I have started to feel like a detective but I'm not sure of what.
Christ Church. No longer a church at all. Initially called the New Chapel built 1651, then demolished and re built in 1843, a chapel of ease to St Margaret's. The church bombed out in the war, now only a garden, the fragment of a burial ground left. It is a scrap of grass where office workers eat sandwiches and fat pigeons eat their crumbs. Alongside, the drinking homeless gather like greasy, injured birds. But this morning on the tube going to work, just when I thought this blog wasn't working - no one reads it, I wasn't brave enough to get into churches most of the time, this was no longer a church, unexpectedly this is what I read:
'In the early morning of the 17th many incendiaries dropped on and around the Christ Church, Victoria. Prompt action from wardens and other helpers extinguished most of these, and incidentally saved the tower- but above the altar there was fire on the roof that could not be reached. The Fire Service was summoned, with a call for high ladders. Meanwhile under the burning roof the heavy embers were falling , wardens - including women - risked themeselves to extricate the Bible and altar pieces. But by chance an ember dropped into an organ - setting up instantly a great blaze. Then the main roof caught fire. The Fire Service arrived and set to work at a height with one of their 100-foot turntable ladders - those extendable steel ladders complete with hose that are commonly called water towers'. For a time the sky above seemed quiet. Then the urgent spasmodic note of a Luftwaffe engine was heard, and a single plane circled above the church. It seemed to retreat, and then to come nosing back again. At last, as if scenting its chosen flower, it dived. A small high explosive came down to its horrid nest on the precarious water-tower reaching up towards it. One fireman was killed and five others received terrible injuries that resulted in death' 'The Blitz, Westminster at War.' William Sansom.
How terrifying - not just the bombing, but the circling, the coming back, the finishing of the job. Watching this happen. Feeling completely helpless.
Piecing things together I went to Westminster City Archive, just to see, just to start. I wanted to know who had lived in our flat. To find out about this place before it became our life. Coming out of the lift on the fifth floor, into a quiet room with sky lights, and view of Westminster rooftops tucked behind bookshelves. No food or drink. The peace of only pencils.
Holding my breath I turned the pages of the 1918 electoral register. It was the earliest they had. I had wanted to start at the beginning. But here, I feel like I am inviting unknown guests to live alongside us.
1918 Amy and Robert John Smith
1939 Vera May Smith and Richard Alfred Smith
1946 Harriet and Harry Powley
1949 Harriett and Harry Powley
Suddenly all of us jostling together, all of us trying to use the bathroom that probably did not exist. All of us calling this place home. But perhaps that is just what history is.
There have been a lot of discoveries, I am starting to become obsessed. Our street - ' Duck Lane ( now St. Matthew Street) was identified as one of the worst slum areas during the eighteenth century- named the ‘Devil’s Acre’ by Charles Dickens. Our block of flats built on that site 1885 (alongside another built in 1860), nearly the first social housing built in London (the world?) I keep thinking of the first tennants. How proud and pleased they must have been. Nearby - another garden, another park just near the boys schools with big gravestones stacked against a wall known as 'England's foulest graveyard.' Bodies looted, pistol armed guards stationed. Am I cramming too much information in here? I have started finding all this out and it is coming thick and fast.
But writing the names, sitting here in this solid walled, cleverly designed small flat, the living room tucked like a secret nest in the centre, doors opening all the way round so that it is possible to run either way shouting 'meet you there' as a game, I feel like I'm summoning something, some proprietorial eyes on this home I keep, some of the decisions I have made. These are people's relatives, people's friends. I sleep in their bedroom. I sit at this computer and write. I clean and clean and clean the same space they cleaned. Dust tucked in the same corners. It is a profound revelation to realise how safe they would think my life was. How easy. Though perhaps also how nonchalant of my safety I have acted, how careless I have been.
Did the Smith's keep the flat for generations - only to move out in or after the war? I don't know yet how to trace them but I would like to try. Another big bomb went off on our street,11th November just after 4pm a cold drizzly day, wiping out a printing works killing 25. The rescue operation took 4 days.
I buy a 1755 map of Westminster on my way out of the Archive Library. A copy of a beautiful hand inked drawing showing flourished curly writing and a large village clustered to the Thames. It cost £2.50. I have already maps from 1869, 1894, and 1916 but they look like the London we know. With no edges. But this map shows New Chapel at the edge of marshland at the border of etched human activity. Just round the corner from the workhouse. Human endeavour creeping on, building more, reclaiming the land.
At night when we sleep in this hot weather, marshland mosquitoes unheard, unknown bite our cheeks, and toes and ankles.
