We have a new hamster. Sparky. Though we all keep calling him Buddy by accident. I had forgotten quite how anxious getting a new hamster makes me. Though probably the first time it coincided with a real low patch when I wasn't sleeping very well and I would wake to hear the poor caged thing running in its wheel. I am slightly phobic about hamster teeth and wee hamster hearts in their thin ribbed bodies. It just never seems much of a life. Though Buddy adapted reasonably well, getting a bit plump and weary, patient with the children's fingers and that crazy perspex ball. Then died young in his sleep, curled in kapok.
Who would of known how different hamsters could be? Or how a name picked so quick can hold so true. Sparky is fast and bright and intent on escape. He stands on the top green plastic platform within the cage and stares me in the eye with wild, brave reproach. He has an us and them attitude. When it is just me and him, the children asleep, I talk to him gently, sing-song like I did when the children were babies and he listens for a while and then skitters away. Though my eldest says sadly 'I don't think he wants to stay in our family' as we watch Sparky attempt to chew a Shawshank Redemption hole in the side of a cardboard box we have put him in to play in. 'He will.' I say. But for once I think I am lying. Exexdh is the only one daring enough to handle him and even then Sparky spins out of his hands like a bat in flight, legs stretched to land. Tonight, I come home from a concert, riding my Boris Bike around the wall of police vans, helicopters overhead, to find out Sparky bit Dad into his nail. Everyone looks grave. He has a beautiful face, big ears very inquisitive but no one wants to touch him. Strangely it is me that puts my hand in the cage, sorts out his food, puts his wheel into position despite my phobias. I corner PSM's ten year old son for advice in the playground, and he says, just let him run over your hand in the cage under the sawdust. Exexdh suggests gloves.
This Quaker meeting house is not open every day but will be open for a meeting on Tuesday lunchtime the sign says as I cycle past on a BB. I am meeting U,OL for a coffee, unexpectedly, on monday morning, and was hoping to visit it afterwards. Though I feel I look like I am stage managing things when I arrive late, pushing the bike, for I can't find a docking bay. As if I have become only the character that I write about. I am in my gold trimmed coat, red tights, with a bike. I have to phone my brother ( also a BB fan ) to find out where to park the bike. Yes, he says. You are in a Boris Bike black hole. But he works out the nearest place to park it and I do.
U,OL and I go to a model shop in Holborn - he wants to find polystyrene for a music case he is making, I want trees as stocking fillers for the boys to decorate a board we have made for battles. The inane detail and precise scale of the miniature world, is beautiful - a minute model of a house being built, a parade of terrace houses, fake moss, intricate trees- all of it fascinating but expensive. Another world that can be made, contained.
I have built this up to be my love story. But it isn't. Or is, because there is a lot of love in it. But I think it is just an old sad story of lives not going quite right, of people making bad choices, of timing just missing. Though part of me still wants a fairy tale ending. I want an easy doorway to open to happiness. To be a heroine to someone. But we have become different people. When we sit and drink our coffee, we are mainly silent. Though when we do talk about things we both nearly cry. Though for different reasons, we don't explain.
On Tuesday I ride up again on the Boris bike. The tarpaulin seems to be coming down around the peace camp in Parliament Square. Though I notice tents have appeared on the pavement by the ministry of defence. I do think I have come along way, as I just walk in to the Meeting House, twisting the tricky handle on the polished door, nodding to a man with a Roy Hattersley mouth, full of teeth and spit, 'yes, for the meeting house' I nod, and walk into the meeting itself. I feel no trepidation only purpose.
I sit on a simple chair in a beautiful proportioned room with a parquet floor. There is in the centre on a table a vase of daffodils under a warm lit light shade, some books placed alongside. When I walk in and sit down there are about eighteen people. And we sit in silence. A few more join. Opening the door, tip toeing in. Opposite where I sit is a huge tall oblong window looking out to bamboo. I am very happy to be there.
On R4 I had caught a scrap about middle aged women becoming increasingly attracted to retreats of silence with an interview with a woman who had gone for 30 days ( I think ) of no talking . She said how easy it was to feel irritation with others despite the silence. Sitting here I ponder it. Really, I think, looking at the beauty of the daffodils, wondering about spring, where they had been flown from, then out over the heads of people on chairs to the bamboo in the grey light outside, looking again at the man with the beard, the corduroy of the jacket infront of me, I can't imagine that. Then a woman in a bright knitted hat creeps in, with a jangly bag, and a cup of tea. A cup of tea! Any minute now I am going to hear slurping noises I think. Any minute now. I glower. Though she must be practised because there are none.
The only ornamentation to this lovely room is a clock. Sometimes 5 minutes of silence goes fast and sometimes slowly.
I think these things too. Can I sit here and not think about God, not about Jesus, what are the rules, I like it here, then a man with a long beard sighs quite heavily, I think about meditation but how that always has noise, a voice saying what to do, I think I would love to live in this room, I could put a kitchen in that corner and a platform for beds. I notice a small amplification system high up by the top recessed windows. Then look at the daffodils. Then the bamboo. A man in a red jumper stands and speaks. He says he went to a meeting recently about William Blake 'Jerusalem', and that they talked about Jesus walking here on this island. My heart sinks slightly that this peace is going to be distorted by nutty talk. He said that nothing was known of Christ's life between being a child and his thirties and it was quite possible he came as a merchant with Joseph of Arimathea. He said he himself, the man in the red jumper ( not Jesus! That would be quite a claim. ) was from Preston in Lancashire and he said that his father said the name came from Priest town and the Phoenicians came there. He said the message was Jerusalem could be built anywhere and within us. And that Salam meant peace. Salam is what I hear the mothers say every morning and every afternoon at the school gates. I thought it was just hello. Peace. It is a lovely thing to say. When he sits. There is still just silence. I see that the woman moves her cup to her face. As if for warmth. Here in this Central London room there is virtually no noise. No clue to lunchtime feet outside.
At the end we shake hands. As announcements are read out. I leave. A kind man in the corduroy signalling that it is ok to go. He waves silently to me as I close the door quietly. I think he means, take what you need.
I look for history about the place but there isn't much. The quakers in Westminster have met weekly since 1655. Even reading these words, I understand for the first time that all churches are connected by people showing up week after week after week. That is what makes the church. They turn up, they come. Former Meeting Houses were in Pall Mall, the Strand and near to Westminster Abbey. This building was bombed in the war and then re built in the 1950s
I read too,
'True silence ... is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.'
William Penn, 1699
'It is important that the waiting in silence and the listening are done as a group. The people taking part are trying to become something more than just a collection of individuals; they want to become aware of being part of a 'we', rather than just a solitary 'I'.'
Also, Patrick Newley's (the soho writer, raconteur and agent to the underbelly of the British entertainment scene) mother became warden of the meeting house in the 70s and he transformed part of it into a theatrical agency and PR office, acting chiefly for drag queens and a crony of the Krays.
Then the next day, the wednesday I go to, 'Towards Silence' John Taverner at St Martin's in the Field. I had picked up a leaflet when I had visited before, this concert part of an inter faith day of quiet within the church. I had wanted to take U,OL, with some plan of taking him to good things, to revive his spirit. But he couldn't come or chose not to. Though also I think later that isn't my job. He has the choice to revive himself.
Then I think about the chattiness of my whole project. The noise of me me me, me - on and on and on. Mainly I like to be very quiet about myself. Private. I have been surprised and mildly horrified by this insistence of telling, of attempting to tell my truth. Quite often, even writing it, I think SHUT UP, SHUT UP, STOP IT. Though strangely it feels like a silent thing, a black hole - this blog. I write, it sits, suspended, almost no where. But people are reading it. I have admittedly started sending it out, to people I know, but before that, I finally found the stats button, and there were readers. I was breathless.
Years ago I went on the tube to dinner at a friend's flat in Elephant and Castle. I think U,OL had just left for Russia and I was bereft. I sat in a nearly empty carriage alone. A mother and son got on and the mother, tall, very black, probably Ethiopian, with high proud cheekbones sat next to me, very close, swaying as if asleep and the child, as if in the same dream, sat on my knee, but not like he knew it was on my knee, but like he thought I was a chair or more exactly that I wasn't there. For some reason, as if they were sleepwalkers, which even now, I almost think they were, I knew I mustn't make a sound, mustn't disturb them in anyway though I think I held the child. So we sat tight together, not making a sound until they got off. Which they did. I remember thinking I must be dead, or not visible to them. I don't know. But I think now, we were just alongside, some strange trust together. And I almost think that is what this is like. A quiet space where I pour all these words. If you read it you are just alongside, with your own concerns that might, even briefly, match.
Anyhow, it is the day of the student demonstrations. The TV on at work is agog for violence. Which unfolds. A police van trashed, a beautiful girl with an old fashioned Anne Frank face talking eloquently for non violence. When I leave work, I think I will be able to go to the concert and then scout round on the way home to see what is going on. I am almost rubbing my hands in anticipation that I will have so much to write about. But as I walk up from Embankment tube against the tide of office workers, and into Trafalgar Square, I can hear chanting and dirty youths, like foot soldiers from an old, old battle, storm through the street, staves made from the spine of placards. They are not like the plush Millbank lot I saw, they have cheap dirty trainers and violent, hardened faces, they shout 'Don't visit London it is shit.' for they presume we are tourists, walking past on the pavements. And their voices are high on the new power of their old rage. Behind their stampede a fire has been lit in the street out of bollards and cardboard and rubbish is strewn. It is something medieval, a fire tossed casually but dangerously into the road. The traffic like a startled horse, nervy from the flames, holds back. And I, I don't know what to do, so I walk into the church, show my solo ticket and sit down, restricted view, behind a pillar for the concert.
It is calm and peaceful, full and plush. Behind, a man talks of icons, the British Museum, religious theologians his Kindle and a chapter in the Brothers Karamazof by Dostoevsky that he has downloaded (just the one chapter), because it is a philosophical debate of how things are. I just love gizmos he says. It is like an interior and exterior experience because all these things that seem fine and good and of wealth to the soul and spirit, seem also to depend on a lot of people not being there. Outside, even when the beautiful high, unaccompanied singing starts, harmonies of voice soaring, everyone intent, we can hear a steady angry chant and the pitch and squeak of the police amplified by megaphones. Blue lights revolve in the big windows of the church. 'Towards silence.' We have been asked not to clap when the concert that includes a tibetan bowl rung like a bell, ends to preserve the conversation with silence. I don't know. I enjoy it but I don't love it though I keep quiet, leaving, as the audience like a congregation flood out into Trafalgar Square, Police vans parked up. Helicopters overhead. Where the fire had been lit, there are more police vans packed like bricks and beyond that protesters that I can't see. I cycle back, nosing my way round the back of the ministry of defense, trying to find a short cut, trying to get a good look around. A policeman stood apart from his gang in a van, nearly lets me cycle down the last bit of Whitehall, but then says, 'Love, they have been breaking glass, You don't want to rip your tyres. A pause. 'Boris's tyres.' We laugh
This is my personal experience of the Tory cuts. At our school the Holiday play schemes no longer exist and probably after christmas the after school care play-centres will be cut. It doesn't work. Doesn't make sense. People who work. Who pay for this childcare. Will not have it. It may be that this childcare is funded, helped along. But no one is having a manicure while their children play Connect 4 in a bright lit school hall. They have jobs. They work really hard. They are trying, really trying, not to be on benefits. When exexdh had no unsupervised access to the children I had 7 minutes to do a 15 minute journey between the tube and the school playcentre after work. I did a soldiers run, jogging to the count of 15 and walking 15, dignity gone, slightly desperate, very tired.
