Oh, oh there doesn't seem to have been time for an xmas special this year ( though I sandwiched the trip to the Bloomsbury Baptist church in a present buying dash to Forbidden Planet before work believing that there would be. )
Unexpectedly seeing the church - a faux Notre Dame frontage, big but almost invisible in that funny back corner of Covent Garden / New Oxford St /Holborn where the rates must still be low enough for specialised shops to exist and the chiefly male enclaves of Models Zone and Forbidden Planet mean that my sons will cheerfully visit the British Museum if they can go at least window shopping afterwards - I thought as if in a trance - I CAN DO IT - I can get into a church AND write an xmas special - though there were only 4 more days until christmas and nothing was wrapped or cooked and I had a full day of work infront of me. That morning I was making a dash for a gift for PSM's sons's birthday present for a party that afternoon. Despite an almost official rumour early in December that payday would be brought forward my calculations for Christmas had come to a grinding standstill when it wasn't. Though just in the nick of time the wages had cleared the night before and I had chanced final stocking filler purchases online despite Amazon no longer guaranteeing their delivery. Later when I got to work I rang numbers I found on google to chivy the gifts in time for christmas. A kind but weary sounding man on a Scottish Industrial estate said 'We are working flat out to get everything out' about a life-sized gorilla puppet I had bought for my younger son. Then there is a long pause as he goes to check. 'Yes', he says - 'it is packaged ready to go - with luck on your side it will be there.' then a pause, 'It's big' he drawls. I feel I have a direct number to Polar Express HQ.
I have only visited a Baptist church once before
http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/baptist-church-horseferry-road.html
and I still walk past that odd and shuttered building, It was in the early days of the blog when I managed to write a post almost once a week though I found my own project daunting. Just finding the confidence to get into a church at all was hard - I remember being terrified this one would smell ( though it did ) and terrified I would walk in on a full submerged baptism ( I didn't).
A sandwich board says the church is open and I push open the glass door - to find three awkward but smiley youngish people at an over manned welcoming desk, I realise I haven't even had time to worry about the submersion. Though it is just past 10 am in the morning so it seems unlikely. Can I quickly have a look at your church I ask, yes, they wave me in - smiling and nodding encouragingly. It is a large, light auditorium, with a curved balcony above and a flower-shaped window high up behind. But and I have found this before in the non conformist churches - there seems something completely missing - it is almost like a lecture theatre, there is no sound, no shade or dark, no secret corners - it is just a big, clean, well-vacuumed space. I try to write about what it is that is missing. I think of the carpet and how it almost hushes the presence of my own step from the church, the sound of myself in a holy space. I have a book about shadows in art and it is a very favourite photograph - a black and white photograph taken by Monet at Giverny with his own shadow falling across the foreground of the lake for recorded is his own presence with the thing that fascinates and absorbs him.
I think of my own home and despite my despair sometimes at our tiny space, the small rooms and the seemingly endless shift of small pieces of plastic, papers, books and folded clothes from one room to another there is sometimes a pause when everything is tidied and clean when I see the beauty of the home we live in, the home I have made. I think of our lives and the fun and activity and thoughts and shouting and the carefully picked beauty of our things, cups and pictures, the drawings and postcards, colours and lampshades and our lives together. I think you would feel it when you walked in, the richness of our lives despite the cramp of the space.
I do not sit, though I think I should, I am worried about being late for work. It is the last day today before christmas and there is still so much to do - we are attempting to complete three newspapers in a week - two are finished but the third needs to be or we will have to go into work over the holiday. 'Happy Christmas' I say to the slightly nerdy and startled trio at the desk. There is a small nativity behind them and some tension as if perhaps the girl used to go out with one of the men and now goes out with the other. Though they are of a wholesome, indeterminate knitting pattern age and time. 'Happy Christmas' they say.
Afterwards cycling to work I think I have squandered the Christmas Special for there was so little Christmas or anything at all much in the church. Perhaps I can pretend I never went I think - perhaps I can get into another Church, a more beautiful one and say that it is the Xmas one.
Though of course I don't. Christmas takes over like a cocoa cola truck driven at top speed by a smiling yet manic faced santa who cooks and vacuums and wraps. On Christmas day we dance Gangnam Style to a new Wii game and play Scrabble.
Before Christmas I had seen on the step of an office on the mini roundabout corner of Artillery Row and Great Peter St that I have described before for the sunlight hits and warms the space and the homeless know to sun themselves there like cats on a favourite wall. In the littered debris of bottles and cans was an order early for Christmas supermarket brochure splayed like porn. Images of plentiful Christmas food and treats spread wide on bright lit pages. I thought it is a dream we are all chasing - all salivating for and there is something repugnant to the greed of it and yet I wouldn't know how to stop. When the boys shout on Christmas morning 'Everything is Brilliant.' I am happy.
The church opened in December 1848 as a showcase for the Baptist faith in London and was funded and built by Sir Samuel Morton Peto MP. He had made his money as a building contractor involved in the building of many London landmarks including Nelson's Column, the Houses of Parliament and the infrastructure of London's brick sewers but then moved his interests to the railways. He built railways here and abroad - including Canada, Norway and Algeria ( accompanying Napoleon III in the late 1850s to open this line.) Until then religious intolerance and financial restraints had meant meeting houses were lowly, hidden places - rooms above shops and tucked down alleyways. When the Baptist Church was proposed on this site there was reluctance to lease the land to nonconformists with their dull spire-less architecture. Peto is said to have exclaimed ' A spire my Lord? We shall have two!' And the twin spires graced the towers until 1951 when they were deemed unsafe and brought down.
The first preacher Revd William Brock claimed 'the Bible and The Times newspaper are the best materials for the preacher', for the God of the Bible was also the God of everyday life.
Cycling over Westminster Bridge I see a man dressed in tight jeans with pink frilly knickers over them navigating the pedestrians and traffic on a skateboard. Wow I think he has sorted out what he needs from life and gone for it.
I have printed a calendar of the washing up pictures I have taken. I love the compositions of colour and the celebration of everyday.
And then Christmas over I just run out of steam. My friend said I didn't get to the heart of the knights templar - and I knew she was right - I could just about hear horses hooves on cobbles in the alleys around the church but I never got to the beard and hair and spit of big fighting men praying. And now I spend evening after evening infront of the computer a bit knackered and a bit glum in January edging into February like a teenager revising, clicking yahoo news, desultorily reading about weather and murders and debt thinking I don't really want to write about this church - then inching another tiny piece of history
I find a submerged baptism from the Bloomsbury Central Church on youtube! Fascinatingly the CARPET ROLLS BACK at the altar and sections come away to reveal a pool - men in baggy gym wear stand lowering a woman backwards into the water which she comes out of shuddering with joy. At Blackpool Circus when I was a little girl the grand finale of the show was the ring filling with water and a silvery swan with dancers floating in it. Two years ago I went back with the boys and their cousins to find the vast room with trapezes strung to the heavens reduced to a beautiful, gilded trinket-sized theatre. As the musicians started their helter skelter tunes I held my breath that the range of ages 6 - 16 could be entertained, then watched them roar with laughter, doubled up with mirth as the slapstick clown trapped light then flung it from a bucket as the lights came up. The finale creaked into action as the floor lowered and a swan was raised, the water filled the floor - oooh I cooed.
Another friend emails kindly to say - just write - you are funny - don't worry about the research and the churches. But I love the churches I want to say - I think there should be more churches and less me. Though also I realise that when I first started writing this blog I wanted to show I could be funny and real and now I have become only earnest. My over worked, slightly put on, brave heroine voice has become mannered - I use words and expressions over and over - 'slightly', 'weary', 'held my breath'. It seems to be the narrative I tell. I wonder if it has become embarrassing. I feel have lost confidence in the project and my own writing, though I don't want to give up. Perhaps it will get easier I think when spring comes, when I get to the City churches, relieved to have finally finished this one.
Amen.
Saturday, 9 February 2013
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
The Temple Church
I completely and utterly lose it with ( the very very good looking/ see previous post ) exh. I am shouting and swearing into a mobile that barely works in a dark damp street near London Bridge. Some logical part of myself knows this isn't a good idea, that falling into this black place of rage can do no good but another tiny part feels that it is about time, that finally something is being freed. It is powerful to feel the words gather speed on their spindly legs to the beat and power of wide wings though I wonder briefly if this is an actual madness, a late Van Gogh landscape, if I have slipped now into this tumult unable to recover
Later I find out that I misunderstood the text that triggered the outburst - that I am almost completely in the wrong.
On a grey day ( and there is going to be a theme here for it is a friday lunchtime - the only day I seem able to take a break ) I cycle out from work to get into a church. I know St Mary Le Strand is closed on Mondays and Fridays so I am aiming for the church at Temple. I have caught whispers of it's beauty and also Da Vinci code conspiracy theories in other research so I think it is going to be a good one.
Parking the bike just off Fleet St I am again in a part of London I have never been. I think as I walk down a thin cobbled street that it is like being a secret agent with my own self-generated, slightly nerdy special mission to complete. I am hidden in this snatched fraction of the day for no one knows where I am and I can't imagine telling anyone I work with where I have been. On the east side at the gatehouse of the walled court I ask a security man if it is possible to visit the church - yes he waves me in. Like Lincoln's Inn there is a courtyard - but less of a quadrangle - more a carpark with an irregular arrangement of very old and modern buildings that run into lawns. I don't know where I am going and I follow the crunch of wet gravel in a straight line looking down to a view of the Embankment and the Thames. Walk like a lawyer I think imagining the scurry of the white rabbit with a pocket watch - though there is no restriction to being here - I just don't want to look like a Dan Brown conspiracy tourist. I climb some greasy steps to see if a hall with stained glass is a church - it isn't - then sidle between two buildings on a path into a courtyard alongside offices
I have often thought I would like to take photographs through the windows walking past empty offices. I love the still empty air of the partitioned spaces and the seemingly neutral and 'timeless' aesthetic of computer, keyboard, desk and chair made jaunty by bright coloured talismans of family life or souvenirs of individuality. Here at lunchtime at Temple these arrangements of greige are crammed into small Dickensian rooms with bound papers spilling onto desks.
Under the shelter of a stone arch I find a map on the wall then have to back track up skiddy stone steps, through the same courtyard but on the other side alongside more office windows. The central garden is planted beautifully with plumbago and dark dahlias all of it sodden by the rain. Through the windows I see: a corporate lunchtime group perched at a round table with catered sandwiches, papers built in pillars curving against the window like a hoarders work in progress then in a tiny basement room two men struggling with a photo copier as if in a lover's clinch or knights in a cave against a dragon. I turn the corner to find the round church - labrador yellow set back from a courtyard, a column topped by a statue of two knights on a horse in the centre of the square. It marks the reach of the fire of London I find out later. The flames somehow stopping an arm's length from the church. Writing this I think can that really be true then check my map book because I know there is a map of the burnt out areas of the city. Yes, the beautifully drawn map by Wencelaus Holler in 1666 shows the white space of land destroyed by fire lapping the ink drawing of the circular church /tower and a few fine pen-nibbed trees surviving nearby.
At the door of the church however a poster announces tours and admission fees. I need £4 to enter. I have to troop back out through an alleyway onto Fleet St to get the cash and then back again with the money. As I enter the church there are two women on the door both very helpful but proprietorial and a bit bossy of their ancient space. There is scaffolding like a curtain across the view of the altar straight ahead but as I turn my head to see into the round of the church I can see effigies slightly submerged in the stone floor and it seems the altar is almost a side show to this old, circular shaped place. In the high, light, buttressed circle there are 9 stone knights lying as if on very thin mats on a bare floor. They are beautiful, the textures of their chain mail and socks like knitted stone just sleeping
I discover these are Knights Templar from the ancient order founded in 1119 by Hugh de Payens from Champagne and Godfrey de Saint Omer from Picardy to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. and that this church is a Templar church founded in 1185. When Jerusalem came under Muslim control in 638 bandits and fanatics preyed on the travelling christians and this new order formed to defend them. They became the most feared knights as their devotion to scripture gave them the willingness to die. The statue I had seen outside the church is the emblem of the order - the two knights together on a horse; a symbol of slightly disputed meaning - either their humble beginnings when horses had to be shared or the charity shown when a knight takes up a wounded Christian. Initially a round church modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was established in Holborn in 1128 on the site of an old Roman Temple. When this site became too small for the increasing numbers they moved to the present site building a larger round church set amongst grand halls, cloisters and walks. The church was consecrated February 10th 1185 in a ceremony by Heraclius Patriarch of Jerusalem and it is believed likely that Henry 11 was also present at the consecration.
In an address given in 1885 to celebrate the seven hundredth anniversary of the consecration of the church I find contemporary concerns:
'The Templars have bequeathed us, as legacy, this lesson which we must not forget in the hour when we would fain recall the days of their grandeur and fresh enthusiasm: there is no promise of continuance for any institute, any party, any church, any creed.' the sermon by Alfred Ainger 10 Feb 1885.
For only two years after the consecration of this chuch in 1185 the Holy City of Jerusalem was captured by the Saladin the great sultan of Islam and when the pure Gothic chancel extension to the nave was consecrated in 1240 in the presence of Henry III there were less than eighty remaining years before the Knights of the Temple were no more.
