Keeping a Kind of Vigil

It wasn't the first time I found myself negotiating my way through another sort of spiritual space. On St George's Day this week - the customary St George's Day, though in the Church calendar the Great-Martyr George has been bumped backward to next Monday because you can't celebrate a feast day in the Octave of Easter - I attended the monthly Vigil at Crossbones Graveyard in Southwark. Without recounting the contested history of the site, which you can look up for yourself, in later years the graveyard has become 'a shrine for the outcast dead' as that history has been recovered, publicised, and acknowledged, and therefore part of the consciousness of those living who also feel themselves marginalised and outcast and who read their own experiences in those souls who are memorialised at Crossbones. Although the acknowledgment of the site has included recognition by the cathedral community mere yards away, this place belongs to those the Church has traditionally pushed away, which makes it all the more affecting that it can make sincere use of Christian imagery and words from time to time.

This week's Vigil was especially poignant as it took place after an apparent attack on the shrine, burning some of the memorials and decorations. It was stressed that the rituals weren't religious, and indeed there is nothing specifically religious about burning incense, ringing bells, silence, tying ribbons in remembrance, and reciting poems. It was only the final bit I felt I had to stand back from - a collective act of re-hallowing the memorial by the assembled community touching the gates, while a prayer was recited and repeated with the aim of 'concentrating energy', a mode of operating that goes all the way back to the New Thought of the 1880s. It was described as an act of 'magic', so I touched nothing and said nothing. But then, it seems to me, Crossbones is a place of integrity, for me as for anyone.

In Memoriam

Yesterday I went back to Holy Trinity Hawley to rifle through the vestment drawers, discovering in the process a pink fiddleback (the only Roman-style kit the church has apart from the incumbent's own). 'I came through the cemetery', I told him, 'You have a remarkable line in floral tributes here'. 'Yes', he responded dubiously, 'I'm not sure everything there is entirely legal'. 

On my return journey to the car I looked more carefully at the monuments. I remember S.D. telling me once that to demand most people to think coherently and philosophically was expecting too much, and that the great majority of souls gather together a collection of images and ideas that work for them. This is what you find in Hawley Cemetery. 

The arch of flowers around the heavenly gates - with the cross atop for good measure, does announce some kind of belief in a postmortem existence:

There's a little devotional card in the above picture (as well as some souvenirs of Cyprus), and at the monument below there's not just one but two large Jesuses draped with rosaries. But you also get some extremely eclectic bits and pieces. That's a small black elephant decorated with pieces of mirror in front of Jesus, a little old chap sitting in a chair, various toy vehicles, and cut off on the left side, a squirrel with a candle holder. In addition this tomb has china birds, metal ladybirds, and a photo of a dog among other objects.

I would very much like to know what's going on in some of the assemblages. A laminated picture of Last of the Summer Wine laid on astroturf (there's a lot of astroturf in the cemetery, perhaps a symbol of eternity) made me gape at first, but I suppose it must have been a show especially beloved by the deceased. Presumably the cigarette lighters and beer can in the second photo below are an insight into the enthusiasms of that grave's occupant, too.

But I'm not sure that applies to everything. Are some of the toys and ornaments reflecting not the commitments of the dead, but the feelings of the living, perhaps children?

If you had to summarise the ideas you can see expressed in these groups of artefacts, they would be something like 'This is what we want to remember about Grandad, we trust he's safe, and we think his safety has something to do with Jesus and angels'. Functionally it's a cheap, demotic version of the grandiose stuff aristocrats used to fill churches with, though I fear it won't last as long.

Marcher Land Adventures 4

Thursday's itinerary wasn't that involved as I was heading to the Valleys in the evening to see Cylene and Deri. It was no surprise to begin with a castle, though, on this occasion White Castle, completing my circuit of the Three Castles. There's nothing all that remarkable about White Castle, nor is it noticeably white. It does have a waterfilled moat, though.

Raglan Castle is a different matter. The seat of the Earl of Worcester, this is one of Wales's grandest ruined castles, occupied until the Civil War, knocked about by Oliver Cromwell, and finally abandoned by the Countess of Worcester who inherited it after the Restoration as it would have been far too expensive to make habitable. Its status as a Tudor palace as well as medieval fortress means that it has, first, something of the air of the kind of castles you see in fantasy manuscripts such as the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, and also the remains of a formal courtyard with a fountain in it.

Abergavenny was the next stop, an agreeable town with lots of small shops and, as far as I could see in the centre, no vacant sites at all. The Priory contains a mass of medieval sculpture, and one incomparable treasure - a mighty 15th-century Jesse, once the base of an entire Jesse Tree and carved from one trunk of oak. There is nothing else like it in Europe. It was completed with a modern Jesse Tree window as late as 2017.