I would never be violent but I am angry.
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Sunday, 14 November 2010
Orange Street Congregational Church
Standing trying to shelter from the thin, cold rain in a narrow patch of dry pavement with the puffed-up, dirty pigeons opposite the Orange Street Congregational Church I text my friend to say I wish I was a normal person. She replies she is about to go into her dark cupboard under the stairs and she wishes she was a normal person too. And ps. her girlfriend has gone to TK Maxx. And despite our wishes I think we are both relieved that we are not there.
The boys are away with exexdh and his mum and I feel like an outsider within the day.
It is Remembrance Sunday and I have walked up and past the cenotaph. Stood silent wearing my poppy near Westminster tube. Hurrying, trying to get nearer to the war memorial as Big Ben started chiming 11am, a women's cockney voice came out of a souvenir stall saying 'stand still'. I did. Looking up to Westminster Abbey's rooves and thinking about the bombs raining down. Gathered crowds stood quiet. There is something really powerful to the collective silence. Though I wonder if it is possible to record all the inane thoughts in those few minutes. I find my mind wandering to baking bread and X factor. Then as the silence is coming to an end a South American lady asks me 'Can you tell me what is going on?' I shake my head. She stands, her head on one side, puzzled, staring into my mute face. Finally people begin to pull themselves out of the stillness and I say and my voice seems really loud 'It is the Remembrance Day silence.'
Then because all the roads are blocked off I weave up behind the Ministry of Defense, through narrow streets I have never been before. Over Trafalgar Square. Under the ship in the bottle sculpture on the fouth plinth. Did you ever see the Mark Wallinger Ecce Homo 1999? It was the most beautiful thing. A life sized christ on the plinth, naked apart from a loin cloth and a crown of thorns, his hands tied. Made tiny by the scale of everything surrounding. A vulnerable human standing still and quiet. I have a little picture of it in my bedroom.
'I wanted to show him as an ordinary human being.' Mark Wallinger said.
I think Mark Wallinger is my celebrity crush. (You see perhaps how ill suited I am to work on a celebrity magazine?) I love the humour and humanity to his work. I met him years ago on a Lord Snowdon photo shoot. Should I say well known royal photographer? I'm not sure. I used to work for a Sunday supplement that used Lord Snowdon a lot. It was my job (among other things) to help get the props, help the shoots run smoothly. Snowdon wanted a life sized model of a horse for this shoot. Though I've just remembered he insisted everyone call them 'sittings'. This was before the internet and I remember phoning round every prop house, every lead I had for a horse model. I think it was probably two days work before, just in the nick of time I secured one, arranged for it to be delivered to the studio.
It was around the time of the deterioration of my relationship with U,OL. He was going to Russia. I wanted to get married. Like magnets repelling both desires could not meet. Now I think how young I was, and how silly. But the night before the Mark Wallinger shoot we split up. Finally honest with each other, almost close again as we agreed to part, but we could not sleep, both weeping throughout the night. But a car was booked to take me to the shoot in the morning (I can't remember why - but at this time, with this magazine though not paid very well there were these grand gestures.) and I leave, still weeping. Though this wasn't in fact the end. I think there was another couple of tries before he finally left for Russia.
Anyhow, red eyed and exhausted I arrive at the studio. The huge plastic moulded horse is there. Snowdon is making asides about Mark Wallinger behind his back, saying he is a bit stiff and his paintings are boring, then he decides after a few shots of the artist in jockey silks with the horse that he wants to try the shoot outside. I have one of those out of body moments as I carry a surprisingly light, life sized model of a horse over a zebra crossing, followed by Snowdon limping and Mark Wallinger in jockey gear, my heart broken. When the shoot finishes Mark offers me a lift back to the office, but the few hours of smiling and charm, have been enough for me and I want to have a good cry on the tube before getting back to work. At that point, I don't really like his paintings either. I find them a bit stiff. So I say, no thank you, it will be quicker on the tube. Now I wonder what we would have talked about. Strangely, I imagine him offering me a boiled sweet.
Today, turning the corner into Orange Street the lights are on within the small church and a sign above the door is lit up. Good. I think. It is another old fashioned, smelly looking church, though the building is beautiful, a simple, white, low, one storey chapel. Outside there is a plaque that details the history of the site as a huguenot chapel built in 1686. There are also glass covered notice boards with long tracts about the state of the world and the state of the United Reformed church and some signs of notice of service in chinese. The second coming of Christ is imminent it says and we must repent. I open the door and stand in the narrow porch I can hear the sermon, an angry voice talking about peace. It is a little bit musty smelling but not too bad. I wait there wondering what to do. I can't march in while the service is taking place, so I decide to wait outside and watch for people coming out of the service and then hope I can slip in.
I feel like a private detective standing on the corner, by the back door of the National Gallery in the drizzle waiting. Cold, I walk round the block a few times, up into Leicester Square and back round. I am standing there for about an hour, and when I hear music straining out of the building I think oh good they are nearly finished. But still no one comes out. Then a chinese woman goes in through the door, dithers in the porch and enters. I am so cold I follow her. Though I can hear organ music playing and I am still worried that I am bursting in on something. 'Would it be possible just to have a quick look at the church?' I say smiling. Strangely the tiny church is empty, neat dark pews in rows, only a man, his face hidden behind a curtain playing the organ. Where did they go? I think. But perhaps I missed the congregation leaving when I went round the block. Or maybe there hadn't been a congregation and the man behind the curtain had been shouting about peace on his own.
The walls are bright orange red, and the organ at the end is ornate. I like the simpleness of the space, the old fashioned scrub of it. Though when I look on the internet there are homophobic rants that make my skin crawl. There is a very precise mind working away patching the bible to our world. Another tract which I barely understand is about the israelites, and their ancestors, including the royal family.
The chinese woman who I followed welcomes me kindly but suspiciously. Did I read about the church in a tourist guide? She asks. I say no, I live near here. There is about to be a chinese service she says, the organ still playing, the man covered by the curtain, but if I want to come again, I should come come at 11am on a sunday. Is there a leaflet I could have, I ask but she says no. Though on a revolving stand there are a lot of booklets to buy.
The original Huguenot church was called the Temple of Leicester Fields because it was then, as described before in the St Martins in the Field blog, a place only of fields. Huguenots were the french protestants, who escaped persecution by the Roman Catholics after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 which had given them religious freedom. Many went to Holland, some to South Africa, even America, and here, thousands to England - in this area and also Spitalfields. They were skilled people, noblemen, intellectuals and craftsmen bringing silk weaving to London. That original church was much bigger than the tiny chapel now. Also I remember looking at old pictures for St Martins in the Fields and realising that this place was initially only the outskirts, along the route between the city and Westminster, a place where religious freedom could be practised, new communities could be built. Sir Isaac Newton lived in the house adjacent and owned by the church. I just looked it up to find out Newton moved to London in 1696, and that he was an MP and also the warden of the Royal Mint. All that and a physicist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and theologian. Now I have just found an inventory of everything in this house (even though he wasn't living in it) when he died.
http://www.isaacnewton.org.uk/ntheman/NTMinv
how completely fascinating - a description of a man by his things - his feather bolsters, his sword, forty articles in Dutch.
At the time of the Wesley's the church passed from French protestantism to English protestantism, and the hymn written by the then minister Toplady 'Rock of Ages' was first sung here. In 1787 badly in need of repair it closed, and then passed from the Church of England to the Non Conformists becoming a Congregationalist Church. Just before WW1 Westminster council passed a demolition order first on the church and then on Newton's house. The congregationalists led a nomadic life until 1925 when the council leased most of the site for a library and a temporary chapel was built, the building that still stands.
Walking home, there are old soldiers everywhere and it is really raining. Outside a pub I see two pearly kings drinking with a Chelsea Pensioner. My umbrella is broken and I stop and buy a 'I love London' brolly. It makes me happy.
Amen
The boys are away with exexdh and his mum and I feel like an outsider within the day.
It is Remembrance Sunday and I have walked up and past the cenotaph. Stood silent wearing my poppy near Westminster tube. Hurrying, trying to get nearer to the war memorial as Big Ben started chiming 11am, a women's cockney voice came out of a souvenir stall saying 'stand still'. I did. Looking up to Westminster Abbey's rooves and thinking about the bombs raining down. Gathered crowds stood quiet. There is something really powerful to the collective silence. Though I wonder if it is possible to record all the inane thoughts in those few minutes. I find my mind wandering to baking bread and X factor. Then as the silence is coming to an end a South American lady asks me 'Can you tell me what is going on?' I shake my head. She stands, her head on one side, puzzled, staring into my mute face. Finally people begin to pull themselves out of the stillness and I say and my voice seems really loud 'It is the Remembrance Day silence.'
Then because all the roads are blocked off I weave up behind the Ministry of Defense, through narrow streets I have never been before. Over Trafalgar Square. Under the ship in the bottle sculpture on the fouth plinth. Did you ever see the Mark Wallinger Ecce Homo 1999? It was the most beautiful thing. A life sized christ on the plinth, naked apart from a loin cloth and a crown of thorns, his hands tied. Made tiny by the scale of everything surrounding. A vulnerable human standing still and quiet. I have a little picture of it in my bedroom.
'I wanted to show him as an ordinary human being.' Mark Wallinger said.
I think Mark Wallinger is my celebrity crush. (You see perhaps how ill suited I am to work on a celebrity magazine?) I love the humour and humanity to his work. I met him years ago on a Lord Snowdon photo shoot. Should I say well known royal photographer? I'm not sure. I used to work for a Sunday supplement that used Lord Snowdon a lot. It was my job (among other things) to help get the props, help the shoots run smoothly. Snowdon wanted a life sized model of a horse for this shoot. Though I've just remembered he insisted everyone call them 'sittings'. This was before the internet and I remember phoning round every prop house, every lead I had for a horse model. I think it was probably two days work before, just in the nick of time I secured one, arranged for it to be delivered to the studio.
It was around the time of the deterioration of my relationship with U,OL. He was going to Russia. I wanted to get married. Like magnets repelling both desires could not meet. Now I think how young I was, and how silly. But the night before the Mark Wallinger shoot we split up. Finally honest with each other, almost close again as we agreed to part, but we could not sleep, both weeping throughout the night. But a car was booked to take me to the shoot in the morning (I can't remember why - but at this time, with this magazine though not paid very well there were these grand gestures.) and I leave, still weeping. Though this wasn't in fact the end. I think there was another couple of tries before he finally left for Russia.
Anyhow, red eyed and exhausted I arrive at the studio. The huge plastic moulded horse is there. Snowdon is making asides about Mark Wallinger behind his back, saying he is a bit stiff and his paintings are boring, then he decides after a few shots of the artist in jockey silks with the horse that he wants to try the shoot outside. I have one of those out of body moments as I carry a surprisingly light, life sized model of a horse over a zebra crossing, followed by Snowdon limping and Mark Wallinger in jockey gear, my heart broken. When the shoot finishes Mark offers me a lift back to the office, but the few hours of smiling and charm, have been enough for me and I want to have a good cry on the tube before getting back to work. At that point, I don't really like his paintings either. I find them a bit stiff. So I say, no thank you, it will be quicker on the tube. Now I wonder what we would have talked about. Strangely, I imagine him offering me a boiled sweet.
