I gave myself a bit of talking to after the last post, I had to try harder, to be a bit more determined to actually get into a church. It was no good just endlessly being 'a bit shy' to get through the door. Whatever it was I feared needed to be overcome. I have decided to make a list of some of those fears ( I might add to them later) but at the moment ( and slightly nonsensically) they seem to be the fear of:
a funny smell (specifically of dirty charity shops)
the suspicion in old people's gaze
the trust in old people's gazes,
belief,
expectation of belief,
non belief
stupidity,
expectation
not being able to escape.
being asked 'can I help you?'
not wanting to walk in on a fully submerged baptism. ( I am keen to get in the baptist church next)
I have read too in a book I bought called 'How to Read a Church' ( I bought it this summer but haven't had time to even dip into it until this week) that ' The Church is a symbol of heaven, of the world as it should and could be'. Aha, I thought when I read it that's the question I'm after. Perhaps if I was Mystery Worshipper that would be my final q n a 'Did the church symbolize heaven to you? As the world as it should and could be?' It is such a good question. Is the world as it should and could be? You could ask it of almost anything.
Determined, I ask exexdh if he can come and look after the boys on Wednesday so I can slip out to an evening bible and prayer meeting at the Baptist Church. Though, and it is a popular phrase, sometimes I think I should get out more. But not there.
Monday morning I wake up thinking 'Remember this was meant to be fun' and on tuesday, 'I just dread going'.
Then my new pal, a recentish single mum friend from school, asks if I would like to come after school on wednesday with her boys and my boys for her birthday tea party. Yes. We do. She and her boys are great. They came camping with us and calling ourselves the PSM (pissed single mums/ did I say I was perfect? oh no I'm not/ though we are talking two extra glasses of wine not falling on the floor) we worked side by side, laughing. But I am worried that it will make me late for the Baptist Church or that it will be hard to turn down a glass of wine, and I won't want to bustle myself in that door with even a whiff of alcohol. But mainly I think phew, I don't have to go and try.
My new thing is I have signed up for a Boris bike ( the recently started scheme in London - bikes that you collect and drop off at docking bays across the city for an annual/monthly/weekly/daily fee). I have done this specifically to be able to get easily to the greengrocers on Lupus Street in Pimlico. When the four of us first moved back to London we lived at the end of that street, under a bridge and around the corner, all us squashed in a tiny one bedroom peabody flat. It was at the time that dh was becoming exdh. And he just got d and d and d and d. And the rows were horrible. I would pass Manolo's every day on the two mile journey to and from school - pushing the youngest's buggy, goading, encouraging, singing to the increasingly angry and violent eldest. God, it is boring the tiny intricate details of how really difficult our life was then, like the workings of a clock, each hardship dependent on the other, each creating a new tiny trial, though really and I never seem to get to this bit I would like to list how I did get out, a how-to-guide, for sometimes I feel I am writing this for that myself, for I would have loved to have found this, found out it is possible to make your life nice or at least much much much much better. Back then, that school run was a daily dante's inferno, an epic voyage.
The shop had no inviting produce outside, no great window displays, it looked rather old fashioned and musty. I know it sounds mad but I walked past many times before I had the courage to go in. I don't know why, I find being visible hard. I have always thought I would be happier invisible but perhaps that is just the observer in me. But when I did turn the squeaky wheels of the buggy in I found this incredible thing. Manolo's supplied the fruit and veg to restuarants, their stock was very fresh, very seasonal, fine quality fruit and veg, but cheap. And Maria, the spanish shopkeeper was beautiful and kind and funny with an incredibly happy marriage to her greengrocer husband Manolo ( he does the buying and the deliveries). She called my youngest the 'little bird' when he reached out his still chubby hand from the restrain of the pushchair to pop cherry tomatoes into his mouth, and I would remonstrate with him while she laughed and allowed it, and told him about a real bird that used to come and fly down and steal the cherries from the doorway. Anyhow, all this to say that not only was I able to buy delicious food - pomegranates, artichokes, big field mushrooms alongside the staples, really good apples, delicious tomatoes that burst in your mouth with flavour, but it was, at that time, that very bleak and isolated time the one place I felt connected. I wasn't the only one. Old people still shuffle into the shop to buy a daily apple and small bag of potatoes and Maria gives them a chair and listens to them. I have heard her checking that they are taking their medicine, how they are. Once, she told me, an old lady collapsed onto her, both of them pinned down on the floor, until somone found them. And though I believed I maintained the pretence that I might just, at a pinch, come from the beautiful big houses nearby, that my life was ok, with my carefully picked clothes and constant cheer, there was a day when I miscalculated and I just didn't have enough money to pay, and Maria only smiled and said it was fine, I know you will pay me, I trust you, you can always come here and have what you want, writing down 'little bird' and the amount on a tiny scrap of paper kept in her till.
