St Giles in the Field

I am sick of my own whiny voice. Early on writing this blog Exh emailed a cartoon to me. Two dogs sat together, 'I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.'
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/60/6068/MIID100Z/posters/alex-gregory-i-had-my-own-blog-for-a-while-but-i-decided-to-go-back-to-just-pointless-new-yorker-cartoon.jpg
I thought it was his way of drily condoning what I was writing about though I think at that point he just hadn't read it. It seemed hilarious for it coincided exactly with how I saw the on and on yap of the compulsive and painful truth telling. I stuck the cartoon up, can see it now on the right hand side of the computer, the London map dense with the yellow and purple spots of churches visited and still to visit stretched out on the wall behind.

It seems a big debate at the moment - how the family is written about. I caught something on the radio whilst hurrying out to work, and read in the Guardian about the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard who has written a six-volume literary epic based on his famiy in particular his alcoholic father. Half of his family no longer speak to him though it is hailed as a masterpiece. In the article he says,
'As a person, I'm polite - I want to please. One of the reasons for that is my father; he had that grip on me. For 40 years I'd lived that tension between my inner and outer selves. Suddenly now the point was not to please, it was to speak the truth. To write reality."
Though he also realised it was:
''Just me and the computer in a room by myself. It never occured to me that it might cause problems - I was just telling the truth, wasn't I? But I was also being very naive. I sent a copy to everyone involved before the first volume was published, and then I discovered how difficult this was going to be. It was like hell."

On the radio ( Start the Week R4): I thought it suggested if it was good writing it was ok and if it wasn't it wasn't. But then I go back and find the podcast ( I have never done this before - and there is an excitement and a slight panic that I will spend my time just listening to back catalogues of R4) and hear Will Eaves express my own anxiety to these rules that there is no way of knowing while you do it that you are able to achieve this. He believes too that writing creates a 'Freestanding structure, whatever the origins maybe.' While AS Byatt countered 'Writing about people you know is always an exercise in power.' and that it is a dangerous thing to have a writer close'. 'an appalling thing' she says. I don't know. I wanted to describe good and bad things that have happened fairly. Though I may have failed. In the last blog I meant only to describe one more time exh's alcoholism to describe my own continuing reaction to it. The attachment I made to his behaviour. The trigger of hyper alertness it seemed to switch on. Though I do think - what else would or could you do? With children? A woman - a friend of exh said at a party, her arms heaved righteously under her bosom, but of course - you are the co dependent. A wagging slightly mean finger to her tongue. Oh yes, I said but I still don't think there is another way to behave once the shock of alcoholism takes hold. Though perhaps it is co dependent to take them on? Take a risk on dangerous things? Ignore the warning signals? I don't know, I do feel rebellious of the label given but understand I took part in a pattern, even hide my own drinking issues in the pockets of ex's own problems.

A voice coach that I had never heard of talks on desert island discs about the horror and pain of living with an alcoholic husband and how coming out of it she felt she fought every day for survival. How pleased she was not to have had children within that relationship and how damaging it was. Oh I thought, a catch of pain, as I heard her talk, that is what it was like, I didn't make it up. It really was that tough. She picked really beautiful music too, classical music that I jotted down.
The dusty smugness of DIDiscs seems to have been replaced by people talking quite honestly about the route and pain of their lives. But perhaps again that is how we speak now? I have heard John Prescott, James Corden and some rugby player discuss eloquently the difficulty at times of being themselves.
James Corden was very honest and charming ( is that compatible?) about his Salvation Army family, the love they gave him, his own ambition, and the loneliness and lost feelings induced by a party life style. His family arriving at his London flat to rescue him, only a lindt chocolate rabbit and some vitamin water in the fridge - no milk to make a cup of tea - but his Dad hugging and praying with him.

I hear too on the radio that before her death Angela Carter was asked to be on Desert Island discs then they put her recording slot back ( possibly for John Major ) and by the time the BBC could do the interview she was too ill. She organised her own funeral to be a Desert Island discs show and a final revelation was that she had chosen a zebra as her luxury. I laugh out loud at the beauty of a desert island with a zebra alongside. I love zebras for I always think that they make unicorns look possible, indeed almost anything possible.

I have been ill for bloody weeks. Just as I started the broadsheet work I was so excited about I got a cold. Then it knocked me sideways as it mutated from the normal sniff and splutter of a few days and I shivered and sweated and ached and it carried on and on and on, briefly ceasing, then returning with renewed vigour, evolving new symptoms. I sneezed and blew my nose raw in the hush of the civilised office where decorous journalists with principles, debated art and books. I couldn't not go, I needed to prove my reliability but I was soggy and sweating, barely able to cope and slightly wild-eyed to stress, though always trying to smile. It was a manic combination. I wanted to be asked back but in the circumstances it was hard to make a great impression. Luckily I get other work with other newspapers but I wait to know if they are going to book me for a long stint that was mooted.