Today, turning the corner into Orange Street the lights are on within the small church and a sign above the door is lit up. Good. I think. It is another old fashioned, smelly looking church, though the building is beautiful, a simple, white, low, one storey chapel. Outside there is a plaque that details the history of the site as a huguenot chapel built in 1686. There are also glass covered notice boards with long tracts about the state of the world and the state of the United Reformed church and some signs of notice of service in chinese. The second coming of Christ is imminent it says and we must repent. I open the door and stand in the narrow porch I can hear the sermon, an angry voice talking about peace. It is a little bit musty smelling but not too bad. I wait there wondering what to do. I can't march in while the service is taking place, so I decide to wait outside and watch for people coming out of the service and then hope I can slip in.
I feel like a private detective standing on the corner, by the back door of the National Gallery in the drizzle waiting. Cold, I walk round the block a few times, up into Leicester Square and back round. I am standing there for about an hour, and when I hear music straining out of the building I think oh good they are nearly finished. But still no one comes out. Then a chinese woman goes in through the door, dithers in the porch and enters. I am so cold I follow her. Though I can hear organ music playing and I am still worried that I am bursting in on something. 'Would it be possible just to have a quick look at the church?' I say smiling. Strangely the tiny church is empty, neat dark pews in rows, only a man, his face hidden behind a curtain playing the organ. Where did they go? I think. But perhaps I missed the congregation leaving when I went round the block. Or maybe there hadn't been a congregation and the man behind the curtain had been shouting about peace on his own.
The walls are bright orange red, and the organ at the end is ornate. I like the simpleness of the space, the old fashioned scrub of it. Though when I look on the internet there are homophobic rants that make my skin crawl. There is a very precise mind working away patching the bible to our world. Another tract which I barely understand is about the israelites, and their ancestors, including the royal family.
The chinese woman who I followed welcomes me kindly but suspiciously. Did I read about the church in a tourist guide? She asks. I say no, I live near here. There is about to be a chinese service she says, the organ still playing, the man covered by the curtain, but if I want to come again, I should come come at 11am on a sunday. Is there a leaflet I could have, I ask but she says no. Though on a revolving stand there are a lot of booklets to buy.
The original Huguenot church was called the Temple of Leicester Fields because it was then, as described before in the St Martins in the Field blog, a place only of fields. Huguenots were the french protestants, who escaped persecution by the Roman Catholics after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 which had given them religious freedom. Many went to Holland, some to South Africa, even America, and here, thousands to England - in this area and also Spitalfields. They were skilled people, noblemen, intellectuals and craftsmen bringing silk weaving to London. That original church was much bigger than the tiny chapel now. Also I remember looking at old pictures for St Martins in the Fields and realising that this place was initially only the outskirts, along the route between the city and Westminster, a place where religious freedom could be practised, new communities could be built. Sir Isaac Newton lived in the house adjacent and owned by the church. I just looked it up to find out Newton moved to London in 1696, and that he was an MP and also the warden of the Royal Mint. All that and a physicist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and theologian. Now I have just found an inventory of everything in this house (even though he wasn't living in it) when he died.
http://www.isaacnewton.org.uk/ntheman/NTMinv
how completely fascinating - a description of a man by his things - his feather bolsters, his sword, forty articles in Dutch.
At the time of the Wesley's the church passed from French protestantism to English protestantism, and the hymn written by the then minister Toplady 'Rock of Ages' was first sung here. In 1787 badly in need of repair it closed, and then passed from the Church of England to the Non Conformists becoming a Congregationalist Church. Just before WW1 Westminster council passed a demolition order first on the church and then on Newton's house. The congregationalists led a nomadic life until 1925 when the council leased most of the site for a library and a temporary chapel was built, the building that still stands.
Walking home, there are old soldiers everywhere and it is really raining. Outside a pub I see two pearly kings drinking with a Chelsea Pensioner. My umbrella is broken and I stop and buy a 'I love London' brolly. It makes me happy.
Amen
Monday, 8 November 2010
St James the Less, Vauxhall Bridge Rd
St James the Less stands dark, slightly foreboding, set back from Vauxhall Bridge Rd, between an estate pub and a building site. Litter and leaves catch in eddies in the expanse of paving stones between the grimy main road and grimy church. I walk past once in the week but it isn't open and the only notice is the times of the services on Sunday.
So I go again on the Sunday. I aim to get there for 10.30 and have a look round before the service starts at 11am. I am taking the boys for lunch at my mum and dads with fireworks afterwards, so exexdh is to have them briefly, before we set out. But I am late. I hear 11 strike on Big Ben as I walk down Vauxhall Bridge Rd, a bit flustered, very slightly hungover, having thought I was being clever and taking a short cut but having gone the wrong way - though surprised to have done so, for I live here and know my way really well. Surprised too to hear the clock so clearly from this distance. I am starting to have to travel a bit further to visit churches but I can still hear Big Ben. I get as far as the porch under the tall four storey tower, with it's patterned brick arches, and intricately carved doorway and the wooden door open to a glass one where I can see a man standing just the other side, with a hymn book ready to hand out. I can make out people in pews and a large lit over head screen, and an unexpected richness of mosaic, and brickwork. But I can't sit through the service without being really late for my mum and dad's so I have to turn round and leave. But it feels unsatisfactory, I could see there was something fine to the detail of the church
My youngest son, (which seems as scripted as U'OL coming back on the scene), has started to demand to pray. He is five. He has been to church possibly, twice in his life, goes to a predominantly muslim school with no obvious religious worship, though they did a nativity the first year Gordon Brown's son was in reception ( the year before my youngest attended, and the year after the eldest started ), and beyond slipping out to visit churches twice I have barely mentioned my church visiting project at home. He started asking about two weeks ago, but I couldn't face mentioning it, it just seemed too much like an invented plot. Though years ago he had a dream he had stigmata. Of course he didn't know the word, but he described it exactly. Which scared the hell out of me. Anyhow we have started doing the Lord's Prayer each night. The old words incredibly soothing to speak out loud. And the youngest kneels and closes his eyes, beautiful in his pyjamas. The eldest initially sarcastic, has since asked for a prayer of trust. I find a prayer by Ignatius Loyola 1491-1556.
Saying the words, I wish I could believe something. I can see it would be good for us.
But in the back of the car, through the stop starting of traffic lights at the outskirts of London with a wildly inappropriate CD that we all adore - Leadbelly, Buddy Holly, The Damned, White Stripes, The Clash - the youngest sings 'I want to be a Christian, I want to go to Church' to the tune of I'm so bored of the USA. I wince at the combination. Though I promise I will take him.
Later, I look up St James the Less, to find out it is a celebrated Gothic Victorian Church. There is only a little bit of history - it was built by three sisters in memory of their father the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol between 1856 - 61 in one of the poorest areas. But there is an immense amount of architectural information - designed by G.E Street, a victorian gothic architect of note, he employed the best craftsmen for this, his first church in London- Thomas Earp for stone carving and Clayton and Bell for stained glass and the famous Victorian artist GF Wyatt painted the mural above the chancel, called the The Doom, later replaced by a mosaic he designed. I feel a bit of a fraud because I haven't really seen the interior. Also I discover, John Betjeman, a big fan of Gothic Victorian Churches, helped save it, writing letters to defend the church from demolition, which is amazing symmetry because I have just been reading 'On Churches' by JB, and how he saved loads of churches, writing many letters. Then I find a painting of St James the Less by John Piper in his book English Churches with an introduction by John Betjeman which includes:
'The more you look at churches the more you appreciate their varying atmospheres – whether the vicar is high or low or breezy or lazy or crazy. You notice too oddities of furnishing, hymn boards, oil lamps, electric lighting, pipes, wires and heating stoves.'
And I thought yes. Yes. Exactly.
But then I want to actually see the church, and it seems to suggest on a Victorian architecture history site that it is often open at lunchtimes. So I go back again. From a distance I can see the gate to the porch is chained shut, and I nearly just cycle away. But a man is walking up to the church so I follow him and see him ring the bell of a side door and disappear inside. I have to go and park up the Boris Bike and then come back. Another man rings the bell and disappears inside. I press the bell. The door buzzes and lets me in. Above the bell I suddenly notice two AAs in a triangle. Oh, I think, for after all I did look up all the local AA meetings for exexdh in the area when he first stopped drinking, I just didn't remember it here. Anyhow, I am in a hallway at the bottom of some stairs, with an empty dark kitchen with toddler toys stacked and no one and no noise. I see a sign for the office but when I open the door it is dark and closed. I move further into the building, I just want to ask someone if it is ok just to have a look around. I open another door, pushing it open into a bright lit empty room with chairs around a table. Only then do I really realise I could accidentally walk into the AA meeting and it would be hard to get the words out quick enough to explain the mistake.
I am about to chicken out, to leave, when I see a heavy wooden door to the side. I lift the latch, surprised it is open and feeling like I am in a fairytale I walk through into the dark, unlit church. The air is so quiet and still and subdued, I feel my lungs fill with the grainy peace. From very far away I can hear voices but no one challenges me and I walk quietly around. I am briefly worried that they will think I have got lost and come and collect me for the meeting and usher me out of the church and onto a chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit and everything to say about alcohol. Then I feel free, just allowed to be here under these high ceilings, in a huge space like finding lung capacity.
In this dull gloaming light, the church is pixellated with the patterns of red, black and cream bricks. There is an extraordinary font of wrought iron with a roof like a nutty hat at ascot. Then sofas crammed in the back. Beautiful stained glass, beautiful tiles, and the overhead screen hung from the high ceiling. The G.F. Watts mosaic is high up on the chancel wall picturing Christ in heaven. Far away, in the corner there looks to be a skeleton glowing out from the dark. Slightly wary, I get near, but it is a large figure of made out of parts of musical instruments, the body a squeezebox, the fingers keys from a piano, the legs saxophones. It is crazy loose-limbed - a strange, crude representation of Christ. I go back to look at the craftsmanship of the iron work, and the pulpit. But mainly I like the fact I shouldn't be here, there is no electric light, there is space and quiet to breathe deeply.
Then today at work on the TV above my head I see the scenes of fire and windows breaking, and demonstrators pouring into Millbank Tower. Just round the corner from us, just round the corner from the school. I watch fascinated, slightly admiring ( though later I think - of what? ) but anxious for my children. Also I know, having been to a children's birthday party at the Pizza Express in the wings of the building that diners, tucking into doughballs and a Veneziana would have surprise ringside seats to the burning of David Cameron and Nick Clegg effigies. Then cower at the back of the restuarant near the toilets (or watch - which would you do?) as windows were broken, youths showed their bottoms and young people overcame the police. I would have taken a photograph of those diners faces but I don't think anyone did.
Later, on my way home from work I think I will just go and see, getting off one stop early. Walking past the peace camp and the increased police presence at the Houses of Parliament, and in a straight line on. I wondered if I will recognise students in the normal crowds of tourists and office workers. But it is surprisingly easy. Young women wear DM's again and young men look earnest.
