I gave myself a bit of talking to after the last post, I had to try harder, to be a bit more determined to actually get into a church. It was no good just endlessly being 'a bit shy' to get through the door. Whatever it was I feared needed to be overcome. I have decided to make a list of some of those fears ( I might add to them later) but at the moment ( and slightly nonsensically) they seem to be the fear of:
a funny smell (specifically of dirty charity shops)
the suspicion in old people's gaze
the trust in old people's gazes,
belief,
expectation of belief,
non belief
stupidity,
expectation
not being able to escape.
being asked 'can I help you?'
not wanting to walk in on a fully submerged baptism. ( I am keen to get in the baptist church next)
I have read too in a book I bought called 'How to Read a Church' ( I bought it this summer but haven't had time to even dip into it until this week) that ' The Church is a symbol of heaven, of the world as it should and could be'. Aha, I thought when I read it that's the question I'm after. Perhaps if I was Mystery Worshipper that would be my final q n a 'Did the church symbolize heaven to you? As the world as it should and could be?' It is such a good question. Is the world as it should and could be? You could ask it of almost anything.
Determined, I ask exexdh if he can come and look after the boys on Wednesday so I can slip out to an evening bible and prayer meeting at the Baptist Church. Though, and it is a popular phrase, sometimes I think I should get out more. But not there.
Monday morning I wake up thinking 'Remember this was meant to be fun' and on tuesday, 'I just dread going'.
Then my new pal, a recentish single mum friend from school, asks if I would like to come after school on wednesday with her boys and my boys for her birthday tea party. Yes. We do. She and her boys are great. They came camping with us and calling ourselves the PSM (pissed single mums/ did I say I was perfect? oh no I'm not/ though we are talking two extra glasses of wine not falling on the floor) we worked side by side, laughing. But I am worried that it will make me late for the Baptist Church or that it will be hard to turn down a glass of wine, and I won't want to bustle myself in that door with even a whiff of alcohol. But mainly I think phew, I don't have to go and try.
My new thing is I have signed up for a Boris bike ( the recently started scheme in London - bikes that you collect and drop off at docking bays across the city for an annual/monthly/weekly/daily fee). I have done this specifically to be able to get easily to the greengrocers on Lupus Street in Pimlico. When the four of us first moved back to London we lived at the end of that street, under a bridge and around the corner, all us squashed in a tiny one bedroom peabody flat. It was at the time that dh was becoming exdh. And he just got d and d and d and d. And the rows were horrible. I would pass Manolo's every day on the two mile journey to and from school - pushing the youngest's buggy, goading, encouraging, singing to the increasingly angry and violent eldest. God, it is boring the tiny intricate details of how really difficult our life was then, like the workings of a clock, each hardship dependent on the other, each creating a new tiny trial, though really and I never seem to get to this bit I would like to list how I did get out, a how-to-guide, for sometimes I feel I am writing this for that myself, for I would have loved to have found this, found out it is possible to make your life nice or at least much much much much better. Back then, that school run was a daily dante's inferno, an epic voyage.
The shop had no inviting produce outside, no great window displays, it looked rather old fashioned and musty. I know it sounds mad but I walked past many times before I had the courage to go in. I don't know why, I find being visible hard. I have always thought I would be happier invisible but perhaps that is just the observer in me. But when I did turn the squeaky wheels of the buggy in I found this incredible thing. Manolo's supplied the fruit and veg to restuarants, their stock was very fresh, very seasonal, fine quality fruit and veg, but cheap. And Maria, the spanish shopkeeper was beautiful and kind and funny with an incredibly happy marriage to her greengrocer husband Manolo ( he does the buying and the deliveries). She called my youngest the 'little bird' when he reached out his still chubby hand from the restrain of the pushchair to pop cherry tomatoes into his mouth, and I would remonstrate with him while she laughed and allowed it, and told him about a real bird that used to come and fly down and steal the cherries from the doorway. Anyhow, all this to say that not only was I able to buy delicious food - pomegranates, artichokes, big field mushrooms alongside the staples, really good apples, delicious tomatoes that burst in your mouth with flavour, but it was, at that time, that very bleak and isolated time the one place I felt connected. I wasn't the only one. Old people still shuffle into the shop to buy a daily apple and small bag of potatoes and Maria gives them a chair and listens to them. I have heard her checking that they are taking their medicine, how they are. Once, she told me, an old lady collapsed onto her, both of them pinned down on the floor, until somone found them. And though I believed I maintained the pretence that I might just, at a pinch, come from the beautiful big houses nearby, that my life was ok, with my carefully picked clothes and constant cheer, there was a day when I miscalculated and I just didn't have enough money to pay, and Maria only smiled and said it was fine, I know you will pay me, I trust you, you can always come here and have what you want, writing down 'little bird' and the amount on a tiny scrap of paper kept in her till.
For the first time writing this bloody thing, I am crying.
Now I live the opposite side from the school and the shop is quite a long way away. But I still always try and go once a week but I can never manage it in the school holidays, and it has got harder now I am doing three days work not two, to find the time to get there and I haven't been able to get there for absolutely ages. But my plan is with a Boris bike I will be able to get there easily. This day, I do some other shopping and then walk onto hers. I am excited about the idea of cycling home, of using the bike for the first time, Through the door I notice a slump to Maria's posture, a little bit of weight put on, a guardedness to her welcome that I have never seen. I ask her about her summer, I ask her about the ongoing battle with the council to be allowed again to put the produce out on the street, I am prodding her to tell me what is wrong. Then, finally she starts to tell me, and I hadn't even noticed, Tesco's has opened up on the street and their own trade has, she says literally disappeared. She had thought, as I had done when we talked about it before it happened that it would bring more shoppers to the street and they could coexist. It is not true though, she says and she is holding back her own tears, she is throwing veg away every day, for everything, the parsnips, the celeriac, french green beans just stays on the shelves. The shop is shutting in November. Though, and she says the really upsetting thing is when her old customers come in for just a pack of celery and she can see through the milky transparency of that blue and red logoed bag, their tasteless apples and potatoes and flabby tomatoes. Now I am howling, literally howling because of her kindness and for the irretrievable, the careless harm, the damage done almost unnoticed. There is no history of greengrocers as far as I know. Or is this the start? But something very good will no longer be there, will have gone without a trace.
In a mild shock ( and yes, I can see a grief for a greengrocers might seem a trifle strong a term) but I think that is what I feel on this day, plus I have forgotten the boris bike map, and thought it would be obvious where the docking bay is but it isn't, I wander the ordered streets of pimlico. White, proud, affluent houses in precise, tree lined, gridded rows. It is the London of old Disney films, easy to imagine clean children marched by perambulator pushing nannies, smiling maids twirling with feather dusters, men in plush overcoats, women rustling. Now there are bugaboos in paint chart shades, personally trained bodies, pale caramel tans, a lot of cashmere and still, even now, builders vans and skips parked up.
Finally I find the bikes but the key doesn't work, the bike does not release. I have to walk home. With sudden inspiration I realise if I can find a church with it's door open I can get in and 'do it' and be able to get to my friend's tea party easily. Pimlico is packed with churches. I try two with no luck. Doors bolted tight. But around another street corner, another chuch, one I have never even seen before, howdydoodee St Gabriel's church door is wide open.
I walk in hesitantly, there is a woman in an old fashioned pinny cleaning. 'Is it ok just to have a look around' I say loudly and clearly. 'Yes', she says, smiling. I walk quietly, respectfully around. The air is still and dense, the hush disturbed by my presence. High vaulted ceiling giving heaven enough space, damp peeling damaged walls, the shinest, polished parquet floor ever. A child daubed mobile, white paint on black card, hung on a small statue of jesus as a boy. I think for a minute, slightly amused that it is halloween themed ghosts but on closer inspection I think they are angels. I sit at the back while the lady cleans. I think, good, I have got this done, like ticking a box.
I am reading 'Absence of Mind' easiest just to copy from the book jacket to explain, 'in this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought - science, religion, and consciousness' 'By defending the importance of individual reflection...... Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.' Reading it, snatches of it, on the tube on my way to work, a page or two in bed at the end of the day, is like the air in the church, dense and heavy, with slight shifts of movement as I read. I have flashes of excited comprehension but when I go back to copy them up, I lose the thread. I need more time, I think, to get to what I think.
Finally, something has happened which is so completely unexpected, so ludicrously like a plot, that I feel it is barely credible but it is true. The man I mentioned having once truly loved - turns up. We have been emailing each other for over a year, cautiously and kindly, with respect for our present family situations. He is married with a son. He left me, went to russia, came back with a pregnant wife. I never saw him again, or heard from him until this recent time and I found it very hard to recover from his absence, Though I did. Out of the blue he e mails to say his wife and son are away and he comes to my flat. He has always loved me he says. It seems a cliche and if I was you dear reader ( I know now there are a few ) I would doubt this, but he is a good man and an honourable one, and his anger and unhappiness and regret are near to poison. I say I think it is probably too late. I think I say, that I am almost irrelevant compared to inventing at least a window in his own trapped life.
After he has gone that night I email him to say I will probably write about you in this. He replies, 'the minute I walked through the door I knew I could be walking into your blog'.
So yes, another opened door.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
CHC / Sacred Heart / Wesleyan Chapel, Horseferry Road
Yes. I saw the Pope. Briefly, on the friday. The boys were not back from swimming when I got home from work and I just walked up and waited for him to come out of Westminster Abbey. From far away I could recognise the stoop of his dipped head and the padding of white and red satin on the step of the abbey. Shortly after, the cavalcade of darkened windows sped past, a lady infront of me saying, 'I knew he'd come this way, I knew he'd come this way'. But I didn't really feel anything one way or the other, except perhaps that I had stood in the right place. Though I think I clapped or waved. And later wondered why.
There are only two churches left nearby now and both are on Horseferry Road. After these two I will have to go a little bit further afield - though not far really, Pimlico and St James or up Whitehall.
