Of course I went. I took my sons. We took a step ladder!
We went down our street, turned right, turned left and turned right again and walked a few metres to stand opposite Westminster Abbey door. I had good intentions of getting up early to bag a space but somehow ( I made two Victoria Sponges and washed the kitchen floor before leaving) it was 10.30 when we left and the wedding started at 11am. It was crowded by the Abbey but we could get near. We stood in almost exactly the same place I had seen the pope and just a bit further back from where at the edge of parliament square I had seen the thick black wall of policemen kettle protestors but this was the busiest. This was packed. Today I was with my friend that I have known since school, her girlfriend, her girlfriend's pretty niece, the boys and at the last minute exh had rung the bell and said could he come with us too - so we all walked down there together. Though there was only one real royalist among us and it was my friend's girlfriend. Exh had made royal wedding badges to sell and he carried them on a make shift tray slung round his neck - dressed like the guest of a big fat wedding. A rogue hat and a button hole. People kept taking his picture though not many bought badges.
There was a time early on writing this blog when I found the task of describing Westminster Abbey too daunting and thought about leaving it until last. Then as soon as I had been and learnt the history of an Abbey built on an island in the marshes by the Thames over a thousand years ago I wished I had started there. It was where Westminster began. This history radiating out from the boggy island as the surrounding land was drained and built on. Researching or writing this I have often been surprised at who lived here - then it dawned on me that early on there was only Westminster or The City of London - the rest of London wasn't here. Though I was excited to find out recently that Caxton brought his press here from Bruges in 1473 the first printing press in England. I discover the shop was here, adjacent to the Abbey and that he rented tenements and a loft over the gate to the Almonry (near the west end). It wasn't just London radiating from Westminster Abbey but our language too.
When the Royal Wedding was announced I thought oh wow if I had waited that would have been a perfect ending to ISICTT - it would have been going for just over a year AND it would end with a wedding! What a perfect and traditional way to end a story I think and I am tempted.
The royalist in our party has brough a mini tv and spare batteries and lots of people cluster around to work out what is happening. There is a debate in the crowd whether to climb on top of a bus stop to get a better view and for a while no one dares. Eventually a man gets up and he is then asked by the police to get down. Which he does. Another man asks exh the price of his badges and then whips out a trading licensing id. 'Either give them away or I'll confiscate them' he hisses as exh bundles badges into his pockets. The children squabble about turns on the ladder. Then fight. I worry that this will be what the crowd remember. It will be what I remember. Though as the bride arrives I hold the ladder for one son and put the other on my shoulders, slightly stooped, eyeing the pavement with a wobbly gaze. The crowds surge holding periscopes, cameras and phones aloft. I am pleased I am not a royalist, that I don't really mind missing it. Though I am not sure anyone sees much. Or even that we mind.
At some point a couple push buggies, one each, through the dense mass of people. It looks hard work and there isn't much further they can get. The crowd advise them to stay put, it gets more crowded further down, they won't see much more. The couple stop to take breath. Then start, ' I'd rather be anywhere but here today.' They say. 'Who'd come here.' They say. 'What a big fuss.' They say before pushing on. This is not a cut through. This is a dead end. I don't understand their effort.
After the arrivals the crowd thins and we are able to inch our ladder down the street. A policewoman only a fraction away from obesity ( I only mention it because I have never seen it before) says we mustn't use our ladder. My friend says - we've been using it just down the street and she says, well, I would have stopped you, if I'd seen you. 'It's a by law.' Though there is a lack of conviction and I doubt it. How can it be a by law to set up a ladder? It is how things are built. But just a bit further down we find a good angle to the Abbey door against a wall ( still with the ladder ) and my eldest son becomes a tripod to the royalist friend. Everyone is happy.
The crowd cheer when the couple are pronounced man and wife and we hear Jerusalem sung from within the church itself.
A group of pretty girls push a young woman in a wheelchair into the crowded throng. We need to get to Trafalgar Square. They announce. The crowd takes charge. It is impossible, now, from here, they say. Even with a wheelchair? Even with a wheelchair is the verdict. The pretty girl in the wheelchair says 'I suffer from claustrophobia' but it is a quiet, low down voice and I feel only me and my friend from school holding the ladder hear her. They all keep pushing on. Again, there is only a dead end to reach.
Three women in black robes, but not full face burkahs stand alongside us. They have slightly masculine faces and whitening make up - creamy, a little bit oily, like floating chalk on their skin I think of Michael Jackson. They are smiley with me and my grumpy, bickering sons. We are all here. I think. Celebrating something. Love or tradition. Or history. Or just living round the corner. The carriages and horses and soldiers line up alongside us, ludicrously fairy tale, a historic toy box come to life.
The bride and groom appear at the door of the Abbey. I am still holding child legs steady as the crowd cheers. Though later I am pleased because our royalist friend gets perfect pictures of the pair smiling at the doorway.
After the carriages and soldiers and finally the mini buses for the guests have all disappeared we meet PSM and her two sons on parliament square. The peace tents are still parked tight on the edge of pavement by railings. But just for this day the green lawn of the square has been opened. We walk down The Mall as the flypast flies past, and then cut through horse guards parade and into the park. A huge royal standard billows over Buckingham Palace. Crowds of people are clustered, picnicking, wearing flags and hats like old fashioned scenes in modern colours.
Then back for tea. By now there is quite a throng - 5 boys, 6 women ( my Indonesian friend comes with her son) and exh. I have said there will be an English tea. ( Remember the Victoria Sponges? ) I serve tea and Cava and make egg and cucumber sandwiches but there isn't really enough. I put pizza out for the children but unexpectedly they go for cucumber sandwiches and everytime I slice the crusts off another round and put them out on a fancy cake stand they have gone. I worry that my friend's girlfriend is hungry. I worry that I have told my Indonesian friend that there will be alcohol but not that there will be lesbians. Though I need her to accept us as we are. Then hold my breath when PSM asks me about UL - for an adulterous relationship is almost too much to ask anyone to accept. But she takes everything in her stride, smiling, kind and funny. And the cakes save the day - they are delicious.
Trying to piece this together I find that nearby 'Caxton Hall' near St James's tube station was a registery office popular with famous people.
http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2009/06/caxton-hall-in-westminster-and-the-marriage-of-diana-dors-to-dennis-hamilton/ ( the description of Diana Dors wedding is hilarious and terrifying )
Two days later we wake to find Bin Laden is dead.
I don't think this will be the last post. I think my ambition is to reach The City.
Amen.
Friday, 29 April 2011
Monday, 18 April 2011
Saint Etienne, Vallouise, France
I feel like I am in a Pixar film. We have two hamsters in the flat. One in a cage in the kitchen, one in a cage in the living room. Both gnawing at the bars. If I didn't keep closing the door between the rooms they would be able to see the mirror of their solitary bent-on-escape lives. Which seems cruel to both though I have been told that two male hamsters would fight to the death if put together.
We are looking after PSM's eldest son's hamster while they are on holiday. Mush Mush. A golden hamster with gentle eyes and inquisitivie whiskers. Everytime I mention the fight to the death the boys look fascinated, even sly, certain Sparky would win. Though Sparky - who has entertained us by building structures out of his sawdust to get nearer to the bars, mixing water from his bottle to the sawdust to make a firmer mixture to build those slopes and spires, and eventually a kind of condensation heating system out of these water/sawdust mixtures, all the time maintaining his fierce stare and wild determination seems to have a new ploy. He has become a 'pet'. My youngest son plucked up courage to handle him with gloves and within a couple of holiday hours both boys were bare hand handling, even putting him in their pockets and on their shoulders. I worry that my own fear has blighted the little furry fellows life. Or he has pulled off his best stunt yet, swopping himself with another more biddable but look-a-like pet.
It is the Easter holidays. In my surprising life we went ski ing for the first five days. My brother has a flat in the Alps and I would beg, steal or borrow to ski, to teach my young sons to ski. Infact of course I mainly borrowed. But it always costs more than I think and I come back with shaky financial nerves, not enough money left to buy the beds for them that I had also borrowed money for and a sense that my strategy, this brave but foolhardy sailing into the wind, trying to give them a good life, a life off the breadline I have put myself on will tumble. I should get a proper job. Spend less on ebay shoes. Spend less. I don't know. I feel shaky and wrong with my illusions of grandeur. Defeated. At one point I let them watch tv on a beautiful sunny afternoon so that I can cry while I tidy up their bedroom. I berate myself that other mother's are managing better and indeed facebook proves it. Sunny smiling children mix perfume in perfumed gardens.
Later ( and all of it behind scenes ) I pull myself together and we have fish and chips in St James's park and play catch. It is magical. All three of us happy.
My answer ( if anyone ever asked ) to 'What is the most surprising thing about you?' Would be that I can ski. That I can ski well.
I go with exh and two other Dads and their sons. I forget to be alarmed at the exclusively male company until just before going. My plan is that each adult takes responsibility for one days food and I get a bit bossy just before we go about how to do it. I want us to save money, I want us to be fed well. But it is good for me to lay down the law for I would have adopted annoying martyr tendencies if I hadn't and everyone sticks to the arrangement with good grace.
This holiday my youngest son cracks it - he learns to ski. I feel like a lioness watching as he is joined by his brother and the two other boys coming down the mountain, his cheeky face beaming - the three older boys at his side, caring for him, praising him, standing by him when he falls until I swoop from high to lift him onto his feet. In the time between speeding down the mountain, dusting snow out of small children's gloves and necks, strapping small feet into ski boots and persuading boys to put suncream on or sitting on chair lifts both exh and his friend keep drily suggesting I find time to visit a church. This blog has caused so much trouble in this group, and I am not really forgiven, certainly not by exh so I say, no I don't think so. I enjoy just the speed, the angle my body can make coming down a mountain fast, the swoop and elegance of a turn. Of not thinking of anything, anybody, but doing this, being here now. And the mountains are magnificent, beautiful, breathtaking. Oh it is a good thing.
During an evening meal the two other dad's charm me with a tale of themselves as young men paying a prostitute to play table tennis with an imaginary ball in ( I think ) Poland. They said when their hour was up, she stopped on the minute but that she played well.
On the last day it is necessary to do a supermarket shop to replace things we have used in the flat and me and one of the dads drive down the mountain to do it. He has injured his knee and has not been able to ski the last few days and has already explored some of the valley. I keep saying nervously how brilliant the holiday has been and then remembering about his knee and feeling guilty. Can we just go back to a church in the village, he has left his camera case he says. I think he is teasing me, wonder if he is testing me but can only say yes. He parks the car like in a car advert, just flung by a water trough that serves as a roundabout in an old stone, fairy tale village. We enter the church through a beautiful old grained wood carved door. The church is lovely, of basillica design, arches like the structure of internal organs .
I am paranoid that he has engineered this and determined as I look round not to write about it. He finds his camera case quickly and easily - did he just have it in his pocket I wonder? There are lovely statues and frescos. A rich gold altarpiece with floral decorations painted on the vaulted ceiling above. A fresco of dead christ, his rib cage exposed and puny and some absolutely lovely figures of saints - Saint Pancrace, Saint Roc, Saint Jacques de Compostelle, Sainte Barbe, Saint Antoine and another of a pious but sinister looking priest. I am grateful to come here, see this lovely church built in the 14th century - tucked in a dead end valley with a glacier like that hitchcock ship in Marnie at the end of their 'street' - it must have been a remote place for most of history.
Back in London I think I am going to have to describe the French church after all for the Easter holdiday means I have no time to visit anywhere but adventure playgrounds and pet shops. Also I want to be straight about my Marie Antoinette lifestyle. I am poor but I have assumptions of middle class life which are tricky to balance with where I am and what I describe.
Round here preparations are under way for the Royal Wedding - shop facades are being steam cleaned on Victoria Street to a certain height as if getting rid of old grime to eye level. Though I check the route and it doesn't look like the royal couple will come this way so I not sure what it is about. Though there will be thousands of people pouring down these streets maybe they just want their brand names to look good. I discover too more historic grime of where I live. On my street corner I find a description of badger baiting:
'In 1792 one William Ebberfield ( probably the same individual as a well-known local criminal called Slender Billy, later hanged for forgery) was prosecuted by his neighbours for the nuisance caused by dog- and badger baiting in a house in Great Peter St. In another ( or perhaps the same ) 'pit' said to be Duck Lane, the the heart of the Westminster slums, a dog-fighting African monkey attracted the fashionable West End to rub shoulders with more local low life.'