'I love the gargoyles' I say to the women on the desk as I buy a postcard. 'Grotesques', she corrects me correctly but primly. 'They are replacements put there in 1862'. I am surprised for they seem so very authentic.
I find the Templar Knight described by Bernard of Clairvaux, a nephew of one of the founding knights as:
' Truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armour of faith just as his body is protected by the armour of steel. He is thus doubly-armed, and need fear neither demons nor men.'
I wonder if the grotesques represent this. When Philip 11 suddenly and harshly disbanded the Templars 'The charges of heresy included spitting, trampling, or urinating on the cross; while naked, being kissed obscenely by the receptor on the lips, navel, and base of the spine; heresy and worship of idols; institutionalized sodomy; and also accusations of contempt of the Holy Mass and denial of the sacraments. Barbara Frale has suggested that these acts were intended to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a Crusader might be subjected to if captured by the Saracens. According to this line of reasoning, they were taught how to commit apostasy with the mind only and not with the heart.' Barbara Frale, 'The Chinon Chart: Papal Absolution to the last Templar, Master Jacques de Molay', Journal of Medieval History, 30 (2004), 127.
Though I also find Bernard ( 1090 -1153) moaning about the grotesques.'What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters under the very eyes of the brothers as they read? What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, strange savage lions and monsters? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man?' I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body. Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, then again an animal half horse, half goat....Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities we should at least regret what we have spent on them.'
Much of the church has been destroyed or restored or replaced. After the departure of the Templars the land and buildings were rented to lawyers and their tenure made official in 1608 by James 1. Christopher Wren tinkered the original structure after the Fire of London though the fire had not damaged the building at all and on 10th May 1941 incendiary bombs set light to the roof, setting fire to much of the church and cracking the dark Purbeck marble columns by the intense heat. The columns and the church have been restored though it seems the original columns had a 'light outward lean, an architectural quirk,' which was reproduced in the replaced columns.
This takes me so long to write. I am not sure why. I thought I would love the mystery and tales of these knights but every night I sit to write and I just feel weary - I fiddle and fiddle with a few words but without the passion I normally feel for this project . Every day on the way to work I cycle past St Margaret's in Parliament Square. I didn't care for it much when I wrote about it and now I love it's almost organic form, the intricate tracery like the delicate structure of a mushroom in the shade of the Abbey. I have learnt so much from the churches I think but worry I have written myself into a cul de sac.
I am reading ''A jury of Her Peers' American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx' by Elaine Showalter for I am thinking how to write or what to write. I have barely any time to read or write anything at all and I only seem to be able to write this blog slowly. I am worried it won't add up to anything much. Though I send it to an agent who always says nice things about my writing, and he does but as always he says it is ( sadly ) unpublishable. I guess I want to write something that is publishable that I want now to be published.
Reading 'A Jury of Her Peers' I find comrades alongside my slightly solitary life for described are the early challenges of being a woman and a writer.
I find 'Anne Bradshaw vouched for by her brother in law that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making 'these Poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments'
Lydia Maria Child a writer and American abolitionist in 1864 listed she had:
Cooked 360 dinners
Cooked 362 breakfasts
Swept and dusted sitting room and kitchen 350 times
Flilled lamps 362 times
Swept and dusted chamber and stairs 40 times.
Beside innumerable jobs too small to mention.'
Though what I identify with is the beady eye alongside families, the difficulty of getting everything to square.
I hear a well heeled writer at work say he has never dusted anything in his life. Oh I think with a quick flash of spite but somebody will have done. Some people will have done that for you - for it seems to me that dust is matter that should be considered by all.
In the time I take to write this I see the first sprouts of scaffolding appear above the fence of the boarded up site on the corner of Horseferry Road where the court was, then a bright yellow digger and a crane installed. The crane looms high above the west tower of the Houses of Parliament catching the light bright against the blue sky, the gold tips of the tower behind glinting in the same sunlight. The space is still there but it is being filled in above dark green hoardings and portacabins built on stilts.
Unexpectedly the day before I finish writing this I have to research photographs of Jerusalem for a Christmas themed travel piece on the Holy Land. Oh I think seeing pictures of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem and The Temple Mount, I never thought about this. It is described as a tacky place, too full of tourists and too full of the warring concerns of different faiths but in the pictures I find it beautiful. Someone in the office says over my shoulder that they went with their family on a coach trip out of a water park in Egypt and it was like stepping into another time, but sacred. In these dark, disputed candle lit places I think that despite the dusting of the faithful there must be old traces, old matter, dead skin mingled and collected like sand.
Amen
Later I find out that I misunderstood the text that triggered the outburst - that I am almost completely in the wrong.
On a grey day ( and there is going to be a theme here for it is a friday lunchtime - the only day I seem able to take a break ) I cycle out from work to get into a church. I know St Mary Le Strand is closed on Mondays and Fridays so I am aiming for the church at Temple. I have caught whispers of it's beauty and also Da Vinci code conspiracy theories in other research so I think it is going to be a good one.
Parking the bike just off Fleet St I am again in a part of London I have never been. I think as I walk down a thin cobbled street that it is like being a secret agent with my own self-generated, slightly nerdy special mission to complete. I am hidden in this snatched fraction of the day for no one knows where I am and I can't imagine telling anyone I work with where I have been. On the east side at the gatehouse of the walled court I ask a security man if it is possible to visit the church - yes he waves me in. Like Lincoln's Inn there is a courtyard - but less of a quadrangle - more a carpark with an irregular arrangement of very old and modern buildings that run into lawns. I don't know where I am going and I follow the crunch of wet gravel in a straight line looking down to a view of the Embankment and the Thames. Walk like a lawyer I think imagining the scurry of the white rabbit with a pocket watch - though there is no restriction to being here - I just don't want to look like a Dan Brown conspiracy tourist. I climb some greasy steps to see if a hall with stained glass is a church - it isn't - then sidle between two buildings on a path into a courtyard alongside offices
I have often thought I would like to take photographs through the windows walking past empty offices. I love the still empty air of the partitioned spaces and the seemingly neutral and 'timeless' aesthetic of computer, keyboard, desk and chair made jaunty by bright coloured talismans of family life or souvenirs of individuality. Here at lunchtime at Temple these arrangements of greige are crammed into small Dickensian rooms with bound papers spilling onto desks.
Under the shelter of a stone arch I find a map on the wall then have to back track up skiddy stone steps, through the same courtyard but on the other side alongside more office windows. The central garden is planted beautifully with plumbago and dark dahlias all of it sodden by the rain. Through the windows I see: a corporate lunchtime group perched at a round table with catered sandwiches, papers built in pillars curving against the window like a hoarders work in progress then in a tiny basement room two men struggling with a photo copier as if in a lover's clinch or knights in a cave against a dragon. I turn the corner to find the round church - labrador yellow set back from a courtyard, a column topped by a statue of two knights on a horse in the centre of the square. It marks the reach of the fire of London I find out later. The flames somehow stopping an arm's length from the church. Writing this I think can that really be true then check my map book because I know there is a map of the burnt out areas of the city. Yes, the beautifully drawn map by Wencelaus Holler in 1666 shows the white space of land destroyed by fire lapping the ink drawing of the circular church /tower and a few fine pen-nibbed trees surviving nearby.
At the door of the church however a poster announces tours and admission fees. I need £4 to enter. I have to troop back out through an alleyway onto Fleet St to get the cash and then back again with the money. As I enter the church there are two women on the door both very helpful but proprietorial and a bit bossy of their ancient space. There is scaffolding like a curtain across the view of the altar straight ahead but as I turn my head to see into the round of the church I can see effigies slightly submerged in the stone floor and it seems the altar is almost a side show to this old, circular shaped place. In the high, light, buttressed circle there are 9 stone knights lying as if on very thin mats on a bare floor. They are beautiful, the textures of their chain mail and socks like knitted stone just sleeping
I discover these are Knights Templar from the ancient order founded in 1119 by Hugh de Payens from Champagne and Godfrey de Saint Omer from Picardy to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. and that this church is a Templar church founded in 1185. When Jerusalem came under Muslim control in 638 bandits and fanatics preyed on the travelling christians and this new order formed to defend them. They became the most feared knights as their devotion to scripture gave them the willingness to die. The statue I had seen outside the church is the emblem of the order - the two knights together on a horse; a symbol of slightly disputed meaning - either their humble beginnings when horses had to be shared or the charity shown when a knight takes up a wounded Christian. Initially a round church modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was established in Holborn in 1128 on the site of an old Roman Temple. When this site became too small for the increasing numbers they moved to the present site building a larger round church set amongst grand halls, cloisters and walks. The church was consecrated February 10th 1185 in a ceremony by Heraclius Patriarch of Jerusalem and it is believed likely that Henry 11 was also present at the consecration.
In an address given in 1885 to celebrate the seven hundredth anniversary of the consecration of the church I find contemporary concerns:
'The Templars have bequeathed us, as legacy, this lesson which we must not forget in the hour when we would fain recall the days of their grandeur and fresh enthusiasm: there is no promise of continuance for any institute, any party, any church, any creed.' the sermon by Alfred Ainger 10 Feb 1885.
For only two years after the consecration of this chuch in 1185 the Holy City of Jerusalem was captured by the Saladin the great sultan of Islam and when the pure Gothic chancel extension to the nave was consecrated in 1240 in the presence of Henry III there were less than eighty remaining years before the Knights of the Temple were no more.
It seems The Knights Templar evolved an early banking system - not unlike using travellers cheques - so pilgrims could redeem money against valuables deposited with the Templars rather than carrying wealth on their dangerous pilgrimages. The order became very rich and powerful, taking valuables from their conquests, gifts from the wealthy initiated into the order and offering loans to monarchs. However, with wealth and power came envy and hostility and the Order was disbanded when King Philip 1V of France put thousands to death in the 14th century in order to plunder their wealth for his war against England.
With this sudden demise I find conspiracy theories: the knights become a part of Switzerland, taking their banking expertise to the Swiss, the knights sailed to America, went to Scotland, became involved with the Freemasons. Dan Brown's plots seem to use ideas that they held dangerous secret knowledge against the Church which the Church wanted buried. I even ( and quite unexpectedly) find a complicated tale that the Knights Templar were imprisoned in the castle local to my home town and built tunnels under the streets - that a stone Owl perched on a building in the high street holds a Freemasons secret message. Though I am interested in the reference to the symbol of the stone owl - when I drive out of London with the boys to see my mum and dad we always look for and laugh at a stone owl balanced on the corner of a Barclays bank in St John's Wood - I have always told them it is real, to check if it has flown away but they are now old enough to tell me stories about it too.
Looking up from the knights on the floor I see a ring of 'gargoyles' around the walls of the circular church. Beautifully modelled they are disturbing and funny. A man stretches his mouth wide to poke his tongue out, another man is cross eyed. The mad, blind. toothless and terrified are all gathered. A devilish goat, a simple king, faces with lolling expressions even a man having his ear bitten by a dog. I feel I have found a secret, something really special.With this sudden demise I find conspiracy theories: the knights become a part of Switzerland, taking their banking expertise to the Swiss, the knights sailed to America, went to Scotland, became involved with the Freemasons. Dan Brown's plots seem to use ideas that they held dangerous secret knowledge against the Church which the Church wanted buried. I even ( and quite unexpectedly) find a complicated tale that the Knights Templar were imprisoned in the castle local to my home town and built tunnels under the streets - that a stone Owl perched on a building in the high street holds a Freemasons secret message. Though I am interested in the reference to the symbol of the stone owl - when I drive out of London with the boys to see my mum and dad we always look for and laugh at a stone owl balanced on the corner of a Barclays bank in St John's Wood - I have always told them it is real, to check if it has flown away but they are now old enough to tell me stories about it too.
'I love the gargoyles' I say to the women on the desk as I buy a postcard. 'Grotesques', she corrects me correctly but primly. 'They are replacements put there in 1862'. I am surprised for they seem so very authentic.
I find the Templar Knight described by Bernard of Clairvaux, a nephew of one of the founding knights as:
' Truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armour of faith just as his body is protected by the armour of steel. He is thus doubly-armed, and need fear neither demons nor men.'
I wonder if the grotesques represent this. When Philip 11 suddenly and harshly disbanded the Templars 'The charges of heresy included spitting, trampling, or urinating on the cross; while naked, being kissed obscenely by the receptor on the lips, navel, and base of the spine; heresy and worship of idols; institutionalized sodomy; and also accusations of contempt of the Holy Mass and denial of the sacraments. Barbara Frale has suggested that these acts were intended to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a Crusader might be subjected to if captured by the Saracens. According to this line of reasoning, they were taught how to commit apostasy with the mind only and not with the heart.' Barbara Frale, 'The Chinon Chart: Papal Absolution to the last Templar, Master Jacques de Molay', Journal of Medieval History, 30 (2004), 127.
Though I also find Bernard ( 1090 -1153) moaning about the grotesques.'What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters under the very eyes of the brothers as they read? What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, strange savage lions and monsters? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man?' I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body. Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, then again an animal half horse, half goat....Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities we should at least regret what we have spent on them.'
