St Clement Danes

It is Sunday afternoon and I am cycling down the Strand really really fast, wearing a cape, with a man in a white van gesticulating at me and I am absolutely hopping mad. I have discovered this morning that there has been an incident at Exh's new place yesterday that includes our children, a knife, a screwdriver, PSM's sons, and an altercation with some big boys. The children had been allowed to roam Bermondsey unattended. I am furious and frightened. I feel sick. Everyone is safe and all is well and in many ways the incident is better than it sounds but in many others it is worse. I have the sense that my optimism that everything will be ok is not true. That my foggy cheer that by the teenage years we will have worked out so much I will not be shocked by what is to come is only an essential lie that I tell myself. Once a woman cornered me to say how much I would suffer when they were teenagers. Her beautiful and seemingly biddable son had turned unexpectedly drunken and nasty. I thought grumpily that she should keep quiet, as if transgressing the sanctity of motherhood truths like talking about childbirth to a first time pregnant mum. After all my oldest friend's son is 21 this year and I have witnessed some of the pain of a son growing up. Though he is a fantastic. However my eldest child has a warrior heart - brave and fearless and while you would want him on your side in any battle he is a difficult child to fit into the mild mannered expectations of our time. I believe he would stoop to pick up the wounded in a battle if they were on his side but I believe too he would be a ferocious enemy. Also and this is understandable as a 9 year old boy he has no comprehension that he is mortal. I believe too he needs more freedom - I have seen his engrossed and happy face as he made camps in muddy fields on his own for hours, and yet I trap him in a second floor flat with a making box, a wii, a load of lego and a lot of paper and pens. Of course I get them out to the park, to the countryside, to Richmond Park as much as possible, but he needs freedom to make mistakes on his own.


'Oh' I feel like roaring. Sometimes I don't know what to do. I think of everything tender in him, the care and thought with which he picks presents, the dedicated attention and gentle patience he lavishes on his young cousins, the enthusiasm and beauty with which he makes a japanese garden on a beach and the question he asked me the day before - did you realise when you were a little girl that the people around you had witnessed the war? - but I have realised this morning for the first time he is a danger to himself. He will swagger down the street, he will challenge others, he will get into fights. I have to teach him to be safe but I worry it is inherent in him.


I am aiming for the Savoy Chapel but I sort of know I am late. The incident has taken hours of discussion and detective work to sort out what is being said and what is nearest the truth. Then just before getting on the bike I spoke to PSM and she has added extra details which seem to change everything and mean that someone/everyone is lying. Though I suspect infact everyone believes the truth they are telling. It just doesn't all add up.

The Chapel, just off the Strand is shut. It is only open for a service at 11am on Sundays, there seems to be some restoration work going on which means it is shut in the week. Oh, I think, what shall I do now. I still have the anger and tears choked in my throat, stuck like a swallowed spoon. I am in a haze. Shall I get another bike and go up to try Soho? Or South London? I have got to get into a church today for I am starting full time work the next day - I have just over a month booked at one newspaper and then a contract at the quality broadsheet for six months potentially being extended for a year. I got the job! Though the combination of pending full time work and being less available to my sons is an additional worry.
Then I look up and laugh. It is a game that is easy to play in London - how many churches can you see at one time - and here in easy view are two churches as if under my nose. The first, at the bottom of Aldwych, St Mary Le Strand is shut. But, a little bit further down the Strand, on a kind of traffic island in the wide thoroughfare St Clement Danes is open. Oh I think a rush of excitement - this is nearly the City - this is the Oranges and Lemons church.

At the gate I see that the church is affiliated with the Royal airforce and as I walk in I can see display cases of airforce memorabilia and postcards for sale. A man in the office at the side nods to me as I enter. The church is light and bright and beautiful - dark wood at the lower floor and white columns reaching up from the gallery, ornate plaster work of swags and rich gilding in the vaulted roof, I sit in a pew. I want just to think.

Across from me an old woman with a peaceful face also sits at a pew. She is folding things into plastic bags. Large with bare arms she is like a painting, somehow monumental, completely at ease with herself, engrossed in her task, oblivious of my sidelong eyes observing her.