Monday 12 July 2010
Thursday 1 July 2010
St Margarets of Antioch, Westminster
I went searching for this church with an ill remembered tip from Mystery Worshipper. I wasn't sure I could be right. That somehow, right next to Westminster Abbey there is another church? It didn't make sense.
Though I realise too, I am avoiding Westminster Abbey for various reasons. I might have to pay? There is just too much history for one trip and too much work for me to condense it in to one post? But also probably I should have started there. Somehow Westminster Abbey is central, the beginning - a monastery on an island, around which the land was reclaimed by the monks. But at the moment it feels like something unwieldy on the horizon that I will skirt around for as long as possible.
Unusually, I am working all week and the flat is already untidier and my patience less. But today I have sped up doing the washing up, hanging out the washing, making the beds, and have made half an hour between dropping the boys off to school and going to work to sit in the church. Walking into parliament square in this secret pouch of the day, I feel pleased with myself to have found it.
The peace camp is still there. A big banner says 'Capitalism isn't working. Another world is possible.' I try foolishly, vainly, hopefully to imagine it. Once I had a beautiful dream about love, and it was like a sort of heaven, with every bit of my body filled up, breathing fully, absolutely and utterly at peace in warm english countryside alongside someone who loved me. And when I woke I felt bereft that I couldn't be there, that I was missing out on a whole hidden dimension, like the only time I took magic mushrooms ( a long time ago, well before the children) and the magical animated kingdom with the crouched warm animals purring in the dark corner turned back into my living room with the neatly folded pile of towels on a chair.
MW is right though, surprisingly there is another church. In the skirts of Westminster Abbey, a smaller, delicate church with a sturdy tower. It is the parish church of the Houses of Commons. I don't think I have ever noticed it or if I have I just hadn't noticed they were separate. It isn't open yet, a notice says it will open at 9.30 though the queue into Westminster Abbey is just beginning to move. Tourists finger money belts ready to pay. I sit on the step of St Margarets of Antioch in the sunshine and when Big Ben strikes half past the wooden door is shouldered open from inside bolts.
The church was built initially in the 11th century, next to the Abbey because the monks needed to carry out 'God's Work' undisturbed and the local population kept coming to hear their mass being sung. St Margaret's was built as the public place to worship leaving the monks alone to their 'Divine Office'. Later it was rebuilt a few times, but essentially stayed the same since 1523, despite various restorations. The puritans adopting it as more suitable place for parliamentary worship than the fancier abbey.
The church smells strongly of church. A bit damp, a bit mouldy, with hints of polish, like the smell of shade and age and of never quite being warm. The walls are packed with memorial tablets, but a jumble of sizes and dates and styles. I am not sure if it is just my mood but the church doesn't come together for me. I am impatient with it and myself. Some of the windows are the most incredibly rich intense stained glass, but along the south side just grey washes and murky abstract windows. I guess they are by the artist John Piper just from the colours but in an I Spy way I am pleased to find out I am right. Though John Piper's windows put in 1966 to cover bomb damage from the war, are murky and depressing, only an estimation alongside the vivid jewel colours of the windows of flemish glass that commemorate the betrothal of Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur from 1509.
The guide says the replaced windows, a blackened memorial and pew 38 show signs of fire from the bombs of the blitz. I look carefully at the pew but can't see any damage. I am reading about the bombing in Westminster, and I am fascinated and horrified. The ordinairy, things I see everyday, under daily attack. A family living in the flat I live in, trooping down the slightly shallow step of the stairs we bump scooters down, out to their shelter, listening every day, every night to the sounds overhead. Their children so near to danger all the time. I want to know where they sheltered. I want to know who they were. Reading the reports of bombs going off or not going off, people dead or lucky escapes, a pattern is revealed and it is as simple as this, you were lucky or not lucky. Everybody was equal. I think of Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and how do they cope with the unrelenting expectation of threat.
Mud and clay, matter itself becoming disturbed, the dust, plaster, bricks, the earth, loam what people are dug from.
I do sit. But not for long. Briefly I feel very little, though almost happy for the absence of myself in this church, for the absence of self within my day.
When I walk outside to the tube, past the Houses of Parliament, past the peace camp again, I see a table set out in the centre of the tents on the grass with wonky chairs and all sorts of wonky people sat talking . I am not sure if it is breakfast or a meeting. A discussion of this other world. Though later that day at work searching picture libraries for photographs of celebrities: Abbey Clancy clutching the arm of Peter Crouch, Kylie Minogue dwarfed by her boyfriend, I see pictures of flat yellow grass marked in primary school patterns where some of the tents have been taken down and some of the protestors have left. They have lost their legal battle to be there.