Also the overcrowding,
'Under parliamentary powers obtained in 1845, Victoria Street was cut through the Almonry, Dacre Street, and the northern ends of Duck Lane and Strutton Ground. The slums, however, did not go away. Indeed the vicar of St John's estimated that the work displaced five thousand of the poor from their homes. Although three quarters of these left the district, mostly crossing the river to other poor districts, the remainder croweded into the courts and cottages that were left, living three or four families to a house built for one. A local missionary estimated in 1855 that in one of the areas's 24 common lodging houses an average occupancy might be one hundred and twenty people a night. 72 lived in one of the twelve six-roomed houses in one court. From another in the course of three months, 69 young people had been sentenced to transportation, and one hanged at Newgate.'
'Westminster And Pimlico Past.' Isobel Watson.
The imprint of desperation still exists. I have seen a young man in shabby shoes and a grey face his fingers shaking, his eyes ashamed but determined, neck methadone in one gulp at the counter in Boots, a gentle girl like a soft Disney animal, kindly holding out the plastic measured cup. We'll see you tomorrow she said. He waved. An acrid aftertaste in the air. A homeless man ran bleeding through our courtyard recently but followed by a well dressed man who stubbornly kept on his trail organising help. Another destitute man sits on the corner sometimes with his arm around a life sized toy Alasatian Dog. But Westminster Council are trying to pass by laws to make street sleeping illegal and helping or feeding homeless people prosecutable with heavy fines.
http://www.westminster.gov.uk/press-releases/2011-02/soup-runs-and-rough-sleeping-could-be-banned-at-we/
http://london.indymedia.org/articles/7920
My youngest son, has only just started to read but he understood immediately the flier that came through the door - 'Do not feed the homeless' it said, drumming up support for a demonstration against the measures and he wrote in his still big, wavery letters. NOT RITE.
Finally and this was before school broke up my Indonesian friend came unexpectedly one morning to drop her son off so I could take him to school. His beautiful face anxious as she ushered him in. I need to tell you something privately she said and I pulled the door to and stood with her in the stairwell hearing the boys all laughing slightly manically inside. Her husband had been set upon by three men, somewhere just outside of London. His face had been smashed, his cheekbone broken. I have to go to him she said. Yes, I said let me know what I can do to help. But I don't think there is anything I can do. They are trapped in something terrible and I don't even know what it is.
Amen.
We are looking after PSM's eldest son's hamster while they are on holiday. Mush Mush. A golden hamster with gentle eyes and inquisitivie whiskers. Everytime I mention the fight to the death the boys look fascinated, even sly, certain Sparky would win. Though Sparky - who has entertained us by building structures out of his sawdust to get nearer to the bars, mixing water from his bottle to the sawdust to make a firmer mixture to build those slopes and spires, and eventually a kind of condensation heating system out of these water/sawdust mixtures, all the time maintaining his fierce stare and wild determination seems to have a new ploy. He has become a 'pet'. My youngest son plucked up courage to handle him with gloves and within a couple of holiday hours both boys were bare hand handling, even putting him in their pockets and on their shoulders. I worry that my own fear has blighted the little furry fellows life. Or he has pulled off his best stunt yet, swopping himself with another more biddable but look-a-like pet.
It is the Easter holidays. In my surprising life we went ski ing for the first five days. My brother has a flat in the Alps and I would beg, steal or borrow to ski, to teach my young sons to ski. Infact of course I mainly borrowed. But it always costs more than I think and I come back with shaky financial nerves, not enough money left to buy the beds for them that I had also borrowed money for and a sense that my strategy, this brave but foolhardy sailing into the wind, trying to give them a good life, a life off the breadline I have put myself on will tumble. I should get a proper job. Spend less on ebay shoes. Spend less. I don't know. I feel shaky and wrong with my illusions of grandeur. Defeated. At one point I let them watch tv on a beautiful sunny afternoon so that I can cry while I tidy up their bedroom. I berate myself that other mother's are managing better and indeed facebook proves it. Sunny smiling children mix perfume in perfumed gardens.
Later ( and all of it behind scenes ) I pull myself together and we have fish and chips in St James's park and play catch. It is magical. All three of us happy.
My answer ( if anyone ever asked ) to 'What is the most surprising thing about you?' Would be that I can ski. That I can ski well.
I go with exh and two other Dads and their sons. I forget to be alarmed at the exclusively male company until just before going. My plan is that each adult takes responsibility for one days food and I get a bit bossy just before we go about how to do it. I want us to save money, I want us to be fed well. But it is good for me to lay down the law for I would have adopted annoying martyr tendencies if I hadn't and everyone sticks to the arrangement with good grace.
This holiday my youngest son cracks it - he learns to ski. I feel like a lioness watching as he is joined by his brother and the two other boys coming down the mountain, his cheeky face beaming - the three older boys at his side, caring for him, praising him, standing by him when he falls until I swoop from high to lift him onto his feet. In the time between speeding down the mountain, dusting snow out of small children's gloves and necks, strapping small feet into ski boots and persuading boys to put suncream on or sitting on chair lifts both exh and his friend keep drily suggesting I find time to visit a church. This blog has caused so much trouble in this group, and I am not really forgiven, certainly not by exh so I say, no I don't think so. I enjoy just the speed, the angle my body can make coming down a mountain fast, the swoop and elegance of a turn. Of not thinking of anything, anybody, but doing this, being here now. And the mountains are magnificent, beautiful, breathtaking. Oh it is a good thing.
During an evening meal the two other dad's charm me with a tale of themselves as young men paying a prostitute to play table tennis with an imaginary ball in ( I think ) Poland. They said when their hour was up, she stopped on the minute but that she played well.
On the last day it is necessary to do a supermarket shop to replace things we have used in the flat and me and one of the dads drive down the mountain to do it. He has injured his knee and has not been able to ski the last few days and has already explored some of the valley. I keep saying nervously how brilliant the holiday has been and then remembering about his knee and feeling guilty. Can we just go back to a church in the village, he has left his camera case he says. I think he is teasing me, wonder if he is testing me but can only say yes. He parks the car like in a car advert, just flung by a water trough that serves as a roundabout in an old stone, fairy tale village. We enter the church through a beautiful old grained wood carved door. The church is lovely, of basillica design, arches like the structure of internal organs .
I am paranoid that he has engineered this and determined as I look round not to write about it. He finds his camera case quickly and easily - did he just have it in his pocket I wonder? There are lovely statues and frescos. A rich gold altarpiece with floral decorations painted on the vaulted ceiling above. A fresco of dead christ, his rib cage exposed and puny and some absolutely lovely figures of saints - Saint Pancrace, Saint Roc, Saint Jacques de Compostelle, Sainte Barbe, Saint Antoine and another of a pious but sinister looking priest. I am grateful to come here, see this lovely church built in the 14th century - tucked in a dead end valley with a glacier like that hitchcock ship in Marnie at the end of their 'street' - it must have been a remote place for most of history.
Back in London I think I am going to have to describe the French church after all for the Easter holdiday means I have no time to visit anywhere but adventure playgrounds and pet shops. Also I want to be straight about my Marie Antoinette lifestyle. I am poor but I have assumptions of middle class life which are tricky to balance with where I am and what I describe.
Round here preparations are under way for the Royal Wedding - shop facades are being steam cleaned on Victoria Street to a certain height as if getting rid of old grime to eye level. Though I check the route and it doesn't look like the royal couple will come this way so I not sure what it is about. Though there will be thousands of people pouring down these streets maybe they just want their brand names to look good. I discover too more historic grime of where I live. On my street corner I find a description of badger baiting:
'In 1792 one William Ebberfield ( probably the same individual as a well-known local criminal called Slender Billy, later hanged for forgery) was prosecuted by his neighbours for the nuisance caused by dog- and badger baiting in a house in Great Peter St. In another ( or perhaps the same ) 'pit' said to be Duck Lane, the the heart of the Westminster slums, a dog-fighting African monkey attracted the fashionable West End to rub shoulders with more local low life.'
Also the overcrowding,
'Under parliamentary powers obtained in 1845, Victoria Street was cut through the Almonry, Dacre Street, and the northern ends of Duck Lane and Strutton Ground. The slums, however, did not go away. Indeed the vicar of St John's estimated that the work displaced five thousand of the poor from their homes. Although three quarters of these left the district, mostly crossing the river to other poor districts, the remainder croweded into the courts and cottages that were left, living three or four families to a house built for one. A local missionary estimated in 1855 that in one of the areas's 24 common lodging houses an average occupancy might be one hundred and twenty people a night. 72 lived in one of the twelve six-roomed houses in one court. From another in the course of three months, 69 young people had been sentenced to transportation, and one hanged at Newgate.'
'Westminster And Pimlico Past.' Isobel Watson.
The imprint of desperation still exists. I have seen a young man in shabby shoes and a grey face his fingers shaking, his eyes ashamed but determined, neck methadone in one gulp at the counter in Boots, a gentle girl like a soft Disney animal, kindly holding out the plastic measured cup. We'll see you tomorrow she said. He waved. An acrid aftertaste in the air. A homeless man ran bleeding through our courtyard recently but followed by a well dressed man who stubbornly kept on his trail organising help. Another destitute man sits on the corner sometimes with his arm around a life sized toy Alasatian Dog. But Westminster Council are trying to pass by laws to make street sleeping illegal and helping or feeding homeless people prosecutable with heavy fines.
http://www.westminster.gov.uk/press-releases/2011-02/soup-runs-and-rough-sleeping-could-be-banned-at-we/
http://london.indymedia.org/articles/7920
My youngest son, has only just started to read but he understood immediately the flier that came through the door - 'Do not feed the homeless' it said, drumming up support for a demonstration against the measures and he wrote in his still big, wavery letters. NOT RITE.
Finally and this was before school broke up my Indonesian friend came unexpectedly one morning to drop her son off so I could take him to school. His beautiful face anxious as she ushered him in. I need to tell you something privately she said and I pulled the door to and stood with her in the stairwell hearing the boys all laughing slightly manically inside. Her husband had been set upon by three men, somewhere just outside of London. His face had been smashed, his cheekbone broken. I have to go to him she said. Yes, I said let me know what I can do to help. But I don't think there is anything I can do. They are trapped in something terrible and I don't even know what it is.
Amen.
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
St Michael's Chester Square
We all went to the Stop The Cuts March! Almost everyone I have ever mentioned in this blog was there, somewhere. If this was Jane Austen it would be the Box Hill picnic though with a lot less dramatic impact and more people and more banners.
Me, the children, exh and the exd friend of exh set off. One son dressed in a storm trooper costume, another in a viking helmet and me in ( I didn't seem to have any marching shoes) wellington boots and a bowler hat. Though all of us being awful ( not the exd friend luckily - he behaved perfectly. ) The boys crying on our street corner because I wouldn't let them take guns. Exh disappearing. Me frazzled for we are meant to be meeting people and we are late. Exh reappearing. With a bubble machine that looks exactly like a gun I have just confiscated. Both boys want the bubble machine and both boys still want guns. I am rolling my eyes and sniping at exh though later I feel I lost track of humour because a bubble machine subverts a gun so well.
Joining the march at parliament square our spirits soar. We become part of something bigger than our leaky bickering boat, and are buoyed up, part of a current - nice nurses, beautiful handstitched TUC banners, good people blowing whistles. At Downing St we all boo. Everyone taking pictures or film. The children surprised by the childishness of adults. BOO!
We meet our friends on the corner of Piccadilly. “HEY HEY, HO HO, THE FUNDING CUTS HAVE GOT TO GO!' From near Green Park I see a church that I have wanted to visit tucked into a dark street like a scene from a period drama. 'STOP THE CUTS. STOP THE CUTS. STOP THE CUTS.' Later in Hyde Park we meet more friends and a message comes through on my phone from UL who had been marching with his son saying that banks are being trashed near Cambridge Circus and there is pandemonium. Police sirens scream around Hyde Park Corner and we, the three families coming back to the flat for tea, cut through the opulence of Belgravia to avoid it. Under the nose of policemen a young couple, like insects, black scarves over their faces and really enormous bags, like stretched skin, the shells of cockroachs slung on their backs, carry a crate of beer. Close up, we can see pale skin, and make out skinny youthful faces, a boy and a girl. It is like a black space when they walk past, as if breath is held. All the children are fascinated, open mouthed, their instinctive love of order threatened. What do they have in their bags? They want to know. Why have they got masks on? Why did the policemen not stop them?
