It felt like a magnificent moment, driving off. Boys sandwiched in the back between cool boxes and sleeping bags. Roof rack high (admittedly packed by exexdh). Bee Gees greatest hits on the car stereo. Children lulled yet fascinated by the high voices and their mum singing full tilt. The start of our annual camping holiday to a beautiful farm in Dorset. But less than a mile away from home, in one of the smartest cut throughs in London, the car just quietly failed.
I had joined the AA (the breakdown service, not the other one) just days before ( it had felt at the time like part of the spree but suddenly the best money I had ever spent) and a man, like the older Robert De Niro, wise with a heavy accent and just a hint of courtly male menace, came and worked on the car for hours. Talking on the phone he said he was in mourning, a very recent bereavement 'I'm just not myself' he said in a drawl. I felt like I was in a film. The dead-end woman played ludicrously by Michelle Pfeiffer.
Exexdh came on his bike, like an audience. Not feeling well he sat on a bench and watched.
Initial optimism from all gave way. It became increasingly obvious the car wasn't going to make it. Frantic phone calls to our friends, nearing the camp site in their camper van said we could get towed to their house and borrow their car. Robert de Niro towed me down to South London. 'She can do it.' He said a pronouncement of faith when Exexdh said he should steer the car. I felt stupidly proud of his belief and I did it.
But something happened. Exexdh stepped up. Volunteered when insurance on the friend's car seemed unlikely, to drive us down in their car and then drive himself back that night. He always joins us later in the week for our youngest's birthday but the total journey down that day ( towing etc ) took nine hours in total, and we did it, all of us with patience and good humour and he still had to drive back. Our funny, damaged family suddenly working together. Putting a tent up in the dark.
That week camping I thought, you can choose very easily how you would like to live in a field. It is just you and your children with others. It is a simple life, keeping yourself above the level of mud and dry under shelter, not burnt from the sun and you can choose the best you can. I chose, and I realise I can be irritating: to laugh, muck about, cook pancakes, have a fabulous birthday party (remember those light up balloons!), swim, wash up, wash up wash up wash up. I was happy. So happy.
I thought about belief. I don't believe. I didn't think I believed anything. But I realise I believe you should be kind. That you should be kind to all. That you should always do unto others as you would do for yourself. That you should live with joy. I would run for miles to catch a plastic bag blowing in the wind. I think I realised with some doubt that central to the core of me was inherited Christian beliefs.
There were many families camping together. Each showed their beliefs in their actions. I'm just trying this out:
The medieval family ( I was thinking of calling them feudal but I think medieval works, somehow it seems kinder and I don't want to be unkind) believe in themselves above and beyond all others. Their family is a fortress wall. Their commitment is only to themselves, they don't care how others work on their behalf, they feed themselves, make arrangements for themselves but eat greedily from what others provide. Others do not exist as they do and they would fight them if they did. ' I don't react well to being told what to do, and don't do it.' The breath of that sentence still warm as a pan of sausages is indicated, 'could you turn those while I ............'
The Capitalist Family. Buy and negotiate their position. They work for the camp in payment for or in lieu of benefit. There is sometimes little enjoyment to their contribution but it is done to keep the currency of effort going.
from there the combinations are varied:
capitalist/christian possibly the most succesful combination of self and selfless. After all Christianity has a strong tradition of martyrs.
All of this is just an attempt to explain something, and I feel I could be foolish, or arrogant or plain stupid to try but it seemed really simple at the time. The more you do with joy and enjoyment and love the more you enjoy.
Blimey! I am writing this but I never expected it, I might not agree with it later even, but I think it is worth a try. Something needs to be said. How we live doesn't seem quite right.
And exexhdh got it that week and turned up ready and present to take part. He didn't have a back pocket of doubt or two fingered meaness behind my back he just took part with love and joy.
I am not explaining a happy ending exactly just an observation of how that time was lived.
