Of Cats and Men

In her rather brutal memoir of life in a pre-reform Roman Catholic convent, Through the Narrow Gate, Karen Armstrong relates how her Sisters went a bit crackers after a stray cat found its way into the precincts. They competed to feed it and look after it, and got hysterically jealous and angry with each other. It was, Armstrong suggested, very clearly a function of the locked-down emotional lives the nuns were forced to live by a regime which deliberately stifled and thwarted affection developing between the human inmates of the convent, in the belief that human love and divine love are necessarily rivals. 

Last Wednesday, at Southwark Cathedral, they buried a cat. Bishop Philip North of Burnley, doughty champion of Catholic orthodoxy in the Church of England, was incredulous, Tweeting that he hoped it was a joke for the sake of the bereaved people whose loved ones' funeral services were restricted and curtailed during the pandemic. Not at all, responded the Southwark Cathedral clergy, this ceremony, for this animal, was a means for others to mourn when other forms of mourning were unavailable. Doorkins the cathedral cat had become as much a member of the community as any of its human inhabitants.

Animals aren't human: their mental worlds are closed to us, and while we can observe how they behave, our interpretations of that behaviour, or at least of how they conceive it, are projections. In The Four Loves, CS Lewis rates our love of animals not as an example of the amatory category he calls 'the love of the sub-human', but of 'affection', akin to the kind of feeling we might have for certain sorts of human beings with whom we are generously but not intimately involved. Thinking about it that way side-steps barren discussions about whether animals have 'souls'; but Lewis still only ascribes to them 'personality, or the illusion of personality'. It's more about us, than them.

Even so, this is not nothing. I have no interest in animals at all though I am moderately well disposed to my fish and the birds that find their way into my garden (I could easily live without the cats), but have been educated in these matters by meeting people whose relationship with their pets is emotional and meaningful, however unequal it may be. I've even carried out a funeral service for a dog. Animals aren't people: but their connection with us is real enough. There is no issue about recognising that, even at a cathedral.

The one aspect of the passing of Doorkins, as with her life, that troubles me is the particular projections placed on her. The cathedral was happy to make use of her commercially, and arguably her very name was a snarky exploitation of a mute creature in order to poke fun at a celebrity atheist. She treated the bishop with disdain, the Dean recalled. No, she didn't: she had no idea who the bishop was. You may have wanted to think she did. Her inner world was utterly unknown to any of the people who may have interacted with her day by day, or theirs to her. Had it been me, I would have been perfectly content to commend her into the Lord's keeping, but I might not have made such a fuss of it: there's something not quite seemly in doing so.

(As I will never have another reason to show it to you, here is Susan Herbert's reimagining of St Catherine as a cat:)

God's Ape

The Today programme this morning interviewed US sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, known especially for her 2016 book on Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, Strangers in Their Own Land. She outlined why the poor white Americans she'd spoken to then, and revisited recently, would still vote for Donald Trump next week (if they hadn't already done so), despite dislike for his character and 'weariness' at the chaos and conflict he has brought with him. He is 'a representative of their way of life': he speaks for them, he seems to respect them, so they are electorally and emotionally loyal in return for being 'culturally uplifted'. 

The evangelical Christians among them, Dr Hochschild says, have a particular viewpoint. Some have moved on from seeing the President as Cyrus, the instrument in God's hand no matter what his personal opinions may be, to placing him in a different context:

some of them, especially the evangelicals, are thinking, Oh, he’s suffering for us. It fits into a religious theme: he’s taking on our welfare, he’s facing enemies for us, almost like he’s Jesus.

Now, this is visibly different from the kind of sloppy and imprecise use of religious language that might describe a secular political figure as 'a saviour' because they are regarded as coming to the rescue of a particular point of view or group of people. It places Mr Trump in a redemptive framework, and interprets events such as his contracting Covid or being vilified in the media as equivalent to the sufferings of Christ: by these experiences he draws fire from his supporters in a strangely mystical way justifying them as people and the way they look at the world. I can't think of any other political figures being regarded in quite this way. To ascribe the redemptive role of Jesus to any other person could not unreasonably described as blasphemy. 