For the first time writing this bloody thing, I am crying.
Now I live the opposite side from the school and the shop is quite a long way away. But I still always try and go once a week but I can never manage it in the school holidays, and it has got harder now I am doing three days work not two, to find the time to get there and I haven't been able to get there for absolutely ages. But my plan is with a Boris bike I will be able to get there easily. This day, I do some other shopping and then walk onto hers. I am excited about the idea of cycling home, of using the bike for the first time, Through the door I notice a slump to Maria's posture, a little bit of weight put on, a guardedness to her welcome that I have never seen. I ask her about her summer, I ask her about the ongoing battle with the council to be allowed again to put the produce out on the street, I am prodding her to tell me what is wrong. Then, finally she starts to tell me, and I hadn't even noticed, Tesco's has opened up on the street and their own trade has, she says literally disappeared. She had thought, as I had done when we talked about it before it happened that it would bring more shoppers to the street and they could coexist. It is not true though, she says and she is holding back her own tears, she is throwing veg away every day, for everything, the parsnips, the celeriac, french green beans just stays on the shelves. The shop is shutting in November. Though, and she says the really upsetting thing is when her old customers come in for just a pack of celery and she can see through the milky transparency of that blue and red logoed bag, their tasteless apples and potatoes and flabby tomatoes. Now I am howling, literally howling because of her kindness and for the irretrievable, the careless harm, the damage done almost unnoticed. There is no history of greengrocers as far as I know. Or is this the start? But something very good will no longer be there, will have gone without a trace.
In a mild shock ( and yes, I can see a grief for a greengrocers might seem a trifle strong a term) but I think that is what I feel on this day, plus I have forgotten the boris bike map, and thought it would be obvious where the docking bay is but it isn't, I wander the ordered streets of pimlico. White, proud, affluent houses in precise, tree lined, gridded rows. It is the London of old Disney films, easy to imagine clean children marched by perambulator pushing nannies, smiling maids twirling with feather dusters, men in plush overcoats, women rustling. Now there are bugaboos in paint chart shades, personally trained bodies, pale caramel tans, a lot of cashmere and still, even now, builders vans and skips parked up.
Finally I find the bikes but the key doesn't work, the bike does not release. I have to walk home. With sudden inspiration I realise if I can find a church with it's door open I can get in and 'do it' and be able to get to my friend's tea party easily. Pimlico is packed with churches. I try two with no luck. Doors bolted tight. But around another street corner, another chuch, one I have never even seen before, howdydoodee St Gabriel's church door is wide open.
I walk in hesitantly, there is a woman in an old fashioned pinny cleaning. 'Is it ok just to have a look around' I say loudly and clearly. 'Yes', she says, smiling. I walk quietly, respectfully around. The air is still and dense, the hush disturbed by my presence. High vaulted ceiling giving heaven enough space, damp peeling damaged walls, the shinest, polished parquet floor ever. A child daubed mobile, white paint on black card, hung on a small statue of jesus as a boy. I think for a minute, slightly amused that it is halloween themed ghosts but on closer inspection I think they are angels. I sit at the back while the lady cleans. I think, good, I have got this done, like ticking a box.
I am reading 'Absence of Mind' easiest just to copy from the book jacket to explain, 'in this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought - science, religion, and consciousness' 'By defending the importance of individual reflection...... Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.' Reading it, snatches of it, on the tube on my way to work, a page or two in bed at the end of the day, is like the air in the church, dense and heavy, with slight shifts of movement as I read. I have flashes of excited comprehension but when I go back to copy them up, I lose the thread. I need more time, I think, to get to what I think.