At the end. Packing up. Oh, oh a slow and labourious process, folding a natty kitchen unit into a flat bag, cleaning out tents of mud and grass fluff, unravelling kites, packing and packing. I kept going all day in the heat. The arranged deal with two young sons and exexhdh was that we would pack up, swim in the sea, eat pizza and play cricket and walk to the nearby old church. Something for everybody and guess which one I chose. But all of it was shortened and snipped at the edges and eldest son suggested in his unswerving and sometimes unnerving logic that if he and youngest went and got the pizza ( there is a van in the farm yard) then there would be more time for cricket) and I gave them the money to go. When the eldest came back shouting 'come come' saying the youngest had hurt himself jumping off a hay bale I said fucking hell ( so rare my swearing of any sort these days and this was extreme by fear and guilt that I had let them go) and ran top speed terrified that my keeness to shave time had worn thin my own normal stingent son safety rules and caused catastophe, the new (and I overheard them to be christian or certainly they went to Greenbelt, so I imagine you would have to be christian) families moving into the plot we were leaving looked horrified, their young babies crawling in the earth. When I returned carrying the youngest, his graze more a whisper of white dragged skin not even pinked with blood, I felt their disapproval of this lax, swearing mum. I said, relentlessly cheerful, relentlessly friendly, I expect you will cheer when we have finally gone.
Finally, a dip in the sea, pizza eaten, cricket played, car packed, we drove off, no time for the church for it was nearly dark. There was no cheer, just a watery wave, but the church bells rang out, unexpectedly, beautifully, across the fields.
Tuesday 17 August 2010
Friday 6 August 2010
Westminster Abbey I
Done it! Broken through the barriers of time, and worry - too big, too expensive, too touristy, too exhausting. Westminster Abbey. The boys away at exexhDH's family for most of the week. Mainly I am working but I have one whole, full day off. I take money from a cash point on the way there to pay the entrance fee, but have my teeth gritted to the price. Remember I'm on what feels like a slightly out of hand spree - they are wants that have been backing up and really none of them of are outlandish but just the flood of them seems to be costly:
filing boxes x 6 (yellow)
a top for me
a belt for me
origami paper and book (for boys)
Extravagant but beautiful light up balloons for camping birthday parties ( mine and youngest son's/camping next week)
a necklace from the house of fraser sale for me (there certainly seems to be a for me theme here)
fabric paints (for boys)
lots of birthday presents for others that I have skipped or side stepped
I suspect the consumer in me would always have a list of the next purchases I would like to make which are:
new beds for the boys with storage underneath (found them on ebay for £120 a piece with mattress- can they be any good?)
lamp for sitting room
electric whisk (make those meringues and cakes easier)
haircut (yup, for me again)
underwear (ditto)
But I am holding back. Mildly panic stricken by the urge of want. By money which is meant for other things.
Anyhow. It is beautiful, hot, sunny, the same weather as when I went to St Margarets of Antioch. I have attempted to get to Westminster Abbey by 9.30 when it opens but I am probably 10 minutes late. Without the boys, time is really odd - slower and faster at the same time, precious but slack, the space of them mourned. Parliament Square is fenced off in ugly tarpaulin, the decison seems to be rather than have a peace camp, there will be nothing, though the tents cluster at the edge of the pavement and the fenced off land. Sculptures of great men like clumsy parcels with plastic wound round. Winston Churchill a big coat wrapped in a mac.
Entrance from the north transept. £15 admission price. I have it ready. But just at the last minute shuffling in, I think I will just try my Westminster res card, the one I use to get cheap swimming, the one I lend to an exD friend of exexDH to go swimming - a funny arrangement where he takes it in the week and then appears on saturdays for breakfast after AA meetings so I can take the boys to swimming lessons and we try to talk about art over the heads of my sons while I make pancakes or scrambled eggs. The eldest ( often angry ) and youngest ( who licks his arm ) and usually exexDH turns up too. I am to meet him later at the Tate. While it is probably the nearest thing I have had to a date for 11 years and it does feel slightly date-like, I don't really want a date. I don't want to feel vulnerable, I don't want to lead someone on, I don't want to be rejected. I definately don't want an exD or a D either. Plus, I have made a rule to be taken out for dinner and cherished. But I like him, he is funny and kind and oh, oh, the idea someone might laugh at a joke I make is too much of a draw. Also, I think he probably feels exactly the same. I am the ex missus of an exD. Though it makes it easy for both of us, for some things don't have to be explained, the extremes are known.