If the President wins next week, you can expect this to increase apace, and it leads me to disturbing reflections. I am already coming round to the conclusion that the effects of climate change mean that our civilisation will not outlast this century, and realistically I can't see anything that will avert that. But although this may entail the end of the current order of things, I still thought the religious element was missing. The Book of Revelation depicts a situation in which the climactic division of good and evil takes place through the activities of a figure who presents themselves as a suffering servant, a parody of Christ, and who deceives the world - or part of it. That piece of the puzzle may be sliding into place, and St Levan's Stone is pulled a little farther apart.

PS. I'd forgotten until today that Mr Trump stated that him catching Covid was 'a gift from God' ...

Keep Up At The Back

There is one aspect of their work in which I have a great deal of sympathy with Government ministers, which is keeping track of information. Today there has been a mixup over where to put our Slimming World group - the only external hirers we have at the moment - caused by me not taking account of Rick the verger acting on his initiative; an apparent misunderstanding of a mailout I sent about our annual Memorial Service, which led to reports of people planning to do the opposite of what I'd intended and had me checking the text of the letter back in the church office (it was as I remembered, and really hard to misinterpret); and, at the evening visit to the Air Cadets, forgetting that I needed to broadcast my session online as well as in person (in the end it didn't matter, but it was still very unsettling). After a few unexpected incidents of this kind my head starts to spin and I feel like my ganglions are getting tangled up. I become incapable of remembering anything at all. What is my Microsoft password? How do I open up this application? Which firm serviced the church boilers last? What's this person's surname? And I wonder how politicians, who deal daily with situations that shift and rearrange themselves like sand dunes in a storm, manage at all. Those who offer themselves for public office must be to some extent a different breed from me, is the only conclusion I can draw.

Dorset in the Autumn 6: A Mystery

Now, I said I wasn't going to post about my Dorset holiday again, but I'd forgotten that there was one more site which I ought to have added to the post on follies. On my walk from Corfe I wanted to see the 'Monument' marked on the map at Bucknowle House. Bucknowle has a long history: there was a Romano-British villa on the site, one of a series demonstrating that the Isle of Purbeck was perhaps the most heavily-populated part of Dorset at that time. The Monument, however, appears on the modern Ordnance Survey map ...

 ... but not, as far as I can tell, any others, even fairly detailed maps from a few decades ago. You can see how the site is easy to pinpoint, at the top of a long plot of land which tapers to the north, away from the house called West Bucknowle, just above the contour line marked '47' in the map. But when you get there, this is what you find:

Under this mass of leaves is a concrete platform, and at its rear beneath the bush and to its right are several hefty shaped granite blocks loosely arranged in a semicircle. Nothing like granite is native to Purbeck. The blocks don't seem to have anything carved on them (not that I could see very well). Is this the 'Monument'? It's in the right place, and is an artificial structure of some sort, but isn't much of one. What does it commemorate? Is it really, like the 'ruined cottage' at St Catherine's Hill, a very recent piece of work even though it looks so overgrown - although the tendency of the Ordnance Survey is the other way round, keeping items recorded even when they've long disappeared? I'm really noting it here just so that there is some record of it: there's nothing else about it anywhere online.

Think Big

'It's so good that you're back', said Sheila when I dropped round her newsletter this morning. 'You make us feel safe, spiritually.' That was nice, and a warming thought when the rain began and soaked me as I cycled the parish.

The rain had cleared a bit by the time I got to the house of our Pastoral Assistant Sarah, who delivers a wodge of newsletters for me. She and her husband had watched a conversation I'd recorded and uploaded with a Green councillor and XR activist about the environmental implications and possible consequences of the epidemic. 

'I know we're all recycling and trying to use our cars less and things to help the environment', said Sarah, 'but is there anything bigger we can do, as a church?'

'Well', I answered, 'apart from the global overthrow of capitalism I'm not sure.'

'Hmm', Sarah thought, 'that might be a bit big. I mean, on our own.'

Back to Change

In many ways, the parish seems normal on my return to work, despite the masks ubiquitous in the shops. I was able to go for a coffee yesterday, the children make their way to school, the bell of the church rings, just as usual. Meanwhile in Wales my friends Cylene and Dee are incarcerated apart from food shopping, even though just up the valley from them the infection rates are lower than here. That's devolution for you.