Infront, hung on the back of each pew there are beautiful cross stitched kneelers. I love the time and care of their work. Nimble fingers counting out in stitches airforce ensignia. I bought recently on ebay a half finished patchwork cushion cover for £15 - it is one of the most beautiful things I possess - possibly from the 30s, the rich colour and textures of the velvets and silks stiched together with highly visible herringbone stitch are in irregular triangular shapes. Like the structure of a leaf the construction is visible, a show of the craft and care and time of a woman's work. I would like to have it framed, would like it one day to hang above my desk while I write. If I was stuck for words or stories I would look at the combinations of colours and patterns, the unexpected arrangements that work so beautifully. When I try to identify the herringbone pattern of the stitch I find:

'Patchwork represents religious poverty in several cultures. A prominent example is the kesa or kasay which origninated in India in the fourth century BC. It arrived in Japan with Buddhism in the sixth century c.e and became a Western Asian tradition. The patched shawl is a symbol of Buddha, who was often depicted with a patched robe draped over his left shoulder. Worn for worship and ritual, the kesa represented a vow of poverty and served as a symbol of humility. The rectangular kesa is about one yard wide and two and a half times the length of the human body.
As a devotional act, monks cleaned and stitched together discarded fabric in a traditional manner, based on seven vertical columns. The pieces of fabric are sewn from the centre, slightly overlapping one another. Patterns are based on rank and position, including the quality and colour of the cloth. In some cases, a brocade fabric was cut up, rearranged and put back together in an artistic manner. Prayers were repeated while the kesa was being sewn, put on, and taken off. the kesa was only cleaned with purified water and incense. In most cases it was the only personal possession owned by a Buddhist monk. Needlework through history: An enclylopedia Catherine Amoroso Leslie

On a whim I have started taking pictures of my washing up on the draining board. I spend so much time doing it day in day out - breakfast bowls, coffee cups, wine glasses, cooking pots, bread tins, stacking clean colourful cups and plates in a higher and higher perfectly balanced arrangements that I thought it would be funny take a record of my work. Also, sometimes, the early morning sunlight hitting a colour combination - a green patterned tea cup with a pink, yellow and orange plastic beaker is just beautiful.

'I believe life is sacred' a man says simply in a discussion about euthanasia on the radio. Ah, I think with a comic book light bulb above my head - get that sound effect machine back out - Ding! That is the key. That is what is celebrated in all these churches, what is found when I come through the doors. It seems very simple and yet completely overlooked most of the time. Life is sacred. Here in the space of these churches is the acceptance of mystery at the heart of life and the celebration of it too. Just sitting still here I understand this for the first time. I don't have to believe I think looking at the cruxifix and the flicker of an altar candle - just accept the statement of sacred. Perhaps it is what my children are missing. I remember travelling in Greece and admiring the inventiveness of the roadside shrines. Votive candles flickering in spindly glass boxes, pictures, a small glass of something, some herbs, once I saw a bottle of coca cola. I thought they were like 'welcome' boxes to god, like a hostess offering some small nibbles to a guest on arrival. This was years ago when I was an art student and I wanted then to make my own, to give thanks by what I kept precious in that box. Though I never did it. Now I would keep an orange, an apple, an egg, a large glass of wine, a candle, maybe a slice of home made bread and something that smells nice, maybe some basil or sage and a bowl of Walker's Chilli Sensations crisps. Simple things that could be shared. I write all this and then google these boxes and discover infact all my ideas are wrong - shockingly they mark road accidents - in memorial for those who died or in thanks for survival. Oh.

Sport I think. That is what we need. More sport for the boys. I will just have to organise them.

I notice the beatiful wooden pulpit, like an intricately carved look out post. I find out it was carved by Grinling Gibbons who's work I have admired before in a Wren church.

In the St Clement Danes guide book I read:
'The Romans, having founded Londinium and occupied it for 400 years, abandoned it in the early 5th century. They left behind them the walled City of London and an embryonic Christian worship.'
Ding! Again that light bulb. Oh I suddenly realise, understanding my stupidity - it is because of the Romans there is Christianity in Britain. I can't tell you what a complete revelation this is to me - and with it the realisation of why it is called the Roman Catholic Church. I think it is almost too embarrassing to mention this it seems so completely obvious but somehow it makes many things very clear to me. The baton on and on of worship. Not only was London created by the Romans but the churches are their legacy. I had only thought of the roman gods as their religion, forgetting St Paul and his travels. On a recent quick dip into the British Museum I was also fascinated by the crossover sarcophogases - egyptian to roman. Again I hadn't understood this movement of change from one to another. It is something that interests me the shifts of power blending and merging, we were taught in 'periods' at school not the gaps between, the downhill run to a new order. I start reading about the Romans in quiet moments on a very rare not busy day at work, I catch Mary Beard on TV talking about the Romans and showing us their remains littered under the streets of Rome - a block of flats still standing, basement burial chambers under modern apartment blocks. We live on the patterns of their lives I think, the Strand itself the straight line of a Roman road.