The Baptist Chapel on Horseferry road has a metal grille across the door and a billboard chained to the wall advertising Sunday services and a lunchtime one too but I have never seen the door open. It looks like a kind of Gordon Ramsey's nightmare of a church, a bit dirty, a bit down at heel, a chapel time forgot. Hmm, but I will have to try to go, and increasingly I have a sinking feeling that I will have to go to a service or run in and out through the jaws of that concertina metal gate at service time. The other church is only a few buildings away, on the corner, with stained glass and a porch and a pretty garden. Though I have only seen the door open once and the very young mums smoking on the church steps looked really doubtful when I said I wanted to have a quick look in and I bottled it. Also I have never managed to work out what sort of church it is - there is no sign and no advert of services.
I feel I am struggling. Not just with the churches. I went to Westminster Archive with a to do list. I had found a booklet at the archive 'Tracing the History of Your House' ( I think home would be a better word really, I can't be the only person without a house interested in history but perhaps I am just being prickly) and thought it was going to be easy. I had decided since Westminster Abbey to start at the beginning - to start at 1885 when this block was built or as near as I could, and then trace the families that had lived here. In the 1888 electoral register I had already found George Harry Davidson listed (women did not have the vote, were not listed) but the booklet said that 'The census enumerators' returns for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 are often the most exciting source for house historians. They list all the occupants present on census night. From 1851 their precise ages, occupations and places of birth are recorded together with their relationship to the head of the household' I imagined the knock at this door, and the feeling of importance answering who you all were, small faces peering out.
But in the Archive I felt only anxious. I didn't know how to work the microfiche and the pages jumped and danced, as I jiggled the glass plate, finding the magnified worn edges of photographed dust on acetate, then spinning across spidery scrawl. Just these Peabody blocks alone had pages and pages of dense black ink, like ants crawling. I couldn't read the script very well, the letters of the blocks were completely undecipherable and I felt increasingly agitated. I scrawled and scrawled through the names, the addresses, trying to match letters to other letters, trying to spot Davidson. Nothing was clear. My guess would be that in 1891 Thomas Roadnight a 34 year old Police Constable from Bucks in Aylesbury lived here with his wife Julia 33, daughter Jessie 10 and son Frederick 8 but at the moment it doesn't feel a very good guess ( though I have had an idea to match the capital letters of nearby street names from maps of the time to the block letters to decode the writing and will go back and try this) but even writing this I just feel anxious. I thought discovering these people would be fascinating and affirming but actually somehow it is the opposite, these invisible people make me feel invisible too. I'm not even sure that is right, but all that living: that noisy, hungry, shouting, kissing, bodily fluid living seemed transient, just a baton to be passed on.
I will keep going but have realised I had previously been lucky, stories just falling into my lap.
Late Sunday afternoon I pace that corner of Horseferry Rd. I must be able to get into one of them I reason. Though the old dread of entering a church, of looking needy returns. To be a supplicant. I see the door of the nameless church open, a small square sign says CHC and and I climb the stairs. In the porch there are many leaflets and I can hear a shuffle of presence inside the building. Through square stained glass window tiles I see people standing still. But strangely there is no noise, no music, no prayer. I shift uneasily pressing into the swing door. It doesn't give easily.
Of course I can't do it. Leaflets in hand I am back down the stairs, back down the street, then back home.
When I check CHC it stands for Cardinal Hume Centre, opened in 1986, set up as part of the work of Cardinal Hume to help the community to help the homeless. A hostel built later in 1989. Not a church at all.
But then history unfolding, it was originally a Wesleyan chapel built in 1814, then bought by the mother of the Countess of Gainsborough in 1927 and dedicated to the convent of Sacred Heart in thanks for a son recovering from a serious illness. Some demoliton took place, some building work started, then bombed out on 14th May 1944. Building started again in 1962 and was completed 1963 but the sisters of the eucharist vacated the sacred heart convent in 1986 and the centre was established. A strange combination on the same site, a methodist chapel from the tradition of preaching open air, in fields, in towns, taken over by an order of catholicism. After all John Wesley called the pope the antichrist. But in London both had been outsiders - hosting meetings in homes, suffering persecution and arrests, perched here, on this corner opposite where the workhouse had been.
Walking back from school the next morning, still proud in my new blue gold trimmed coat, I meet a man with grizzled face, crumpled in a full suit and bowler hat. I smile.
'What you laughing at.' He says.
Nothing. I said. 'You look great.'
Like a magician his stories unfold like coloured handkerchiefs from pockets. 'The funny thing was, I was standing under a building site, bang wang, a bucket of white paint, right on top of me,' His arms upraised, eyebrows up, eyes beady, 'But there, just infront of me, a bag full of all this.' He gestures to his suit. 'And oh my goodness look at these!' He points to his toes. 'Hundred pound shoes.' I nod. Looking at the shiny satin tie. 'And you know, the other night? Fishing....' He is a showman. There might be doves under that hat. There is enough time for me to savour the idea. Him. Hungry but resourceful. In his suit. Fishing. 'Out pops a man in a bra and pants.' he says 'Oooh, and he said, will you fiddle with me willy?' Then, quick like brackets in the conversation, ' I just need one pound forty.' I give him two pounds.
The lollipop lady on our street watches the transaction with suspicion. In the many surprising things about where I live a lollipop lady is another one.
There are only two churches left nearby now and both are on Horseferry Road. After these two I will have to go a little bit further afield - though not far really, Pimlico and St James or up Whitehall.
The Baptist Chapel on Horseferry road has a metal grille across the door and a billboard chained to the wall advertising Sunday services and a lunchtime one too but I have never seen the door open. It looks like a kind of Gordon Ramsey's nightmare of a church, a bit dirty, a bit down at heel, a chapel time forgot. Hmm, but I will have to try to go, and increasingly I have a sinking feeling that I will have to go to a service or run in and out through the jaws of that concertina metal gate at service time. The other church is only a few buildings away, on the corner, with stained glass and a porch and a pretty garden. Though I have only seen the door open once and the very young mums smoking on the church steps looked really doubtful when I said I wanted to have a quick look in and I bottled it. Also I have never managed to work out what sort of church it is - there is no sign and no advert of services.
I feel I am struggling. Not just with the churches. I went to Westminster Archive with a to do list. I had found a booklet at the archive 'Tracing the History of Your House' ( I think home would be a better word really, I can't be the only person without a house interested in history but perhaps I am just being prickly) and thought it was going to be easy. I had decided since Westminster Abbey to start at the beginning - to start at 1885 when this block was built or as near as I could, and then trace the families that had lived here. In the 1888 electoral register I had already found George Harry Davidson listed (women did not have the vote, were not listed) but the booklet said that 'The census enumerators' returns for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 are often the most exciting source for house historians. They list all the occupants present on census night. From 1851 their precise ages, occupations and places of birth are recorded together with their relationship to the head of the household' I imagined the knock at this door, and the feeling of importance answering who you all were, small faces peering out.
But in the Archive I felt only anxious. I didn't know how to work the microfiche and the pages jumped and danced, as I jiggled the glass plate, finding the magnified worn edges of photographed dust on acetate, then spinning across spidery scrawl. Just these Peabody blocks alone had pages and pages of dense black ink, like ants crawling. I couldn't read the script very well, the letters of the blocks were completely undecipherable and I felt increasingly agitated. I scrawled and scrawled through the names, the addresses, trying to match letters to other letters, trying to spot Davidson. Nothing was clear. My guess would be that in 1891 Thomas Roadnight a 34 year old Police Constable from Bucks in Aylesbury lived here with his wife Julia 33, daughter Jessie 10 and son Frederick 8 but at the moment it doesn't feel a very good guess ( though I have had an idea to match the capital letters of nearby street names from maps of the time to the block letters to decode the writing and will go back and try this) but even writing this I just feel anxious. I thought discovering these people would be fascinating and affirming but actually somehow it is the opposite, these invisible people make me feel invisible too. I'm not even sure that is right, but all that living: that noisy, hungry, shouting, kissing, bodily fluid living seemed transient, just a baton to be passed on.
I will keep going but have realised I had previously been lucky, stories just falling into my lap.
Late Sunday afternoon I pace that corner of Horseferry Rd. I must be able to get into one of them I reason. Though the old dread of entering a church, of looking needy returns. To be a supplicant. I see the door of the nameless church open, a small square sign says CHC and and I climb the stairs. In the porch there are many leaflets and I can hear a shuffle of presence inside the building. Through square stained glass window tiles I see people standing still. But strangely there is no noise, no music, no prayer. I shift uneasily pressing into the swing door. It doesn't give easily.
Of course I can't do it. Leaflets in hand I am back down the stairs, back down the street, then back home.
When I check CHC it stands for Cardinal Hume Centre, opened in 1986, set up as part of the work of Cardinal Hume to help the community to help the homeless. A hostel built later in 1989. Not a church at all.
But then history unfolding, it was originally a Wesleyan chapel built in 1814, then bought by the mother of the Countess of Gainsborough in 1927 and dedicated to the convent of Sacred Heart in thanks for a son recovering from a serious illness. Some demoliton took place, some building work started, then bombed out on 14th May 1944. Building started again in 1962 and was completed 1963 but the sisters of the eucharist vacated the sacred heart convent in 1986 and the centre was established. A strange combination on the same site, a methodist chapel from the tradition of preaching open air, in fields, in towns, taken over by an order of catholicism. After all John Wesley called the pope the antichrist. But in London both had been outsiders - hosting meetings in homes, suffering persecution and arrests, perched here, on this corner opposite where the workhouse had been.
Walking back from school the next morning, still proud in my new blue gold trimmed coat, I meet a man with grizzled face, crumpled in a full suit and bowler hat. I smile.
'What you laughing at.' He says.
Nothing. I said. 'You look great.'
Like a magician his stories unfold like coloured handkerchiefs from pockets. 'The funny thing was, I was standing under a building site, bang wang, a bucket of white paint, right on top of me,' His arms upraised, eyebrows up, eyes beady, 'But there, just infront of me, a bag full of all this.' He gestures to his suit. 'And oh my goodness look at these!' He points to his toes. 'Hundred pound shoes.' I nod. Looking at the shiny satin tie. 'And you know, the other night? Fishing....' He is a showman. There might be doves under that hat. There is enough time for me to savour the idea. Him. Hungry but resourceful. In his suit. Fishing. 'Out pops a man in a bra and pants.' he says 'Oooh, and he said, will you fiddle with me willy?' Then, quick like brackets in the conversation, ' I just need one pound forty.' I give him two pounds.
