It is something to do with the attendance to life departing - the spirit still contained within the little body but tipping on a precipice - plus subtefuge to the children that causes me such distress. Also I am not completely sure my instincts are good - friends text to say I should have him put down at the vet or even hurry nature myself though he doesn't look to be in actual pain, just weakening and weakening - but for so long now that it has become completely normal and completely horrible at the same time. I can't stand the cliff top to grief - though I have a malteser box ready to bury him in - but for some reason - work, money, just balancing everything I feel I just can't cope with anymore, just can't face the extremity to the children feelings and I feel slightly manic. Then I discover a mum I like very much from school has had a breakdown and her children come to stay for a few nights and another sadness and stress and subterfuge takes over/alongside. The hamster lying almost still in a cage cloaked in a blanket in the corner of the flat as the four children play.
The mum and dad are splitting up and the mum is in hospital - but the children have only been told she is exhausted. I can only ask the children what they normally do at home - if they are ok - if there is anything we can do to make them feel more comfortable. They are beautifully behaved - the boy in my eldest son's year and a little girl of 5. I am unused to the absolute willingness of a little girl as she offers to clean the chairs and dry up ( it is true though i am reluctant to collude ) but also children that go to sleep like light bulbs. The little girl takes to bed the valentine bag she has made her mother though it spreads a new form of glitter - thinner like worms across every part of our flat as if love tries to escape in the night leaving the squirm of shiny trails.
I laugh with exh that we are the patron saints of separated families - suddenly helping other people in the place we have come from though and this is difficult to say - I feel two things - absolute pride that we came through but also looking back at the tightrope - I can't see how I came out still walking.
Sparky dies finally but peacefully. and the children's grief is raw. We sit and read the Michael Rosen Sad Book and draw and cry. This seemingly small grief feels like a preparation for all grief, taps into the grief that they already feel and it is horrible to watch. I think I deal with the emotions well though I am unable, completely unable to pick up the little corpse. Exh says - you manage so many difficult things it is surprising you can't handle this. I just can't I wail then watch my youngest choke sobs with the upturned, stiff, little body in his hands, it's claws clenched.
I wake on a Sunday morning when the boys are with exh's mum and think unexpectedly I will go to an Evensong. As a child it was my favourite service, I liked the light at that time of day - either electric lit or light evening and also the lilt of the service. I wonder if it was because it was just shorter though I think somehow children know what is authentic and the old words seemed more true than the fuss of family services with the vicar meaning well but seeming insincere. Once I have come up with the plan I am determined though somehow nervous to stick to it. Still trying to get into St Mary Le Strand I google for service times but there is no evensong. St Brides does. Though the website's strap-line is 'spiritual home of the media' and I have some fear that I will walk into a work situation, like an office leaving do where I don't know anyone. Though when I park the bike I think excitedly I have reached the shadow's of St Paul's.
'He just didn't find me'. I hear the very, very intelligent woman that sits behind me at work say about God. ' Though I wish he had. I went to church every Sunday. Sometimes twice when I was singing in the choir. Though I never understood 'The meek shall inherit the earth. It just isn't true.'
I am surprised and fascinated by this open and casual discussion of religion in a newspaper office. Even thinking about it seems a dirty secret sometimes for there seems always to be an assumption that religion is not just not cool but ' non intelligent ' though she is older and grand.
It is nearly dark as I wind around almost empty narrow back streets and alleys to get to the church. I wonder why I have made this rather odd cut through from the side street BB bay but the church bells are ringing out and I am nearly late and as I turn into a passageway that runs alongside a tall wall by the churchyard the bells stop. For just a breath in the gloaming I think oh this is the oldest view I have seen but part of it is to do with what seems the ancient hurry of the bell. I scurry down the old steps dipping down from the level of the graveyard to a high shored up wall that keels over a narrow curved street. In this dusky light it feels like I have gone back in time. I can't quite work out how to get into the church but a man infront of me turns off from the narrow curved street and I follow him up some more steps alongside railings and then left into the church. Out of the dark the church is bright lit with shiny chequered floors and I have to move between screens with huge woodcarvings balanced on top into the main area of the church like venturing into a warm kernel. There are little lampshades at the side pews, an eagle lectern and an altar like a big ornate wardrobe. It is almost full, people sat in the pews and on extra chairs and vergers moving forward, the choir processing to their stalls whilst everyone sings. I rustle into a pew and find the hymn book and sing too.
Next to me are a handsome languid couple nestled to each other like a cashmere catalogue photograph. Behind them a resolute blonde girl hand in hand with a proud looking young man. Media couples showing up as their preparation to marry here I think. The rest, mainly people on their own in the pews or seats look intelligent, intense and reasonably good looking. A good place to find a boyfriend I think briefly. Then realise there is a real peace here. The singing is beautiful, and just as I remembered there is something special to this time of day - the night drawing in and a feeling of safety and celebration in a beautiful place as if all dark is kept outside by belonging here.
