St Anne's Soho

I wear my I heart London hoodie with some leather-look shorts I got free from work and some sparkly tights and get the bus up to Soho on a Sunday morning. I love what I am wearing. I feel jaunty and perky and somehow witty. Though I probably look ridiculous. It has been a theme since the breakdown of my marriage that I have enjoyed clothes even more whilst trying to spend as little as I can. Bright clashing colours, a rainbow selection of tights, higher and higher heels, sequins, shorts, a jumpsuit - careful purchases made on ebay and at the sales, occasional ( but not many) grit the teeth full price purchases. The confidence of my clothes is like a disguise of who I am. Or just an illustration of the mad bravery with which I believe I conduct my life, all showy and ridiculous and based on almost nothing. Though sometimes I have thought the brighter the outfit the more invisible I am. For a while, age, circumstances, isolation it felt like no one noticed me anymore and despite the mad, garish waving, I started to enjoy my secret agent special mission- to become completely invisible in bright colours and hotpants. Though I could make myself laugh with the nuttiness, could make myself laugh with a crazy combination, could gain so much pleasure from the surprise of colours together and yet no one ever seemed to bat an eyelid. My mum was horrified by an exposed zip on a red dress but it was the zip that was worrying her not the red And yet it all seems so shallow. I wondered if I looked like someone obsessed by clothes ( though I am), someone who cared only about shopping ( which I am not), as if perhaps I dressed like someone I wouldn't perhaps like. Occasionally people talk to me as if I am an idiot or a child and I realise the disguise of my clothes have done their job.

When I walk off the street into St Anne's Church Soho, I haven't really thought through what I am doing. The outside of the church is flat to the street, more like the entrance to a church hall. It is Sunday so I imagine there is a good chance of getting in and indeed a sign on the pavement says 'Church Open' so I walk down a stone passageway to where I can hear singing. The paving stones are old. I think I can just loiter by the door until the service is over or peer through and sit at the back. I can see a room at the end of the passageway with chairs and tea cups laid out and a reception area - so it is a complete surprise to be ambushed from the side by a verger with a service sheet and ushered to a chair in a carpeted room, like a large lounge with an altar piece in it. Communion is just being blessed, and I am sat at the side of the room alongside the altar but not facing it, like a naughty step for late comers. The congregation of about 11 ( which seems large in this small room) all face the altar and the vicar, blessing the wine and wafers, all peer at me in my I heart London hoodie. I feel a bit of a fool. As if I look like the worst sort of tourist. Someone who just gapes and moves on.

Then a man appears at the doorway that I have just come through, that I am sat beside and beckons me out. I have been found out I think panicking. But of what!? I wonder later. I don't have to believe in God to be here. The man, about my own age, good looking starts saying talking intently to me - indicating we should go to a room at the back of the church. 'I have just walked in off the street.' I say. 'I just wanted to have a look.' 'You're not Karen?' He says. 'No.' ( so of all the names that I might, just might be called that is not it ) He apologises and leads me back to my seat. I am peered at again, but it is not unfriendly, just attentive to detail.

Once after exh had left but was still drinking I got him to babysit while I went to an Al anon meeting. They are the meetings for families and friends of alcoholics. I wanted help with the impact of exh's alcoholism on the boys. Or I just wanted help. In a forlorn church basement a similar mismatched group of 11 all sat, disciples arched around empty chairs. I did think oh bloody hell I never wanted to be here and I remembered a friend saying someone she knew had been and that AA met down the hall and it sounded much more fun. But just like writing this I thought - face it. You are in on this. You are involved. Every time you take a step to telling the truth it gets better. These meetings are secret but I wanted to say how warmly I was welcomed and how kind and considerate they were of each other - though it became apparent they were a sort of family - they had know each other for years. Go to a bigger group they told me, we are too comfortable here. I look back into that room in my mind and see a rather disparate group of people but they had become a true family for they told and accepted each others truth and understood the extreme velcro of their attachments. I remember a very damaged seeming woman saying, yes, good, get ok for the children and another ( very like me, indeed ) stood slightly reluctantly but then talked with passion about how she had become well and how she had first come to this group when she was pregnant with her second baby and that child was now in it's late twenties. Their encouragement was really valuable to me. Though I never went back. Something happened after that and exh no longer had unsupervised access for a while so there was no babysitting anymore and by the time he did again I thought I was ok. I remembered this suddenly in this carpeted room with people queueing for communion and in my anxieties to make a good relationship now, and my fears that I am only capable of making a bad one I think should I go back again. That I need some sort of family to watch me wisely.