As the Romans departed the City of London the walled city seems chiefly to have been abandoned though there is some mystery surrounding this - I think of it though - a desolate place, temples left to decay, the rain beating down on elegant columns, the ruins of Roman life fading away. Lundenwic, a port area near the present St Clement Danes was established but when the warriors of Denmark came up the Thames spreading slaughter at the beginning of the 9th century the Saxon population retreated back within the city walls. Eventually Alfred the Great overcame the Danes in 878AD and Guthrum their leader accepted baptism and peace. It is thought that Alfred allowed Danes with English wives to settle in the old 'wic' or port ( hence Aldwych) and that these people took over a small wooden church already in existence. Later, under the Danish king Canute (1017-35) a small stone church was built, dedicated to St Clement. Over the years it was enlarged and restored many times, acquiring a tower in about 1100. This is the church that became known as St Clement of the Danes.

According to the confession of Thomas Winter, it was here that the Gunpowder Plot in was concocted in 1605. He says, "So we met behind St. Clement's, Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy, Mr. Wright, Mr. Guy Fawkes, and myself, and having, upon a primer, given each other the oath of secrecy, in a chamber where no other body was, we went after into the next room and heard Mass, and received the blessed Sacrament upon the same.'

John Donne lived (1573 - 1631) in the parish and his wife was buried here - though the gravestone no longer exists Donne's epitaph to her remains, now engraved on a tablet within the church. 'Her husband John Donne made speechless by grief, sets up this stone to speak, brings his ashes to hers in a new marriage under God'. She died giving birth to their twelth child.

Despite escaping the Great Fire of London in 1666 the church had become run down or even derelict and became one of the few 51 London churches Christopher Wren designed and supervised in the late 17th century outside the City of London after the fire.

I look up the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' but it seems little is known, though the first written record of it is from 1744. There appears to be another version too:

Gay go up and gay go down,
To ring the bells of London town.

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clements.

Bull's eyes and targets,
Say the bells of St. Marg'ret's.

Brickbats and tiles,
Say the bells of St. Giles'.

Halfpence and farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin's.

Pancakes and fritters,
Say the bells of St. Peter's.

Two sticks and an apple,
Say the bells of Whitechapel.

Pokers and tongs,
Say the bells of St. John's.

Kettles and pans,
Say the bells of St. Ann's.

Old Father Baldpate,
Say the slow bells of Aldgate.

You owe me ten shillings,
Say the bells of St. Helen's.

When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.

Pray when will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

Chop chop chop chop
The last man's dead!

Theories suggest that these are all the bells of the churches that could be heard from Newgate prison where executions took place and that the meter of the couplets match the sound of the peal of the bells. Another that St Clement Danes' churchyard once stretched to the bank of the Thames and the local children helped to unload cargoes of ships attempting to evade customs duty, receiving foreign fruit as a reward. Then I find the suggestion: 'The round singing of the ancients, of which this game is a fitting illustration, is probably a relic of Celtic festivity. The burden of a song, chorused by the entire company, followed the stanza sung by the vocalist, and this soloist, having finished, had license to appoint the next singer, 'canere ad myrtum,' by handing him the myrtle branch. At all events round singing was anciently so performed by the Druids, the Bardic custom of the men of the wand."
In 1920 a service was introduced at the church for the children of the local school to be given an orange and a lemon which still exists today.

On the 10th May 1941 St Clement Danes received a direct hit from an enemy bomber. Fire roared through the building, Wren's woodwork catching easily, flames as high as the steeple. In the guide book there is a picture of the tower lit like a light house in the dark night, fire spewing from the windows and arches. That night a heavy night of bombing in the capital 1,480 people were killed

Geoff Sanfield recalls his family house in Barnet north London being hit for it was the suburbs just as much as the centre of London that lay at risk. This was just one incident from the thousands that night:

'The bombing had eased somewhat by April 1941, so we came home. The grass in the garden was waist high and the five sycamore trees were even higher and made for great climbing.

On Saturday, May 10th, 1941, the biggest raid on London took place when Hitler sent over everything. For some reason, we had not gone to the Anderson shelter that night, probably fed up with all the various privations, and also things had been beginning to ease a little. We were bombed at around 11 pm. Four bombs in all; one three houses along from us, one on the allotment at the bottom of the garden and two further away.

The various blasts blew the curtains in and most of the windows out, some ceilings out and plaster came in. My sister and I, who were sleeping in a double bed in a downstairs rear room, were still asleep beneath curtains, dust and plaster etc. Dad had been in the kitchen making cocoa, and finished up amidst all the pots and pans. Mum had been standing in the doorway to our room and was narrowly missed by the front door, which was blown in. I can still smell the cordite, explosions, plaster, dust and fractured sewers etc.

We were dragged out of the house and up the front garden path, and I can remember stooping to pick up a large bomb splinter that had become embedded in the garden gate, now hanging by one hinge: I was promptly pulled away as it was still very hot, but what a souvenir to have had!