The lollipop lady on our street watches the transaction with suspicion. In the many surprising things about where I live a lollipop lady is another one.
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Westminster Abbey II
Children back to school. Back to the mantra of Westminster Abbey/ Westminster Archive. I try to get the cleaning done as fast as I can to get to the Abbey again. I have a plan. I am going to hire one of the audio guides. Though I feel slightly rudderless and melancholic, the children have consumed my time for weeks and I am back to the solitary duel of trying to write and keep us all respectable. But the chores take longer than I want: the washing, the beds, phoning for appointments, stowing camping equipment into cupboards, sorting out worn out clothes or clothes too small. Just as I am finishing the vacuuming the machine loses suction and I realise I haven't changed the bag for ages. Somehow (just full?) the bag has burst inside the machine and months of dust and hair has been collecting around the bag not just in it. Like very fine grey flour, our skin, clouds in the clean kitchen. I can see into the dusty belly of our home - dried pasta, cheerios, hair clips, quite a lot of lego, two gogos, a favourite glove matted with doormat hair.
At that moment I get a text from 'capitalist' dad saying that he wants to read the blog. I panic. At least, as my brother says when I text him frantically for advice it isn't the feudal bastards.
I feel I am starting to get myself into difficult water. Exexdh recently read it, he fished around and found it. He seems ok but sometimes it is hard to tell. I am not completely sure I would be. I am not sure 'captitalist' dad will be either though there is nothing really wrong with what I said. Also, and importantly I was just trying to bend circumstances into an idea or a debate. My aim is to write as truthfully as I possibly can but it is hard thing to do. I want to be able to describe and include everything. All the strands of life. I want it to be as near how I feel and think and see as possible. But just the way I write is sometimes too pretty, too la, la, too contrived. Though really there should be more inane thoughts: clothes, celebrities, the diet I am on to try and lose my tummy fat (porridge, lots of omelettes, no white flour) and perhaps a little bit more day to day anguish. I really do find things hard sometimes. I have to trick myself with a fantastic new navy blue coat with beautiful big buttons and gold trim. I have to meditate, make jokes, try not to drink too much. I have to keep going. But there are also truths at the edge of what I'm writing, things that don't make sense to the picture I am building, things that are too complicated to explain. For example I spent the last week of the school holidays with the boys and a friend on a fabulous trip to a water park in Egypt. It was a free press trip from my work. I have to write a feature for the paper. Which I have never done before. I was tempted not to mention it, I didn't go to a church there and it doesn't fit in with what I want to write about. But the omission allows me to build the fiction of the poor me, poor me stoic brave heroine without mentioning the ridiculously lucky perks.
Also, and there is a deep breath here, I had no idea when I started writing this that I would want to try to tell the truth. My truth. When exexDH was just H and I started to notice empty cans of lager hidden in our home, I didn't tell anyone. When I noticed that all the holiday souvenir bottles, the cheap tequila with a bright red plastic hat top, the greek brandy, the firewater without a name, tucked away in the downstairs toilet had been secretly finished, left empty. ( We had a house then, I had bought it, and paid for it with a long commute, a house I could only just afford.) I didn't tell anyone. I didn't say that I would get up in the morning at the weekend and play intricate games with playmobil for hours with my young sons while H lay in bed, hungover, cross, depressed. Or worse when I thought the morning was going well, everybody up, everybody cheerful and I would suddenly realise that H was completely D and it was perhaps only 11 in the morning. My boss at the job I did and hated had a DH and she told me she lay on the kitchen floor and cried because she felt so trapped. She said she phoned the Samaritans. I said - 'Get him out! Get counselling! Get the children ok!' She followed my advice and I learned from what she said and lay on the kitchen floor and cried, I phoned Samaritans, I felt so trapped. But I didn't let myself name what was happening.
Third time down to parliament square. Tarpaulin still tight to the fenced off square. I thought I had read that everyone but Brian Haw ( the peace camp founder) had been removed but it isn't true. Haw ( I think ) is the only tent allowed on the green but others still cluster on the edge of the pavements. I fish around now on the internet to find out what is happening Two tents perched on a corner, flat on the slabs.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9277/
I have also found a sort of precedent in 1887, the unemployed took to sleeping out in Trafalgar Square and St James’ Park, and the Social Democratic Federation began organising them under the slogan ‘not charity but work’. The police began clearing the Square using force, so that minor clashes between the police and the unemployed became a daily event. Finally, all meetings in it were banned. November 13th 1887 two squadrons of life guards from Whitehall dispersed the crowds, one man dying on 'Bloody Sunday'. I have also read that the suffragettes detonated a bomb in Westminster Abbey June 1914 and I am shocked and suddenly interested in the history of civil disobedience, the powerful undercurrent of the history of protest, the power of organised anger. Here from a newspaper report the next day.
'Beyond the fact that the police have in their possession a feather boa, a guidebook and a small silk bag found in a chair nearby there is nothing in the nature of a clue to the perpetrator of the outrage and such articles, or course, may have belonged to an ordinary Abbey visitor.' NYT 12 June 1914
The posters here say, 'The Dispossessed.' 'Not a protest for peace. A demand.'
For the second time I use my wes res card to gain free entrance into Westminster Abbey. Inside, something has changed I think. I can see, turning my eyes right, down the nave, to the high narrow beauty of the vaulted ceiling, as if air and vision is trapped up there in the delicate fanned shapes and it is stunning. I cannot believe that this view was here before. I remember some restoration work taking place, maybe the view was blocked off, I think, I cannot have seen it so differently. But the audio guides, which I queue to receive, are small and grey, like a block in my hand. I want to ask the girl about the view and what happened to the white, long thin phones from a few weeks ago? But I don't. What I described wasn't quite right. My truth is hazy. Perhaps if I went again the audio guides would be black and sleek?
I follow the guide diligently. But there isn't really anything here in the main church that I didn't notice without it - the commentary feels as piecemeal and pecking at the whole thing as my own attempt, just an approximation. But I feel tense and miserable. I needn't have come back I think. Then in the old cloister, through an entrance that I hadn't found, hadn't seen, under a beautiful carved christ is a beautiful octagonal room, the Chapter House, light with old vaulting and the remnants of 1400 wall paintings, scenes from the Apocalypse including Doomsday. This is where the monks came and worshipped every day before the abbey that stands now was built. Beside this, to the left, coming out, a sign saying the oldest door in England. The oak door put in place in the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey's founder, Edward the Confessor. It makes it the only surviving Anglo Saxon door in Britain. Apparently made from one tree, its rings suggest it grew between AD 924 and 1030, probably in Essex. The simple function of it, a door that has been opened and shut for nearly a thousand years.
Back out and under the old, thick, cold arched walls to the beautiful small cloister with the thin, pretty fountain is the infirmary clustured round the courtyard. The audio guide tells me the monks suffered from obesity and drink, perhaps like us, protected and safe, they had lost the strict boundaries of survival and couldn't control the basic instinct for more. Though at one pont half the monks were killed by bubonic plague. I find too, three beautiful early tombs in the main cloister, the earliest - Gilbert Crispin Abbot 1085 -1117, the figure flattened and polished by time, but the form, so simple, so exactly human I find it really moving.
That night ironing school uniforms I have a sudden realisation. I have viewed it all wrong. I should have started in the oldest part, moved through and away from the thick walls, past the cloister into the Abbey, then the soaring heights and beauty and human acheivement of the vaulted high light ceilings would be a revelation. It is like finding the beginning unexpectedly, right in the middle of something else, a knot untangled.
At that moment I get a text from 'capitalist' dad saying that he wants to read the blog. I panic. At least, as my brother says when I text him frantically for advice it isn't the feudal bastards.
I feel I am starting to get myself into difficult water. Exexdh recently read it, he fished around and found it. He seems ok but sometimes it is hard to tell. I am not completely sure I would be. I am not sure 'captitalist' dad will be either though there is nothing really wrong with what I said. Also, and importantly I was just trying to bend circumstances into an idea or a debate. My aim is to write as truthfully as I possibly can but it is hard thing to do. I want to be able to describe and include everything. All the strands of life. I want it to be as near how I feel and think and see as possible. But just the way I write is sometimes too pretty, too la, la, too contrived. Though really there should be more inane thoughts: clothes, celebrities, the diet I am on to try and lose my tummy fat (porridge, lots of omelettes, no white flour) and perhaps a little bit more day to day anguish. I really do find things hard sometimes. I have to trick myself with a fantastic new navy blue coat with beautiful big buttons and gold trim. I have to meditate, make jokes, try not to drink too much. I have to keep going. But there are also truths at the edge of what I'm writing, things that don't make sense to the picture I am building, things that are too complicated to explain. For example I spent the last week of the school holidays with the boys and a friend on a fabulous trip to a water park in Egypt. It was a free press trip from my work. I have to write a feature for the paper. Which I have never done before. I was tempted not to mention it, I didn't go to a church there and it doesn't fit in with what I want to write about. But the omission allows me to build the fiction of the poor me, poor me stoic brave heroine without mentioning the ridiculously lucky perks.
Also, and there is a deep breath here, I had no idea when I started writing this that I would want to try to tell the truth. My truth. When exexDH was just H and I started to notice empty cans of lager hidden in our home, I didn't tell anyone. When I noticed that all the holiday souvenir bottles, the cheap tequila with a bright red plastic hat top, the greek brandy, the firewater without a name, tucked away in the downstairs toilet had been secretly finished, left empty. ( We had a house then, I had bought it, and paid for it with a long commute, a house I could only just afford.) I didn't tell anyone. I didn't say that I would get up in the morning at the weekend and play intricate games with playmobil for hours with my young sons while H lay in bed, hungover, cross, depressed. Or worse when I thought the morning was going well, everybody up, everybody cheerful and I would suddenly realise that H was completely D and it was perhaps only 11 in the morning. My boss at the job I did and hated had a DH and she told me she lay on the kitchen floor and cried because she felt so trapped. She said she phoned the Samaritans. I said - 'Get him out! Get counselling! Get the children ok!' She followed my advice and I learned from what she said and lay on the kitchen floor and cried, I phoned Samaritans, I felt so trapped. But I didn't let myself name what was happening.