Nearing Victoria I see another church. One I didn't know was there, one I must have missed. It is much nearer than some other churches I have already been to. There. I think. I'll do that next. Pleased to have made a discovery. Outside an exclusive Belgravia shop a man in plush corduroy and a blazer pauses, watches us trudging along with our weary children as if we are foot soldiers back from an old battle, as if we are a defeated enemy. Finally back at the flat, eating toasted sandwiches we watch Fortnum and Masons's taken over on the tv. 'Oh' I say. 'What a shame. I love Fortnum and Mason's it's so beautiful.' My more left wing but rich friends scowl at me.
UL tells me later he saw the bloc party kids - a big group of those insect-like, masked youth- move up and out of Trafalagar Square, menacing but choreographed, wearing black and red, banging sticks, marching in formation - intent on trouble. He said they were 'high' but he wasn't sure if it was just excitement and fear or drugs too.
UL and I haven't seen each other much. He was ill, then one of the boys was ill and Exh has been on a babysitting boycott for weeks. We squeeze in a cup of coffee at the British Library before I meet a friend who works there for lunch. Everything feels rather unsatisfactory for I just have too much to do, I don't really have time for either assignation - I haven't yet been to a church, I need to buy hamster bedding, should be working on my novel or editing a friend's photographs for money. We correspond continually - modern electronic love letters of beauty and mundane detail. Homework, meals made, misunderstandings, political debate, It is wonderful and exciting but sometimes I wonder if the gaps between what we write and who we are is too wide. The reality is we are a middle aged couple that repeat themselves, apologise for wearing glasses, and forget they have told each other something already. I know that love is there but it is hard to trust. I worry each sentence exchanged and see trapdoors in everything. I know I will ruin what there is if I keep going with my detective's eye and empty pockets of faith. But I can't seem to help myself.
I write this and then think does it sound too mean? I have become increasingly squashed now between hurting people in my life, telling a story and telling the truth. I discuss this with a writer friend. She suggests writing about it. Being honest about the difficulties. She suggests researching how Charles Dickens responded to opinions on his serialised novels.
'Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Nell and her grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: "You know you're going to have to kill her, don't you?" Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence "You think they're going to lose, you think they're going to lose, they win". In tragedy, it is: "You think they're going to win, you think they're going to win, they lose". The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Nell died.
He abides by plot which seems to be the sensible answer. But doesn't really help me. My plot was an accident. Unexpected. Muddled.
I race back from the British Library to the church I saw. Squeezing time before getting the boys from school The main door is shut, but I spot a back door, left slightly open. Pinned wonkily is a poster for a baby singing group. There are two women with smart buggies and cashmere dressed babies approaching and for a minute I think they are smiling at me, but of course it is at each other. 'Is it possible to get into the church this back way?' I ask. 'I just want to have a quick look.' Probably functioning on exhaustion and Munch mask screams behind the perfect make up they are helpful and usher me in. Only when we are all inside, past the kitchen, into the gloom of the vestry is there a sudden suspicious glance, an understandable holding tight of their babies. These are the first-to-arrive-mums, the organised ones but I am beyond their comprehension, a funny woman in patent platform court shoes rattling the bull ring of the locked wooden door into the actual church, then standing at the glass peering into view the interior. Which is almost square with a high ceiling. Stained glass, simple pews. A lot of space. I dare only a quick look before turning and bobbing and thanking my exit. Rushing to Sainsbury's and to get the boys from school.
I don't know I find these Pimlico/Belgravia churches hard to remember, hard to attach to. So difficult that when I went past St Saviour's the other day I couldn't really remember whether I had been inside or not. And when I read that St Michael's like St Paul's Wilton Place was designed by Thomas Cundy Jnr I know I have been to that church but can't quite remember which one it was. Most of the churches I have been to I remember vividly, but these few lack, lack what - a heart, a mystery, authenticity?
Initially a church was not planned in Chester Square ( built 1835) but squeezed into an awkward space meant for a mews when the nearby Chapel of the Lock and hospital was demolished in1842 leaving the new residents with no where to worship. Though it a surprise that the clientele of this 'the most retired and therefore the most satisfying of the Belgravia squares.' Nickolaus Pevsner - would be have been happy to worship in the Chapel of the Lock which had been alongside a leper hospital for women of dubious reputation.
'LOOK HOSPITAL, removed, from its old habitat in Grosvenor Place, to a more appropriate position in the Harrow Road, discharges the functions both of a hospital (established in 1746) and an asylum (dating from 1787) for penitent Magdalenes afflicted with disease, or sincerely desirous of abandoning the "primrose path that leads to the everlasting bonfire."
Cruchley's London in 1865 : A Handbook for Strangers, 1865
'Look or Lock' referring 'to the old French loques, rags, from the linen applied to sores; "but otherwise, and with more probability, from the Saxon loq, shut, closed, in reference to the necessary seclusion of the leper on account of the infectious nature of his disease." (Archer's Vestiges, Part I.)'
Finally ( and yes, I'm rushing ) I find these two things
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2011/02/yemeni-protest-chants.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/28/cuts-protest-uk-uncut-fortnum
I don't know. Our assumptions of safety get us into trouble sometimes.
Amen.
Me, the children, exh and the exd friend of exh set off. One son dressed in a storm trooper costume, another in a viking helmet and me in ( I didn't seem to have any marching shoes) wellington boots and a bowler hat. Though all of us being awful ( not the exd friend luckily - he behaved perfectly. ) The boys crying on our street corner because I wouldn't let them take guns. Exh disappearing. Me frazzled for we are meant to be meeting people and we are late. Exh reappearing. With a bubble machine that looks exactly like a gun I have just confiscated. Both boys want the bubble machine and both boys still want guns. I am rolling my eyes and sniping at exh though later I feel I lost track of humour because a bubble machine subverts a gun so well.
Joining the march at parliament square our spirits soar. We become part of something bigger than our leaky bickering boat, and are buoyed up, part of a current - nice nurses, beautiful handstitched TUC banners, good people blowing whistles. At Downing St we all boo. Everyone taking pictures or film. The children surprised by the childishness of adults. BOO!
We meet our friends on the corner of Piccadilly. “HEY HEY, HO HO, THE FUNDING CUTS HAVE GOT TO GO!' From near Green Park I see a church that I have wanted to visit tucked into a dark street like a scene from a period drama. 'STOP THE CUTS. STOP THE CUTS. STOP THE CUTS.' Later in Hyde Park we meet more friends and a message comes through on my phone from UL who had been marching with his son saying that banks are being trashed near Cambridge Circus and there is pandemonium. Police sirens scream around Hyde Park Corner and we, the three families coming back to the flat for tea, cut through the opulence of Belgravia to avoid it. Under the nose of policemen a young couple, like insects, black scarves over their faces and really enormous bags, like stretched skin, the shells of cockroachs slung on their backs, carry a crate of beer. Close up, we can see pale skin, and make out skinny youthful faces, a boy and a girl. It is like a black space when they walk past, as if breath is held. All the children are fascinated, open mouthed, their instinctive love of order threatened. What do they have in their bags? They want to know. Why have they got masks on? Why did the policemen not stop them?
Nearing Victoria I see another church. One I didn't know was there, one I must have missed. It is much nearer than some other churches I have already been to. There. I think. I'll do that next. Pleased to have made a discovery. Outside an exclusive Belgravia shop a man in plush corduroy and a blazer pauses, watches us trudging along with our weary children as if we are foot soldiers back from an old battle, as if we are a defeated enemy. Finally back at the flat, eating toasted sandwiches we watch Fortnum and Masons's taken over on the tv. 'Oh' I say. 'What a shame. I love Fortnum and Mason's it's so beautiful.' My more left wing but rich friends scowl at me.
UL tells me later he saw the bloc party kids - a big group of those insect-like, masked youth- move up and out of Trafalagar Square, menacing but choreographed, wearing black and red, banging sticks, marching in formation - intent on trouble. He said they were 'high' but he wasn't sure if it was just excitement and fear or drugs too.
UL and I haven't seen each other much. He was ill, then one of the boys was ill and Exh has been on a babysitting boycott for weeks. We squeeze in a cup of coffee at the British Library before I meet a friend who works there for lunch. Everything feels rather unsatisfactory for I just have too much to do, I don't really have time for either assignation - I haven't yet been to a church, I need to buy hamster bedding, should be working on my novel or editing a friend's photographs for money. We correspond continually - modern electronic love letters of beauty and mundane detail. Homework, meals made, misunderstandings, political debate, It is wonderful and exciting but sometimes I wonder if the gaps between what we write and who we are is too wide. The reality is we are a middle aged couple that repeat themselves, apologise for wearing glasses, and forget they have told each other something already. I know that love is there but it is hard to trust. I worry each sentence exchanged and see trapdoors in everything. I know I will ruin what there is if I keep going with my detective's eye and empty pockets of faith. But I can't seem to help myself.
I write this and then think does it sound too mean? I have become increasingly squashed now between hurting people in my life, telling a story and telling the truth. I discuss this with a writer friend. She suggests writing about it. Being honest about the difficulties. She suggests researching how Charles Dickens responded to opinions on his serialised novels.
'Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Nell and her grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: "You know you're going to have to kill her, don't you?" Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence "You think they're going to lose, you think they're going to lose, they win". In tragedy, it is: "You think they're going to win, you think they're going to win, they lose". The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Nell died.
He abides by plot which seems to be the sensible answer. But doesn't really help me. My plot was an accident. Unexpected. Muddled.
I race back from the British Library to the church I saw. Squeezing time before getting the boys from school The main door is shut, but I spot a back door, left slightly open. Pinned wonkily is a poster for a baby singing group. There are two women with smart buggies and cashmere dressed babies approaching and for a minute I think they are smiling at me, but of course it is at each other. 'Is it possible to get into the church this back way?' I ask. 'I just want to have a quick look.' Probably functioning on exhaustion and Munch mask screams behind the perfect make up they are helpful and usher me in. Only when we are all inside, past the kitchen, into the gloom of the vestry is there a sudden suspicious glance, an understandable holding tight of their babies. These are the first-to-arrive-mums, the organised ones but I am beyond their comprehension, a funny woman in patent platform court shoes rattling the bull ring of the locked wooden door into the actual church, then standing at the glass peering into view the interior. Which is almost square with a high ceiling. Stained glass, simple pews. A lot of space. I dare only a quick look before turning and bobbing and thanking my exit. Rushing to Sainsbury's and to get the boys from school.
I don't know I find these Pimlico/Belgravia churches hard to remember, hard to attach to. So difficult that when I went past St Saviour's the other day I couldn't really remember whether I had been inside or not. And when I read that St Michael's like St Paul's Wilton Place was designed by Thomas Cundy Jnr I know I have been to that church but can't quite remember which one it was. Most of the churches I have been to I remember vividly, but these few lack, lack what - a heart, a mystery, authenticity?
Initially a church was not planned in Chester Square ( built 1835) but squeezed into an awkward space meant for a mews when the nearby Chapel of the Lock and hospital was demolished in1842 leaving the new residents with no where to worship. Though it a surprise that the clientele of this 'the most retired and therefore the most satisfying of the Belgravia squares.' Nickolaus Pevsner - would be have been happy to worship in the Chapel of the Lock which had been alongside a leper hospital for women of dubious reputation.
'LOOK HOSPITAL, removed, from its old habitat in Grosvenor Place, to a more appropriate position in the Harrow Road, discharges the functions both of a hospital (established in 1746) and an asylum (dating from 1787) for penitent Magdalenes afflicted with disease, or sincerely desirous of abandoning the "primrose path that leads to the everlasting bonfire."
Cruchley's London in 1865 : A Handbook for Strangers, 1865
'Look or Lock' referring 'to the old French loques, rags, from the linen applied to sores; "but otherwise, and with more probability, from the Saxon loq, shut, closed, in reference to the necessary seclusion of the leper on account of the infectious nature of his disease." (Archer's Vestiges, Part I.)'
