Sunday morning. It is Radio 2 love songs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle time and I am waiting for exh to come and look after the boys so I can go to church. He is late. I am disorganised. My hair is wet and I am trying to wrap christmas presents for my best friend who I haven't seen since just before christmas. How does that happen? We are going to hers for sunday lunch. I am starting to think I will have to miss the church, that I won't get there in time when exh bursts through the door panting and gasping. He just woke up he says.
I put lipstick on and dash for it. Out into the damp sunday morning and quiet streets. A gathering of men on a street corner looks like one of those history walks and I lean into to hear what they are saying. But then I see a dungeons and dragon style book clutched by one and realise it is a queue for some sort of convention in a pub. The men have the happy animated faces of being with their own kind, of being understood. I pass by onto St James Park where there are snowdrops and pink blossom in the mist. It feels lovely to be out. I would have been dreading going before, really dreading it but I realise the fear has gone, now it is just what I do. No one is going to hurt or mock me. I enjoy it.
Oh and I have been looking forward to going to the Chapel Royal. There seems such a mystery to it. Within the dark slightly foreboding thick walls of St James palace there is a chapel where the services are open to all. I wouldn't even know about it if I hadn't tried before to get into the Lady Chapel just around the corner. A notice there said that it was only open in the summer months but services went on within the palace all year. On Pall Mall I find the gateway flanked by empty sentry boxes and a policeman standing guard. Is it ok to go to the church service? I falter. He waves me in. I am only just in time and a robed 'greeter' in the thick old stone walls of the doorway ushers me through the door into the tiny narrow church, opening a small, high up, hinged door of a pew to squeeze me into a seat. I am next to a smart politician-like couple and a tweed man who smells of clean strong soap. The plush chapel, is soft-lit with desk style lamps, like an expensive but characterless hotel and it is packed. Instead of sitting looking forward towards the altar we are all sat either side of the nave staring at each other. I remember with embarrassment that my hair is still wet and that I must look rather dishevelled and unkempt. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I feel I have tumbled into another world.
Above the heads of the congregation the organ, pounds and soars joyfully.
Everyone rises as the choir enters. Small boys like white mice in extraordinary red jackets with gold braid and big gold buttons, red breeches and oliver cromwell shoes with buckles, the older choir flamingoes in white surplices with respectful bent necks and dipped heads, a man in crow robes, intricate ruffled sleeves and a black staff, some more men in surplices and the vicar all sailing in like swans. They process to the front of the church. Wow. I think. This goes on every sunday and who would know? This has happened every Sunday for hundreds of years.
We sit. Stand again and sing. Sit. The choir sings. There is a reading. Then another. The lord's prayer. Psalms from the St James prayer book. The tweed and soap man next to me relishes each word, really enjoys each one, as if reaching his tongue for an oyster, pulling and sucking the texture. It is almost embarrassing how much pleasure he is obtaining from speaking them aloud as if he is talking dirty alongside. I mumble along. Thinking I really don't believe what I'm saying but I think being here saying them is good. The kneelers are purple velvet. Very royal. Very posh hotel plush. And everyone kneels. In the parish church of my childhood there was a bit of laziness about kneeling - you could, but most people just put their hands together and crouched.
How funny - I find later, having written this that Samuel Pepys on the 10th May, 1663 'I walked to St. James's, and was there at masse, and was forced in the crowd to kneel down"
Observed by an elderly man on the opposite side I gaze around the room. The ceiling is panelled and intricately painted. Up high is the organ, tapestries hung high either side of the altar, a big quite modern looking stained glass window above the altar depicting a tree and at the back, just above me, a sort of royal box facing the altar. I imagine this is where the royal family worship if they come. It is completely hidden from view. Do you just not know if they are here I wonder? Are they here I think. The pews we are sat in have high walls as if we are fenced and stalled like animals. Or part of a lock-in with the Establishment.
The 'Chapel Royal' initially was not a place but a body of priests and singers who cared for the spiritual needs of the Sovereign and travelled with him. But Henry V111 took a fancy to the site of a female leper colony that had stood in this then remote corner since the saxon times. There was good hunting alongside and good access to the woods of Kensington and he comandeered the hospital, building a palace including the chapel as a home for the Chapel Royal. Like a fly digesting time in longer flashes, slowed down, opened up, it is impossible to understand that this place that is a brief stroll from my flat, from the Thames, from Whitehall could seem remote but perhaps the outskirts, the outside, the edge is always the furthest place away and therefore distant.
I read too that the chapel was considered the cradle of English church music - Tallis, Handel, and Henry Purcell were all organists or composers of the chapel and the poet Dryden escaped his many creditors by staying with Henry Purcell in a turret room of the composers apartments.