But the card works! Not 10% off, not 15%, even 20% or 50% but bang, bingo, can't believe it - I am in, I live here, haven't come off a coach, dragged a wheelie suitcase, sat in a seventies steak house or even come on the tube, just walked round the corner and it is absolutely free. I am so pleased. £15 pounds is still a worrying amount to me. The belt I shouldn't have bought but love. The amount of most of the things I have listed. In the extraordinarirly bad times, I have fed the children reasonably well for a week for not much more than double that.
Under the porch with stone saints clustered, through the door and then unexpected a great crowd of grey dead people, limbs waving around, flanked by the shuffling living with audio guides. I can't explain it, but I thought I would walk in and it would be about the building, about height and awe but it isn't it is a clutter. All I can see is statues packed in, like a store room of ambitious people. This is just a first impression I think because that entrance brings you into a waving woman on her back and some seafaring chaps. Then a vicar, a real one, with a wolf smile, glides infront of me, saying to a young pretty guide 'where did the all the people come from? Who opened the doors?' Eyebrows arched. And then I can imagine the quiet and magnificence of just being there. Not him, not her, not any of us. The hush.
I reach kings. There are seventeen monarchs buried here. Including the shrine of Edward the Confessor. How amazing. How old. He built his palace near the original monastic community (initially 12 monks on an isolated marshy area of the Thames called 'Thorney Island', King Edgar giving Dunstan, bishop of London the land in AD960) then built a new church dedicated to St Peter. Though he died a few days after it's consecration in 1065 his burial depicted in the Bayeux tapestry. Less than a year later William the Conqueror was crowned in the earliest Abbey. Later again, nearly a hundred years Edward the Confessor became a saint and his remains moved to a magnificent shrine in the presence of Henry ll and Thomas Becket. Henry III started the building of the abbey we see now, inspired by the french gothic cathedrals. All this I've learnt but I think maybe I will go back, even try an audio guide, because all I could see was a lot of railings with huge caskets hidden behind.
Everyone has the guides, like enormous, white, comedy sketch 80s phones, and the people look with their ears, a crouched shuffling view. I am overwhelmed. The greats and then the merely clever, the clerics, the administrators who secured themselves a patch by nimble deals. The layers of age, kings and kings and kings, then Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth 1, these people, their remains are really here. Chapel entrances dip into smooth bowed stone worn by feet. It is too much to describe it all - this is what I noticed - two tiny figures in a chapel, a couple, a man and a woman measuring from my elbow to my thumb, pocket sized tombs, as poignant and vulnerable as Ron Mueck's sculpture 'Dead Dad'. At the side of Mary Queen of Scotts laid quiet and marble, a bag tucked beside with a sticker that says 'Mary Queen of Scotts fire blanket.' Something warm, something protective. All history kept safe, kept continuous, the line of story, the story of state and power on and on. But also inherent threat imminent, attack anticipated.
Then the writers and poets. So many. Chaucer 'Clerk of works of the Palace of Westminster' ( I didn't know he'd lived here) 'O Rare, Ben Johnson', Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy slightly worn, TS Eliot 'The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living' the cut of the text overdone, fussy in the craft of modern stone masonry.
Turning off into the cloister is the really old bit. Against the wall, tombs with shapes that look ancient rather than christian. Presumably just ancient christian. I have a sketch of them but not sure how to describe the cartoon bone shape with crosses at either end at the ball of the bone. Alongside, along the thick, rough walls, the doorway into the Pyx Chamber. It has been there since the Norman Conquest, a room that feels underground by the thickness of the walls but isn't. Huge wooden chests, which were used for counting and valuing money . A thousand years later the room used as a safe HQ in the 2nd WW. The people from the war that I'm trying to imagine must have tried to imagine the other people, with as little success, I don't know, I find it hard not to try.
On again under a low moon sliced tunnel to a deeper recessed, I think an even older, small cloister with a fountain, finally the garden, and when I get out there I am the only one. I'm not sure the audio guide takes you there. But it is beautiful, old walls, a strange view of the rooves of the abbey then the houses of parliament. Beautiful. An old fig tree the height of an oak. Calm.
Back through. The carved stones of war heroes. Again, I can't explain it but the recent typeface of the dead is horrible, the pride of the carver rather then the truth of those that died. A name is just a spoken thing rather than a flourish. Written well it conveys the gravity of them gone.