I get to Lambeth bridge where cars in a tailgated traffic jam are being diverted. It is dark and really cold. A runner flashes past and dips down the steps to the Thames path. There is police tape across the road, with a few coppers alongside but no barrier to the pavement. I think they will say 'Turn back now, lady' or some such. But no one stops me and I keep walking on an almost empty street. Above a helicopter hovers, as if focussing. I am carrying a Gap bag with a new coat for my eldest son, some jogging bottoms and pants for both, using one of those 30% off vouchers and a heavy tesco bag too. Nearing Millbank Tower, police like dark beetles in riot gear arch together herding the few demonstrators left. Apart from the helicopter, it is very quiet. Bystanders and students ( ex protestors?) stand on the pavement in the dark under the trees by the Thames, placards littered. Many are drinking. Cans or whole bottles. Better protest than drink, I think. But I worry about everyone's drinking these days, including my own, for it doesn't seem good for survival. You ain't the fittest if you are drinking and that seems to be how evolution works. Inside the foyer of the lit building I can see police in riot helmets and fluroscent yellow jackets jammed together, like fish in a tin. Too many and too big for the space. On the walls in surprisingly thin and ineffectual pen there is an anarchist A in a circle, 'Tory scum', and a drawing of a prick and a broken glass door with some girls taking photos on their phones, I walk on. It doesn't seem very substantial. Though I think the lib dems will not be trusted for a long time. Do you remember Nick Clegg's sudden credible status through the televised debate? - I think I had forgotten, I just thought he was a twit - but those young people had wanted to believe absolutely - and here they are disappointed. Combined with the gleeful cruelty of the Conservatives, I think people already feel trapped in having got what they didn't want.
Past the Tate and then circling back to home. I hear a young man say 'In the UK there just aren't many of the lower or upper classes' and I think maybe not where you live mate.
Behind the buildings, I look up and see the tower and I think there are still people up there. ghostly white against the dark night sky, with a helicopter coming in, really near as if herding. I imagine that they got in, went as far as they could and don't know what to do now. Though the power of having obtained the roof top, however briefly, must be amazing.
Amen
So I go again on the Sunday. I aim to get there for 10.30 and have a look round before the service starts at 11am. I am taking the boys for lunch at my mum and dads with fireworks afterwards, so exexdh is to have them briefly, before we set out. But I am late. I hear 11 strike on Big Ben as I walk down Vauxhall Bridge Rd, a bit flustered, very slightly hungover, having thought I was being clever and taking a short cut but having gone the wrong way - though surprised to have done so, for I live here and know my way really well. Surprised too to hear the clock so clearly from this distance. I am starting to have to travel a bit further to visit churches but I can still hear Big Ben. I get as far as the porch under the tall four storey tower, with it's patterned brick arches, and intricately carved doorway and the wooden door open to a glass one where I can see a man standing just the other side, with a hymn book ready to hand out. I can make out people in pews and a large lit over head screen, and an unexpected richness of mosaic, and brickwork. But I can't sit through the service without being really late for my mum and dad's so I have to turn round and leave. But it feels unsatisfactory, I could see there was something fine to the detail of the church
My youngest son, (which seems as scripted as U'OL coming back on the scene), has started to demand to pray. He is five. He has been to church possibly, twice in his life, goes to a predominantly muslim school with no obvious religious worship, though they did a nativity the first year Gordon Brown's son was in reception ( the year before my youngest attended, and the year after the eldest started ), and beyond slipping out to visit churches twice I have barely mentioned my church visiting project at home. He started asking about two weeks ago, but I couldn't face mentioning it, it just seemed too much like an invented plot. Though years ago he had a dream he had stigmata. Of course he didn't know the word, but he described it exactly. Which scared the hell out of me. Anyhow we have started doing the Lord's Prayer each night. The old words incredibly soothing to speak out loud. And the youngest kneels and closes his eyes, beautiful in his pyjamas. The eldest initially sarcastic, has since asked for a prayer of trust. I find a prayer by Ignatius Loyola 1491-1556.
Saying the words, I wish I could believe something. I can see it would be good for us.
But in the back of the car, through the stop starting of traffic lights at the outskirts of London with a wildly inappropriate CD that we all adore - Leadbelly, Buddy Holly, The Damned, White Stripes, The Clash - the youngest sings 'I want to be a Christian, I want to go to Church' to the tune of I'm so bored of the USA. I wince at the combination. Though I promise I will take him.
Later, I look up St James the Less, to find out it is a celebrated Gothic Victorian Church. There is only a little bit of history - it was built by three sisters in memory of their father the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol between 1856 - 61 in one of the poorest areas. But there is an immense amount of architectural information - designed by G.E Street, a victorian gothic architect of note, he employed the best craftsmen for this, his first church in London- Thomas Earp for stone carving and Clayton and Bell for stained glass and the famous Victorian artist GF Wyatt painted the mural above the chancel, called the The Doom, later replaced by a mosaic he designed. I feel a bit of a fraud because I haven't really seen the interior. Also I discover, John Betjeman, a big fan of Gothic Victorian Churches, helped save it, writing letters to defend the church from demolition, which is amazing symmetry because I have just been reading 'On Churches' by JB, and how he saved loads of churches, writing many letters. Then I find a painting of St James the Less by John Piper in his book English Churches with an introduction by John Betjeman which includes:
'The more you look at churches the more you appreciate their varying atmospheres – whether the vicar is high or low or breezy or lazy or crazy. You notice too oddities of furnishing, hymn boards, oil lamps, electric lighting, pipes, wires and heating stoves.'
And I thought yes. Yes. Exactly.
But then I want to actually see the church, and it seems to suggest on a Victorian architecture history site that it is often open at lunchtimes. So I go back again. From a distance I can see the gate to the porch is chained shut, and I nearly just cycle away. But a man is walking up to the church so I follow him and see him ring the bell of a side door and disappear inside. I have to go and park up the Boris Bike and then come back. Another man rings the bell and disappears inside. I press the bell. The door buzzes and lets me in. Above the bell I suddenly notice two AAs in a triangle. Oh, I think, for after all I did look up all the local AA meetings for exexdh in the area when he first stopped drinking, I just didn't remember it here. Anyhow, I am in a hallway at the bottom of some stairs, with an empty dark kitchen with toddler toys stacked and no one and no noise. I see a sign for the office but when I open the door it is dark and closed. I move further into the building, I just want to ask someone if it is ok just to have a look around. I open another door, pushing it open into a bright lit empty room with chairs around a table. Only then do I really realise I could accidentally walk into the AA meeting and it would be hard to get the words out quick enough to explain the mistake.
I am about to chicken out, to leave, when I see a heavy wooden door to the side. I lift the latch, surprised it is open and feeling like I am in a fairytale I walk through into the dark, unlit church. The air is so quiet and still and subdued, I feel my lungs fill with the grainy peace. From very far away I can hear voices but no one challenges me and I walk quietly around. I am briefly worried that they will think I have got lost and come and collect me for the meeting and usher me out of the church and onto a chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit and everything to say about alcohol. Then I feel free, just allowed to be here under these high ceilings, in a huge space like finding lung capacity.
In this dull gloaming light, the church is pixellated with the patterns of red, black and cream bricks. There is an extraordinary font of wrought iron with a roof like a nutty hat at ascot. Then sofas crammed in the back. Beautiful stained glass, beautiful tiles, and the overhead screen hung from the high ceiling. The G.F. Watts mosaic is high up on the chancel wall picturing Christ in heaven. Far away, in the corner there looks to be a skeleton glowing out from the dark. Slightly wary, I get near, but it is a large figure of made out of parts of musical instruments, the body a squeezebox, the fingers keys from a piano, the legs saxophones. It is crazy loose-limbed - a strange, crude representation of Christ. I go back to look at the craftsmanship of the iron work, and the pulpit. But mainly I like the fact I shouldn't be here, there is no electric light, there is space and quiet to breathe deeply.
Then today at work on the TV above my head I see the scenes of fire and windows breaking, and demonstrators pouring into Millbank Tower. Just round the corner from us, just round the corner from the school. I watch fascinated, slightly admiring ( though later I think - of what? ) but anxious for my children. Also I know, having been to a children's birthday party at the Pizza Express in the wings of the building that diners, tucking into doughballs and a Veneziana would have surprise ringside seats to the burning of David Cameron and Nick Clegg effigies. Then cower at the back of the restuarant near the toilets (or watch - which would you do?) as windows were broken, youths showed their bottoms and young people overcame the police. I would have taken a photograph of those diners faces but I don't think anyone did.
Later, on my way home from work I think I will just go and see, getting off one stop early. Walking past the peace camp and the increased police presence at the Houses of Parliament, and in a straight line on. I wondered if I will recognise students in the normal crowds of tourists and office workers. But it is surprisingly easy. Young women wear DM's again and young men look earnest.
I get to Lambeth bridge where cars in a tailgated traffic jam are being diverted. It is dark and really cold. A runner flashes past and dips down the steps to the Thames path. There is police tape across the road, with a few coppers alongside but no barrier to the pavement. I think they will say 'Turn back now, lady' or some such. But no one stops me and I keep walking on an almost empty street. Above a helicopter hovers, as if focussing. I am carrying a Gap bag with a new coat for my eldest son, some jogging bottoms and pants for both, using one of those 30% off vouchers and a heavy tesco bag too. Nearing Millbank Tower, police like dark beetles in riot gear arch together herding the few demonstrators left. Apart from the helicopter, it is very quiet. Bystanders and students ( ex protestors?) stand on the pavement in the dark under the trees by the Thames, placards littered. Many are drinking. Cans or whole bottles. Better protest than drink, I think. But I worry about everyone's drinking these days, including my own, for it doesn't seem good for survival. You ain't the fittest if you are drinking and that seems to be how evolution works. Inside the foyer of the lit building I can see police in riot helmets and fluroscent yellow jackets jammed together, like fish in a tin. Too many and too big for the space. On the walls in surprisingly thin and ineffectual pen there is an anarchist A in a circle, 'Tory scum', and a drawing of a prick and a broken glass door with some girls taking photos on their phones, I walk on. It doesn't seem very substantial. Though I think the lib dems will not be trusted for a long time. Do you remember Nick Clegg's sudden credible status through the televised debate? - I think I had forgotten, I just thought he was a twit - but those young people had wanted to believe absolutely - and here they are disappointed. Combined with the gleeful cruelty of the Conservatives, I think people already feel trapped in having got what they didn't want.
Past the Tate and then circling back to home. I hear a young man say 'In the UK there just aren't many of the lower or upper classes' and I think maybe not where you live mate.
Behind the buildings, I look up and see the tower and I think there are still people up there. ghostly white against the dark night sky, with a helicopter coming in, really near as if herding. I imagine that they got in, went as far as they could and don't know what to do now. Though the power of having obtained the roof top, however briefly, must be amazing.
Amen
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
St Martins in the Fields. Trafalgar Square
I think it is the tube strike but it isn't. I get the wrong day, the day before, not the actual day. A little bit like weather reports I find it hard to take in such details. Listening to the news I think ok, concentrate it is coming - rain or winter coat? And then I blink, or turn the tap on to wash up, and the report has gone, and yet again I make an ill informed guess, just looking out of the window and we are down the flights of stairs, late for school and standing outside, the children and me under blue skies and sunshine in thin clothes feeling a little bit cold. If we go fast we'll be alright I say.
This day though, I go to Notting Hill on the bus thinking I have been really clever and aren't I lucky because it isn't too packed for a tube strike day. I have an appointment with a counsellor I have started seeing and I didn't want to miss it. For some reason I don't really want to write this. Though perhaps it is just another truth barrier to go through. Angry children. Counselling through a domestic abuse charity.
The day I rang the domestic abuse charity it was well after the worst - after separating, after the drinking stopped. I had been given the leaflet initially by the woman who came after I phoned for help after exdh disappeared drunk driving the children around and held onto it, though I can remember well before that looking at the poster on the wall at a toddler group thinking that is what it feels like. But there was never any physical violence so I was unconfident that it described what it was. But exexdh had shouted and sworn and ranted at me one more time and after soothing the children back to bed, back to sleep I lay on the floor and sobbed and thought I cannot allow this to carry on anymore. This is my home. The next morning shaky and weary I took the children to school and then came back, took the phone into bed, lay under the covers and phoned the number. I told my tale to a kind, warm voiced woman.