Though UL now back to the acroynym of OL loses his Turkmenistan job because a client pulls out and then gets it back a week later because there are new clients.

I cycle up to the corner of Oxford St/Tottenham Court Rd/Covent Garden on a strangely warm saturday early evening, looking for a church to visit. I realise in the throng of Soho that there is no way that a church will be open now at this time. But still I steer the bike round the options. I feel slightly weary of my task, I want to get to the City churches not be weaving around the dust and I heart london tat of this end of Oxford St. Not really surprisingly The French Protestant church on Soho Square, The Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, St Giles in The Field and the Swiss Church are all closed but partly because I am against the tide of people in couples and groups out to bars and restaurants and theatres with what feels like a forlorn task set and I don't have anything else to do on a Saturday evening I keep moving round. I'll find something I think but the nearest I get to a church is two men coming out of a side door of a monumental grand building at the end of Covent Garden which I see is the Freemasons Hall, the headquaters of the United Grand Lodge of England. I am resentful sometimes of my obedience to the task - the spiral around of the purple dots - but if I didn't stick to my plan I would miss out the ones I didn't like the look of and would already have missed some of the best stories. Though increasingly I think that I will continue this arc of the spiral that I am on, which is going to take me round the cusp of south london shortly but use Oxford Street as a rough boundary for a while, then make a bit of a dash east. When I say 'dash' I am probably talking about a year away really. Blimey! I seem resigned to the long haul. I don't seem to get more than one a month done these days. Anyhow, I am not sure what I am saying makes sense! Unless you are such an isictt fan that you have your own map and sticker system at home! Oh go on! Tell me you are!

For some reason though I think St Giles in the Field is a Hawksmoor church and I feel excited as I cycle up again on a Tuesday lunchtime. I am going into Peter Ackroyd territory I think, though I have never read Hawksmoor only tried. I think oh good - I will have to try harder, try again. I read his TS Eliot biography which I loved and I used to waitress in a small restaurant where he had a regular table. He seemed a good man. The church flanks the north end of Covent Garden, the east of Charing Cross Rd, a scruffy, confusing patch of one way streets made dusty by the Crossrail building work consuming the area, a huge crater behind hoardings. The church is a large slab of a building, elegant but huge, set back from the road, resting in gardens surrounded by railings. There is a coffee stall to one side of the entrance and a cluster of dirty comrades in overcoats sat on benches, cans of beer tucked at their legs, Inside the church it is completely empty and quiet. Later I find a leaflet that describes the church as a representation of the journey of Christianity, the font near the doorway signifying baptism as the start of a Christian life, the clear sweep of the nave from the back of the church to the east end past the word of God of the pulpit and lectern through to the sanctuary of the altar where the sacraments were given all the way to the image of Jesus. I only really saw a plain space, galleries either side, plain glass windows apart from behind the altar where there is stained glass. To the left is a large architectural model of the church as it is. I peer in through the windows. I want to see a representation of my own solitary figure in a cape stooping to look at a tiny model of the same church within the wooden interior but of course it is empty. Known as the Poet's church, Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning married here, John Milton's daughter was baptized here and Andrew Marvell buried in 1678.