Finally, finally into the high ceiling vaults of the church. Here is the tomb of the unknown soldier 1920 then the scientists - Newton and ( I overhear a guide ) 'We let him in.' Darwin. There is magnificence and light and beauty and I realise this is how the church should be seen, how it was intended to be viewed. Tourists are exited through the entrance if that makes sense and it is hard to understand the church without that initial view. I sit.
Later I go to the Tate to the surveillance exhibition. I like lots of it. The small, tiny details. The first paparazzi pictures. Bits and bobs. The Date or Non Date and I skirt the exhibition independently, never near, never looking together, but unexpectedly we come across each other near the end, our pace finally coinciding but I can't bear the intimacy and overtake him.
Almost the last room, Bruce Nauman 'Mapping the Studio' a film of roughly 52 minutes that I watch for roughly 4 minutes. It is the Artist's studio with a film camera running at night, I wait, watching nothing. I have always been fascinated by capturing the grainy stillness of night, the shift of light and not much. Looking and looking, like trying to find the proof of nothing without you, or an internal feeling, a trace of history, or the warmth of a ghost. I wait.
Once years and years ago I was unfaithful to a man I truly loved and I ended up in an open air swimming pool somewhere near Sheffield. Swimming, I lost track of the man I didn't care about but had lied to my work and taken the train to see. I can remember clearly looking around for someone or something to recognise but there was nothing just many heads bobbing. I was completely unattached, completely unknown, free in a rectangle of water with a swimming suit on under a big, open sky.
Watching the film, and the night of the studio unexpectedly there is a twitch of movement. Bright eyes. I guess a mouse. Things happen that you don't see, don't know, I think.
Amen
filing boxes x 6 (yellow)
a top for me
a belt for me
origami paper and book (for boys)
Extravagant but beautiful light up balloons for camping birthday parties ( mine and youngest son's/camping next week)
a necklace from the house of fraser sale for me (there certainly seems to be a for me theme here)
fabric paints (for boys)
lots of birthday presents for others that I have skipped or side stepped
I suspect the consumer in me would always have a list of the next purchases I would like to make which are:
new beds for the boys with storage underneath (found them on ebay for £120 a piece with mattress- can they be any good?)
lamp for sitting room
electric whisk (make those meringues and cakes easier)
haircut (yup, for me again)
underwear (ditto)
But I am holding back. Mildly panic stricken by the urge of want. By money which is meant for other things.
Anyhow. It is beautiful, hot, sunny, the same weather as when I went to St Margarets of Antioch. I have attempted to get to Westminster Abbey by 9.30 when it opens but I am probably 10 minutes late. Without the boys, time is really odd - slower and faster at the same time, precious but slack, the space of them mourned. Parliament Square is fenced off in ugly tarpaulin, the decison seems to be rather than have a peace camp, there will be nothing, though the tents cluster at the edge of the pavement and the fenced off land. Sculptures of great men like clumsy parcels with plastic wound round. Winston Churchill a big coat wrapped in a mac.
Entrance from the north transept. £15 admission price. I have it ready. But just at the last minute shuffling in, I think I will just try my Westminster res card, the one I use to get cheap swimming, the one I lend to an exD friend of exexDH to go swimming - a funny arrangement where he takes it in the week and then appears on saturdays for breakfast after AA meetings so I can take the boys to swimming lessons and we try to talk about art over the heads of my sons while I make pancakes or scrambled eggs. The eldest ( often angry ) and youngest ( who licks his arm ) and usually exexDH turns up too. I am to meet him later at the Tate. While it is probably the nearest thing I have had to a date for 11 years and it does feel slightly date-like, I don't really want a date. I don't want to feel vulnerable, I don't want to lead someone on, I don't want to be rejected. I definately don't want an exD or a D either. Plus, I have made a rule to be taken out for dinner and cherished. But I like him, he is funny and kind and oh, oh, the idea someone might laugh at a joke I make is too much of a draw. Also, I think he probably feels exactly the same. I am the ex missus of an exD. Though it makes it easy for both of us, for some things don't have to be explained, the extremes are known.
But the card works! Not 10% off, not 15%, even 20% or 50% but bang, bingo, can't believe it - I am in, I live here, haven't come off a coach, dragged a wheelie suitcase, sat in a seventies steak house or even come on the tube, just walked round the corner and it is absolutely free. I am so pleased. £15 pounds is still a worrying amount to me. The belt I shouldn't have bought but love. The amount of most of the things I have listed. In the extraordinarirly bad times, I have fed the children reasonably well for a week for not much more than double that.