The vicar's sermon is of love. He talks well and passionately about showing up everyday to love, of being free from the limitations of romantic love to form a deeper and fundamental joy. He talks about faith and doubt. He is talking about God. But love is love I think. Mary I's heart is buried beneath the chapel. Charles I recieved the sacrament of Holy Communion prior to his execution here. Diana's body lay by the altar before her funeral. Victoria and Albert married here. Though I find all this out later. But it is me that is wracked by doubt. As if trust is something I haven't used for a while I keep opening the store cupboard door to find the basics, all the horded tins and packets look ok but are infact old, past their sell by date, no longer quite nice. Something has grown unknown and unexpected like mould or weevils in the everyday ingredients. I am horrified. I thought everything was just put away dry and stored. Here I say, and here, look at this, and this, showing ul what leaving did, what has been done. I have prided myself on my sanity and find now occasionally a raw madness in attempting to trust.
At the end of the service the white mice, the flamingoes, the black crow, all process out, the organ playing.
I shake hands with the vicar in the old walls of the palace as I leave but I notice that others keep his hand, holding it tight, maintaining steady eye contact. Not me. I flinch from the warmth and sincerity of the greeting. Bobbing my head in embarrassment. In the park though I feel fresh, restored. I need faith I think. I need to clean those cupboards and keep only the nourishment of good.
Monday 21 February 2011
Tuesday 15 February 2011
St Saviour's, Pimlico
Something has happened. Whether I have got more organised or the children's increasing contentment and my own upsurge of happiness has combined to good effect but I am less manic, less stricken with the poverty of time. Before I felt I was running, literally running between everything needing to be done, wheras now, I feel I am ambling, able to take in some of the scenery. I painted my nails at the weekend while the boys played lego. My elder son saying sternly to the younger one, let mum sit there - she can't do ANYTHING while her nails are drying. Thank you. I said, admiring the shiny red gloss and the rare view from the sofa understanding for the first time the benefits of nail varnish.
But really it is as if time itself has expanded. I seem able to fit in two or three dates a week with ul without anyone really noticing. Perhaps if the neighbours watched the windows really carefully they would see him here occasionally after the children have gone to bed or briefly when they are at school. But it isn't just time for dates there just feels more time for everything. Today I did a supermarket shop, the vacuuming, the paperwork, I made appointments for the doctor and the dentist, and registered for tickets for the Olympics. I left the flat clean and tidy to go to St Saviour's on a BB, knowing the church would be open for a Tuesday lunchtime mass, I caught the end of the service, had a good look round, then went and bought hamster bedding (from a newsgents/come pet store), good salami and Italian cheese from the Italian cafe and was back at the flat starting to write with a good two hours clear before picking the children. Even now writing this in the evening - I have already made minestrone soup, tidied up, put the children to bed and again I have a couple of hours stretching ahead. Plus as if this new telescopic time, extends even further I have started reading again. Sitting on the tube and just before I go to sleep. Finally I have read The Corrections ( loved it, but not completely convinced it had the depth of it's touted masterpiece/ maybe squandered 'Christmas' at the end) I have read Invisible by Paul Auster. Oh I love Paul Auster. But it isn't his best. Now I am reading Island on the Edge of the World. The story of St Kilda by Charles Maclean.
St Saviours is at the Vauxhall Bridge Rd end of Lupus Street, just before the tube station. In the not just manic but nearly mad days when we lived round the corner from the other end of Lupus St and had a two mile journey to school each day and another two on the way back and exh was very, very dh - I used the clock on the church to know if we were late or not. Pushing the youngest still in his buggy, encouraging the eldest on his bike, singing, telling stories, chanting positive affirmations and taking deep breaths. Shall we go down the 'secret path' this morning I would encourage as I led them on a route through the vast Churchill Garden estate. Every morning stopping to say 'We're going to rescue you!' to a teddy bear rotting behind a wire fence that had been thrown in a tangled piece of undergrowth behind some flats, his dirty fur and sad face slumped in leaves. We talked about bringing a fishing line to rescue him. Of cleaning him up. Of loving him back to life. I even thought about writing a children's story about the bear and that school route - the herons we spotted at the edge of the Thames dock ( once even a kingfisher ), the tough dogs and very very occasionally tough people we skirted in the estate, the concrete and the patches of nature combined. But perhaps I knew it wasn't really a children's story. Though it was my children's story. There was a slumped unhappy figure in our lives and those boys certainly wanted to love him back to life and even I would have perhaps still have attempted to try on their behalf.
When I creep into the church today it looks completely empty but I can hear the end of the Lord's prayer sing-songed from a side chapel and a woman in orange perched on a chair mouthing the words. I can hear the voices of others but she is the only one I can see. Stepping out of the day into those old words, I can feel the soothing peace. Despite my personal feelings of wellbeing something truly terrible has happened and a church seems a really good place to go.
Yesterday was Valentine's day. My sons made me perfume with a strong top note of toothpaste in a milk carton. UL brought me some supermarket flowers (no one can be completely perfect). Exh broke the rules and let himself into the flat also to leave some flowers. But as I left to pick the boys up from school I miss a call from my bestfriend and then a text comes in. The text is from my elder sons best friend's mother who is living in a refuge, though finally, finally she is going to be housed, but she texts me to say she has terrible news, two children who lived at the refuge and were really good friends with her children were murdered yesterday by their dad. It is all over the news. she says. Reading the text I feel sick to the stomach. I feel angry and shaky. I feel, and this is so instinctive and the thoughts feel so old - so completely weary of men and their dangerous harboured thoughts.