Yesterday's coffee fortified me for a virtual school governors' meeting in the evening. This year, we were told, there are 18 pupils who qualify for pupil premium, a little over one child in every ten. At Branscombe Meads school at the other end of the village, this would be nothing remarkable, but Swanvale Halt Infants has never had more than a handful of PP children. The great majority are in this year's Reception class, so they have been assessed since the epidemic started. Meanwhile the headteacher's been contacted four times this half-term by social workers with concerns about pupils; normally, she says, she gets one such enquiry every term or so, so by this rough index family strain is running at eight times the standard. Things look normal-ish, but they aren't.

The church congregation is generally on the older side, like many, and I get the impression - not that I have counted it up - that where members have families including younger children they tend to live elsewhere. It means that my sense of what is actually going on in the parish has to come more from random scraps of information and conversation with those who feel confident enough to talk to me about troubling matters, and not everyone does. I encourage church members to talk to their neighbours, too, and to pray for them.

Dorset in the Autumn 5: The Tank Museum, Bovington

Swanage, Wimborne, Blandford, Wareham: all the little Dorset museums are closed by the pandemic at the moment, and a couple are caught in the middle of refurbishment projects. So my museum-visiting was confined to the Tank Museum at Bovington, another place I hadn’t seen in maybe forty years. Reports from my sister and family encouraged me to return to a collection which wouldn’t normally have tempted me much, but of course times have moved on since the 1970s and the Tank Museum is now imaginatively displayed and has a pleasant café on a mezzanine above the great hangar (with the tanks) which used to be all you got. 

Walking down the incline after my lunch into that dramatic space, I was hit by the aroma of metal, oil, and canvas, which took me back to my years working for the Royal Engineers Museum in the mid-1990s. There’s much too much to take in over the course of a mere ninety minutes or so (several of which were spent waiting to take that photograph of the film reflected on a female tank factory worker’s denims), and I felt the most intense section of the displays was the first, exploring early tank development in World War One. Those first machines look so weird, so alien, that they have a hideous power even surpassing the sleeker and more familiar violence of their modern counterparts. You can easily imagine the impact that they would have had crawling across the trenches towards the German lines, even before they managed to fire a shot: an emissary from somewhere hellish, within that general hell.

Dorset in the Autumn 4: In Ruins

Somehow I managed to miss the turning to Knowlton, and had to stop in a layby and turn the car round – but not before investigating the little ruin I could see in the wood a couple of hundred yards away. It’s an old lodge of the Wimborne St Giles estate. Presumably it once looked like the Pepperpot Lodges closer to the house, but even the Landmark Trust would find a restoration job on this hard work.

Corfe Castle is a rather grander ruin. Unlike some of the places I saw on my Dorset trip this autumn, of course nothing much has changed about Corfe: that’s the point of being owned by the National Trust. But my reaction has changed since my last visit which can’t have been less than thirty years ago (since then the closest I’ve been is driving around the base of the motte through the cramped grey stone streets of Corfe town). My sense of dread caught me by surprised. From a distance the Castle is a comforting presence, one of the images of Dorset simply everyone knows; its familiar, gaunt profile binds the landscape together. But close up the sense of raw power is overwhelming, notwithstanding the Castle’s ruinous outline, even though the slighted towers that have crashed into the northern part of the enclosure look more like a Neolithic monument than a medieval fortress. Built to control, to dominate, the gaps in its massive walls seem to scream with rage that they can no longer fulfil their purpose. The impression of terror and suffering is helped along by the notices calling attention to the horrors that have happened within the grey walls, such as Eleanor of Brittany’s knights being starved to death in 1206. I’m becoming more subject to these impressions as time has gone on: here, in my sixth decade, I’m finally suffering the consequences of too much reading, like a greying Catherine Morland.

The remains of Sturminster Newton Castle are very different. There’s not much of them, and they sit up a lane just off the main road, all but invisible until you turn onto the motte. There is a story of a golden treasure hidden here in a well and guarded by a spectral cat with saucer-sized eyes, but thankfully there’s little sense of that trolling around on a bright autumn afternoon.