Under the porch with stone saints clustered, through the door and then unexpected a great crowd of grey dead people, limbs waving around, flanked by the shuffling living with audio guides. I can't explain it, but I thought I would walk in and it would be about the building, about height and awe but it isn't it is a clutter. All I can see is statues packed in, like a store room of ambitious people. This is just a first impression I think because that entrance brings you into a waving woman on her back and some seafaring chaps. Then a vicar, a real one, with a wolf smile, glides infront of me, saying to a young pretty guide 'where did the all the people come from? Who opened the doors?' Eyebrows arched. And then I can imagine the quiet and magnificence of just being there. Not him, not her, not any of us. The hush.
I reach kings. There are seventeen monarchs buried here. Including the shrine of Edward the Confessor. How amazing. How old. He built his palace near the original monastic community (initially 12 monks on an isolated marshy area of the Thames called 'Thorney Island', King Edgar giving Dunstan, bishop of London the land in AD960) then built a new church dedicated to St Peter. Though he died a few days after it's consecration in 1065 his burial depicted in the Bayeux tapestry. Less than a year later William the Conqueror was crowned in the earliest Abbey. Later again, nearly a hundred years Edward the Confessor became a saint and his remains moved to a magnificent shrine in the presence of Henry ll and Thomas Becket. Henry III started the building of the abbey we see now, inspired by the french gothic cathedrals. All this I've learnt but I think maybe I will go back, even try an audio guide, because all I could see was a lot of railings with huge caskets hidden behind.
Everyone has the guides, like enormous, white, comedy sketch 80s phones, and the people look with their ears, a crouched shuffling view. I am overwhelmed. The greats and then the merely clever, the clerics, the administrators who secured themselves a patch by nimble deals. The layers of age, kings and kings and kings, then Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth 1, these people, their remains are really here. Chapel entrances dip into smooth bowed stone worn by feet. It is too much to describe it all - this is what I noticed - two tiny figures in a chapel, a couple, a man and a woman measuring from my elbow to my thumb, pocket sized tombs, as poignant and vulnerable as Ron Mueck's sculpture 'Dead Dad'. At the side of Mary Queen of Scotts laid quiet and marble, a bag tucked beside with a sticker that says 'Mary Queen of Scotts fire blanket.' Something warm, something protective. All history kept safe, kept continuous, the line of story, the story of state and power on and on. But also inherent threat imminent, attack anticipated.
Then the writers and poets. So many. Chaucer 'Clerk of works of the Palace of Westminster' ( I didn't know he'd lived here) 'O Rare, Ben Johnson', Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy slightly worn, TS Eliot 'The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living' the cut of the text overdone, fussy in the craft of modern stone masonry.
Turning off into the cloister is the really old bit. Against the wall, tombs with shapes that look ancient rather than christian. Presumably just ancient christian. I have a sketch of them but not sure how to describe the cartoon bone shape with crosses at either end at the ball of the bone. Alongside, along the thick, rough walls, the doorway into the Pyx Chamber. It has been there since the Norman Conquest, a room that feels underground by the thickness of the walls but isn't. Huge wooden chests, which were used for counting and valuing money . A thousand years later the room used as a safe HQ in the 2nd WW. The people from the war that I'm trying to imagine must have tried to imagine the other people, with as little success, I don't know, I find it hard not to try.
On again under a low moon sliced tunnel to a deeper recessed, I think an even older, small cloister with a fountain, finally the garden, and when I get out there I am the only one. I'm not sure the audio guide takes you there. But it is beautiful, old walls, a strange view of the rooves of the abbey then the houses of parliament. Beautiful. An old fig tree the height of an oak. Calm.
Back through. The carved stones of war heroes. Again, I can't explain it but the recent typeface of the dead is horrible, the pride of the carver rather then the truth of those that died. A name is just a spoken thing rather than a flourish. Written well it conveys the gravity of them gone.
Finally, finally into the high ceiling vaults of the church. Here is the tomb of the unknown soldier 1920 then the scientists - Newton and ( I overhear a guide ) 'We let him in.' Darwin. There is magnificence and light and beauty and I realise this is how the church should be seen, how it was intended to be viewed. Tourists are exited through the entrance if that makes sense and it is hard to understand the church without that initial view. I sit.