Finally, something has happened which is so completely unexpected, so ludicrously like a plot, that I feel it is barely credible but it is true. The man I mentioned having once truly loved - turns up. We have been emailing each other for over a year, cautiously and kindly, with respect for our present family situations. He is married with a son. He left me, went to russia, came back with a pregnant wife. I never saw him again, or heard from him until this recent time and I found it very hard to recover from his absence, Though I did. Out of the blue he e mails to say his wife and son are away and he comes to my flat. He has always loved me he says. It seems a cliche and if I was you dear reader ( I know now there are a few ) I would doubt this, but he is a good man and an honourable one, and his anger and unhappiness and regret are near to poison. I say I think it is probably too late. I think I say, that I am almost irrelevant compared to inventing at least a window in his own trapped life.
After he has gone that night I email him to say I will probably write about you in this. He replies, 'the minute I walked through the door I knew I could be walking into your blog'.
So yes, another opened door.
Wednesday 29 September 2010
Tuesday 21 September 2010
CHC / Sacred Heart / Wesleyan Chapel, Horseferry Road
Yes. I saw the Pope. Briefly, on the friday. The boys were not back from swimming when I got home from work and I just walked up and waited for him to come out of Westminster Abbey. From far away I could recognise the stoop of his dipped head and the padding of white and red satin on the step of the abbey. Shortly after, the cavalcade of darkened windows sped past, a lady infront of me saying, 'I knew he'd come this way, I knew he'd come this way'. But I didn't really feel anything one way or the other, except perhaps that I had stood in the right place. Though I think I clapped or waved. And later wondered why.
There are only two churches left nearby now and both are on Horseferry Road. After these two I will have to go a little bit further afield - though not far really, Pimlico and St James or up Whitehall.
The Baptist Chapel on Horseferry road has a metal grille across the door and a billboard chained to the wall advertising Sunday services and a lunchtime one too but I have never seen the door open. It looks like a kind of Gordon Ramsey's nightmare of a church, a bit dirty, a bit down at heel, a chapel time forgot. Hmm, but I will have to try to go, and increasingly I have a sinking feeling that I will have to go to a service or run in and out through the jaws of that concertina metal gate at service time. The other church is only a few buildings away, on the corner, with stained glass and a porch and a pretty garden. Though I have only seen the door open once and the very young mums smoking on the church steps looked really doubtful when I said I wanted to have a quick look in and I bottled it. Also I have never managed to work out what sort of church it is - there is no sign and no advert of services.
I feel I am struggling. Not just with the churches. I went to Westminster Archive with a to do list. I had found a booklet at the archive 'Tracing the History of Your House' ( I think home would be a better word really, I can't be the only person without a house interested in history but perhaps I am just being prickly) and thought it was going to be easy. I had decided since Westminster Abbey to start at the beginning - to start at 1885 when this block was built or as near as I could, and then trace the families that had lived here. In the 1888 electoral register I had already found George Harry Davidson listed (women did not have the vote, were not listed) but the booklet said that 'The census enumerators' returns for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 are often the most exciting source for house historians. They list all the occupants present on census night. From 1851 their precise ages, occupations and places of birth are recorded together with their relationship to the head of the household' I imagined the knock at this door, and the feeling of importance answering who you all were, small faces peering out.
But in the Archive I felt only anxious. I didn't know how to work the microfiche and the pages jumped and danced, as I jiggled the glass plate, finding the magnified worn edges of photographed dust on acetate, then spinning across spidery scrawl. Just these Peabody blocks alone had pages and pages of dense black ink, like ants crawling. I couldn't read the script very well, the letters of the blocks were completely undecipherable and I felt increasingly agitated. I scrawled and scrawled through the names, the addresses, trying to match letters to other letters, trying to spot Davidson. Nothing was clear. My guess would be that in 1891 Thomas Roadnight a 34 year old Police Constable from Bucks in Aylesbury lived here with his wife Julia 33, daughter Jessie 10 and son Frederick 8 but at the moment it doesn't feel a very good guess ( though I have had an idea to match the capital letters of nearby street names from maps of the time to the block letters to decode the writing and will go back and try this) but even writing this I just feel anxious. I thought discovering these people would be fascinating and affirming but actually somehow it is the opposite, these invisible people make me feel invisible too. I'm not even sure that is right, but all that living: that noisy, hungry, shouting, kissing, bodily fluid living seemed transient, just a baton to be passed on.
I will keep going but have realised I had previously been lucky, stories just falling into my lap.
Late Sunday afternoon I pace that corner of Horseferry Rd. I must be able to get into one of them I reason. Though the old dread of entering a church, of looking needy returns. To be a supplicant. I see the door of the nameless church open, a small square sign says CHC and and I climb the stairs. In the porch there are many leaflets and I can hear a shuffle of presence inside the building. Through square stained glass window tiles I see people standing still. But strangely there is no noise, no music, no prayer. I shift uneasily pressing into the swing door. It doesn't give easily.
