations of separation that were made in the summer and I feel caught by the twine of their unhealthy life. After escaping an alcoholic relationship I am anxious this can only be another trap. Perhaps we are both just too damaged I think. Or am I just better at spotting unhealthy patterns? Did we have a bad relationship before? All I have remembered was our fascination with each other. But oh oh oh I feel sad.
I used to attend a mother and toddler group in the church hall of Holy Apostles with my youngest son - little girls in sparkly-heeled cinderella slippers doggedly shuffling dolls in buggies as he donned a policeman outfit and a batman mask before driving a plastic hooded car around the hall. Mothers resigned to the display of these apparently intrinsic roles. The church hall has a beautiful, nicely-planted, mediterreanean 50s style sunny courtyard and I assume the entrance of the church is there. But it isn't and I have to walk around to the next street to find the door. Up some steps, the door is open, I can hear singing, there is a service. I stand in the porch, like a phone box dense with cards - advertising religious services including counselling for those who have suffered from the abuse of priests.
The church is quite long and narrow and plain though busy. The congregation are queueing for communion. Vaulted like the interior bones of a whale the room has neutral colours that make the colours of people's sunday best vibrant.
The old Holy Apostles Church (then on Claverton Street - on the site of an old rather grand columned Wesleyen chapel) was bombed out in the war on 16th April 1941. The attack on Pimlico that night was ferocious. In nearby Sutherland Terrace the whole terrace of thirty odd houses was obliterated apart from three dwellings:
'But here, in the night, in a place ringed with fires, the devastation seemed endless, a wide earthern space swelling with mounds and pitted with hole. In all the noise, in all the urgency of the moment there was felt in the air that shroud of emptiness that hangs over a battlefield.'
'When rescue and first aid parties were already engaged on this field, engaged in what one heavy rescue man could only describe as digging, digging, digging', wardens away at a post in Glasgow Terrace saw through the flared and spitting skyscape the drifting pale glint of another parachute. It was coming from the south of the river.'
As this new blast hit Sutherland Terrace:
'Over two thousand kilos of high explosive split over vehicles, men, wounded. Excavations made were filled in, men were killed and lorries blown up. A stretcher bearer remembers that 'it was just as though a huge orange flare had gone up under your throat. A hell of a bang. Then it was like a sandpapered ramrod down your throat, and your lungs puffing out like a pouter pigeon. Then dead dead silence. Then, as though some time afterwards. a slow shower of bricks everywhere.'
'The Blitz. Westminster at War' William Sansom
That night in London 450 bombers were used. In Westminster there were 148 dead. 564 injured seriously. It was called 'The Wednesday'
'Keep calm and carry' on is not just a tea towel.
Missionaries sheltering under the porch were left unscathed when the Church of Holy Apostles was hit and the parish priest Canon Hadfield clambered through the smoking debris to rescue the Blessed Sacrament, and then carry it on his bike through the blackout and continued bombing and fires of the night to Westminster Cathedral.
The Monster Tavern was also bombed out that night, a relic of the bygone more pastoral past of Pimlico - it had set up as a rival to 'Jenny's whim' - a tea garden and drinking house on the pimlico side of Ebury Bridge in the then fields between Chelsea and Westminster. Among the ponds and flower beds, clever spring devices released effigies of grotesque animals and theatrical characters to surprise patrons. The Monster tavern gained it's name by adopting similiar terrifying displays but kept going into the 20th century. In the book I have 'Blitz over Westminster' - photographs showing bombed out sites with casualty numbers and reference numbers to the reports made of bombs dropped - even the remains of the Monster Tavern just looks like a pub not the dark dreamlike place of entertainment I imagined.
With no home the Holy Apostles Church continued to hold services in another bombed site, and after the war in a prefab hut on their old site. This was then requisitioned for the Churchill Garden estate and the future of the Holy Apostles Church looked very uncertain. Canon Hadfield again cycled around at night planting 'miraculous medals' on bombed sites to demand to build a new church. I spend ages trying to find out about this character, consulting the Catholic Herald Archive, trawling through a whole history of catholic ramblers, even phoning the Holy Apostles Church for a copy of their history. The lady on the phone says they have run out, she has even given her own copy away and gives me a few numbers to try. No one rings me back.
All I find is that this Yorkshire man Canon Hadfield 'was Pimlico' and it was his determination that obtained the Cumberland/Winchester St site. He then got his architect father's Sheffield based firm to design the new church. It opened in 1957. Described by a more recent friar as a false tooth in the orderly splendour of Winchester and Cumberland Streets - 'But in our case it is a beautiful false tooth especially when viewed from Cumberland St.'
