The Queen's Chapel of Savoy

We get up at 5.45 to see the river pageant. The boys waking as if going on holiday, scrambling into their clothes while I make sandwiches. Outside the light has the grey speckle of underarm, warm and damp but not quite raining. I carry bags of activities and food, my sons carry the folding camping stools. We thought we would pitch up at the end of our street in the garden by the Houses of Parliament - we had done a recce the night before and there were toilets and a coffee kiosk setting up - with lots of room to run about until it got crowded. This morning in the gloom we can see the silhouettes of a few umbrellas already at the river side but vistas of free space under the trees. For a moment the plan seems to have gone ridiculously smoothly and my eldest insists we high five. At the gate however there are security men. 'We have to sweep the garden for bombs', they say, we can't let anyone in until 11am. But, there are people already here I say pointing at the draggle of umbrellas already on the front. 'They were here before we arrived' says the man. We can't do anything about them now. You should have got here 5 minutes ago - we weren't here. We plead for a while but they won't let us in. Let's keep walking, I say, we'll find a place. On Westminster Bridge there is a group of older women already set up with camping chairs and union jacks at the edge of the bridge under Big Ben and a gentle elderly lady with bulging feet in old lady sandals, a mac and a cheap umbrella. It has started to pour and the wind has picked up. Security guards give conflicting advice as to where we can be, allowing us onto the bridge and then herding us back. It is all women here someone observes, then notices my sons. For about 10 minutes we debate whether it would be better to be here with the best view or nearer to PSM's house on the South Bank with the obvious advantages of friends, toilets and cups of tea. My youngest needs a wee and the decision is made.

On the east side of Waterloo Bridge we choose our place on the railings, in view of St Paul's, almost as if standing where Canaletto painted the historic view of the Thames. It is pouring now and really cold. My youngest has retreated to PSM's to watch cartoons though my eldest is still at my side - I am going to sit with you all day he says. By 9am we have sat for 2 hours played a lot of games of travel Connect 4 and he has tooted a rather beautiful looking but tuneless brass horn that I bought for him on the internet loudly and repeatedly to tug boats and steam boats moving up river. We have spent the only money I have on hot drinks and a minescule bag of warm doughnuts and when he says 'how much longer' I have to say probably 7 hours. Understandably he decamps to PSMs for a break. I do wonder what giving up might feel like, the dirty damp bags a tide at my feet.

On one side there are now two old ladies from the North and on the other an East End family, of different generations - a nice young man and his girlfriend with smart cityessex (citisex?) accents, his cockney mum and grumpy cockney granny in high heeled flip flops with socks who says every now and then. 'I don't think I should have come.' coughs a bit, then sniffs the air and says longingly 'I can smell bacon.' Though the family try and jolly her on. The rest of us are smiley and stoic in waterproofs. At 9.30 it starts filling up and a posh older man with a booming voice, spots a gap between me and the east end granny and stakes a claim on the railings, phoning his family on the mobile, I have found a simply perfect spot he says. It is absolutely marvellous. For a while the original settlers bristle to the boom of him but then we all relax and get on. He is really nice to the grandchildren that he slots in around us, and the WAGs and sons or husbands of his family become the crowd behind us but retreat/duck under his well meaning Empire-running tone.

I am in the elderly women gang on the unsuitable footwear. I dithered in the hallway about wellies. Then plumped for ballet pumps and no socks and oh my goodness I am cold.

At 11am the children return with PSM's sons and PSM and her boyfriend. She takes one look at me and goes home bringing socks, wellies, a hot water bottle and a flask of hot sweet tea. She is a midwife and I feel I have been midwifed though it is lovely to feel so cared for.

The children settle down to a couple of hours Where's Wally and Tintin books while I stitch union jacks out of felt. When I thought I would be entertaining the boys for hours and hours on my own I packed craft material and bamboo sticks to make flags. I think I look a bit mad and a lot more patriotic than I actually am, doling out sandwiches and union jacks to four boys. Somehow though I don't know how exactly, it is assumed I am a single mum by the boomy grandad who is unable to hide his surprise I know who Canaletto is. PSM always more sensible than me has retreated to the warmth of her house, to drink cava and wait for some friends. Though it is no longer actually raining now just damp. There are dark inflatable speed boats patrolling the sides of the river, low in the water but skimming fast, men with guns shadowy in black. The boys watch them through binoculars, sing songs and talk nonsense - with intermittant bursts on the golden horn. When they turn to me and ask how much longer they look disbelieving when I say probably 4 hours.

About 1 o'clock the crowds are 9 or 10 deep but a procession of small children in bone dry cashmere breton jumpers process in a line like a scene from a stylish french children's book to our vantage point at the railings propelled by a professionally blow dried mother hissing in their ear - 'well done' and 'keep going'. At the railings she is showy and loud pointing out London landmarks, herding the children and staking a claim with her body language, hogging the view of the older women next to us. I feel tired and angry. 'I am really sorry we have all been here a very long time, it isn't fair if you take our space. 'MY MOTHER HAS BEEN HERE SINCE 10! she says shrilly, waving to a woman 5 back in the crowd. But she isn't at the front I say. I hate being rude or mean but I don't want to let her take our place, can't stand the air of entitlement. We have been here since 7 I say dourly, like a toad on a camping stool, guarding something momentarily precious. 'These nice people have been here since 7 she says in a shiny voice to the children, not catching my unblinking hooded eye under the green waterproof - though there is a tinge of incredulity, as if only fools would make the effort. And that's why we are at the front. I say. She stays. I glower. She stays. I glower. In pique I use my son's camera to take a picture of her. In a town on the border of Mexico and America I once saw grids of poloroid pictures of shoplifters pinned to the pound shops door. In the small hazy focus of the bare backroom they had been taken to, powerful portraits of fear, defiance and sulky resentment. Though I am still surprised by how much authority a camera has - as if there is a central 'badly behaved' shop door pictures could be sent to for the mother turns back her party from the railings. Oh I just wanted my children to see the pageant she says in a little girl voice as they depart. The children cry on the retreat, like little pink mice, their tails tucked behind them. I feel like someone wicked in a nursery rhyme though a woman on the other side of the northern women say she had asked them to move too.

At 2pm PSM texts me to say she will never get through the crowd to the front but can I have two of her friends children please. Small boys are despatched to collect them, squeezing back between the crowds legs as if amoebas splitting and doubling. PSM's eldest son carries a clingfilmed glass of cava for me. With six children I feel we are a rowdy pack, but the Grandad says - leave them - they are enjoying themselves, they have done very well, but in a benevolent 'isn't it jolly what things under microscopes do when you watch them' tone. My eldest and PSM's youngest, sing the National Anthem at the top of their voices, which should be charming but isn't. The cashmere breton jumpered children have been packed at the feet of the Grandad's family. Only writing this do I realise this wasn't just kindness - they were a part of it.

By 3pm excitement is high - across the river we can see the flicker of screens between trees and know the Queen has embarked, that the boats are on their way. Every 10 minutes the boys ( and one girl ) say - how much longer - and I guess 10 minutes. Then they ask again. 10 minutes I guess again. But suddenly it is nearly happening and I feel tired and cold and need a wee.

The Bell boat is first, careering rather madly, through the choppy water, the bells ringing out, tipping back and forth on wheels like something put together from the making box. Then the Venetian style Gloriana, very beautiful, men in time powering the boat cleanly through the currents. Behind with the the flurry of oars and paddles, and punts the little boats pour under Waterloo Bridge - comical and beautiful in their pell mell dash and endeavour. Red, blue, yellow, gold, orange, - flashes of colour and rich details - canoes and skiffs, gondalas, row boats, kayaks, fishing boats, the rhythm of oars in and out and in and out, shoulders moving together. I hear myself just saying, oh, it is lovely, repeatedly. Like a Richard Scary children's book page full of crazy animals in crazy vehicles spread out infront of us the boys and I point out to each other different boats and flags The gondala' we say, to the elegant arc of a white and golden boat. The little long boat! for there is a mini Viking boat with shields and a dragon masthead. The willow pattern plate boat - a low slung boat with a braided canopy But the scene does look like the Canaletto - it is absolutely beautiful. And we wave and wave and wave.

Infront of us though the boats have to funnel through a channel between moored boats packed with flag waving wellwishers and the currents of the Thames seem to pick up on this corner and we see the oarsmen, the canoeists, backing up, jamming into pockets, a little bit of panic then paddling through.

The Commonwealth boats glide in, jaunty, more controlled with their little motors powering their triangular formation. Flags fluttering, turquoise clad crew, padded and proud. The Grandad behind is listing the countries of each flag, to no one in particular. He wants his binoculars back from his grandchildren but everytime he nearly gets them another striped child lisps it is their turn. He is kind enough not to demand them but I feel he would like to. I am on his side. Oh it is beautiful I say again. A big pleasure boat with an orchestra playing Handel's water music in a plastic flapping gazebo on the top deck sails past, music in gusts, everyone cheering.