Of course I can't do it. Leaflets in hand I am back down the stairs, back down the street, then back home.
When I check CHC it stands for Cardinal Hume Centre, opened in 1986, set up as part of the work of Cardinal Hume to help the community to help the homeless. A hostel built later in 1989. Not a church at all.
But then history unfolding, it was originally a Wesleyan chapel built in 1814, then bought by the mother of the Countess of Gainsborough in 1927 and dedicated to the convent of Sacred Heart in thanks for a son recovering from a serious illness. Some demoliton took place, some building work started, then bombed out on 14th May 1944. Building started again in 1962 and was completed 1963 but the sisters of the eucharist vacated the sacred heart convent in 1986 and the centre was established. A strange combination on the same site, a methodist chapel from the tradition of preaching open air, in fields, in towns, taken over by an order of catholicism. After all John Wesley called the pope the antichrist. But in London both had been outsiders - hosting meetings in homes, suffering persecution and arrests, perched here, on this corner opposite where the workhouse had been.
Walking back from school the next morning, still proud in my new blue gold trimmed coat, I meet a man with grizzled face, crumpled in a full suit and bowler hat. I smile.
'What you laughing at.' He says.
Nothing. I said. 'You look great.'
Like a magician his stories unfold like coloured handkerchiefs from pockets. 'The funny thing was, I was standing under a building site, bang wang, a bucket of white paint, right on top of me,' His arms upraised, eyebrows up, eyes beady, 'But there, just infront of me, a bag full of all this.' He gestures to his suit. 'And oh my goodness look at these!' He points to his toes. 'Hundred pound shoes.' I nod. Looking at the shiny satin tie. 'And you know, the other night? Fishing....' He is a showman. There might be doves under that hat. There is enough time for me to savour the idea. Him. Hungry but resourceful. In his suit. Fishing. 'Out pops a man in a bra and pants.' he says 'Oooh, and he said, will you fiddle with me willy?' Then, quick like brackets in the conversation, ' I just need one pound forty.' I give him two pounds.
The lollipop lady on our street watches the transaction with suspicion. In the many surprising things about where I live a lollipop lady is another one.
There are only two churches left nearby now and both are on Horseferry Road. After these two I will have to go a little bit further afield - though not far really, Pimlico and St James or up Whitehall.
The Baptist Chapel on Horseferry road has a metal grille across the door and a billboard chained to the wall advertising Sunday services and a lunchtime one too but I have never seen the door open. It looks like a kind of Gordon Ramsey's nightmare of a church, a bit dirty, a bit down at heel, a chapel time forgot. Hmm, but I will have to try to go, and increasingly I have a sinking feeling that I will have to go to a service or run in and out through the jaws of that concertina metal gate at service time. The other church is only a few buildings away, on the corner, with stained glass and a porch and a pretty garden. Though I have only seen the door open once and the very young mums smoking on the church steps looked really doubtful when I said I wanted to have a quick look in and I bottled it. Also I have never managed to work out what sort of church it is - there is no sign and no advert of services.
I feel I am struggling. Not just with the churches. I went to Westminster Archive with a to do list. I had found a booklet at the archive 'Tracing the History of Your House' ( I think home would be a better word really, I can't be the only person without a house interested in history but perhaps I am just being prickly) and thought it was going to be easy. I had decided since Westminster Abbey to start at the beginning - to start at 1885 when this block was built or as near as I could, and then trace the families that had lived here. In the 1888 electoral register I had already found George Harry Davidson listed (women did not have the vote, were not listed) but the booklet said that 'The census enumerators' returns for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 are often the most exciting source for house historians. They list all the occupants present on census night. From 1851 their precise ages, occupations and places of birth are recorded together with their relationship to the head of the household' I imagined the knock at this door, and the feeling of importance answering who you all were, small faces peering out.