Sometimes I have thought that if I finish this blog I'll do another about madonna and child representations. It is a hard plural to work out - madonnas and child? madonnas and children? Though I imagine if I started looking they would probably be everywhere ( also I could go back into the churches and look again and look more carefully ). I remember at school an amazing and inspiring art teacher teaching us art history and we studied so many - Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Duccio. Now most of those are around the corner at the National Gallery and what a pleasure to find time to see them. But only very recently did I truly understand that these sculptures and paintings are attempts made by generations and generations to describe the bond and strength and sacrifice by mothers for children. I want to find one in this church and think of the strength and power of this woman who escaped this brutal man with her children and then fought in the courts for two years not to allow him access to the children knowing he was not safe. Whilst week in week out testing their spellings, feeding them, washing their clothes, keeping their finger and toe nails straight and short. Oh! but it was overturned. All that strength and fight and journey for them to be murdered. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I am not sure I have the right to write about this, it is not my story. But still I know just enough about chaos to watch at school and see the Mums who feel frightened, the ones with bruises. But I only find a michaelangelo copy of a madonna and child and I don't know how you know what is a copy or not but I felt I did.
It is nice in the church, the communion being taken, the words being said, some nice stained glass, nice kneelers hung neatly on the back of the pews, but nothing I latch onto. A font topped by a huge gothic wooden top like an ornate spire with a pulley system to lift the lid off. I imagine having a baby christened and worrying that the rope would snap, the great heavy wooden structure hurtling to hurt the baby. It is one of the fears that I wake in the night with - that somehow the bunk bed ( which isn't really a bunk bed but a platform bed with a mattress underneath) will collapse and crush my younger son. Lying in the dark I can picture the bolts working loose from the structure, the wooden slats tumbling, the noise of the crash and screaming. But then I make myself listen to the silence, imagine a big 'golf sale' sign arrow that means 'I can't think about this now' and finally tumble back into sleep.
St Saviour's is part of Thomas Cubitt's Pimlico, like square feet of building rolled out with churches attached. Previously it was where vegetables were grown for Westminster and the City of London, with a tea garden in the meadows, reed banks, a steel works and a distillery. Thomas Cubitt pieced together the land from different landowners and by 1839 he had established an eleven acre factory area on the river bank on the present site of Dolphin Square, just round the corner from St Saviour's.
'Here the joinery, glass, plasterwork, steel and marble, as well as some of the bricks and cement for the various building operations were produced, using the latest steam-driven technology, enabling the business in Pimlico and beyond to benefit from the sheer scale of production as well as control of the entire process.'
While Cubitt had to clear most of the older generation gardening businesses out of the area in order to make the roads he then sub-let again for gardening, until he was ready to sponsor building on a large scale in 1840. Like the ferry man who sabotaged the building of Westminster Bridge the market gardeners must have taken this changing world badly.
St Saviour's was consecrated in 1864 and designed by Thomas Cundy. But Pimlico struggled as an area as early as 1852 - Henry Mayhew noted the neighbourhood 'prolific in loose women' in particular he identified this neighbourhood as one where an affluent man might seek a discreet introduction to the sort of 'quiet lady whose secrecy he can reply upon...who in all probability does not reside at any great distance.' Though I also read that at Victoria station there were complaints of being accosted by a 'low class of unfortunates who come from Great Peter Street, Laundry Yard and the black area that lies in the very shadow of the Houses of Parliament' Which is where I live.
Today I ring my best friend back. She says on valentines day afternoon she was upstairs in her house tidying the bedroom and saw flames leaping behind the blinds in the opposite house's bedroom and called the firebrigade. Then she ran across the road and knocked at the door to save the occupants. Her son who is nearly twenty was shouting out of her upstairs window 'Come away mum come away mum come away from the fire'. Standing on the step she suddenly realises somehow ( I don't get this bit but that is what she says) that what she has seen is infact the glint of hundreds of candles and valentine balloons. Too late, the operator says the fire engine is on it's way. The man in his dressing gown descends the stairs, tying the belt and shuffling his parts, opening the door as the fire engine arrives. I hope it was HIS wife I say.
Amen.
But really it is as if time itself has expanded. I seem able to fit in two or three dates a week with ul without anyone really noticing. Perhaps if the neighbours watched the windows really carefully they would see him here occasionally after the children have gone to bed or briefly when they are at school. But it isn't just time for dates there just feels more time for everything. Today I did a supermarket shop, the vacuuming, the paperwork, I made appointments for the doctor and the dentist, and registered for tickets for the Olympics. I left the flat clean and tidy to go to St Saviour's on a BB, knowing the church would be open for a Tuesday lunchtime mass, I caught the end of the service, had a good look round, then went and bought hamster bedding (from a newsgents/come pet store), good salami and Italian cheese from the Italian cafe and was back at the flat starting to write with a good two hours clear before picking the children. Even now writing this in the evening - I have already made minestrone soup, tidied up, put the children to bed and again I have a couple of hours stretching ahead. Plus as if this new telescopic time, extends even further I have started reading again. Sitting on the tube and just before I go to sleep. Finally I have read The Corrections ( loved it, but not completely convinced it had the depth of it's touted masterpiece/ maybe squandered 'Christmas' at the end) I have read Invisible by Paul Auster. Oh I love Paul Auster. But it isn't his best. Now I am reading Island on the Edge of the World. The story of St Kilda by Charles Maclean.
