Guard's Chapel, Birdcage Walk

My guilty pleasure on Sunday mornings is Radio 2 Love Songs. While the children watch Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles ( I have a feeling that letting them do that should be on my guilt list too?) I clear up or put the washing on and turn the dial from R4 and sing. l love the combination of cheesy tunes and heartfelt messages. Everything I would have sneered at in my pre children, arty world seems really valuable and valid. 'To my darling wife. I love you so very much.' To my loving husband you are a great dad and a wonderful husband.' 'Through the ups and downs, through thick and thin we have made it together.'

Well done. I think. Well done. Like listening to shiny medals of courageous love.

I don't even think I have envy, I just appreciate the possibility, the 'proof' of a solid thing, a celebrated partnership. Care and kindness at the core.

Afterwards, the boys and I play playmobil - creating an expedition to rescue endangered species from a far flung land. Though, somehow there is a restaurant for monkeys to eat bananas with the money they made from selling the provisions for the voyage and a king who drives a police car with his friend the squirrel.

Exexdh arrives to take over because I have made the arrangement to slip out to go to the Guard's Chapel. I have broken my own rules and checked on the website, though it gave me no detail beyond a rather vague instruction that there is a service every sunday at 11am and sometimes at midday too. Though imagine my relief that the public are welcome. Otherwise I would have had to try and muscle my way in on a soldiers church!

The day is beautiful. Blue crisp sky, autumn light. A treat to be out, on my own, doing something I want to do. I enjoy this feeling briefly before remembering that this rarely won treat might be better spent reading a book with a delicious cup of coffee, or going to an exhibition, not dreading getting into a church.

Have you ever been to St James's Park? It is the most ludicrously pretty park in London. Squirrels sit on the railings and nuzzle nuts from your fingers ( not mine - I'm too hesitant - but the boys love it), there are really beautiful and thoughtfully planted flowerbeds, a bridge that crosses the man made lake, with views of the war office that look like a grown up Disney land ( tricky to imagine, but true! Go!) and ( I feel there should be a drum roll.........) Pelicans. Yes Pelicans! They are so completely bonkers a species. But here. Being photographed, ( or even weirder to imagine - asleep, in the dark , sitting on a nest, or still on the water) as you read this. In central london! Finally, a playground where you can push your kid in a swing and look to see if the flag is flying on Buckingham Palace, and wonder if the queen is lonely, and watching you, from her bedroom window.

However, I walk around the side of the park, by now, hesitant. I hope I can find the church easily for I never walk this way, have never actually seen it, only know it to exist from my compulsive map reading, for as early as my 1869 map it says 'Garrison chapel'. But it is easy - set back behind the railings a beautiful simple, unexpectedly-concrete building with a cross on it. Then posters that advertise the guardsmen's museum, and also a soldiers shop for children, and tanks at the gate.

On the steps of the chapel is a soldier in a kilt with bagpipes talking on his mobile. He says as I near, ' I better go, I will be playing shortly.' But remains chatting on his phone. I am trying to peer through the glass of the entrance, I can hear music but it looks dark within. Suddenly I realise it is packed. Men in the thick weave of uniform, stood, so close to the glass they cause the dark. I keep peering in, moving along the glass to work out the space, I catch a glimpse of the nave and a golden altar area, and then a door is pushed open from inside in invitation, an order of service is pushed into my hand and a handsome black guy in uniform has stepped aside to let me have a chair.

I am in a service!
The church is packed. The music is beautiful. Everyone is singing a hymn. There are dense pockets of only soldiers but many dignitaries too, standing tall, shoulder to shoulder. I am so amazed to come out of my own life to this, to this solidarity, and high soaring choir and strong men singing that I nearly cry, but I don't, unexpectedly I join in.