But in the Archive I felt only anxious. I didn't know how to work the microfiche and the pages jumped and danced, as I jiggled the glass plate, finding the magnified worn edges of photographed dust on acetate, then spinning across spidery scrawl. Just these Peabody blocks alone had pages and pages of dense black ink, like ants crawling. I couldn't read the script very well, the letters of the blocks were completely undecipherable and I felt increasingly agitated. I scrawled and scrawled through the names, the addresses, trying to match letters to other letters, trying to spot Davidson. Nothing was clear. My guess would be that in 1891 Thomas Roadnight a 34 year old Police Constable from Bucks in Aylesbury lived here with his wife Julia 33, daughter Jessie 10 and son Frederick 8 but at the moment it doesn't feel a very good guess ( though I have had an idea to match the capital letters of nearby street names from maps of the time to the block letters to decode the writing and will go back and try this) but even writing this I just feel anxious. I thought discovering these people would be fascinating and affirming but actually somehow it is the opposite, these invisible people make me feel invisible too. I'm not even sure that is right, but all that living: that noisy, hungry, shouting, kissing, bodily fluid living seemed transient, just a baton to be passed on.
I will keep going but have realised I had previously been lucky, stories just falling into my lap.
Late Sunday afternoon I pace that corner of Horseferry Rd. I must be able to get into one of them I reason. Though the old dread of entering a church, of looking needy returns. To be a supplicant. I see the door of the nameless church open, a small square sign says CHC and and I climb the stairs. In the porch there are many leaflets and I can hear a shuffle of presence inside the building. Through square stained glass window tiles I see people standing still. But strangely there is no noise, no music, no prayer. I shift uneasily pressing into the swing door. It doesn't give easily.
Of course I can't do it. Leaflets in hand I am back down the stairs, back down the street, then back home.
When I check CHC it stands for Cardinal Hume Centre, opened in 1986, set up as part of the work of Cardinal Hume to help the community to help the homeless. A hostel built later in 1989. Not a church at all.
But then history unfolding, it was originally a Wesleyan chapel built in 1814, then bought by the mother of the Countess of Gainsborough in 1927 and dedicated to the convent of Sacred Heart in thanks for a son recovering from a serious illness. Some demoliton took place, some building work started, then bombed out on 14th May 1944. Building started again in 1962 and was completed 1963 but the sisters of the eucharist vacated the sacred heart convent in 1986 and the centre was established. A strange combination on the same site, a methodist chapel from the tradition of preaching open air, in fields, in towns, taken over by an order of catholicism. After all John Wesley called the pope the antichrist. But in London both had been outsiders - hosting meetings in homes, suffering persecution and arrests, perched here, on this corner opposite where the workhouse had been.
Walking back from school the next morning, still proud in my new blue gold trimmed coat, I meet a man with grizzled face, crumpled in a full suit and bowler hat. I smile.
'What you laughing at.' He says.
Nothing. I said. 'You look great.'
Like a magician his stories unfold like coloured handkerchiefs from pockets. 'The funny thing was, I was standing under a building site, bang wang, a bucket of white paint, right on top of me,' His arms upraised, eyebrows up, eyes beady, 'But there, just infront of me, a bag full of all this.' He gestures to his suit. 'And oh my goodness look at these!' He points to his toes. 'Hundred pound shoes.' I nod. Looking at the shiny satin tie. 'And you know, the other night? Fishing....' He is a showman. There might be doves under that hat. There is enough time for me to savour the idea. Him. Hungry but resourceful. In his suit. Fishing. 'Out pops a man in a bra and pants.' he says 'Oooh, and he said, will you fiddle with me willy?' Then, quick like brackets in the conversation, ' I just need one pound forty.' I give him two pounds.
The lollipop lady on our street watches the transaction with suspicion. In the many surprising things about where I live a lollipop lady is another one.
Tuesday 7 September 2010
Westminster Abbey II
Children back to school. Back to the mantra of Westminster Abbey/ Westminster Archive. I try to get the cleaning done as fast as I can to get to the Abbey again. I have a plan. I am going to hire one of the audio guides. Though I feel slightly rudderless and melancholic, the children have consumed my time for weeks and I am back to the solitary duel of trying to write and keep us all respectable. But the chores take longer than I want: the washing, the beds, phoning for appointments, stowing camping equipment into cupboards, sorting out worn out clothes or clothes too small. Just as I am finishing the vacuuming the machine loses suction and I realise I haven't changed the bag for ages. Somehow (just full?) the bag has burst inside the machine and months of dust and hair has been collecting around the bag not just in it. Like very fine grey flour, our skin, clouds in the clean kitchen. I can see into the dusty belly of our home - dried pasta, cheerios, hair clips, quite a lot of lego, two gogos, a favourite glove matted with doormat hair.