Finally ( and yes, I'm rushing ) I find these two things
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2011/02/yemeni-protest-chants.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/28/cuts-protest-uk-uncut-fortnum
I don't know. Our assumptions of safety get us into trouble sometimes.
Amen.
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Grosvenor Chapel, South Audley St
'Your life sounds like a film at the moment.' a friend says. 'Yes.' I say . But I feel slightly detached as if writing my life separates me from myself. That sometimes I don't have time to experience what is happening to me, for I am always worrying about the next bit, what other people think, about the neighbours, about money, about what to make for tea. Also, I boasted about time having expanded but it just isn't true. I am swimming upstream, slightly harried, flailing against whatever is oncoming. Though occasionally the fast currents form warm deep pools and briefly I kick out my legs and tread water.
The night I started writing this blog I could not sleep for I knew somehow this was my adventure. Though I had no idea what I would write and when the words first tumbled out I held my breath as if they were escaping. The adventure turned out to be to tell my truth and my ambition became to make it as honest and real as possible. Though the stories have gathered unexpected momentum as if into a plot. But reality seems a difficult story to write. It becomes invasive and perhaps questionable for different realities are owned by different people.
Today at the doctor's I heard an older receptionist talking to a young pretty colleague. With great kindness and concern she was talking about her alcoholic partner. The pretty girl seemed to have experience of alcoholic behaviour too and asked deftly 'Does he take it out on you, does he get nasty towards you, are his outbursts directed at you?' 'Oh yes. Of course.' said the kindly and chatty woman. I was only eavesdropping but I realised she was oblivious of what she had said. Why? 'Of course? ' Why? 'Oh yes? ' Though I understood.
My pride meant I did not tell people what was happening to me as our family life gathered speed to the point where h was really really dh. I felt I peered out of a 'hide', a camouflaged place - observing normality from a smiley face. I thought it was all my fault. I thought others would think that too. I thought I have children now and I better make it work for all. Some of the tales I have told or events that have happened have been so truly painful and what a funny word - embarrassing - how did I get here - how did I let these things happen - how did I become so trapped - that writing the words, telling the truth freed me from that hidden, isolated observation post of pride and shame. Recently I went to see the twin babies of a couple I know and really like and in the midst of all the love and beauty and wow how lovely I am holding a baby, ooh now I am holding another one, and how do you ever get time to do anything ever again, one of the women said oh I read your recent blog this afternoon and she said it so matter of factly and warmly I felt like crying. Everything I once screened and desperately hid was just accepted in a nice calm room.
Years ago I worked with a picture editor - an honourable but difficult and demanding man who was brilliant and determined about what he did. He helped discover the artist Richard Billingham and in a junior position I spent a lot of time within office hours helping colour photocopy ( remember it was a while ago ) Richard Billingham's brilliant pictures from the snap shots originally taken for the work to be edited into a book. RB was a young art student who wanted to be a painter. His Dad Ray was a chronic alcoholic. His Mum Liz obese, with a love of colour and decoration and pets. They lived in a council flat in Dudley. RB had taken hundreds of pictures of his family life. His Dad slumped by a bed, his mum in a big dress raising a fist to his Dad infront of a gaudy carnival of colourful knick knacks and a dog and a cat eating dropped peas and carrots off the dirty floor. Richard had intended to make paintings from them. Understandable for the colour in his pictures has the verve of brushstrokes. But his tutors, this man I worked for and some others I didn't know, found them - greedily understanding their painful and beautiful honesty. At the time there was almost a blood lust for 'reality' in photography and a hunting mentality about obtaining it. As publication of the book loomed - letters come from a german art gallery that advised them all to leave the young man alone. This gallery had worked with a very young german female artist on a reality project and built her up and she had not been able to cope and killed herself.
But the book 'Ray's a laugh' is a masterpiece. And Richard Billingham is still an artist. I get it down from the shelf to look at it to write this. They are better even than I remembered. Very shocking but very very beautiful. Despite and including the violence and dirt they feel to me to be about love. And I remember there is a quote from Richard that when he came home the first thing he always did was check Ray was breathing, check he was still alive, and the photographs started with this.
I didn't write about these because they are about an alcoholic I just wanted to think about the ethics of portraying 'reality'. Of describing other people's lives involved in your own. I always think of the 'authorship' of Richard's pictures. That when the scratched and badly cared for negatives were lovingly hand printed to exhibition quality there was more to the pictures than the lazily cropped snaps printed on a machine at the chemists had shown. In these unseen edges there was more compositional balance, even more of an exact idea of a whole picture. Richard 'constructed' the pictures from the real events that occured infront of his eyes. He 'told' these lives. His skill makes them real. Not just them being in them. Though when the book was first published it felt like a boundary of reality was crossed. That there was no longer any privacy. Not even within the family.
Oh it is tricky.
In Mayfair I try to obain access to the grand fronted Christian Scientist reading room but only a bookshop is open. The man who appears from a back room says the 'church' ( is that what it is called - I am not sure?) is only open for services. There is a slight smell of wee and unwashed clothes. I take a BB from right outside and weave again up through the beautiful streets tucked between Park Lane and Berkeley Square. I don't have much time, I have an appointment with the bank which I am dreading and later exh wants to talk to me. Belatedly he has been reading the blog.
These streets are where I walked just after christmas trying to decide whether UOL ( unexpected old love) could or would become UL. It felt like a journey that day into a beautiful and unknown place, the church I eventually found a surprise, like one of those precious beautiful eggs that open to reveal intricate treasure.
Today though the church I had hoped to go into on that day is open and fortunately there is a BB locking station alongside. It is a relief because I am running out of time. Grosvenor Chapel. I don't know why it looks Dutch to me or maybe just American. Simple and charming with painted doors and a white portico. A clock and a steeple. I slip in through the door and there are buckets of flowers in the hallway. I am not sure if these are being stored for the flower stall at the side or if the church is about to be decorated. There is no one around. Inside it is plain and spacious with a wooden gallery and a simple shallow marble font on a slim stem.
At the altar there are pillars and fences and railings as if to keep the eye moving inwards, as if somewhere in the centre of these arrangements something is hidden. I read afterwards that the simple georgian church was built in 1730. On a peppercorn rent for 99 years given by Sir Grosvenor to developers including Benjamin Timbrell who designed it almost from a 'pattern book' of recently built churches like St Martin's in the Field and St George's of Hanover Square without having to bother with an architect. It's simple emphasis on the pulpit and the spoken word was changed by John Ninian Compern in 1912 'to a prayerful church in which attention is directed to the mystery of the altar.'
'In the body of the church Comper brought the iron Georgian communion rails forward to enclose a new sanctuary within which the High Altar stands against the screen. It is flanked by two Corinthian columns intended to carry a canopy which was never completed, and the giant Ionic columns at each side set the scale for colonnades which were to run the whole length of the building, replacing the gallery columns. They carry a beam on which stands the rood with the crucified Christ, attended by his Virgin Mother and the beloved disciple John, triumphing over the dragons of evil. Two angels kneel below with chalices to gather the sacred blood. The three delicate stained glass windows in the south wall are also by Comper two of which contain his trademark strawberry motif.'
I find also photographs of a beautiful installation on the internet by Claire Morgan in 2005 made on the stairs up to the church galleries of the Grosvenor Chapel where she made an arch of real strawberries hung on nylon thread
http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/page18.htm
I am so worried about what is about to come - the bank/exh- my reality - that I leave quickly. Back onto the bike in cold sunshine.
Since Richard Billingham's pictures were published technology has increased the pursuit of 'reality' I think. Like a mass produced invasion. Digital cameras, home computers. How we process what we see has changed. For example I read that the advent of computer-based non-linear editing systems for video in 1989 made it easy to quickly edit hours of video footage into a usable form, something that had been very difficult to do before. (Film, which was easy to edit, was too expensive to shoot enough hours of footage with on a regular basis.) This became reality TV. But it is a strange reality - Big Brother, Jade Goody, Katie Price, The Only Way is Essex, even some programme I saw mentioned recently 'The Batchlorette' where a man chose a bride from a group of girls - leaving the spurned girl from the final two with a kiss, sobbing, heartbroken.
Big personalities acting out what being a human being is under the eye of a camera.
Finally I want to mention Nigel Shafran who is another photographer whose work I love. He takes beautiful pictures of rather unnoticed parts of life - the washing up on the draining board, his girlfriend, gentle ordinary domestic scenes. A very early picture shows the mark left by a sock on his girlfriend's leg, just the imprint on her skin. Time, love, a whisper of something noticed. Observation rather than entertainment from reality. 'An acceptance of the way things are.' he says.
The bank manager consolidates my debts. Exh says he won't babysit anymore.
Amen
The night I started writing this blog I could not sleep for I knew somehow this was my adventure. Though I had no idea what I would write and when the words first tumbled out I held my breath as if they were escaping. The adventure turned out to be to tell my truth and my ambition became to make it as honest and real as possible. Though the stories have gathered unexpected momentum as if into a plot. But reality seems a difficult story to write. It becomes invasive and perhaps questionable for different realities are owned by different people.
Today at the doctor's I heard an older receptionist talking to a young pretty colleague. With great kindness and concern she was talking about her alcoholic partner. The pretty girl seemed to have experience of alcoholic behaviour too and asked deftly 'Does he take it out on you, does he get nasty towards you, are his outbursts directed at you?' 'Oh yes. Of course.' said the kindly and chatty woman. I was only eavesdropping but I realised she was oblivious of what she had said. Why? 'Of course? ' Why? 'Oh yes? ' Though I understood.
My pride meant I did not tell people what was happening to me as our family life gathered speed to the point where h was really really dh. I felt I peered out of a 'hide', a camouflaged place - observing normality from a smiley face. I thought it was all my fault. I thought others would think that too. I thought I have children now and I better make it work for all. Some of the tales I have told or events that have happened have been so truly painful and what a funny word - embarrassing - how did I get here - how did I let these things happen - how did I become so trapped - that writing the words, telling the truth freed me from that hidden, isolated observation post of pride and shame. Recently I went to see the twin babies of a couple I know and really like and in the midst of all the love and beauty and wow how lovely I am holding a baby, ooh now I am holding another one, and how do you ever get time to do anything ever again, one of the women said oh I read your recent blog this afternoon and she said it so matter of factly and warmly I felt like crying. Everything I once screened and desperately hid was just accepted in a nice calm room.
Years ago I worked with a picture editor - an honourable but difficult and demanding man who was brilliant and determined about what he did. He helped discover the artist Richard Billingham and in a junior position I spent a lot of time within office hours helping colour photocopy ( remember it was a while ago ) Richard Billingham's brilliant pictures from the snap shots originally taken for the work to be edited into a book. RB was a young art student who wanted to be a painter. His Dad Ray was a chronic alcoholic. His Mum Liz obese, with a love of colour and decoration and pets. They lived in a council flat in Dudley. RB had taken hundreds of pictures of his family life. His Dad slumped by a bed, his mum in a big dress raising a fist to his Dad infront of a gaudy carnival of colourful knick knacks and a dog and a cat eating dropped peas and carrots off the dirty floor. Richard had intended to make paintings from them. Understandable for the colour in his pictures has the verve of brushstrokes. But his tutors, this man I worked for and some others I didn't know, found them - greedily understanding their painful and beautiful honesty. At the time there was almost a blood lust for 'reality' in photography and a hunting mentality about obtaining it. As publication of the book loomed - letters come from a german art gallery that advised them all to leave the young man alone. This gallery had worked with a very young german female artist on a reality project and built her up and she had not been able to cope and killed herself.
But the book 'Ray's a laugh' is a masterpiece. And Richard Billingham is still an artist. I get it down from the shelf to look at it to write this. They are better even than I remembered. Very shocking but very very beautiful. Despite and including the violence and dirt they feel to me to be about love. And I remember there is a quote from Richard that when he came home the first thing he always did was check Ray was breathing, check he was still alive, and the photographs started with this.
I didn't write about these because they are about an alcoholic I just wanted to think about the ethics of portraying 'reality'. Of describing other people's lives involved in your own. I always think of the 'authorship' of Richard's pictures. That when the scratched and badly cared for negatives were lovingly hand printed to exhibition quality there was more to the pictures than the lazily cropped snaps printed on a machine at the chemists had shown. In these unseen edges there was more compositional balance, even more of an exact idea of a whole picture. Richard 'constructed' the pictures from the real events that occured infront of his eyes. He 'told' these lives. His skill makes them real. Not just them being in them. Though when the book was first published it felt like a boundary of reality was crossed. That there was no longer any privacy. Not even within the family.
