Tradition Resumed

In March 2020, I went doorknocking - visiting houses which had recently changed hands - for what would turn out to be the last time in seventeen months. Even when theoretically it became possible (and houses have been bought and sold throughout the pandemic) I decided new residents might not welcome an unknown person on their doorstep. Only today have I dared to resumed what is, I'm afraid, my chiefest expression of outreach in the community. I have no reason to believe that ten years of this, even done as diligently as I can, has resulted in a mass of conversions. What it does it to keep me in touch with what is happening in a way I would not be otherwise - inreach, you might call it. Once upon a time I would try and spot the estate agents' boards when they went up and came down, until Dr Abacus pointed out all the data about property sales were on Rightmove and that was where the Government itself gets its information!

I only had five properties to visit today. First, a house in a small close at the top of the hill (Hannah the churchwarden happens to live opposite); that was owned by a young family who'd come from London. Second, a modern terraced house in a yard just off the main street, and adjoining another congregation member's: nobody in. Third, a little Victorian cottage set back from one of the village streets in a row which I didn't know existed even after nearly twelve years here. That was being refurbished, but a neighbour helpfully told me the young woman who's bought it will be moving in from Brighton later in the year. Fourth, a 1930s bungalow: nobody in. Fifth, a new house right on the edge of the village (the last on its road, in fact), where I met a grandmother who moved initially into another house in the village to be closer to her grandchildren just as the lockdown started, but before that was living about five miles away.

She pointed out to me a group of people, children and grown-ups, in the paddock opposite, saying they were setting up a garden. And so it proved: they were part of the community action group which works on the private rental estate in that part of the parish (about 150 houses and flats), planting raised beds in old tyres, making bug hotels and bird feeders. Now there you are, you see, without my somewhat fond evangelistic efforts I would never have found out about that. And I wouldn't have made the transition, which I rather needed to do that morning, from feeling completely useless and superfluous to the life of the world in general to seeing myself as quite blessed. 

Mellow at Enton Mill

Usually I prefer walks to have some specific thing or feature to aim at, but despite the degree of inertia one needs to overcome, it's always worth while to change your surroundings, even if not by very  much, and even if there's nothing very remarkable at the end. The mere variation has good mental effects and therefore physical ones. Today my destination was Enton Mill, an extraordinarily picturesque range of buildings which Pevsner managed to overlook completely - a 17th-century mill Tudorified in the early 1900s and augmented with a cottage or two. You can't get near the pools (well, not legitimately), but you can sit beneath the footpath sign by the side of the lane and eat your lunch if you happen to have one. And that was the focus of my walk today. The photo includes my tea perched on my knee, in honour of Dr Bones who inherited the ability to balance teacups (sometimes adding the saucer) in that position from her clergyman father. It was very unstable and I removed it as soon as the image was achieved.

As I sat munching my lovely sandwich prepared by John at the Swanvale Halt railway station kiosk I could see the brim of my hat bobbing up and down and it struck me how funny I must look, a middle-aged man all alone sat snacking on a bank, and also that I didn't mind this. I had a vague memory of what must be a cartoon I have seen in which a character sits in a park or something, doing the same thing, and of having felt affection for that character, a reaction which must have had something to do with the story, whatever it was. I could see myself as childlike, oddly.

If we are lucky, perhaps we become more childlike as we grow old, but it's a childlikeness which incorporates a sort of awareness children themselves can't have. We are indulgent and forgiving towards children, and if we can glimpse the childlikeness in ourselves we might also be tender towards our silliness. From that it's an easy step to discovering the same tenderness for others too. 

Hortus Conclusus

In his phantasmagoric 1984 art collection Hallelujah Anyway Patrick Woodroffe includes the haunting image of the 'Hortus Conclusus', a ‘melancholy mediaeval prophecy’ depicted as a sprawling and ruinously ancient tree rooted onto a tower of rock, islanded above a cataract in a poisoned and desolate landscape. The real medieval hortus conclusus, in contrast, was the ‘Enclosed Garden’, a walled would-be paradise designed to recreate Eden for the delight of ladies in hennins and escoffions, but Woodroffe’s is – he has a learned and fictional folklorist declare – an apocalyptic vision:

When all things come to an end – as some day they surely must – then shall the very last man shut himself away in the Last Garden on Earth. There he shall hide and care for the last tree and the last flowers, while all around him the world shall be swallowed up. … And one day even the Last Garden shall be swept away and with it the very last man, and the Earth shall have no husbandman, and shall run savage like the Wilderness. And of Man there shall remain no trace, neither memory nor regret.

Sometimes, when it’s all in full leaf and hung with bees and butterflies, my garden feels like the Hortus Conclusus, as though nothing exists outside it but ruin; as though the waves of desolation are lapping at its walls (or chainlink fences overgrown with bindweed and bramble). The water trickles in the pond and the marjoram flowers provide multitudes of bees in umpteen varieties with plenty to keep them going. The burning world is a long way away.

