Thereby Hangs a Tail

Not for the first time, an excited dog at the altar rail with its owner calms down and gazes rapt as I bless it with the Host.

I would like to think this is the mute Creation recognising the sacramental Presence of its Lord, but I suspect Tommy just thinks he's going to get a biscuit.

'I Was a Teenage Banshee' (Sue Webster, 2019)

Very very vaguely, I think I’d been aware of artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble,  but really only began to pay attention when they’d separated and it became clear that Ms Webster was one of PJ Harvey’s chums. Polly wrote a poem as an introduction to Webster’s The Folly Acres Cookbook in 2015, and, for a fan, Webster’s Instagram feed is worth keeping an eye on as occasionally they do stuff together and PJH even consents to be photographed. But Webster also has other enthusiasms, and I couldn’t help noticing that Siouxsie Sioux pops up on that Instagram feed rather often.

Sue Webster’s current book, I Was a Teenage Banshee, delineates her own relationship with the Queen of Gothdom and how it wove in and out of her bumpy adolescence and partnership with Tim Noble (PJH appears very fleetingly). One Wednesday morning in 1978 the eleven-year-old Sue Webster sat beside the letterbox of her family home in Leicester, waiting for the highlight of her week – the arrival of music magazine NME - and its plop to the floor on this particular morning was to bend the trajectory of her life, like a prism twisting the light. ‘I found myself catapulted across the room by a pair of killer-heeled, thigh-length patent leather boots … The figure I saw rising above me, wearing Cleopatra-style make-up and sporting a Nazi swastika armband, belonged to the surrogate mother I’d long been searching for’. Bowie, Kate Bush, the Slits, the Sisters, and a Leicester band or two, are all present in the book too, but they are barely even support acts; years later, Webster reflects that ‘everything I ever learned in life was from listening to the first four albums of Siouxsie and the Banshees’.

But the narrative doesn’t start there. It starts in the middle, with Webster leaving for university and her father packing three cardboard boxes full of tat which she then carts around with her for the intervening years, never examining them until the day in 2014 when she and Tim Noble part. That’s when she chooses to open them. Box one contained school work and juvenile art work. Box two sheltered diaries, personalia, and ‘letters written to me by friends I had forgotten and who had once cared for me’. Box three was the Banshees box.

It was, Webster says, ‘the obsession that dragged me kicking and screaming throughout my adolescence’: LPs and singles, concert tickets and coach passes, ‘crumpled posters with economical squares of Blu Tack still attached’, her fan club membership card, bootleg tapes and ‘much sought-after concert T-shirts held together for dear life by safety pins, not for the punk aesthetic but in order to retain their very existence’. She uses the memorabilia to prise open the story of her life.

I Was a Teenage Banshee is a big, floppy paperback, pricey and quite difficult to handle both physically and conceptually. Ms Webster presents her tale, a narrative of difficult growing up, love, loss and art, as an excavation of artefacts, elaborating on ‘Crime Scene’, the wall-collage she made out of the bits and pieces from the cardboard boxes and the links between them. Some items come from the boxes and some are the artworks she and Tim Noble make, apart and together: especially together, filtering their own enthusiasms and the works of past artists through their own trashy and deeply committed aesthetic. There are two contextualising essays – ‘A Touch of Insanity’, about Webster’s teenage skirmishes with the mental health system; and the concluding ‘I Was a Teenage Banshee’, laying out how she met and fell for Siouxsie Sioux – and, straying and rambling through memory and rant, they are moving and illuminating, but for the most part we have to draw our own conclusions from those juxtapositions of paper scraps, photos and artwork.

Doing it isn’t that easy, and clearer statements about Webster’s actual interactions with Siouxsie and her music come from other sources than the book, for example a recent account in US magazine Interview. Here, she describes how she listened to The Scream and heard not raucous punk but ‘almost like a soundtrack to a film … it left a lot more to the imagination’. Goth hadn’t really been synthesised at this stage but that’s as good an account of the difference between the two as you might ask for. Her leather jacket with studs and painted Banshee images she made herself: ‘it was my pride and joy, my armour that I put on when I went to the gigs … It’s the thing that defines you, because you aren’t afraid to step out of your front door wearing something that you’ve made’. By the time she went to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham in 1988, there to meet her future lover and collaborator, Webster had dyed her hair blonde, acquired a baseball cap, and, whether her earlier phase was best described as Goth or Punk, she’d left it behind. No Banshees music later than 1984’s baleful album Juju gets a mention, but Webster doesn’t forget completely: she sees Siouxsie perform again several times in the 2000s, adding to that pile of fading concert tickets. She doesn’t tell us what she thinks about those later encounters with her idol, coming to her again after so many years have passed, more experienced, more secure, much better-off, and with her hair black again albeit not as spiky as in 1984. There’s a lot she doesn’t tell us, in fact.