Later I laugh that I wrote that everyone is 'intelligent, intense and rgl' as if describing how I would like to be/'my own kind/ a tribe'. Though I have rarely felt myself to belong to a 'set'. But then I think about other professional 'packs'. I hardly know any lawyers but once I went to a friend's child's christening ( she is married to a barrister ) and I was bundled into the back of a tiny car to get a lift back to the house/lunch after the service with two in the front. A man and a woman but not a couple - old friends - though possibly some sexual arrangement/historic flirtation between them - she appeared to be a middle aged anorexic and he had to stop to buy coca cola he was so hung over. Once the car doors were slammed shut they laughed so cruelly at the hostess, my beautiful art school friend for being so eccentric - and yet they seemed a crazy couple - something from a guinness world record challenge - how to fit so many awkward arms and legs in a tiny space. Eccentric too that they didn't know how to be polite. Later I thought they were just a tribe, a gang and that my friend just didn't belong in their world and neither did I - sat in the back of the car I just didn't register, was almost invisible just not 'one of them'.
The Verger taking the service ( the Vicar is ill ) starts by apologising for not having lit the altar candles and then says when he was trained he was told if mistakes happen to ignore them in a grand way and not to lose the authority of the service but that the world had changed - it is a disarming start and he carries on to quote Nigel Benn the boxer and a feud with Chris Eubanks.
Unexpectedly I had chanced on the radio someone talking about Mystery Worshipper and it felt like another guilty secret / area of expertise being aired in public. I peruse the MW website regularly to check reports on the church services of the churches I visit - like 'entertaining angels unaware' the radio guest said for if God appeared in any guise he should be made welcome - though secret shoppers might be a better analogy. I had been thinking anyhow about the home / guest aspect of churches after visiting Bloomsbury Baptist Church - when the minister replied to my unkind and snipey post - kindly asking if I had received a warm welcome. I was embarrassed to be caught out as a rude guest - reporting on the icy atmosphere of a guest bedroom or the nylon sheets on the bed when the welcome had been friendly and sincere. Though rushing to get the post written I had failed also to mention the really good works the Bloomsbury church carried out for the homeless.
Though the mystery worshipper seemed to have the same gripes about the atmosphere that I did:
'Recalling other interiors of a similar style (churches, lecture rooms, school assembly halls and meeting halls), and wondering whether they are intrinsically stultifying to the imagination, since I found myself unable to imagine anything else while in that setting.'
Though giving high praise for the sermon.
Though giving high praise for the sermon.
And on St Brides:
'Walking down the passage that led from Fleet Street to St Bride's and hearing the choir rehearsing as I approached the church. I instinctively felt that I'd discovered somewhere that reflected spirituality and warmth.'
Only when I got home and started looking up the history of the church did I find out that whatever I and Mystery Worshipper felt was ancient. There has been a place of worship on this site since Roman times, certainly from the 5th century when St Bridget or her followers founded the church. Also that I had missed the crypt that housed the medieval chapel and roman remains that had been discovered when the church was rebuilt after being bombed in the war.
On a Wednesday lunch time I go back along the narrow passageways and streets - Magpie Alley, Primrose Lane - the names of covered over and disappeared things - dropped feathers and pale yellow faces paved below.
Back in the church ( still shiny and chequered ) I find the crypt down narrow stairs though I seem to be in a haze because I don't really understand the stone remains uncovered from the earth. A 'bridge' crosses over the curve of stone foundations, then tucked in a corner is the display information for an iron coffin with patented clasp found in the graveyard though the space is empty. Invented to keep out body snatchers in the 19th Century it was a faddy invention too expensive for most to use and slow to rot - at present on display at the Museum of London's exhibition Doctors, Dissectors and Resurrection Men exhibition. At the end there is a medieval chapel - a beautiful and peaceful small, vaulted cave but cluttered with modern blue glass altar candles and modern wall hangings that I really don't like. I do sit there for a minute but another man is coming in and there doesn't seem enough space for two strangers to sit together.
In the other room ( the layout is quite odd - there are more remains but with mirrors fitted so it is possible to see areas out of view. I don't really understand the mirrors ( perhaps not tall enough to view what they are arranging to show? ) though I am really vague about the whole exhibition - I don't understand the diagram with coloured outlines showing the church from roman, twelfth century, thirteenth and fourteenth century and Wren's seventeenth century building - perhaps because I am rushing, perhaps because my concentration is exhausted by work and children. I had expected to be really moved by what was here underground, discovered after the devastation after the war but I am slightly baffled. I see the fragments of roman life, the remains of fortification walls, but I can't understand the structure or the history. I am disappointed because I had thought I would see the well that the church was built alongside but this isn't accessible to the public. Also when the crypts were opened there were skulls laid in rows and a chequerboard made of bones but there is no trace of this.
