Church of Holy Apostles

Sitting in my kitchen late at night texting a quite nice girl from The Only Way is Essex about pictures of her as a little girl I think, really, something has got to change. Increasingly I just feel really, really stressed. Since the closure of the News of the World my part-time job share - like an unnoticed gas leak has invisibly filled every nook and crany of my life. I wake in the morning worrying that a car I have booked will not have picked up a celebrity, that a shot that the editor would like will not get taken, that I will not possibly get everything done. I work long hours at incredible speed and with great concentration, then take the paperwork home. I have gone to work the last three Sundays because I didn't know how the work would get done if I didn't. I have always worked hard but this is different. I don't know what to do. Of course I need the money but I have started to make mistakes and the amount of work I am getting through is impossible to maintain. All I really want to do is write. Sometimes I think if I only I stopped doing some of the things I don't really want to do, don't believe in maybe things would get better. Though I deliberately flatter the TOWIE girl to get the results I want and it works. She calls me babe as she agrees to send the pictures.

I slip into the Holy Apostles Catholic Church on a Sunday morning, parking the Boris Bike round the back of nearby St Gabriel's church. I can see on the surrounding Pimlico skyline the spires of three churches. Almost a year ago I signed up for a BB, almost a year ago I visited this church, almost a year ago I met UL after an absence of 12 years. It is a kind of anniversary. Though he is still in his very bad marriage despite declarations of separation that were made in the summer and I feel caught by the twine of their unhealthy life. After escaping an alcoholic relationship I am anxious this can only be another trap. Perhaps we are both just too damaged I think. Or am I just better at spotting unhealthy patterns? Did we have a bad relationship before? All I have remembered was our fascination with each other. But oh oh oh I feel sad.

I used to attend a mother and toddler group in the church hall of Holy Apostles with my youngest son - little girls in sparkly-heeled cinderella slippers doggedly shuffling dolls in buggies as he donned a policeman outfit and a batman mask before driving a plastic hooded car around the hall. Mothers resigned to the display of these apparently intrinsic roles. The church hall has a beautiful, nicely-planted, mediterreanean 50s style sunny courtyard and I assume the entrance of the church is there. But it isn't and I have to walk around to the next street to find the door. Up some steps, the door is open, I can hear singing, there is a service. I stand in the porch, like a phone box dense with cards - advertising religious services including counselling for those who have suffered from the abuse of priests.

The church is quite long and narrow and plain though busy. The congregation are queueing for communion. Vaulted like the interior bones of a whale the room has neutral colours that make the colours of people's sunday best vibrant.

The old Holy Apostles Church (then on Claverton Street - on the site of an old rather grand columned Wesleyen chapel) was bombed out in the war on 16th April 1941. The attack on Pimlico that night was ferocious. In nearby Sutherland Terrace the whole terrace of thirty odd houses was obliterated apart from three dwellings:

'But here, in the night, in a place ringed with fires, the devastation seemed endless, a wide earthern space swelling with mounds and pitted with hole. In all the noise, in all the urgency of the moment there was felt in the air that shroud of emptiness that hangs over a battlefield.'

'When rescue and first aid parties were already engaged on this field, engaged in what one heavy rescue man could only describe as digging, digging, digging', wardens away at a post in Glasgow Terrace saw through the flared and spitting skyscape the drifting pale glint of another parachute. It was coming from the south of the river.'

As this new blast hit Sutherland Terrace:

'Over two thousand kilos of high explosive split over vehicles, men, wounded. Excavations made were filled in, men were killed and lorries blown up. A stretcher bearer remembers that 'it was just as though a huge orange flare had gone up under your throat. A hell of a bang. Then it was like a sandpapered ramrod down your throat, and your lungs puffing out like a pouter pigeon. Then dead dead silence. Then, as though some time afterwards. a slow shower of bricks everywhere.'
'The Blitz. Westminster at War' William Sansom

That night in London 450 bombers were used. In Westminster there were 148 dead. 564 injured seriously. It was called 'The Wednesday'

'Keep calm and carry' on is not just a tea towel.