At that moment I get a text from 'capitalist' dad saying that he wants to read the blog. I panic. At least, as my brother says when I text him frantically for advice it isn't the feudal bastards.
I feel I am starting to get myself into difficult water. Exexdh recently read it, he fished around and found it. He seems ok but sometimes it is hard to tell. I am not completely sure I would be. I am not sure 'captitalist' dad will be either though there is nothing really wrong with what I said. Also, and importantly I was just trying to bend circumstances into an idea or a debate. My aim is to write as truthfully as I possibly can but it is hard thing to do. I want to be able to describe and include everything. All the strands of life. I want it to be as near how I feel and think and see as possible. But just the way I write is sometimes too pretty, too la, la, too contrived. Though really there should be more inane thoughts: clothes, celebrities, the diet I am on to try and lose my tummy fat (porridge, lots of omelettes, no white flour) and perhaps a little bit more day to day anguish. I really do find things hard sometimes. I have to trick myself with a fantastic new navy blue coat with beautiful big buttons and gold trim. I have to meditate, make jokes, try not to drink too much. I have to keep going. But there are also truths at the edge of what I'm writing, things that don't make sense to the picture I am building, things that are too complicated to explain. For example I spent the last week of the school holidays with the boys and a friend on a fabulous trip to a water park in Egypt. It was a free press trip from my work. I have to write a feature for the paper. Which I have never done before. I was tempted not to mention it, I didn't go to a church there and it doesn't fit in with what I want to write about. But the omission allows me to build the fiction of the poor me, poor me stoic brave heroine without mentioning the ridiculously lucky perks.
Also, and there is a deep breath here, I had no idea when I started writing this that I would want to try to tell the truth. My truth. When exexDH was just H and I started to notice empty cans of lager hidden in our home, I didn't tell anyone. When I noticed that all the holiday souvenir bottles, the cheap tequila with a bright red plastic hat top, the greek brandy, the firewater without a name, tucked away in the downstairs toilet had been secretly finished, left empty. ( We had a house then, I had bought it, and paid for it with a long commute, a house I could only just afford.) I didn't tell anyone. I didn't say that I would get up in the morning at the weekend and play intricate games with playmobil for hours with my young sons while H lay in bed, hungover, cross, depressed. Or worse when I thought the morning was going well, everybody up, everybody cheerful and I would suddenly realise that H was completely D and it was perhaps only 11 in the morning. My boss at the job I did and hated had a DH and she told me she lay on the kitchen floor and cried because she felt so trapped. She said she phoned the Samaritans. I said - 'Get him out! Get counselling! Get the children ok!' She followed my advice and I learned from what she said and lay on the kitchen floor and cried, I phoned Samaritans, I felt so trapped. But I didn't let myself name what was happening.
Third time down to parliament square. Tarpaulin still tight to the fenced off square. I thought I had read that everyone but Brian Haw ( the peace camp founder) had been removed but it isn't true. Haw ( I think ) is the only tent allowed on the green but others still cluster on the edge of the pavements. I fish around now on the internet to find out what is happening Two tents perched on a corner, flat on the slabs.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9277/
I have also found a sort of precedent in 1887, the unemployed took to sleeping out in Trafalgar Square and St James’ Park, and the Social Democratic Federation began organising them under the slogan ‘not charity but work’. The police began clearing the Square using force, so that minor clashes between the police and the unemployed became a daily event. Finally, all meetings in it were banned. November 13th 1887 two squadrons of life guards from Whitehall dispersed the crowds, one man dying on 'Bloody Sunday'. I have also read that the suffragettes detonated a bomb in Westminster Abbey June 1914 and I am shocked and suddenly interested in the history of civil disobedience, the powerful undercurrent of the history of protest, the power of organised anger. Here from a newspaper report the next day.
'Beyond the fact that the police have in their possession a feather boa, a guidebook and a small silk bag found in a chair nearby there is nothing in the nature of a clue to the perpetrator of the outrage and such articles, or course, may have belonged to an ordinary Abbey visitor.' NYT 12 June 1914
The posters here say, 'The Dispossessed.' 'Not a protest for peace. A demand.'