Third time down to parliament square. Tarpaulin still tight to the fenced off square. I thought I had read that everyone but Brian Haw ( the peace camp founder) had been removed but it isn't true. Haw ( I think ) is the only tent allowed on the green but others still cluster on the edge of the pavements. I fish around now on the internet to find out what is happening Two tents perched on a corner, flat on the slabs.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9277/
I have also found a sort of precedent in 1887, the unemployed took to sleeping out in Trafalgar Square and St James’ Park, and the Social Democratic Federation began organising them under the slogan ‘not charity but work’. The police began clearing the Square using force, so that minor clashes between the police and the unemployed became a daily event. Finally, all meetings in it were banned. November 13th 1887 two squadrons of life guards from Whitehall dispersed the crowds, one man dying on 'Bloody Sunday'. I have also read that the suffragettes detonated a bomb in Westminster Abbey June 1914 and I am shocked and suddenly interested in the history of civil disobedience, the powerful undercurrent of the history of protest, the power of organised anger. Here from a newspaper report the next day.
'Beyond the fact that the police have in their possession a feather boa, a guidebook and a small silk bag found in a chair nearby there is nothing in the nature of a clue to the perpetrator of the outrage and such articles, or course, may have belonged to an ordinary Abbey visitor.' NYT 12 June 1914
The posters here say, 'The Dispossessed.' 'Not a protest for peace. A demand.'
For the second time I use my wes res card to gain free entrance into Westminster Abbey. Inside, something has changed I think. I can see, turning my eyes right, down the nave, to the high narrow beauty of the vaulted ceiling, as if air and vision is trapped up there in the delicate fanned shapes and it is stunning. I cannot believe that this view was here before. I remember some restoration work taking place, maybe the view was blocked off, I think, I cannot have seen it so differently. But the audio guides, which I queue to receive, are small and grey, like a block in my hand. I want to ask the girl about the view and what happened to the white, long thin phones from a few weeks ago? But I don't. What I described wasn't quite right. My truth is hazy. Perhaps if I went again the audio guides would be black and sleek?
I follow the guide diligently. But there isn't really anything here in the main church that I didn't notice without it - the commentary feels as piecemeal and pecking at the whole thing as my own attempt, just an approximation. But I feel tense and miserable. I needn't have come back I think. Then in the old cloister, through an entrance that I hadn't found, hadn't seen, under a beautiful carved christ is a beautiful octagonal room, the Chapter House, light with old vaulting and the remnants of 1400 wall paintings, scenes from the Apocalypse including Doomsday. This is where the monks came and worshipped every day before the abbey that stands now was built. Beside this, to the left, coming out, a sign saying the oldest door in England. The oak door put in place in the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey's founder, Edward the Confessor. It makes it the only surviving Anglo Saxon door in Britain. Apparently made from one tree, its rings suggest it grew between AD 924 and 1030, probably in Essex. The simple function of it, a door that has been opened and shut for nearly a thousand years.
Back out and under the old, thick, cold arched walls to the beautiful small cloister with the thin, pretty fountain is the infirmary clustured round the courtyard. The audio guide tells me the monks suffered from obesity and drink, perhaps like us, protected and safe, they had lost the strict boundaries of survival and couldn't control the basic instinct for more. Though at one pont half the monks were killed by bubonic plague. I find too, three beautiful early tombs in the main cloister, the earliest - Gilbert Crispin Abbot 1085 -1117, the figure flattened and polished by time, but the form, so simple, so exactly human I find it really moving.
That night ironing school uniforms I have a sudden realisation. I have viewed it all wrong. I should have started in the oldest part, moved through and away from the thick walls, past the cloister into the Abbey, then the soaring heights and beauty and human acheivement of the vaulted high light ceilings would be a revelation. It is like finding the beginning unexpectedly, right in the middle of something else, a knot untangled.
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
St Andrew's Church, Preston Dorset
It felt like a magnificent moment, driving off. Boys sandwiched in the back between cool boxes and sleeping bags. Roof rack high (admittedly packed by exexdh). Bee Gees greatest hits on the car stereo. Children lulled yet fascinated by the high voices and their mum singing full tilt. The start of our annual camping holiday to a beautiful farm in Dorset. But less than a mile away from home, in one of the smartest cut throughs in London, the car just quietly failed.
I had joined the AA (the breakdown service, not the other one) just days before ( it had felt at the time like part of the spree but suddenly the best money I had ever spent) and a man, like the older Robert De Niro, wise with a heavy accent and just a hint of courtly male menace, came and worked on the car for hours. Talking on the phone he said he was in mourning, a very recent bereavement 'I'm just not myself' he said in a drawl. I felt like I was in a film. The dead-end woman played ludicrously by Michelle Pfeiffer.
Exexdh came on his bike, like an audience. Not feeling well he sat on a bench and watched.
Initial optimism from all gave way. It became increasingly obvious the car wasn't going to make it. Frantic phone calls to our friends, nearing the camp site in their camper van said we could get towed to their house and borrow their car. Robert de Niro towed me down to South London. 'She can do it.' He said a pronouncement of faith when Exexdh said he should steer the car. I felt stupidly proud of his belief and I did it.
But something happened. Exexdh stepped up. Volunteered when insurance on the friend's car seemed unlikely, to drive us down in their car and then drive himself back that night. He always joins us later in the week for our youngest's birthday but the total journey down that day ( towing etc ) took nine hours in total, and we did it, all of us with patience and good humour and he still had to drive back. Our funny, damaged family suddenly working together. Putting a tent up in the dark.
That week camping I thought, you can choose very easily how you would like to live in a field. It is just you and your children with others. It is a simple life, keeping yourself above the level of mud and dry under shelter, not burnt from the sun and you can choose the best you can. I chose, and I realise I can be irritating: to laugh, muck about, cook pancakes, have a fabulous birthday party (remember those light up balloons!), swim, wash up, wash up wash up wash up. I was happy. So happy.
I thought about belief. I don't believe. I didn't think I believed anything. But I realise I believe you should be kind. That you should be kind to all. That you should always do unto others as you would do for yourself. That you should live with joy. I would run for miles to catch a plastic bag blowing in the wind. I think I realised with some doubt that central to the core of me was inherited Christian beliefs.
There were many families camping together. Each showed their beliefs in their actions. I'm just trying this out:
The medieval family ( I was thinking of calling them feudal but I think medieval works, somehow it seems kinder and I don't want to be unkind) believe in themselves above and beyond all others. Their family is a fortress wall. Their commitment is only to themselves, they don't care how others work on their behalf, they feed themselves, make arrangements for themselves but eat greedily from what others provide. Others do not exist as they do and they would fight them if they did. ' I don't react well to being told what to do, and don't do it.' The breath of that sentence still warm as a pan of sausages is indicated, 'could you turn those while I ............'
The Capitalist Family. Buy and negotiate their position. They work for the camp in payment for or in lieu of benefit. There is sometimes little enjoyment to their contribution but it is done to keep the currency of effort going.
from there the combinations are varied:
capitalist/christian possibly the most succesful combination of self and selfless. After all Christianity has a strong tradition of martyrs.
All of this is just an attempt to explain something, and I feel I could be foolish, or arrogant or plain stupid to try but it seemed really simple at the time. The more you do with joy and enjoyment and love the more you enjoy.
Blimey! I am writing this but I never expected it, I might not agree with it later even, but I think it is worth a try. Something needs to be said. How we live doesn't seem quite right.
And exexhdh got it that week and turned up ready and present to take part. He didn't have a back pocket of doubt or two fingered meaness behind my back he just took part with love and joy.
I am not explaining a happy ending exactly just an observation of how that time was lived.
At the end. Packing up. Oh, oh a slow and labourious process, folding a natty kitchen unit into a flat bag, cleaning out tents of mud and grass fluff, unravelling kites, packing and packing. I kept going all day in the heat. The arranged deal with two young sons and exexhdh was that we would pack up, swim in the sea, eat pizza and play cricket and walk to the nearby old church. Something for everybody and guess which one I chose. But all of it was shortened and snipped at the edges and eldest son suggested in his unswerving and sometimes unnerving logic that if he and youngest went and got the pizza ( there is a van in the farm yard) then there would be more time for cricket) and I gave them the money to go. When the eldest came back shouting 'come come' saying the youngest had hurt himself jumping off a hay bale I said fucking hell ( so rare my swearing of any sort these days and this was extreme by fear and guilt that I had let them go) and ran top speed terrified that my keeness to shave time had worn thin my own normal stingent son safety rules and caused catastophe, the new (and I overheard them to be christian or certainly they went to Greenbelt, so I imagine you would have to be christian) families moving into the plot we were leaving looked horrified, their young babies crawling in the earth. When I returned carrying the youngest, his graze more a whisper of white dragged skin not even pinked with blood, I felt their disapproval of this lax, swearing mum. I said, relentlessly cheerful, relentlessly friendly, I expect you will cheer when we have finally gone.
Finally, a dip in the sea, pizza eaten, cricket played, car packed, we drove off, no time for the church for it was nearly dark. There was no cheer, just a watery wave, but the church bells rang out, unexpectedly, beautifully, across the fields.
I had joined the AA (the breakdown service, not the other one) just days before ( it had felt at the time like part of the spree but suddenly the best money I had ever spent) and a man, like the older Robert De Niro, wise with a heavy accent and just a hint of courtly male menace, came and worked on the car for hours. Talking on the phone he said he was in mourning, a very recent bereavement 'I'm just not myself' he said in a drawl. I felt like I was in a film. The dead-end woman played ludicrously by Michelle Pfeiffer.
Exexdh came on his bike, like an audience. Not feeling well he sat on a bench and watched.
Initial optimism from all gave way. It became increasingly obvious the car wasn't going to make it. Frantic phone calls to our friends, nearing the camp site in their camper van said we could get towed to their house and borrow their car. Robert de Niro towed me down to South London. 'She can do it.' He said a pronouncement of faith when Exexdh said he should steer the car. I felt stupidly proud of his belief and I did it.
But something happened. Exexdh stepped up. Volunteered when insurance on the friend's car seemed unlikely, to drive us down in their car and then drive himself back that night. He always joins us later in the week for our youngest's birthday but the total journey down that day ( towing etc ) took nine hours in total, and we did it, all of us with patience and good humour and he still had to drive back. Our funny, damaged family suddenly working together. Putting a tent up in the dark.