I have always felt that I was a powerful person so it is a surprise to be or have to tell this.
She said you need a solicitor. She said yes, you need to talk through what has happened to you for you have been so strong and you have had no support. Yes. You do not have to live in this way.
So on this tube strike day that isn't - I think - I know, I can walk back through the parks afterwards and then onto a church. I can go and have a look at the Anish Kapoor sculptures. What a treat, I think, and the day is beautiful, warm, crisp blue skies and the autumn trees are strutted peacocks, flame coloured in amazing display.
This is beautiful. I am glad of everything that has put me there at exactly that moment. Not knowing it isn't really a tube strike yet.
In a bit of Hyde Park I don't know very well I find the first sculpture. A Rothko dark pink curved disc in a grey pond. Reflected clouds moving across the sheen of metal and swans and geese scudding beneath, like their home just got a satellite disc. Quite nice I think and move to a huge curved rectangular mirror. But the concrete base it is on causes a funny angled reflection and the scrub of mud and worn grass where people have walked round is ugly. Ho, ho, ho I think at the fairground fattening and upside down of behind but mainly I'm just not sure, not convinced as I tack back across the park to the robocop liquid metal of a spire reaching up. OK. It is OK, for I like the heaven reference, the church reference and I am reading John Betjeman 'On Churches.' But I am surprised by my friend's recommendation. Then, walking down to the lake I see the huge disc like a landed moon, clouds made monumental by their framing, energetic, like thick painted brushstrokes. Oh, I think oh. It is beautiful, And then I turn behind to see the red disc now glowing like a red orb. I feel in a constellation between the two. Earth and the sky combined unexpectedly into wonder.
How much art can you take? Passing the Serpentine Gallery I dither about going in, worried I have got to get everything done and I am working 4 days this week not 3 and time is tight and I still have to get into a church. But, I reason as I am here I might as well just whizz in. An exhibition by Klara Liden.
In a dark room a grainy projected film shows a man ( I think ) but it turns out to be a woman, the artist, slipping slowly backwards, feet sliding a moonwalk through night time streets. It is haunting and repetitive, her journey ending back where she started. A loop. A circumference.
In another room, the same fleshy youth, the artist, beats a bicycle with a stick. It starts out just a knocking, like finding a note, almost a sensual tracing of the form, then increases, but not so much, for the violence is sidelong, casual, a little bit sly, loses momentum and then gathers again. There is no real frenzy to it. Though the bike does topple over, does break into pieces but it never seems inevitable.
These are just observations. I am not sure what I want from them.
I buy some postcards and set off across the park again. It is a long walk and eventually I take a Boris bike from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. I feel I am playing hookey on my own life to fit so much beauty into one morning.
I know St Martin's in The Field's has a cafe and has a lot of concerts but I don't know if I will be able to get in, I don't know if the actual church will be open.
But, walking up the steps, admiring the sky and view of Trafalgar Square which is so beautiful, letting light and space come into the heart of London, the doors are open. Though I still peer suspiciously in from the vestibule doors into the church. There are people sat at pews. I see people inside welcoming others. And walk in.
'There is a free concert.' The kind faces say. It starts at one o'clock. I am tempted to stay but think I will decide as I look around.
The church is beautiful. A huge space. Like an American church. I think, and then find out later that it's 1721 design was copied across North America Simple wood pews, a balcony above with more wooden pews, ornate chandeliers, and baroque white plaster ceilings with gold decorations and an amazing modern window at the end that later I find out to be by the Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. It has clear leaded glass that shapes into a patched cross in a hazy, optical illusion. As if there is a shimmer, a movement to it, like a vibration.
The first official reference to a church on the site was in 1222, when The Archbishop of Canterbury decided that William, the Abbot of Westminster had authority of the church over Eustace the Bishop of London. That church was surrounded by fields in an isolated position between the cities of London and Westminster. Imagine! Trafalgar Square! Though excavations in 2006 led to the discovery of a Roman aged grave from about 410. This body, so far outside the limits of Roman London burial has led to ideas that it was an early Christian centre. (possibly reusing the site or building of a pagan temple).
Much later Henry V111 around 1542 built a new church and extended the parish boundaries to keep plague victims being carried through his palace and this was enlarged in 1607 and then pulled down in 1721 to be replaced by the current building. designed by James Gibb. The Vicar of St Martin's Dick Shepherd during the WW1 saw St Martin's as 'the church of the ever open door' following the example of the patron saint St Martin a roman soldier, who became a christian and is remembered for giving half his cloak to a beggar, Dick Shepherd allowed soldiers to rest in the church on the way to France in WW1. And his open door policy led to the work with homeless people, then later the chinese population that arrived in the 1960s and this busy feeling of committed welcome that is apparent this day.
I discover too, on the internet that there is a CD of recordings from WW2 - THE BLITZ Vol 1 (1939-41)
Audiobook 2xCD on CD41 label
ISBN: 978-1-906310-00-4
'An evocative double-disc set, The Blitz (Vol 1) features 145 minutes of rare material recorded 1939 and 1941. Most of the 44 tracks cover the period of night air raids in British cities between September 1940 and May 1941, including the heavy raids on London known as Black Saturday (7 September 1940) and the Second Fire of London (29 December 1940). All the featured recordings are first-hand accounts made at the time, and include civilians, evacuees, ARP and civil defence personnel, RAF pilots, AA gunners and politicians, as well as actuality recordings made during raids and inside shelters.'
With a report from 'CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow from St Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square during an air raid alert on 24 August 1940. The crypt of this famous church was used as a public shelter. On this night German aircraft bound for Rochester and Thameshaven instead dropped bombs over Central London, causing the first damage from enemy bombs since 1918.'
I am fascinated that I might be able to just choose to play tracks of this. That I can buy it like a greatest hits. Though I will.
Reluctantly I think I really don't have time to stay for the concert but I follow an open door down some steps to explore what there is. In the basement, in this space where people sheltered night after night from bombs, the cafe is packed under vaulted bricks. It is lunchtime. I move on to a huge modern underground expanse of space where there is a shop and a brass rubbing centre, then a sprial staircase that goes back up to the street. I have seen a mention of the Dick Shepherd chapel available for private prayer at any time and follow the arrows to find it. At the back, down some stairs, very quiet, behind glass is a modern simple chapel, two candles either end of a table and some chairs. I look through the glass, to a space cutaway in the earth under the pavement of busy feet, a very very peaceful room. Even walking home tonight from work, thinking oh, oh I am behind writing this, how will I finish it, and then I just remember the peace of that room deep within the building.
But now, just finishing, I hear something creaking and moving in the kitchen. I am not sure what it could be. I listen intently. I feel slightly frightened that unexpectedly a mouse or rat or just something could somehow, not sure, have mangaged to get up here. Then there is a muffled flat bang. It is a balloon bursting within a paper mache mask we were making for halloween and didn't finish, it is such a peculiar sound, such a strange tectonic movement in our flat, that I laugh.
Amen
This day though, I go to Notting Hill on the bus thinking I have been really clever and aren't I lucky because it isn't too packed for a tube strike day. I have an appointment with a counsellor I have started seeing and I didn't want to miss it. For some reason I don't really want to write this. Though perhaps it is just another truth barrier to go through. Angry children. Counselling through a domestic abuse charity.
The day I rang the domestic abuse charity it was well after the worst - after separating, after the drinking stopped. I had been given the leaflet initially by the woman who came after I phoned for help after exdh disappeared drunk driving the children around and held onto it, though I can remember well before that looking at the poster on the wall at a toddler group thinking that is what it feels like. But there was never any physical violence so I was unconfident that it described what it was. But exexdh had shouted and sworn and ranted at me one more time and after soothing the children back to bed, back to sleep I lay on the floor and sobbed and thought I cannot allow this to carry on anymore. This is my home. The next morning shaky and weary I took the children to school and then came back, took the phone into bed, lay under the covers and phoned the number. I told my tale to a kind, warm voiced woman.
I have always felt that I was a powerful person so it is a surprise to be or have to tell this.
She said you need a solicitor. She said yes, you need to talk through what has happened to you for you have been so strong and you have had no support. Yes. You do not have to live in this way.
So on this tube strike day that isn't - I think - I know, I can walk back through the parks afterwards and then onto a church. I can go and have a look at the Anish Kapoor sculptures. What a treat, I think, and the day is beautiful, warm, crisp blue skies and the autumn trees are strutted peacocks, flame coloured in amazing display.
This is beautiful. I am glad of everything that has put me there at exactly that moment. Not knowing it isn't really a tube strike yet.
In a bit of Hyde Park I don't know very well I find the first sculpture. A Rothko dark pink curved disc in a grey pond. Reflected clouds moving across the sheen of metal and swans and geese scudding beneath, like their home just got a satellite disc. Quite nice I think and move to a huge curved rectangular mirror. But the concrete base it is on causes a funny angled reflection and the scrub of mud and worn grass where people have walked round is ugly. Ho, ho, ho I think at the fairground fattening and upside down of behind but mainly I'm just not sure, not convinced as I tack back across the park to the robocop liquid metal of a spire reaching up. OK. It is OK, for I like the heaven reference, the church reference and I am reading John Betjeman 'On Churches.' But I am surprised by my friend's recommendation. Then, walking down to the lake I see the huge disc like a landed moon, clouds made monumental by their framing, energetic, like thick painted brushstrokes. Oh, I think oh. It is beautiful, And then I turn behind to see the red disc now glowing like a red orb. I feel in a constellation between the two. Earth and the sky combined unexpectedly into wonder.
How much art can you take? Passing the Serpentine Gallery I dither about going in, worried I have got to get everything done and I am working 4 days this week not 3 and time is tight and I still have to get into a church. But, I reason as I am here I might as well just whizz in. An exhibition by Klara Liden.
In a dark room a grainy projected film shows a man ( I think ) but it turns out to be a woman, the artist, slipping slowly backwards, feet sliding a moonwalk through night time streets. It is haunting and repetitive, her journey ending back where she started. A loop. A circumference.
In another room, the same fleshy youth, the artist, beats a bicycle with a stick. It starts out just a knocking, like finding a note, almost a sensual tracing of the form, then increases, but not so much, for the violence is sidelong, casual, a little bit sly, loses momentum and then gathers again. There is no real frenzy to it. Though the bike does topple over, does break into pieces but it never seems inevitable.
These are just observations. I am not sure what I want from them.
I buy some postcards and set off across the park again. It is a long walk and eventually I take a Boris bike from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. I feel I am playing hookey on my own life to fit so much beauty into one morning.
I know St Martin's in The Field's has a cafe and has a lot of concerts but I don't know if I will be able to get in, I don't know if the actual church will be open.
But, walking up the steps, admiring the sky and view of Trafalgar Square which is so beautiful, letting light and space come into the heart of London, the doors are open. Though I still peer suspiciously in from the vestibule doors into the church. There are people sat at pews. I see people inside welcoming others. And walk in.
'There is a free concert.' The kind faces say. It starts at one o'clock. I am tempted to stay but think I will decide as I look around.
The church is beautiful. A huge space. Like an American church. I think, and then find out later that it's 1721 design was copied across North America Simple wood pews, a balcony above with more wooden pews, ornate chandeliers, and baroque white plaster ceilings with gold decorations and an amazing modern window at the end that later I find out to be by the Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. It has clear leaded glass that shapes into a patched cross in a hazy, optical illusion. As if there is a shimmer, a movement to it, like a vibration.