St Saviours is at the Vauxhall Bridge Rd end of Lupus Street, just before the tube station. In the not just manic but nearly mad days when we lived round the corner from the other end of Lupus St and had a two mile journey to school each day and another two on the way back and exh was very, very dh - I used the clock on the church to know if we were late or not. Pushing the youngest still in his buggy, encouraging the eldest on his bike, singing, telling stories, chanting positive affirmations and taking deep breaths. Shall we go down the 'secret path' this morning I would encourage as I led them on a route through the vast Churchill Garden estate. Every morning stopping to say 'We're going to rescue you!' to a teddy bear rotting behind a wire fence that had been thrown in a tangled piece of undergrowth behind some flats, his dirty fur and sad face slumped in leaves. We talked about bringing a fishing line to rescue him. Of cleaning him up. Of loving him back to life. I even thought about writing a children's story about the bear and that school route - the herons we spotted at the edge of the Thames dock ( once even a kingfisher ), the tough dogs and very very occasionally tough people we skirted in the estate, the concrete and the patches of nature combined. But perhaps I knew it wasn't really a children's story. Though it was my children's story. There was a slumped unhappy figure in our lives and those boys certainly wanted to love him back to life and even I would have perhaps still have attempted to try on their behalf.
When I creep into the church today it looks completely empty but I can hear the end of the Lord's prayer sing-songed from a side chapel and a woman in orange perched on a chair mouthing the words. I can hear the voices of others but she is the only one I can see. Stepping out of the day into those old words, I can feel the soothing peace. Despite my personal feelings of wellbeing something truly terrible has happened and a church seems a really good place to go.
Yesterday was Valentine's day. My sons made me perfume with a strong top note of toothpaste in a milk carton. UL brought me some supermarket flowers (no one can be completely perfect). Exh broke the rules and let himself into the flat also to leave some flowers. But as I left to pick the boys up from school I miss a call from my bestfriend and then a text comes in. The text is from my elder sons best friend's mother who is living in a refuge, though finally, finally she is going to be housed, but she texts me to say she has terrible news, two children who lived at the refuge and were really good friends with her children were murdered yesterday by their dad. It is all over the news. she says. Reading the text I feel sick to the stomach. I feel angry and shaky. I feel, and this is so instinctive and the thoughts feel so old - so completely weary of men and their dangerous harboured thoughts.
Sometimes I have thought that if I finish this blog I'll do another about madonna and child representations. It is a hard plural to work out - madonnas and child? madonnas and children? Though I imagine if I started looking they would probably be everywhere ( also I could go back into the churches and look again and look more carefully ). I remember at school an amazing and inspiring art teacher teaching us art history and we studied so many - Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Duccio. Now most of those are around the corner at the National Gallery and what a pleasure to find time to see them. But only very recently did I truly understand that these sculptures and paintings are attempts made by generations and generations to describe the bond and strength and sacrifice by mothers for children. I want to find one in this church and think of the strength and power of this woman who escaped this brutal man with her children and then fought in the courts for two years not to allow him access to the children knowing he was not safe. Whilst week in week out testing their spellings, feeding them, washing their clothes, keeping their finger and toe nails straight and short. Oh! but it was overturned. All that strength and fight and journey for them to be murdered. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I am not sure I have the right to write about this, it is not my story. But still I know just enough about chaos to watch at school and see the Mums who feel frightened, the ones with bruises. But I only find a michaelangelo copy of a madonna and child and I don't know how you know what is a copy or not but I felt I did.
It is nice in the church, the communion being taken, the words being said, some nice stained glass, nice kneelers hung neatly on the back of the pews, but nothing I latch onto. A font topped by a huge gothic wooden top like an ornate spire with a pulley system to lift the lid off. I imagine having a baby christened and worrying that the rope would snap, the great heavy wooden structure hurtling to hurt the baby. It is one of the fears that I wake in the night with - that somehow the bunk bed ( which isn't really a bunk bed but a platform bed with a mattress underneath) will collapse and crush my younger son. Lying in the dark I can picture the bolts working loose from the structure, the wooden slats tumbling, the noise of the crash and screaming. But then I make myself listen to the silence, imagine a big 'golf sale' sign arrow that means 'I can't think about this now' and finally tumble back into sleep.
St Saviour's is part of Thomas Cubitt's Pimlico, like square feet of building rolled out with churches attached. Previously it was where vegetables were grown for Westminster and the City of London, with a tea garden in the meadows, reed banks, a steel works and a distillery. Thomas Cubitt pieced together the land from different landowners and by 1839 he had established an eleven acre factory area on the river bank on the present site of Dolphin Square, just round the corner from St Saviour's.