Is it the Queen? Is it the Queen? Is it the Queen? my youngest says.

A boat with some trumpeters dressed a bit like cards in Alice in Wonderland playing a fanfare comes under the bridge. Da da they say. Da da da da da da da da dahhhh! Then the royal barge - a big maroon thing ploughing through the water flanked by the drop shadow of the dark inflatable security boats, and backed up behind with matt grey warships, soldiers at attention, alert to attack. But after all that waiting I find it hard to remember anything and I confuse the snippets I have seen on tv with the not much I remember. I think it may have started really pouring at this time though that might happen shortly after. I remember people saying they couldn't see the thousands of flowers on the barge and I say - the flowers are in the swags - in the garlands. The Grandad snaps once or twice at my sons/charges to keep their heads down, but he still hasn't got his binoculars back and is feeling frustrated. I continually tap at the 6 children with my felt flag not to stand on the concrete of the railings so that other people can see. I feel briefly like I have turned into the grumpy east end granny though no one attends to my grumbling. A few people sing God Save the Queen but just like my son and his friend it sounds slightly ironic, a little bit tongue in cheek, a little bit don't care and the woman leading it at the back just sounds drunk.

I think then it is odd - I have waited in the cold and rain for 9 hours for something I don't believe in - don't really give a shit about. Infront of us the big boat moored up and packed with well wishers tips precariously as everyone leans to wave. Our crowd keep laughing as the boat tips alarmingly further and further out of the water, the bottom of the boat, a muddy white, revealed.

No one says - god bless you ma am , no one says anything very much about the Queen at all apart from she works hard. I hear people say this will never happen again in out life time. Not even in your life time a woman points out to my sons, calculating the possible reign of Charles or William to not amount to much and I think most are just there for the sense of history. Though I wonder if a boat pageant might become the new royal pop concert - there is something so popular and spectacular to it.

But seeing the Queen as a vulnerable grainy fleck of white in the grey damp air waving on a boat floating on the Thames I think of my Mum. They have the same dogged duty, the same unfailing and unstinting duty to duty. Though what they are dutiful to is almost forgotten, a dry husk of whatever it is they were told was important to be as good little girls. The guarding has become the important thing, their determination and obedience almost the value itself. When I watch the tv I think the Queen has a few seconds when she looks up to the drip of her gazebo, the grey rain coming down and wonders just briefly why she is here, what on earth she is doing adrift on a tarty barge. But I also think Kate Middleton looks lonely. Stood a fraction behind William as he laughs with his brother she laughs too, but anxiously, looking to check if she laughed correctly. A family I supose. Just a flawed family.

Later I find out researching and watching endless youtube clips of the pageant to try and remember what happened that someone I went to college with, a friend's ex boyfriend was in charge of the look and dressing of the Royal barge which seems funny. He was then an energetic, beautiful but appropriately for art school, snarling young man. Though I like the idea of the banner at the stern decorated with more than half a million gold buttons in the shape of the royal coat of arms - though I am not sure anyone noticed it.

If it hadn't already started raining when the Queen passed by - it does now - a deluge as the cheery Dunkirk boats come through. The boats of different shapes and sizes are painted and polished with the spit and rub of pride and it is almost possible to smell the fresh paint and duraglit across the width of the Thames. The crowds cheer and cheer in the rain proud of the pluck, the spirit and bravery of boats that evacuated 338,226 troops from the shores of France. When those troops were cut off by the German Army on the shores of France in the early summer of 1940 the extent of the possible disastrous defeat was kept from the British public. However King George V1 ( the Queen's father) called for an unprecedented week of prayer - the Archbishop of Canterbury led prayers 'for our soldiers in dire peril in France' and the public knew something grave was up. These little boats - the fishing boats and pleasure craft alongside royal national lifeboats and British destroyers ferried the troops to safety 'a miracle of deliverance' as hailed Winston Churchill.

A military band packed onto a pleasure boat sails through, drummers drumming scottish songs, the grandad humming, a few of us snatching the words we know, good to jig a little in the sheeting rain. Then the toot of the historic boats, steam funnels puffing smoke. The boys take it in turn to play the golden horn in conversation to the boat whistles. The working boats following, life boats and fire boats spraying water.

The music is muddled in my mind and it seems not very well reported on tv or even youtube - though it was beautiful and there was a boat with an amazing eastern sounding choir, which I imagine must be the Shree Muktajeevan Pipe Banc and Dhol Ensemble.

Toot toot toot, the golden horn played right in my ear. I have had enough.

This is the end, the War and Peace moment, the moment when the French army retreat - when the crowds who have stood so long, came together into a collective of cheers and reasonably goodwill decide - everyone, all at the same time, without saying goodbye or even making a plan just ups and leaves. I think one of the boys says - I have had enough and rather than do the normal - just 10 minutes more - I just say yes. Let's go. Only then noticing the departing backs of the Grandad's family, the empty stretch of railings, just the movement of retreat. The recreation boats are coming through, endless white fibre glass boats that our gaze slide away from. And we run back through the rain and abandoned union jacks curled in puddles to PSM's house. And PSM and her friends cheer me when I come in as if the Queen herself has arrived - I am my mother's daughter with my ridiculous stoic duty to the task. Our children will remember this for ever they say, giving me soup and tea. Secretly I think I don't think the children really cared. Perhaps even I didn't really, though I had wanted to see the Thames swamped with colourful boats.

I am just saying I wish I had seen The London Philarmonic Orchestra when we hear it. PSM's house is just set back from the South bank ( though behind solid office blocks ) and we hear them loud and clearly. She runs out with her boyfriend into the rain to see, the rest of us stand in a the sea of a lego of a boys bedroom to hear them.

I will never get these tired damp boys home without a fuss I think looking out at the pouring rain, knowing I haven't got enough money for a taxi or even a bus as a back up plan and too proud to ask PSM to borrow some. But we walk back through the lash of wind and rain happily carrying our damp stools and bags. My youngest dancing on tip toes through the lakes of puddles, his face completely absorbed to the dance he makes.

I wonder what church could sit with the pageant but think I will just have to make it work - there aren't any specifically royal churches left that I know.

When I walk down Savoy Hill to the Savoy Chapel there are still metal barricades stacked up, left over from the pageant though I think by the time I get to the church it is a week later. The chapel is set back in a garden but there is building work going on and it looks closed up and a bit of a mess, though there are old gravestones skewed into the railings, as if the earth has just been turned over.

I have tried a few times to get into the church and it has always been shut ( even when it should have been open ) so I am pleased to see the door wide open. Inside a very plain and small village hall style porch there are flowers on a table and closed doors. Then a door opens revealing a glimpse of the chapel, a mother propelling a child as if to the toilet. I squeeze past their hurried exit into the small chapel where it looks like the congregation are just leaving. I think I'll just sit briefly, before realising the seemingly departing congregation are mainly a family gathered around the font with a baby. It is a christening and the baptism is about to take place. I lose my nerve and get only a quick look at the high narrow chapel with painted ceiling and anonymous plush decor and recognise the slightly anonymous royal chapel style. It doesn't seem anything to do with the hotel at all but The Queen's Chapel of Savoy. Completely unexpectedly it is a royal chapel. 'The chapel belongs to Her Majesy The Queen in her right as Duke of Lancaster'. In a glass case there is a signed book of the monarchs that have visited.

A church was originally built here in the Middle Ages as part of the Savoy Palace, the walled riverside mansion built by Count Peter of Savoy in 1246. He was given the riverside land between Westminster and the City of London when his niece married Henry 111. Later it became the home of John of Gaunt who inherited the title of Duke of Lancaster in 1351. With it came the rights of palatine giving his land the right to be ruled autonomously from the rest of the kingdom, indeed this area known as 'Savoy' kept many of these special judicial privileges until 1873. Under these laws someone being pursued for a debt in London could reside in the Savoy without fear of arrest by people acting under the King's authority. The vast palace where Chaucer ( a clerk of the palace ) began the Canterbury Tales was burnt down in the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 fueled by the unpopularity of John O Gaunt's poll tax which taxed rich and poor alike. Later restored and rebuilt by Henry V11 it became a hospital for the homeless, a vast nave filled with a hundred beds, and the first to benefit from permanent medical staff. It closed in 1702, falling into disrepair. Though there is a Turner sketch of the ruins and I love the idea of this gothic crumbling pile in the heart of London.