The first official reference to a church on the site was in 1222, when The Archbishop of Canterbury decided that William, the Abbot of Westminster had authority of the church over Eustace the Bishop of London. That church was surrounded by fields in an isolated position between the cities of London and Westminster. Imagine! Trafalgar Square! Though excavations in 2006 led to the discovery of a Roman aged grave from about 410. This body, so far outside the limits of Roman London burial has led to ideas that it was an early Christian centre. (possibly reusing the site or building of a pagan temple).
Much later Henry V111 around 1542 built a new church and extended the parish boundaries to keep plague victims being carried through his palace and this was enlarged in 1607 and then pulled down in 1721 to be replaced by the current building. designed by James Gibb. The Vicar of St Martin's Dick Shepherd during the WW1 saw St Martin's as 'the church of the ever open door' following the example of the patron saint St Martin a roman soldier, who became a christian and is remembered for giving half his cloak to a beggar, Dick Shepherd allowed soldiers to rest in the church on the way to France in WW1. And his open door policy led to the work with homeless people, then later the chinese population that arrived in the 1960s and this busy feeling of committed welcome that is apparent this day.
I discover too, on the internet that there is a CD of recordings from WW2 - THE BLITZ Vol 1 (1939-41)
Audiobook 2xCD on CD41 label
ISBN: 978-1-906310-00-4
'An evocative double-disc set, The Blitz (Vol 1) features 145 minutes of rare material recorded 1939 and 1941. Most of the 44 tracks cover the period of night air raids in British cities between September 1940 and May 1941, including the heavy raids on London known as Black Saturday (7 September 1940) and the Second Fire of London (29 December 1940). All the featured recordings are first-hand accounts made at the time, and include civilians, evacuees, ARP and civil defence personnel, RAF pilots, AA gunners and politicians, as well as actuality recordings made during raids and inside shelters.'
With a report from 'CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow from St Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square during an air raid alert on 24 August 1940. The crypt of this famous church was used as a public shelter. On this night German aircraft bound for Rochester and Thameshaven instead dropped bombs over Central London, causing the first damage from enemy bombs since 1918.'
I am fascinated that I might be able to just choose to play tracks of this. That I can buy it like a greatest hits. Though I will.
Reluctantly I think I really don't have time to stay for the concert but I follow an open door down some steps to explore what there is. In the basement, in this space where people sheltered night after night from bombs, the cafe is packed under vaulted bricks. It is lunchtime. I move on to a huge modern underground expanse of space where there is a shop and a brass rubbing centre, then a sprial staircase that goes back up to the street. I have seen a mention of the Dick Shepherd chapel available for private prayer at any time and follow the arrows to find it. At the back, down some stairs, very quiet, behind glass is a modern simple chapel, two candles either end of a table and some chairs. I look through the glass, to a space cutaway in the earth under the pavement of busy feet, a very very peaceful room. Even walking home tonight from work, thinking oh, oh I am behind writing this, how will I finish it, and then I just remember the peace of that room deep within the building.
But now, just finishing, I hear something creaking and moving in the kitchen. I am not sure what it could be. I listen intently. I feel slightly frightened that unexpectedly a mouse or rat or just something could somehow, not sure, have mangaged to get up here. Then there is a muffled flat bang. It is a balloon bursting within a paper mache mask we were making for halloween and didn't finish, it is such a peculiar sound, such a strange tectonic movement in our flat, that I laugh.
Amen
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Guard's Chapel, Birdcage Walk
My guilty pleasure on Sunday mornings is Radio 2 Love Songs. While the children watch Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles ( I have a feeling that letting them do that should be on my guilt list too?) I clear up or put the washing on and turn the dial from R4 and sing. l love the combination of cheesy tunes and heartfelt messages. Everything I would have sneered at in my pre children, arty world seems really valuable and valid. 'To my darling wife. I love you so very much.' To my loving husband you are a great dad and a wonderful husband.' 'Through the ups and downs, through thick and thin we have made it together.'
Well done. I think. Well done. Like listening to shiny medals of courageous love.
I don't even think I have envy, I just appreciate the possibility, the 'proof' of a solid thing, a celebrated partnership. Care and kindness at the core.
Afterwards, the boys and I play playmobil - creating an expedition to rescue endangered species from a far flung land. Though, somehow there is a restaurant for monkeys to eat bananas with the money they made from selling the provisions for the voyage and a king who drives a police car with his friend the squirrel.
Exexdh arrives to take over because I have made the arrangement to slip out to go to the Guard's Chapel. I have broken my own rules and checked on the website, though it gave me no detail beyond a rather vague instruction that there is a service every sunday at 11am and sometimes at midday too. Though imagine my relief that the public are welcome. Otherwise I would have had to try and muscle my way in on a soldiers church!
The day is beautiful. Blue crisp sky, autumn light. A treat to be out, on my own, doing something I want to do. I enjoy this feeling briefly before remembering that this rarely won treat might be better spent reading a book with a delicious cup of coffee, or going to an exhibition, not dreading getting into a church.
Have you ever been to St James's Park? It is the most ludicrously pretty park in London. Squirrels sit on the railings and nuzzle nuts from your fingers ( not mine - I'm too hesitant - but the boys love it), there are really beautiful and thoughtfully planted flowerbeds, a bridge that crosses the man made lake, with views of the war office that look like a grown up Disney land ( tricky to imagine, but true! Go!) and ( I feel there should be a drum roll.........) Pelicans. Yes Pelicans! They are so completely bonkers a species. But here. Being photographed, ( or even weirder to imagine - asleep, in the dark , sitting on a nest, or still on the water) as you read this. In central london! Finally, a playground where you can push your kid in a swing and look to see if the flag is flying on Buckingham Palace, and wonder if the queen is lonely, and watching you, from her bedroom window.
However, I walk around the side of the park, by now, hesitant. I hope I can find the church easily for I never walk this way, have never actually seen it, only know it to exist from my compulsive map reading, for as early as my 1869 map it says 'Garrison chapel'. But it is easy - set back behind the railings a beautiful simple, unexpectedly-concrete building with a cross on it. Then posters that advertise the guardsmen's museum, and also a soldiers shop for children, and tanks at the gate.
On the steps of the chapel is a soldier in a kilt with bagpipes talking on his mobile. He says as I near, ' I better go, I will be playing shortly.' But remains chatting on his phone. I am trying to peer through the glass of the entrance, I can hear music but it looks dark within. Suddenly I realise it is packed. Men in the thick weave of uniform, stood, so close to the glass they cause the dark. I keep peering in, moving along the glass to work out the space, I catch a glimpse of the nave and a golden altar area, and then a door is pushed open from inside in invitation, an order of service is pushed into my hand and a handsome black guy in uniform has stepped aside to let me have a chair.
I am in a service!
The church is packed. The music is beautiful. Everyone is singing a hymn. There are dense pockets of only soldiers but many dignitaries too, standing tall, shoulder to shoulder. I am so amazed to come out of my own life to this, to this solidarity, and high soaring choir and strong men singing that I nearly cry, but I don't, unexpectedly I join in.
The chapel is beautiful. The main structure is plain smooth concrete, high walls up to a wooden ceiling and flags hanging down. At the end, is an amazing old, golden, painted apse, which doesn't make sense in this sixties building but looks beautiful. We are into the National Anthem. Everyone straight backed. Then:
O Trinity of love and power
Our brethren shield in danger's hour:
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoeer they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.
Sung with such resolute demand.
I don't know about anything. But inside that church there is a certaintity and I think it is this: We are brave. We have survived in great adversity. Not everyone does. We give thanks. (I sometimes feel all of those things but I haven't been to war and even I can see it sounds trite.) This was a homecoming for the London Regiment of the Territorial army, back from Afghanistan. Men from all walks of life - estate agents, postmen, business consultants, who have gone on a tour of duty.
I found these quotes from people setting out:
Lance Corporal George Anderson- An estate agent working for Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward who described civilian life as “mincing around London making money for someone else”. and “The most exciting thing that happens all week is getting a parking ticket.”
Lieutenant Pete Quentin, 26, a Cambridge graduate and former research fellow at the think-tank Civitas, said the threat gave him a better perspective on life and made him appreciate his family and friends.
As if there is an evolutionary dead end to being safe. As if there is a sense of 'real' in these extremes. These men have been to the edge of that safety, to the rough terrain, to the skirmishes of life and death and returned. Here they are safe with their families and singing in this church. Their war carrying on a long, long way a way - a hazy, incomprehensible distance from us.
My favourite anti war story is seeing a sloaney middle-aged woman with a head scarf and a harvest festival-style, good-works basket on the tube years ago when I was a student. Pinned to her cardigan was a homemade badge, biro-scrawled, wonky writing on feint lined paper, and then wrapped in shiny sellotape wound round and round it said 'I don't like the armed forces.' Just that. It seemed an unlikely and mildly ridiculous protest but utterly heartfelt.
And when London stopped still and the estimated 2 million marched against going into war in Iraq, h and me went with our new tiny baby to Hyde Park and stood with a Picasso dove placard in the crowd. Though, beyond a lazy, ' I don't really like war ' and perhaps 'I don't think the truth is being told about the motives for this.' I didn't exactly know what I felt, and worried that it had been more of photo opportunity for a much photographed new baby and it's proud parents, though later we realised with disappointment that we hadn't put a film in the camera and there were no pictures.
We lived then, in the small peabody flat, near Chelsea Barracks, and witnessed one night, craning our heads, in the dark, above street lights, the military departing. Traffic lights stop-starting the column of camouflaged tanks, trucks, light guns, landrovers that rumbled on and and on, for a very, very long time. I imagined somebody, their head out of a window in Iraq watching their arrival with true fear. My own slightly sentimental anxieties for this world and my baby son, felt rather luxurious that night.
I am not certain what I think. The power in that church was incredible. It was like a world I had never known. True belief, belted out. Though what was being believed in I wasn't sure.
Later I discover Guard's Chapel, initially built in 1838 was bombed in the blitz and then again on 18th June 1944, later rebuilt in 1963. I have got used to these phrases, almost got used to how much was bombed around here. But, and I think there should be a careful pause here. I discover in 1944 it was bombed on a sunday morning, just after the service had started at 11 o'clock when the church was packed. A distant buzzing was heard by the congregation that grew louder and turned into a roar, drowning out the hymn. Then the engine cut out and the V1 glided down and exploded on the roof of the chapel. The whole roof collapsed. 121 military and civilians were killed and 141 seriously injured. Only the Bishop of Maidstone conducting the service was totally unhurt for the altar was covered by a portico (the one still in the church today,)and it had sheltered him from the blast. It was said that after the explosion the alter candles were still burning.
It took 2 days to dig the dead and injured out of the devastation. News of this awful tragedy was suppressed although rumours of the disaster soon spread across London.
I meant to write with grave concern about David Cameron, his cuts, the businesses already closing around here and the tense faces of the civil servants on their way to work but unexpectedly this, this terrible tale was provided, almost ready made.
Amen
Well done. I think. Well done. Like listening to shiny medals of courageous love.
I don't even think I have envy, I just appreciate the possibility, the 'proof' of a solid thing, a celebrated partnership. Care and kindness at the core.
Afterwards, the boys and I play playmobil - creating an expedition to rescue endangered species from a far flung land. Though, somehow there is a restaurant for monkeys to eat bananas with the money they made from selling the provisions for the voyage and a king who drives a police car with his friend the squirrel.