'Here the joinery, glass, plasterwork, steel and marble, as well as some of the bricks and cement for the various building operations were produced, using the latest steam-driven technology, enabling the business in Pimlico and beyond to benefit from the sheer scale of production as well as control of the entire process.'
While Cubitt had to clear most of the older generation gardening businesses out of the area in order to make the roads he then sub-let again for gardening, until he was ready to sponsor building on a large scale in 1840. Like the ferry man who sabotaged the building of Westminster Bridge the market gardeners must have taken this changing world badly.
St Saviour's was consecrated in 1864 and designed by Thomas Cundy. But Pimlico struggled as an area as early as 1852 - Henry Mayhew noted the neighbourhood 'prolific in loose women' in particular he identified this neighbourhood as one where an affluent man might seek a discreet introduction to the sort of 'quiet lady whose secrecy he can reply upon...who in all probability does not reside at any great distance.' Though I also read that at Victoria station there were complaints of being accosted by a 'low class of unfortunates who come from Great Peter Street, Laundry Yard and the black area that lies in the very shadow of the Houses of Parliament' Which is where I live.
Today I ring my best friend back. She says on valentines day afternoon she was upstairs in her house tidying the bedroom and saw flames leaping behind the blinds in the opposite house's bedroom and called the firebrigade. Then she ran across the road and knocked at the door to save the occupants. Her son who is nearly twenty was shouting out of her upstairs window 'Come away mum come away mum come away from the fire'. Standing on the step she suddenly realises somehow ( I don't get this bit but that is what she says) that what she has seen is infact the glint of hundreds of candles and valentine balloons. Too late, the operator says the fire engine is on it's way. The man in his dressing gown descends the stairs, tying the belt and shuffling his parts, opening the door as the fire engine arrives. I hope it was HIS wife I say.
Amen.
Tuesday 1 February 2011
St-Mary- at-Lambeth
I forgot to mention the windmills last week.
I think of them as I cross over the Thames at Lambeth Bridge for I have seen maps and pictures with the sails dotted on the pastoral and then industrial South London skyline
Today from the bridge I see the Houses of Parliament dipping steeply into the deep water of the river, the London Eye turning impercetibly, the yellow, cartoon-like amphibean vehicle of the Duck tours passing underneath, the new south london skyscrapers awkward on the horizon - that triple clock one with the head like a 70s pencil case and whatever the new really tall one is going to be - underneath all that sky. This is an ancient place to cross the river, where the horse ferry between Westminster and Lambeth Palace operated with flat bottomed punts capable of fitting a coach and six horses.
I have remembered that there is a church south of the river much nearer home than the last one I wrote about but it is not a church anymore but The Garden Museum. Tucked right next to the Palace of Lambeth on the corner of a mini roundabout and a block of modern flats I wonder too if there might be a church within Lambeth Palace. The big gates are open in the old gate house which is unusual and I find a reception. The helpful east european man doesn't think there is a church but gives me a telephone number and a form to fill in to organise visits with parties of over 50. I take the form and think I will ring and see.
This week I asked UL why he did not stay in Russia? Why he did not make his life there? Remember that is where he went. That he can speak Russian fluently. That his wife is from an ex soviet state. He talked to me of eventually missing the home of language, of living inside what you can say, the layers of what is understood. I imagined my own interior space like the cave of a walnut, a finely woven nest - tongued by words and the tilt and tip of comprehension when fully attended to, the lilt and rhythm of questions, the playfulness, the understanding, the vibration and power of humour, passion and kindness. I think it is possibly the one thing I have always known I needed is that central pleasure of language. What I always enjoyed with him. I find it hard at most times to maintain confidence and often strangely writing or talking is where I feel most at ease - like taking a little hammer to chip away at the bother of being. Only occasionally and preciously, reaching the rare silence of truly understanding or truly being understood as if kept kernalled safe.
The church/museum is set back in the scrap of a graveyard by this overplanned mini roundabout surrounded by traffic lights. I have been once before. I went with the boys and my mum and dad after Sunday lunch. The boys with their bikes and cooped up races and my mum and dad behind and disapproving but brave with limping hips. At the museum which seemed at the time ludicrously expensive when they paid, ( give me the money! give me the money! I could buy washing powder with it! funny how pride is?) they dawdled over each watering can and I stood the boys in the graveyard garden feeling the exhaustion of being a single parent and the weary position of doing the best bad job I could - understanding the day wasn't going very well and knowing it was unlikely to get much better.
Today it costs me £6 to get in even though I explain ( look at me these days! haggling to get into a church!) that I don't want to go to the museum I just want to look at the remains of the church. Though in the end I am late to pick the children up because I spend so long there. The church interior has been blanked out by plain plywood boxed structures and a stairway that creates the exhibition space. It is as if the details of the church have been packed away in a packing case but inside out with the church architecture wrapped round the exterior of the box. I am not sure that gets there exactly but it is confused and complicated, obliterating and making neutral the church itself. On the west side the shelved wall of an L shaped souvenir shop selling greetings cards, dinky garden inspired gifts and historical gardening books is lined against a detail of the rood screen. On the east a cafe crouched in the plywood partitions and under old windows - though in a church with so little left of itself there is some bad stained glass.