The Chapel known as both St Mary in the Hospital and St John the Baptist in the Savoy was the only thing to survive a fire of 1860 and was later restored. In the 18th century it was a place where marriages without banns could legally occur and was referred to in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited as the place where divorced couples got married - 'a poky little place'

The impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte bought the ruins of the Savoy Palace in 1880 initially to build the Savoy Theatre for the production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It was the first public building to be lit entirely by electricity and so successful was the venture that it financed the building of the Savoy, most of the revenue coming from the Mikado.

Writing and researching this I was for a while worried that there was going to be no connection to the Savoy hotel. I had bought the brilliant The West End Front - The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels (if you know me and it is your birthday soon expect it as a present) after hearing extracts on R4 - and wanted to use the fascinating stories some of which show so clearly the divide between rich and poor during the war.

As the communist newspaper The Daily Worker asserted in September 194o campaigning against the lack of reasonable or indeed any shelter from the Blitz in Stepney,

'If you live in the Savoy Hotel you are called by telephone when the sirens sound and then tucked into bed by servants in a luxury bomb-proof shelter. But if you live in Paradise Court you may find yourself without a refuge of any kind.' Then in big bold print 'THE PEOPLE MUST ACT'.

On 14th September, the 8th night of the Blitz they did. Meeting in Embankment Gardens they waited for the air raid siren to begin, unfurled their banners and marched onto the Savoy. Why the Savoy? 'It was the nearest' was the straightforward reply. Mainly east end communists - dockers, clothing workers, bootmakers though a few recruits had been picked up on the night from the poor public east end air-raid facilities. Somewhere between 40 and 80 it is claimed, though memories seem uncertain. The group marched through the doors of the Savoy, making a speech for equality. Despite the panic button being pressed and the police being called unexpectedly and cleverly the assistant general manager Willy Hofflin answered simply, 'There is no reason why these people should not have the same shelter as the Savoy's guests.' Infact, with bombs coming down outside it was the law not to turn people away into danger.

In a padded, cavernous space with a dance floor on one side and a dormitory on the other, separate quarters for single men and women and camp beds with matching sheets and pillows in green and pink and blue, a snore warden and uniformed nurses - the invaders were heard to remark - 'Shelters....why we'd love to live in such places'.

They ordered tea, demanding to pay only what they would pay in a Lyons Corner House. The waiters huddled to debate the request seemingly sympathetic to the invaders for in minutes trolleys appeared with tea and bread and butter.

After that there are two versions of the night - that the all clear sounded just as tea was served or that they stayed a victorious night.

Barely reported in the British press the Savoy invasion gained more coverage in the Nazi 'Volkischer Beobachter' 'For ten days now eight million people have flown into the air raid shelters and the subway' 'Londoners have become cave dwellers. Life has stopped. The working population is fleeing from the east and south of the city to the West End. Desperate men and women have stormed the luxurious Savoy hotel. Only police have been able to evacuate them. The question comes into one's mind.....whether at all and for how long the English population will follow Churchill on this path....'

Only fuelling the suspicion that the Communists were working on behalf of the Nazis. When the Savoy invasion was discussed in parliament the matter was taken very seriously and Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary,

'agreed with the Prime Minister that it would be necessary to take strong action to prevent demonstrations of this kind, which if allowed to grow, might easily lead to serious difficulties.'

The communists kept going with their attempts to find safe places for people to shelter repeatedly targeted the tube stations - exhorting London Transport to keep the gates unlocked or getting a crowbar to the barriers when shut. Only a week after the Savoy invasion on 21st September London Transport switched off the electricity at Aldwych, chemical toilets were installed and 2,500 were finally allowed to shelter on the Piccadilly line track along with the Elgin Marbles which had already been stored there three weeks previously.

'We went to the Savoy to show the class position; to show how the rich lived with a great mass of stuff while the ordinary working man and woman had to live on the coupon books. And because of what we did, the Underground was opened, and people had somewhere to shelter from the bombs. I'm very proud of the part I played.' says Max Levitas who was part of the Savoy invasion to Matthew Sweet the author of 'The West End Front'.

Finally I look again at the Canaletto:

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/canaletto/the-river-thames-with-st-paul-s-cathedral-on-lord-mayor-s-day-

finding diarists Pepys and John Evelyn's description of the 1660 pageant when King Charles 11 took part in the pageant a year after the restoration of the monarchy. Pepys described the scene as the king and queen journeyed downriver from Hampton court to Whitehall 'under a canopy with 10,000 barges and boats, I think, for we could see no water for them.'

For Evelyn, the event 'was the most magnificent triumph that ever floated on the Thames.' He wrote admiringly of 'the innumerable boats and vessels dress'd and adorn'd with all imaginable pomp...the thrones, arches....stately barges...musiq and peals of ordnance both from ye vessels and the shore'

In the painting St Paul's dominates the skyline but surrounding it - under an egg blue sky are the many church spires of the city. The only secular interruption to the sky is the Monument. On the long wait at the side of the Thames when arguments broke out and distraction was needed I had said - let's count how many churches we can see but it wasn't a game that captured the imagination of the pack of occasionally unruly children and I don't remember the answer. The spires peered from behind office blocks, nudged the view from the layer of buildings. St Paul's still central but the Monument hidden from view. I thought I have become a church watcher - like a bird watcher - the sightings on a skyline or glimpsed down a side street, the observation of history, the peck of another time, the i spy thrill of spotting one I haven't seen before.

Amen.

Notre Dame of France, Leicester Square

I think about Co Dependency and Christianity as I cycle to work across the parks, mainly in the rain. After a really horrible row with exh and an evening of tears and wine and good advice from a mum who spent a year in a refuge I grumpily get the co dependency books back out. It seems I need to accept my part in my problems. Though I believe I do mainly, I just need to guard the boundaries. The ride is beautiful: nosing the bike infront of Buckingham Palace, along the bottom of the damp dark green of Green Park, under Wellington Arch, up the steady incline of Hyde Park, past the barracks, alongside the lake, over the road, past the gallery and beneath the canopy of old trees. Dogs like cartoon characters in dog walker packs, all ears and eyebrows stretched taut on leads, then wet deck chairs blown inside out, billowed pregnant in the wind. At the brim of the hill The Round Pond is almost part of the sky, a grey disc of reflected cloud with swans and geese flapping their wings in a slow feathered cancan under the unseasonable gloom. Tourists at the gates of Kensington Palace, where the tide of cellophane flowers lapped when Diana died talk in hushed voices of where they were when she died ( in a teepee in New Mexico with shagging lesbians if you want to know.) Princess Diana is almost the patron saint of CD I think, all those unsuitable men, the middle of the night bedside hospital visits, the unhappy childhood, the open wound of that savagely caring heart dragged like heavy luggage. I imagine a catholic coloured statue of her, a Jeff Koons perhaps, a single tear in the corner of those dipped blue eyes dropping with the weight of the sorrow of the world.

This is the Christianity I learnt at home, at sunday school, at school:

Think of others before yourself.

Give without counting the cost.

Do a good turn every day.

As a family we said prayers every night until I was a teenager when I finally rebelled against the tradition, the words themselves exhausted by the speed with which we rattled them off. We didn't have a TV and I think my childhood was more old fashioned than my age. Exh still laughs at my 'Oranges are not the Only Fruit' story of collecting for Oxfam when the men landed on the moon. ( though not actually the first landing I suspect ). My younger brother and I peering round the dimpled glass front door of a house to see the grainy black and white picture of men in bulky suits as if made on Blue Peter. My Mum above us rattling the collecting tin circled by the pictures of starving children to a Dad who was surprised the door bell had rung.

Co d is what you learn when you detach from an alcoholic. What you have become or have always been. It is the unhealthy attachment to another, the willingness to take care of someone else's problems, a compulsive wish to control others by your care.

This is what Nietzsche said on christianity:

'Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.'

He 'called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a "calamitous error", and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian world.'

' Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Nietzsche sees slave-morality born out of the resentment of slaves. It works to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g., relabeling it as "meekness." '

It seems a lot of the churches I want to get into now are only open on Sundays or odd times in the week and it is increasingly difficult just to slip into a church as I am working all but full time. Also I have discovered on my map behind the computer that charts churches I have been to and those still to visit, a purple sticker over a yellow one on a church in Soho - though I am not sure if this is a mistake or if the boys are playing a trick on me. I had a boyfriend once a long time ago, a college boyfriend, who kept adding extra birds to a large copy of Constable's Haywain that hung in his parents front room. They never noticed he said and the intricacy of the sly sabotage made me laugh.

It is pouring as I turn off Leicester Square into the narrow street of Notre Dame of France. Infront of the Odeon there is a woman with a clip board directing passersby away from the workmen creating a gothic landscape for the premiere of Snow White and the Hunstmen. A drunk man cackles to security guards behind the newly errected barriers 'It is pissing down, no one will be coming here.' 'They will come.' they say calmly - behind them green astro turf being rolled out and men placing fake crows in fake trees.