Much of the church has been destroyed or restored or replaced. After the departure of the Templars the land and buildings were rented to lawyers and their tenure made official in 1608 by James 1. Christopher Wren tinkered the original structure after the Fire of London though the fire had not damaged the building at all and on 10th May 1941 incendiary bombs set light to the roof, setting fire to much of the church and cracking the dark Purbeck marble columns by the intense heat. The columns and the church have been restored though it seems the original columns had a 'light outward lean, an architectural quirk,' which was reproduced in the replaced columns.
This takes me so long to write. I am not sure why. I thought I would love the mystery and tales of these knights but every night I sit to write and I just feel weary - I fiddle and fiddle with a few words but without the passion I normally feel for this project . Every day on the way to work I cycle past St Margaret's in Parliament Square. I didn't care for it much when I wrote about it and now I love it's almost organic form, the intricate tracery like the delicate structure of a mushroom in the shade of the Abbey. I have learnt so much from the churches I think but worry I have written myself into a cul de sac.
I am reading ''A jury of Her Peers' American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx' by Elaine Showalter for I am thinking how to write or what to write. I have barely any time to read or write anything at all and I only seem to be able to write this blog slowly. I am worried it won't add up to anything much. Though I send it to an agent who always says nice things about my writing, and he does but as always he says it is ( sadly ) unpublishable. I guess I want to write something that is publishable that I want now to be published.
Reading 'A Jury of Her Peers' I find comrades alongside my slightly solitary life for described are the early challenges of being a woman and a writer.
I find 'Anne Bradshaw vouched for by her brother in law that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making 'these Poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments'
Lydia Maria Child a writer and American abolitionist in 1864 listed she had:
Cooked 360 dinners
Cooked 362 breakfasts
Swept and dusted sitting room and kitchen 350 times
Flilled lamps 362 times
Swept and dusted chamber and stairs 40 times.
Beside innumerable jobs too small to mention.'
Though what I identify with is the beady eye alongside families, the difficulty of getting everything to square.
I hear a well heeled writer at work say he has never dusted anything in his life. Oh I think with a quick flash of spite but somebody will have done. Some people will have done that for you - for it seems to me that dust is matter that should be considered by all.
In the time I take to write this I see the first sprouts of scaffolding appear above the fence of the boarded up site on the corner of Horseferry Road where the court was, then a bright yellow digger and a crane installed. The crane looms high above the west tower of the Houses of Parliament catching the light bright against the blue sky, the gold tips of the tower behind glinting in the same sunlight. The space is still there but it is being filled in above dark green hoardings and portacabins built on stilts.
Unexpectedly the day before I finish writing this I have to research photographs of Jerusalem for a Christmas themed travel piece on the Holy Land. Oh I think seeing pictures of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem and The Temple Mount, I never thought about this. It is described as a tacky place, too full of tourists and too full of the warring concerns of different faiths but in the pictures I find it beautiful. Someone in the office says over my shoulder that they went with their family on a coach trip out of a water park in Egypt and it was like stepping into another time, but sacred. In these dark, disputed candle lit places I think that despite the dusting of the faithful there must be old traces, old matter, dead skin mingled and collected like sand.
Amen
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
St Lincoln's Inn chapel
The man says - here - look at this, opening a hinged wall of paintings to reveal in the bottom left hand corner a painting of the ruins of the bank of England.
It is 10 o'clock in the morning in the Sir John Soanes museum and the boys are wary but intrigued. I am trying ( and failing ) to drop them off early to a holiday workshop in the basement next door. I feel like a pushy mum with my attempt to saturate them in a beautiful cultured place but also in my attempt to do this and get to work on time. The workshop starts at 10.30 and my work starts at 10 but with the ludicrous and often unfounded optimism with which I often lead my life I thought if I was half an hour early for one and half an hour late for the other somehow it would work out - but it isn't doing. There seems to be a rather strict 10.30 drop off policy. However, rather than just hang about outside we look around the house - 'don't touch' I have to hiss, 'don't run' I whistle through the spit of my teeth - though I can see that out of the fresh air and stretch of a campsite in Dorset this is a darkly lit, odd place stuffed with odd old stuff and yet I want them to love it.
'Sir John Soanes was fascinated by the buildings he designed being abandoned and another culture taking over' our narrator explains. I think of Roman Temples left to ruin in a green damp landscape alongside the huge arc of the Thames as the Romans departed in 410AD. Then I imagine our own landscape in ruins - the Bank of England ( mostly changed since Sir John Soane's original building) with the pillars tipped, grass growing and nearby the tumble of Next, Accessorize and Eat. I wonder at the archaeology of our chilly sandwiches and co ordinating consumer concerns. As a child I thought that in the future orange groves would grow where junior football teams spat pips from juicy segments at half time, though I also wanted to rewrite Cinderella from the view point of the ugly sisters.
Watching Newsnight I laugh dryly hearing an American Economist say that George Osbourne would have failed economic policy if it was an exam.
The painting is squashed in a room stacked with Hogarths and Canelettos and shows the Bank of England cut away, tall scruffy trees growing alongside, a misty fog coating the air, masonry tumbled against a dark stormy sky. It was painted by Joseph Gandy the romantic but tragic architect and draftsman who worked for 40 years alongside the significantly more successful Sir John Soane. Both were obsessed with posterity and Roman ruins and spent hours discussing and working on their melancholic dreams of excavated remains and the future. Though it was Sir John that could rouse himself from these reveries to talk of bricks and plumbing to his many clients while Gandy only ever built a couple of buildings and ended mad and penniless in a windowless cell in an asylum in Devon.
Sir John Soane also wrote 'Crude Hints towards the History of My House' in 1810 imagining returning to his home in the 1830s to find a dilapidated ruin. Though this somber mood is believed to be provoked by his disappointment in his sons, his friendship with Turner breaking down and rows with the Royal Academy of Architects.
Watching Newsnight I laugh dryly hearing an American Economist say that George Osbourne would have failed economic policy if it was an exam.
The painting is squashed in a room stacked with Hogarths and Canelettos and shows the Bank of England cut away, tall scruffy trees growing alongside, a misty fog coating the air, masonry tumbled against a dark stormy sky. It was painted by Joseph Gandy the romantic but tragic architect and draftsman who worked for 40 years alongside the significantly more successful Sir John Soane. Both were obsessed with posterity and Roman ruins and spent hours discussing and working on their melancholic dreams of excavated remains and the future. Though it was Sir John that could rouse himself from these reveries to talk of bricks and plumbing to his many clients while Gandy only ever built a couple of buildings and ended mad and penniless in a windowless cell in an asylum in Devon.
http://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/remembering-exposition-at-sir-john.html
Sir John Soane also wrote 'Crude Hints towards the History of My House' in 1810 imagining returning to his home in the 1830s to find a dilapidated ruin. Though this somber mood is believed to be provoked by his disappointment in his sons, his friendship with Turner breaking down and rows with the Royal Academy of Architects.
In front of the painting the stooped but impassioned guide also says to the boys - holding their attention with a severe eye - 'look within the ruin - who does Sir John think will survive', 'Are they workmen? one falters. 'Yes. People building again. People who can use their hands.'
Leaving them, their heads dipped in concentration in a beautifully proportioned Georgian basement cutting, sticking and drawing I leg it. From the Boris Bike corner of the elegant square I can see a towered gateway opposite - I have no idea what it is but it looks like an entrance to a castle. I don't know this area of London at all but every corner is almost a pantomime extreme 'untouched London view'.
I am trying to get into St Mary Le Strand church at Aldwych - we pass it every morning on the bus as we go to these workshops so I think it must be possible but the timing is always just too tight. One day exh who is skimming his own work by half an hour to pick them up at lunchtime rings to say he is going to be late. I set off hurriedly from work cycling over the river to pick the boys up and hold onto them before exh gets there ( though I get lost in the back streets and find myself pushing the BB over the crunch of gravel amazed in the grounds of St Lincoln's Inn thinking about Volpone and discovering the gatehouse that I had seen from the square is the gatehouse of St Lincoln's Inn. ) I attempt to bribe the boys with a bag of sweets to come to SMLS with me while we wait. They are up for it but exh phones to say he has arrived and I pass them like a baton into the back of the car and pedal back to work without getting into the church.
This is the end of the summer - the summer holidays petering out into trips to Clarks, Sports Direct and name tags sewn in the neck of soft collars. Optimistic sticker charts ( times tables and music practice ) are stuck to the kitchen wall, ironed clothes laid out and the alarm clock set.
Back into the routine of school and work I think I will be able to get to SMLS in a lunch break but I don't seem to have them. I love the work - the mixture of organising photo shoots across the world and looking at beautiful pictures but the desk is understaffed by stress and illness and the amount of work is unrelenting. Losing a job at the beginning of the year has knocked my sense of safety and I worry and worry that I am not quite fast enough, organised enough. I work 5 days a week, often until 8pm then at home I often do more.
Finally I cycle out on a Friday lunchtime determined to get to the church. I want to be quick but can't find a docking bay free for the bike. This is the Westminster border and I am at the edge of an area I know so enjoy circling old streets looking for a place to park. Though time is ticking for I meant to just slip out for a quick break and will get behind at work by this jaunt. I thought SMLS to be open at lunchtimes but the gates are shut and padlocked.
Oh, I think, then walk up the end bit of The Strand, just before it becomes Fleet Street wondering if there might be a church in the Royal Courts of Justice though with a bit of nosing about there doesn't seem to be anything. I have been helping my friend edit her poem about the Resurrection Men - Bishop, Williams and May who killed to sell bodies for anatomical research - and much of it is based in this area for they were caught trying to sell a 'fresh' body at King's College. I think I tormented her by knowing nothing of the subject and clean of knowledge depended entirely on her words to imagine these places - so it feels funny but fascinating to be in her landscape. I will try Lincoln's Inn I think - I feel completely out of my own time now as if there isn't really an office to go back to and a lot of work waiting to do. I turn down an alley - an old bell hung from an old building, shop windows bowed onto the street - lawyers rooms crammed together. At the end of the yard is a street that swerves off at the end with low village like buildings, like a Dickensian scene
Writing this I discover it is Carey Street previously the home of bankruptcy courts a possible etymology of the term queer street.
I duck under a low alley lined with lawyers bookshops and into a huge green square. It is so bright and perfect looking - a little bit New England with white fences. There are beautiful old roses tumbling over a wall, tourists milling around and the scurry of lawyers passing. I know there is a church here but I am not sure which building is the church - all of it is historic, turreted and ornate most of it could be ecclesiastical - just as I think I will have to go to the gatehouse to ask I see a sign saying that there are guided tours that start in the chapel and instructions on how to find it.
I am trying to get into St Mary Le Strand church at Aldwych - we pass it every morning on the bus as we go to these workshops so I think it must be possible but the timing is always just too tight. One day exh who is skimming his own work by half an hour to pick them up at lunchtime rings to say he is going to be late. I set off hurriedly from work cycling over the river to pick the boys up and hold onto them before exh gets there ( though I get lost in the back streets and find myself pushing the BB over the crunch of gravel amazed in the grounds of St Lincoln's Inn thinking about Volpone and discovering the gatehouse that I had seen from the square is the gatehouse of St Lincoln's Inn. ) I attempt to bribe the boys with a bag of sweets to come to SMLS with me while we wait. They are up for it but exh phones to say he has arrived and I pass them like a baton into the back of the car and pedal back to work without getting into the church.
This is the end of the summer - the summer holidays petering out into trips to Clarks, Sports Direct and name tags sewn in the neck of soft collars. Optimistic sticker charts ( times tables and music practice ) are stuck to the kitchen wall, ironed clothes laid out and the alarm clock set.
Back into the routine of school and work I think I will be able to get to SMLS in a lunch break but I don't seem to have them. I love the work - the mixture of organising photo shoots across the world and looking at beautiful pictures but the desk is understaffed by stress and illness and the amount of work is unrelenting. Losing a job at the beginning of the year has knocked my sense of safety and I worry and worry that I am not quite fast enough, organised enough. I work 5 days a week, often until 8pm then at home I often do more.
Finally I cycle out on a Friday lunchtime determined to get to the church. I want to be quick but can't find a docking bay free for the bike. This is the Westminster border and I am at the edge of an area I know so enjoy circling old streets looking for a place to park. Though time is ticking for I meant to just slip out for a quick break and will get behind at work by this jaunt. I thought SMLS to be open at lunchtimes but the gates are shut and padlocked.
Oh, I think, then walk up the end bit of The Strand, just before it becomes Fleet Street wondering if there might be a church in the Royal Courts of Justice though with a bit of nosing about there doesn't seem to be anything. I have been helping my friend edit her poem about the Resurrection Men - Bishop, Williams and May who killed to sell bodies for anatomical research - and much of it is based in this area for they were caught trying to sell a 'fresh' body at King's College. I think I tormented her by knowing nothing of the subject and clean of knowledge depended entirely on her words to imagine these places - so it feels funny but fascinating to be in her landscape. I will try Lincoln's Inn I think - I feel completely out of my own time now as if there isn't really an office to go back to and a lot of work waiting to do. I turn down an alley - an old bell hung from an old building, shop windows bowed onto the street - lawyers rooms crammed together. At the end of the yard is a street that swerves off at the end with low village like buildings, like a Dickensian scene
Writing this I discover it is Carey Street previously the home of bankruptcy courts a possible etymology of the term queer street.
