Changing Assumptions

At Fr Thesis’s central London church the grand festival of the Assumption of the BVM yesterday involved a procession around the streets with a statue of the Virgin being carried in a flower-decked litter flanked by Chelsea Pensioners: at Swanvale Halt we are a little lower-key, and the observation was confined to liturgical propers, vestments (my 18^th-century blue set) and reciting the Angelus at the main morning service. Our statue can’t really be moved anywhere as it is rooted to its plinth very firmly. As I pointed out in my sermon to mark the occasion, I think the B.V. of Swanvale Halt looks remarkably like 1920s movie star Lillian Gish, who made her last movie at the age of 94: you can often guess when bits of religious art have been produced by which celebrities they remind you of. The statue arrived in the church at the end of the 1960s from the London convent of an order of sisters based in Surrey, and we suspect that our late sacristan Mary had connections with them; but on the back is a plaque recording that it was donated in memory of a member of the congregation. Miss Lanfield was, in her younger days, a militant suffragette who was known for such exploits as following Asquith to a wedding with a dogwhip concealed in her umbrella intending to give him a thrashing; throwing a tomato at the Director of Public Prosecutions; infiltrating the House of Commons disguised as a man; and smashing windows at the General Post Office. She was imprisoned and force-fed, and was awarded the WSPU’s medal with a variety of bars for it. There can’t be many Virgins in churches with that kind of history behind them: all on the day when women in Afghanistan see twenty years of liberty about to be thrown into the fire.