In a flat faced large 50s building I walk up the steps and into a huge rotunda room with grey light from a cupola skylight in the shallow domed roof. It is a bit murky, a bit municipal, a bit unkempt. I sit at a pew. Just sit. There are about five others sat in the pews with their heads bowed. Perhaps just sheltering I wonder - the heels of scruffy shoes and stowed bags visible, though they seem devout in their prayer. As I sit in the grey stillness it feels like an arbitary act that I am just sitting still on a Tuesday lunchtime here in this place. I begin to hear high holy music, as if almost at a frequency beyond human ear, I can't work out where it is coming from, and imagine a cd piped in for atmosphere. Later when I am researching the church I find a mention on flickr that there was an organ playing when the photographer took the pictures and I wonder now writing this whether someone was actually quietly playing.

Above the altar piece is an large ornate and richly detailed tapestry of Mary. Like a Disney princess she is surrounded by animals and birds - a cockerel, a peacock, a squirrel, a deer. I am mesmerized by the fine detail though I find it a bit sickly, a bit ugly.

Eventually I stand and walk to the back of the church, finding blue and white delft tiles depicting the Stations of the Cross and a notice board on the curved wall labelled 'Spiritual Life' listing retreats, and prayer groups, some of it in French. I find too a mention of Jean Cocteau's mural. Aha I think, they are here. A friend had mentioned that there were some of Cocteau murals in a french church in Soho but for some reason I had assumed they were in the French Protestant church in Soho Square which I still haven't got into. I have to wander around the church, up to the altar and then to the side curved wall where there are glass booths sectioned off from the church. It isn't clear if they are chapels or offices but pressing my face to the dark glass and through the reflection I see the slab of an altar and vibrant life-sized drawings of the Cruxifiction on the wall behind. Passionate but stylised line drawings in bright pencil crayon colours they show only the legs and bleeding feet of Jesus, the blood dripping from his feet to a rose. Homoerotic soldiers, bereft women, a gold ringed black sun, there is an odd but modern narrative within the picture, a crucifixion of difficult human emotions.

The mural was painted over eight days in Novemeber 1959 when Jean Cocteau was promoting his film Le Testament d'Orphee in London. The church had been badly bombed in 1940 and then restored. The french cultural attache Renee Varin was commissioned to encourage eminent french artists to help create a sacred space. Though Cocteau's poetry, opium and homosexuality were seen to sit uneasily with his Catholicism he was invited to decorate a chapel and screens had to be errected to keep away the crowds while he worked.

'He arrived each morning about 10am and began by lighting a candle. He was heard talking to the Virgin Mary while working on the drawing. 'O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God's creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too....I am drawing you with light strokes....You are the yet unfinished work of Grace.'

And when he left,

'I am sorry to go, as if the wall of the chapel had drawn me into another world.' 'I shall never forget that wide open heart of Notre Dame de France and the place you allowed me to take within it'

Though as I begin researching the murals I am tipped through a door of conspiracy and complicated plots attached to Cocteau. A lot seems to be based on the discredited Priory of Sion - a lineage invented by the frenchman Pierre Plantard in 1956 to prove he was descended from the true King of France. The plot included fake documents being planted by Plantard and accomplices in the Biblioteque Nationale and across France to establish his claim. (Oh I love the idea of false history embedded in the real. ) Despite Plantard admitting his hoax the story seems to have gathered momentum, being used to prove the lineage of Jesus and Mary Magdalegne and becoming the basis of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. The son of a suicide Cocteau was listed by Plantard as a Grand Master of Sion along with Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. The murals at Notre Dame fuel the debate:

'The Priory of Sion has, in the past, purposely used the letters "MM", or sometimes jus "M" to symbolize Magdalene and Cocteau used them as well. In the Church of Notre Dame de France ("Our Lady of France") in London, which Cocteau decorated with fantastic murals, this letter "M" is mysteriously placed on the altar, directly beneath the scene of the crucifixion. To the left are depicted the dice thrown by the Roman soldiers who according to the Gospels, cast lots to determine who should get Christ's clothing after he died. The number of dots that are shown on the dice is fifty-eight, a significant number. The skull of Baphomet, which the Templars and later the Priory of Sion are said to have possessed, was referred to cryptically as "Caput 58M" 5 +8= 13, and "M" is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Therefore "58M" could be a code for "Mary Magdalene" who is traditionally shown praying before a skull.'

'The same statement is being made in Cocteau's mural at Notre Dame. This statement is further reinforced by the fact that the 'M' on the altar is directly below a rose that Cocteau has placed on the cross, precisely beneath Christ's feet. Not only does that make it a 'rose cross' but the rose is above the initial for 'Mary'. The term 'Rosemary' is used in occult parlance to refer to the female consort of a god or demon. (Thus the title for the film Rosemary's Baby.) This is exactly what Magdalene's symbolism entailed. The fact that the rose as well as the blood drops beneath it, are coloured both red and blue may indicate the 'blue blood' of Christ's royal line. Given all of this, the Church's title 'Notre Dame de France' is interesting. Most would assume this to be a reference to the Virgin Mary, who is called by Catholics 'Our Lady'. But the true 'Lady of France' is the goddess Marianne, their national symbol. Perhaps 'Marianne' and Magdalene' are representations of the same archetype.'

http://quintessentialpublications.com/tymman/?page_id=26

Phew, I find this stuff exhausting. Though ( and I think this is my favourite bit) I also read fascinating accounts of two female academics of impeccable reputation being transported through time in the gardens of Versailles in 1901. Cocteau calling it 'the most important experiences of our time'

http://www.kathleenmcgowan.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52:the-mystery-of-the-versailles-time-slip&catid=38:articles&Itemid=62

Notre Dame of France itself was established by the Marist Fathers for the French community in London in the 1860s in a building that had previously been 'Burford's Panaroma' accounting for its circular shape. Consecrated in 1868 the church's mission included a hospital, an orphanage and two schools which were run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul. The Marist fathers wished to put the sacrifice of Mary at the centre of their faith - Mary's close and gentle but human relationship to Jesus to mirror their own. They call themselves rather intriguingly 'hidden and unknown' - I think they mean that their work is 'unsung' 'unobserved' - again like Mary - with the sacrifice of her holy motherhood.

The original panoramic building was built in 1793 by Richard Barker. He had invented a circular drawing on a cylindrical surface to convey complete 360 degree scenes in 1792 and obtained a royal lincence in 1787 for the exclusive use of his invention for fourteen years. Initially setting up with his son he showed huge panoraomic drawings in a make shift shed in his back garden near Leicester Square before purchasing this site and commissioning the purpose designed rotunda building. 'Panorama painting seems to be all the rage' wrote Constable in a letter of 1803 and Ruskin later described a visit to Milan:

'I had been partly prepared for this view [of the city from the cathedral roof] by the admirable presentation of it in London a year or two before, in a great exhibition of which the vanishing has been in later life a greatly felt loss to me,--Burford's panorama in Leicester Square, which was an educational institution of the highest and purest value, and ought to have been supported by the government as one of the most beneficial school instruments in London. There I had seen, exquisitely painted, the view from the roof of Milan Cathedral, when I had no hope of ever seeing the reality, but with a joy and wonder of the deepest;--and now to be there indeed, made a deep wonder become fathomless. (from Praeterita: TheAutobiography of John Ruskin [Oxford 1978]

http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/2003/panorama/new_001.htm for a picture.

It was not the only spectacular attraction of Leicester Square - in 1851 the area was occupied by a large, circular, domed building, in which was exhibited Wyld's "Great Globe."

http://www.ssplprints.com/image/105139/unattributed-wylds-globe-leicester-square-london-12-july-1851 Do look! It is a fascinating illustration!

The representation of the world was sixty-five feet in diameter, and comprised a surface of some ten thousand square feet. Galleries encircled the interior of the building at different heights from the ground, by which means visitors were enabled to walk round and inspect every portion of the globe, an attendant, staff in hand, pointing out its principal features; lectures were likewise delivered at intervals during the day.