We were taken to neighbours for the night and Dad returned to what was left of the house, but it had already been looted, mostly food, but also some cutlery and cut glass. One particular piece was a wedding present to my parents from an uncle who had recently been killed. Dad pulled back the debris-covered bedclothes and went to bed, remarking that Mr Hitler was not going to deprive him of his bed.'

http://ww2today.com/10th-may-1941-huge-raid-on-london

I think of my son's astute question about my childhood and think - no - I had no idea that my parents generation witnessed such destruction. (I am an old mother and my mother was an old mother within her generation.) I just longed for hotpants and thought the Osmonds sounded dangerous belted from a dark shop doorway in a Welwyn Garden City precinct. When my Grandad and my grandparents next door neighbour died a day apart the funerals were held back to back in the small village in the Lake District where my mum had been brought up. I witnessed and kept like a stone in a secret pocket, my fingers occasionally fiddling the shape in a thin silky lining, the scene in my grandma's house when my aunt still with her coat on broke down crying after the neighbour's funeral. It wasn't the grief that was hard to understand from the hidden curl of a large chair but the hushed but palpable scorn of my mother and assembled relatives that she had done so.


The Rector of St Clement Danes was said to die from shock within five weeks of the bombing of the church and his funeral was held in the ruins. By 1953 the parish was combined with that of St Mary le Strand and it must have seemed that the church would be forgotten for wildflowers and grasses grew in the remains. However it was given into the keep of the Air Council and rebuilt faithful to Wren's designs, restored as a perpetual shrine of rememebrance to those killed in RAF service. The chancel arch is surmounted by the restored Stuart coat of arms and carries a latin inscription which translated reads, 'Built by Christopher Wren 1681. Destroyed by the thunderbolts of air warfare 1941. Restored by the Royal Air Force 1958.'

Walking up to Victoria Street on St George's day I hear the tinny sound of amplified brass bands and car horns blaring. What's happening I think, catching the streak of red and white flags and the bounce of red and white balloons dragged fast by a parade of scruffy vehicles at the end of the street. People stand bemused by the rattle of vans and scaffolding lorries careering past decked out with a few St George's flags and a couple of random inflatable figures attached to the back of a truck. It goes quickly passed and it seems as if everyone breathes again, frightened by the brief rough display of patriotism.

Finally, the work I am doing at the moment is at High Street Kensington and I can cycle every day through the parks to work. It is lovely - if often damp. Though I wonder if this has caused this blog to take so long - I sit to work in the evenings as usual but I am exhausted, tired physically. In some ways it is good for me because I tuck myself into bed by 11pm when normally I am up until at least 12pm and then read a few pages of War and Peace before sleeping well. ( Losing my job stopped me reading, then I lost a page and finally when I had worked out a plan to borrow someone's kindle to read just that page before recommencing the book, the missing page turned up folded in the ruin of the paperback.) Thinking about War and Peace as I pedal the slight incline up from Hyde Park Corner through the fine sheen of oily rain coating the park, I worry I have fallen out of love with fiction. I still think W and P is the most fantastic thing I have read but as I near the end, the shocking violence and tidying of plot that is accumulating to the finish doesn't interest me as much as the vast vistas of the main book. I like the mundane immensity and non symmetrical nature of life as it plods on, too awkward and sad and sometimes pointless to be tied into a plot, though occasionally finding the rhyme of coincidence and joy. At that moment I see a battalion of plumed golden helmeted soldiers on magnificent black horses on the brow of the hill in the mist of steady drizzle. I can hear the creak of their breast plates and saddles and the jangle of their reins - I imagine a Russian landscape with similar officers step step stepping huge black horses into a village. I see the power and awe they would instill from the discipline of horses moving in time, the straight backs and anonymity of fighting men. These are the Life Guards of the British Household Cavalary exercising near their barracks.

I get used to seeing the soldiers on horseback each morning as I cycle to the brow of the gentle hill, always in a slightly different place, always involved in slight different exercises - marching in line, turning as a unit, galloping, soldiers tilting in their saddles to joust hoops from the ground. Another morning under wet trees I see only soldiers training. Dressed in black they are doing a fast continous circuit - lying on their backs stomach crunching, then sprinting, then jogging back to stomach crunches, their steady fast, obedient and repeated actions reducing them to ants, limbs busy, following orders.



As I pass Kensington Palace on the bike one morning into the pleasure of the downhill, feet off the pedals swoop, I hear distant screams, girls voices high and far away like on a fairground ride. As I cycle down alongside the parkside hotel the screams get louder. Girls in school uniforms cluster in hoodies, screaming and waving handmade posters - 'Justin Bieber' they scream. 'Justin Bieber.'

Amen