Dorset in the Autumn 3: Follies and Folklore

The built environment of Swanage owes a lot to George Burt, Victorian builder and partner to John Mowlem whose company survived until being bought by Carillion in 2006. Burt was in a good position to salvage bits and pieces from demolished buildings in London and cart them back to his native town. Chief and roguest, perhaps, among these, was the 17^th-century frontage of the Mercers’ Hall which, in the mid-1880s, became Swanage’s new Town Hall: ‘wildly undisciplined’, Pevsner calls it, and is not far wrong. Burt was also responsible for The Arcade, originally intended as a whole row of premises but which is now possibly the most pretentious pizza-house anywhere outside Italy. Burt’s own home, the incredible castellated Purbeck House, sheltered a variety of rescued architectural bits and pieces including dramatic gateways and a rock arch. Finally, down the coast at Durlston, Burt built a little castle adorned with an open-air palaeontology lesson carved in stone. Here you find the famous Stone Globe, and also a limestone map of East Dorset, too, showing the distance of various places from Durlston.

Follies are not really folkloric though often stories can arise about them. My Dorset travels brought me face to face with two folkloric artefacts, one which I expected to see, and the other a surprise. The first was the sheela-na-gig keeping its place for close on nine centuries among the riotous corbels carved around the monumental church at Studland – a figure so weird and stylised she scarcely looks human. Had PJ Harvey known about this Dorset sheela she wouldn’t have had to drive to Kilpeck in 1990 to look at the more famous one there.

Of course I’ve been to Knowlton Rings many times, but somehow had never noticed that the two yew trees on the edge of the henge have become wishing or memorial trees, tied with ribbons, decorated with painted stones, knitted flowers, bells, and even children’s ties. All of these have stories of their own, and on my visit were telling them to the gale blowing around the Rings. There were definitely no ribbons or relics present when we first came to Knowlton: the earliest reference I can find to this use of the trees is from 2013.

St Catherine in Dorset 2020

There would have been little reason to venture to Abbotsbury on my Dorset trip this autumn, as the pandemic has closed the chapel on the hill to visitors; but that’s not the only St Catherine site in Dorset. In Kingston Church, to my surprise, I found a window – nothing grand, to be sure, in fact the cheapest Victorian tat, so cheap it’s losing its pigment, but a welcome sight.

Then, on the far east of the county is St Catherine’s Hill. We’ve been there not too long ago, and I wanted to locate the ruined cottage with the bell, which may have been a chapel, ‘hidden in the trees in the southeast corner’. There are plenty of trees there, dense and difficult, clumps of small hazels and birches over the slopes and a mix of older trees about the bottom, between the lanes. I couldn’t find anything, apart from an abandoned tent which had clearly been someone’s home at some time. Scratched and discouraged, I made my way back along the lane – and there was just what I’d been looking for, a ruinous wall with a bell in a tiny gable. It didn’t look like a cottage, and while its Gothic doorway lent it more of a chapel-like appearance, I had my suspicions about it. These were confirmed when I worked out in whose garden it was and the owners told me it was no more than twenty years old, a folly which was just one of the embellishments they’d made to the property over the decades. The bell came from France!

So this was not a kind of spiritual heir to the lost medieval chapel which once occupied the hilltop. I tried to work out exactly where that had been, too, but it turned out to be a far from easy task. There is a square earthwork – possibly Roman – between the rifle range and the concrete mass of the southern reservoir, and the chapel was there, possibly the little flat platform pierced by five oaks and pines, but it’s hard to discern. Far busier than the hill at Abbotsbury, which has only ever been used for its chapel and livestock, the Christchurch one maintains a greater mystery and lost-ness beneath its gorse and pines.

The Dorset Landscape, October 2020

When my intended Autumn trip to a folly in South Wales fell through thanks to epidemic restrictions I was extremely lucky to find an alternative in Dorset - a flat in the centre of Swanage, not my usual holiday fare but a strange pleasure to sit in the bay window and watch the good citizens of that seaside town go about their business, and then emerge from my secret doorway into the street. Access to the Isle of Purbeck can either be gained by going through Wareham to the west, or via the old chain ferry between Sandbanks and Shell Bay on the east. I chose the latter, for time's sake.

There are several Purbecks. Heathlands of sand and gravel slope towards Poole Harbour to the north of a narrow band of chalk hill - almost a single one, in fact - and then a small strip of fertile farmland separates that from the limestone plateau on the south which finally collapses into the sea. I spent a bit of time walking all of them!

Shipstal Point at Arne felt a bit like Barbados-in-Dorset.

Before the tourists arrived to paddle at Swanage or goggle at the ruins of Corfe Castle, the economy of the limestone area in south Purbeck rested on stoneworking. The landscape is still pitted with the remains of tiny shallow mines, like this one. Men and boys sweated and sometimes died in them. Loads of stone were piled on carts below ground and then winched to the surface by donkeys walking around great wooden windlasses. Heaven help anyone below if the chain broke.