I discover however that King John held his parliament here in 1210, Thomas Wolsey was St Bride's parson, Samuel Pepys was christened here and emperor Charles V lodged in Bridewell Palace alongside the church when he visited Henry V111 in 1522 and that the church has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. From the Roman traces and original 6th century church it was replaced 5 times before the 15th century church that became known as the 'printer's church' was built. In the 1500s Wynkyn de Worde brought the printing business he inherited from Caxton to St Bride's bringing his business to the clergy who had big houses nearby. As the trade burgeoned the church became known as the printer's church and later as Fleet Street developed as the home of newspapers the journalist's church.
The guide book claims a crossover in language between trade and theology.
'The printer 'justifies' a line of type, meaning that he makes it fill a space neatly. Theologically, justification is to have all spaces filled with Christ's righteousness and thereby be freed from the penalties of sin.'
And then fire:
'For two days and nights after the hour before dawn on Sunday, 2 September 1666, the inhabitants watched the fire approach with growing alarm. By Tuesday morning, the third day, it had reached Blackfriars, and on that day the parish of St Bride was overwhelmed. 'Ye parishe was burnt downe', wrote the clerk in the Burial Register, 'but sixteene houses in ye brode place by Newe Street.' The plague had wrought havoc among the parishioners, now the parish itself except for sixteen houses had been destroyed. The Church had become a blackened skeleton, its belfry empty and its stones shattered.'
Only melted metal from a medieval curfew bell and the eagle lectern which was rescued from the church survived. Afterwards the churchwardens wisely took Dr Wren out for dinner at the Globe Tavern at a cost of £12.17 od and the church became one of the first post-fire churches ready for worship. Only after the church was again destroyed on 29th December 1940 was it discovered that Christopher Wren had just built over the remains of the six previous churches forming extensive crypts had been used for burials and layered the history of the church.
Cycling home from work one night I notice suddenly that the disputed line of pavement and grass in Parliament Square is bald, shaved of tents. At home I look it up - the last tents - left unmanned were cleared away on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It seems a spiteful date.
I think of Brian Haw's symbolic vigilance for peace cleaned away, his 9 cold pavement years leaving no trace. I discover his Dad worked in a betting shop and committed suicide by gassing himself when Brian was 13. He had been one of the first soldiers to enter the Bergen Belsen concentration camp at the end of WW2.
Brian Haw's 'rectitude was a mirror that the people in the building opposite couldn't bear.' said Mark Wallinger.
Watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89OvMy2z_Mo - dead bodies dragged to a pit like a bucket slowly filled, the healthy and practical stoicism of the living like ants - I think we should all hold the mirror up.
I tell the boys I am going to make tiny temporary peace sculptures and place them surreptitiously on the the posts that rope off the pavement from the grass in Parliament Square opposite the House of Commons. Guerrilla art I say and they are keen to help. But I haven't done it. Yet.
Amen
'Walking down the passage that led from Fleet Street to St Bride's and hearing the choir rehearsing as I approached the church. I instinctively felt that I'd discovered somewhere that reflected spirituality and warmth.'
Only when I got home and started looking up the history of the church did I find out that whatever I and Mystery Worshipper felt was ancient. There has been a place of worship on this site since Roman times, certainly from the 5th century when St Bridget or her followers founded the church. Also that I had missed the crypt that housed the medieval chapel and roman remains that had been discovered when the church was rebuilt after being bombed in the war.
On a Wednesday lunch time I go back along the narrow passageways and streets - Magpie Alley, Primrose Lane - the names of covered over and disappeared things - dropped feathers and pale yellow faces paved below.
Back in the church ( still shiny and chequered ) I find the crypt down narrow stairs though I seem to be in a haze because I don't really understand the stone remains uncovered from the earth. A 'bridge' crosses over the curve of stone foundations, then tucked in a corner is the display information for an iron coffin with patented clasp found in the graveyard though the space is empty. Invented to keep out body snatchers in the 19th Century it was a faddy invention too expensive for most to use and slow to rot - at present on display at the Museum of London's exhibition Doctors, Dissectors and Resurrection Men exhibition. At the end there is a medieval chapel - a beautiful and peaceful small, vaulted cave but cluttered with modern blue glass altar candles and modern wall hangings that I really don't like. I do sit there for a minute but another man is coming in and there doesn't seem enough space for two strangers to sit together.