That week camping I thought, you can choose very easily how you would like to live in a field. It is just you and your children with others. It is a simple life, keeping yourself above the level of mud and dry under shelter, not burnt from the sun and you can choose the best you can. I chose, and I realise I can be irritating: to laugh, muck about, cook pancakes, have a fabulous birthday party (remember those light up balloons!), swim, wash up, wash up wash up wash up. I was happy. So happy.
I thought about belief. I don't believe. I didn't think I believed anything. But I realise I believe you should be kind. That you should be kind to all. That you should always do unto others as you would do for yourself. That you should live with joy. I would run for miles to catch a plastic bag blowing in the wind. I think I realised with some doubt that central to the core of me was inherited Christian beliefs.
There were many families camping together. Each showed their beliefs in their actions. I'm just trying this out:
The medieval family ( I was thinking of calling them feudal but I think medieval works, somehow it seems kinder and I don't want to be unkind) believe in themselves above and beyond all others. Their family is a fortress wall. Their commitment is only to themselves, they don't care how others work on their behalf, they feed themselves, make arrangements for themselves but eat greedily from what others provide. Others do not exist as they do and they would fight them if they did. ' I don't react well to being told what to do, and don't do it.' The breath of that sentence still warm as a pan of sausages is indicated, 'could you turn those while I ............'
The Capitalist Family. Buy and negotiate their position. They work for the camp in payment for or in lieu of benefit. There is sometimes little enjoyment to their contribution but it is done to keep the currency of effort going.
from there the combinations are varied:
capitalist/christian possibly the most succesful combination of self and selfless. After all Christianity has a strong tradition of martyrs.
All of this is just an attempt to explain something, and I feel I could be foolish, or arrogant or plain stupid to try but it seemed really simple at the time. The more you do with joy and enjoyment and love the more you enjoy.
Blimey! I am writing this but I never expected it, I might not agree with it later even, but I think it is worth a try. Something needs to be said. How we live doesn't seem quite right.
And exexhdh got it that week and turned up ready and present to take part. He didn't have a back pocket of doubt or two fingered meaness behind my back he just took part with love and joy.
I am not explaining a happy ending exactly just an observation of how that time was lived.
At the end. Packing up. Oh, oh a slow and labourious process, folding a natty kitchen unit into a flat bag, cleaning out tents of mud and grass fluff, unravelling kites, packing and packing. I kept going all day in the heat. The arranged deal with two young sons and exexhdh was that we would pack up, swim in the sea, eat pizza and play cricket and walk to the nearby old church. Something for everybody and guess which one I chose. But all of it was shortened and snipped at the edges and eldest son suggested in his unswerving and sometimes unnerving logic that if he and youngest went and got the pizza ( there is a van in the farm yard) then there would be more time for cricket) and I gave them the money to go. When the eldest came back shouting 'come come' saying the youngest had hurt himself jumping off a hay bale I said fucking hell ( so rare my swearing of any sort these days and this was extreme by fear and guilt that I had let them go) and ran top speed terrified that my keeness to shave time had worn thin my own normal stingent son safety rules and caused catastophe, the new (and I overheard them to be christian or certainly they went to Greenbelt, so I imagine you would have to be christian) families moving into the plot we were leaving looked horrified, their young babies crawling in the earth. When I returned carrying the youngest, his graze more a whisper of white dragged skin not even pinked with blood, I felt their disapproval of this lax, swearing mum. I said, relentlessly cheerful, relentlessly friendly, I expect you will cheer when we have finally gone.
Finally, a dip in the sea, pizza eaten, cricket played, car packed, we drove off, no time for the church for it was nearly dark. There was no cheer, just a watery wave, but the church bells rang out, unexpectedly, beautifully, across the fields.
Friday, 6 August 2010
Westminster Abbey I
Done it! Broken through the barriers of time, and worry - too big, too expensive, too touristy, too exhausting. Westminster Abbey. The boys away at exexhDH's family for most of the week. Mainly I am working but I have one whole, full day off. I take money from a cash point on the way there to pay the entrance fee, but have my teeth gritted to the price. Remember I'm on what feels like a slightly out of hand spree - they are wants that have been backing up and really none of them of are outlandish but just the flood of them seems to be costly:
filing boxes x 6 (yellow)
a top for me
a belt for me
origami paper and book (for boys)
Extravagant but beautiful light up balloons for camping birthday parties ( mine and youngest son's/camping next week)
a necklace from the house of fraser sale for me (there certainly seems to be a for me theme here)
fabric paints (for boys)
lots of birthday presents for others that I have skipped or side stepped
I suspect the consumer in me would always have a list of the next purchases I would like to make which are:
new beds for the boys with storage underneath (found them on ebay for £120 a piece with mattress- can they be any good?)
lamp for sitting room
electric whisk (make those meringues and cakes easier)
haircut (yup, for me again)
underwear (ditto)
But I am holding back. Mildly panic stricken by the urge of want. By money which is meant for other things.
Anyhow. It is beautiful, hot, sunny, the same weather as when I went to St Margarets of Antioch. I have attempted to get to Westminster Abbey by 9.30 when it opens but I am probably 10 minutes late. Without the boys, time is really odd - slower and faster at the same time, precious but slack, the space of them mourned. Parliament Square is fenced off in ugly tarpaulin, the decison seems to be rather than have a peace camp, there will be nothing, though the tents cluster at the edge of the pavement and the fenced off land. Sculptures of great men like clumsy parcels with plastic wound round. Winston Churchill a big coat wrapped in a mac.
Entrance from the north transept. £15 admission price. I have it ready. But just at the last minute shuffling in, I think I will just try my Westminster res card, the one I use to get cheap swimming, the one I lend to an exD friend of exexDH to go swimming - a funny arrangement where he takes it in the week and then appears on saturdays for breakfast after AA meetings so I can take the boys to swimming lessons and we try to talk about art over the heads of my sons while I make pancakes or scrambled eggs. The eldest ( often angry ) and youngest ( who licks his arm ) and usually exexDH turns up too. I am to meet him later at the Tate. While it is probably the nearest thing I have had to a date for 11 years and it does feel slightly date-like, I don't really want a date. I don't want to feel vulnerable, I don't want to lead someone on, I don't want to be rejected. I definately don't want an exD or a D either. Plus, I have made a rule to be taken out for dinner and cherished. But I like him, he is funny and kind and oh, oh, the idea someone might laugh at a joke I make is too much of a draw. Also, I think he probably feels exactly the same. I am the ex missus of an exD. Though it makes it easy for both of us, for some things don't have to be explained, the extremes are known.
But the card works! Not 10% off, not 15%, even 20% or 50% but bang, bingo, can't believe it - I am in, I live here, haven't come off a coach, dragged a wheelie suitcase, sat in a seventies steak house or even come on the tube, just walked round the corner and it is absolutely free. I am so pleased. £15 pounds is still a worrying amount to me. The belt I shouldn't have bought but love. The amount of most of the things I have listed. In the extraordinarirly bad times, I have fed the children reasonably well for a week for not much more than double that.
Under the porch with stone saints clustered, through the door and then unexpected a great crowd of grey dead people, limbs waving around, flanked by the shuffling living with audio guides. I can't explain it, but I thought I would walk in and it would be about the building, about height and awe but it isn't it is a clutter. All I can see is statues packed in, like a store room of ambitious people. This is just a first impression I think because that entrance brings you into a waving woman on her back and some seafaring chaps. Then a vicar, a real one, with a wolf smile, glides infront of me, saying to a young pretty guide 'where did the all the people come from? Who opened the doors?' Eyebrows arched. And then I can imagine the quiet and magnificence of just being there. Not him, not her, not any of us. The hush.
I reach kings. There are seventeen monarchs buried here. Including the shrine of Edward the Confessor. How amazing. How old. He built his palace near the original monastic community (initially 12 monks on an isolated marshy area of the Thames called 'Thorney Island', King Edgar giving Dunstan, bishop of London the land in AD960) then built a new church dedicated to St Peter. Though he died a few days after it's consecration in 1065 his burial depicted in the Bayeux tapestry. Less than a year later William the Conqueror was crowned in the earliest Abbey. Later again, nearly a hundred years Edward the Confessor became a saint and his remains moved to a magnificent shrine in the presence of Henry ll and Thomas Becket. Henry III started the building of the abbey we see now, inspired by the french gothic cathedrals. All this I've learnt but I think maybe I will go back, even try an audio guide, because all I could see was a lot of railings with huge caskets hidden behind.
Everyone has the guides, like enormous, white, comedy sketch 80s phones, and the people look with their ears, a crouched shuffling view. I am overwhelmed. The greats and then the merely clever, the clerics, the administrators who secured themselves a patch by nimble deals. The layers of age, kings and kings and kings, then Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth 1, these people, their remains are really here. Chapel entrances dip into smooth bowed stone worn by feet. It is too much to describe it all - this is what I noticed - two tiny figures in a chapel, a couple, a man and a woman measuring from my elbow to my thumb, pocket sized tombs, as poignant and vulnerable as Ron Mueck's sculpture 'Dead Dad'. At the side of Mary Queen of Scotts laid quiet and marble, a bag tucked beside with a sticker that says 'Mary Queen of Scotts fire blanket.' Something warm, something protective. All history kept safe, kept continuous, the line of story, the story of state and power on and on. But also inherent threat imminent, attack anticipated.
Then the writers and poets. So many. Chaucer 'Clerk of works of the Palace of Westminster' ( I didn't know he'd lived here) 'O Rare, Ben Johnson', Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy slightly worn, TS Eliot 'The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living' the cut of the text overdone, fussy in the craft of modern stone masonry.
Turning off into the cloister is the really old bit. Against the wall, tombs with shapes that look ancient rather than christian. Presumably just ancient christian. I have a sketch of them but not sure how to describe the cartoon bone shape with crosses at either end at the ball of the bone. Alongside, along the thick, rough walls, the doorway into the Pyx Chamber. It has been there since the Norman Conquest, a room that feels underground by the thickness of the walls but isn't. Huge wooden chests, which were used for counting and valuing money . A thousand years later the room used as a safe HQ in the 2nd WW. The people from the war that I'm trying to imagine must have tried to imagine the other people, with as little success, I don't know, I find it hard not to try.