Later I go to the Tate to the surveillance exhibition. I like lots of it. The small, tiny details. The first paparazzi pictures. Bits and bobs. The Date or Non Date and I skirt the exhibition independently, never near, never looking together, but unexpectedly we come across each other near the end, our pace finally coinciding but I can't bear the intimacy and overtake him.
Almost the last room, Bruce Nauman 'Mapping the Studio' a film of roughly 52 minutes that I watch for roughly 4 minutes. It is the Artist's studio with a film camera running at night, I wait, watching nothing. I have always been fascinated by capturing the grainy stillness of night, the shift of light and not much. Looking and looking, like trying to find the proof of nothing without you, or an internal feeling, a trace of history, or the warmth of a ghost. I wait.
Once years and years ago I was unfaithful to a man I truly loved and I ended up in an open air swimming pool somewhere near Sheffield. Swimming, I lost track of the man I didn't care about but had lied to my work and taken the train to see. I can remember clearly looking around for someone or something to recognise but there was nothing just many heads bobbing. I was completely unattached, completely unknown, free in a rectangle of water with a swimming suit on under a big, open sky.
Watching the film, and the night of the studio unexpectedly there is a twitch of movement. Bright eyes. I guess a mouse. Things happen that you don't see, don't know, I think.
Amen
Sunday 1 August 2010
Westminster Abbey. prologue
End of school, school holidays and birthday parties seem to have taken up my time. In the last two weeks I have made seven chocolate cakes, two batches of club penguin cookies and two meringue cakes. We have camped in my mum and dad's garden. I have run backwards and forwards across Regent's park before work to take the boys and their cousins to QPR football camp then across London in my lunch hour to take my eldest neice to a textile designer friend in Clapham. In a brave strike I have consolidated many of my money woes, repaying huge amounts and then spent a load of money - new tv! glasses! pretty dress! badminton net! All of it seems necessary but still makes me anxious. My position now is tight but not quite desperate. It is such an improvement but I feel I could be squandering it with this spree.
On facebook a girl I used to work with but barely like, posts pictures of her children's birthday party, a party I think I would like to have given. A beautiful garden with lanterns and a bedouin tent. But for my youngest son's party I run an obstacle course in the scabby, rat running, dog poo car park below. Next to the muddy flowerbed with the grave of our recently demised hamster 'Buddy' (oh, oh) tucked behind the foliage and alongside the hidden bedding of a homeless man.
This is what you had to do. Kick a football through a tunnel, run through the tunnel, knock a shuttlecock over moving bunting, limbo under the bunting, jump a jump, put The Mask on (yes, the green, Jim Carey one), play the Ukele, any song you like, up the ladder, star jump, collect a sweet from a flour cake. Bow.
The neighbours appeared from no where, carrying shopping bags, just as I demonstrate the race. I find it hard to look them in the eye (though they are nice) after the time exexDH then just drunk exh broke the door down. He couldn't get the keys to work. But here I am singing happy birthday, strumming a ukele, with a mask on. They watch baffled but smiling. Small children clamouring to have a go. I am not sure if I am brave or a fool.
'I am going to go to Westminster Abbey. I am going to go to Westminster Archive. ' It is like a refrain. But I can't seem to shave enough time of a day to get there. It is the school holidays there just isn't that time to shave.
On Radio 4 there is a programme with historic trials from the Old Bailey. I catch a little bit of it washing up. A woman tried for treason - having her drunken husband killed for a penny.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17260420-42-person238&div=t17260420-42
She said he beat her, she said he kept her hungry, she said he drank, that he was no good. The head was found in a bucket on horseferry road 1726, just on the edge of that marshy map.
I wonder if there is something inevitable and ancient to the places where poverty of spirit collects.
On the last day of term I see the young, white, shouting mum with her mum and a friend. The friend has a pitball, straining at a lead, albino bollocks, barking. 'yes, armed with intent' the friend says. 'He's going to say bye byes' says the mum of her mum, her scottish accent with finality. Only a bit older than me, the grandma, nice, bright, friendly but once I wondered if she was Mary Bell, if they all had secret identies.
