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.