On again under a low moon sliced tunnel to a deeper recessed, I think an even older, small cloister with a fountain, finally the garden, and when I get out there I am the only one. I'm not sure the audio guide takes you there. But it is beautiful, old walls, a strange view of the rooves of the abbey then the houses of parliament. Beautiful. An old fig tree the height of an oak. Calm.
Back through. The carved stones of war heroes. Again, I can't explain it but the recent typeface of the dead is horrible, the pride of the carver rather then the truth of those that died. A name is just a spoken thing rather than a flourish. Written well it conveys the gravity of them gone.
Finally, finally into the high ceiling vaults of the church. Here is the tomb of the unknown soldier 1920 then the scientists - Newton and ( I overhear a guide ) 'We let him in.' Darwin. There is magnificence and light and beauty and I realise this is how the church should be seen, how it was intended to be viewed. Tourists are exited through the entrance if that makes sense and it is hard to understand the church without that initial view. I sit.
Later I go to the Tate to the surveillance exhibition. I like lots of it. The small, tiny details. The first paparazzi pictures. Bits and bobs. The Date or Non Date and I skirt the exhibition independently, never near, never looking together, but unexpectedly we come across each other near the end, our pace finally coinciding but I can't bear the intimacy and overtake him.
Almost the last room, Bruce Nauman 'Mapping the Studio' a film of roughly 52 minutes that I watch for roughly 4 minutes. It is the Artist's studio with a film camera running at night, I wait, watching nothing. I have always been fascinated by capturing the grainy stillness of night, the shift of light and not much. Looking and looking, like trying to find the proof of nothing without you, or an internal feeling, a trace of history, or the warmth of a ghost. I wait.
Once years and years ago I was unfaithful to a man I truly loved and I ended up in an open air swimming pool somewhere near Sheffield. Swimming, I lost track of the man I didn't care about but had lied to my work and taken the train to see. I can remember clearly looking around for someone or something to recognise but there was nothing just many heads bobbing. I was completely unattached, completely unknown, free in a rectangle of water with a swimming suit on under a big, open sky.
Watching the film, and the night of the studio unexpectedly there is a twitch of movement. Bright eyes. I guess a mouse. Things happen that you don't see, don't know, I think.
Amen
filing boxes x 6 (yellow)
a top for me
a belt for me
origami paper and book (for boys)
Extravagant but beautiful light up balloons for camping birthday parties ( mine and youngest son's/camping next week)
a necklace from the house of fraser sale for me (there certainly seems to be a for me theme here)
fabric paints (for boys)
lots of birthday presents for others that I have skipped or side stepped
I suspect the consumer in me would always have a list of the next purchases I would like to make which are:
new beds for the boys with storage underneath (found them on ebay for £120 a piece with mattress- can they be any good?)
lamp for sitting room
electric whisk (make those meringues and cakes easier)
haircut (yup, for me again)
underwear (ditto)
But I am holding back. Mildly panic stricken by the urge of want. By money which is meant for other things.
Anyhow. It is beautiful, hot, sunny, the same weather as when I went to St Margarets of Antioch. I have attempted to get to Westminster Abbey by 9.30 when it opens but I am probably 10 minutes late. Without the boys, time is really odd - slower and faster at the same time, precious but slack, the space of them mourned. Parliament Square is fenced off in ugly tarpaulin, the decison seems to be rather than have a peace camp, there will be nothing, though the tents cluster at the edge of the pavement and the fenced off land. Sculptures of great men like clumsy parcels with plastic wound round. Winston Churchill a big coat wrapped in a mac.
Entrance from the north transept. £15 admission price. I have it ready. But just at the last minute shuffling in, I think I will just try my Westminster res card, the one I use to get cheap swimming, the one I lend to an exD friend of exexDH to go swimming - a funny arrangement where he takes it in the week and then appears on saturdays for breakfast after AA meetings so I can take the boys to swimming lessons and we try to talk about art over the heads of my sons while I make pancakes or scrambled eggs. The eldest ( often angry ) and youngest ( who licks his arm ) and usually exexDH turns up too. I am to meet him later at the Tate. While it is probably the nearest thing I have had to a date for 11 years and it does feel slightly date-like, I don't really want a date. I don't want to feel vulnerable, I don't want to lead someone on, I don't want to be rejected. I definately don't want an exD or a D either. Plus, I have made a rule to be taken out for dinner and cherished. But I like him, he is funny and kind and oh, oh, the idea someone might laugh at a joke I make is too much of a draw. Also, I think he probably feels exactly the same. I am the ex missus of an exD. Though it makes it easy for both of us, for some things don't have to be explained, the extremes are known.
But the card works! Not 10% off, not 15%, even 20% or 50% but bang, bingo, can't believe it - I am in, I live here, haven't come off a coach, dragged a wheelie suitcase, sat in a seventies steak house or even come on the tube, just walked round the corner and it is absolutely free. I am so pleased. £15 pounds is still a worrying amount to me. The belt I shouldn't have bought but love. The amount of most of the things I have listed. In the extraordinarirly bad times, I have fed the children reasonably well for a week for not much more than double that.
Under the porch with stone saints clustered, through the door and then unexpected a great crowd of grey dead people, limbs waving around, flanked by the shuffling living with audio guides. I can't explain it, but I thought I would walk in and it would be about the building, about height and awe but it isn't it is a clutter. All I can see is statues packed in, like a store room of ambitious people. This is just a first impression I think because that entrance brings you into a waving woman on her back and some seafaring chaps. Then a vicar, a real one, with a wolf smile, glides infront of me, saying to a young pretty guide 'where did the all the people come from? Who opened the doors?' Eyebrows arched. And then I can imagine the quiet and magnificence of just being there. Not him, not her, not any of us. The hush.
I reach kings. There are seventeen monarchs buried here. Including the shrine of Edward the Confessor. How amazing. How old. He built his palace near the original monastic community (initially 12 monks on an isolated marshy area of the Thames called 'Thorney Island', King Edgar giving Dunstan, bishop of London the land in AD960) then built a new church dedicated to St Peter. Though he died a few days after it's consecration in 1065 his burial depicted in the Bayeux tapestry. Less than a year later William the Conqueror was crowned in the earliest Abbey. Later again, nearly a hundred years Edward the Confessor became a saint and his remains moved to a magnificent shrine in the presence of Henry ll and Thomas Becket. Henry III started the building of the abbey we see now, inspired by the french gothic cathedrals. All this I've learnt but I think maybe I will go back, even try an audio guide, because all I could see was a lot of railings with huge caskets hidden behind.
Everyone has the guides, like enormous, white, comedy sketch 80s phones, and the people look with their ears, a crouched shuffling view. I am overwhelmed. The greats and then the merely clever, the clerics, the administrators who secured themselves a patch by nimble deals. The layers of age, kings and kings and kings, then Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth 1, these people, their remains are really here. Chapel entrances dip into smooth bowed stone worn by feet. It is too much to describe it all - this is what I noticed - two tiny figures in a chapel, a couple, a man and a woman measuring from my elbow to my thumb, pocket sized tombs, as poignant and vulnerable as Ron Mueck's sculpture 'Dead Dad'. At the side of Mary Queen of Scotts laid quiet and marble, a bag tucked beside with a sticker that says 'Mary Queen of Scotts fire blanket.' Something warm, something protective. All history kept safe, kept continuous, the line of story, the story of state and power on and on. But also inherent threat imminent, attack anticipated.
Then the writers and poets. So many. Chaucer 'Clerk of works of the Palace of Westminster' ( I didn't know he'd lived here) 'O Rare, Ben Johnson', Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy slightly worn, TS Eliot 'The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living' the cut of the text overdone, fussy in the craft of modern stone masonry.
Turning off into the cloister is the really old bit. Against the wall, tombs with shapes that look ancient rather than christian. Presumably just ancient christian. I have a sketch of them but not sure how to describe the cartoon bone shape with crosses at either end at the ball of the bone. Alongside, along the thick, rough walls, the doorway into the Pyx Chamber. It has been there since the Norman Conquest, a room that feels underground by the thickness of the walls but isn't. Huge wooden chests, which were used for counting and valuing money . A thousand years later the room used as a safe HQ in the 2nd WW. The people from the war that I'm trying to imagine must have tried to imagine the other people, with as little success, I don't know, I find it hard not to try.
On again under a low moon sliced tunnel to a deeper recessed, I think an even older, small cloister with a fountain, finally the garden, and when I get out there I am the only one. I'm not sure the audio guide takes you there. But it is beautiful, old walls, a strange view of the rooves of the abbey then the houses of parliament. Beautiful. An old fig tree the height of an oak. Calm.
Back through. The carved stones of war heroes. Again, I can't explain it but the recent typeface of the dead is horrible, the pride of the carver rather then the truth of those that died. A name is just a spoken thing rather than a flourish. Written well it conveys the gravity of them gone.
Finally, finally into the high ceiling vaults of the church. Here is the tomb of the unknown soldier 1920 then the scientists - Newton and ( I overhear a guide ) 'We let him in.' Darwin. There is magnificence and light and beauty and I realise this is how the church should be seen, how it was intended to be viewed. Tourists are exited through the entrance if that makes sense and it is hard to understand the church without that initial view. I sit.
Later I go to the Tate to the surveillance exhibition. I like lots of it. The small, tiny details. The first paparazzi pictures. Bits and bobs. The Date or Non Date and I skirt the exhibition independently, never near, never looking together, but unexpectedly we come across each other near the end, our pace finally coinciding but I can't bear the intimacy and overtake him.
Almost the last room, Bruce Nauman 'Mapping the Studio' a film of roughly 52 minutes that I watch for roughly 4 minutes. It is the Artist's studio with a film camera running at night, I wait, watching nothing. I have always been fascinated by capturing the grainy stillness of night, the shift of light and not much. Looking and looking, like trying to find the proof of nothing without you, or an internal feeling, a trace of history, or the warmth of a ghost. I wait.
Once years and years ago I was unfaithful to a man I truly loved and I ended up in an open air swimming pool somewhere near Sheffield. Swimming, I lost track of the man I didn't care about but had lied to my work and taken the train to see. I can remember clearly looking around for someone or something to recognise but there was nothing just many heads bobbing. I was completely unattached, completely unknown, free in a rectangle of water with a swimming suit on under a big, open sky.