Amen
Though I realise too, I am avoiding Westminster Abbey for various reasons. I might have to pay? There is just too much history for one trip and too much work for me to condense it in to one post? But also probably I should have started there. Somehow Westminster Abbey is central, the beginning - a monastery on an island, around which the land was reclaimed by the monks. But at the moment it feels like something unwieldy on the horizon that I will skirt around for as long as possible.
Unusually, I am working all week and the flat is already untidier and my patience less. But today I have sped up doing the washing up, hanging out the washing, making the beds, and have made half an hour between dropping the boys off to school and going to work to sit in the church. Walking into parliament square in this secret pouch of the day, I feel pleased with myself to have found it.
The peace camp is still there. A big banner says 'Capitalism isn't working. Another world is possible.' I try foolishly, vainly, hopefully to imagine it. Once I had a beautiful dream about love, and it was like a sort of heaven, with every bit of my body filled up, breathing fully, absolutely and utterly at peace in warm english countryside alongside someone who loved me. And when I woke I felt bereft that I couldn't be there, that I was missing out on a whole hidden dimension, like the only time I took magic mushrooms ( a long time ago, well before the children) and the magical animated kingdom with the crouched warm animals purring in the dark corner turned back into my living room with the neatly folded pile of towels on a chair.
MW is right though, surprisingly there is another church. In the skirts of Westminster Abbey, a smaller, delicate church with a sturdy tower. It is the parish church of the Houses of Commons. I don't think I have ever noticed it or if I have I just hadn't noticed they were separate. It isn't open yet, a notice says it will open at 9.30 though the queue into Westminster Abbey is just beginning to move. Tourists finger money belts ready to pay. I sit on the step of St Margarets of Antioch in the sunshine and when Big Ben strikes half past the wooden door is shouldered open from inside bolts.
The church was built initially in the 11th century, next to the Abbey because the monks needed to carry out 'God's Work' undisturbed and the local population kept coming to hear their mass being sung. St Margaret's was built as the public place to worship leaving the monks alone to their 'Divine Office'. Later it was rebuilt a few times, but essentially stayed the same since 1523, despite various restorations. The puritans adopting it as more suitable place for parliamentary worship than the fancier abbey.
The church smells strongly of church. A bit damp, a bit mouldy, with hints of polish, like the smell of shade and age and of never quite being warm. The walls are packed with memorial tablets, but a jumble of sizes and dates and styles. I am not sure if it is just my mood but the church doesn't come together for me. I am impatient with it and myself. Some of the windows are the most incredibly rich intense stained glass, but along the south side just grey washes and murky abstract windows. I guess they are by the artist John Piper just from the colours but in an I Spy way I am pleased to find out I am right. Though John Piper's windows put in 1966 to cover bomb damage from the war, are murky and depressing, only an estimation alongside the vivid jewel colours of the windows of flemish glass that commemorate the betrothal of Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur from 1509.
The guide says the replaced windows, a blackened memorial and pew 38 show signs of fire from the bombs of the blitz. I look carefully at the pew but can't see any damage. I am reading about the bombing in Westminster, and I am fascinated and horrified. The ordinairy, things I see everyday, under daily attack. A family living in the flat I live in, trooping down the slightly shallow step of the stairs we bump scooters down, out to their shelter, listening every day, every night to the sounds overhead. Their children so near to danger all the time. I want to know where they sheltered. I want to know who they were. Reading the reports of bombs going off or not going off, people dead or lucky escapes, a pattern is revealed and it is as simple as this, you were lucky or not lucky. Everybody was equal. I think of Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and how do they cope with the unrelenting expectation of threat.
Mud and clay, matter itself becoming disturbed, the dust, plaster, bricks, the earth, loam what people are dug from.
I do sit. But not for long. Briefly I feel very little, though almost happy for the absence of myself in this church, for the absence of self within my day.
When I walk outside to the tube, past the Houses of Parliament, past the peace camp again, I see a table set out in the centre of the tents on the grass with wonky chairs and all sorts of wonky people sat talking . I am not sure if it is breakfast or a meeting. A discussion of this other world. Though later that day at work searching picture libraries for photographs of celebrities: Abbey Clancy clutching the arm of Peter Crouch, Kylie Minogue dwarfed by her boyfriend, I see pictures of flat yellow grass marked in primary school patterns where some of the tents have been taken down and some of the protestors have left. They have lost their legal battle to be there.
Amen
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