I duck under a low alley lined with lawyers bookshops and into a huge green square. It is so bright and perfect looking - a little bit New England with white fences. There are beautiful old roses tumbling over a wall, tourists milling around and the scurry of lawyers passing. I know there is a church here but I am not sure which building is the church - all of it is historic, turreted and ornate most of it could be ecclesiastical - just as I think I will have to go to the gatehouse to ask I see a sign saying that there are guided tours that start in the chapel and instructions on how to find it.
On the east side of the square I find myself under a low arched open crypt with stunted buttresses like squat thick tree trunks - still unsure where to go. Hesitantly I walk up the stairs at the back of this area and then at the top open the doors into the chapel. There is a man speaking to a tour gathered though the pews are so high they are like wooden booths. The windows are tall with jewel stained glass in a dense patchwork of coats of arms. It is as if I have lost all sense of time for I sit for a while just looking at the glass and listening to the talk.
He talks of John Donne who laid the foundation stone of the chapel in 1620. Donne had been the preacher at Lincoln's Inn between 1620 and 1622 and preached the first sermon in 1623 packing the congregation so full that people passed out and were taken for dead. The chapel bell that rang out at midday to mark the passing away of a 'bencher' ( a member of the inn's governing body ) is to have inspired John Donne's line 'Never send to know for whom the bells toll; it tolls for thee'. The tour guide in the pulpit also talks of the aristocracy sending their second or third son's to Lincoln's Inn to learn law so that disputes of land could be resolved.
Later I find out that originally during the 12th and 13th century the law was taught in the City of London by the clergy. However Henry III decreed that no institutes of legal education could exist in the City of London and a papal bull declared that the clergy could no longer teach common law only canon law and so the institutes of legal education fell apart. Common lawyers collected at the hamlet of Holborn - the nearest place to the law courts of Westminster Hall that was outside the City - and at sometime ( it is unknown exactly when ) Lincoln's Inn was formed. Ben Jonson is reputed to have helped as a brick layer in the construction of the Inn, and Oliver Cromwell lived over the gateway nearest to Chancery Lane. Dickens wrote in Bleak House:
‘This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and blighted lands in every shire; which has its warn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance; which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give - who does not often give - the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!”
On a trip to the Natural History Museum with the boys we find a room on Earth's Restless Surface just after the earthquake simulator. Briefly I find the statement that change is all that is certain comforting and then as I move around the exhibition I panic. I think it is the sense of scale and time that disturbs me - tiny drops of water building or carving rock, gravity itself eroding matter, everything shifting, everything tumbling. When my eldest son was little he would talk and talk about outer space from the strapped child seat at the back seat of the car as I drove. I wonder now if it was before the youngest was born or more likely just after. Each question would make our own position in the car more tiny, more ridiculous, it was like a zoom lens rendering us invisible. I attempted to answer each question though sometimes I didn't know the answers and often the answer was just yes. Though infinity seems like a guess sometimes, a dinner plate to fall off.
I discover too that Sir John Soane's disappointment with his two sons was more than ( or perhaps because of ) a pushy parent's inability to cope with a lack of achievement - though he pushed and pushed them both to become architect's. The elder son John died young while the youngest George exhorted money from his family with threats of becoming an actor, was imprisoned for debt and fraud and then published anonymously an article 'The Present Low State of the Arts in England and more particularly of Architecture' in which Soane was singled out for personal attack. Later George lived in a menage a trois with his wife and her sister subjecting the family to domestic abuse and though Soane's paid for the grandson's education - again attempting to keep the lineage of architecture in his name by placing him under the guidance of another architect the grandson was dismissed for staying out late with a known homosexual. At night just before sleep I think about the rage and secrets hidden in this story.
I hear a woman on radio 4 talking about writing her own life as a book and she said between describing the drug habit she picked up once it was published that the trick was just to call everyone really good looking - they don't mind what you write as long if you say that - it made me laugh out loud as I washed up.
Finally I have a vivid dream that my hand is held by a ghost. That I am just standing in a lobby somewhere and my hand is held warm and tight by nothing. It is a real shock even in a dream and I wake frightened.
Amen
Friday, 13 July 2012
St John of the White Tower
The Court on Horseferry Rd that closed in December has been demolished. A vast space on the corner of Marsham St opened up revealing a rather blank blocks of flats and unexpectedly a view of the gothic, golden-tipped tower of the Houses of Parliament with the Union Jack flying. I find the view fascinating as we walk to and from school, the change it makes to other buildings, the layers of London peeled back, the shift/mark of change like a lost tooth. Though the speed that it has been taken down and the hoarding advertising luxury apartments suggests it won't be there long.
My 16 year old niece comes to stay for a week while she does a fashion course and my sister in law and two nephews come for the weekend ( It is a long story but employment worries mean my elder brother now works in Dubai on his own and his family live in their home in the North of England though he comes home for snatched weekends and holidays. My sister in law and I became close through our children but perhaps closer since this arrangement took hold - she isn't exactly a single mum but she does the work of one at the moment - and it is nice to spend time working together in a team, kind to each other, able to make each other laugh, part of each other's families. I squash everyone into the flat squeezing buckled air beds into the boys' room and sleep on the sofa. The youngest nephew once said to the boys 'Aren't you embarrassed to live here?' not understanding that most of their school friends live cooped lives with dirty yards too.
We take a boat to the Tower of London. It rains a bit and we can't really hear the commentary. She must have been cold my sister in law and I say about the Queen - for it is a much warmer day and yet the wind on the river is old lady chilly. Just as we disembark I see the Spirit of Chartwell motor past. I think after all they did a good job for it is an ugly boat brown boat, like an obese cinderella skiving up the river. As our boat turns to dock at the Tower of London I feel excited, just as I did as a child by Traitor's Gate. It seems so easy to imagine the dead end fear of being rowed in, fear stage managed in the crick of the neck height of the castle and the low down boat gliding in. With absolutely no queue we see the Crown Jewels. Unexpectedly there is barely any grumbling from the children. Such riches seem to quiet them. Narnian scabbards, diamonds and rubies and sapphires bigger than birds eggs, a huge ornate gold punch bowl, detailed by fish and lobsters - holding 115 bottles of wine my eldest son winks at me. The last glass case of the exhibition shows the cases the jewels travel in - sculptural, empty spaces describing a puzzle of baffling forms. Afterwards I notice a church tucked into the corner of the courtyard. I want to go there I say as my sister in law and I hand out sandwiches to the range of ages ( 6 - 16 ) sat on a damp bench, hoods up, waterproofed against the drizzle. But we see the ravens, the torture chamber, the Bloody Tower, then the White tower. Walking into the White Tower we pass an open door that reveals the narrow staircase where the bones of two young boys were found buried, then troop past suits of armour through bare halls. I catch the cousins ( brothers/boys ) fighting - cuffing and kicking opposite boy armour. My sister in law is round the corner - so i intervene - quietly shouting at them to stop it, what a bad example, how old are there, all the things you say. Behind me a guard of the tower, a cell block H looking woman takes over from my remonstrations and says she will throw them out. Chastised we move on through. There is a room of majestic life sized models of horses, almost as if stabled and beautifully carved called the 'Line of Kings'. Restored onto the throne in 1660 Charles II presented this Line of Kings- each king since Wiliam the Conquerer represented by their armour and the powerful model of horses. Possibly one of the first tourist attractions it was an advert to the strength of royal lineage and he opened the tower to the public putting both weapons and the crown jewels on display. A Stuart spin doctor he also laid on the Royal Thames pageant. At work I get a book catalogue that lists a book called Rebranding Rule' the restoration and revolution monarchy 1660 -1741 by Kevin Sharpe that seems to be about the public representation of monarchy after the aftermath of Cromwell. Oh I think rather chuffed I am on to something. Though I also read in the Metro that there has been the biggest amount of reported visitors to Buckingham Palace this year, many coming to see Kate Middleton's wedding dress despite the queen called the headless dummy horrible, horrid and 'made to look very creepy.' I think how the anxieties of royalty must be imbedded - perhaps the riots triggered old fears of execution. Though they have had a good year this year - putting a lot of verve to their popularity - the pageant, jumping out of helicopters, a summer of flag flying and pride.
I discover too that until 1830 a menagerie was housed at the Tower of London, another potent symbol of power and strength. Believed to have started with one lion in the time of King John the collection grew - a gift of three leopards from the Holy Roman Emperor in 1235, a white bear believed to be a polar bear donated by the King of Norway in 1251, and an African Elephant ( the first in England since the Roman invasion of 43AD ) given by Louis IX in 1255.
By 1741 the first true guide book to the Tower listed the animals on display and recorded their often mundane names:'The collection included Marco and Phillis the lions and their son Nero, another two lionesses called Jenny and Nanny, a leopard called Will, a panther called Jenny, two tigers confusingly also called Will and Phillis with their son Dick, as well as a racoon, two vultures, two eagles, an ape and a porcupine whose names were unrecorded.'
The Menagerie was not without incident - 1686 a keeper's daughter was mauled by a lion, a boys leg torn by monkeys in the 17th century and an escaped Leopard shot in the 18th century.By 1830 the animals were trundled away to form London Zoo or sold and shipped to an American showman.
I lose all the children for a while - I can't exactly remember if I go back to check on one group or forward to check on another but somehow I am without any of them for a while. I coast briefly, unattached to anything, not really taking in the details any more, just resting, aware of the historic space but also an ugliness to the display. I notice a huge fireplace in one room and think what a beautiful space and then climb some wooden steps into a simple stone room and suddenly there is some rush and an attractive smiley woman is saying 'IF YOU WANT TO HEAR THE TALK YOU NEED TO SIT NOW!' Oh I think looking up to the simple arches and windows above a table altarpiece, I didn't know this was here. But with a lovely feeling of recognition of a space as if I knew already about this simple but completely beautiful chapel. I think oh it is on the cover of a book my dad gave me about the city churches, that I haven't let myself look at yet. A pause here - I have mumbled an interest in London churches to my Mum and Dad who used to nag me how the novel was doing - but not revealed the extent of this project. I wonder if it is accepted within the family I have become a Sunday writer, lost my ambition, that I am too old for publication. I wonder with fear if it is true. Though I am so involved in the obsession of this work I don't think there is anything else I can do now. I lean on a pillar for the talk. I think the children or my sister in law will either come up the stairs and find me or come back to find out where I have got to but no one does.
The young woman gives an enthusiastic and smiley sing song talk to the seated audience. She over emphases the first word of each sentence - HERE, she says, the White Tower was built with work commencing in 1078, the thick walls a symbol of Norman strength but also a royal home, a safe place. IT capitalised on the wooden fortification built in 1066 as William the Conqueror's stronghold, becoming one of the biggest forts in Christendom. THE small chapel is the oldest intact church in London she says and was the king's private chapel situated next to the royal bedroom. HENRY VII's wife Elizabeth of York lay in state having died in childbirth here, MARY I was married by proxy here to Philip II of Spain and Lady Jane Grey would have worshipped here. MUCH earlier during the peasant's revolt of 1381 the castle was stormed as the young King Richard II went to hear the demands of the peasants at Mile End. THE Lord Chancellor, Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury who was particularly associated with the disputed poll tax and Lord Treasurer ( Robert de Hales, the Grand Prior of the Knights Hospitallers of England ) were both dragged from the chapel, then taken and beheaded on Tower Green. The guide passes a laminate picture between the different nationalities seated on wooden chairs showing Simon of Sudbury's part mummified skull that is preserved in his home town clearly showing the axe mark. A South African girl passes it back to me as I loll on the pillar looking at the dense stone of the structure, the simple space that was probably once ornately coloured holding my breath. It seems such a tight space for these tales, I wasn't expecting to come across it. The small Norman arched window above the altar table faces directly east along with the gallery windows curved around the apse and I imagine the sun light spilling into the chapel as it rises each day. Though writing this I realise this is why churches are often to be built east to west, that out of the darkness the sun rising each day could be a celebration.
I catch up with the others, though no one seems to have missed me, everyone just milling around now, the children bored, anticipating the gift shop. Just before departing I find a list of executions within the tower listed by centuries and I am surprised to read that in the 20th century 12 people were executed. 11 during World War I and one during World War II - all shot by firing squad. We are running out of time because my sister in law and her sons need to catch a train. Though I still try to get in the other church in the corner of the walls of the castle. 'Only if you are part of a tour' the beefeater says, so I will have to go back.
Later I read:'...the Tower appears almost as a character symbolising both protection and fearful danger.' about Shakespeare's Richard III. For the young sons of Edward IV confined in secure cells on upper floors in the White Tower in May 1483 it seems to have been danger. The Princes in the Tower disappeared in July 1483 presumably murdered. In 1674 workmen digging out foundations of a staircase leading up to the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, high in the White Tower, found a chest containing the skeletons of two boys and Charles II had the remains buried at Westminster Abbey. Tests carried out by medical experts in 1933 confirmed that these bones were those of two children of the ages of the Princes in the Tower in September 1483. Though there is now controversy that this can be true. I wonder too how handy for Charles II to have loopholes in his lineage cleared up.
