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.