The back garden grave yard is beautiful. I remember being there with the boys and feel I have come along way. I don't feel desperate anymore. There is the grave of the Tradescants, an amazing tomb with finely detailed relief. On one side a scene with a crocodile, beautiful shells at the bottom of the sea and some egyptian buildings. On the other the suggestion of unrelenting History and Time - with classical pillars broken and buried underground and spires tumbling with the movement of earth. John Tradescant father and son were travellers, diplomats, horticultural pioneers, and polymaths, they were also collectors, acquiring (and asking their friends to acquire) specimens of the wonders of the world. This grave is the reason the garden museum is here for they were impotant botanists and horticulturists, the younger said to be the first man to grow a pineapple in England. Indeed there are stone pineapples on Lambeth Bridge in celebration. Their botanical garden in Lambeth became the centre of horitcultural interest in Britain and thier collections could be viewed by the public at a large house 'The Ark'. Described by a German traveller George Christoph Sirn in 1638
'In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies- when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones'.
All this (apparently in dubious circumstances) was taken over by Elias Ashmole and formed the foundation of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. 'Museum' itself a new word listed a few years later in the New World of Words (1706) as `a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for `Ashmole's Museum', described as `a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.
Though there is another grave in this beautifully planted place that just says 'Reader, prepare to meet thy god.'
I discover later that the tower of the church is medieval and I feel ashamed I did not notice it. The church just seemed bland, though checking the photos I realise that the tower is the part nearest to Lambeth Palace and maybe I wasn't concentrating when I entered and the rest of the mainly victorian building is so hidden by its clumsy museum purpose. The church is mentioned in the Domesday Book and apparently even before the Norman Conquest there was a church dedicated to St Mary's here which belonged to the Countess Goda, sister to King Edward the Confessor. I think the site was higher and drier than much of the south bank of the thames for the land around was low and sodden and developed very slowly. The Archbishop of Canterbury took up residence of the Manor of Lambeth in 1197 - giving the church a special importance and the bells of the church rang out whenever royal personages came to visit the Archbishop, the boats pulling up at the landing alongside.
Up the staircase of the museum, is the engraving of 'The Prospect of London and Westminster taken form Lambeth' by W.Hollar 1707 edition of a 1647 plate. Oh, it is beautiful with intricately inked detail, the arch of the wide river, Westminster Abbey high in the distance across the river, rural Lambeth etched on the bend of the Thames and St Mary's central, the Tradescant tomb clearly visible. Wencelas Hollar 1607 - 1677 was an engraver and map maker from Prague who came to London in 1637. Charging 4 pence an hour he was prolific with 2733 examples of his work known and listed - views of London, a map after the Great fire, detailed depictions of women's fashions, animals and engraved portraits of both of the Tradescant's. A biography written by a contemporary John Aubrey has this detail of Holler leaving London during the civil war and then returning.
“I remember he told me that when he first came into England, (which was a serene time of peace) that the people, both poore and rich, did looke cheerfully, but at his returne, he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spightfull, as if bewitched.
But somehow he died penniless. “He was a very friendly good-natured man as could be, but shiftlesse as to the world, and dyed not rich."
I engineer time to spend with ul. Though on a rare weekend I don't have the boys we see each other until late and then meet again early in the morning. This is what an affair feels like I think. But I know him so well I skate round the guilt. Just. Perhaps only just. The following morning I phone exh to make arrangements about the children. But they have all stayed with friends and exh is in the shower. His friend answers and pretends to be him tired, shouting, explaining the children woke them all up at five in the morning.
He means it so genuinely as a joke. But I think it is exh. I think he is drunk. It sounds so perfectly like when he was. And exactly the right time of day. It is 10 oclock in the morning. I just keep saying 'I can't really understand what you are saying' I keep saying it. I am terrified. This life, my life, the boys life that I believe to be on solid ground is suddenly tipped up, I am drowning. I want to puke. I want to cry. Also I understand I have been arrogant - our life has got better because exh stopped drinking - not really anything to do with me. I have worked hard but not made the fundamental difference.