Though anybody who complains about Leicester Square these days will like the later description of the central patch of land once the Globe had closed down: 'Overgrown with rank and fetid vegetation, it was a public nuisance, both in an æsthetic and in a sanitary point of view; covered with the débris of tin pots and kettles, cast-off shoes, old clothes, and dead cats and dogs, it was an eye-sore to every one forced to pass by it. '

The Notre Dame Hall beneath the church later hosted many punk gigs. Here, a description from John Springate from the Glitter Band:

'Gerry Shephard and I went to see The Sex Pistols at Notre Dame Hall in Leicester Square, which I think was late-76. Gerry and I were dressed in our snazziest gear with flared trousers and all that, and there's all these punks there with drainpipe jeans, short hair, really sort of 'now'. The Sex Pistols came on and did four numbers and I said to Gerry - cos we'd had had enough by then, we'd seen enough and we came out - I said, 'Well that's it then.' I just knew.'

http://www.alwynwturner.com/glitter/punk.html ( a music site charting glam rock in its proponents own words including its demise as punk arrived. Here too is this great description from Tina Charles ( 'I love to love ( But my Baby Loves to Dance') ):

'I did a TV show in Germany with The Clash and Dana and Showaddywaddy, which was a very strange group of people. And we were all on the 'plane going over and I always remember The Clash were so badly behaved, taking all the mini-bar from the hotel and everything - they were just shocking. And there was Dana and I behaving ourselves totally.'

And in the late 80s when I helped my neighbours in the opposite bedsit in Baron's Court run a party business we hosted a Burns Night party there - attaching stag's heads to sandy concrete and borrowed tartan draped round pillars and folding endless purple and green napkins. Thatcher's children indeed.

I struggle writing the Cocteau conspiracy theories for days then wipe out the whole post by accident. In tears I text friends to see if they can help me retrieve what I have written. I take it on myself to delve deep into the bowels of the computer getting as far as 'meta data and hidden cache' but not knowing the software to open them with.

Still cycling back and forth across the parks - preparations for the Queen's celebrations are underway. One morning with traffic at a standstill I have to push the bike infront of the palace because the roads are shut. Soldiers in Nutcracker suite outfits dotted across Green Park move in a slow pace sweeping for bombs. Another day, I turn the bike onto Birdcage Walk to find myself at the head of a busby-clad brass band regiment like a middle aged masthead on a hired bike. I treat myself to an out of character self-waved circular cheer - a booyah! to the world, though no one is watching .

I rewrite the blog - remembering almost word for word some of the early stuff then getting bogged down in religious conspiracies again. It feels like it takes me ages - an extra week at least to rewrite and I don't even have the satisfaction of a purple sticker to place.

OL sends me an image of a church sign he has seen in Cambridgeshire visiting his parents. 'The Hokey Cokey is NOT what its all about' it says. He says it is the sister image to a nearby off licence which says 'What if the Hokey Cokey IS all it's about?'

Amen.

St Clement Danes

It is Sunday afternoon and I am cycling down the Strand really really fast, wearing a cape, with a man in a white van gesticulating at me and I am absolutely hopping mad. I have discovered this morning that there has been an incident at Exh's new place yesterday that includes our children, a knife, a screwdriver, PSM's sons, and an altercation with some big boys. The children had been allowed to roam Bermondsey unattended. I am furious and frightened. I feel sick. Everyone is safe and all is well and in many ways the incident is better than it sounds but in many others it is worse. I have the sense that my optimism that everything will be ok is not true. That my foggy cheer that by the teenage years we will have worked out so much I will not be shocked by what is to come is only an essential lie that I tell myself. Once a woman cornered me to say how much I would suffer when they were teenagers. Her beautiful and seemingly biddable son had turned unexpectedly drunken and nasty. I thought grumpily that she should keep quiet, as if transgressing the sanctity of motherhood truths like talking about childbirth to a first time pregnant mum. After all my oldest friend's son is 21 this year and I have witnessed some of the pain of a son growing up. Though he is a fantastic. However my eldest child has a warrior heart - brave and fearless and while you would want him on your side in any battle he is a difficult child to fit into the mild mannered expectations of our time. I believe he would stoop to pick up the wounded in a battle if they were on his side but I believe too he would be a ferocious enemy. Also and this is understandable as a 9 year old boy he has no comprehension that he is mortal. I believe too he needs more freedom - I have seen his engrossed and happy face as he made camps in muddy fields on his own for hours, and yet I trap him in a second floor flat with a making box, a wii, a load of lego and a lot of paper and pens. Of course I get them out to the park, to the countryside, to Richmond Park as much as possible, but he needs freedom to make mistakes on his own.


'Oh' I feel like roaring. Sometimes I don't know what to do. I think of everything tender in him, the care and thought with which he picks presents, the dedicated attention and gentle patience he lavishes on his young cousins, the enthusiasm and beauty with which he makes a japanese garden on a beach and the question he asked me the day before - did you realise when you were a little girl that the people around you had witnessed the war? - but I have realised this morning for the first time he is a danger to himself. He will swagger down the street, he will challenge others, he will get into fights. I have to teach him to be safe but I worry it is inherent in him.


I am aiming for the Savoy Chapel but I sort of know I am late. The incident has taken hours of discussion and detective work to sort out what is being said and what is nearest the truth. Then just before getting on the bike I spoke to PSM and she has added extra details which seem to change everything and mean that someone/everyone is lying. Though I suspect infact everyone believes the truth they are telling. It just doesn't all add up.

The Chapel, just off the Strand is shut. It is only open for a service at 11am on Sundays, there seems to be some restoration work going on which means it is shut in the week. Oh, I think, what shall I do now. I still have the anger and tears choked in my throat, stuck like a swallowed spoon. I am in a haze. Shall I get another bike and go up to try Soho? Or South London? I have got to get into a church today for I am starting full time work the next day - I have just over a month booked at one newspaper and then a contract at the quality broadsheet for six months potentially being extended for a year. I got the job! Though the combination of pending full time work and being less available to my sons is an additional worry.
Then I look up and laugh. It is a game that is easy to play in London - how many churches can you see at one time - and here in easy view are two churches as if under my nose. The first, at the bottom of Aldwych, St Mary Le Strand is shut. But, a little bit further down the Strand, on a kind of traffic island in the wide thoroughfare St Clement Danes is open. Oh I think a rush of excitement - this is nearly the City - this is the Oranges and Lemons church.

At the gate I see that the church is affiliated with the Royal airforce and as I walk in I can see display cases of airforce memorabilia and postcards for sale. A man in the office at the side nods to me as I enter. The church is light and bright and beautiful - dark wood at the lower floor and white columns reaching up from the gallery, ornate plaster work of swags and rich gilding in the vaulted roof, I sit in a pew. I want just to think.

Across from me an old woman with a peaceful face also sits at a pew. She is folding things into plastic bags. Large with bare arms she is like a painting, somehow monumental, completely at ease with herself, engrossed in her task, oblivious of my sidelong eyes observing her.

Infront, hung on the back of each pew there are beautiful cross stitched kneelers. I love the time and care of their work. Nimble fingers counting out in stitches airforce ensignia. I bought recently on ebay a half finished patchwork cushion cover for £15 - it is one of the most beautiful things I possess - possibly from the 30s, the rich colour and textures of the velvets and silks stiched together with highly visible herringbone stitch are in irregular triangular shapes. Like the structure of a leaf the construction is visible, a show of the craft and care and time of a woman's work. I would like to have it framed, would like it one day to hang above my desk while I write. If I was stuck for words or stories I would look at the combinations of colours and patterns, the unexpected arrangements that work so beautifully. When I try to identify the herringbone pattern of the stitch I find:

'Patchwork represents religious poverty in several cultures. A prominent example is the kesa or kasay which origninated in India in the fourth century BC. It arrived in Japan with Buddhism in the sixth century c.e and became a Western Asian tradition. The patched shawl is a symbol of Buddha, who was often depicted with a patched robe draped over his left shoulder. Worn for worship and ritual, the kesa represented a vow of poverty and served as a symbol of humility. The rectangular kesa is about one yard wide and two and a half times the length of the human body.
As a devotional act, monks cleaned and stitched together discarded fabric in a traditional manner, based on seven vertical columns. The pieces of fabric are sewn from the centre, slightly overlapping one another. Patterns are based on rank and position, including the quality and colour of the cloth. In some cases, a brocade fabric was cut up, rearranged and put back together in an artistic manner. Prayers were repeated while the kesa was being sewn, put on, and taken off. the kesa was only cleaned with purified water and incense. In most cases it was the only personal possession owned by a Buddhist monk. Needlework through history: An enclylopedia Catherine Amoroso Leslie

On a whim I have started taking pictures of my washing up on the draining board. I spend so much time doing it day in day out - breakfast bowls, coffee cups, wine glasses, cooking pots, bread tins, stacking clean colourful cups and plates in a higher and higher perfectly balanced arrangements that I thought it would be funny take a record of my work. Also, sometimes, the early morning sunlight hitting a colour combination - a green patterned tea cup with a pink, yellow and orange plastic beaker is just beautiful.