Watching the film, and the night of the studio unexpectedly there is a twitch of movement. Bright eyes. I guess a mouse. Things happen that you don't see, don't know, I think.
Amen
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Westminster Abbey. prologue
End of school, school holidays and birthday parties seem to have taken up my time. In the last two weeks I have made seven chocolate cakes, two batches of club penguin cookies and two meringue cakes. We have camped in my mum and dad's garden. I have run backwards and forwards across Regent's park before work to take the boys and their cousins to QPR football camp then across London in my lunch hour to take my eldest neice to a textile designer friend in Clapham. In a brave strike I have consolidated many of my money woes, repaying huge amounts and then spent a load of money - new tv! glasses! pretty dress! badminton net! All of it seems necessary but still makes me anxious. My position now is tight but not quite desperate. It is such an improvement but I feel I could be squandering it with this spree.
On facebook a girl I used to work with but barely like, posts pictures of her children's birthday party, a party I think I would like to have given. A beautiful garden with lanterns and a bedouin tent. But for my youngest son's party I run an obstacle course in the scabby, rat running, dog poo car park below. Next to the muddy flowerbed with the grave of our recently demised hamster 'Buddy' (oh, oh) tucked behind the foliage and alongside the hidden bedding of a homeless man.
This is what you had to do. Kick a football through a tunnel, run through the tunnel, knock a shuttlecock over moving bunting, limbo under the bunting, jump a jump, put The Mask on (yes, the green, Jim Carey one), play the Ukele, any song you like, up the ladder, star jump, collect a sweet from a flour cake. Bow.
The neighbours appeared from no where, carrying shopping bags, just as I demonstrate the race. I find it hard to look them in the eye (though they are nice) after the time exexDH then just drunk exh broke the door down. He couldn't get the keys to work. But here I am singing happy birthday, strumming a ukele, with a mask on. They watch baffled but smiling. Small children clamouring to have a go. I am not sure if I am brave or a fool.
'I am going to go to Westminster Abbey. I am going to go to Westminster Archive. ' It is like a refrain. But I can't seem to shave enough time of a day to get there. It is the school holidays there just isn't that time to shave.
On Radio 4 there is a programme with historic trials from the Old Bailey. I catch a little bit of it washing up. A woman tried for treason - having her drunken husband killed for a penny.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17260420-42-person238&div=t17260420-42
She said he beat her, she said he kept her hungry, she said he drank, that he was no good. The head was found in a bucket on horseferry road 1726, just on the edge of that marshy map.
I wonder if there is something inevitable and ancient to the places where poverty of spirit collects.
On the last day of term I see the young, white, shouting mum with her mum and a friend. The friend has a pitball, straining at a lead, albino bollocks, barking. 'yes, armed with intent' the friend says. 'He's going to say bye byes' says the mum of her mum, her scottish accent with finality. Only a bit older than me, the grandma, nice, bright, friendly but once I wondered if she was Mary Bell, if they all had secret identies.
Is it an age thing? The awareness of history. The textile designer friend has started mudlarking. He has found digging at the side of the Thames, a golden pin, a roman coin, and a medieval tile with a dog paw print dried into the clay. Real treasure. Fine, beautiful forgotten things. Small, precious with the touch of long gone fingers, the warmth and jump of a dog. He says he wants to talk more about this now than textiles though all of the designers come to him, Donna Karan, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Giles Deacon - even (and he shudders, though says she is nice, funny, sophisticated) Victoria Beckham.
I have been worried since the last post that I didn't get near to describing how unrelenting the bombing was here. I mentioned a couple of incidents and yet night after night the bombs kept coming. Even if one dropped and caused slight damage another could be dropped on top of that.
April 19th 148 killed and 564 seriously injured
May 10th 110 killed and 385 seriously injured.
'The whole area suffered and it was noticeable in the morning air that an invisible veil of plaster dust hung its odour over the air of every street, bombed or not bombed, for Westminster was impregnated with it.'
Westminster Abbey, watched, cared for, kept at attention - 'observer posts were positioned at tatical points, and here, at nearly one hundred feet above ground level, the Abbey firewatchers spent their blitz nights. Areas of these roofs are flat and safe and solid, like the secure decks of some enormous stone ship. The pinnacles, the spires, the buttresses that appear from the ground reasonably diminutive grow huge in this strange and isolated land above. It is though one stood in a new city of white and black stone, each pinnacle above and below glinting like the spire of a seperate church, with the flying buttresses presenting an architecture quite new and of no formal meaning. The ground below is forgotten, only this queer, beautiful but unintelligible island exists. Such an edifice flickering in the reddish reflection of London's fires must have been a mermorable sight - with around the black sea of the streets dotted here and there with fires, like pools of red phosphorus.'
Though I think that a sense of survival is what we now crave, but only because we are safe.
I buy a card of that 'Keep calm and carry on' poster and put it up in the hall way by the door. It is a flashpoint for all of us, late, putting shoes on, my eldest son often oblivious to the real demands of time and not his own concentration of interests. 'Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!' I shout. But then seeing it there, I feel I insult the real message. All I have to do is get two boys to get their trainers on and their hair brushed and to school on time. The real 'Keep calm and carry on' is stoic but terrible, an oblivion, a self medication to the horror of surrounding death and destruction. The thin, neutral typeface, so strong, so resililent. My mum and dad grew up during the war. I have always felt they trained me for another, by my lack of complaining, grin and bear it, potential bravery. A very polite put up and shut up. But it has made me weak, not strong. For the strong things I felt have not always been said. I got used to not saying them.
I admit defeat, I haven't gone to Westminster Abbey, I haven't gone to Westminster Archive - I haven't had time. I have decided this time just to describe - here, what I have seen, the bits and pieces.
Finally, I was crossing the road on the way to pick up a parcel from the sorting office - just round the back of House of Fraser, and I saw something glittering on the road. I thought for a minute it was a dropped brooch with a central glinting jewel, and even when I was close I still thought it was a brooch with a jewel but there on the tarmac was the head of a pigeon, about the size of my thumb pad, his eye open and bright, just lying there, looking up, dead, decapitated, as if from no where.
On facebook a girl I used to work with but barely like, posts pictures of her children's birthday party, a party I think I would like to have given. A beautiful garden with lanterns and a bedouin tent. But for my youngest son's party I run an obstacle course in the scabby, rat running, dog poo car park below. Next to the muddy flowerbed with the grave of our recently demised hamster 'Buddy' (oh, oh) tucked behind the foliage and alongside the hidden bedding of a homeless man.
This is what you had to do. Kick a football through a tunnel, run through the tunnel, knock a shuttlecock over moving bunting, limbo under the bunting, jump a jump, put The Mask on (yes, the green, Jim Carey one), play the Ukele, any song you like, up the ladder, star jump, collect a sweet from a flour cake. Bow.
The neighbours appeared from no where, carrying shopping bags, just as I demonstrate the race. I find it hard to look them in the eye (though they are nice) after the time exexDH then just drunk exh broke the door down. He couldn't get the keys to work. But here I am singing happy birthday, strumming a ukele, with a mask on. They watch baffled but smiling. Small children clamouring to have a go. I am not sure if I am brave or a fool.
'I am going to go to Westminster Abbey. I am going to go to Westminster Archive. ' It is like a refrain. But I can't seem to shave enough time of a day to get there. It is the school holidays there just isn't that time to shave.
On Radio 4 there is a programme with historic trials from the Old Bailey. I catch a little bit of it washing up. A woman tried for treason - having her drunken husband killed for a penny.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17260420-42-person238&div=t17260420-42
She said he beat her, she said he kept her hungry, she said he drank, that he was no good. The head was found in a bucket on horseferry road 1726, just on the edge of that marshy map.
I wonder if there is something inevitable and ancient to the places where poverty of spirit collects.
On the last day of term I see the young, white, shouting mum with her mum and a friend. The friend has a pitball, straining at a lead, albino bollocks, barking. 'yes, armed with intent' the friend says. 'He's going to say bye byes' says the mum of her mum, her scottish accent with finality. Only a bit older than me, the grandma, nice, bright, friendly but once I wondered if she was Mary Bell, if they all had secret identies.
Is it an age thing? The awareness of history. The textile designer friend has started mudlarking. He has found digging at the side of the Thames, a golden pin, a roman coin, and a medieval tile with a dog paw print dried into the clay. Real treasure. Fine, beautiful forgotten things. Small, precious with the touch of long gone fingers, the warmth and jump of a dog. He says he wants to talk more about this now than textiles though all of the designers come to him, Donna Karan, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Giles Deacon - even (and he shudders, though says she is nice, funny, sophisticated) Victoria Beckham.
I have been worried since the last post that I didn't get near to describing how unrelenting the bombing was here. I mentioned a couple of incidents and yet night after night the bombs kept coming. Even if one dropped and caused slight damage another could be dropped on top of that.
April 19th 148 killed and 564 seriously injured
May 10th 110 killed and 385 seriously injured.
'The whole area suffered and it was noticeable in the morning air that an invisible veil of plaster dust hung its odour over the air of every street, bombed or not bombed, for Westminster was impregnated with it.'
Westminster Abbey, watched, cared for, kept at attention - 'observer posts were positioned at tatical points, and here, at nearly one hundred feet above ground level, the Abbey firewatchers spent their blitz nights. Areas of these roofs are flat and safe and solid, like the secure decks of some enormous stone ship. The pinnacles, the spires, the buttresses that appear from the ground reasonably diminutive grow huge in this strange and isolated land above. It is though one stood in a new city of white and black stone, each pinnacle above and below glinting like the spire of a seperate church, with the flying buttresses presenting an architecture quite new and of no formal meaning. The ground below is forgotten, only this queer, beautiful but unintelligible island exists. Such an edifice flickering in the reddish reflection of London's fires must have been a mermorable sight - with around the black sea of the streets dotted here and there with fires, like pools of red phosphorus.'
Though I think that a sense of survival is what we now crave, but only because we are safe.