I must have told my sister in law about the blog over a glass of wine though I don't remember doing so. Out of the blue she emails weeks after their visit to say she has read the blog and found it intensely moving. I wonder and worry whether she might just feel sorry for me. Is it any good I want to reply. Can I write? I want to reply, can I? Or am I just a Sunday writer? Is it ok to write about my children? My family? You?
There is always a moment of optimism when I first start writing about a church when I think oh this one is going to be easy, I will have this done in a couple of days. I will be back to doing a church a week I think excitedly eyeing the City churches as I pass them. But then the summer holidays hit, the sun comes out, the boys camp in Norfolk with their Dad and friends and I join them for a weekend. The following week I even sit and watch some of the Olympics, 'Mum's watching telly' the boys say in glee as I shout at athletes winning gold medals. Then we are off for the annual camping holiday in Dorset where we catch Olympic sailing from the cliff tops. I finally finish War and Peace ( it has taken me exactly a year ), those last pages so dense with ideas of power and scale, freedom and humanity that I have wondered occasionally if I might not make it, might not get to the end. Briefly wonder if that happened - would I lie - say I had read it. But I do. The last thirty pages taking three months. Oh but it is worth it. I don't believe it is a plot spoiler to copy the last paragraph. Tolstoy finished by talking of the historic acceptance of earth's motion in space and it's imperceptibility:
'In the first case, we had to get away from a false sensation of immobility in space and accept movement that we could not feel. In the present case it is no less essential to get away from a false sensation of freedom and accept a dependence that we cannot feel.'
Amen.
It is nearly the end of term. We are all tired and grumpy. Waking everyday to this grey sci-fi summer we talk of rain at breakfast. The boys usually recalcitrant to waterproofs understand their necessity like soldiers stowing kit. I am finding the high pressure full time job and my own life hard to sandwich. As if I am a voyeur on comfortable and cultured lives, my face feels pressed to the glass of ease and ambition. Though I like the work, feel completely at home looking carefully at beautiful pictures, trying to find the detail of narrative that makes sense of a story and my sons have a better standard of drawing paper. No longer felt-penning superheroes on the other side of TOWIE girls in bikinis, they sketch on the reverse of Titians, theatre productions and news pictures of the anniversary of the London riots. When it goes well it is work I love - there is just a lot of it and I have to squeeze in parent teacher meetings, cooking cakes to thank teachers and baking Munch scream cookies for the Bazaar with finding and paying for childcare. The boys exhausted melt down being dragged home, the last children left at after school play centre. Oh I think then this is tough.
Between school and work I ride the Boris Bikes over Westminster Bridge past PSM's house near to the turrets of Southwark Cathedral. The brief space between home and work feels like freedom. The view of Big Ben, the river, crowds increasing as the Olympics near.
I have been collecting 'old views'. Cycling or walking past I suddenly catch one - a back street in Waterloo, without the gloss of front doors but an overgrown row of back yards, a corner in St James's, roof tops and elegant pillars, a street a stillness to time, a fold, something eyes from another time saw. A handkerchief of land in Russell Square, an old bomb site just left. A turn near Borough market that bears almost no trace of now. I like the authenticity of the past almost undisturbed. It is like a rhyme or a wink, how Paul Auster describes the vibration of coincidences. Once, cycling home on a bike I see a woman in a Crinoline and two men in frock coats on Pall Mall, just standing on the corner trying to hail a cab, hair tucked into wigs, a little bit drunk.
Between school and work I ride the Boris Bikes over Westminster Bridge past PSM's house near to the turrets of Southwark Cathedral. The brief space between home and work feels like freedom. The view of Big Ben, the river, crowds increasing as the Olympics near.
I have been collecting 'old views'. Cycling or walking past I suddenly catch one - a back street in Waterloo, without the gloss of front doors but an overgrown row of back yards, a corner in St James's, roof tops and elegant pillars, a street a stillness to time, a fold, something eyes from another time saw. A handkerchief of land in Russell Square, an old bomb site just left. A turn near Borough market that bears almost no trace of now. I like the authenticity of the past almost undisturbed. It is like a rhyme or a wink, how Paul Auster describes the vibration of coincidences. Once, cycling home on a bike I see a woman in a Crinoline and two men in frock coats on Pall Mall, just standing on the corner trying to hail a cab, hair tucked into wigs, a little bit drunk.
My 16 year old niece comes to stay for a week while she does a fashion course and my sister in law and two nephews come for the weekend ( It is a long story but employment worries mean my elder brother now works in Dubai on his own and his family live in their home in the North of England though he comes home for snatched weekends and holidays. My sister in law and I became close through our children but perhaps closer since this arrangement took hold - she isn't exactly a single mum but she does the work of one at the moment - and it is nice to spend time working together in a team, kind to each other, able to make each other laugh, part of each other's families. I squash everyone into the flat squeezing buckled air beds into the boys' room and sleep on the sofa. The youngest nephew once said to the boys 'Aren't you embarrassed to live here?' not understanding that most of their school friends live cooped lives with dirty yards too.
We take a boat to the Tower of London. It rains a bit and we can't really hear the commentary. She must have been cold my sister in law and I say about the Queen - for it is a much warmer day and yet the wind on the river is old lady chilly. Just as we disembark I see the Spirit of Chartwell motor past. I think after all they did a good job for it is an ugly boat brown boat, like an obese cinderella skiving up the river. As our boat turns to dock at the Tower of London I feel excited, just as I did as a child by Traitor's Gate. It seems so easy to imagine the dead end fear of being rowed in, fear stage managed in the crick of the neck height of the castle and the low down boat gliding in. With absolutely no queue we see the Crown Jewels. Unexpectedly there is barely any grumbling from the children. Such riches seem to quiet them. Narnian scabbards, diamonds and rubies and sapphires bigger than birds eggs, a huge ornate gold punch bowl, detailed by fish and lobsters - holding 115 bottles of wine my eldest son winks at me. The last glass case of the exhibition shows the cases the jewels travel in - sculptural, empty spaces describing a puzzle of baffling forms. Afterwards I notice a church tucked into the corner of the courtyard. I want to go there I say as my sister in law and I hand out sandwiches to the range of ages ( 6 - 16 ) sat on a damp bench, hoods up, waterproofed against the drizzle. But we see the ravens, the torture chamber, the Bloody Tower, then the White tower. Walking into the White Tower we pass an open door that reveals the narrow staircase where the bones of two young boys were found buried, then troop past suits of armour through bare halls. I catch the cousins ( brothers/boys ) fighting - cuffing and kicking opposite boy armour. My sister in law is round the corner - so i intervene - quietly shouting at them to stop it, what a bad example, how old are there, all the things you say. Behind me a guard of the tower, a cell block H looking woman takes over from my remonstrations and says she will throw them out. Chastised we move on through. There is a room of majestic life sized models of horses, almost as if stabled and beautifully carved called the 'Line of Kings'. Restored onto the throne in 1660 Charles II presented this Line of Kings- each king since Wiliam the Conquerer represented by their armour and the powerful model of horses. Possibly one of the first tourist attractions it was an advert to the strength of royal lineage and he opened the tower to the public putting both weapons and the crown jewels on display. A Stuart spin doctor he also laid on the Royal Thames pageant. At work I get a book catalogue that lists a book called Rebranding Rule' the restoration and revolution monarchy 1660 -1741 by Kevin Sharpe that seems to be about the public representation of monarchy after the aftermath of Cromwell. Oh I think rather chuffed I am on to something. Though I also read in the Metro that there has been the biggest amount of reported visitors to Buckingham Palace this year, many coming to see Kate Middleton's wedding dress despite the queen called the headless dummy horrible, horrid and 'made to look very creepy.' I think how the anxieties of royalty must be imbedded - perhaps the riots triggered old fears of execution. Though they have had a good year this year - putting a lot of verve to their popularity - the pageant, jumping out of helicopters, a summer of flag flying and pride.
I discover too that until 1830 a menagerie was housed at the Tower of London, another potent symbol of power and strength. Believed to have started with one lion in the time of King John the collection grew - a gift of three leopards from the Holy Roman Emperor in 1235, a white bear believed to be a polar bear donated by the King of Norway in 1251, and an African Elephant ( the first in England since the Roman invasion of 43AD ) given by Louis IX in 1255.
By 1741 the first true guide book to the Tower listed the animals on display and recorded their often mundane names:'The collection included Marco and Phillis the lions and their son Nero, another two lionesses called Jenny and Nanny, a leopard called Will, a panther called Jenny, two tigers confusingly also called Will and Phillis with their son Dick, as well as a racoon, two vultures, two eagles, an ape and a porcupine whose names were unrecorded.'
The Menagerie was not without incident - 1686 a keeper's daughter was mauled by a lion, a boys leg torn by monkeys in the 17th century and an escaped Leopard shot in the 18th century.By 1830 the animals were trundled away to form London Zoo or sold and shipped to an American showman.
I lose all the children for a while - I can't exactly remember if I go back to check on one group or forward to check on another but somehow I am without any of them for a while. I coast briefly, unattached to anything, not really taking in the details any more, just resting, aware of the historic space but also an ugliness to the display. I notice a huge fireplace in one room and think what a beautiful space and then climb some wooden steps into a simple stone room and suddenly there is some rush and an attractive smiley woman is saying 'IF YOU WANT TO HEAR THE TALK YOU NEED TO SIT NOW!' Oh I think looking up to the simple arches and windows above a table altarpiece, I didn't know this was here. But with a lovely feeling of recognition of a space as if I knew already about this simple but completely beautiful chapel. I think oh it is on the cover of a book my dad gave me about the city churches, that I haven't let myself look at yet. A pause here - I have mumbled an interest in London churches to my Mum and Dad who used to nag me how the novel was doing - but not revealed the extent of this project. I wonder if it is accepted within the family I have become a Sunday writer, lost my ambition, that I am too old for publication. I wonder with fear if it is true. Though I am so involved in the obsession of this work I don't think there is anything else I can do now. I lean on a pillar for the talk. I think the children or my sister in law will either come up the stairs and find me or come back to find out where I have got to but no one does.
The young woman gives an enthusiastic and smiley sing song talk to the seated audience. She over emphases the first word of each sentence - HERE, she says, the White Tower was built with work commencing in 1078, the thick walls a symbol of Norman strength but also a royal home, a safe place. IT capitalised on the wooden fortification built in 1066 as William the Conqueror's stronghold, becoming one of the biggest forts in Christendom. THE small chapel is the oldest intact church in London she says and was the king's private chapel situated next to the royal bedroom. HENRY VII's wife Elizabeth of York lay in state having died in childbirth here, MARY I was married by proxy here to Philip II of Spain and Lady Jane Grey would have worshipped here. MUCH earlier during the peasant's revolt of 1381 the castle was stormed as the young King Richard II went to hear the demands of the peasants at Mile End. THE Lord Chancellor, Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury who was particularly associated with the disputed poll tax and Lord Treasurer ( Robert de Hales, the Grand Prior of the Knights Hospitallers of England ) were both dragged from the chapel, then taken and beheaded on Tower Green. The guide passes a laminate picture between the different nationalities seated on wooden chairs showing Simon of Sudbury's part mummified skull that is preserved in his home town clearly showing the axe mark. A South African girl passes it back to me as I loll on the pillar looking at the dense stone of the structure, the simple space that was probably once ornately coloured holding my breath. It seems such a tight space for these tales, I wasn't expecting to come across it. The small Norman arched window above the altar table faces directly east along with the gallery windows curved around the apse and I imagine the sun light spilling into the chapel as it rises each day. Though writing this I realise this is why churches are often to be built east to west, that out of the darkness the sun rising each day could be a celebration.
I catch up with the others, though no one seems to have missed me, everyone just milling around now, the children bored, anticipating the gift shop. Just before departing I find a list of executions within the tower listed by centuries and I am surprised to read that in the 20th century 12 people were executed. 11 during World War I and one during World War II - all shot by firing squad. We are running out of time because my sister in law and her sons need to catch a train. Though I still try to get in the other church in the corner of the walls of the castle. 'Only if you are part of a tour' the beefeater says, so I will have to go back.
Later I read:'...the Tower appears almost as a character symbolising both protection and fearful danger.' about Shakespeare's Richard III. For the young sons of Edward IV confined in secure cells on upper floors in the White Tower in May 1483 it seems to have been danger. The Princes in the Tower disappeared in July 1483 presumably murdered. In 1674 workmen digging out foundations of a staircase leading up to the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, high in the White Tower, found a chest containing the skeletons of two boys and Charles II had the remains buried at Westminster Abbey. Tests carried out by medical experts in 1933 confirmed that these bones were those of two children of the ages of the Princes in the Tower in September 1483. Though there is now controversy that this can be true. I wonder too how handy for Charles II to have loopholes in his lineage cleared up.