'I believe life is sacred' a man says simply in a discussion about euthanasia on the radio. Ah, I think with a comic book light bulb above my head - get that sound effect machine back out - Ding! That is the key. That is what is celebrated in all these churches, what is found when I come through the doors. It seems very simple and yet completely overlooked most of the time. Life is sacred. Here in the space of these churches is the acceptance of mystery at the heart of life and the celebration of it too. Just sitting still here I understand this for the first time. I don't have to believe I think looking at the cruxifix and the flicker of an altar candle - just accept the statement of sacred. Perhaps it is what my children are missing. I remember travelling in Greece and admiring the inventiveness of the roadside shrines. Votive candles flickering in spindly glass boxes, pictures, a small glass of something, some herbs, once I saw a bottle of coca cola. I thought they were like 'welcome' boxes to god, like a hostess offering some small nibbles to a guest on arrival. This was years ago when I was an art student and I wanted then to make my own, to give thanks by what I kept precious in that box. Though I never did it. Now I would keep an orange, an apple, an egg, a large glass of wine, a candle, maybe a slice of home made bread and something that smells nice, maybe some basil or sage and a bowl of Walker's Chilli Sensations crisps. Simple things that could be shared. I write all this and then google these boxes and discover infact all my ideas are wrong - shockingly they mark road accidents - in memorial for those who died or in thanks for survival. Oh.

Sport I think. That is what we need. More sport for the boys. I will just have to organise them.

I notice the beatiful wooden pulpit, like an intricately carved look out post. I find out it was carved by Grinling Gibbons who's work I have admired before in a Wren church.

In the St Clement Danes guide book I read:
'The Romans, having founded Londinium and occupied it for 400 years, abandoned it in the early 5th century. They left behind them the walled City of London and an embryonic Christian worship.'
Ding! Again that light bulb. Oh I suddenly realise, understanding my stupidity - it is because of the Romans there is Christianity in Britain. I can't tell you what a complete revelation this is to me - and with it the realisation of why it is called the Roman Catholic Church. I think it is almost too embarrassing to mention this it seems so completely obvious but somehow it makes many things very clear to me. The baton on and on of worship. Not only was London created by the Romans but the churches are their legacy. I had only thought of the roman gods as their religion, forgetting St Paul and his travels. On a recent quick dip into the British Museum I was also fascinated by the crossover sarcophogases - egyptian to roman. Again I hadn't understood this movement of change from one to another. It is something that interests me the shifts of power blending and merging, we were taught in 'periods' at school not the gaps between, the downhill run to a new order. I start reading about the Romans in quiet moments on a very rare not busy day at work, I catch Mary Beard on TV talking about the Romans and showing us their remains littered under the streets of Rome - a block of flats still standing, basement burial chambers under modern apartment blocks. We live on the patterns of their lives I think, the Strand itself the straight line of a Roman road.

As the Romans departed the City of London the walled city seems chiefly to have been abandoned though there is some mystery surrounding this - I think of it though - a desolate place, temples left to decay, the rain beating down on elegant columns, the ruins of Roman life fading away. Lundenwic, a port area near the present St Clement Danes was established but when the warriors of Denmark came up the Thames spreading slaughter at the beginning of the 9th century the Saxon population retreated back within the city walls. Eventually Alfred the Great overcame the Danes in 878AD and Guthrum their leader accepted baptism and peace. It is thought that Alfred allowed Danes with English wives to settle in the old 'wic' or port ( hence Aldwych) and that these people took over a small wooden church already in existence. Later, under the Danish king Canute (1017-35) a small stone church was built, dedicated to St Clement. Over the years it was enlarged and restored many times, acquiring a tower in about 1100. This is the church that became known as St Clement of the Danes.

According to the confession of Thomas Winter, it was here that the Gunpowder Plot in was concocted in 1605. He says, "So we met behind St. Clement's, Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy, Mr. Wright, Mr. Guy Fawkes, and myself, and having, upon a primer, given each other the oath of secrecy, in a chamber where no other body was, we went after into the next room and heard Mass, and received the blessed Sacrament upon the same.'

John Donne lived (1573 - 1631) in the parish and his wife was buried here - though the gravestone no longer exists Donne's epitaph to her remains, now engraved on a tablet within the church. 'Her husband John Donne made speechless by grief, sets up this stone to speak, brings his ashes to hers in a new marriage under God'. She died giving birth to their twelth child.

Despite escaping the Great Fire of London in 1666 the church had become run down or even derelict and became one of the few 51 London churches Christopher Wren designed and supervised in the late 17th century outside the City of London after the fire.

I look up the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' but it seems little is known, though the first written record of it is from 1744. There appears to be another version too:

Gay go up and gay go down,
To ring the bells of London town.

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clements.

Bull's eyes and targets,
Say the bells of St. Marg'ret's.

Brickbats and tiles,
Say the bells of St. Giles'.

Halfpence and farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin's.

Pancakes and fritters,
Say the bells of St. Peter's.

Two sticks and an apple,
Say the bells of Whitechapel.

Pokers and tongs,
Say the bells of St. John's.

Kettles and pans,
Say the bells of St. Ann's.

Old Father Baldpate,
Say the slow bells of Aldgate.

You owe me ten shillings,
Say the bells of St. Helen's.

When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.

Pray when will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

Chop chop chop chop
The last man's dead!

Theories suggest that these are all the bells of the churches that could be heard from Newgate prison where executions took place and that the meter of the couplets match the sound of the peal of the bells. Another that St Clement Danes' churchyard once stretched to the bank of the Thames and the local children helped to unload cargoes of ships attempting to evade customs duty, receiving foreign fruit as a reward. Then I find the suggestion: 'The round singing of the ancients, of which this game is a fitting illustration, is probably a relic of Celtic festivity. The burden of a song, chorused by the entire company, followed the stanza sung by the vocalist, and this soloist, having finished, had license to appoint the next singer, 'canere ad myrtum,' by handing him the myrtle branch. At all events round singing was anciently so performed by the Druids, the Bardic custom of the men of the wand."
In 1920 a service was introduced at the church for the children of the local school to be given an orange and a lemon which still exists today.

On the 10th May 1941 St Clement Danes received a direct hit from an enemy bomber. Fire roared through the building, Wren's woodwork catching easily, flames as high as the steeple. In the guide book there is a picture of the tower lit like a light house in the dark night, fire spewing from the windows and arches. That night a heavy night of bombing in the capital 1,480 people were killed

Geoff Sanfield recalls his family house in Barnet north London being hit for it was the suburbs just as much as the centre of London that lay at risk. This was just one incident from the thousands that night:

'The bombing had eased somewhat by April 1941, so we came home. The grass in the garden was waist high and the five sycamore trees were even higher and made for great climbing.

On Saturday, May 10th, 1941, the biggest raid on London took place when Hitler sent over everything. For some reason, we had not gone to the Anderson shelter that night, probably fed up with all the various privations, and also things had been beginning to ease a little. We were bombed at around 11 pm. Four bombs in all; one three houses along from us, one on the allotment at the bottom of the garden and two further away.

The various blasts blew the curtains in and most of the windows out, some ceilings out and plaster came in. My sister and I, who were sleeping in a double bed in a downstairs rear room, were still asleep beneath curtains, dust and plaster etc. Dad had been in the kitchen making cocoa, and finished up amidst all the pots and pans. Mum had been standing in the doorway to our room and was narrowly missed by the front door, which was blown in. I can still smell the cordite, explosions, plaster, dust and fractured sewers etc.

We were dragged out of the house and up the front garden path, and I can remember stooping to pick up a large bomb splinter that had become embedded in the garden gate, now hanging by one hinge: I was promptly pulled away as it was still very hot, but what a souvenir to have had!

We were taken to neighbours for the night and Dad returned to what was left of the house, but it had already been looted, mostly food, but also some cutlery and cut glass. One particular piece was a wedding present to my parents from an uncle who had recently been killed. Dad pulled back the debris-covered bedclothes and went to bed, remarking that Mr Hitler was not going to deprive him of his bed.'

http://ww2today.com/10th-may-1941-huge-raid-on-london

I think of my son's astute question about my childhood and think - no - I had no idea that my parents generation witnessed such destruction. (I am an old mother and my mother was an old mother within her generation.) I just longed for hotpants and thought the Osmonds sounded dangerous belted from a dark shop doorway in a Welwyn Garden City precinct. When my Grandad and my grandparents next door neighbour died a day apart the funerals were held back to back in the small village in the Lake District where my mum had been brought up. I witnessed and kept like a stone in a secret pocket, my fingers occasionally fiddling the shape in a thin silky lining, the scene in my grandma's house when my aunt still with her coat on broke down crying after the neighbour's funeral. It wasn't the grief that was hard to understand from the hidden curl of a large chair but the hushed but palpable scorn of my mother and assembled relatives that she had done so.