The Museum was - I saw with some sense of inevitability - in the Castle. At first I thought from the scaffolding enclosing the little keep-like building that houses it that the Museum was shut like all the rest I'd tried to visit, but no! There is a mocked-up grocer's shop based on the one round the corner run by Basil Jones until the 1980s, and all the advertising material he left behind. Here he is. It's clear he doesn't actually want you to buy anything. That may explain why the shop isn't there anymore. There's an Anderson shelter retrieved from an Abergavenny back garden and accompanying sound effects - the entire air raid right through to the all-clear, which is a bit of an ordeal.

The road along the head of the valleys between Merthyr and Aberdare is being rebuilt, and will be until 2025. It seems to consist of multiple roundabouts that don't lead anywhere but exist only to make you go on purposeless detours. I got lost going to Aberdare, got lost taking Cylene out for a meal, and lost again twice on the way back.

Bank Holiday Discoveries

It isn’t unknown to find a folly not listed in the great survey by Headley & Meulenkamp, but it’s much rare for them to miss a whole garden landscape with its attendant follies. They can be forgiven for overlooking the arrangements at Deepdene near Dorking, as they were completely ruinous and, in the case of one of the structures, actually buried by the local council. But having discovered this place existed, I went to look at it yesterday, a little Bank Holiday excursion.

In 1652 Charles Howard, one of the family of the Dukes of Norfolk, inherited the Deepdene estate and remodelled the garden immediately to the rear of the house in the form of a long, narrow amphiteatre. To this he added a modest flint Tower at the side, and right at the top a Grotto; and opening off one side, next to the Tower, were caves which Mr Howard enlarged and embellished with arched openings and where he ‘conducted experiments’ in his own laboratory). A later owner of Deepdene, banking heir Thomas Hope, added a second layer of folly-building, remodelling the Grotto and adding a Temple to the top of the Terrace above the garden, and, half a mile off to the southeast, a Mausoleum to house first the body of his son who died at the age of 7, and then himself and other family members.

Should we categorise Deepdene as yet another Gothic Garden? It’s not far off, though it’s a very mild example of the genre. Charles Howard’s Embattled Tower is just a toy, sitting very undramatically by the side of a nice flat lawn, and it comes as something of a disappointment to discover that his ‘experiments’ in the caves were in the fields of tanning and leather-working, rather than alchemy or revivification of the dead as we might hope. Thomas Hope’s enthusiasms went nowhere near Gothic, and instead it was Egypt and Greece that captured his imagination (he remodelled the family house in London, built by Robert Adam, in Egyptian manner); but while his follies weren’t Gothic in style, they certainly had an umbrageous personality. At the back of what’s left of the Grotto you can see the false wall be put in over Charles Howard’s flints, with niches to hold artefacts from his own Grand Tour. The Temple at the top of the slope, demolished in 1955, combined Classical and Egyptian motifs, and had Egyptian statues looming either side of its central portico. The Mausoleum is a profoundly gloomy structure even in the Spring sun, squat and pylon-like. I wondered why the orientation panel at the entrance to the grounds included little motifs of screaming Grecian theatrical masks until discovering that Mr Hope put them on the Temple.

However we might think about that, what can’t be doubted is that Deepdene is a garden without a house: that was, scandalously, demolished as late as 1969. The whole landscape passed to the Council who decided that the safest thing to do with the Mausoleum, for instance, was to stick a concrete cap on it and then bury it; it was only exhumed in 2015 when a group of local enthusiasts persuaded the authorities to try and revive the garden. A copy of one of Mr Hope’s Coade-stone lions was placed in the middle of the lawn, the Grotto relieved of the brick pillars put in when it was used as an ammo store in WW2, and the walks reopened. And that wartime usage is another layer in Deepdene’s history: Charles Howard’s underground laboratory became a secret telephone exchange, while the woods are still marked with processions of anti-tank dragon’s teeth, arranged up and down the slopes.

Deepdene was my intended destination yesterday; Coverwood, however, was a happy accident, as I followed the yellow signs indicating a garden open under the National Gardens Scheme, and found a working farm, a Jacobean-style Edwardian house in the woods along the valley, and calming lakes.

Words of Encouragement

The grim monument of Archbishop George Abbott in Holy Trinity, Guildford, provides one of the most Gothic experiences you can have in Surrey. His effigy rests on a charnel house propped up on columns of books, all carved in marble. Yesterday our suffragan bishop had been addressing us all in the church about the theme of ‘Tension’ in Advent, and as I sat with ++George for a few minutes to contemplate I reflected that this dramatic structure also had a tension about it. All flesshe ys grasse, it seems to want to say, and nothing earthly about us abides, but it also wants to do it in grandiose marble funerary art and to remind us that the Archbishop was very, very clever and devoted to his books. He doesn’t want us to remember that he was (to date) the only Archbishop of Canterbury ever to have killed anyone outside conditions of war. Oops! It was an accident, honest.

The Study Morning was billed as a ‘retreat’ though there’s only so much retreating you can do together with a hundred or more other people at a town-centre church. I am better at these things than I would have been at the start of my ministry, a bit less brittle and insecure, and so I can let most of it wash over me and even try to be prayerful now and again. After it was all over I went for lunch with Cara from Emwood and Gillian from Stanpool and we weren’t even that bitchy. Not about what we’d just been listening to, anyway.