Out of the church I wander home. I don't have the boys for the weekend and feel aimless. On a whim I go into the National Gallery - I just think I'll do a whistlestop tour of my favourite paintings, aiming for Courbet. There are such fantastic paintings there, Velazquez 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary', Titian 'The Death of Actaeon', a beautiful new Monet with sunset light and some fascinating Norwegian landscape painter Peder Balke that I have never heard of - almost japanese in his brush strokes - whose career as a painter foundered because of his lack of success though he privately continued with these intimate and passionate landscapes perhaps daring more. I end with 'Young Ladies on the Bank of the Seine' by Courbet with their disturbing trotter limbs. I feel connected and buzzing. How often I forget if you see or engage with great things you can feel better.

This summer I have felt very down. Almost despairing. I have been working too hard and I have felt exhausted. The balance of my life has felt wrong, in need of adjustment.

Though I have been meaning to boast for a while that I am reading War and Peace. After Jonathan Franzen - who seemed to refer to it a lot - and another friend with a fabulous child heart raved about it - I thought it best be done. I never cared for Anna Karenina though I think I read it twice - but this is the most amazing writing, most fantastic tale. I have always thought I was a I 'heart' Dostoyevsky girl with his dense psychological currents of the soul but here the writing is almost transparent, a clean camera eye, swivelling to describe a whole battlefield, turning to the petty conceits of a soiree, gathering together the trifling mistakes that can become a marriage. I am still less than half the way through ( I read it in short bursts on the tube ) but oh, I am pleased I have left it until now - when I was young I would have wolfed it down and not taken time to admire the immensity and beauty of it. I think when I have finished it I will just start again. Set myself to read it every year.

When I get home and read about the church I realise I haven't understood at all. The church is much much older than I imagined - consecrated in 1686 but bombed out during the blitz. It lay between Wardour St and Dean St and there is still a proper church facade and a churchyard on the Wardour Street side opened as St Anne's gardens. Though I hadn't seen this, have never noticed it. Built in the fields of Soho - Christopher Wren or William Talman are said to be the architects - though there seems to be difficulty in assigning authorship - later repairs in 1830 caused James Savage the architect and surveyor 'to criticize Talman's incapacity on the assumption that he was the designer of the roof, contrasting it with Wren's superficially similar 'Master piece of construction' at St. James's: for 'Mr Talman at St. Anne's has missed the proper Principle of constructing a roof of this form'.

During the war the church was hit twice during savage raids - 24th September 1940 and then again on May 10th 1941 ( an intense night of bombing. 300 german bombers arriving over London on a moonlit night, 110 killed and 385 seriously injured in the raids.) That night a bomb passed right through a block of flats opposite my son's school into the earth. It exploded on the clay of the ancient foundations of the old Millbank prison bringing down 24 flats. 24 died though 20 people trapped in a shelter were rescued after an hour and a half digging. Then in February 1944 ( which I include because it is such a poignant and revealing description) 'In the shadow of St Anne's sad but beautiful ruin' there was another bomb nearby. 'A gas main was alight opposite, a mound of brown earth steamed where a small club, fortunately unfilled at that time, had been accomodated: up Wardour Street firemen trailed their hoses among dress maker's dummies; on the trees in St Anne's churchyard hung a tattering of scarecrow garments blasted from a second hand clothiers. The Prime Minster arrived and talked with rescuers and rescued. It was a cold February night: firelight, water on the streets, a woman sobbing dark in a doorway, a great kernel of activity gradually decreasing as the incident was cleared and the night wore on.' The Blitz Westminster at War. William Sansom

Afterwards, between 1941 and 1958 the church promoted a link between the church and the literary world with the St Anne's Society meeting at St Anne's house - Agatha Christie and T.S. Elliott attended meetings and the ashes of Dorothy L Sayers ( a longtime church warden ) are buried deep beneath a brick chamber under the tower.

By 1953 it was thought the church would not be re built and the remains of the east wall were demolished, the site deconsecrated and prepared for sale. In the 60s as Piccadilly became a centre for drug addicts Ken Leech a priest on the staff of St Anne's opened a temporary night shelter for the homeless in the basement of St Anne's house. Soho had become a troubled place 'The site of the Church was a car park. The Parish School in Great Windmill Street was threatened with closure. The sex industry had taken over the area and the local authority was moving tenants out of Soho'. The Soho Society ( a group formed in the early 70s to stop the demoliton and redevelopment of Soho) restored the tower in 1979. 'Let people know that life and heart and hope are in Soho', wrote John Betjeman, patron of the fund raising appeal.

By 1990 the church was rebuilt with a community centre and flats. By 1999 it was a place of community focus for the grief connected to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan.

I go back just to look at the building I had not seen, to visit the churchyard. It is early evening in Soho. I can glimpse further down Wardour street throngs of people, bright lights and rainbow flags. The churchyard is gated - almost armed against intrusion - and I realise I have walked past hundreds of times and not noticed the garden or the chuchyard. I peer through the smell of piss and the mesh of the gate and the surprise of the church facade and tower. Hazlitt I see in huge lettering on a tomb. A couple argue rather theatrically about cigarettes by the wall of the churchyard. I don't know if they are friends or lovers but I think he is gay and she is kidding herself about something.

Amen.