Holiday

What a lot I managed to do during my week off. Resisting my natural instinct just to lie in a darkened room for five days, I amassed a pleasing list of folk seen: Ms Brightshades and Fr Fretboard in London, Lady Arlen (visiting Dorset for a festival) and my family in Dorset, Cara and her husband at Emwood, and Dr & Mrs Abacus in Surbiton. Their daughter was so small the last time I saw her that she took some convincing it had ever happened. 

And as well as taking in Art Deco buildings in Dorset, I saw plenty of other nice things too. Adverts on LiberFaciorum kept arguing that I should visit Tower Bridge, so eventually I did. Some of the views of the staircases are positively Piranesian. I was relieved that the walkways between the towers weren't open to the air, but they do have glass sections which children seemed happy to walk over but I found completely terrifying. I sometimes get vertiginous standing on a chair.

Lady Arlen and I had a few minutes to kill before seeing my Mum, so we took a little stroll on Turbary Common. The Speckled Wood butterfly was a pleasure though perhaps not an unexpected one, but we weren't anticipating meeting cows. Later in the day I paid my respects to the Shelleys in St Peter's Churchyard - it always tickles me that Mary, Bysshe, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft have ended up in Bournemouth of all places - and had an ice cream on the beach.

I may share some images of St John's Church in Wotton another day: for now, here's the churchyard and its view into the Surrey hills on Wednesday. The churchwarden let me into the building.

Finally Friday found me at historic sites just into Kent. Bayham Abbey is a ruin in - at the moment - a baking field of dry grass with a little Gothick house adjoining. It was dissolved ahead of England's other religious houses in 1525 as Cardinal Wolsey raised funds to build Cardinal College in Oxford. Apparently the local people rioted in protest, though it's so out-of-the-way it's hard to see where they can have come from. A small riot, perhaps. 

Not far away is Scotney Castle. I hadn't realised that this was the family seat of Christopher Hussey, the architectural historian who did so much to bring to public record both the history of the English country house and of the Picturesque (and so I know his stuff quite well). By his time the family lived in the New Castle built on the top of the hill by Anthony Salvin, while the Old Castle formed a colossal garden feature on its island below a quarry. It's a beautiful site, which I saw in gorgeous sunshine. I bought books in the National Trust secondhand bookshop (including one about the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, in Italian but the pictures are great), and tried the pea-and-mint soup, a decision which didn't go too badly. Betty Hussey's very, very pink bathroom was a bit of a challenge, but interestingly the NT says Scotney has come with a bigger collection of objects than any of their other properties, attics stuffed full of them which they are still cataloguing after 15 years. One of these is this amazing child's fairy fancy-dress costume, laid out in one of the bedrooms. 

And no sooner had I entered the New Castle that I encountered my patron saint. 'Madonna and Child', the caption describes this painting by Luca Longhi, but that's St Catherine: she's brought her wheel along, otherwise she might not be recognised and let into the party. 

S Tosoni & E Zuccala, 'Italian Goth Subculture: Kindred Creatures and other dark enactments in Milan, 1982-1991 (Palgrave, 2020)

The authors’ earlier Creature Simili came out as long ago as 2013; the newer book covers the same ground, but has been considerably reworked – so they say, as I don’t read Italian that fluently I will have to take their word for it! This is a thorough sociological examination of Italian first-wave Goth, at least in the vicinity of Milan, a very precise context. The Creature Simili (Kindred Creatures) of the title were an absolutely specific, and in fact self-named, group, the editors and originators of a fanzine called Amen. They had been taking part in the radical punk-based squatting movement in the city, a response, Tosoni & Zuccala’s interviewees felt, to the eclipse of the sort of political hopes engendered in the 1970s. The punks were desperate, nihilistic, and made their point by rejecting everything from the surrounding society. The Creature Simili collective felt the same, but found the punk template restricting and unimaginative and, while maintaining sympathetic links with the world of the squats, wanted to branch out musically and socially, activist but not so extreme: they were the punks’ ‘Kindred Creatures’. They and the black-clad folk they drew in didn’t refer to themselves as Goths for several years, when the word made its way over from London, and instead became known as ‘darks’, and their subculture, simply ‘Dark’. Tosoni & Zuccala describe the different groupings within Milanese Dark, the loners and the club-goers, the hangers-around in public squares, the mutual scorn between the fancy-dressers who changed in the safety of the toilets at clubs like the Hysterika, and the hardliners who crimped their hair and wore black every day and risked the wrath of families, teachers, and other young people. The interviewees describe how music, clothing, and the wider Gothic tradition (including aspects of it very few people outside Italy would be aware of) fed into their sense of self and helped them navigate a way forward. They describe how violent the streets of Milan could be for darks, and how often they had to run away from skinheads and paninari.