I buy a book on amazon called 'Lambeth windmills' a careful piece of detective work tracing windmills from the end of the 16th century that appear and disappear from maps - as the fickle design mind of the cartographer decides whether he fancied using the nice symbol of sails or didn't have enough space to squeeze it in. Normally windmills are associated with corn milling but in Lambeth, famous for wood yards, glassmaking, pottery and boat building the spread of industrialization caused the power of the wind to be set to other tasks - mechanical saws and crushing materials for the production of china ware. The Garden museum had a history of Lambeth powerpoint installation, outlining the industries, the smell, the fast development south of the river, it was what made me late to pick the boys up from school - so many details I wanted to catch them all. From 'A Map of the New Roads from Westminster Bridge' published in 1753 showing the three windmills near St Mary-at-Lambeth in almost open fields progress hurtled on, steam, the railways, mass production and the windmills disappearing. My final detail and oh, there seems so many, even lovely ones I can't really fit in - the poetry of Herrick, a toll path across the Lambeth marshes, even Lambeth Bridge featured in the 1982 music video hit 'pass the dutchie' by Musical Youth - is the history of Doulton's pottery in Lambeth. A patnership formed in 1815 when John Doulton ( who had just finished an apprenticeship with early commercial potter John Dwight) and John Watts ( previous forman of the existing pottery) were taken into partnership by a young widow Martha Jones who had inherited the business from her late husband. Alongside beautiful tiles and beautiful porcelain they made drain pipes. Thousands of drain pipes. High temperature firing taking stoneware to its true vitrified form. Expanded by Doulton's son Henry these drainpipes drained and dried the boggy land of London for building and allowed the vanguard of Victorian sanitation to be brought to Metropolitan London. This is the land our city is built on. Our waste matter taken away.
Amen.
I think of them as I cross over the Thames at Lambeth Bridge for I have seen maps and pictures with the sails dotted on the pastoral and then industrial South London skyline
Today from the bridge I see the Houses of Parliament dipping steeply into the deep water of the river, the London Eye turning impercetibly, the yellow, cartoon-like amphibean vehicle of the Duck tours passing underneath, the new south london skyscrapers awkward on the horizon - that triple clock one with the head like a 70s pencil case and whatever the new really tall one is going to be - underneath all that sky. This is an ancient place to cross the river, where the horse ferry between Westminster and Lambeth Palace operated with flat bottomed punts capable of fitting a coach and six horses.
I have remembered that there is a church south of the river much nearer home than the last one I wrote about but it is not a church anymore but The Garden Museum. Tucked right next to the Palace of Lambeth on the corner of a mini roundabout and a block of modern flats I wonder too if there might be a church within Lambeth Palace. The big gates are open in the old gate house which is unusual and I find a reception. The helpful east european man doesn't think there is a church but gives me a telephone number and a form to fill in to organise visits with parties of over 50. I take the form and think I will ring and see.
This week I asked UL why he did not stay in Russia? Why he did not make his life there? Remember that is where he went. That he can speak Russian fluently. That his wife is from an ex soviet state. He talked to me of eventually missing the home of language, of living inside what you can say, the layers of what is understood. I imagined my own interior space like the cave of a walnut, a finely woven nest - tongued by words and the tilt and tip of comprehension when fully attended to, the lilt and rhythm of questions, the playfulness, the understanding, the vibration and power of humour, passion and kindness. I think it is possibly the one thing I have always known I needed is that central pleasure of language. What I always enjoyed with him. I find it hard at most times to maintain confidence and often strangely writing or talking is where I feel most at ease - like taking a little hammer to chip away at the bother of being. Only occasionally and preciously, reaching the rare silence of truly understanding or truly being understood as if kept kernalled safe.
The church/museum is set back in the scrap of a graveyard by this overplanned mini roundabout surrounded by traffic lights. I have been once before. I went with the boys and my mum and dad after Sunday lunch. The boys with their bikes and cooped up races and my mum and dad behind and disapproving but brave with limping hips. At the museum which seemed at the time ludicrously expensive when they paid, ( give me the money! give me the money! I could buy washing powder with it! funny how pride is?) they dawdled over each watering can and I stood the boys in the graveyard garden feeling the exhaustion of being a single parent and the weary position of doing the best bad job I could - understanding the day wasn't going very well and knowing it was unlikely to get much better.
Today it costs me £6 to get in even though I explain ( look at me these days! haggling to get into a church!) that I don't want to go to the museum I just want to look at the remains of the church. Though in the end I am late to pick the children up because I spend so long there. The church interior has been blanked out by plain plywood boxed structures and a stairway that creates the exhibition space. It is as if the details of the church have been packed away in a packing case but inside out with the church architecture wrapped round the exterior of the box. I am not sure that gets there exactly but it is confused and complicated, obliterating and making neutral the church itself. On the west side the shelved wall of an L shaped souvenir shop selling greetings cards, dinky garden inspired gifts and historical gardening books is lined against a detail of the rood screen. On the east a cafe crouched in the plywood partitions and under old windows - though in a church with so little left of itself there is some bad stained glass.
The back garden grave yard is beautiful. I remember being there with the boys and feel I have come along way. I don't feel desperate anymore. There is the grave of the Tradescants, an amazing tomb with finely detailed relief. On one side a scene with a crocodile, beautiful shells at the bottom of the sea and some egyptian buildings. On the other the suggestion of unrelenting History and Time - with classical pillars broken and buried underground and spires tumbling with the movement of earth. John Tradescant father and son were travellers, diplomats, horticultural pioneers, and polymaths, they were also collectors, acquiring (and asking their friends to acquire) specimens of the wonders of the world. This grave is the reason the garden museum is here for they were impotant botanists and horticulturists, the younger said to be the first man to grow a pineapple in England. Indeed there are stone pineapples on Lambeth Bridge in celebration. Their botanical garden in Lambeth became the centre of horitcultural interest in Britain and thier collections could be viewed by the public at a large house 'The Ark'. Described by a German traveller George Christoph Sirn in 1638
'In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies- when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones'.