For the second time I use my wes res card to gain free entrance into Westminster Abbey. Inside, something has changed I think. I can see, turning my eyes right, down the nave, to the high narrow beauty of the vaulted ceiling, as if air and vision is trapped up there in the delicate fanned shapes and it is stunning. I cannot believe that this view was here before. I remember some restoration work taking place, maybe the view was blocked off, I think, I cannot have seen it so differently. But the audio guides, which I queue to receive, are small and grey, like a block in my hand. I want to ask the girl about the view and what happened to the white, long thin phones from a few weeks ago? But I don't. What I described wasn't quite right. My truth is hazy. Perhaps if I went again the audio guides would be black and sleek?
I follow the guide diligently. But there isn't really anything here in the main church that I didn't notice without it - the commentary feels as piecemeal and pecking at the whole thing as my own attempt, just an approximation. But I feel tense and miserable. I needn't have come back I think. Then in the old cloister, through an entrance that I hadn't found, hadn't seen, under a beautiful carved christ is a beautiful octagonal room, the Chapter House, light with old vaulting and the remnants of 1400 wall paintings, scenes from the Apocalypse including Doomsday. This is where the monks came and worshipped every day before the abbey that stands now was built. Beside this, to the left, coming out, a sign saying the oldest door in England. The oak door put in place in the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey's founder, Edward the Confessor. It makes it the only surviving Anglo Saxon door in Britain. Apparently made from one tree, its rings suggest it grew between AD 924 and 1030, probably in Essex. The simple function of it, a door that has been opened and shut for nearly a thousand years.
Back out and under the old, thick, cold arched walls to the beautiful small cloister with the thin, pretty fountain is the infirmary clustured round the courtyard. The audio guide tells me the monks suffered from obesity and drink, perhaps like us, protected and safe, they had lost the strict boundaries of survival and couldn't control the basic instinct for more. Though at one pont half the monks were killed by bubonic plague. I find too, three beautiful early tombs in the main cloister, the earliest - Gilbert Crispin Abbot 1085 -1117, the figure flattened and polished by time, but the form, so simple, so exactly human I find it really moving.
That night ironing school uniforms I have a sudden realisation. I have viewed it all wrong. I should have started in the oldest part, moved through and away from the thick walls, past the cloister into the Abbey, then the soaring heights and beauty and human acheivement of the vaulted high light ceilings would be a revelation. It is like finding the beginning unexpectedly, right in the middle of something else, a knot untangled.
At that moment I get a text from 'capitalist' dad saying that he wants to read the blog. I panic. At least, as my brother says when I text him frantically for advice it isn't the feudal bastards.
I feel I am starting to get myself into difficult water. Exexdh recently read it, he fished around and found it. He seems ok but sometimes it is hard to tell. I am not completely sure I would be. I am not sure 'captitalist' dad will be either though there is nothing really wrong with what I said. Also, and importantly I was just trying to bend circumstances into an idea or a debate. My aim is to write as truthfully as I possibly can but it is hard thing to do. I want to be able to describe and include everything. All the strands of life. I want it to be as near how I feel and think and see as possible. But just the way I write is sometimes too pretty, too la, la, too contrived. Though really there should be more inane thoughts: clothes, celebrities, the diet I am on to try and lose my tummy fat (porridge, lots of omelettes, no white flour) and perhaps a little bit more day to day anguish. I really do find things hard sometimes. I have to trick myself with a fantastic new navy blue coat with beautiful big buttons and gold trim. I have to meditate, make jokes, try not to drink too much. I have to keep going. But there are also truths at the edge of what I'm writing, things that don't make sense to the picture I am building, things that are too complicated to explain. For example I spent the last week of the school holidays with the boys and a friend on a fabulous trip to a water park in Egypt. It was a free press trip from my work. I have to write a feature for the paper. Which I have never done before. I was tempted not to mention it, I didn't go to a church there and it doesn't fit in with what I want to write about. But the omission allows me to build the fiction of the poor me, poor me stoic brave heroine without mentioning the ridiculously lucky perks.
Also, and there is a deep breath here, I had no idea when I started writing this that I would want to try to tell the truth. My truth. When exexDH was just H and I started to notice empty cans of lager hidden in our home, I didn't tell anyone. When I noticed that all the holiday souvenir bottles, the cheap tequila with a bright red plastic hat top, the greek brandy, the firewater without a name, tucked away in the downstairs toilet had been secretly finished, left empty. ( We had a house then, I had bought it, and paid for it with a long commute, a house I could only just afford.) I didn't tell anyone. I didn't say that I would get up in the morning at the weekend and play intricate games with playmobil for hours with my young sons while H lay in bed, hungover, cross, depressed. Or worse when I thought the morning was going well, everybody up, everybody cheerful and I would suddenly realise that H was completely D and it was perhaps only 11 in the morning. My boss at the job I did and hated had a DH and she told me she lay on the kitchen floor and cried because she felt so trapped. She said she phoned the Samaritans. I said - 'Get him out! Get counselling! Get the children ok!' She followed my advice and I learned from what she said and lay on the kitchen floor and cried, I phoned Samaritans, I felt so trapped. But I didn't let myself name what was happening.
