St Mary's Bourne Street

I stand in porches to peer I think, squinting through the reflected light of the glass door into the dark church. I can see the backs of heads of a few worshippers and hear the beautiful soaring high voices of a choir. It is the sunday morning after the clocks turned back and I just didn't get it together to be on time for the service. I don't know what to do. I dither. I can't enter now, it would be rude or just a bit dramatic. I'll have to wait until everyone comes out I think, annoyed with myself for being late. I feel like I have a lot to do though I am slightly lonely and the boys are away. Then I sit in a coffee shop to wait. At the cafe I overhear a pretty very young woman say she lost 20 million recently - though I am straining to hear 2O million what? Shares? Pounds? What else could it possibly be? Over the next few days I wonder what else she could have meant but can't think of anything. Try it. Stamps? Sweets? er Kilograms? Handkerchiefs? I don't know. The church service still hasn't finished when I finish my coffee so I walk round the block a couple of times. In the peace of Sunday morning posh streets, well heeled people walk dogs or children and I peer into luxe lives.

I see immaculately tidy, plush rooms and search for stray details of life - a ginger cat still as an ornament in the corner of a window, a doll tipped up face down on a toy high chair, a family slightly squashed around a table eating a meal in a basement with the window open and some really beautiful yolk yellow cast iron cooking pots on a window shelf. Each time round the block I come again to the long view of the church. I have never seen this chuch before today - had no idea what to expect. It is a fairly ordinary dark red brick with a pitched roof and a solitary bell in a cote, a church from a northern town not a parish church of this wealthy hushed neighbourhood. But the doors at the side are locked and I have to turn the corner to the entrance set back from the street sandwiched between houses.

The night before I came back over Westminster Bridge on a night bus with UL and looked up to see Big Ben dark orange from reflected light, dimmed as if eclipsed, the hands of the clock straight up to twelve o'clock. Oh, I say. Oh. Big Ben has become to me a lighthouse, a beacon - the boom of hundreds of new years eves and new resolutions made - a big bright licked dinner plate of light. I live here! I am nearly home! I live here! I am nearly home! But this night it is dull, shut down, as if resting and no bell rings out. Oh I think - the time is being changed on the clock but the bus sails past and I don't think to watch. I am fiddling with this image in my mind for days - lost time, limbo time, time travel, time turned back - there seems a gap in normal time at least. I imagine unexpectedly seeing the hands go backwards and the shock of seeing it. ( Once long ago I lived in a flat in White City overlooking the Westway and opened the blinds one morning to see all the traffic go backwards - what seemed like the world tipping, something, possibly just me, having fallen off an axis of sense was infact a road accident and traffic reversing to exit a slip road.) I google changing the clocks on Big Ben and find out that the clock would have been stopped the following midday - and worked on since then, checked over, then restarted exactly at 12 o'clock in the new time. So what I see is not midnight but held onto midday. Is it literally time stood still I wonder? Thinking of UL and me. Though perhaps it is just limbo. A place pretending to have no time, not recognising time has moved on. Later I mention seeing the shut down clock to my eldest son who explains the process I had only just discovered in great detail. How did you know that? I say amazed. 'It was on Newsround Mum.' He says nonchalantly.

Another night with the boys away I cycle up into Bloomsbury on a Boris Bike to meet a friend and talk about an art project. He works at the university of London. Cycling along the dark damp beautiful streets I feel suddenly and rather unexpectedly that I am in a dream. I pass earnestly happy young people deep in discussion, as if passing my own ambitions and ideals through the light drizzle. In the bright electric light of his university office we sit and talk about recording nearly extinct languages around the world and the hand gestures that accompany them as exactly as possible with as little 'surface' or manipulation to the representation. There is something here I want badly I think. Though it isn't an envious reaction. Just a realisation.

I want the pursuit of knowledge. Time to do what interests me.

On the third lap around the streets alongside the church elegant, elderly, made-up women come around the corner sparrow fawn, pearls and gold chokered at their neck. The church service is finished, the congregation departing. At the door an effusive handsome vicar in a black robe like a friendly wolf talks flamboyantly of a church in europe that he had visited. Worshippers are coming out, queueing to talk to him. Against the tide I stand near, waiting. Can I just go in to see your church? I ask. He waves me in ebulliently.