In the playground I am able to talk about War and Peace with the Russian mum that exh and I christened momdel. She is beautiful. I am certain she has been a model at some point but since our eldest children started school together she has been studying english literature. She finished her MA in the summer. She said her mother who is staying now to help with the children is horrified by the dirt on her crockery because she puts a book on the taps to read whilst washing up. I said maybe we should buy those transparent recipe book holders and read through most of the housework.
But oh, it is so good:
'Sometimes Pierre remembered what he had been told about soldiers in a shelter under fire with nothing to do, trying their best to keep busy and thus make the danger easier to bear. and Pierre pictured all men as soldiers like these, escaping from life through ambition, cards, law-making, women, little playthings, horses, politics, sport, wine, even government service. 'Everything matters, nothing matters, it's all the same. If I can only escape, one way or another!' Thought Pierre . 'And not see it, the terrible it.'
On the way back from school the children find a huge clean empty cardboard box on the street. They plead with me to be allowed to take it home, they want to build a tank. We take it in turns to carry it though it is a big as me and double the size of the youngest. Civil servants smile as with arms spread wide he manages to walk it along the pavement. Huge in our tiny flat, they play in it for days, muffled games overheard, friends coming to play disappearing into it's well armoured depths.
Another day on our way back from St James's park climbing trees my eldest son tells me that his class had to write what they would like to be when they grow up. He says his best friend wrote down artist and that he wrote he would like to be a soldier or an explorer. I wince. A friend's son who has always wanted to be a soldier is now 15. She is an artist, a brilliant single mum. I have watched at her sidelines as he escalates his once childish obsession to nearly become a career. Once I said ridiculously, hopelessly, ludicrously - I couldn't bear him to go to war. Another friend - formerly known as FB quite rightly snapped at me reminding me to think how she felt. I thought I had. But I couldn't. But my son says his friend Rami says he would like to be a pilot so that when the 'mighty war' does come he can fly his family to safety.
oh, I think, with fear. oh.
I slip into the Holy Apostles Catholic Church on a Sunday morning, parking the Boris Bike round the back of nearby St Gabriel's church. I can see on the surrounding Pimlico skyline the spires of three churches. Almost a year ago I signed up for a BB, almost a year ago I visited this church, almost a year ago I met UL after an absence of 12 years. It is a kind of anniversary. Though he is still in his very bad marriage despite declarations of separation that were made in the summer and I feel caught by the twine of their unhealthy life. After escaping an alcoholic relationship I am anxious this can only be another trap. Perhaps we are both just too damaged I think. Or am I just better at spotting unhealthy patterns? Did we have a bad relationship before? All I have remembered was our fascination with each other. But oh oh oh I feel sad.
I used to attend a mother and toddler group in the church hall of Holy Apostles with my youngest son - little girls in sparkly-heeled cinderella slippers doggedly shuffling dolls in buggies as he donned a policeman outfit and a batman mask before driving a plastic hooded car around the hall. Mothers resigned to the display of these apparently intrinsic roles. The church hall has a beautiful, nicely-planted, mediterreanean 50s style sunny courtyard and I assume the entrance of the church is there. But it isn't and I have to walk around to the next street to find the door. Up some steps, the door is open, I can hear singing, there is a service. I stand in the porch, like a phone box dense with cards - advertising religious services including counselling for those who have suffered from the abuse of priests.
The church is quite long and narrow and plain though busy. The congregation are queueing for communion. Vaulted like the interior bones of a whale the room has neutral colours that make the colours of people's sunday best vibrant.
The old Holy Apostles Church (then on Claverton Street - on the site of an old rather grand columned Wesleyen chapel) was bombed out in the war on 16th April 1941. The attack on Pimlico that night was ferocious. In nearby Sutherland Terrace the whole terrace of thirty odd houses was obliterated apart from three dwellings:
'But here, in the night, in a place ringed with fires, the devastation seemed endless, a wide earthern space swelling with mounds and pitted with hole. In all the noise, in all the urgency of the moment there was felt in the air that shroud of emptiness that hangs over a battlefield.'
'When rescue and first aid parties were already engaged on this field, engaged in what one heavy rescue man could only describe as digging, digging, digging', wardens away at a post in Glasgow Terrace saw through the flared and spitting skyscape the drifting pale glint of another parachute. It was coming from the south of the river.'