Oh it is tricky.
In Mayfair I try to obain access to the grand fronted Christian Scientist reading room but only a bookshop is open. The man who appears from a back room says the 'church' ( is that what it is called - I am not sure?) is only open for services. There is a slight smell of wee and unwashed clothes. I take a BB from right outside and weave again up through the beautiful streets tucked between Park Lane and Berkeley Square. I don't have much time, I have an appointment with the bank which I am dreading and later exh wants to talk to me. Belatedly he has been reading the blog.
These streets are where I walked just after christmas trying to decide whether UOL ( unexpected old love) could or would become UL. It felt like a journey that day into a beautiful and unknown place, the church I eventually found a surprise, like one of those precious beautiful eggs that open to reveal intricate treasure.
Today though the church I had hoped to go into on that day is open and fortunately there is a BB locking station alongside. It is a relief because I am running out of time. Grosvenor Chapel. I don't know why it looks Dutch to me or maybe just American. Simple and charming with painted doors and a white portico. A clock and a steeple. I slip in through the door and there are buckets of flowers in the hallway. I am not sure if these are being stored for the flower stall at the side or if the church is about to be decorated. There is no one around. Inside it is plain and spacious with a wooden gallery and a simple shallow marble font on a slim stem.
At the altar there are pillars and fences and railings as if to keep the eye moving inwards, as if somewhere in the centre of these arrangements something is hidden. I read afterwards that the simple georgian church was built in 1730. On a peppercorn rent for 99 years given by Sir Grosvenor to developers including Benjamin Timbrell who designed it almost from a 'pattern book' of recently built churches like St Martin's in the Field and St George's of Hanover Square without having to bother with an architect. It's simple emphasis on the pulpit and the spoken word was changed by John Ninian Compern in 1912 'to a prayerful church in which attention is directed to the mystery of the altar.'
'In the body of the church Comper brought the iron Georgian communion rails forward to enclose a new sanctuary within which the High Altar stands against the screen. It is flanked by two Corinthian columns intended to carry a canopy which was never completed, and the giant Ionic columns at each side set the scale for colonnades which were to run the whole length of the building, replacing the gallery columns. They carry a beam on which stands the rood with the crucified Christ, attended by his Virgin Mother and the beloved disciple John, triumphing over the dragons of evil. Two angels kneel below with chalices to gather the sacred blood. The three delicate stained glass windows in the south wall are also by Comper two of which contain his trademark strawberry motif.'
I find also photographs of a beautiful installation on the internet by Claire Morgan in 2005 made on the stairs up to the church galleries of the Grosvenor Chapel where she made an arch of real strawberries hung on nylon thread
http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/page18.htm
I am so worried about what is about to come - the bank/exh- my reality - that I leave quickly. Back onto the bike in cold sunshine.
Since Richard Billingham's pictures were published technology has increased the pursuit of 'reality' I think. Like a mass produced invasion. Digital cameras, home computers. How we process what we see has changed. For example I read that the advent of computer-based non-linear editing systems for video in 1989 made it easy to quickly edit hours of video footage into a usable form, something that had been very difficult to do before. (Film, which was easy to edit, was too expensive to shoot enough hours of footage with on a regular basis.) This became reality TV. But it is a strange reality - Big Brother, Jade Goody, Katie Price, The Only Way is Essex, even some programme I saw mentioned recently 'The Batchlorette' where a man chose a bride from a group of girls - leaving the spurned girl from the final two with a kiss, sobbing, heartbroken.
Big personalities acting out what being a human being is under the eye of a camera.
Finally I want to mention Nigel Shafran who is another photographer whose work I love. He takes beautiful pictures of rather unnoticed parts of life - the washing up on the draining board, his girlfriend, gentle ordinary domestic scenes. A very early picture shows the mark left by a sock on his girlfriend's leg, just the imprint on her skin. Time, love, a whisper of something noticed. Observation rather than entertainment from reality. 'An acceptance of the way things are.' he says.
The bank manager consolidates my debts. Exh says he won't babysit anymore.
Amen
Monday, 21 February 2011
Chapel Royal, St James's Palace
Sunday morning. It is Radio 2 love songs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle time and I am waiting for exh to come and look after the boys so I can go to church. He is late. I am disorganised. My hair is wet and I am trying to wrap christmas presents for my best friend who I haven't seen since just before christmas. How does that happen? We are going to hers for sunday lunch. I am starting to think I will have to miss the church, that I won't get there in time when exh bursts through the door panting and gasping. He just woke up he says.
I put lipstick on and dash for it. Out into the damp sunday morning and quiet streets. A gathering of men on a street corner looks like one of those history walks and I lean into to hear what they are saying. But then I see a dungeons and dragon style book clutched by one and realise it is a queue for some sort of convention in a pub. The men have the happy animated faces of being with their own kind, of being understood. I pass by onto St James Park where there are snowdrops and pink blossom in the mist. It feels lovely to be out. I would have been dreading going before, really dreading it but I realise the fear has gone, now it is just what I do. No one is going to hurt or mock me. I enjoy it.
Oh and I have been looking forward to going to the Chapel Royal. There seems such a mystery to it. Within the dark slightly foreboding thick walls of St James palace there is a chapel where the services are open to all. I wouldn't even know about it if I hadn't tried before to get into the Lady Chapel just around the corner. A notice there said that it was only open in the summer months but services went on within the palace all year. On Pall Mall I find the gateway flanked by empty sentry boxes and a policeman standing guard. Is it ok to go to the church service? I falter. He waves me in. I am only just in time and a robed 'greeter' in the thick old stone walls of the doorway ushers me through the door into the tiny narrow church, opening a small, high up, hinged door of a pew to squeeze me into a seat. I am next to a smart politician-like couple and a tweed man who smells of clean strong soap. The plush chapel, is soft-lit with desk style lamps, like an expensive but characterless hotel and it is packed. Instead of sitting looking forward towards the altar we are all sat either side of the nave staring at each other. I remember with embarrassment that my hair is still wet and that I must look rather dishevelled and unkempt. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I feel I have tumbled into another world.
Above the heads of the congregation the organ, pounds and soars joyfully.
Everyone rises as the choir enters. Small boys like white mice in extraordinary red jackets with gold braid and big gold buttons, red breeches and oliver cromwell shoes with buckles, the older choir flamingoes in white surplices with respectful bent necks and dipped heads, a man in crow robes, intricate ruffled sleeves and a black staff, some more men in surplices and the vicar all sailing in like swans. They process to the front of the church. Wow. I think. This goes on every sunday and who would know? This has happened every Sunday for hundreds of years.
We sit. Stand again and sing. Sit. The choir sings. There is a reading. Then another. The lord's prayer. Psalms from the St James prayer book. The tweed and soap man next to me relishes each word, really enjoys each one, as if reaching his tongue for an oyster, pulling and sucking the texture. It is almost embarrassing how much pleasure he is obtaining from speaking them aloud as if he is talking dirty alongside. I mumble along. Thinking I really don't believe what I'm saying but I think being here saying them is good. The kneelers are purple velvet. Very royal. Very posh hotel plush. And everyone kneels. In the parish church of my childhood there was a bit of laziness about kneeling - you could, but most people just put their hands together and crouched.
How funny - I find later, having written this that Samuel Pepys on the 10th May, 1663 'I walked to St. James's, and was there at masse, and was forced in the crowd to kneel down"
Observed by an elderly man on the opposite side I gaze around the room. The ceiling is panelled and intricately painted. Up high is the organ, tapestries hung high either side of the altar, a big quite modern looking stained glass window above the altar depicting a tree and at the back, just above me, a sort of royal box facing the altar. I imagine this is where the royal family worship if they come. It is completely hidden from view. Do you just not know if they are here I wonder? Are they here I think. The pews we are sat in have high walls as if we are fenced and stalled like animals. Or part of a lock-in with the Establishment.
The 'Chapel Royal' initially was not a place but a body of priests and singers who cared for the spiritual needs of the Sovereign and travelled with him. But Henry V111 took a fancy to the site of a female leper colony that had stood in this then remote corner since the saxon times. There was good hunting alongside and good access to the woods of Kensington and he comandeered the hospital, building a palace including the chapel as a home for the Chapel Royal. Like a fly digesting time in longer flashes, slowed down, opened up, it is impossible to understand that this place that is a brief stroll from my flat, from the Thames, from Whitehall could seem remote but perhaps the outskirts, the outside, the edge is always the furthest place away and therefore distant.
I read too that the chapel was considered the cradle of English church music - Tallis, Handel, and Henry Purcell were all organists or composers of the chapel and the poet Dryden escaped his many creditors by staying with Henry Purcell in a turret room of the composers apartments.
The vicar's sermon is of love. He talks well and passionately about showing up everyday to love, of being free from the limitations of romantic love to form a deeper and fundamental joy. He talks about faith and doubt. He is talking about God. But love is love I think. Mary I's heart is buried beneath the chapel. Charles I recieved the sacrament of Holy Communion prior to his execution here. Diana's body lay by the altar before her funeral. Victoria and Albert married here. Though I find all this out later. But it is me that is wracked by doubt. As if trust is something I haven't used for a while I keep opening the store cupboard door to find the basics, all the horded tins and packets look ok but are infact old, past their sell by date, no longer quite nice. Something has grown unknown and unexpected like mould or weevils in the everyday ingredients. I am horrified. I thought everything was just put away dry and stored. Here I say, and here, look at this, and this, showing ul what leaving did, what has been done. I have prided myself on my sanity and find now occasionally a raw madness in attempting to trust.
At the end of the service the white mice, the flamingoes, the black crow, all process out, the organ playing.
I shake hands with the vicar in the old walls of the palace as I leave but I notice that others keep his hand, holding it tight, maintaining steady eye contact. Not me. I flinch from the warmth and sincerity of the greeting. Bobbing my head in embarrassment. In the park though I feel fresh, restored. I need faith I think. I need to clean those cupboards and keep only the nourishment of good.
I put lipstick on and dash for it. Out into the damp sunday morning and quiet streets. A gathering of men on a street corner looks like one of those history walks and I lean into to hear what they are saying. But then I see a dungeons and dragon style book clutched by one and realise it is a queue for some sort of convention in a pub. The men have the happy animated faces of being with their own kind, of being understood. I pass by onto St James Park where there are snowdrops and pink blossom in the mist. It feels lovely to be out. I would have been dreading going before, really dreading it but I realise the fear has gone, now it is just what I do. No one is going to hurt or mock me. I enjoy it.
Oh and I have been looking forward to going to the Chapel Royal. There seems such a mystery to it. Within the dark slightly foreboding thick walls of St James palace there is a chapel where the services are open to all. I wouldn't even know about it if I hadn't tried before to get into the Lady Chapel just around the corner. A notice there said that it was only open in the summer months but services went on within the palace all year. On Pall Mall I find the gateway flanked by empty sentry boxes and a policeman standing guard. Is it ok to go to the church service? I falter. He waves me in. I am only just in time and a robed 'greeter' in the thick old stone walls of the doorway ushers me through the door into the tiny narrow church, opening a small, high up, hinged door of a pew to squeeze me into a seat. I am next to a smart politician-like couple and a tweed man who smells of clean strong soap. The plush chapel, is soft-lit with desk style lamps, like an expensive but characterless hotel and it is packed. Instead of sitting looking forward towards the altar we are all sat either side of the nave staring at each other. I remember with embarrassment that my hair is still wet and that I must look rather dishevelled and unkempt. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I feel I have tumbled into another world.
Above the heads of the congregation the organ, pounds and soars joyfully.
Everyone rises as the choir enters. Small boys like white mice in extraordinary red jackets with gold braid and big gold buttons, red breeches and oliver cromwell shoes with buckles, the older choir flamingoes in white surplices with respectful bent necks and dipped heads, a man in crow robes, intricate ruffled sleeves and a black staff, some more men in surplices and the vicar all sailing in like swans. They process to the front of the church. Wow. I think. This goes on every sunday and who would know? This has happened every Sunday for hundreds of years.