Of course it’s not. As the earth warms some plants will retreat and others will advance, and insects or birds we find familiar in southern England will be ousted in favour of others, new fauna which will cause us different problems. In fifty years, when I am long gone, my garden, if it still exists, will look different, and not because this little bust and the other statuary will be absent. A younger generation will accommodate itself to changes like this, and will mourn the past no more than I am especially affected by the lack of elm trees in the English countryside, which all vanished in my childhood thanks to ophiostoma ulmi. I fear that will not be the worst they have to deal with.

Who Does What?

The little stacks of paper - not as high or as colourful as this - spread over my dining room table, then the chairs, and finally the floor. There had to be a lot of them, as each represented a member of the congregation and the jobs they do, or did before covid put paid to so much of our church life. Some people have a stack that is only one sheet of paper high; others have gathered reams of roles. I am reaching the end of a big project of writing role descriptions for everything that everyone does. To be entirely frank, I probably wouldn't have even begun had not incoming churchwarden Grant expressed some irritation with verger Rick's habit of taking responsibility for things when he has not been explicitly asked to: you could describe this as initiative, but sometimes it goes beyond that and we agreed that what he needed was something that described what he is actually supposed to be doing. However, if the verger is to have a job description, everyone must, so Rick doesn't feel singled out.

In fact the diocese has been nagging at us incumbents to do this for some time, if only because it gives an opportunity to state which roles are subject to DBS clearance (or, as the Safeguarding Department insists on terming it, 'eligible for clearance' as though it was a privilege people looked forward to) and which aren't. It has been a colossal and bewildering exercise of drafting and consultation, and this final stage will involve writing a letter to everyone and getting the things to people (not everyone is online and I think in this case physical bits of paper will concentrate the mind). 

One ambiguity is that I don't really know how many of these beloved souls will actually want to resume their former roles once it becomes possible. For a liturgical, sacramentally-focused church, we now have perilously few people who are available to carry out liturgical functions; and then there's the practical but vital stuff, such as serving the post-service refreshments that enable people to get to know one another, the most basic step in building up the Body of Christ as any kind of community. I am starting to see how the pandemic has cut us down to the roots. I would like this to be like coppicing a tree, an operation that enables it to spring back into life and new growth - but I am far from sure!

Camberley Religion

A clean sweep of the Camberley churches – well, almost – the other day was completed by going home along the B3411 and gaining access to two more, so it was quite a haul. Not that the Camberley district presents us with anything very Anglo-Catholic now, though there are hints of what might once have been. The whole area used to be part of the sprawling parish of Ash which, from the 1500s, included a timbered chapel of St Peter at Frimley; this was rebuilt in the 1820s and became a parish church in its own right in 1866. By that time the military town of Yorktown/Camberley was growing up to the north, graced with its own church of St Michael which was eventually separated from St Peter’s, and both churches produced daughters in the decades afterwards.

Let’s go to St Peter’s, Frimley, first. The VCH describes the tower as ‘debased’ and Pevsner characterises the interior as ‘awful’: but its sheer ‘awfulness’ affords some interest in the form of its galleries and wall-benches, which the Ecclesiologists would have swept away given the chance. The reredos shows that even what must have been a relatively Low church could by 1880 install marble and a carved cross and not feel too many pangs of conscience. But the church benefits from a nice reordering done in 2011: I am not generally fond of this spindly style of altar furniture but at Frimley it looks quite dramatic against the lit east end.

The mother church of Camberley, and daughter in its turn to Frimley, is St Michael’s, Yorktown. I couldn’t actually get in on my visit, and the best I could do was peer through a locked door, but it’s a big, if unremarkable middle-of-the-road church. The building is one of Henry Woodyer’s, and, once completed with a spire forty years after being opened, sits lowering very handsomely over the town. Or it would, if it were not now screened by trees and a gigantic wall bordering the A30 which makes it sadly hard to see from nearby, though the spire pokes up as soon as you draw away. Looking at images of the interior available online I can’t see anything north of Victorian floral-and-choral.

I was much luckier with St Michael’s clutch of offspring churches. The earliest of these that survives is St Paul’s. This began as a flint Brethren chapel built by a Camberley wine merchant called Thomas Boyes; when Boyes sold out to a staunch Anglican called Mr Fowler some time before 1895 the building was passed to the vicar of Camberley, and was replaced in 1903 by the present redbrick and timber fabric designed by WD Caroe (and it looks it). The main part of the building is nothing but a barn, looking even emptier under covid restrictions – ‘the inside never given a thought’, says Pevsner – its walls austerely adorned with the monuments of military gentlemen. But the sanctuary, behind the red-carpeted dais which now bears the altar table, is a genuinely exciting architectural space. The heavy carved furniture reminds me of West Byfleet’s, and behind the red curtain (part of a set of post-WW2 amendments) are two regular holes in the wall either side of the altar – I wonder what they were? The old font is marooned outside, which is a bit of a shame.