It appears there has been a place of worship on this site since Saxon times. I write this and then start looking up about Saxon beliefs and feel swamped. Though there is very little solid information just lots of gods and ritual sacrifice ( animals).
Though I find Pope Gregory the Great instructing Abbot Mellitus that:
'I have come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols in England should not on any account be destroyed. Augustine must smash the idols, but the temples themselves should be sprinkled with holy water, and altars set up in them in which relics are to be enclosed. For we ought to take advantage of well-built temples by purifying them from devil-worship and dedicating them to the service of the true God.'
In 1120 Henry 1's wife Matilda founded a christian leper hospital called St Giles here in the countryside, out of the city and away from Westminster, in a place of marshy land that would seperate the diseased from the able bodied. St. Giles was the patron saint of woodland, of lepers, beggars, cripples, and of those struck by sudden misery, and driven into solitude. Years ago when post modernism seemed a complicated thing that needed studying, not just the scrapbook of our lives I tried to read french philosophy though most of it was just too dense for me to understand. I recorded myself reading Blanchot believing that I would be able to decode the layered text if I did. OL then just my boyfriend, was caught on the tape in the background just coming round, the door opening, the shuffle of his step in the hall before the cassette is switched off. When he went to Russia and disappeared I used to play the scrap of recorded time and listen to the mundane moment of our life together, the assumption of the here and now fluttering and observed like something trapped in a jar. Anyhow, in Foucault's 'Madness and Civilisation' ( frankly a page turner in comparison to Blanchot) I can remember with fascination the suggestion that lepers existed in the place later consigned to the mad - literally outside of the city walls. Though I discover now some medieval sources suggest that those suffering from leprosy were considered to be going through Purgatory on Earth, and for this reason their suffering was considered holier than the ordinary person's. More frequently, lepers were seen to exist in a place between life and death. Though leprosy mainly disappeared in the mid sixteenth century and the 'outsider' position - the 'not us' - was taken by poverty, poor vagabonds, criminals and ‘dangerous minds.' Indeed after the reformation a post catholic church was built at St Giles in the Field in 1632 and the poor flocked to the area - vagrants expelled from the City, irish, french refugees and the 'st giles blackbirds' - the poor and black who had escaped from slavery or the army. At the crossroads of Oxford St, Charing Cross Rd and Tottenham Court Rd there was a gallows and a 'cage' for miscreants and even after the 15th century when the gallows was moved further to the edge of the developing city, the condemned would stop on their journey at the Resurrection gate of St Giles in the Fields and be given a bowl of ale.
In this 'damp and unwholesome' parish of St Giles the great plague of 1664 started and the first victim was buried in the churchyard. By the end 3,216 plague deaths were recorded in this parish of 2,000 households. Indeed so many were buried that the ground of the churchyard rose, the land got soggier and the application for a new, the present church was passed in 1730.


I stand in Foyles bookshop on the Southbank reading Peter Ackroyd's London biography. I am struggling a bit with Ackroyd envy, his work is so good and I am worried that it means mine is pointless, these tales have been told already. I have discovered already the design of the present church is not a Hawksmoor though he did submit designs for the Church under the commission of 50 churches but it was turned down in favour of the Palladian scheme by Flitcroft but also that Peter Ackroyd has written a whole chapter on the St Giles area. A crossroads of time and eternity, he calls it. He seems to believe like I do that a place holds an imprint of history, that the homeless and drunken and derranged gather like migrating souls, to an old nest. Though perhaps it is just that aid is given in these historical areas of poverty. I live on the corner of what was once the slum known as Devil's Acre and there are at least two hostels nearby. The homeless fold themselves into boxes and bins in our courtyard and sleep in snagged nylon sleeping bags outside office blocks. Recently I saw a man in a hospital gown and bare feet, his toes clenched like pigeon claws to the pavement and when it was really cold earlier in the year I saw a figure crouched over an army stove, sheltering down our thin dark street as if it were an ancient ditch.

Hogarth the master of detail of such depraved squalor used the St Giles parish as the backdrop for 'Gin Lane' 1751.
'Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin. Desperation, death and decay pervade the scene. The only businesses that flourish are those which serve the gin industry: gin sellers; distillers (the aptly named Kilman); the pawnbroker where the avaricious Mr. Gripe greedily takes the vital possessions (the carpenter offers his saw and the housewife her cooking utensils) of the alcoholic residents of the street in return for a few pennies to feed their habit; and the undertaker, for whom Hogarth implies at least a handful of new customers from this scene alone. Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit —as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs— lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff.[a] This mother was not such an exaggeration as she might appear: in 1734, Judith Dufour reclaimed her two-year-old child from the workhouse where it had been given a new set of clothes; she then strangled it and left the infant's body in a ditch so that she could sell the clothes (for 1s. 4d.) to buy gin.[10] In another case, an elderly woman, Mary Estwick, let a toddler burn to death while she slept in a gin-induced stupor.'

Round here the worst casualties are the crack addicts, the yellow-faced lost souls with their tatoos pale on the nicotine stain of liver damaged skin. I saw near Victoria station a man, barely human, stopping a bus. He was in the middle of the road with two fingers up. his clothes barely covering his body, just a blur of hair and flesh, his back arched like a snarling kicked dog, more a hound than a man. Another howled down our street, his arms gibbering his own body in comfort.

I discover too that attempts in the nineteenth century to clear the slums of St Giles to make way for sanitation and transport systems meant that the evicted just moved into near by slums, such as 'Devil's Acre and Church Lane making them more overcrowded still'. So this corner I live on holds the trace of St Giles's history.

It is Spring now and I see a heavily bearded man sat in a doorway, in a corner with the most sun, he has taken his shoes and socks off, undone the layers of his coats, and sits stretched out and smiling into the warmth, his large gnarled feet bare. If I ever have time or money I would pay for or push a foot health trolley round for the homeless. It seems the thing most needed. Socks on demand, new boots if needed, antiseptic cream, a foot massage and toe nail clippers.

Amen