We sit. Stand again and sing. Sit. The choir sings. There is a reading. Then another. The lord's prayer. Psalms from the St James prayer book. The tweed and soap man next to me relishes each word, really enjoys each one, as if reaching his tongue for an oyster, pulling and sucking the texture. It is almost embarrassing how much pleasure he is obtaining from speaking them aloud as if he is talking dirty alongside. I mumble along. Thinking I really don't believe what I'm saying but I think being here saying them is good. The kneelers are purple velvet. Very royal. Very posh hotel plush. And everyone kneels. In the parish church of my childhood there was a bit of laziness about kneeling - you could, but most people just put their hands together and crouched.
How funny - I find later, having written this that Samuel Pepys on the 10th May, 1663 'I walked to St. James's, and was there at masse, and was forced in the crowd to kneel down"
Observed by an elderly man on the opposite side I gaze around the room. The ceiling is panelled and intricately painted. Up high is the organ, tapestries hung high either side of the altar, a big quite modern looking stained glass window above the altar depicting a tree and at the back, just above me, a sort of royal box facing the altar. I imagine this is where the royal family worship if they come. It is completely hidden from view. Do you just not know if they are here I wonder? Are they here I think. The pews we are sat in have high walls as if we are fenced and stalled like animals. Or part of a lock-in with the Establishment.
The 'Chapel Royal' initially was not a place but a body of priests and singers who cared for the spiritual needs of the Sovereign and travelled with him. But Henry V111 took a fancy to the site of a female leper colony that had stood in this then remote corner since the saxon times. There was good hunting alongside and good access to the woods of Kensington and he comandeered the hospital, building a palace including the chapel as a home for the Chapel Royal. Like a fly digesting time in longer flashes, slowed down, opened up, it is impossible to understand that this place that is a brief stroll from my flat, from the Thames, from Whitehall could seem remote but perhaps the outskirts, the outside, the edge is always the furthest place away and therefore distant.
I read too that the chapel was considered the cradle of English church music - Tallis, Handel, and Henry Purcell were all organists or composers of the chapel and the poet Dryden escaped his many creditors by staying with Henry Purcell in a turret room of the composers apartments.
The vicar's sermon is of love. He talks well and passionately about showing up everyday to love, of being free from the limitations of romantic love to form a deeper and fundamental joy. He talks about faith and doubt. He is talking about God. But love is love I think. Mary I's heart is buried beneath the chapel. Charles I recieved the sacrament of Holy Communion prior to his execution here. Diana's body lay by the altar before her funeral. Victoria and Albert married here. Though I find all this out later. But it is me that is wracked by doubt. As if trust is something I haven't used for a while I keep opening the store cupboard door to find the basics, all the horded tins and packets look ok but are infact old, past their sell by date, no longer quite nice. Something has grown unknown and unexpected like mould or weevils in the everyday ingredients. I am horrified. I thought everything was just put away dry and stored. Here I say, and here, look at this, and this, showing ul what leaving did, what has been done. I have prided myself on my sanity and find now occasionally a raw madness in attempting to trust.
At the end of the service the white mice, the flamingoes, the black crow, all process out, the organ playing.
I shake hands with the vicar in the old walls of the palace as I leave but I notice that others keep his hand, holding it tight, maintaining steady eye contact. Not me. I flinch from the warmth and sincerity of the greeting. Bobbing my head in embarrassment. In the park though I feel fresh, restored. I need faith I think. I need to clean those cupboards and keep only the nourishment of good.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
St Saviour's, Pimlico
Something has happened. Whether I have got more organised or the children's increasing contentment and my own upsurge of happiness has combined to good effect but I am less manic, less stricken with the poverty of time. Before I felt I was running, literally running between everything needing to be done, wheras now, I feel I am ambling, able to take in some of the scenery. I painted my nails at the weekend while the boys played lego. My elder son saying sternly to the younger one, let mum sit there - she can't do ANYTHING while her nails are drying. Thank you. I said, admiring the shiny red gloss and the rare view from the sofa understanding for the first time the benefits of nail varnish.
But really it is as if time itself has expanded. I seem able to fit in two or three dates a week with ul without anyone really noticing. Perhaps if the neighbours watched the windows really carefully they would see him here occasionally after the children have gone to bed or briefly when they are at school. But it isn't just time for dates there just feels more time for everything. Today I did a supermarket shop, the vacuuming, the paperwork, I made appointments for the doctor and the dentist, and registered for tickets for the Olympics. I left the flat clean and tidy to go to St Saviour's on a BB, knowing the church would be open for a Tuesday lunchtime mass, I caught the end of the service, had a good look round, then went and bought hamster bedding (from a newsgents/come pet store), good salami and Italian cheese from the Italian cafe and was back at the flat starting to write with a good two hours clear before picking the children. Even now writing this in the evening - I have already made minestrone soup, tidied up, put the children to bed and again I have a couple of hours stretching ahead. Plus as if this new telescopic time, extends even further I have started reading again. Sitting on the tube and just before I go to sleep. Finally I have read The Corrections ( loved it, but not completely convinced it had the depth of it's touted masterpiece/ maybe squandered 'Christmas' at the end) I have read Invisible by Paul Auster. Oh I love Paul Auster. But it isn't his best. Now I am reading Island on the Edge of the World. The story of St Kilda by Charles Maclean.
St Saviours is at the Vauxhall Bridge Rd end of Lupus Street, just before the tube station. In the not just manic but nearly mad days when we lived round the corner from the other end of Lupus St and had a two mile journey to school each day and another two on the way back and exh was very, very dh - I used the clock on the church to know if we were late or not. Pushing the youngest still in his buggy, encouraging the eldest on his bike, singing, telling stories, chanting positive affirmations and taking deep breaths. Shall we go down the 'secret path' this morning I would encourage as I led them on a route through the vast Churchill Garden estate. Every morning stopping to say 'We're going to rescue you!' to a teddy bear rotting behind a wire fence that had been thrown in a tangled piece of undergrowth behind some flats, his dirty fur and sad face slumped in leaves. We talked about bringing a fishing line to rescue him. Of cleaning him up. Of loving him back to life. I even thought about writing a children's story about the bear and that school route - the herons we spotted at the edge of the Thames dock ( once even a kingfisher ), the tough dogs and very very occasionally tough people we skirted in the estate, the concrete and the patches of nature combined. But perhaps I knew it wasn't really a children's story. Though it was my children's story. There was a slumped unhappy figure in our lives and those boys certainly wanted to love him back to life and even I would have perhaps still have attempted to try on their behalf.
When I creep into the church today it looks completely empty but I can hear the end of the Lord's prayer sing-songed from a side chapel and a woman in orange perched on a chair mouthing the words. I can hear the voices of others but she is the only one I can see. Stepping out of the day into those old words, I can feel the soothing peace. Despite my personal feelings of wellbeing something truly terrible has happened and a church seems a really good place to go.
Yesterday was Valentine's day. My sons made me perfume with a strong top note of toothpaste in a milk carton. UL brought me some supermarket flowers (no one can be completely perfect). Exh broke the rules and let himself into the flat also to leave some flowers. But as I left to pick the boys up from school I miss a call from my bestfriend and then a text comes in. The text is from my elder sons best friend's mother who is living in a refuge, though finally, finally she is going to be housed, but she texts me to say she has terrible news, two children who lived at the refuge and were really good friends with her children were murdered yesterday by their dad. It is all over the news. she says. Reading the text I feel sick to the stomach. I feel angry and shaky. I feel, and this is so instinctive and the thoughts feel so old - so completely weary of men and their dangerous harboured thoughts.
Sometimes I have thought that if I finish this blog I'll do another about madonna and child representations. It is a hard plural to work out - madonnas and child? madonnas and children? Though I imagine if I started looking they would probably be everywhere ( also I could go back into the churches and look again and look more carefully ). I remember at school an amazing and inspiring art teacher teaching us art history and we studied so many - Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Duccio. Now most of those are around the corner at the National Gallery and what a pleasure to find time to see them. But only very recently did I truly understand that these sculptures and paintings are attempts made by generations and generations to describe the bond and strength and sacrifice by mothers for children. I want to find one in this church and think of the strength and power of this woman who escaped this brutal man with her children and then fought in the courts for two years not to allow him access to the children knowing he was not safe. Whilst week in week out testing their spellings, feeding them, washing their clothes, keeping their finger and toe nails straight and short. Oh! but it was overturned. All that strength and fight and journey for them to be murdered. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I am not sure I have the right to write about this, it is not my story. But still I know just enough about chaos to watch at school and see the Mums who feel frightened, the ones with bruises. But I only find a michaelangelo copy of a madonna and child and I don't know how you know what is a copy or not but I felt I did.
It is nice in the church, the communion being taken, the words being said, some nice stained glass, nice kneelers hung neatly on the back of the pews, but nothing I latch onto. A font topped by a huge gothic wooden top like an ornate spire with a pulley system to lift the lid off. I imagine having a baby christened and worrying that the rope would snap, the great heavy wooden structure hurtling to hurt the baby. It is one of the fears that I wake in the night with - that somehow the bunk bed ( which isn't really a bunk bed but a platform bed with a mattress underneath) will collapse and crush my younger son. Lying in the dark I can picture the bolts working loose from the structure, the wooden slats tumbling, the noise of the crash and screaming. But then I make myself listen to the silence, imagine a big 'golf sale' sign arrow that means 'I can't think about this now' and finally tumble back into sleep.
St Saviour's is part of Thomas Cubitt's Pimlico, like square feet of building rolled out with churches attached. Previously it was where vegetables were grown for Westminster and the City of London, with a tea garden in the meadows, reed banks, a steel works and a distillery. Thomas Cubitt pieced together the land from different landowners and by 1839 he had established an eleven acre factory area on the river bank on the present site of Dolphin Square, just round the corner from St Saviour's.
'Here the joinery, glass, plasterwork, steel and marble, as well as some of the bricks and cement for the various building operations were produced, using the latest steam-driven technology, enabling the business in Pimlico and beyond to benefit from the sheer scale of production as well as control of the entire process.'
While Cubitt had to clear most of the older generation gardening businesses out of the area in order to make the roads he then sub-let again for gardening, until he was ready to sponsor building on a large scale in 1840. Like the ferry man who sabotaged the building of Westminster Bridge the market gardeners must have taken this changing world badly.
St Saviour's was consecrated in 1864 and designed by Thomas Cundy. But Pimlico struggled as an area as early as 1852 - Henry Mayhew noted the neighbourhood 'prolific in loose women' in particular he identified this neighbourhood as one where an affluent man might seek a discreet introduction to the sort of 'quiet lady whose secrecy he can reply upon...who in all probability does not reside at any great distance.' Though I also read that at Victoria station there were complaints of being accosted by a 'low class of unfortunates who come from Great Peter Street, Laundry Yard and the black area that lies in the very shadow of the Houses of Parliament' Which is where I live.
Today I ring my best friend back. She says on valentines day afternoon she was upstairs in her house tidying the bedroom and saw flames leaping behind the blinds in the opposite house's bedroom and called the firebrigade. Then she ran across the road and knocked at the door to save the occupants. Her son who is nearly twenty was shouting out of her upstairs window 'Come away mum come away mum come away from the fire'. Standing on the step she suddenly realises somehow ( I don't get this bit but that is what she says) that what she has seen is infact the glint of hundreds of candles and valentine balloons. Too late, the operator says the fire engine is on it's way. The man in his dressing gown descends the stairs, tying the belt and shuffling his parts, opening the door as the fire engine arrives. I hope it was HIS wife I say.
Amen.
But really it is as if time itself has expanded. I seem able to fit in two or three dates a week with ul without anyone really noticing. Perhaps if the neighbours watched the windows really carefully they would see him here occasionally after the children have gone to bed or briefly when they are at school. But it isn't just time for dates there just feels more time for everything. Today I did a supermarket shop, the vacuuming, the paperwork, I made appointments for the doctor and the dentist, and registered for tickets for the Olympics. I left the flat clean and tidy to go to St Saviour's on a BB, knowing the church would be open for a Tuesday lunchtime mass, I caught the end of the service, had a good look round, then went and bought hamster bedding (from a newsgents/come pet store), good salami and Italian cheese from the Italian cafe and was back at the flat starting to write with a good two hours clear before picking the children. Even now writing this in the evening - I have already made minestrone soup, tidied up, put the children to bed and again I have a couple of hours stretching ahead. Plus as if this new telescopic time, extends even further I have started reading again. Sitting on the tube and just before I go to sleep. Finally I have read The Corrections ( loved it, but not completely convinced it had the depth of it's touted masterpiece/ maybe squandered 'Christmas' at the end) I have read Invisible by Paul Auster. Oh I love Paul Auster. But it isn't his best. Now I am reading Island on the Edge of the World. The story of St Kilda by Charles Maclean.