Third time down to parliament square. Tarpaulin still tight to the fenced off square. I thought I had read that everyone but Brian Haw ( the peace camp founder) had been removed but it isn't true. Haw ( I think ) is the only tent allowed on the green but others still cluster on the edge of the pavements. I fish around now on the internet to find out what is happening Two tents perched on a corner, flat on the slabs.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9277/
I have also found a sort of precedent in 1887, the unemployed took to sleeping out in Trafalgar Square and St James’ Park, and the Social Democratic Federation began organising them under the slogan ‘not charity but work’. The police began clearing the Square using force, so that minor clashes between the police and the unemployed became a daily event. Finally, all meetings in it were banned. November 13th 1887 two squadrons of life guards from Whitehall dispersed the crowds, one man dying on 'Bloody Sunday'. I have also read that the suffragettes detonated a bomb in Westminster Abbey June 1914 and I am shocked and suddenly interested in the history of civil disobedience, the powerful undercurrent of the history of protest, the power of organised anger. Here from a newspaper report the next day.
'Beyond the fact that the police have in their possession a feather boa, a guidebook and a small silk bag found in a chair nearby there is nothing in the nature of a clue to the perpetrator of the outrage and such articles, or course, may have belonged to an ordinary Abbey visitor.' NYT 12 June 1914
The posters here say, 'The Dispossessed.' 'Not a protest for peace. A demand.'
For the second time I use my wes res card to gain free entrance into Westminster Abbey. Inside, something has changed I think. I can see, turning my eyes right, down the nave, to the high narrow beauty of the vaulted ceiling, as if air and vision is trapped up there in the delicate fanned shapes and it is stunning. I cannot believe that this view was here before. I remember some restoration work taking place, maybe the view was blocked off, I think, I cannot have seen it so differently. But the audio guides, which I queue to receive, are small and grey, like a block in my hand. I want to ask the girl about the view and what happened to the white, long thin phones from a few weeks ago? But I don't. What I described wasn't quite right. My truth is hazy. Perhaps if I went again the audio guides would be black and sleek?
I follow the guide diligently. But there isn't really anything here in the main church that I didn't notice without it - the commentary feels as piecemeal and pecking at the whole thing as my own attempt, just an approximation. But I feel tense and miserable. I needn't have come back I think. Then in the old cloister, through an entrance that I hadn't found, hadn't seen, under a beautiful carved christ is a beautiful octagonal room, the Chapter House, light with old vaulting and the remnants of 1400 wall paintings, scenes from the Apocalypse including Doomsday. This is where the monks came and worshipped every day before the abbey that stands now was built. Beside this, to the left, coming out, a sign saying the oldest door in England. The oak door put in place in the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey's founder, Edward the Confessor. It makes it the only surviving Anglo Saxon door in Britain. Apparently made from one tree, its rings suggest it grew between AD 924 and 1030, probably in Essex. The simple function of it, a door that has been opened and shut for nearly a thousand years.
Back out and under the old, thick, cold arched walls to the beautiful small cloister with the thin, pretty fountain is the infirmary clustured round the courtyard. The audio guide tells me the monks suffered from obesity and drink, perhaps like us, protected and safe, they had lost the strict boundaries of survival and couldn't control the basic instinct for more. Though at one pont half the monks were killed by bubonic plague. I find too, three beautiful early tombs in the main cloister, the earliest - Gilbert Crispin Abbot 1085 -1117, the figure flattened and polished by time, but the form, so simple, so exactly human I find it really moving.
That night ironing school uniforms I have a sudden realisation. I have viewed it all wrong. I should have started in the oldest part, moved through and away from the thick walls, past the cloister into the Abbey, then the soaring heights and beauty and human acheivement of the vaulted high light ceilings would be a revelation. It is like finding the beginning unexpectedly, right in the middle of something else, a knot untangled.
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