Missionaries sheltering under the porch were left unscathed when the Church of Holy Apostles was hit and the parish priest Canon Hadfield clambered through the smoking debris to rescue the Blessed Sacrament, and then carry it on his bike through the blackout and continued bombing and fires of the night to Westminster Cathedral.

The Monster Tavern was also bombed out that night, a relic of the bygone more pastoral past of Pimlico - it had set up as a rival to 'Jenny's whim' - a tea garden and drinking house on the pimlico side of Ebury Bridge in the then fields between Chelsea and Westminster. Among the ponds and flower beds, clever spring devices released effigies of grotesque animals and theatrical characters to surprise patrons. The Monster tavern gained it's name by adopting similiar terrifying displays but kept going into the 20th century. In the book I have 'Blitz over Westminster' - photographs showing bombed out sites with casualty numbers and reference numbers to the reports made of bombs dropped - even the remains of the Monster Tavern just looks like a pub not the dark dreamlike place of entertainment I imagined.

With no home the Holy Apostles Church continued to hold services in another bombed site, and after the war in a prefab hut on their old site. This was then requisitioned for the Churchill Garden estate and the future of the Holy Apostles Church looked very uncertain. Canon Hadfield again cycled around at night planting 'miraculous medals' on bombed sites to demand to build a new church. I spend ages trying to find out about this character, consulting the Catholic Herald Archive, trawling through a whole history of catholic ramblers, even phoning the Holy Apostles Church for a copy of their history. The lady on the phone says they have run out, she has even given her own copy away and gives me a few numbers to try. No one rings me back.

All I find is that this Yorkshire man Canon Hadfield 'was Pimlico' and it was his determination that obtained the Cumberland/Winchester St site. He then got his architect father's Sheffield based firm to design the new church. It opened in 1957. Described by a more recent friar as a false tooth in the orderly splendour of Winchester and Cumberland Streets - 'But in our case it is a beautiful false tooth especially when viewed from Cumberland St.'

In the playground I am able to talk about War and Peace with the Russian mum that exh and I christened momdel. She is beautiful. I am certain she has been a model at some point but since our eldest children started school together she has been studying english literature. She finished her MA in the summer. She said her mother who is staying now to help with the children is horrified by the dirt on her crockery because she puts a book on the taps to read whilst washing up. I said maybe we should buy those transparent recipe book holders and read through most of the housework.

But oh, it is so good:

'Sometimes Pierre remembered what he had been told about soldiers in a shelter under fire with nothing to do, trying their best to keep busy and thus make the danger easier to bear. and Pierre pictured all men as soldiers like these, escaping from life through ambition, cards, law-making, women, little playthings, horses, politics, sport, wine, even government service. 'Everything matters, nothing matters, it's all the same. If I can only escape, one way or another!' Thought Pierre . 'And not see it, the terrible it.'


On the way back from school the children find a huge clean empty cardboard box on the street. They plead with me to be allowed to take it home, they want to build a tank. We take it in turns to carry it though it is a big as me and double the size of the youngest. Civil servants smile as with arms spread wide he manages to walk it along the pavement. Huge in our tiny flat, they play in it for days, muffled games overheard, friends coming to play disappearing into it's well armoured depths.


Another day on our way back from St James's park climbing trees my eldest son tells me that his class had to write what they would like to be when they grow up. He says his best friend wrote down artist and that he wrote he would like to be a soldier or an explorer. I wince. A friend's son who has always wanted to be a soldier is now 15. She is an artist, a brilliant single mum. I have watched at her sidelines as he escalates his once childish obsession to nearly become a career. Once I said ridiculously, hopelessly, ludicrously - I couldn't bear him to go to war. Another friend - formerly known as FB quite rightly snapped at me reminding me to think how she felt. I thought I had. But I couldn't. But my son says his friend Rami says he would like to be a pilot so that when the 'mighty war' does come he can fly his family to safety.

oh, I think, with fear. oh.