St Mary’s is on the west side of the town, and dates to 1937. Here we find more timber, and if the interior looks a bit confused, this is because it’s been rearranged repeatedly. The liturgical east end was originally at what is now the back, which explains why it’s set a step higher than the rest of the floor, and then the building was orientated to one of the long walls. Now the congregation has decided the altar should go at the opposite end to its original location, and are waiting to see whether it’s safe to remove the pillar which is currently right in front of it. There is some nice mid-century glass.

Back north of the main road is St Martin’s. There was a church opened in what is now the hall in 1961, but the current building was consecrated in 1993. Nobody would claim it as a gem, and it’s pretty much an empty space in which churchy things can happen rather than a sacred space in which secular things can happen. But it’s actually rather a pleasure to be able to get into a modern church at all as these are the ones most likely to be shut. Two sofa areas, I was told, have been introduced during the pandemic, though I can’t see the connection as I would have thought sofas would be the last thing you’d want. We had one at Swanvale Halt for a while but it attracted tramps and after I had to clean up vomit behind it before an 8am mass one Sunday I concluded it had to go.

St Andrew’s, Frimley Green, was a stroke of luck: I met the incumbent who was going in to do a short job and my photography and his task took exactly the same amount of time. Frimley parish set up an iron church here in 1889, replaced by the current redbrick one in 1911, ‘looking like it was bought at Liberty’s’ as Pevsner can’t resist remarking, and it continues Camberley’s theme of timbers (with some unfortunate steel cross-ties).

Now, apart from Mr Woodyer’s presence at St Michael’s and the sedilia at St Paul’s, it looked as though the Catholic movement passed the entire district by without a second glance, but at St Andrew’s I spotted a curtained aumbry by the altar. Experience has taught me that aumbries don’t necessarily have anything in them, so I asked whether they reserved the Blessed Sacrament in the church. The answers ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ I was prepared for, but not the one I received, which was ‘We try not to’, a remark whose actual meaning I am still turning over in my mind. Meanwhile the entrance lobby at St Paul’s has a photo of the clergy (and everyone else in the church) taken a few years ago, which shows them wearing an extraordinary costume of black preaching scarves, embroidered as though they were stoles, over cassock-albs, and I don’t know what to make of that, either (the swirly flames in the photos are faces blurred out).

If there was ever a church in the area which had a Catholic identity, it’s the long-vanished St George’s (1893-1967). If so it would repeat the pattern we see elsewhere of a daughter church being able to advance further than its parent. It was designed by Arnold Hoole, who’d got the job of completing the spire of St Michael’s and who had a fondness for ironwork screens, tall altars and candlesticks, and altar crosses that were straining to become tabernacles. We can see this in his design drawings and the only photo I can find of the interior of St George’s; and in his other church, the very Anglo-Catholic St Michael’s Beckenham (bombed out in 1944 and since rebuilt in a very different style). I’d be surprised if Camberley hadn’t once had any church in this tradition.

Paying Your Way

There is precious little happening in the parish at the moment, so I will rest content with another example of the 'modern indulgence' concept we have noted in the past. I had a free evening before my day off tomorrow so I decided to do my shopping early, meaning I was in clericals rather than civvies as I would be on a Thursday. Emptying my trolley at the checkout I got out my debit card ready to pay, and then when the time came forgot which pocket I'd put it in, occasioning repeated checking, emptying and refilling every pocket in my clothing. A chap with a little girl in a pushchair waiting offered, 'if I pay for you, will I get into heaven?' This provoked a short, jocular, and I fear not very enlightening theological conversation along the lines that there are other requirements. Most morning I pray for the chance to talk to people about God and I am not sure this counted.

 

Baptismal Regeneration

‘What do we normally do?’ I and Rick the verger ran around the church after the mid-morning service getting ready for our first baptism since March 2020. I thought there might be time to set up the card reader for donations but when I opened the box found a note saying ‘App needs updating’ so I abandoned that and made a joke about it instead. The family asked if I could read ‘Footprints’, and I realised I’d left it at home. In between looking it up on my phone and then accidentally shutting the phone down I ran out of data so had to rush into the church office, turn on the computer and the printer (which had run out of toner, and only still working because I had cheated it into believing it still has some), and get another copy. I knew the family pretty well and there were a number of familiar faces among the congregation young and old, but I was struggling to remember what I normally say at baptisms – not the liturgy, which is all written down, but the various routines I have worked out over fifteen years to explain it and to make unaccustomed churchgoers feel as much at ease as possible – and Baby Tom was moderately vocal throughout the proceedings. At one point he made a horrendous noise not very different from the one generated by our misbehaving sound system earlier in the morning. It is of course lovely to have celebrated a baptism service again, and it was possibly even more lovely to get home and lie down.