Is it an age thing? The awareness of history. The textile designer friend has started mudlarking. He has found digging at the side of the Thames, a golden pin, a roman coin, and a medieval tile with a dog paw print dried into the clay. Real treasure. Fine, beautiful forgotten things. Small, precious with the touch of long gone fingers, the warmth and jump of a dog. He says he wants to talk more about this now than textiles though all of the designers come to him, Donna Karan, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Giles Deacon - even (and he shudders, though says she is nice, funny, sophisticated) Victoria Beckham.
I have been worried since the last post that I didn't get near to describing how unrelenting the bombing was here. I mentioned a couple of incidents and yet night after night the bombs kept coming. Even if one dropped and caused slight damage another could be dropped on top of that.
April 19th 148 killed and 564 seriously injured
May 10th 110 killed and 385 seriously injured.
'The whole area suffered and it was noticeable in the morning air that an invisible veil of plaster dust hung its odour over the air of every street, bombed or not bombed, for Westminster was impregnated with it.'
Westminster Abbey, watched, cared for, kept at attention - 'observer posts were positioned at tatical points, and here, at nearly one hundred feet above ground level, the Abbey firewatchers spent their blitz nights. Areas of these roofs are flat and safe and solid, like the secure decks of some enormous stone ship. The pinnacles, the spires, the buttresses that appear from the ground reasonably diminutive grow huge in this strange and isolated land above. It is though one stood in a new city of white and black stone, each pinnacle above and below glinting like the spire of a seperate church, with the flying buttresses presenting an architecture quite new and of no formal meaning. The ground below is forgotten, only this queer, beautiful but unintelligible island exists. Such an edifice flickering in the reddish reflection of London's fires must have been a mermorable sight - with around the black sea of the streets dotted here and there with fires, like pools of red phosphorus.'
Though I think that a sense of survival is what we now crave, but only because we are safe.
I buy a card of that 'Keep calm and carry on' poster and put it up in the hall way by the door. It is a flashpoint for all of us, late, putting shoes on, my eldest son often oblivious to the real demands of time and not his own concentration of interests. 'Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!' I shout. But then seeing it there, I feel I insult the real message. All I have to do is get two boys to get their trainers on and their hair brushed and to school on time. The real 'Keep calm and carry on' is stoic but terrible, an oblivion, a self medication to the horror of surrounding death and destruction. The thin, neutral typeface, so strong, so resililent. My mum and dad grew up during the war. I have always felt they trained me for another, by my lack of complaining, grin and bear it, potential bravery. A very polite put up and shut up. But it has made me weak, not strong. For the strong things I felt have not always been said. I got used to not saying them.
I admit defeat, I haven't gone to Westminster Abbey, I haven't gone to Westminster Archive - I haven't had time. I have decided this time just to describe - here, what I have seen, the bits and pieces.
Finally, I was crossing the road on the way to pick up a parcel from the sorting office - just round the back of House of Fraser, and I saw something glittering on the road. I thought for a minute it was a dropped brooch with a central glinting jewel, and even when I was close I still thought it was a brooch with a jewel but there on the tarmac was the head of a pigeon, about the size of my thumb pad, his eye open and bright, just lying there, looking up, dead, decapitated, as if from no where.
On facebook a girl I used to work with but barely like, posts pictures of her children's birthday party, a party I think I would like to have given. A beautiful garden with lanterns and a bedouin tent. But for my youngest son's party I run an obstacle course in the scabby, rat running, dog poo car park below. Next to the muddy flowerbed with the grave of our recently demised hamster 'Buddy' (oh, oh) tucked behind the foliage and alongside the hidden bedding of a homeless man.
This is what you had to do. Kick a football through a tunnel, run through the tunnel, knock a shuttlecock over moving bunting, limbo under the bunting, jump a jump, put The Mask on (yes, the green, Jim Carey one), play the Ukele, any song you like, up the ladder, star jump, collect a sweet from a flour cake. Bow.
The neighbours appeared from no where, carrying shopping bags, just as I demonstrate the race. I find it hard to look them in the eye (though they are nice) after the time exexDH then just drunk exh broke the door down. He couldn't get the keys to work. But here I am singing happy birthday, strumming a ukele, with a mask on. They watch baffled but smiling. Small children clamouring to have a go. I am not sure if I am brave or a fool.