I book a standing ticket at the Globe for the Richard III for £5. I have never seen the play before or been to the Globe. But I love the aeroplanes passing overhead in the blue sky of the open roof, the gaudy painted colours of the stage, the pack and cheer of the crowd, the standing audience swaying as legs grow tired. Mark Rylance is Richard III with an all male cast. He is brilliant, deviously charming on spindly legs and nursing a drooping claw, a damaged man damaging others with his ruthless ambition. The ghosts of all he kills lining around him in the final scenes:
Sweating and terrified, Richard asks desperately, “What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by. / Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I. / Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am” (V.v.136–138)
“I shall despair. There is no creature loves me, / And if I die no soul will pity me. / Nay, wherefore should they?—Since that I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself?” (V.v.154–157). Shakespeare too helped tell our stories - the stories of our king's lineage, stories that made the monarchy real to the people in the pit.
I must have told my sister in law about the blog over a glass of wine though I don't remember doing so. Out of the blue she emails weeks after their visit to say she has read the blog and found it intensely moving. I wonder and worry whether she might just feel sorry for me. Is it any good I want to reply. Can I write? I want to reply, can I? Or am I just a Sunday writer? Is it ok to write about my children? My family? You?
There is always a moment of optimism when I first start writing about a church when I think oh this one is going to be easy, I will have this done in a couple of days. I will be back to doing a church a week I think excitedly eyeing the City churches as I pass them. But then the summer holidays hit, the sun comes out, the boys camp in Norfolk with their Dad and friends and I join them for a weekend. The following week I even sit and watch some of the Olympics, 'Mum's watching telly' the boys say in glee as I shout at athletes winning gold medals. Then we are off for the annual camping holiday in Dorset where we catch Olympic sailing from the cliff tops. I finally finish War and Peace ( it has taken me exactly a year ), those last pages so dense with ideas of power and scale, freedom and humanity that I have wondered occasionally if I might not make it, might not get to the end. Briefly wonder if that happened - would I lie - say I had read it. But I do. The last thirty pages taking three months. Oh but it is worth it. I don't believe it is a plot spoiler to copy the last paragraph. Tolstoy finished by talking of the historic acceptance of earth's motion in space and it's imperceptibility:
'In the first case, we had to get away from a false sensation of immobility in space and accept movement that we could not feel. In the present case it is no less essential to get away from a false sensation of freedom and accept a dependence that we cannot feel.'
Amen.
Sunday, 3 June 2012
The Queen's Chapel of Savoy
We get up at 5.45 to see the river pageant. The boys waking as if going on holiday, scrambling into their clothes while I make sandwiches. Outside the light has the grey speckle of underarm, warm and damp but not quite raining. I carry bags of activities and food, my sons carry the folding camping stools. We thought we would pitch up at the end of our street in the garden by the Houses of Parliament - we had done a recce the night before and there were toilets and a coffee kiosk setting up - with lots of room to run about until it got crowded. This morning in the gloom we can see the silhouettes of a few umbrellas already at the river side but vistas of free space under the trees. For a moment the plan seems to have gone ridiculously smoothly and my eldest insists we high five. At the gate however there are security men. 'We have to sweep the garden for bombs', they say, we can't let anyone in until 11am. But, there are people already here I say pointing at the draggle of umbrellas already on the front. 'They were here before we arrived' says the man. We can't do anything about them now. You should have got here 5 minutes ago - we weren't here. We plead for a while but they won't let us in. Let's keep walking, I say, we'll find a place. On Westminster Bridge there is a group of older women already set up with camping chairs and union jacks at the edge of the bridge under Big Ben and a gentle elderly lady with bulging feet in old lady sandals, a mac and a cheap umbrella. It has started to pour and the wind has picked up. Security guards give conflicting advice as to where we can be, allowing us onto the bridge and then herding us back. It is all women here someone observes, then notices my sons. For about 10 minutes we debate whether it would be better to be here with the best view or nearer to PSM's house on the South Bank with the obvious advantages of friends, toilets and cups of tea. My youngest needs a wee and the decision is made.
On the east side of Waterloo Bridge we choose our place on the railings, in view of St Paul's, almost as if standing where Canaletto painted the historic view of the Thames. It is pouring now and really cold. My youngest has retreated to PSM's to watch cartoons though my eldest is still at my side - I am going to sit with you all day he says. By 9am we have sat for 2 hours played a lot of games of travel Connect 4 and he has tooted a rather beautiful looking but tuneless brass horn that I bought for him on the internet loudly and repeatedly to tug boats and steam boats moving up river. We have spent the only money I have on hot drinks and a minescule bag of warm doughnuts and when he says 'how much longer' I have to say probably 7 hours. Understandably he decamps to PSMs for a break. I do wonder what giving up might feel like, the dirty damp bags a tide at my feet.
On one side there are now two old ladies from the North and on the other an East End family, of different generations - a nice young man and his girlfriend with smart cityessex (citisex?) accents, his cockney mum and grumpy cockney granny in high heeled flip flops with socks who says every now and then. 'I don't think I should have come.' coughs a bit, then sniffs the air and says longingly 'I can smell bacon.' Though the family try and jolly her on. The rest of us are smiley and stoic in waterproofs. At 9.30 it starts filling up and a posh older man with a booming voice, spots a gap between me and the east end granny and stakes a claim on the railings, phoning his family on the mobile, I have found a simply perfect spot he says. It is absolutely marvellous. For a while the original settlers bristle to the boom of him but then we all relax and get on. He is really nice to the grandchildren that he slots in around us, and the WAGs and sons or husbands of his family become the crowd behind us but retreat/duck under his well meaning Empire-running tone.
I am in the elderly women gang on the unsuitable footwear. I dithered in the hallway about wellies. Then plumped for ballet pumps and no socks and oh my goodness I am cold.
At 11am the children return with PSM's sons and PSM and her boyfriend. She takes one look at me and goes home bringing socks, wellies, a hot water bottle and a flask of hot sweet tea. She is a midwife and I feel I have been midwifed though it is lovely to feel so cared for.
The children settle down to a couple of hours Where's Wally and Tintin books while I stitch union jacks out of felt. When I thought I would be entertaining the boys for hours and hours on my own I packed craft material and bamboo sticks to make flags. I think I look a bit mad and a lot more patriotic than I actually am, doling out sandwiches and union jacks to four boys. Somehow though I don't know how exactly, it is assumed I am a single mum by the boomy grandad who is unable to hide his surprise I know who Canaletto is. PSM always more sensible than me has retreated to the warmth of her house, to drink cava and wait for some friends. Though it is no longer actually raining now just damp. There are dark inflatable speed boats patrolling the sides of the river, low in the water but skimming fast, men with guns shadowy in black. The boys watch them through binoculars, sing songs and talk nonsense - with intermittant bursts on the golden horn. When they turn to me and ask how much longer they look disbelieving when I say probably 4 hours.
About 1 o'clock the crowds are 9 or 10 deep but a procession of small children in bone dry cashmere breton jumpers process in a line like a scene from a stylish french children's book to our vantage point at the railings propelled by a professionally blow dried mother hissing in their ear - 'well done' and 'keep going'. At the railings she is showy and loud pointing out London landmarks, herding the children and staking a claim with her body language, hogging the view of the older women next to us. I feel tired and angry. 'I am really sorry we have all been here a very long time, it isn't fair if you take our space. 'MY MOTHER HAS BEEN HERE SINCE 10! she says shrilly, waving to a woman 5 back in the crowd. But she isn't at the front I say. I hate being rude or mean but I don't want to let her take our place, can't stand the air of entitlement. We have been here since 7 I say dourly, like a toad on a camping stool, guarding something momentarily precious. 'These nice people have been here since 7 she says in a shiny voice to the children, not catching my unblinking hooded eye under the green waterproof - though there is a tinge of incredulity, as if only fools would make the effort. And that's why we are at the front. I say. She stays. I glower. She stays. I glower. In pique I use my son's camera to take a picture of her. In a town on the border of Mexico and America I once saw grids of poloroid pictures of shoplifters pinned to the pound shops door. In the small hazy focus of the bare backroom they had been taken to, powerful portraits of fear, defiance and sulky resentment. Though I am still surprised by how much authority a camera has - as if there is a central 'badly behaved' shop door pictures could be sent to for the mother turns back her party from the railings. Oh I just wanted my children to see the pageant she says in a little girl voice as they depart. The children cry on the retreat, like little pink mice, their tails tucked behind them. I feel like someone wicked in a nursery rhyme though a woman on the other side of the northern women say she had asked them to move too.
At 2pm PSM texts me to say she will never get through the crowd to the front but can I have two of her friends children please. Small boys are despatched to collect them, squeezing back between the crowds legs as if amoebas splitting and doubling. PSM's eldest son carries a clingfilmed glass of cava for me. With six children I feel we are a rowdy pack, but the Grandad says - leave them - they are enjoying themselves, they have done very well, but in a benevolent 'isn't it jolly what things under microscopes do when you watch them' tone. My eldest and PSM's youngest, sing the National Anthem at the top of their voices, which should be charming but isn't. The cashmere breton jumpered children have been packed at the feet of the Grandad's family. Only writing this do I realise this wasn't just kindness - they were a part of it.
By 3pm excitement is high - across the river we can see the flicker of screens between trees and know the Queen has embarked, that the boats are on their way. Every 10 minutes the boys ( and one girl ) say - how much longer - and I guess 10 minutes. Then they ask again. 10 minutes I guess again. But suddenly it is nearly happening and I feel tired and cold and need a wee.
The Bell boat is first, careering rather madly, through the choppy water, the bells ringing out, tipping back and forth on wheels like something put together from the making box. Then the Venetian style Gloriana, very beautiful, men in time powering the boat cleanly through the currents. Behind with the the flurry of oars and paddles, and punts the little boats pour under Waterloo Bridge - comical and beautiful in their pell mell dash and endeavour. Red, blue, yellow, gold, orange, - flashes of colour and rich details - canoes and skiffs, gondalas, row boats, kayaks, fishing boats, the rhythm of oars in and out and in and out, shoulders moving together. I hear myself just saying, oh, it is lovely, repeatedly. Like a Richard Scary children's book page full of crazy animals in crazy vehicles spread out infront of us the boys and I point out to each other different boats and flags The gondala' we say, to the elegant arc of a white and golden boat. The little long boat! for there is a mini Viking boat with shields and a dragon masthead. The willow pattern plate boat - a low slung boat with a braided canopy But the scene does look like the Canaletto - it is absolutely beautiful. And we wave and wave and wave.
Infront of us though the boats have to funnel through a channel between moored boats packed with flag waving wellwishers and the currents of the Thames seem to pick up on this corner and we see the oarsmen, the canoeists, backing up, jamming into pockets, a little bit of panic then paddling through.
The Commonwealth boats glide in, jaunty, more controlled with their little motors powering their triangular formation. Flags fluttering, turquoise clad crew, padded and proud. The Grandad behind is listing the countries of each flag, to no one in particular. He wants his binoculars back from his grandchildren but everytime he nearly gets them another striped child lisps it is their turn. He is kind enough not to demand them but I feel he would like to. I am on his side. Oh it is beautiful I say again. A big pleasure boat with an orchestra playing Handel's water music in a plastic flapping gazebo on the top deck sails past, music in gusts, everyone cheering.
Is it the Queen? Is it the Queen? Is it the Queen? my youngest says.
A boat with some trumpeters dressed a bit like cards in Alice in Wonderland playing a fanfare comes under the bridge. Da da they say. Da da da da da da da da dahhhh! Then the royal barge - a big maroon thing ploughing through the water flanked by the drop shadow of the dark inflatable security boats, and backed up behind with matt grey warships, soldiers at attention, alert to attack. But after all that waiting I find it hard to remember anything and I confuse the snippets I have seen on tv with the not much I remember. I think it may have started really pouring at this time though that might happen shortly after. I remember people saying they couldn't see the thousands of flowers on the barge and I say - the flowers are in the swags - in the garlands. The Grandad snaps once or twice at my sons/charges to keep their heads down, but he still hasn't got his binoculars back and is feeling frustrated. I continually tap at the 6 children with my felt flag not to stand on the concrete of the railings so that other people can see. I feel briefly like I have turned into the grumpy east end granny though no one attends to my grumbling. A few people sing God Save the Queen but just like my son and his friend it sounds slightly ironic, a little bit tongue in cheek, a little bit don't care and the woman leading it at the back just sounds drunk.
I think then it is odd - I have waited in the cold and rain for 9 hours for something I don't believe in - don't really give a shit about. Infront of us the big boat moored up and packed with well wishers tips precariously as everyone leans to wave. Our crowd keep laughing as the boat tips alarmingly further and further out of the water, the bottom of the boat, a muddy white, revealed.
No one says - god bless you ma am , no one says anything very much about the Queen at all apart from she works hard. I hear people say this will never happen again in out life time. Not even in your life time a woman points out to my sons, calculating the possible reign of Charles or William to not amount to much and I think most are just there for the sense of history. Though I wonder if a boat pageant might become the new royal pop concert - there is something so popular and spectacular to it.