St Saviours is at the Vauxhall Bridge Rd end of Lupus Street, just before the tube station. In the not just manic but nearly mad days when we lived round the corner from the other end of Lupus St and had a two mile journey to school each day and another two on the way back and exh was very, very dh - I used the clock on the church to know if we were late or not. Pushing the youngest still in his buggy, encouraging the eldest on his bike, singing, telling stories, chanting positive affirmations and taking deep breaths. Shall we go down the 'secret path' this morning I would encourage as I led them on a route through the vast Churchill Garden estate. Every morning stopping to say 'We're going to rescue you!' to a teddy bear rotting behind a wire fence that had been thrown in a tangled piece of undergrowth behind some flats, his dirty fur and sad face slumped in leaves. We talked about bringing a fishing line to rescue him. Of cleaning him up. Of loving him back to life. I even thought about writing a children's story about the bear and that school route - the herons we spotted at the edge of the Thames dock ( once even a kingfisher ), the tough dogs and very very occasionally tough people we skirted in the estate, the concrete and the patches of nature combined. But perhaps I knew it wasn't really a children's story. Though it was my children's story. There was a slumped unhappy figure in our lives and those boys certainly wanted to love him back to life and even I would have perhaps still have attempted to try on their behalf.
When I creep into the church today it looks completely empty but I can hear the end of the Lord's prayer sing-songed from a side chapel and a woman in orange perched on a chair mouthing the words. I can hear the voices of others but she is the only one I can see. Stepping out of the day into those old words, I can feel the soothing peace. Despite my personal feelings of wellbeing something truly terrible has happened and a church seems a really good place to go.
Yesterday was Valentine's day. My sons made me perfume with a strong top note of toothpaste in a milk carton. UL brought me some supermarket flowers (no one can be completely perfect). Exh broke the rules and let himself into the flat also to leave some flowers. But as I left to pick the boys up from school I miss a call from my bestfriend and then a text comes in. The text is from my elder sons best friend's mother who is living in a refuge, though finally, finally she is going to be housed, but she texts me to say she has terrible news, two children who lived at the refuge and were really good friends with her children were murdered yesterday by their dad. It is all over the news. she says. Reading the text I feel sick to the stomach. I feel angry and shaky. I feel, and this is so instinctive and the thoughts feel so old - so completely weary of men and their dangerous harboured thoughts.
Sometimes I have thought that if I finish this blog I'll do another about madonna and child representations. It is a hard plural to work out - madonnas and child? madonnas and children? Though I imagine if I started looking they would probably be everywhere ( also I could go back into the churches and look again and look more carefully ). I remember at school an amazing and inspiring art teacher teaching us art history and we studied so many - Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Duccio. Now most of those are around the corner at the National Gallery and what a pleasure to find time to see them. But only very recently did I truly understand that these sculptures and paintings are attempts made by generations and generations to describe the bond and strength and sacrifice by mothers for children. I want to find one in this church and think of the strength and power of this woman who escaped this brutal man with her children and then fought in the courts for two years not to allow him access to the children knowing he was not safe. Whilst week in week out testing their spellings, feeding them, washing their clothes, keeping their finger and toe nails straight and short. Oh! but it was overturned. All that strength and fight and journey for them to be murdered. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I am not sure I have the right to write about this, it is not my story. But still I know just enough about chaos to watch at school and see the Mums who feel frightened, the ones with bruises. But I only find a michaelangelo copy of a madonna and child and I don't know how you know what is a copy or not but I felt I did.
It is nice in the church, the communion being taken, the words being said, some nice stained glass, nice kneelers hung neatly on the back of the pews, but nothing I latch onto. A font topped by a huge gothic wooden top like an ornate spire with a pulley system to lift the lid off. I imagine having a baby christened and worrying that the rope would snap, the great heavy wooden structure hurtling to hurt the baby. It is one of the fears that I wake in the night with - that somehow the bunk bed ( which isn't really a bunk bed but a platform bed with a mattress underneath) will collapse and crush my younger son. Lying in the dark I can picture the bolts working loose from the structure, the wooden slats tumbling, the noise of the crash and screaming. But then I make myself listen to the silence, imagine a big 'golf sale' sign arrow that means 'I can't think about this now' and finally tumble back into sleep.
St Saviour's is part of Thomas Cubitt's Pimlico, like square feet of building rolled out with churches attached. Previously it was where vegetables were grown for Westminster and the City of London, with a tea garden in the meadows, reed banks, a steel works and a distillery. Thomas Cubitt pieced together the land from different landowners and by 1839 he had established an eleven acre factory area on the river bank on the present site of Dolphin Square, just round the corner from St Saviour's.
'Here the joinery, glass, plasterwork, steel and marble, as well as some of the bricks and cement for the various building operations were produced, using the latest steam-driven technology, enabling the business in Pimlico and beyond to benefit from the sheer scale of production as well as control of the entire process.'
While Cubitt had to clear most of the older generation gardening businesses out of the area in order to make the roads he then sub-let again for gardening, until he was ready to sponsor building on a large scale in 1840. Like the ferry man who sabotaged the building of Westminster Bridge the market gardeners must have taken this changing world badly.
St Saviour's was consecrated in 1864 and designed by Thomas Cundy. But Pimlico struggled as an area as early as 1852 - Henry Mayhew noted the neighbourhood 'prolific in loose women' in particular he identified this neighbourhood as one where an affluent man might seek a discreet introduction to the sort of 'quiet lady whose secrecy he can reply upon...who in all probability does not reside at any great distance.' Though I also read that at Victoria station there were complaints of being accosted by a 'low class of unfortunates who come from Great Peter Street, Laundry Yard and the black area that lies in the very shadow of the Houses of Parliament' Which is where I live.
Today I ring my best friend back. She says on valentines day afternoon she was upstairs in her house tidying the bedroom and saw flames leaping behind the blinds in the opposite house's bedroom and called the firebrigade. Then she ran across the road and knocked at the door to save the occupants. Her son who is nearly twenty was shouting out of her upstairs window 'Come away mum come away mum come away from the fire'. Standing on the step she suddenly realises somehow ( I don't get this bit but that is what she says) that what she has seen is infact the glint of hundreds of candles and valentine balloons. Too late, the operator says the fire engine is on it's way. The man in his dressing gown descends the stairs, tying the belt and shuffling his parts, opening the door as the fire engine arrives. I hope it was HIS wife I say.
Amen.
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
St-Mary- at-Lambeth
I forgot to mention the windmills last week.
I think of them as I cross over the Thames at Lambeth Bridge for I have seen maps and pictures with the sails dotted on the pastoral and then industrial South London skyline
Today from the bridge I see the Houses of Parliament dipping steeply into the deep water of the river, the London Eye turning impercetibly, the yellow, cartoon-like amphibean vehicle of the Duck tours passing underneath, the new south london skyscrapers awkward on the horizon - that triple clock one with the head like a 70s pencil case and whatever the new really tall one is going to be - underneath all that sky. This is an ancient place to cross the river, where the horse ferry between Westminster and Lambeth Palace operated with flat bottomed punts capable of fitting a coach and six horses.
I have remembered that there is a church south of the river much nearer home than the last one I wrote about but it is not a church anymore but The Garden Museum. Tucked right next to the Palace of Lambeth on the corner of a mini roundabout and a block of modern flats I wonder too if there might be a church within Lambeth Palace. The big gates are open in the old gate house which is unusual and I find a reception. The helpful east european man doesn't think there is a church but gives me a telephone number and a form to fill in to organise visits with parties of over 50. I take the form and think I will ring and see.
This week I asked UL why he did not stay in Russia? Why he did not make his life there? Remember that is where he went. That he can speak Russian fluently. That his wife is from an ex soviet state. He talked to me of eventually missing the home of language, of living inside what you can say, the layers of what is understood. I imagined my own interior space like the cave of a walnut, a finely woven nest - tongued by words and the tilt and tip of comprehension when fully attended to, the lilt and rhythm of questions, the playfulness, the understanding, the vibration and power of humour, passion and kindness. I think it is possibly the one thing I have always known I needed is that central pleasure of language. What I always enjoyed with him. I find it hard at most times to maintain confidence and often strangely writing or talking is where I feel most at ease - like taking a little hammer to chip away at the bother of being. Only occasionally and preciously, reaching the rare silence of truly understanding or truly being understood as if kept kernalled safe.
The church/museum is set back in the scrap of a graveyard by this overplanned mini roundabout surrounded by traffic lights. I have been once before. I went with the boys and my mum and dad after Sunday lunch. The boys with their bikes and cooped up races and my mum and dad behind and disapproving but brave with limping hips. At the museum which seemed at the time ludicrously expensive when they paid, ( give me the money! give me the money! I could buy washing powder with it! funny how pride is?) they dawdled over each watering can and I stood the boys in the graveyard garden feeling the exhaustion of being a single parent and the weary position of doing the best bad job I could - understanding the day wasn't going very well and knowing it was unlikely to get much better.
Today it costs me £6 to get in even though I explain ( look at me these days! haggling to get into a church!) that I don't want to go to the museum I just want to look at the remains of the church. Though in the end I am late to pick the children up because I spend so long there. The church interior has been blanked out by plain plywood boxed structures and a stairway that creates the exhibition space. It is as if the details of the church have been packed away in a packing case but inside out with the church architecture wrapped round the exterior of the box. I am not sure that gets there exactly but it is confused and complicated, obliterating and making neutral the church itself. On the west side the shelved wall of an L shaped souvenir shop selling greetings cards, dinky garden inspired gifts and historical gardening books is lined against a detail of the rood screen. On the east a cafe crouched in the plywood partitions and under old windows - though in a church with so little left of itself there is some bad stained glass.
The back garden grave yard is beautiful. I remember being there with the boys and feel I have come along way. I don't feel desperate anymore. There is the grave of the Tradescants, an amazing tomb with finely detailed relief. On one side a scene with a crocodile, beautiful shells at the bottom of the sea and some egyptian buildings. On the other the suggestion of unrelenting History and Time - with classical pillars broken and buried underground and spires tumbling with the movement of earth. John Tradescant father and son were travellers, diplomats, horticultural pioneers, and polymaths, they were also collectors, acquiring (and asking their friends to acquire) specimens of the wonders of the world. This grave is the reason the garden museum is here for they were impotant botanists and horticulturists, the younger said to be the first man to grow a pineapple in England. Indeed there are stone pineapples on Lambeth Bridge in celebration. Their botanical garden in Lambeth became the centre of horitcultural interest in Britain and thier collections could be viewed by the public at a large house 'The Ark'. Described by a German traveller George Christoph Sirn in 1638
'In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies- when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones'.
All this (apparently in dubious circumstances) was taken over by Elias Ashmole and formed the foundation of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. 'Museum' itself a new word listed a few years later in the New World of Words (1706) as `a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for `Ashmole's Museum', described as `a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.
Though there is another grave in this beautifully planted place that just says 'Reader, prepare to meet thy god.'
I discover later that the tower of the church is medieval and I feel ashamed I did not notice it. The church just seemed bland, though checking the photos I realise that the tower is the part nearest to Lambeth Palace and maybe I wasn't concentrating when I entered and the rest of the mainly victorian building is so hidden by its clumsy museum purpose. The church is mentioned in the Domesday Book and apparently even before the Norman Conquest there was a church dedicated to St Mary's here which belonged to the Countess Goda, sister to King Edward the Confessor. I think the site was higher and drier than much of the south bank of the thames for the land around was low and sodden and developed very slowly. The Archbishop of Canterbury took up residence of the Manor of Lambeth in 1197 - giving the church a special importance and the bells of the church rang out whenever royal personages came to visit the Archbishop, the boats pulling up at the landing alongside.