Of course the economy is different now. There are great cruisers moored in Bournemouth Bay at the moment, surreal and slightly terrifying. They have nowhere to go.

This unexpected trip re-acquainted me with places I hadn't seen for decades: some were the same as ever, and others deeply altered, and I'll post about more of them later. Even the same place, of course, can alter significantly depending on the weather, as Ballard Down did on Thursday; on the way out, windblown and rain-shrouded, and on the return journey, bathed in sun (still windy, though). 

'Melmoth', by Sarah Perry (Serpent's Tail, 2018)

My friend Dr Spooner at Lancaster has in the past encouraged me to read Charles Maturin's first-wave Gothic door-stopper Melmoth the Wanderer, but I have failed so far. Instead I took away on holiday with me Sarah Perry's novel from a couple of years ago which took its inspiration from that book. Like her best-seller The Essex Serpent it's not a hard read, but although everybody described that story as Gothic because it had a Victorian setting, a surgeon as a character, and a weird East Anglian legend as a frame, it was a gentle and modest book with a happy and muted ending. Melmoth is also humane and warm at heart, and while central characters die, they do so only when it's time to go; but it has much more Gothic hysteria embedded in it and if you don't like that, you won't swallow it at all.

Melmoth is the witness. Cursed, so the legend goes, to walk the earth eternally as punishment for denying the Resurrection - for refusing to be a witness - she appears whenever there is great sin and sorrow, and offers comfort to the guilty, if only they will join her in despair, take her hand in her utter loneliness. English translator in Gothic Prague, Helen Franklin, comes across stories of Melmoth left by a dead man in a university library: the Witness appears as smoke, as black drapes and hair, as a squawking crowd of jackdaws. She is always just out of sight, until the moment comes when a soul is ready and then she is all too obvious. She moves through 17th-century England, the Armenian Massacre, the Holocaust, and Helen's own past, and present.

Secrets and stories and pain are the currency of the Gothic tradition, but what Mrs Perry does very deftly is to use it to explore guilt, complicity, suffering, and finding the courage to go on: to refuse, in the grammar of the novel, to take Melmoth's hand. It takes great skill and imagination to add a new room to the great haunted house of the Gothic, but, like Sadako in Ring or the House of Leaves, that's what Melmoth is. We're all sinners, after all, and despair may not be far away, like a black figure half-seen in the corner of the eye, like the sound of a jackdaw taking wing. And, given that Serpent's Tail publishes the book, I can't help imagining the Witness as looking a bit like Diamanda Galás. 

New Normal

Harriet moves around her house very gingerly with her walker. The dog was looking eagerly out of the window as I walked into the drive, as though he had heard me while I was at the top of the road. It didn't take Harriet long to open the door, so she must have been waiting for me too. 

It has been not quite a month since I last went to see her. I wasn't taking her communion this time - it was just an opportunity to check on her as I won't have the chance to do so for a couple of weeks, and communication any other way than face-to-face is complicated. Not unexpectedly conversation included the frustrations and hazards of disability. Harriet has live-in care now, something a lot of us would struggle with: is it more of a strain to have someone living in your house, or to move to a different setting to be looked after, and lose your familiar surroundings? At least her current carer seems to care: she's had two in quick succession who didn't. I sit, with an unexpected slice of cake, and find myself just as unexpectedly angry at the thought of an ill person taking the dramatic step of having a stranger come to live with them, and then finding that stranger is cruel or careless. At least Harriet has others to speak for her, and can speak for herself: others don't.

'It's a pain to be asked fifteen times in a day whether I want to go to the toilet', Harriet admitted. She struggled with her cake and dropped bits repeatedly. There is a little part of me that wants to offer to help, but I don't. I say how, when a thought pops into my mind, I try to reflect that the same thought has probably occurred to everyone else who's interacted that day with whoever it is I'm talking to, and so I don't need to say it. Harriet struggled with her cake, perhaps, but she got there in the end. The problem was not her ability to manage the cake, but my embarrassment at her possibly being embarrassed at being awkward. Of course she was going to have to battle, but ultimately it was no big deal for her or me, and there was no need to try to put everything 'right', to restore a false sort of normality. This is Harriet's normal, one she manages with fortitude.