But seeing the Queen as a vulnerable grainy fleck of white in the grey damp air waving on a boat floating on the Thames I think of my Mum. They have the same dogged duty, the same unfailing and unstinting duty to duty. Though what they are dutiful to is almost forgotten, a dry husk of whatever it is they were told was important to be as good little girls. The guarding has become the important thing, their determination and obedience almost the value itself. When I watch the tv I think the Queen has a few seconds when she looks up to the drip of her gazebo, the grey rain coming down and wonders just briefly why she is here, what on earth she is doing adrift on a tarty barge. But I also think Kate Middleton looks lonely. Stood a fraction behind William as he laughs with his brother she laughs too, but anxiously, looking to check if she laughed correctly. A family I supose. Just a flawed family.
Later I find out researching and watching endless youtube clips of the pageant to try and remember what happened that someone I went to college with, a friend's ex boyfriend was in charge of the look and dressing of the Royal barge which seems funny. He was then an energetic, beautiful but appropriately for art school, snarling young man. Though I like the idea of the banner at the stern decorated with more than half a million gold buttons in the shape of the royal coat of arms - though I am not sure anyone noticed it.
If it hadn't already started raining when the Queen passed by - it does now - a deluge as the cheery Dunkirk boats come through. The boats of different shapes and sizes are painted and polished with the spit and rub of pride and it is almost possible to smell the fresh paint and duraglit across the width of the Thames. The crowds cheer and cheer in the rain proud of the pluck, the spirit and bravery of boats that evacuated 338,226 troops from the shores of France. When those troops were cut off by the German Army on the shores of France in the early summer of 1940 the extent of the possible disastrous defeat was kept from the British public. However King George V1 ( the Queen's father) called for an unprecedented week of prayer - the Archbishop of Canterbury led prayers 'for our soldiers in dire peril in France' and the public knew something grave was up. These little boats - the fishing boats and pleasure craft alongside royal national lifeboats and British destroyers ferried the troops to safety 'a miracle of deliverance' as hailed Winston Churchill.
A military band packed onto a pleasure boat sails through, drummers drumming scottish songs, the grandad humming, a few of us snatching the words we know, good to jig a little in the sheeting rain. Then the toot of the historic boats, steam funnels puffing smoke. The boys take it in turn to play the golden horn in conversation to the boat whistles. The working boats following, life boats and fire boats spraying water.
The music is muddled in my mind and it seems not very well reported on tv or even youtube - though it was beautiful and there was a boat with an amazing eastern sounding choir, which I imagine must be the Shree Muktajeevan Pipe Banc and Dhol Ensemble.
Toot toot toot, the golden horn played right in my ear. I have had enough.
This is the end, the War and Peace moment, the moment when the French army retreat - when the crowds who have stood so long, came together into a collective of cheers and reasonably goodwill decide - everyone, all at the same time, without saying goodbye or even making a plan just ups and leaves. I think one of the boys says - I have had enough and rather than do the normal - just 10 minutes more - I just say yes. Let's go. Only then noticing the departing backs of the Grandad's family, the empty stretch of railings, just the movement of retreat. The recreation boats are coming through, endless white fibre glass boats that our gaze slide away from. And we run back through the rain and abandoned union jacks curled in puddles to PSM's house. And PSM and her friends cheer me when I come in as if the Queen herself has arrived - I am my mother's daughter with my ridiculous stoic duty to the task. Our children will remember this for ever they say, giving me soup and tea. Secretly I think I don't think the children really cared. Perhaps even I didn't really, though I had wanted to see the Thames swamped with colourful boats.
I am just saying I wish I had seen The London Philarmonic Orchestra when we hear it. PSM's house is just set back from the South bank ( though behind solid office blocks ) and we hear them loud and clearly. She runs out with her boyfriend into the rain to see, the rest of us stand in a the sea of a lego of a boys bedroom to hear them.
I will never get these tired damp boys home without a fuss I think looking out at the pouring rain, knowing I haven't got enough money for a taxi or even a bus as a back up plan and too proud to ask PSM to borrow some. But we walk back through the lash of wind and rain happily carrying our damp stools and bags. My youngest dancing on tip toes through the lakes of puddles, his face completely absorbed to the dance he makes.
I wonder what church could sit with the pageant but think I will just have to make it work - there aren't any specifically royal churches left that I know.
When I walk down Savoy Hill to the Savoy Chapel there are still metal barricades stacked up, left over from the pageant though I think by the time I get to the church it is a week later. The chapel is set back in a garden but there is building work going on and it looks closed up and a bit of a mess, though there are old gravestones skewed into the railings, as if the earth has just been turned over.
I have tried a few times to get into the church and it has always been shut ( even when it should have been open ) so I am pleased to see the door wide open. Inside a very plain and small village hall style porch there are flowers on a table and closed doors. Then a door opens revealing a glimpse of the chapel, a mother propelling a child as if to the toilet. I squeeze past their hurried exit into the small chapel where it looks like the congregation are just leaving. I think I'll just sit briefly, before realising the seemingly departing congregation are mainly a family gathered around the font with a baby. It is a christening and the baptism is about to take place. I lose my nerve and get only a quick look at the high narrow chapel with painted ceiling and anonymous plush decor and recognise the slightly anonymous royal chapel style. It doesn't seem anything to do with the hotel at all but The Queen's Chapel of Savoy. Completely unexpectedly it is a royal chapel. 'The chapel belongs to Her Majesy The Queen in her right as Duke of Lancaster'. In a glass case there is a signed book of the monarchs that have visited.
A church was originally built here in the Middle Ages as part of the Savoy Palace, the walled riverside mansion built by Count Peter of Savoy in 1246. He was given the riverside land between Westminster and the City of London when his niece married Henry 111. Later it became the home of John of Gaunt who inherited the title of Duke of Lancaster in 1351. With it came the rights of palatine giving his land the right to be ruled autonomously from the rest of the kingdom, indeed this area known as 'Savoy' kept many of these special judicial privileges until 1873. Under these laws someone being pursued for a debt in London could reside in the Savoy without fear of arrest by people acting under the King's authority. The vast palace where Chaucer ( a clerk of the palace ) began the Canterbury Tales was burnt down in the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 fueled by the unpopularity of John O Gaunt's poll tax which taxed rich and poor alike. Later restored and rebuilt by Henry V11 it became a hospital for the homeless, a vast nave filled with a hundred beds, and the first to benefit from permanent medical staff. It closed in 1702, falling into disrepair. Though there is a Turner sketch of the ruins and I love the idea of this gothic crumbling pile in the heart of London.
The Chapel known as both St Mary in the Hospital and St John the Baptist in the Savoy was the only thing to survive a fire of 1860 and was later restored. In the 18th century it was a place where marriages without banns could legally occur and was referred to in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited as the place where divorced couples got married - 'a poky little place'
The impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte bought the ruins of the Savoy Palace in 1880 initially to build the Savoy Theatre for the production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It was the first public building to be lit entirely by electricity and so successful was the venture that it financed the building of the Savoy, most of the revenue coming from the Mikado.
Writing and researching this I was for a while worried that there was going to be no connection to the Savoy hotel. I had bought the brilliant The West End Front - The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels (if you know me and it is your birthday soon expect it as a present) after hearing extracts on R4 - and wanted to use the fascinating stories some of which show so clearly the divide between rich and poor during the war.
As the communist newspaper The Daily Worker asserted in September 194o campaigning against the lack of reasonable or indeed any shelter from the Blitz in Stepney,
'If you live in the Savoy Hotel you are called by telephone when the sirens sound and then tucked into bed by servants in a luxury bomb-proof shelter. But if you live in Paradise Court you may find yourself without a refuge of any kind.' Then in big bold print 'THE PEOPLE MUST ACT'.
On 14th September, the 8th night of the Blitz they did. Meeting in Embankment Gardens they waited for the air raid siren to begin, unfurled their banners and marched onto the Savoy. Why the Savoy? 'It was the nearest' was the straightforward reply. Mainly east end communists - dockers, clothing workers, bootmakers though a few recruits had been picked up on the night from the poor public east end air-raid facilities. Somewhere between 40 and 80 it is claimed, though memories seem uncertain. The group marched through the doors of the Savoy, making a speech for equality. Despite the panic button being pressed and the police being called unexpectedly and cleverly the assistant general manager Willy Hofflin answered simply, 'There is no reason why these people should not have the same shelter as the Savoy's guests.' Infact, with bombs coming down outside it was the law not to turn people away into danger.
In a padded, cavernous space with a dance floor on one side and a dormitory on the other, separate quarters for single men and women and camp beds with matching sheets and pillows in green and pink and blue, a snore warden and uniformed nurses - the invaders were heard to remark - 'Shelters....why we'd love to live in such places'.
They ordered tea, demanding to pay only what they would pay in a Lyons Corner House. The waiters huddled to debate the request seemingly sympathetic to the invaders for in minutes trolleys appeared with tea and bread and butter.
After that there are two versions of the night - that the all clear sounded just as tea was served or that they stayed a victorious night.
Barely reported in the British press the Savoy invasion gained more coverage in the Nazi 'Volkischer Beobachter' 'For ten days now eight million people have flown into the air raid shelters and the subway' 'Londoners have become cave dwellers. Life has stopped. The working population is fleeing from the east and south of the city to the West End. Desperate men and women have stormed the luxurious Savoy hotel. Only police have been able to evacuate them. The question comes into one's mind.....whether at all and for how long the English population will follow Churchill on this path....'
Only fuelling the suspicion that the Communists were working on behalf of the Nazis. When the Savoy invasion was discussed in parliament the matter was taken very seriously and Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary,
'agreed with the Prime Minister that it would be necessary to take strong action to prevent demonstrations of this kind, which if allowed to grow, might easily lead to serious difficulties.'
The communists kept going with their attempts to find safe places for people to shelter repeatedly targeted the tube stations - exhorting London Transport to keep the gates unlocked or getting a crowbar to the barriers when shut. Only a week after the Savoy invasion on 21st September London Transport switched off the electricity at Aldwych, chemical toilets were installed and 2,500 were finally allowed to shelter on the Piccadilly line track along with the Elgin Marbles which had already been stored there three weeks previously.
'We went to the Savoy to show the class position; to show how the rich lived with a great mass of stuff while the ordinary working man and woman had to live on the coupon books. And because of what we did, the Underground was opened, and people had somewhere to shelter from the bombs. I'm very proud of the part I played.' says Max Levitas who was part of the Savoy invasion to Matthew Sweet the author of 'The West End Front'.
Finally I look again at the Canaletto:
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/canaletto/the-river-thames-with-st-paul-s-cathedral-on-lord-mayor-s-day-
finding diarists Pepys and John Evelyn's description of the 1660 pageant when King Charles 11 took part in the pageant a year after the restoration of the monarchy. Pepys described the scene as the king and queen journeyed downriver from Hampton court to Whitehall 'under a canopy with 10,000 barges and boats, I think, for we could see no water for them.'
For Evelyn, the event 'was the most magnificent triumph that ever floated on the Thames.' He wrote admiringly of 'the innumerable boats and vessels dress'd and adorn'd with all imaginable pomp...the thrones, arches....stately barges...musiq and peals of ordnance both from ye vessels and the shore'
In the painting St Paul's dominates the skyline but surrounding it - under an egg blue sky are the many church spires of the city. The only secular interruption to the sky is the Monument. On the long wait at the side of the Thames when arguments broke out and distraction was needed I had said - let's count how many churches we can see but it wasn't a game that captured the imagination of the pack of occasionally unruly children and I don't remember the answer. The spires peered from behind office blocks, nudged the view from the layer of buildings. St Paul's still central but the Monument hidden from view. I thought I have become a church watcher - like a bird watcher - the sightings on a skyline or glimpsed down a side street, the observation of history, the peck of another time, the i spy thrill of spotting one I haven't seen before.
Amen.
Monday, 14 May 2012
Notre Dame of France, Leicester Square
I think about Co Dependency and Christianity as I cycle to work across the parks, mainly in the rain. After a really horrible row with exh and an evening of tears and wine and good advice from a mum who spent a year in a refuge I grumpily get the co dependency books back out. It seems I need to accept my part in my problems. Though I believe I do mainly, I just need to guard the boundaries. The ride is beautiful: nosing the bike infront of Buckingham Palace, along the bottom of the damp dark green of Green Park, under Wellington Arch, up the steady incline of Hyde Park, past the barracks, alongside the lake, over the road, past the gallery and beneath the canopy of old trees. Dogs like cartoon characters in dog walker packs, all ears and eyebrows stretched taut on leads, then wet deck chairs blown inside out, billowed pregnant in the wind. At the brim of the hill The Round Pond is almost part of the sky, a grey disc of reflected cloud with swans and geese flapping their wings in a slow feathered cancan under the unseasonable gloom. Tourists at the gates of Kensington Palace, where the tide of cellophane flowers lapped when Diana died talk in hushed voices of where they were when she died ( in a teepee in New Mexico with shagging lesbians if you want to know.) Princess Diana is almost the patron saint of CD I think, all those unsuitable men, the middle of the night bedside hospital visits, the unhappy childhood, the open wound of that savagely caring heart dragged like heavy luggage. I imagine a catholic coloured statue of her, a Jeff Koons perhaps, a single tear in the corner of those dipped blue eyes dropping with the weight of the sorrow of the world.
This is the Christianity I learnt at home, at sunday school, at school:
Think of others before yourself.
Give without counting the cost.
Do a good turn every day.