Up the staircase of the museum, is the engraving of 'The Prospect of London and Westminster taken form Lambeth' by W.Hollar 1707 edition of a 1647 plate. Oh, it is beautiful with intricately inked detail, the arch of the wide river, Westminster Abbey high in the distance across the river, rural Lambeth etched on the bend of the Thames and St Mary's central, the Tradescant tomb clearly visible. Wencelas Hollar 1607 - 1677 was an engraver and map maker from Prague who came to London in 1637. Charging 4 pence an hour he was prolific with 2733 examples of his work known and listed - views of London, a map after the Great fire, detailed depictions of women's fashions, animals and engraved portraits of both of the Tradescant's. A biography written by a contemporary John Aubrey has this detail of Holler leaving London during the civil war and then returning.
“I remember he told me that when he first came into England, (which was a serene time of peace) that the people, both poore and rich, did looke cheerfully, but at his returne, he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spightfull, as if bewitched.
But somehow he died penniless. “He was a very friendly good-natured man as could be, but shiftlesse as to the world, and dyed not rich."
I engineer time to spend with ul. Though on a rare weekend I don't have the boys we see each other until late and then meet again early in the morning. This is what an affair feels like I think. But I know him so well I skate round the guilt. Just. Perhaps only just. The following morning I phone exh to make arrangements about the children. But they have all stayed with friends and exh is in the shower. His friend answers and pretends to be him tired, shouting, explaining the children woke them all up at five in the morning.
He means it so genuinely as a joke. But I think it is exh. I think he is drunk. It sounds so perfectly like when he was. And exactly the right time of day. It is 10 oclock in the morning. I just keep saying 'I can't really understand what you are saying' I keep saying it. I am terrified. This life, my life, the boys life that I believe to be on solid ground is suddenly tipped up, I am drowning. I want to puke. I want to cry. Also I understand I have been arrogant - our life has got better because exh stopped drinking - not really anything to do with me. I have worked hard but not made the fundamental difference.
I buy a book on amazon called 'Lambeth windmills' a careful piece of detective work tracing windmills from the end of the 16th century that appear and disappear from maps - as the fickle design mind of the cartographer decides whether he fancied using the nice symbol of sails or didn't have enough space to squeeze it in. Normally windmills are associated with corn milling but in Lambeth, famous for wood yards, glassmaking, pottery and boat building the spread of industrialization caused the power of the wind to be set to other tasks - mechanical saws and crushing materials for the production of china ware. The Garden museum had a history of Lambeth powerpoint installation, outlining the industries, the smell, the fast development south of the river, it was what made me late to pick the boys up from school - so many details I wanted to catch them all. From 'A Map of the New Roads from Westminster Bridge' published in 1753 showing the three windmills near St Mary-at-Lambeth in almost open fields progress hurtled on, steam, the railways, mass production and the windmills disappearing. My final detail and oh, there seems so many, even lovely ones I can't really fit in - the poetry of Herrick, a toll path across the Lambeth marshes, even Lambeth Bridge featured in the 1982 music video hit 'pass the dutchie' by Musical Youth - is the history of Doulton's pottery in Lambeth. A patnership formed in 1815 when John Doulton ( who had just finished an apprenticeship with early commercial potter John Dwight) and John Watts ( previous forman of the existing pottery) were taken into partnership by a young widow Martha Jones who had inherited the business from her late husband. Alongside beautiful tiles and beautiful porcelain they made drain pipes. Thousands of drain pipes. High temperature firing taking stoneware to its true vitrified form. Expanded by Doulton's son Henry these drainpipes drained and dried the boggy land of London for building and allowed the vanguard of Victorian sanitation to be brought to Metropolitan London. This is the land our city is built on. Our waste matter taken away.
Amen.
I think of them as I cross over the Thames at Lambeth Bridge for I have seen maps and pictures with the sails dotted on the pastoral and then industrial South London skyline
Today from the bridge I see the Houses of Parliament dipping steeply into the deep water of the river, the London Eye turning impercetibly, the yellow, cartoon-like amphibean vehicle of the Duck tours passing underneath, the new south london skyscrapers awkward on the horizon - that triple clock one with the head like a 70s pencil case and whatever the new really tall one is going to be - underneath all that sky. This is an ancient place to cross the river, where the horse ferry between Westminster and Lambeth Palace operated with flat bottomed punts capable of fitting a coach and six horses.
I have remembered that there is a church south of the river much nearer home than the last one I wrote about but it is not a church anymore but The Garden Museum. Tucked right next to the Palace of Lambeth on the corner of a mini roundabout and a block of modern flats I wonder too if there might be a church within Lambeth Palace. The big gates are open in the old gate house which is unusual and I find a reception. The helpful east european man doesn't think there is a church but gives me a telephone number and a form to fill in to organise visits with parties of over 50. I take the form and think I will ring and see.
This week I asked UL why he did not stay in Russia? Why he did not make his life there? Remember that is where he went. That he can speak Russian fluently. That his wife is from an ex soviet state. He talked to me of eventually missing the home of language, of living inside what you can say, the layers of what is understood. I imagined my own interior space like the cave of a walnut, a finely woven nest - tongued by words and the tilt and tip of comprehension when fully attended to, the lilt and rhythm of questions, the playfulness, the understanding, the vibration and power of humour, passion and kindness. I think it is possibly the one thing I have always known I needed is that central pleasure of language. What I always enjoyed with him. I find it hard at most times to maintain confidence and often strangely writing or talking is where I feel most at ease - like taking a little hammer to chip away at the bother of being. Only occasionally and preciously, reaching the rare silence of truly understanding or truly being understood as if kept kernalled safe.
The church/museum is set back in the scrap of a graveyard by this overplanned mini roundabout surrounded by traffic lights. I have been once before. I went with the boys and my mum and dad after Sunday lunch. The boys with their bikes and cooped up races and my mum and dad behind and disapproving but brave with limping hips. At the museum which seemed at the time ludicrously expensive when they paid, ( give me the money! give me the money! I could buy washing powder with it! funny how pride is?) they dawdled over each watering can and I stood the boys in the graveyard garden feeling the exhaustion of being a single parent and the weary position of doing the best bad job I could - understanding the day wasn't going very well and knowing it was unlikely to get much better.
Today it costs me £6 to get in even though I explain ( look at me these days! haggling to get into a church!) that I don't want to go to the museum I just want to look at the remains of the church. Though in the end I am late to pick the children up because I spend so long there. The church interior has been blanked out by plain plywood boxed structures and a stairway that creates the exhibition space. It is as if the details of the church have been packed away in a packing case but inside out with the church architecture wrapped round the exterior of the box. I am not sure that gets there exactly but it is confused and complicated, obliterating and making neutral the church itself. On the west side the shelved wall of an L shaped souvenir shop selling greetings cards, dinky garden inspired gifts and historical gardening books is lined against a detail of the rood screen. On the east a cafe crouched in the plywood partitions and under old windows - though in a church with so little left of itself there is some bad stained glass.
The back garden grave yard is beautiful. I remember being there with the boys and feel I have come along way. I don't feel desperate anymore. There is the grave of the Tradescants, an amazing tomb with finely detailed relief. On one side a scene with a crocodile, beautiful shells at the bottom of the sea and some egyptian buildings. On the other the suggestion of unrelenting History and Time - with classical pillars broken and buried underground and spires tumbling with the movement of earth. John Tradescant father and son were travellers, diplomats, horticultural pioneers, and polymaths, they were also collectors, acquiring (and asking their friends to acquire) specimens of the wonders of the world. This grave is the reason the garden museum is here for they were impotant botanists and horticulturists, the younger said to be the first man to grow a pineapple in England. Indeed there are stone pineapples on Lambeth Bridge in celebration. Their botanical garden in Lambeth became the centre of horitcultural interest in Britain and thier collections could be viewed by the public at a large house 'The Ark'. Described by a German traveller George Christoph Sirn in 1638
'In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies- when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones'.
All this (apparently in dubious circumstances) was taken over by Elias Ashmole and formed the foundation of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. 'Museum' itself a new word listed a few years later in the New World of Words (1706) as `a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for `Ashmole's Museum', described as `a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.
Though there is another grave in this beautifully planted place that just says 'Reader, prepare to meet thy god.'
I discover later that the tower of the church is medieval and I feel ashamed I did not notice it. The church just seemed bland, though checking the photos I realise that the tower is the part nearest to Lambeth Palace and maybe I wasn't concentrating when I entered and the rest of the mainly victorian building is so hidden by its clumsy museum purpose. The church is mentioned in the Domesday Book and apparently even before the Norman Conquest there was a church dedicated to St Mary's here which belonged to the Countess Goda, sister to King Edward the Confessor. I think the site was higher and drier than much of the south bank of the thames for the land around was low and sodden and developed very slowly. The Archbishop of Canterbury took up residence of the Manor of Lambeth in 1197 - giving the church a special importance and the bells of the church rang out whenever royal personages came to visit the Archbishop, the boats pulling up at the landing alongside.
Up the staircase of the museum, is the engraving of 'The Prospect of London and Westminster taken form Lambeth' by W.Hollar 1707 edition of a 1647 plate. Oh, it is beautiful with intricately inked detail, the arch of the wide river, Westminster Abbey high in the distance across the river, rural Lambeth etched on the bend of the Thames and St Mary's central, the Tradescant tomb clearly visible. Wencelas Hollar 1607 - 1677 was an engraver and map maker from Prague who came to London in 1637. Charging 4 pence an hour he was prolific with 2733 examples of his work known and listed - views of London, a map after the Great fire, detailed depictions of women's fashions, animals and engraved portraits of both of the Tradescant's. A biography written by a contemporary John Aubrey has this detail of Holler leaving London during the civil war and then returning.
“I remember he told me that when he first came into England, (which was a serene time of peace) that the people, both poore and rich, did looke cheerfully, but at his returne, he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spightfull, as if bewitched.
But somehow he died penniless. “He was a very friendly good-natured man as could be, but shiftlesse as to the world, and dyed not rich."
I engineer time to spend with ul. Though on a rare weekend I don't have the boys we see each other until late and then meet again early in the morning. This is what an affair feels like I think. But I know him so well I skate round the guilt. Just. Perhaps only just. The following morning I phone exh to make arrangements about the children. But they have all stayed with friends and exh is in the shower. His friend answers and pretends to be him tired, shouting, explaining the children woke them all up at five in the morning.
He means it so genuinely as a joke. But I think it is exh. I think he is drunk. It sounds so perfectly like when he was. And exactly the right time of day. It is 10 oclock in the morning. I just keep saying 'I can't really understand what you are saying' I keep saying it. I am terrified. This life, my life, the boys life that I believe to be on solid ground is suddenly tipped up, I am drowning. I want to puke. I want to cry. Also I understand I have been arrogant - our life has got better because exh stopped drinking - not really anything to do with me. I have worked hard but not made the fundamental difference.
I buy a book on amazon called 'Lambeth windmills' a careful piece of detective work tracing windmills from the end of the 16th century that appear and disappear from maps - as the fickle design mind of the cartographer decides whether he fancied using the nice symbol of sails or didn't have enough space to squeeze it in. Normally windmills are associated with corn milling but in Lambeth, famous for wood yards, glassmaking, pottery and boat building the spread of industrialization caused the power of the wind to be set to other tasks - mechanical saws and crushing materials for the production of china ware. The Garden museum had a history of Lambeth powerpoint installation, outlining the industries, the smell, the fast development south of the river, it was what made me late to pick the boys up from school - so many details I wanted to catch them all. From 'A Map of the New Roads from Westminster Bridge' published in 1753 showing the three windmills near St Mary-at-Lambeth in almost open fields progress hurtled on, steam, the railways, mass production and the windmills disappearing. My final detail and oh, there seems so many, even lovely ones I can't really fit in - the poetry of Herrick, a toll path across the Lambeth marshes, even Lambeth Bridge featured in the 1982 music video hit 'pass the dutchie' by Musical Youth - is the history of Doulton's pottery in Lambeth. A patnership formed in 1815 when John Doulton ( who had just finished an apprenticeship with early commercial potter John Dwight) and John Watts ( previous forman of the existing pottery) were taken into partnership by a young widow Martha Jones who had inherited the business from her late husband. Alongside beautiful tiles and beautiful porcelain they made drain pipes. Thousands of drain pipes. High temperature firing taking stoneware to its true vitrified form. Expanded by Doulton's son Henry these drainpipes drained and dried the boggy land of London for building and allowed the vanguard of Victorian sanitation to be brought to Metropolitan London. This is the land our city is built on. Our waste matter taken away.
Amen.
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