The Rector of St Clement Danes was said to die from shock within five weeks of the bombing of the church and his funeral was held in the ruins. By 1953 the parish was combined with that of St Mary le Strand and it must have seemed that the church would be forgotten for wildflowers and grasses grew in the remains. However it was given into the keep of the Air Council and rebuilt faithful to Wren's designs, restored as a perpetual shrine of rememebrance to those killed in RAF service. The chancel arch is surmounted by the restored Stuart coat of arms and carries a latin inscription which translated reads, 'Built by Christopher Wren 1681. Destroyed by the thunderbolts of air warfare 1941. Restored by the Royal Air Force 1958.'

Walking up to Victoria Street on St George's day I hear the tinny sound of amplified brass bands and car horns blaring. What's happening I think, catching the streak of red and white flags and the bounce of red and white balloons dragged fast by a parade of scruffy vehicles at the end of the street. People stand bemused by the rattle of vans and scaffolding lorries careering past decked out with a few St George's flags and a couple of random inflatable figures attached to the back of a truck. It goes quickly passed and it seems as if everyone breathes again, frightened by the brief rough display of patriotism.

Finally, the work I am doing at the moment is at High Street Kensington and I can cycle every day through the parks to work. It is lovely - if often damp. Though I wonder if this has caused this blog to take so long - I sit to work in the evenings as usual but I am exhausted, tired physically. In some ways it is good for me because I tuck myself into bed by 11pm when normally I am up until at least 12pm and then read a few pages of War and Peace before sleeping well. ( Losing my job stopped me reading, then I lost a page and finally when I had worked out a plan to borrow someone's kindle to read just that page before recommencing the book, the missing page turned up folded in the ruin of the paperback.) Thinking about War and Peace as I pedal the slight incline up from Hyde Park Corner through the fine sheen of oily rain coating the park, I worry I have fallen out of love with fiction. I still think W and P is the most fantastic thing I have read but as I near the end, the shocking violence and tidying of plot that is accumulating to the finish doesn't interest me as much as the vast vistas of the main book. I like the mundane immensity and non symmetrical nature of life as it plods on, too awkward and sad and sometimes pointless to be tied into a plot, though occasionally finding the rhyme of coincidence and joy. At that moment I see a battalion of plumed golden helmeted soldiers on magnificent black horses on the brow of the hill in the mist of steady drizzle. I can hear the creak of their breast plates and saddles and the jangle of their reins - I imagine a Russian landscape with similar officers step step stepping huge black horses into a village. I see the power and awe they would instill from the discipline of horses moving in time, the straight backs and anonymity of fighting men. These are the Life Guards of the British Household Cavalary exercising near their barracks.

I get used to seeing the soldiers on horseback each morning as I cycle to the brow of the gentle hill, always in a slightly different place, always involved in slight different exercises - marching in line, turning as a unit, galloping, soldiers tilting in their saddles to joust hoops from the ground. Another morning under wet trees I see only soldiers training. Dressed in black they are doing a fast continous circuit - lying on their backs stomach crunching, then sprinting, then jogging back to stomach crunches, their steady fast, obedient and repeated actions reducing them to ants, limbs busy, following orders.



As I pass Kensington Palace on the bike one morning into the pleasure of the downhill, feet off the pedals swoop, I hear distant screams, girls voices high and far away like on a fairground ride. As I cycle down alongside the parkside hotel the screams get louder. Girls in school uniforms cluster in hoodies, screaming and waving handmade posters - 'Justin Bieber' they scream. 'Justin Bieber.'

Amen

St Giles in the Field

I am sick of my own whiny voice. Early on writing this blog Exh emailed a cartoon to me. Two dogs sat together, 'I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.'
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/60/6068/MIID100Z/posters/alex-gregory-i-had-my-own-blog-for-a-while-but-i-decided-to-go-back-to-just-pointless-new-yorker-cartoon.jpg
I thought it was his way of drily condoning what I was writing about though I think at that point he just hadn't read it. It seemed hilarious for it coincided exactly with how I saw the on and on yap of the compulsive and painful truth telling. I stuck the cartoon up, can see it now on the right hand side of the computer, the London map dense with the yellow and purple spots of churches visited and still to visit stretched out on the wall behind.

It seems a big debate at the moment - how the family is written about. I caught something on the radio whilst hurrying out to work, and read in the Guardian about the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard who has written a six-volume literary epic based on his famiy in particular his alcoholic father. Half of his family no longer speak to him though it is hailed as a masterpiece. In the article he says,
'As a person, I'm polite - I want to please. One of the reasons for that is my father; he had that grip on me. For 40 years I'd lived that tension between my inner and outer selves. Suddenly now the point was not to please, it was to speak the truth. To write reality."
Though he also realised it was:
''Just me and the computer in a room by myself. It never occured to me that it might cause problems - I was just telling the truth, wasn't I? But I was also being very naive. I sent a copy to everyone involved before the first volume was published, and then I discovered how difficult this was going to be. It was like hell."

On the radio ( Start the Week R4): I thought it suggested if it was good writing it was ok and if it wasn't it wasn't. But then I go back and find the podcast ( I have never done this before - and there is an excitement and a slight panic that I will spend my time just listening to back catalogues of R4) and hear Will Eaves express my own anxiety to these rules that there is no way of knowing while you do it that you are able to achieve this. He believes too that writing creates a 'Freestanding structure, whatever the origins maybe.' While AS Byatt countered 'Writing about people you know is always an exercise in power.' and that it is a dangerous thing to have a writer close'. 'an appalling thing' she says. I don't know. I wanted to describe good and bad things that have happened fairly. Though I may have failed. In the last blog I meant only to describe one more time exh's alcoholism to describe my own continuing reaction to it. The attachment I made to his behaviour. The trigger of hyper alertness it seemed to switch on. Though I do think - what else would or could you do? With children? A woman - a friend of exh said at a party, her arms heaved righteously under her bosom, but of course - you are the co dependent. A wagging slightly mean finger to her tongue. Oh yes, I said but I still don't think there is another way to behave once the shock of alcoholism takes hold. Though perhaps it is co dependent to take them on? Take a risk on dangerous things? Ignore the warning signals? I don't know, I do feel rebellious of the label given but understand I took part in a pattern, even hide my own drinking issues in the pockets of ex's own problems.

A voice coach that I had never heard of talks on desert island discs about the horror and pain of living with an alcoholic husband and how coming out of it she felt she fought every day for survival. How pleased she was not to have had children within that relationship and how damaging it was. Oh I thought, a catch of pain, as I heard her talk, that is what it was like, I didn't make it up. It really was that tough. She picked really beautiful music too, classical music that I jotted down.
The dusty smugness of DIDiscs seems to have been replaced by people talking quite honestly about the route and pain of their lives. But perhaps again that is how we speak now? I have heard John Prescott, James Corden and some rugby player discuss eloquently the difficulty at times of being themselves.
James Corden was very honest and charming ( is that compatible?) about his Salvation Army family, the love they gave him, his own ambition, and the loneliness and lost feelings induced by a party life style. His family arriving at his London flat to rescue him, only a lindt chocolate rabbit and some vitamin water in the fridge - no milk to make a cup of tea - but his Dad hugging and praying with him.

I hear too on the radio that before her death Angela Carter was asked to be on Desert Island discs then they put her recording slot back ( possibly for John Major ) and by the time the BBC could do the interview she was too ill. She organised her own funeral to be a Desert Island discs show and a final revelation was that she had chosen a zebra as her luxury. I laugh out loud at the beauty of a desert island with a zebra alongside. I love zebras for I always think that they make unicorns look possible, indeed almost anything possible.

I have been ill for bloody weeks. Just as I started the broadsheet work I was so excited about I got a cold. Then it knocked me sideways as it mutated from the normal sniff and splutter of a few days and I shivered and sweated and ached and it carried on and on and on, briefly ceasing, then returning with renewed vigour, evolving new symptoms. I sneezed and blew my nose raw in the hush of the civilised office where decorous journalists with principles, debated art and books. I couldn't not go, I needed to prove my reliability but I was soggy and sweating, barely able to cope and slightly wild-eyed to stress, though always trying to smile. It was a manic combination. I wanted to be asked back but in the circumstances it was hard to make a great impression. Luckily I get other work with other newspapers but I wait to know if they are going to book me for a long stint that was mooted.

Though UL now back to the acroynym of OL loses his Turkmenistan job because a client pulls out and then gets it back a week later because there are new clients.