As a family we said prayers every night until I was a teenager when I finally rebelled against the tradition, the words themselves exhausted by the speed with which we rattled them off. We didn't have a TV and I think my childhood was more old fashioned than my age. Exh still laughs at my 'Oranges are not the Only Fruit' story of collecting for Oxfam when the men landed on the moon. ( though not actually the first landing I suspect ). My younger brother and I peering round the dimpled glass front door of a house to see the grainy black and white picture of men in bulky suits as if made on Blue Peter. My Mum above us rattling the collecting tin circled by the pictures of starving children to a Dad who was surprised the door bell had rung.
Co d is what you learn when you detach from an alcoholic. What you have become or have always been. It is the unhealthy attachment to another, the willingness to take care of someone else's problems, a compulsive wish to control others by your care.
This is what Nietzsche said on christianity:
'Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.'
He 'called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a "calamitous error", and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian world.'
' Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Nietzsche sees slave-morality born out of the resentment of slaves. It works to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g., relabeling it as "meekness." '
It seems a lot of the churches I want to get into now are only open on Sundays or odd times in the week and it is increasingly difficult just to slip into a church as I am working all but full time. Also I have discovered on my map behind the computer that charts churches I have been to and those still to visit, a purple sticker over a yellow one on a church in Soho - though I am not sure if this is a mistake or if the boys are playing a trick on me. I had a boyfriend once a long time ago, a college boyfriend, who kept adding extra birds to a large copy of Constable's Haywain that hung in his parents front room. They never noticed he said and the intricacy of the sly sabotage made me laugh.
It is pouring as I turn off Leicester Square into the narrow street of Notre Dame of France. Infront of the Odeon there is a woman with a clip board directing passersby away from the workmen creating a gothic landscape for the premiere of Snow White and the Hunstmen. A drunk man cackles to security guards behind the newly errected barriers 'It is pissing down, no one will be coming here.' 'They will come.' they say calmly - behind them green astro turf being rolled out and men placing fake crows in fake trees.
In a flat faced large 50s building I walk up the steps and into a huge rotunda room with grey light from a cupola skylight in the shallow domed roof. It is a bit murky, a bit municipal, a bit unkempt. I sit at a pew. Just sit. There are about five others sat in the pews with their heads bowed. Perhaps just sheltering I wonder - the heels of scruffy shoes and stowed bags visible, though they seem devout in their prayer. As I sit in the grey stillness it feels like an arbitary act that I am just sitting still on a Tuesday lunchtime here in this place. I begin to hear high holy music, as if almost at a frequency beyond human ear, I can't work out where it is coming from, and imagine a cd piped in for atmosphere. Later when I am researching the church I find a mention on flickr that there was an organ playing when the photographer took the pictures and I wonder now writing this whether someone was actually quietly playing.
Above the altar piece is an large ornate and richly detailed tapestry of Mary. Like a Disney princess she is surrounded by animals and birds - a cockerel, a peacock, a squirrel, a deer. I am mesmerized by the fine detail though I find it a bit sickly, a bit ugly.
Eventually I stand and walk to the back of the church, finding blue and white delft tiles depicting the Stations of the Cross and a notice board on the curved wall labelled 'Spiritual Life' listing retreats, and prayer groups, some of it in French. I find too a mention of Jean Cocteau's mural. Aha I think, they are here. A friend had mentioned that there were some of Cocteau murals in a french church in Soho but for some reason I had assumed they were in the French Protestant church in Soho Square which I still haven't got into. I have to wander around the church, up to the altar and then to the side curved wall where there are glass booths sectioned off from the church. It isn't clear if they are chapels or offices but pressing my face to the dark glass and through the reflection I see the slab of an altar and vibrant life-sized drawings of the Cruxifiction on the wall behind. Passionate but stylised line drawings in bright pencil crayon colours they show only the legs and bleeding feet of Jesus, the blood dripping from his feet to a rose. Homoerotic soldiers, bereft women, a gold ringed black sun, there is an odd but modern narrative within the picture, a crucifixion of difficult human emotions.
The mural was painted over eight days in Novemeber 1959 when Jean Cocteau was promoting his film Le Testament d'Orphee in London. The church had been badly bombed in 1940 and then restored. The french cultural attache Renee Varin was commissioned to encourage eminent french artists to help create a sacred space. Though Cocteau's poetry, opium and homosexuality were seen to sit uneasily with his Catholicism he was invited to decorate a chapel and screens had to be errected to keep away the crowds while he worked.
'He arrived each morning about 10am and began by lighting a candle. He was heard talking to the Virgin Mary while working on the drawing. 'O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God's creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too....I am drawing you with light strokes....You are the yet unfinished work of Grace.'
And when he left,
'I am sorry to go, as if the wall of the chapel had drawn me into another world.' 'I shall never forget that wide open heart of Notre Dame de France and the place you allowed me to take within it'
Though as I begin researching the murals I am tipped through a door of conspiracy and complicated plots attached to Cocteau. A lot seems to be based on the discredited Priory of Sion - a lineage invented by the frenchman Pierre Plantard in 1956 to prove he was descended from the true King of France. The plot included fake documents being planted by Plantard and accomplices in the Biblioteque Nationale and across France to establish his claim. (Oh I love the idea of false history embedded in the real. ) Despite Plantard admitting his hoax the story seems to have gathered momentum, being used to prove the lineage of Jesus and Mary Magdalegne and becoming the basis of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. The son of a suicide Cocteau was listed by Plantard as a Grand Master of Sion along with Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. The murals at Notre Dame fuel the debate:
'The Priory of Sion has, in the past, purposely used the letters "MM", or sometimes jus "M" to symbolize Magdalene and Cocteau used them as well. In the Church of Notre Dame de France ("Our Lady of France") in London, which Cocteau decorated with fantastic murals, this letter "M" is mysteriously placed on the altar, directly beneath the scene of the crucifixion. To the left are depicted the dice thrown by the Roman soldiers who according to the Gospels, cast lots to determine who should get Christ's clothing after he died. The number of dots that are shown on the dice is fifty-eight, a significant number. The skull of Baphomet, which the Templars and later the Priory of Sion are said to have possessed, was referred to cryptically as "Caput 58M" 5 +8= 13, and "M" is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Therefore "58M" could be a code for "Mary Magdalene" who is traditionally shown praying before a skull.'
'The same statement is being made in Cocteau's mural at Notre Dame. This statement is further reinforced by the fact that the 'M' on the altar is directly below a rose that Cocteau has placed on the cross, precisely beneath Christ's feet. Not only does that make it a 'rose cross' but the rose is above the initial for 'Mary'. The term 'Rosemary' is used in occult parlance to refer to the female consort of a god or demon. (Thus the title for the film Rosemary's Baby.) This is exactly what Magdalene's symbolism entailed. The fact that the rose as well as the blood drops beneath it, are coloured both red and blue may indicate the 'blue blood' of Christ's royal line. Given all of this, the Church's title 'Notre Dame de France' is interesting. Most would assume this to be a reference to the Virgin Mary, who is called by Catholics 'Our Lady'. But the true 'Lady of France' is the goddess Marianne, their national symbol. Perhaps 'Marianne' and Magdalene' are representations of the same archetype.'
http://quintessentialpublications.com/tymman/?page_id=26
Phew, I find this stuff exhausting. Though ( and I think this is my favourite bit) I also read fascinating accounts of two female academics of impeccable reputation being transported through time in the gardens of Versailles in 1901. Cocteau calling it 'the most important experiences of our time'
http://www.kathleenmcgowan.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52:the-mystery-of-the-versailles-time-slip&catid=38:articles&Itemid=62
Notre Dame of France itself was established by the Marist Fathers for the French community in London in the 1860s in a building that had previously been 'Burford's Panaroma' accounting for its circular shape. Consecrated in 1868 the church's mission included a hospital, an orphanage and two schools which were run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul. The Marist fathers wished to put the sacrifice of Mary at the centre of their faith - Mary's close and gentle but human relationship to Jesus to mirror their own. They call themselves rather intriguingly 'hidden and unknown' - I think they mean that their work is 'unsung' 'unobserved' - again like Mary - with the sacrifice of her holy motherhood.
The original panoramic building was built in 1793 by Richard Barker. He had invented a circular drawing on a cylindrical surface to convey complete 360 degree scenes in 1792 and obtained a royal lincence in 1787 for the exclusive use of his invention for fourteen years. Initially setting up with his son he showed huge panoraomic drawings in a make shift shed in his back garden near Leicester Square before purchasing this site and commissioning the purpose designed rotunda building. 'Panorama painting seems to be all the rage' wrote Constable in a letter of 1803 and Ruskin later described a visit to Milan:
'I had been partly prepared for this view [of the city from the cathedral roof] by the admirable presentation of it in London a year or two before, in a great exhibition of which the vanishing has been in later life a greatly felt loss to me,--Burford's panorama in Leicester Square, which was an educational institution of the highest and purest value, and ought to have been supported by the government as one of the most beneficial school instruments in London. There I had seen, exquisitely painted, the view from the roof of Milan Cathedral, when I had no hope of ever seeing the reality, but with a joy and wonder of the deepest;--and now to be there indeed, made a deep wonder become fathomless. (from Praeterita: TheAutobiography of John Ruskin [Oxford 1978]
http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/2003/panorama/new_001.htm for a picture.
It was not the only spectacular attraction of Leicester Square - in 1851 the area was occupied by a large, circular, domed building, in which was exhibited Wyld's "Great Globe."
http://www.ssplprints.com/image/105139/unattributed-wylds-globe-leicester-square-london-12-july-1851 Do look! It is a fascinating illustration!
The representation of the world was sixty-five feet in diameter, and comprised a surface of some ten thousand square feet. Galleries encircled the interior of the building at different heights from the ground, by which means visitors were enabled to walk round and inspect every portion of the globe, an attendant, staff in hand, pointing out its principal features; lectures were likewise delivered at intervals during the day.
Though anybody who complains about Leicester Square these days will like the later description of the central patch of land once the Globe had closed down: 'Overgrown with rank and fetid vegetation, it was a public nuisance, both in an æsthetic and in a sanitary point of view; covered with the débris of tin pots and kettles, cast-off shoes, old clothes, and dead cats and dogs, it was an eye-sore to every one forced to pass by it. '
The Notre Dame Hall beneath the church later hosted many punk gigs. Here, a description from John Springate from the Glitter Band:
Though anybody who complains about Leicester Square these days will like the later description of the central patch of land once the Globe had closed down: 'Overgrown with rank and fetid vegetation, it was a public nuisance, both in an æsthetic and in a sanitary point of view; covered with the débris of tin pots and kettles, cast-off shoes, old clothes, and dead cats and dogs, it was an eye-sore to every one forced to pass by it. '
The Notre Dame Hall beneath the church later hosted many punk gigs. Here, a description from John Springate from the Glitter Band:
'Gerry Shephard and I went to see The Sex Pistols at Notre Dame Hall in Leicester Square, which I think was late-76. Gerry and I were dressed in our snazziest gear with flared trousers and all that, and there's all these punks there with drainpipe jeans, short hair, really sort of 'now'. The Sex Pistols came on and did four numbers and I said to Gerry - cos we'd had had enough by then, we'd seen enough and we came out - I said, 'Well that's it then.' I just knew.'
http://www.alwynwturner.com/glitter/punk.html ( a music site charting glam rock in its proponents own words including its demise as punk arrived. Here too is this great description from Tina Charles ( 'I love to love ( But my Baby Loves to Dance') ):
'I did a TV show in Germany with The Clash and Dana and Showaddywaddy, which was a very strange group of people. And we were all on the 'plane going over and I always remember The Clash were so badly behaved, taking all the mini-bar from the hotel and everything - they were just shocking. And there was Dana and I behaving ourselves totally.'
And in the late 80s when I helped my neighbours in the opposite bedsit in Baron's Court run a party business we hosted a Burns Night party there - attaching stag's heads to sandy concrete and borrowed tartan draped round pillars and folding endless purple and green napkins. Thatcher's children indeed.
I struggle writing the Cocteau conspiracy theories for days then wipe out the whole post by accident. In tears I text friends to see if they can help me retrieve what I have written. I take it on myself to delve deep into the bowels of the computer getting as far as 'meta data and hidden cache' but not knowing the software to open them with.
Still cycling back and forth across the parks - preparations for the Queen's celebrations are underway. One morning with traffic at a standstill I have to push the bike infront of the palace because the roads are shut. Soldiers in Nutcracker suite outfits dotted across Green Park move in a slow pace sweeping for bombs. Another day, I turn the bike onto Birdcage Walk to find myself at the head of a busby-clad brass band regiment like a middle aged masthead on a hired bike. I treat myself to an out of character self-waved circular cheer - a booyah! to the world, though no one is watching .
I rewrite the blog - remembering almost word for word some of the early stuff then getting bogged down in religious conspiracies again. It feels like it takes me ages - an extra week at least to rewrite and I don't even have the satisfaction of a purple sticker to place.
OL sends me an image of a church sign he has seen in Cambridgeshire visiting his parents. 'The Hokey Cokey is NOT what its all about' it says. He says it is the sister image to a nearby off licence which says 'What if the Hokey Cokey IS all it's about?'
Amen.
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