Exexdh arrives to take over because I have made the arrangement to slip out to go to the Guard's Chapel. I have broken my own rules and checked on the website, though it gave me no detail beyond a rather vague instruction that there is a service every sunday at 11am and sometimes at midday too. Though imagine my relief that the public are welcome. Otherwise I would have had to try and muscle my way in on a soldiers church!
The day is beautiful. Blue crisp sky, autumn light. A treat to be out, on my own, doing something I want to do. I enjoy this feeling briefly before remembering that this rarely won treat might be better spent reading a book with a delicious cup of coffee, or going to an exhibition, not dreading getting into a church.
Have you ever been to St James's Park? It is the most ludicrously pretty park in London. Squirrels sit on the railings and nuzzle nuts from your fingers ( not mine - I'm too hesitant - but the boys love it), there are really beautiful and thoughtfully planted flowerbeds, a bridge that crosses the man made lake, with views of the war office that look like a grown up Disney land ( tricky to imagine, but true! Go!) and ( I feel there should be a drum roll.........) Pelicans. Yes Pelicans! They are so completely bonkers a species. But here. Being photographed, ( or even weirder to imagine - asleep, in the dark , sitting on a nest, or still on the water) as you read this. In central london! Finally, a playground where you can push your kid in a swing and look to see if the flag is flying on Buckingham Palace, and wonder if the queen is lonely, and watching you, from her bedroom window.
However, I walk around the side of the park, by now, hesitant. I hope I can find the church easily for I never walk this way, have never actually seen it, only know it to exist from my compulsive map reading, for as early as my 1869 map it says 'Garrison chapel'. But it is easy - set back behind the railings a beautiful simple, unexpectedly-concrete building with a cross on it. Then posters that advertise the guardsmen's museum, and also a soldiers shop for children, and tanks at the gate.
On the steps of the chapel is a soldier in a kilt with bagpipes talking on his mobile. He says as I near, ' I better go, I will be playing shortly.' But remains chatting on his phone. I am trying to peer through the glass of the entrance, I can hear music but it looks dark within. Suddenly I realise it is packed. Men in the thick weave of uniform, stood, so close to the glass they cause the dark. I keep peering in, moving along the glass to work out the space, I catch a glimpse of the nave and a golden altar area, and then a door is pushed open from inside in invitation, an order of service is pushed into my hand and a handsome black guy in uniform has stepped aside to let me have a chair.
I am in a service!
The church is packed. The music is beautiful. Everyone is singing a hymn. There are dense pockets of only soldiers but many dignitaries too, standing tall, shoulder to shoulder. I am so amazed to come out of my own life to this, to this solidarity, and high soaring choir and strong men singing that I nearly cry, but I don't, unexpectedly I join in.
The chapel is beautiful. The main structure is plain smooth concrete, high walls up to a wooden ceiling and flags hanging down. At the end, is an amazing old, golden, painted apse, which doesn't make sense in this sixties building but looks beautiful. We are into the National Anthem. Everyone straight backed. Then:
O Trinity of love and power
Our brethren shield in danger's hour:
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoeer they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.
Sung with such resolute demand.
I don't know about anything. But inside that church there is a certaintity and I think it is this: We are brave. We have survived in great adversity. Not everyone does. We give thanks. (I sometimes feel all of those things but I haven't been to war and even I can see it sounds trite.) This was a homecoming for the London Regiment of the Territorial army, back from Afghanistan. Men from all walks of life - estate agents, postmen, business consultants, who have gone on a tour of duty.
I found these quotes from people setting out:
Lance Corporal George Anderson- An estate agent working for Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward who described civilian life as “mincing around London making money for someone else”. and “The most exciting thing that happens all week is getting a parking ticket.”
Lieutenant Pete Quentin, 26, a Cambridge graduate and former research fellow at the think-tank Civitas, said the threat gave him a better perspective on life and made him appreciate his family and friends.
As if there is an evolutionary dead end to being safe. As if there is a sense of 'real' in these extremes. These men have been to the edge of that safety, to the rough terrain, to the skirmishes of life and death and returned. Here they are safe with their families and singing in this church. Their war carrying on a long, long way a way - a hazy, incomprehensible distance from us.
My favourite anti war story is seeing a sloaney middle-aged woman with a head scarf and a harvest festival-style, good-works basket on the tube years ago when I was a student. Pinned to her cardigan was a homemade badge, biro-scrawled, wonky writing on feint lined paper, and then wrapped in shiny sellotape wound round and round it said 'I don't like the armed forces.' Just that. It seemed an unlikely and mildly ridiculous protest but utterly heartfelt.
And when London stopped still and the estimated 2 million marched against going into war in Iraq, h and me went with our new tiny baby to Hyde Park and stood with a Picasso dove placard in the crowd. Though, beyond a lazy, ' I don't really like war ' and perhaps 'I don't think the truth is being told about the motives for this.' I didn't exactly know what I felt, and worried that it had been more of photo opportunity for a much photographed new baby and it's proud parents, though later we realised with disappointment that we hadn't put a film in the camera and there were no pictures.
We lived then, in the small peabody flat, near Chelsea Barracks, and witnessed one night, craning our heads, in the dark, above street lights, the military departing. Traffic lights stop-starting the column of camouflaged tanks, trucks, light guns, landrovers that rumbled on and and on, for a very, very long time. I imagined somebody, their head out of a window in Iraq watching their arrival with true fear. My own slightly sentimental anxieties for this world and my baby son, felt rather luxurious that night.
I am not certain what I think. The power in that church was incredible. It was like a world I had never known. True belief, belted out. Though what was being believed in I wasn't sure.
Later I discover Guard's Chapel, initially built in 1838 was bombed in the blitz and then again on 18th June 1944, later rebuilt in 1963. I have got used to these phrases, almost got used to how much was bombed around here. But, and I think there should be a careful pause here. I discover in 1944 it was bombed on a sunday morning, just after the service had started at 11 o'clock when the church was packed. A distant buzzing was heard by the congregation that grew louder and turned into a roar, drowning out the hymn. Then the engine cut out and the V1 glided down and exploded on the roof of the chapel. The whole roof collapsed. 121 military and civilians were killed and 141 seriously injured. Only the Bishop of Maidstone conducting the service was totally unhurt for the altar was covered by a portico (the one still in the church today,)and it had sheltered him from the blast. It was said that after the explosion the alter candles were still burning.
It took 2 days to dig the dead and injured out of the devastation. News of this awful tragedy was suppressed although rumours of the disaster soon spread across London.
I meant to write with grave concern about David Cameron, his cuts, the businesses already closing around here and the tense faces of the civil servants on their way to work but unexpectedly this, this terrible tale was provided, almost ready made.
Amen
Monday, 18 October 2010
St Peter's Eaton Square
These are things I do to cheer myself up, to get back on track, to put the wind in my sails when all the puff has gone: I make fresh minestrone soup, bake bread and meditate. But I have done them all this evening and I'm only treading water. Sitting here, eating hot soup, cheese melting into the rich stock, I feel better but not good.
I am working all week and haven't been to a church yet, not even sure what my plan is. On an AZ I mark all the nearby churches. Then realise that I have reached the outskirts of 'just walking past'. As if the stone I threw tentatively when I started this project has just reached the second widening circle.
U,OL after the initial brief flurry of intense e mails has retreated to stories of his father's lawnmower and slight misunderstandings that feel almost like a bicker from e mail to e mail. Perhaps we have disappointed each other? Despite believing quite clearly at the time that I loved him but we had missed the boat, run out of time, I now feel cheated. I would like to see him and make him laugh. He should love me enough to want this too. Is that a reasonable demand? Off a married man? Though ( and I'm not sure I've mentioned this, he had already embarked on an extra curricular affair in answer to his wife's many infidelities.) I feel bleak writing all this. Like holding a new map. A map where the the x marks the spot treasure that was always believed to be very valuable but lost, out of reach, buried, is found, but dulled with time, not polished, a slightly different currency.
I went on a photo shoot for work. The magazine I work part time for has very little budget and a tiny amount of staff. We don't normally do shoots. We don't normally attend them if we do. Normally we send a photographer to squash a white back drop into the lounge of the person being photographed. But, the subject is an ex-celebrity-jungle, glamour girl (but not THAT one, not the most famous, not the one Martin Amis has written about) but she is represented by the ex agency of THAT one, the most famous one) I promise you I have very little interest in this stuff but I KNOW it, I know all of it. This agency are the most controlling, and once powerful machine, their power fading slightly since the departure of THAT one, making them more aggressive, more keen to hold onto what they have. They make you sign copy approval, photo approval, caption approval, they make deals with publications to get the placement they want. Their over air brushed celebrities beam glassily from magazines with an ! at the end. Anyhow, and I'm not sure if we think we have tricked them or they think that they have tricked us, but they allow us a shoot with this girl at their HQ.
The girl is a little tiny tinkerbell, fluffed hair, implacable blue eyes, massive, boob-job boobs, a footballer husband, a raucous voice and two young sons. I am a size 10 but she is half the size of me. I couldn't imagine where she fitted her actual organs into such a tiny space. I couldn't imagine how she had a baby only six months earlier. Occasionally for the camera she looks completely beautiful, more beautiful that then shows in the pictures, more Hollywood glow and glamour than expected.
When the fashion pictures we wanted to do are finished it appears after all it is they who have the upper hand, (how could I have thought otherwise?) because they draw the curtains of the 'games room' with pulled back shag pile carpet, and drop their voices in front of me to discuss the topless shots that will be taken for other magazines. I am trying to leave but as this girl poses she talks with love and care and sweetness of her sons. And the photographers assistant chips in with some tale of a small child melt down he had witnessed, and how he felt sorry for the mother who tried everything.
The thing is, she says, and her voice is certain, categorical, almost strident, 'That is just bad parenting. I have read all the parenting books there are and that is just bad parenting. If you cannot give a child safe boundaries to their rage it is bad parenting.' I am overwhelmed by her good sense and then by my own sadness for my eldest son and his terrible and violent outbursts. Once, with the lollipop lady watching from beady and slightly unforgiving eyes he swung the scooter over his head to hurt me in the street, then threw it, then picked it back up above his head. Though that morning I coolly and continually calmed him while the rage built and retreated, built and retreated and finally left. I believe I have been doing a good job in difficult circumstances ( and indeed he has been turning those rages round, we have worked together to turn those rages round) but somewhere along the line I helped cause them and so I think she is right but I also think, and it is a tiny voice, that I have not let myself use, 'it isn't fair.' I have worked and worked and cared and cared and loved and loved those children but I don't seem to have stopped the damage. Though perhaps I just didn't need a glamour model WAG to inadvertently point it out to me?
In a flurry this morning I decide to take a Boris bike after dropping the boys off at school up to St Peter's in Eaton Square. Parking the bike I feel a shift in my sense of scale. Everything is just a little bit bigger. The Boris Bikes are always big and make me feel small and slightly-doll like, but now the buildings are super sized too. Doors and steps are grand. Windows bigger. Buildings imposing. I try briefly to imagine what it must feel like to only know this world. I imagine that you would know so little. But maybe it isn't true, maybe you just know different things and are almost certainly tall.
The church too is huge - handsome and really beautifully proportioned from the outside, with huge ionic columns and portico and steps up. Though climbing the steps, I am unsure if I will be able to get in or not. But the Jack and the Beanstalk giant wooden doors are open, to the sight of modern etched glass doors that I imagine to be locked. However they too swing open. Inside the interior is light and airy but plush, with anonymously modern fittings like a really good quality but not over designed hotel. At the end, behind the altar piece is a beautiful shaped and smoothed gold mosaic apse, like a cutaway domed, recessed arch, that gives a lovely peace to the room, as if it is somehow a continuous, revealing space. The statues of Mary and Jesus at either side of the neutral nave and pews and the huge cross with Jesus in pain, hanging from the ceiling are super-sized- life-size, but with real human qualities and they look like they don't quite belong in the plush neutrals of this space, almost too kitsch, too emotional, too pious. Though these qualities are framed by the rest of the interior, as if the humanity is allowed to breathe.
