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.