All this (apparently in dubious circumstances) was taken over by Elias Ashmole and formed the foundation of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. 'Museum' itself a new word listed a few years later in the New World of Words (1706) as `a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for `Ashmole's Museum', described as `a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.
Though there is another grave in this beautifully planted place that just says 'Reader, prepare to meet thy god.'
I discover later that the tower of the church is medieval and I feel ashamed I did not notice it. The church just seemed bland, though checking the photos I realise that the tower is the part nearest to Lambeth Palace and maybe I wasn't concentrating when I entered and the rest of the mainly victorian building is so hidden by its clumsy museum purpose. The church is mentioned in the Domesday Book and apparently even before the Norman Conquest there was a church dedicated to St Mary's here which belonged to the Countess Goda, sister to King Edward the Confessor. I think the site was higher and drier than much of the south bank of the thames for the land around was low and sodden and developed very slowly. The Archbishop of Canterbury took up residence of the Manor of Lambeth in 1197 - giving the church a special importance and the bells of the church rang out whenever royal personages came to visit the Archbishop, the boats pulling up at the landing alongside.
Up the staircase of the museum, is the engraving of 'The Prospect of London and Westminster taken form Lambeth' by W.Hollar 1707 edition of a 1647 plate. Oh, it is beautiful with intricately inked detail, the arch of the wide river, Westminster Abbey high in the distance across the river, rural Lambeth etched on the bend of the Thames and St Mary's central, the Tradescant tomb clearly visible. Wencelas Hollar 1607 - 1677 was an engraver and map maker from Prague who came to London in 1637. Charging 4 pence an hour he was prolific with 2733 examples of his work known and listed - views of London, a map after the Great fire, detailed depictions of women's fashions, animals and engraved portraits of both of the Tradescant's. A biography written by a contemporary John Aubrey has this detail of Holler leaving London during the civil war and then returning.
“I remember he told me that when he first came into England, (which was a serene time of peace) that the people, both poore and rich, did looke cheerfully, but at his returne, he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spightfull, as if bewitched.
But somehow he died penniless. “He was a very friendly good-natured man as could be, but shiftlesse as to the world, and dyed not rich."
I engineer time to spend with ul. Though on a rare weekend I don't have the boys we see each other until late and then meet again early in the morning. This is what an affair feels like I think. But I know him so well I skate round the guilt. Just. Perhaps only just. The following morning I phone exh to make arrangements about the children. But they have all stayed with friends and exh is in the shower. His friend answers and pretends to be him tired, shouting, explaining the children woke them all up at five in the morning.
He means it so genuinely as a joke. But I think it is exh. I think he is drunk. It sounds so perfectly like when he was. And exactly the right time of day. It is 10 oclock in the morning. I just keep saying 'I can't really understand what you are saying' I keep saying it. I am terrified. This life, my life, the boys life that I believe to be on solid ground is suddenly tipped up, I am drowning. I want to puke. I want to cry. Also I understand I have been arrogant - our life has got better because exh stopped drinking - not really anything to do with me. I have worked hard but not made the fundamental difference.
I buy a book on amazon called 'Lambeth windmills' a careful piece of detective work tracing windmills from the end of the 16th century that appear and disappear from maps - as the fickle design mind of the cartographer decides whether he fancied using the nice symbol of sails or didn't have enough space to squeeze it in. Normally windmills are associated with corn milling but in Lambeth, famous for wood yards, glassmaking, pottery and boat building the spread of industrialization caused the power of the wind to be set to other tasks - mechanical saws and crushing materials for the production of china ware. The Garden museum had a history of Lambeth powerpoint installation, outlining the industries, the smell, the fast development south of the river, it was what made me late to pick the boys up from school - so many details I wanted to catch them all. From 'A Map of the New Roads from Westminster Bridge' published in 1753 showing the three windmills near St Mary-at-Lambeth in almost open fields progress hurtled on, steam, the railways, mass production and the windmills disappearing. My final detail and oh, there seems so many, even lovely ones I can't really fit in - the poetry of Herrick, a toll path across the Lambeth marshes, even Lambeth Bridge featured in the 1982 music video hit 'pass the dutchie' by Musical Youth - is the history of Doulton's pottery in Lambeth. A patnership formed in 1815 when John Doulton ( who had just finished an apprenticeship with early commercial potter John Dwight) and John Watts ( previous forman of the existing pottery) were taken into partnership by a young widow Martha Jones who had inherited the business from her late husband. Alongside beautiful tiles and beautiful porcelain they made drain pipes. Thousands of drain pipes. High temperature firing taking stoneware to its true vitrified form. Expanded by Doulton's son Henry these drainpipes drained and dried the boggy land of London for building and allowed the vanguard of Victorian sanitation to be brought to Metropolitan London. This is the land our city is built on. Our waste matter taken away.
Amen.
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