I'll just whizz in and I will have done it I think. But the bit of the church I could see when I peered in from the porch is just a side chapel, and the organ music is loud and passionate. Wow. I think. turning into the main body of the church. Dense grey clouds of strong smelling incense fill the space like special effects. People stand heads turned up to the organ playing triumphantly high in a gallery up at the back of the church. Two men absorbed - one playing, one stood close turning the pages. Just for one minute I feel, I feel what? The power and the glory? Mystery? Absolute wonder? It is exhilarating. The organ stops, everyone claps. The two men nod from the balcony.

I think later, of all the churches I have been to and all the tall pipes and ornate details of church organs I have turned my head to see without perhaps realising the impact of the actual music had on the service. I google 'organ music' and discover that the first organ ( a water hydraulis) was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria in the third century bc and described later in latin in the late 4th century by the poet Claudian - Magna levi detrudens murmura tactu....intonet 'let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch.' Used as a musical accompaniment to gladiatorial combat ( blimey - history - a dip into the gladiatorial games is the most fascinatingly brutal display of human cruelty I have read:
http://legvi.tripod.com/gladiators/id1.html)
But by the 8th century the organ is prominent in the liturgy of the Catholic Church for it's ability to 'simultaneously provide a musical foundation below the vocal register, support in the vocal register, and increased brightness above the vocal register.' compliment the human voice and the human voices of a choir. Though during the renaissance the hydraulic organ was used in magical grottos and gardens - run only by water (often waterfalls) whilst the air generated in the pipes were used to make automata figurines dance and birds fly. Other times hidden to simulate the music played by statues in mythological scenes.
But today - something - the frequency, the passion, the immensity of the sound - like a soaring dramatic sound track has unexpectedly transported me from mild lurking depression to joy.

The initially humble chapel was designed by a little known church architect RJ Withers and consecrated in 1874. Built over the underground railway on land where houses had been demolished, it was still an area of slums.
'The chapel as a whole is remarkably effective and has a solid and substantial look which is highly satisfactory. It is, in a word, an excellent specimen of an inexpensive chuch, the cost of the whole, not counting special gifts such as the reredos, altar, font etc, being about £4,500.' The Church Times 1874
It is another Trachaterian church ( as near as dammit catholic whilst still being allowed to be in the Church of England ) set up by Friar WJE Bennett of St Paul's Wilton St and then St Barnabus, Pimlico then taken over by Rev the hon Robert Liddell when he resigned. I have written already of this resignation and the riots that were caused by the high catholic rituals of the movement at St Barnabus.
http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html

Less controversial St Mary's is described in The Chuch Times 1874. 'The service at eleven o'clock was well attended by people from the neighbourhood, and we were glad to notice a good sprinkling of poor women. Mr Eyton, the Curate-in-Charge, was the clebrant, and an unconscionably long sermon was preached by Mr Knox-Little ( curate of St Thomas, Regent Street) which, considering the broiling weather, was little better than cruelty.'

For halloween I tell the boys I have prepared a 'mystery'. There is great excitement as we bob apples and play the game where you cut a cake of flour and have to fish out the fallen sweet with your mouth. In my bedroom I have adapted the huge child sized cardboard box that was has been their 'tank' and hung crepe paper streamers inside like cobwebs. Each child ( there are five boys who take it in turns) sits inside the box. PSM ( under my nervous instruction ) and I wail into a tube, drop cobwebs on their heads, blow through straws onto the back of their necks, put icy fingers on their arms and hang a skull with red shining eyes to a peep hole.

But the room isn't quite dark enough and I forget my lines and indeed my props for I am just too nervy to be a natural performer. 'Lame' each boy says. 'Was that a mystery?' says my eldest in disgust.

I keep remembering Graham Greene's conversion to Catholicism - I read it in his early autobiography 'A sort of Life' and loved the mix of mystery and mundanity. I look for the book on my book shelf and can't find it but here, oh it is worth the read.
http://www.basicincome.com/bp/greenesconversion.htm

Finally, I find a part time local history course that can be done on the internet that I can apply for in January. It will be a start I think excitedly.

Amen