'I am going to go to Westminster Abbey. I am going to go to Westminster Archive. ' It is like a refrain. But I can't seem to shave enough time of a day to get there. It is the school holidays there just isn't that time to shave.
On Radio 4 there is a programme with historic trials from the Old Bailey. I catch a little bit of it washing up. A woman tried for treason - having her drunken husband killed for a penny.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17260420-42-person238&div=t17260420-42
She said he beat her, she said he kept her hungry, she said he drank, that he was no good. The head was found in a bucket on horseferry road 1726, just on the edge of that marshy map.
I wonder if there is something inevitable and ancient to the places where poverty of spirit collects.
On the last day of term I see the young, white, shouting mum with her mum and a friend. The friend has a pitball, straining at a lead, albino bollocks, barking. 'yes, armed with intent' the friend says. 'He's going to say bye byes' says the mum of her mum, her scottish accent with finality. Only a bit older than me, the grandma, nice, bright, friendly but once I wondered if she was Mary Bell, if they all had secret identies.
Is it an age thing? The awareness of history. The textile designer friend has started mudlarking. He has found digging at the side of the Thames, a golden pin, a roman coin, and a medieval tile with a dog paw print dried into the clay. Real treasure. Fine, beautiful forgotten things. Small, precious with the touch of long gone fingers, the warmth and jump of a dog. He says he wants to talk more about this now than textiles though all of the designers come to him, Donna Karan, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Giles Deacon - even (and he shudders, though says she is nice, funny, sophisticated) Victoria Beckham.
I have been worried since the last post that I didn't get near to describing how unrelenting the bombing was here. I mentioned a couple of incidents and yet night after night the bombs kept coming. Even if one dropped and caused slight damage another could be dropped on top of that.
April 19th 148 killed and 564 seriously injured
May 10th 110 killed and 385 seriously injured.
'The whole area suffered and it was noticeable in the morning air that an invisible veil of plaster dust hung its odour over the air of every street, bombed or not bombed, for Westminster was impregnated with it.'
Westminster Abbey, watched, cared for, kept at attention - 'observer posts were positioned at tatical points, and here, at nearly one hundred feet above ground level, the Abbey firewatchers spent their blitz nights. Areas of these roofs are flat and safe and solid, like the secure decks of some enormous stone ship. The pinnacles, the spires, the buttresses that appear from the ground reasonably diminutive grow huge in this strange and isolated land above. It is though one stood in a new city of white and black stone, each pinnacle above and below glinting like the spire of a seperate church, with the flying buttresses presenting an architecture quite new and of no formal meaning. The ground below is forgotten, only this queer, beautiful but unintelligible island exists. Such an edifice flickering in the reddish reflection of London's fires must have been a mermorable sight - with around the black sea of the streets dotted here and there with fires, like pools of red phosphorus.'
Though I think that a sense of survival is what we now crave, but only because we are safe.
I buy a card of that 'Keep calm and carry on' poster and put it up in the hall way by the door. It is a flashpoint for all of us, late, putting shoes on, my eldest son often oblivious to the real demands of time and not his own concentration of interests. 'Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!' I shout. But then seeing it there, I feel I insult the real message. All I have to do is get two boys to get their trainers on and their hair brushed and to school on time. The real 'Keep calm and carry on' is stoic but terrible, an oblivion, a self medication to the horror of surrounding death and destruction. The thin, neutral typeface, so strong, so resililent. My mum and dad grew up during the war. I have always felt they trained me for another, by my lack of complaining, grin and bear it, potential bravery. A very polite put up and shut up. But it has made me weak, not strong. For the strong things I felt have not always been said. I got used to not saying them.
I admit defeat, I haven't gone to Westminster Abbey, I haven't gone to Westminster Archive - I haven't had time. I have decided this time just to describe - here, what I have seen, the bits and pieces.
Finally, I was crossing the road on the way to pick up a parcel from the sorting office - just round the back of House of Fraser, and I saw something glittering on the road. I thought for a minute it was a dropped brooch with a central glinting jewel, and even when I was close I still thought it was a brooch with a jewel but there on the tarmac was the head of a pigeon, about the size of my thumb pad, his eye open and bright, just lying there, looking up, dead, decapitated, as if from no where.
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