I cycle up to the corner of Oxford St/Tottenham Court Rd/Covent Garden on a strangely warm saturday early evening, looking for a church to visit. I realise in the throng of Soho that there is no way that a church will be open now at this time. But still I steer the bike round the options. I feel slightly weary of my task, I want to get to the City churches not be weaving around the dust and I heart london tat of this end of Oxford St. Not really surprisingly The French Protestant church on Soho Square, The Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, St Giles in The Field and the Swiss Church are all closed but partly because I am against the tide of people in couples and groups out to bars and restaurants and theatres with what feels like a forlorn task set and I don't have anything else to do on a Saturday evening I keep moving round. I'll find something I think but the nearest I get to a church is two men coming out of a side door of a monumental grand building at the end of Covent Garden which I see is the Freemasons Hall, the headquaters of the United Grand Lodge of England. I am resentful sometimes of my obedience to the task - the spiral around of the purple dots - but if I didn't stick to my plan I would miss out the ones I didn't like the look of and would already have missed some of the best stories. Though increasingly I think that I will continue this arc of the spiral that I am on, which is going to take me round the cusp of south london shortly but use Oxford Street as a rough boundary for a while, then make a bit of a dash east. When I say 'dash' I am probably talking about a year away really. Blimey! I seem resigned to the long haul. I don't seem to get more than one a month done these days. Anyhow, I am not sure what I am saying makes sense! Unless you are such an isictt fan that you have your own map and sticker system at home! Oh go on! Tell me you are!

For some reason though I think St Giles in the Field is a Hawksmoor church and I feel excited as I cycle up again on a Tuesday lunchtime. I am going into Peter Ackroyd territory I think, though I have never read Hawksmoor only tried. I think oh good - I will have to try harder, try again. I read his TS Eliot biography which I loved and I used to waitress in a small restaurant where he had a regular table. He seemed a good man. The church flanks the north end of Covent Garden, the east of Charing Cross Rd, a scruffy, confusing patch of one way streets made dusty by the Crossrail building work consuming the area, a huge crater behind hoardings. The church is a large slab of a building, elegant but huge, set back from the road, resting in gardens surrounded by railings. There is a coffee stall to one side of the entrance and a cluster of dirty comrades in overcoats sat on benches, cans of beer tucked at their legs, Inside the church it is completely empty and quiet. Later I find a leaflet that describes the church as a representation of the journey of Christianity, the font near the doorway signifying baptism as the start of a Christian life, the clear sweep of the nave from the back of the church to the east end past the word of God of the pulpit and lectern through to the sanctuary of the altar where the sacraments were given all the way to the image of Jesus. I only really saw a plain space, galleries either side, plain glass windows apart from behind the altar where there is stained glass. To the left is a large architectural model of the church as it is. I peer in through the windows. I want to see a representation of my own solitary figure in a cape stooping to look at a tiny model of the same church within the wooden interior but of course it is empty. Known as the Poet's church, Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning married here, John Milton's daughter was baptized here and Andrew Marvell buried in 1678.

It appears there has been a place of worship on this site since Saxon times. I write this and then start looking up about Saxon beliefs and feel swamped. Though there is very little solid information just lots of gods and ritual sacrifice ( animals).
Though I find Pope Gregory the Great instructing Abbot Mellitus that:
'I have come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols in England should not on any account be destroyed. Augustine must smash the idols, but the temples themselves should be sprinkled with holy water, and altars set up in them in which relics are to be enclosed. For we ought to take advantage of well-built temples by purifying them from devil-worship and dedicating them to the service of the true God.'
In 1120 Henry 1's wife Matilda founded a christian leper hospital called St Giles here in the countryside, out of the city and away from Westminster, in a place of marshy land that would seperate the diseased from the able bodied. St. Giles was the patron saint of woodland, of lepers, beggars, cripples, and of those struck by sudden misery, and driven into solitude. Years ago when post modernism seemed a complicated thing that needed studying, not just the scrapbook of our lives I tried to read french philosophy though most of it was just too dense for me to understand. I recorded myself reading Blanchot believing that I would be able to decode the layered text if I did. OL then just my boyfriend, was caught on the tape in the background just coming round, the door opening, the shuffle of his step in the hall before the cassette is switched off. When he went to Russia and disappeared I used to play the scrap of recorded time and listen to the mundane moment of our life together, the assumption of the here and now fluttering and observed like something trapped in a jar. Anyhow, in Foucault's 'Madness and Civilisation' ( frankly a page turner in comparison to Blanchot) I can remember with fascination the suggestion that lepers existed in the place later consigned to the mad - literally outside of the city walls. Though I discover now some medieval sources suggest that those suffering from leprosy were considered to be going through Purgatory on Earth, and for this reason their suffering was considered holier than the ordinary person's. More frequently, lepers were seen to exist in a place between life and death. Though leprosy mainly disappeared in the mid sixteenth century and the 'outsider' position - the 'not us' - was taken by poverty, poor vagabonds, criminals and ‘dangerous minds.' Indeed after the reformation a post catholic church was built at St Giles in the Field in 1632 and the poor flocked to the area - vagrants expelled from the City, irish, french refugees and the 'st giles blackbirds' - the poor and black who had escaped from slavery or the army. At the crossroads of Oxford St, Charing Cross Rd and Tottenham Court Rd there was a gallows and a 'cage' for miscreants and even after the 15th century when the gallows was moved further to the edge of the developing city, the condemned would stop on their journey at the Resurrection gate of St Giles in the Fields and be given a bowl of ale.
In this 'damp and unwholesome' parish of St Giles the great plague of 1664 started and the first victim was buried in the churchyard. By the end 3,216 plague deaths were recorded in this parish of 2,000 households. Indeed so many were buried that the ground of the churchyard rose, the land got soggier and the application for a new, the present church was passed in 1730.


I stand in Foyles bookshop on the Southbank reading Peter Ackroyd's London biography. I am struggling a bit with Ackroyd envy, his work is so good and I am worried that it means mine is pointless, these tales have been told already. I have discovered already the design of the present church is not a Hawksmoor though he did submit designs for the Church under the commission of 50 churches but it was turned down in favour of the Palladian scheme by Flitcroft but also that Peter Ackroyd has written a whole chapter on the St Giles area. A crossroads of time and eternity, he calls it. He seems to believe like I do that a place holds an imprint of history, that the homeless and drunken and derranged gather like migrating souls, to an old nest. Though perhaps it is just that aid is given in these historical areas of poverty. I live on the corner of what was once the slum known as Devil's Acre and there are at least two hostels nearby. The homeless fold themselves into boxes and bins in our courtyard and sleep in snagged nylon sleeping bags outside office blocks. Recently I saw a man in a hospital gown and bare feet, his toes clenched like pigeon claws to the pavement and when it was really cold earlier in the year I saw a figure crouched over an army stove, sheltering down our thin dark street as if it were an ancient ditch.

Hogarth the master of detail of such depraved squalor used the St Giles parish as the backdrop for 'Gin Lane' 1751.
'Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin. Desperation, death and decay pervade the scene. The only businesses that flourish are those which serve the gin industry: gin sellers; distillers (the aptly named Kilman); the pawnbroker where the avaricious Mr. Gripe greedily takes the vital possessions (the carpenter offers his saw and the housewife her cooking utensils) of the alcoholic residents of the street in return for a few pennies to feed their habit; and the undertaker, for whom Hogarth implies at least a handful of new customers from this scene alone. Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit —as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs— lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff.[a] This mother was not such an exaggeration as she might appear: in 1734, Judith Dufour reclaimed her two-year-old child from the workhouse where it had been given a new set of clothes; she then strangled it and left the infant's body in a ditch so that she could sell the clothes (for 1s. 4d.) to buy gin.[10] In another case, an elderly woman, Mary Estwick, let a toddler burn to death while she slept in a gin-induced stupor.'

Round here the worst casualties are the crack addicts, the yellow-faced lost souls with their tatoos pale on the nicotine stain of liver damaged skin. I saw near Victoria station a man, barely human, stopping a bus. He was in the middle of the road with two fingers up. his clothes barely covering his body, just a blur of hair and flesh, his back arched like a snarling kicked dog, more a hound than a man. Another howled down our street, his arms gibbering his own body in comfort.

I discover too that attempts in the nineteenth century to clear the slums of St Giles to make way for sanitation and transport systems meant that the evicted just moved into near by slums, such as 'Devil's Acre and Church Lane making them more overcrowded still'. So this corner I live on holds the trace of St Giles's history.

It is Spring now and I see a heavily bearded man sat in a doorway, in a corner with the most sun, he has taken his shoes and socks off, undone the layers of his coats, and sits stretched out and smiling into the warmth, his large gnarled feet bare. If I ever have time or money I would pay for or push a foot health trolley round for the homeless. It seems the thing most needed. Socks on demand, new boots if needed, antiseptic cream, a foot massage and toe nail clippers.

Amen