The chapel is beautiful. The main structure is plain smooth concrete, high walls up to a wooden ceiling and flags hanging down. At the end, is an amazing old, golden, painted apse, which doesn't make sense in this sixties building but looks beautiful. We are into the National Anthem. Everyone straight backed. Then:

O Trinity of love and power
Our brethren shield in danger's hour:
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoeer they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.

Sung with such resolute demand.

I don't know about anything. But inside that church there is a certaintity and I think it is this: We are brave. We have survived in great adversity. Not everyone does. We give thanks. (I sometimes feel all of those things but I haven't been to war and even I can see it sounds trite.) This was a homecoming for the London Regiment of the Territorial army, back from Afghanistan. Men from all walks of life - estate agents, postmen, business consultants, who have gone on a tour of duty.

I found these quotes from people setting out:

Lance Corporal George Anderson- An estate agent working for Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward who described civilian life as “mincing around London making money for someone else”. and “The most exciting thing that happens all week is getting a parking ticket.”

Lieutenant Pete Quentin, 26, a Cambridge graduate and former research fellow at the think-tank Civitas, said the threat gave him a better perspective on life and made him appreciate his family and friends.

As if there is an evolutionary dead end to being safe. As if there is a sense of 'real' in these extremes. These men have been to the edge of that safety, to the rough terrain, to the skirmishes of life and death and returned. Here they are safe with their families and singing in this church. Their war carrying on a long, long way a way - a hazy, incomprehensible distance from us.

My favourite anti war story is seeing a sloaney middle-aged woman with a head scarf and a harvest festival-style, good-works basket on the tube years ago when I was a student. Pinned to her cardigan was a homemade badge, biro-scrawled, wonky writing on feint lined paper, and then wrapped in shiny sellotape wound round and round it said 'I don't like the armed forces.' Just that. It seemed an unlikely and mildly ridiculous protest but utterly heartfelt.

And when London stopped still and the estimated 2 million marched against going into war in Iraq, h and me went with our new tiny baby to Hyde Park and stood with a Picasso dove placard in the crowd. Though, beyond a lazy, ' I don't really like war ' and perhaps 'I don't think the truth is being told about the motives for this.' I didn't exactly know what I felt, and worried that it had been more of photo opportunity for a much photographed new baby and it's proud parents, though later we realised with disappointment that we hadn't put a film in the camera and there were no pictures.

We lived then, in the small peabody flat, near Chelsea Barracks, and witnessed one night, craning our heads, in the dark, above street lights, the military departing. Traffic lights stop-starting the column of camouflaged tanks, trucks, light guns, landrovers that rumbled on and and on, for a very, very long time. I imagined somebody, their head out of a window in Iraq watching their arrival with true fear. My own slightly sentimental anxieties for this world and my baby son, felt rather luxurious that night.

I am not certain what I think. The power in that church was incredible. It was like a world I had never known. True belief, belted out. Though what was being believed in I wasn't sure.

Later I discover Guard's Chapel, initially built in 1838 was bombed in the blitz and then again on 18th June 1944, later rebuilt in 1963. I have got used to these phrases, almost got used to how much was bombed around here. But, and I think there should be a careful pause here. I discover in 1944 it was bombed on a sunday morning, just after the service had started at 11 o'clock when the church was packed. A distant buzzing was heard by the congregation that grew louder and turned into a roar, drowning out the hymn. Then the engine cut out and the V1 glided down and exploded on the roof of the chapel. The whole roof collapsed. 121 military and civilians were killed and 141 seriously injured. Only the Bishop of Maidstone conducting the service was totally unhurt for the altar was covered by a portico (the one still in the church today,)and it had sheltered him from the blast. It was said that after the explosion the alter candles were still burning.

It took 2 days to dig the dead and injured out of the devastation. News of this awful tragedy was suppressed although rumours of the disaster soon spread across London.

I meant to write with grave concern about David Cameron, his cuts, the businesses already closing around here and the tense faces of the civil servants on their way to work but unexpectedly this, this terrible tale was provided, almost ready made.

Amen