Tosoni & Zuccala’s approach concentrates on what they call the ‘enactments of dark’, as a way of trying to escape from previous analyses of subculture based on thinking about subcultural practices. An ‘enactment’ is a particular social context within which a subculture is experienced, and individual practices can have different significance and weight in different enactments. Once you’ve grasped that you can put aside the sociological theorising; you also need, to an extent, to cope with the translation which seems to have been done by someone who isn’t completely fluent in English. There is one particular phrase which kept catching me out: ‘breaking someone’s balls’ in Italian seems to mean ‘giving someone grief’, but the literal translation reads very oddly in English.

What this book does is show clearly how Goth evolved in a particular social, geographical, and historical context, and how the Gothic tradition enabled groups of young people to explore their sense of self and the world in that context. I imagine parallel studies in other countries would reveal illuminating differences and similarities, so I hope someone is writing them!

Dorset Deco - Survivals and Perils

A trip to Dorset yesterday gave me the chance to revisit some of the Poole-and-Bournemouth area's Art Deco buildings which I last paid any serious attention to some two decades ago. In fact I had never paid any attention at all to the Ice Cream Kiosk in Poole Park, but this quite splendidly survives, even if at the moment it is selling not ice cream but dog portraits:

I reviewed some of the houses on Sandbanks Road, and got improved photos of the Harbour Heights development at Sandbanks, designed by the area's premier Art Deco architect at the time, AJ Seal. This is the house he would have known as The Conning Tower, redeveloped as a block of apartments called Conning Towers in the early 2000s:

Now, I haven't visited the town centre of Bournemouth for some years. My sister's report was that the pandemic and the accelerated economic dislocations that have come with it have resulted in an environment so depressing that on her last visit she ended up going to the Library as it was the only place that seemed to offer any cheer. I didn't find it that bad, though a couple of the main commercial streets have been battered by the closure of the big department stores; I will say more about that another time, but as far as the Art Deco buildings are concerned they are mostly intact, from the humbler stores you can see here to the grander ones such as Seal's Palace Court Hotel and the Echo building on Richmond Hill.

The grand Brights Building on Old Christchurch Road is suffering a bit from the closure of House of Fraser which used to occupy most of it, notwithstanding being one of only three Listed Art Deco buildings in the Dorset conurbation.

Saddest of all, though, is Hinton Road, whose south side is a scene of devastation from the YMCA building onwards. The very first building AJ Seal designed in Art Deco style, the old Palace Court Theatre, has apparently been bought from the church that used to occupy it by Bournemouth Arts University who intend to restore it, so hopefully its future is secure, but Seal's own offices at Palace Court Chambers next door are a wreck. There's even an upstairs window which is entirely knocked out: heaven knows what's going to happen to it.

The Majestic Garage building, long used for offices and an NCP car park, is derelict too, and I had never noticed before the sprawling redbrick building that occupies the long plot to its west. Its days must be numbered. Curiously Google Maps lists it as the home of a private detective agency called 'Fallen Angel Investigations', which given the state of the building sounds like an idea for a TV series.

Into the Woods

 

Would anyone come to our first attempt at Forest Church? In the end there were 15 doughty souls (including me) who took the path through the little area of woodland between two estates in the warm if breezy, dappled sunshine of Sunday afternoon, including Arthur, who thought it was great, and he can't see. Millicent his wife led him, and the journey wasn't arduous. I'd already told them they wouldn't need survival skills and we wouldn't have to draw lots to see who would get eaten first. Almost everyone said they didn't even know the woods were there. The exception was Council environmental officer Amelie, who knew all about them, which is why she and her children brought along a litter-picker and a bin bag: they weren't to know I'd done a recce and filled a bag with trash on Wednesday morning. 

My investigations have shown that the only common factor uniting Forest Church events, which have become increasingly popular over the last five years or so, is that they take place outside. Some are hikes across a landscape that give people a chance to interact with each other and their environment in a deliberately contemplative way. Others major on children's crafts and are basically Messy Church outdoors. Others, again, are tree-hugging hippy flimflam. I've bought guru Bruce Stanley's book Forest Church, which is full of ideas but a lot of it veers much too far away from anything orthodoxly Christian for me. There's also weird stuff like drumming. I assured our participants they wouldn't be expected to do anything weird, or at least no weirder than we normally get up to in a church building. 

The basic assumption is that lots of people find it easier to talk to God, and listen to him, outside than in the surroundings of church buildings, and that he can speak through the natural world if we take time to listen, and pay attention to his works. Even coming from a relatively moderate Anglo-Catholic stance, I think this is not unreasonable, and that was what our Forest Church was designed to do. 