As this new blast hit Sutherland Terrace:
'Over two thousand kilos of high explosive split over vehicles, men, wounded. Excavations made were filled in, men were killed and lorries blown up. A stretcher bearer remembers that 'it was just as though a huge orange flare had gone up under your throat. A hell of a bang. Then it was like a sandpapered ramrod down your throat, and your lungs puffing out like a pouter pigeon. Then dead dead silence. Then, as though some time afterwards. a slow shower of bricks everywhere.'
'The Blitz. Westminster at War' William Sansom
That night in London 450 bombers were used. In Westminster there were 148 dead. 564 injured seriously. It was called 'The Wednesday'
'Keep calm and carry' on is not just a tea towel.
Missionaries sheltering under the porch were left unscathed when the Church of Holy Apostles was hit and the parish priest Canon Hadfield clambered through the smoking debris to rescue the Blessed Sacrament, and then carry it on his bike through the blackout and continued bombing and fires of the night to Westminster Cathedral.
The Monster Tavern was also bombed out that night, a relic of the bygone more pastoral past of Pimlico - it had set up as a rival to 'Jenny's whim' - a tea garden and drinking house on the pimlico side of Ebury Bridge in the then fields between Chelsea and Westminster. Among the ponds and flower beds, clever spring devices released effigies of grotesque animals and theatrical characters to surprise patrons. The Monster tavern gained it's name by adopting similiar terrifying displays but kept going into the 20th century. In the book I have 'Blitz over Westminster' - photographs showing bombed out sites with casualty numbers and reference numbers to the reports made of bombs dropped - even the remains of the Monster Tavern just looks like a pub not the dark dreamlike place of entertainment I imagined.
With no home the Holy Apostles Church continued to hold services in another bombed site, and after the war in a prefab hut on their old site. This was then requisitioned for the Churchill Garden estate and the future of the Holy Apostles Church looked very uncertain. Canon Hadfield again cycled around at night planting 'miraculous medals' on bombed sites to demand to build a new church. I spend ages trying to find out about this character, consulting the Catholic Herald Archive, trawling through a whole history of catholic ramblers, even phoning the Holy Apostles Church for a copy of their history. The lady on the phone says they have run out, she has even given her own copy away and gives me a few numbers to try. No one rings me back.
All I find is that this Yorkshire man Canon Hadfield 'was Pimlico' and it was his determination that obtained the Cumberland/Winchester St site. He then got his architect father's Sheffield based firm to design the new church. It opened in 1957. Described by a more recent friar as a false tooth in the orderly splendour of Winchester and Cumberland Streets - 'But in our case it is a beautiful false tooth especially when viewed from Cumberland St.'
In the playground I am able to talk about War and Peace with the Russian mum that exh and I christened momdel. She is beautiful. I am certain she has been a model at some point but since our eldest children started school together she has been studying english literature. She finished her MA in the summer. She said her mother who is staying now to help with the children is horrified by the dirt on her crockery because she puts a book on the taps to read whilst washing up. I said maybe we should buy those transparent recipe book holders and read through most of the housework.
But oh, it is so good:
'Sometimes Pierre remembered what he had been told about soldiers in a shelter under fire with nothing to do, trying their best to keep busy and thus make the danger easier to bear. and Pierre pictured all men as soldiers like these, escaping from life through ambition, cards, law-making, women, little playthings, horses, politics, sport, wine, even government service. 'Everything matters, nothing matters, it's all the same. If I can only escape, one way or another!' Thought Pierre . 'And not see it, the terrible it.'
On the way back from school the children find a huge clean empty cardboard box on the street. They plead with me to be allowed to take it home, they want to build a tank. We take it in turns to carry it though it is a big as me and double the size of the youngest. Civil servants smile as with arms spread wide he manages to walk it along the pavement. Huge in our tiny flat, they play in it for days, muffled games overheard, friends coming to play disappearing into it's well armoured depths.
Another day on our way back from St James's park climbing trees my eldest son tells me that his class had to write what they would like to be when they grow up. He says his best friend wrote down artist and that he wrote he would like to be a soldier or an explorer. I wince. A friend's son who has always wanted to be a soldier is now 15. She is an artist, a brilliant single mum. I have watched at her sidelines as he escalates his once childish obsession to nearly become a career. Once I said ridiculously, hopelessly, ludicrously - I couldn't bear him to go to war. Another friend - formerly known as FB quite rightly snapped at me reminding me to think how she felt. I thought I had. But I couldn't. But my son says his friend Rami says he would like to be a pilot so that when the 'mighty war' does come he can fly his family to safety.
oh, I think, with fear. oh.
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