In the other room ( the layout is quite odd - there are more remains but with mirrors fitted so it is possible to see areas out of view. I don't really understand the mirrors ( perhaps not tall enough to view what they are arranging to show? ) though I am really vague about the whole exhibition - I don't understand the diagram with coloured outlines showing the church from roman, twelfth century, thirteenth and fourteenth century and Wren's seventeenth century building - perhaps because I am rushing, perhaps because my concentration is exhausted by work and children. I had expected to be really moved by what was here underground, discovered after the devastation after the war but I am slightly baffled. I see the fragments of roman life, the remains of fortification walls, but I can't understand the structure or the history. I am disappointed because I had thought I would see the well that the church was built alongside but this isn't accessible to the public. Also when the crypts were opened there were skulls laid in rows and a chequerboard made of bones but there is no trace of this.
I discover however that King John held his parliament here in 1210, Thomas Wolsey was St Bride's parson, Samuel Pepys was christened here and emperor Charles V lodged in Bridewell Palace alongside the church when he visited Henry V111 in 1522 and that the church has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. From the Roman traces and original 6th century church it was replaced 5 times before the 15th century church that became known as the 'printer's church' was built. In the 1500s Wynkyn de Worde brought the printing business he inherited from Caxton to St Bride's bringing his business to the clergy who had big houses nearby. As the trade burgeoned the church became known as the printer's church and later as Fleet Street developed as the home of newspapers the journalist's church.
The guide book claims a crossover in language between trade and theology.
'The printer 'justifies' a line of type, meaning that he makes it fill a space neatly. Theologically, justification is to have all spaces filled with Christ's righteousness and thereby be freed from the penalties of sin.'
In 1666 the plague hit:
'...the parish had been sorely tried by the Great Plague which reached it in mid-June. The normal mortality had been about nine deaths per week, but these increased to four times that number at the end of July, to over 150 at the end of August and 238 in the week in mid-September when the pestilence was at its height. From that time the figures fell quickly and the danger had passed by November, but it left the parish desolate and many houses tenantless. The vicar, Richard Peirson, stayed at his post, although both his Churchwardens died, and carried through the heartbreaking task of giving what relief was possible and burying the dead.'
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=117959'...the parish had been sorely tried by the Great Plague which reached it in mid-June. The normal mortality had been about nine deaths per week, but these increased to four times that number at the end of July, to over 150 at the end of August and 238 in the week in mid-September when the pestilence was at its height. From that time the figures fell quickly and the danger had passed by November, but it left the parish desolate and many houses tenantless. The vicar, Richard Peirson, stayed at his post, although both his Churchwardens died, and carried through the heartbreaking task of giving what relief was possible and burying the dead.'
And then fire:
'For two days and nights after the hour before dawn on Sunday, 2 September 1666, the inhabitants watched the fire approach with growing alarm. By Tuesday morning, the third day, it had reached Blackfriars, and on that day the parish of St Bride was overwhelmed. 'Ye parishe was burnt downe', wrote the clerk in the Burial Register, 'but sixteene houses in ye brode place by Newe Street.' The plague had wrought havoc among the parishioners, now the parish itself except for sixteen houses had been destroyed. The Church had become a blackened skeleton, its belfry empty and its stones shattered.'
Only melted metal from a medieval curfew bell and the eagle lectern which was rescued from the church survived. Afterwards the churchwardens wisely took Dr Wren out for dinner at the Globe Tavern at a cost of £12.17 od and the church became one of the first post-fire churches ready for worship. Only after the church was again destroyed on 29th December 1940 was it discovered that Christopher Wren had just built over the remains of the six previous churches forming extensive crypts had been used for burials and layered the history of the church.
Cycling home from work one night I notice suddenly that the disputed line of pavement and grass in Parliament Square is bald, shaved of tents. At home I look it up - the last tents - left unmanned were cleared away on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It seems a spiteful date.
I think of Brian Haw's symbolic vigilance for peace cleaned away, his 9 cold pavement years leaving no trace. I discover his Dad worked in a betting shop and committed suicide by gassing himself when Brian was 13. He had been one of the first soldiers to enter the Bergen Belsen concentration camp at the end of WW2.
Brian Haw's 'rectitude was a mirror that the people in the building opposite couldn't bear.' said Mark Wallinger.
Watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89OvMy2z_Mo - dead bodies dragged to a pit like a bucket slowly filled, the healthy and practical stoicism of the living like ants - I think we should all hold the mirror up.
I tell the boys I am going to make tiny temporary peace sculptures and place them surreptitiously on the the posts that rope off the pavement from the grass in Parliament Square opposite the House of Commons. Guerrilla art I say and they are keen to help. But I haven't done it. Yet.
Amen