The church, built initially in 1827 by Henry Hakewill was burnt down in 1987 by an anti catholic arsonist who mistook this church for a catholic one. I find this piece of history surprising. I was at art school around the corner by then and I don't remember anti papism as much of a movement in the 80s. But the beautiful Georgian facade survived and an architect husband and wife team who had lived nearby and watched the church burn, redesigned the structure and the interior of the church. I think they have been allowed to do something extraordinary - in the beauty of a georgian church to redesign the space of worship into a more modern world. But, and it may be a surprise after all that praise, for there is much to admire, I don't like it. Or don't like all of it. The plush is too wealthy, too comfortable, too devoid of history.
Coming away from the St Peter's, towards Victoria, I see a man sat against the railings, bike propped alongside, his calf exposed, his expression homeless. His leg has a terrible, liver-coloured, flat, open wound about the size of a bag of sugar but shaped like a kidney. I stop around the corner and search my bag for the antiseptic cream I always carry. ( a handy distraction to playground scratches.) I dither. Then go back and hand the man the cream. Only as I pass him the tube do I think, would you have done this without just having been to a church, wondering perhaps if I am stage managing a story for this blog? Though I believe my instinct is true, I would have done it anyhow, but I can't really know. The man who is sat resting, jumps to his feet with such violence and just for a minute I wonder if he is going to kiss or hit me. But he doesn't. He hurls the cream as high and as far as he can over the railings into the scrap of park behind him, next to Victoria station.
'It is just cream for your leg.' I point out, almost piously.
'I trust no one. No one.' Nothing. He says in a thick east european accent. Then approaching, 'Give me money.'
'But you just threw my cream over the railings.'
'Lady,' He says. 'I trust no one. You do not know what my mother did to me.'
'No. I don't.' I say finding a pound and giving it to him.
'Thank you. Thank you. I will get you your cream.' He leaps to the top of the sharp railings, a cloth bag dragging. I am terrified he will hurt himelf, impale himself, catch the bag on the sharp spikes and fall badly. Though in the exchange, we have moved slightly into the tight squeeze of the pavement, the railings and the commuters at the bus stop. I cannot see them but I know they are behind me. Watching. Perched at the top of the fence, like a large dirty and worn out bird, this big man, bright eyed, rants while he balances himself to jump down the other side. 'Trust no one. Not the government, not the people with money, most certainly not the people with the money.' He smiles inside his beard, drily. 'I could not trust my mother. Now I do not trust my own criminal mind' He smiles. Then jumps down.
When he return over the sharp fence with the tube of cream, he stops again at the top, his piercing intelligent eyes, briefly rational.
'Lady,' he says, 'Shall I keep it covered or free?'
'Let the air get to it first.' I say. 'Keep it dry and clean if you can.'
'I can only trust my body.' He says.
'Take the cream.' I say.
'I trust no one.'
'Get help from the churches.' I say.
Then he holds his arm with his fist above his head, like a learnt salute. 'I salute the terrorists.'
I retreat into the swarm of packed commuters.
Amen.
I am working all week and haven't been to a church yet, not even sure what my plan is. On an AZ I mark all the nearby churches. Then realise that I have reached the outskirts of 'just walking past'. As if the stone I threw tentatively when I started this project has just reached the second widening circle.
U,OL after the initial brief flurry of intense e mails has retreated to stories of his father's lawnmower and slight misunderstandings that feel almost like a bicker from e mail to e mail. Perhaps we have disappointed each other? Despite believing quite clearly at the time that I loved him but we had missed the boat, run out of time, I now feel cheated. I would like to see him and make him laugh. He should love me enough to want this too. Is that a reasonable demand? Off a married man? Though ( and I'm not sure I've mentioned this, he had already embarked on an extra curricular affair in answer to his wife's many infidelities.) I feel bleak writing all this. Like holding a new map. A map where the the x marks the spot treasure that was always believed to be very valuable but lost, out of reach, buried, is found, but dulled with time, not polished, a slightly different currency.
I went on a photo shoot for work. The magazine I work part time for has very little budget and a tiny amount of staff. We don't normally do shoots. We don't normally attend them if we do. Normally we send a photographer to squash a white back drop into the lounge of the person being photographed. But, the subject is an ex-celebrity-jungle, glamour girl (but not THAT one, not the most famous, not the one Martin Amis has written about) but she is represented by the ex agency of THAT one, the most famous one) I promise you I have very little interest in this stuff but I KNOW it, I know all of it. This agency are the most controlling, and once powerful machine, their power fading slightly since the departure of THAT one, making them more aggressive, more keen to hold onto what they have. They make you sign copy approval, photo approval, caption approval, they make deals with publications to get the placement they want. Their over air brushed celebrities beam glassily from magazines with an ! at the end. Anyhow, and I'm not sure if we think we have tricked them or they think that they have tricked us, but they allow us a shoot with this girl at their HQ.
The girl is a little tiny tinkerbell, fluffed hair, implacable blue eyes, massive, boob-job boobs, a footballer husband, a raucous voice and two young sons. I am a size 10 but she is half the size of me. I couldn't imagine where she fitted her actual organs into such a tiny space. I couldn't imagine how she had a baby only six months earlier. Occasionally for the camera she looks completely beautiful, more beautiful that then shows in the pictures, more Hollywood glow and glamour than expected.
When the fashion pictures we wanted to do are finished it appears after all it is they who have the upper hand, (how could I have thought otherwise?) because they draw the curtains of the 'games room' with pulled back shag pile carpet, and drop their voices in front of me to discuss the topless shots that will be taken for other magazines. I am trying to leave but as this girl poses she talks with love and care and sweetness of her sons. And the photographers assistant chips in with some tale of a small child melt down he had witnessed, and how he felt sorry for the mother who tried everything.
The thing is, she says, and her voice is certain, categorical, almost strident, 'That is just bad parenting. I have read all the parenting books there are and that is just bad parenting. If you cannot give a child safe boundaries to their rage it is bad parenting.' I am overwhelmed by her good sense and then by my own sadness for my eldest son and his terrible and violent outbursts. Once, with the lollipop lady watching from beady and slightly unforgiving eyes he swung the scooter over his head to hurt me in the street, then threw it, then picked it back up above his head. Though that morning I coolly and continually calmed him while the rage built and retreated, built and retreated and finally left. I believe I have been doing a good job in difficult circumstances ( and indeed he has been turning those rages round, we have worked together to turn those rages round) but somewhere along the line I helped cause them and so I think she is right but I also think, and it is a tiny voice, that I have not let myself use, 'it isn't fair.' I have worked and worked and cared and cared and loved and loved those children but I don't seem to have stopped the damage. Though perhaps I just didn't need a glamour model WAG to inadvertently point it out to me?
In a flurry this morning I decide to take a Boris bike after dropping the boys off at school up to St Peter's in Eaton Square. Parking the bike I feel a shift in my sense of scale. Everything is just a little bit bigger. The Boris Bikes are always big and make me feel small and slightly-doll like, but now the buildings are super sized too. Doors and steps are grand. Windows bigger. Buildings imposing. I try briefly to imagine what it must feel like to only know this world. I imagine that you would know so little. But maybe it isn't true, maybe you just know different things and are almost certainly tall.
The church too is huge - handsome and really beautifully proportioned from the outside, with huge ionic columns and portico and steps up. Though climbing the steps, I am unsure if I will be able to get in or not. But the Jack and the Beanstalk giant wooden doors are open, to the sight of modern etched glass doors that I imagine to be locked. However they too swing open. Inside the interior is light and airy but plush, with anonymously modern fittings like a really good quality but not over designed hotel. At the end, behind the altar piece is a beautiful shaped and smoothed gold mosaic apse, like a cutaway domed, recessed arch, that gives a lovely peace to the room, as if it is somehow a continuous, revealing space. The statues of Mary and Jesus at either side of the neutral nave and pews and the huge cross with Jesus in pain, hanging from the ceiling are super-sized- life-size, but with real human qualities and they look like they don't quite belong in the plush neutrals of this space, almost too kitsch, too emotional, too pious. Though these qualities are framed by the rest of the interior, as if the humanity is allowed to breathe.
The church, built initially in 1827 by Henry Hakewill was burnt down in 1987 by an anti catholic arsonist who mistook this church for a catholic one. I find this piece of history surprising. I was at art school around the corner by then and I don't remember anti papism as much of a movement in the 80s. But the beautiful Georgian facade survived and an architect husband and wife team who had lived nearby and watched the church burn, redesigned the structure and the interior of the church. I think they have been allowed to do something extraordinary - in the beauty of a georgian church to redesign the space of worship into a more modern world. But, and it may be a surprise after all that praise, for there is much to admire, I don't like it. Or don't like all of it. The plush is too wealthy, too comfortable, too devoid of history.
Coming away from the St Peter's, towards Victoria, I see a man sat against the railings, bike propped alongside, his calf exposed, his expression homeless. His leg has a terrible, liver-coloured, flat, open wound about the size of a bag of sugar but shaped like a kidney. I stop around the corner and search my bag for the antiseptic cream I always carry. ( a handy distraction to playground scratches.) I dither. Then go back and hand the man the cream. Only as I pass him the tube do I think, would you have done this without just having been to a church, wondering perhaps if I am stage managing a story for this blog? Though I believe my instinct is true, I would have done it anyhow, but I can't really know. The man who is sat resting, jumps to his feet with such violence and just for a minute I wonder if he is going to kiss or hit me. But he doesn't. He hurls the cream as high and as far as he can over the railings into the scrap of park behind him, next to Victoria station.
'It is just cream for your leg.' I point out, almost piously.
'I trust no one. No one.' Nothing. He says in a thick east european accent. Then approaching, 'Give me money.'
'But you just threw my cream over the railings.'
'Lady,' He says. 'I trust no one. You do not know what my mother did to me.'
'No. I don't.' I say finding a pound and giving it to him.
'Thank you. Thank you. I will get you your cream.' He leaps to the top of the sharp railings, a cloth bag dragging. I am terrified he will hurt himelf, impale himself, catch the bag on the sharp spikes and fall badly. Though in the exchange, we have moved slightly into the tight squeeze of the pavement, the railings and the commuters at the bus stop. I cannot see them but I know they are behind me. Watching. Perched at the top of the fence, like a large dirty and worn out bird, this big man, bright eyed, rants while he balances himself to jump down the other side. 'Trust no one. Not the government, not the people with money, most certainly not the people with the money.' He smiles inside his beard, drily. 'I could not trust my mother. Now I do not trust my own criminal mind' He smiles. Then jumps down.
When he return over the sharp fence with the tube of cream, he stops again at the top, his piercing intelligent eyes, briefly rational.
'Lady,' he says, 'Shall I keep it covered or free?'
'Let the air get to it first.' I say. 'Keep it dry and clean if you can.'
'I can only trust my body.' He says.
'Take the cream.' I say.
'I trust no one.'
'Get help from the churches.' I say.
Then he holds his arm with his fist above his head, like a learnt salute. 'I salute the terrorists.'
I retreat into the swarm of packed commuters.
Amen.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
St Gabriel's, Pimlico
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.
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.
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