We had a brief gathering prayer (a bit of Psalm 119), and then went on our little journey, turning a couple of times and noticing what was around us, including the occasional butterfly flitting across the path. We soon arrived at a more open area, in front of the root-bole of a fallen willow tree. As I thought they would, people automatically formed a circle, so I asked them to turn outwards and spend a couple of minutes simply listening and looking - and smelling, for that matter. I used a compass to tell them what direction they were facing in. Then we cut a little sprig from one of the trees, which happened to be a hawthorn, and little William helped me put a prayer on it in recompense for taking the twig, something I borrowed from Shinto, my second favourite religion, with its ceremonies for pruning the like. I read from George Grigson's The Englishman's Flora about some of the properties and folklore of the hawthorn (Jean the Sacristan said her husband calls hawthorn bread-and-cheese, a name Grigson mentions as arising from the habit of young children nibbling the leaves); we followed with a Bible reading somehow relating to the Summer, Psalm 8, a few verses of 'All Creatures of Our God and King' and a bit of open prayer to which a surprising number of people contributed. Amelie wanted to pray for the firefighters battling a wildfire on Hankley Common. Then we left and had a blessing back at the entrance to the woods.

Now, this is supposed to be an outreach event, but all the attenders were folk we knew from either Swanvale Halt church or, in Arthur and Millicent's case, others. But it's a helpful start, and we will have another go in October. It may go nowhere in the end, but I'm glad we tried. 

Amelie noted smoke visible over the hilltop to the west, and thought this was probably from Hankley Common. It also turns out she spent some time working with the ranger team responsible for Turbary Common, round the corner from my childhood home!

Normal Service

 

You don't often see pirates watching country dancers, let alone see them in your parish church, but this was the scene at the Infants School leavers' service on Tuesday, to which I have already alluded in connection to the temperatures that day. It was the first time since 2019 that we were able to gather in our accustomed manner to celebrate the Year 2s passing out and onwards to their junior schools, with all the excitement and emotion that usually entails. The altar was piled with named picture bibles to be given out to the children. In previous years I and the head teacher have done this, but for the sake of speed we had two teachers helping us this time, which did cut proceedings down a bit though we all had to pirouette around one another as we negotiated our way around the children crowded on the stage. The farther candle you can see in the photo has been broken and reset, hence its wonky appearance. It looks straight from the front!

The Church amid the Heat

At the very moment at tea-time on Tuesday that I was listening to a BBC reporter talking about the fire at Wennington in Essex, and mentioning the parish church there, I was watching this aerial footage on Sky, showing that very building. The church was safe in the end, though as you can see the flames came very close, the scorched grassland just a yard or two from the foot of the tower. The image reminded me of the famous photo of St Paul's Cathedral emerging from the smoke of the Blitz, although SS Peter & Paul's, Wennington, is not the grand cathedral of the diocese of London: this doesn't look like an image of defiance, but of vulnerability. The photos of burning houses from Wennington that appeared in the newspapers were more terrible and violent than this, and people live in houses and not in churches, but for me this picture is about the fragility, not merely of the Church, but of the whole of human society in the face of the chaos our hydrocarbon-based economies are unleashing. Of course there are always wildfires in heatwaves. Accounts of holy wells and other folkloric springs often refer to water-sources which 'kept running even in 1921', a once-proverbial time of drought when, again, crops spontaneously caught light in the fields; but as we know the temperatures are significantly higher now.

Here in Swanvale Halt I had a number of tasks on Tuesday which took me out into the heat. There was a mass in the morning (attendance: 4), and then, just after lunch, the Infants School Leavers' Service. The church felt relatively cool when we started and less so after 150 people had been in it for an hour. I stood outside to say goodbye to everyone as they left; there was quite a breeze, but it just felt like being in a fan oven rather than a conventional one. Finally I was at the Air Cadets in the evening. Turnout was unsurprisingly low but the remaining youngsters sat dutiful and even engaged through my presentation on Change. They had the option of leaving the hut if it became unbearable but none of them did. I did cut it a bit out of compassion, though. I'm coming up to a week's leave which means I am psychologically winding down somewhat, but even putting that to one side the heat hardly encouraged me to do anything more than I absolutely had to!

Good Shepherd, Dockenfield

Time to consider that church I mentioned visiting on my trip to the Frensham area - Good Shepherd, Dockenfield, a chapel in Frensham parish dating to 1910 and designed by W Curtis Green in a sort of Arts-and-Crafts style. It's normally shut, and I was kindly shown around by the incumbent, picking my way between the mums and children attenders at a toddler group which is small but doubtless much appreciated, considering how little there would be to do in the immediate area otherwise. Apart from the great cross on the outside of the east end, its arms terminating in the symbols of the Evangelists, the church's fixtures and fittings all look a little later than the building itself - a satisfyingly bulky font, a rood beam, and the Instruments of the Passion right up under the roof. The east end culminates in a curtain and reflects a fashion around that time that finish not in a window but a monumental wall. This is a building clearly influenced by the Catholic tradition, though probably more because expectations had moved in that direction by the interwar period, rather than anything more conscious.

The newest addition is the rather charming Good Shepherd window, dedicated in 2002 and designed by Pauline Baynes, who had lived in Dockenfield for 60 years and had illustrated books by Tolkein, CS Lewis, Richard Adams, and many others.