I buy a card of that 'Keep calm and carry on' poster and put it up in the hall way by the door. It is a flashpoint for all of us, late, putting shoes on, my eldest son often oblivious to the real demands of time and not his own concentration of interests. 'Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!' I shout. But then seeing it there, I feel I insult the real message. All I have to do is get two boys to get their trainers on and their hair brushed and to school on time. The real 'Keep calm and carry on' is stoic but terrible, an oblivion, a self medication to the horror of surrounding death and destruction. The thin, neutral typeface, so strong, so resililent. My mum and dad grew up during the war. I have always felt they trained me for another, by my lack of complaining, grin and bear it, potential bravery. A very polite put up and shut up. But it has made me weak, not strong. For the strong things I felt have not always been said. I got used to not saying them.
I admit defeat, I haven't gone to Westminster Abbey, I haven't gone to Westminster Archive - I haven't had time. I have decided this time just to describe - here, what I have seen, the bits and pieces.
Finally, I was crossing the road on the way to pick up a parcel from the sorting office - just round the back of House of Fraser, and I saw something glittering on the road. I thought for a minute it was a dropped brooch with a central glinting jewel, and even when I was close I still thought it was a brooch with a jewel but there on the tarmac was the head of a pigeon, about the size of my thumb pad, his eye open and bright, just lying there, looking up, dead, decapitated, as if from no where.
Monday, 12 July 2010
Christ Church, Westminster
I have started to feel like a detective but I'm not sure of what.
Christ Church. No longer a church at all. Initially called the New Chapel built 1651, then demolished and re built in 1843, a chapel of ease to St Margaret's. The church bombed out in the war, now only a garden, the fragment of a burial ground left. It is a scrap of grass where office workers eat sandwiches and fat pigeons eat their crumbs. Alongside, the drinking homeless gather like greasy, injured birds. But this morning on the tube going to work, just when I thought this blog wasn't working - no one reads it, I wasn't brave enough to get into churches most of the time, this was no longer a church, unexpectedly this is what I read:
'In the early morning of the 17th many incendiaries dropped on and around the Christ Church, Victoria. Prompt action from wardens and other helpers extinguished most of these, and incidentally saved the tower- but above the altar there was fire on the roof that could not be reached. The Fire Service was summoned, with a call for high ladders. Meanwhile under the burning roof the heavy embers were falling , wardens - including women - risked themeselves to extricate the Bible and altar pieces. But by chance an ember dropped into an organ - setting up instantly a great blaze. Then the main roof caught fire. The Fire Service arrived and set to work at a height with one of their 100-foot turntable ladders - those extendable steel ladders complete with hose that are commonly called water towers'. For a time the sky above seemed quiet. Then the urgent spasmodic note of a Luftwaffe engine was heard, and a single plane circled above the church. It seemed to retreat, and then to come nosing back again. At last, as if scenting its chosen flower, it dived. A small high explosive came down to its horrid nest on the precarious water-tower reaching up towards it. One fireman was killed and five others received terrible injuries that resulted in death' 'The Blitz, Westminster at War.' William Sansom.
How terrifying - not just the bombing, but the circling, the coming back, the finishing of the job. Watching this happen. Feeling completely helpless.
Piecing things together I went to Westminster City Archive, just to see, just to start. I wanted to know who had lived in our flat. To find out about this place before it became our life. Coming out of the lift on the fifth floor, into a quiet room with sky lights, and view of Westminster rooftops tucked behind bookshelves. No food or drink. The peace of only pencils.
Holding my breath I turned the pages of the 1918 electoral register. It was the earliest they had. I had wanted to start at the beginning. But here, I feel like I am inviting unknown guests to live alongside us.
1918 Amy and Robert John Smith
1939 Vera May Smith and Richard Alfred Smith
1946 Harriet and Harry Powley
1949 Harriett and Harry Powley
Suddenly all of us jostling together, all of us trying to use the bathroom that probably did not exist. All of us calling this place home. But perhaps that is just what history is.
There have been a lot of discoveries, I am starting to become obsessed. Our street - ' Duck Lane ( now St. Matthew Street) was identified as one of the worst slum areas during the eighteenth century- named the ‘Devil’s Acre’ by Charles Dickens. Our block of flats built on that site 1885 (alongside another built in 1860), nearly the first social housing built in London (the world?) I keep thinking of the first tennants. How proud and pleased they must have been. Nearby - another garden, another park just near the boys schools with big gravestones stacked against a wall known as 'England's foulest graveyard.' Bodies looted, pistol armed guards stationed. Am I cramming too much information in here? I have started finding all this out and it is coming thick and fast.
But writing the names, sitting here in this solid walled, cleverly designed small flat, the living room tucked like a secret nest in the centre, doors opening all the way round so that it is possible to run either way shouting 'meet you there' as a game, I feel like I'm summoning something, some proprietorial eyes on this home I keep, some of the decisions I have made. These are people's relatives, people's friends. I sleep in their bedroom. I sit at this computer and write. I clean and clean and clean the same space they cleaned. Dust tucked in the same corners. It is a profound revelation to realise how safe they would think my life was. How easy. Though perhaps also how nonchalant of my safety I have acted, how careless I have been.
Did the Smith's keep the flat for generations - only to move out in or after the war? I don't know yet how to trace them but I would like to try. Another big bomb went off on our street,11th November just after 4pm a cold drizzly day, wiping out a printing works killing 25. The rescue operation took 4 days.
I buy a 1755 map of Westminster on my way out of the Archive Library. A copy of a beautiful hand inked drawing showing flourished curly writing and a large village clustered to the Thames. It cost £2.50. I have already maps from 1869, 1894, and 1916 but they look like the London we know. With no edges. But this map shows New Chapel at the edge of marshland at the border of etched human activity. Just round the corner from the workhouse. Human endeavour creeping on, building more, reclaiming the land.
At night when we sleep in this hot weather, marshland mosquitoes unheard, unknown bite our cheeks, and toes and ankles.
Christ Church. No longer a church at all. Initially called the New Chapel built 1651, then demolished and re built in 1843, a chapel of ease to St Margaret's. The church bombed out in the war, now only a garden, the fragment of a burial ground left. It is a scrap of grass where office workers eat sandwiches and fat pigeons eat their crumbs. Alongside, the drinking homeless gather like greasy, injured birds. But this morning on the tube going to work, just when I thought this blog wasn't working - no one reads it, I wasn't brave enough to get into churches most of the time, this was no longer a church, unexpectedly this is what I read:
'In the early morning of the 17th many incendiaries dropped on and around the Christ Church, Victoria. Prompt action from wardens and other helpers extinguished most of these, and incidentally saved the tower- but above the altar there was fire on the roof that could not be reached. The Fire Service was summoned, with a call for high ladders. Meanwhile under the burning roof the heavy embers were falling , wardens - including women - risked themeselves to extricate the Bible and altar pieces. But by chance an ember dropped into an organ - setting up instantly a great blaze. Then the main roof caught fire. The Fire Service arrived and set to work at a height with one of their 100-foot turntable ladders - those extendable steel ladders complete with hose that are commonly called water towers'. For a time the sky above seemed quiet. Then the urgent spasmodic note of a Luftwaffe engine was heard, and a single plane circled above the church. It seemed to retreat, and then to come nosing back again. At last, as if scenting its chosen flower, it dived. A small high explosive came down to its horrid nest on the precarious water-tower reaching up towards it. One fireman was killed and five others received terrible injuries that resulted in death' 'The Blitz, Westminster at War.' William Sansom.
How terrifying - not just the bombing, but the circling, the coming back, the finishing of the job. Watching this happen. Feeling completely helpless.
Piecing things together I went to Westminster City Archive, just to see, just to start. I wanted to know who had lived in our flat. To find out about this place before it became our life. Coming out of the lift on the fifth floor, into a quiet room with sky lights, and view of Westminster rooftops tucked behind bookshelves. No food or drink. The peace of only pencils.
Holding my breath I turned the pages of the 1918 electoral register. It was the earliest they had. I had wanted to start at the beginning. But here, I feel like I am inviting unknown guests to live alongside us.
1918 Amy and Robert John Smith
1939 Vera May Smith and Richard Alfred Smith
1946 Harriet and Harry Powley
1949 Harriett and Harry Powley
Suddenly all of us jostling together, all of us trying to use the bathroom that probably did not exist. All of us calling this place home. But perhaps that is just what history is.
There have been a lot of discoveries, I am starting to become obsessed. Our street - ' Duck Lane ( now St. Matthew Street) was identified as one of the worst slum areas during the eighteenth century- named the ‘Devil’s Acre’ by Charles Dickens. Our block of flats built on that site 1885 (alongside another built in 1860), nearly the first social housing built in London (the world?) I keep thinking of the first tennants. How proud and pleased they must have been. Nearby - another garden, another park just near the boys schools with big gravestones stacked against a wall known as 'England's foulest graveyard.' Bodies looted, pistol armed guards stationed. Am I cramming too much information in here? I have started finding all this out and it is coming thick and fast.
But writing the names, sitting here in this solid walled, cleverly designed small flat, the living room tucked like a secret nest in the centre, doors opening all the way round so that it is possible to run either way shouting 'meet you there' as a game, I feel like I'm summoning something, some proprietorial eyes on this home I keep, some of the decisions I have made. These are people's relatives, people's friends. I sleep in their bedroom. I sit at this computer and write. I clean and clean and clean the same space they cleaned. Dust tucked in the same corners. It is a profound revelation to realise how safe they would think my life was. How easy. Though perhaps also how nonchalant of my safety I have acted, how careless I have been.
Did the Smith's keep the flat for generations - only to move out in or after the war? I don't know yet how to trace them but I would like to try. Another big bomb went off on our street,11th November just after 4pm a cold drizzly day, wiping out a printing works killing 25. The rescue operation took 4 days.
I buy a 1755 map of Westminster on my way out of the Archive Library. A copy of a beautiful hand inked drawing showing flourished curly writing and a large village clustered to the Thames. It cost £2.50. I have already maps from 1869, 1894, and 1916 but they look like the London we know. With no edges. But this map shows New Chapel at the edge of marshland at the border of etched human activity. Just round the corner from the workhouse. Human endeavour creeping on, building more, reclaiming the land.
At night when we sleep in this hot weather, marshland mosquitoes unheard, unknown bite our cheeks, and toes and ankles.
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