Today I take my eldest son to the church. He doesn't really want to go, but he is off school with a rather vague tummy ache. I was all ready to put him into class despite his grumbling but he had statistics and the time of year on his side - his teacher said, seeing his pleading face - 'there is a bug going round and it is contagious, I would take him home'. I could see a flicker of triumph in his pale blue eyes and by 11 o'clock after a few rounds of undisturbed-by-brother Wii while I vacuumed and cleaned he announced he was better. 'Oh good.' I said we can go to a church. He wanted to argue and did try but we went anyhow.
Briefly before that we played his christmas game of 'Rush Hour'. I bought it for him with some money from a great aunt. I think it is a game for one person really but we helped each other. I hadn't played before. On a gridded board small plastic coloured models of cars, vans and lorries fit in units of two or three squares. From a natty drawer under the grey square grid, cards tell you how to arrange the cars according to level - beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert - then you have to free a red car by reversing or advancing. I am not completely sure I have pinned down the essence of the game by this description - basically the car is stuck and you have to free it in as few moves as possible. We work through beginners to intermediate, high fiving, and only writing this do I think probably a pattern emerged, but I/we didn't notice it. We just started each match from scratch - always thrilled when the red car emerged free.
At Sloane Square I expect him to ask if we can go to Peter Jones. It is where we buy shoes and indeed toys. But he doesn't. I think he is slightly fascinated by this glimpse into his mum's secret world - what his mum does when he isn't there. Almost a philosophical question for a young child. If you are there for them? Who are you without them? Though perhaps I am worrying about this anyhow, for as UOL and I attempt to fathom our L there are a few pockets of uneasy but exciting secrets squeezed into my days and occasional evenings that never had any spare time before. Here too, writing this - attempting to describe what I think - it is apparent it is only ever an approximation, a sweeter more lilting version of the mess that I often feel, and it reveals the impossibility to trace or catch thought fully.
My eldest child is by nature an absolute unbeliever. 'God's a baby in the bible and Allah is a pigeon' he once said to me. His sharp brutal wit shocking me. He is still a little kid. Even Santa gets fairly short shrift - ' I know it is you mum.' Today, despite the irritation about the non tummy ache it is nice for the two of us just to be together. For he skips alongside and holds my hand. Which his younger brother normally does. Though his questions are like rounds of sharp pins.
'Can you measure a globe and work out how many miles the earth is?'
I have a stab at explaining scale
His mind fizzing like strip light flashing to on. Aha he says, it depends how big the drawing is. A drawing of a house could be more centimetres than a street. Or a town. Yes. I say.
How many is it?'
'What?'
'Miles round the earth?'
'I don't know. Shall we look it up when we get home?.....' That feeling other parents might just know.
A pause.
'I love you Mum.' Back into thought.
In the church he is ill at ease. He attempts to swagger against the dim grainy light. 'It's creepy Mum.' He says. No. I say, look at the pictures in the windows. The stained glass is rich with beautiful colours and drawn figures but he doesn't know the basic bible stories and can't really follow the narratives. I made this choice early, instinctively, not to take him to church, not to send him to a church school but seeing him so out of water in a place of worship makes me doubt myself. Not even to think about what to believe seems a position of lack. We look at the font, the ceiling buttresses, he notices and likes the light fittings. 'The whole place is HUGE mum' He says. He is right. The nave, the width of the church is extraordinary, almost a square. Later I read it is the widest church in London, eclipsing St Pauls by 4 inches. Then as we inspect the pulpit. 'Is this what you do for your JOB?' A slight incredulity. 'No' I say. 'I just like looking. Having a think. Having a think about the history.' 'Oh.' He says. We both like the Memorial Chapel at the south side. It is like an elegant peaceful room with dining chairs. But perhaps for both of us a more manageable size.
Sitting writing this, with a guide book on my knee, the Memorial chapel being slight denigrated for being a later, lesser design I realise I could have helped him more if I had been able to tell him the history. Broken my own rules by looking it up before we went. I feel slightly disappointed that I hadn't thought this through. Sometimes there just isn't the time to do things properly. Though also, I hope, just to look, without pressure is a good thing too.
Built in 1888 by John Dando Sedding who was inspired by the work of Pugin ( see Farm St ) and an exponent of the Arts and Craft Movement John Betjeman later called it 'the cathedral of Arts and Crafts'. Their message to make everyday things beautiful and to revere Nature through crafts, painting and architecture, in a time of industrialism, The East window (which saved the church from demolition in the 1970s with the help of JB ) is the work of Burne Jones and William Morris and was meant to be a window with 'thousands of bright little figures.' Though infact there are 48 prophets, apostles and saints against a William Morris natural foliage background. On the south wall, tucked into the back, under a stone carved freize of grapes that looks like it never got finished, there is a small Millais painting or sketch of Jesus in his father's carpentry workshop. Which is beautiful. A realistic idea of a workshop with dirt and dust, and wood. But I try to look it up and I can't find a reference to it. I wonder if I got it wrong. Though there is a painting at Tate Britain that seems to match some of what I remember - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_in_the_House_of_His_Parents, so maybe it is a sketch connected to that painting.
I have never liked the pre raphaelites or even the arts and crafts movement much. Both always seemed to be based on fantasy to me, but a slightly dishonest sexual/industrial fantasy, where women didn't come off very well. But I like this sketch, I like the realism, the sense of family. I might go back and look at it again. I wish too that we had slowed down and considered it together, but my son was itching by then to light the 20p candle I had promised if he was a good. Which we did.
Reading the history I start to like Mr Sedding - he designed and helped his wife complete the medieval style embroidery of the altar cloth, which is now at the side of the church behind glass, drawing the thistles at each end from those in his own garden and in an age when previously architects would not have spoken to the masons and carpenters he, an important architect of that time used 'to run across the scaffolding shouting with the builders in their own language'
Also I find he said.
"It is well for a man to have a circle of religious exercises that can so hedge him about, so get behind his life and wind themselves by long familiarity into his character, that they become part of his everyday existence…" .
Later, we pick up the youngest from school, and meet exh to go to the last counselling session for the boys. It is the first time exh has come and we are all nervous.
But we are signed off. The boys are really pleased that their Dad came. That he took part. That he saw their drawings. Though Exh says to me later, surprised. how disturbed the drawings seemed.
I think we have come a long way. A trapped red car surrounded by the juggernauts of alcoholism, denial, manipulation and my own part in all of those. I remember talking to someone I worked with at the time I felt completely trapped about setting up a website called 'Should I stay or should I go?' I would have liked it to exist. I wanted advice. I wanted to be given permission to leave. But, and I thought after playing that Rush Hour, that change is made by small moves of reverse and advance, reverse and advance, the pattern not quite clear, the solution often feeling far away, then a sudden run, a rush and the red car off the board into freedom. That it is worth learning to recognise even small feelings of being trapped and devising strategies of questioning curtailment early. But I also thought change itself is the same. It isn't a dramatic announcement but a series of tiny moves, of back tracking, sudden accelerations, of getting used to, of discovering, finding out if that route is possible while launching into happiness.
Amen
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