On Sunday at Swanvale Halt we’d had three services. The 8am and 10am were a bit thinly attended and as I did the second of a short series of talks about elements of Catholic spiritual life in the Church of England I did wonder whether I was wasting everyone’s time. Problems with the sound system were horribly distracting and the PCC Secretary has just resigned for health reasons, two more little incidents which have contributed to the feeling that the millstones are grinding our little church at the moment. But numbers at the Advent Service of Light in the evening were a bit up on last year.

Yesterday Derek, who came into the church first thing to set the heating for the week, told me how his faith had revived since coming to worship with his wife; at the Study Morning someone I’d dealt with in my role as a vocations advisor and who is now sharing a curacy with her husband came over to tell me how our conversations had been ‘pivotal’ for them both; and Cara thanked me for giving her the idea that it’s important to pray in your church building, as this had actually had a positive effect not just on her own sense of relationship with her parish but also with some difficult souls within it. So perhaps I have done a little good! And the eucharist reminded me of the wonderful gift we are given and can pass on to the souls God loves, which is more important than anything.

A Week's Sights

Ms T was ill; Ms Brightshades was poorly as well; Dr RedMedea was in Greece for the Orthodox Easter ('I like having two Easters', she protested when I said we really should sort this date-clash out); and Fr Allegro (late of Hoxton) was visiting family. My post-Easter week off seeing friends, therefore, didn't go according to plan. Apart from my own family, I only managed to catch up with my colleague from High Wycombe, the Chevalier de Viellecuisine, for lunch and a tour of our old stamping-grounds. 

Despite Ms T's absence, then, I did go to Oxford to make more use of my Bod. card and to see the newly-refurbished City Museum. I remember it from undergraduate days as a tatty little place that tried hard but struggled against the fact that bigger and more prestigious museums had grabbed all the stuff, especially archaeology. I found the 'new' museum very impressive, the various bits and pieces and individual stories bound together by strong graphic design, an unintrusive but definite house style; it's rather a triumph. 

High Wycombe looks a bit tired, and as M. Viellecuisine says, all the 'we buy your gold' shops that opened in the wake of the last recession are now closed in their turn, but that's no different from any other equivalent town. You can still catch a glimpse of a smarter place from the arches of the Guildhall. The Museum is tidy and charming as ever, though it's taking a long time to sort its labelling out!

There was no point going to a London empty of friends I could visit so I decided to see the sea and took the train in the opposite direction, down to Portsmouth. Technically I spent most of the day in Southsea, visiting the Castle, beach, and Highlands Cemetery, and having lunch on the Pier. 'Best of British', insisted the café of its fare, but thankfully it offered some options that didn't involve bacon, including a nice bulky Stilton-and-salad sandwich on granary bread. It all qualifies as British, no doubt. Having finished an ice cream I was sitting by the pier remembering when I and my younger niece had found a mermaid's purse on the beach at Sandbanks a few years ago, and one washed up in the advancing tide right at my feet. Like Mr Benn, I decided to take it home to help me remember.  

Canterbury

It was Lady Wildwood's suggestion that a group of us go to Canterbury on Saturday. I managed to squeeze all my necessary work either side of the date and after a couple of tasks set off. It was a cold but bright day and I was very glad of the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the Cathedral for the first time since 1986, and my friends after a bit less time.

The town of Canterbury is crying 'Slava Ukraini' along with everyone else.

I had forgotten the wonder of the Cathedral. I think its special quality lies in the dramatic disjuncture between the nave and the earlier quire, the monks' part of the church, built in a different style - the earliest Gothic architecture in England - and the fact that the crypt raises the east end up on a far higher level than the nave, so going through the tower arch and then the pulpitum is like entering a different building. It means that you can't see the whole Cathedral in one vista, and makes the layout complex, meaning it takes a bit of exploring; you can't make a simple circuit as you can in most cathedrals. 

There are interesting details everywhere. Inside the Deans' Chapel is

the macabre tomb of Dean Fotherby, carved as a charnel:

The Throne of St Augustine is deservedly charismatic, but I have never read about the Zodiac laid into the floor just to its east, in the foreground in this picture:

There is the Black Prince's aerodynamic armour. No wonder he was invincible:

St Thomas Becket's Well in the Crypt is a bit underwhelming, but I was glad to find it. It's supposedly under the round slab visible here:

I found one unmistakable image of St Catherine, in the windows of St Edward the Confessor's chapel, and another probable one, defaced (literally) on the tomb of Cardinal Morton: I think that must be the remains of the Emperor Maxentius at her feet.

The others had come by train, while I'd driven, so after I left them I popped to see St Augustine's Conduit on the east side of the city. It captured the water of a number of notable springs for the use of the Abbey not far away, though now it could do with a bit of a tidy. It also afforded me a lovely last image of the Cathedral against the setting sun.