But really all you need to unlock the mystery is that statement that Siouxsie became Webster’s ‘surrogate mother’. If her natural birth into a working-class Leicester family promised nothing very exciting, her second parturition from that dark musical and sartorial womb created a new potential life, one of exploration and provocation, one of different responsibilities. ‘I came home from school and hacked off my beautiful long shiny black hair with a razor blade. That’s when everything changed and my life became a serious matter.’

Confronting Countered Truths

Ms Trollsmiter was on her way home from her regular Friday protest slot outside Liverpool Street Station yesterday and at Harrow Station got into quite an altercation with a gentleman who took exception to her climate-change placard. To quote her:

His first sentence was: “You don’t believe in that, do you?” Pointing accusingly at my poster.

“Dude.” I gave him a prolonged look. “I am really tired and I have no interest in being in an argument with you right now. Come back some other day.”

“But you carry that poster, DON'T YOU? And you don’t believe in that, DO YOU?”

The brawliness was still somewhat tempered for about 2-3 minutes in which I tested his claim that the planet has gone through temperature changes before by asking him if he knew ‘why’ the planet had gone through these changes in the past, which he, naturally, didn’t … there was a point during the brawl when he started citing my poster loudly: ‘You’re a SCAREMONGERER!’ Now, at THIS glorious point, I was the LAST-PERSON-EVER-to-stop-him, because he was literally making every single person on the platform want to know what was on my poster …

You may recall my only encounter with a climate-change sceptic was more polite and centred on his bizarre assertion that carbon dioxide isn’t a greenhouse gas, a position which I suppose might be true but, if so, would demand the overturning of quite a lot of science; however, the conversation finished with the same assertion of irresponsibility on my part. I wonder whether all such meetings follow the same trajectory.

Of course we had the same thing from POTUS at the Davos summit a few days ago. It would be a waste of time to pick apart Mr Trump’s assault on ‘prophets of doom … alarmists’ and ‘fortune tellers’; but I have heard similar sorts of sentiments even from people who say they accept the scientific consensus, let alone those who don’t want to think about it. The conclusion you have to draw is that the motivation for this comes from somewhere other than the evidence; its source is, I suspect, not even primarily self-interest, but a facet of individual psychology which no amount of argument is going to shift. I mean, as a Christian priest I am used to dealing with apocalyptic and am very much aware of all the sorry souls who down the centuries have concluded that the End is Nigh based on the interpretation of ancient texts and current political events; but what we are facing presently is not that, it’s the result of decades of measurement across a variety of scientific sub-disciplines which all appear to point in exactly the same direction. For the record, I don’t yet think this is The End, as there are elements of the picture in the Book of Revelation which don’t seem present. It might not be the preliminary to Judgement Day, but merely to an unprecedentedly disruptive and damaging episode in human history involving the deaths of untold millions of people and the breakdown of our current civilisation, no worse than that. No biggie.

Given there is a persistent human constituency inclining towards ‘irrational scepticism’, perhaps we ought to be grateful that Mr Trump is there to articulate it so thoroughly: it shows it vividly for what it is, and as a result might dislodge some of the waverers and float them in the direction of reason. Others will find their attitudes confirmed. I suspect they will not number many in this country, but any at all challenge the belief most of us dreadful liberals have most of the time, that reason counts for a great deal in human affairs.

To Tintinnabulate or Not

So far nobody has asked me that we ring the church bell at Swanvale Halt on January 31st to celebrate the UK's departure from the European Union. I wonder how well the campaign to make this happen across the land is doing more generally. I see that the bit of www.Leave.eu that refers to it has, since I last visited, removed some insulting references to the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, God knows, many of us have some frustrations with), but there are still all the purported parallels with World War Two, despite many Leavers trying to tell us that nobody ever, ever draws on that rhetoric and to say that folk do is a Remainer smear. Ah well, that's by the by really.

When new bells are installed in churches they are, traditionally, not just blessed as any other bit of kit might be but hallowed in a ceremony referred to as Baptism, which suggests that there is something special about them which doesn't apply to statues, altar hangings, candlesticks, or anything else you might find around a church. I suspect this is because bells speak and therefore have a life about them which other inanimate objects don't no matter what holy uses to which they might be put. And what do they speak? In a way they are the voice of God. They summon, they proclaim, they announce his joy and his sorrow. They do not vocalise what we feel, but what he does, and our task is to align our wills with his. That means we ought to be very careful about how we use them. I genuinely do not presume to know what the Lord's opinion might be of the forthcoming shift in the international status of the United Kingdom, and so I will not try to speak for him.

Swanvale Halt only has one bell anyway. If anyone has a million quid or more down the back of the sofa to construct a bell tower it would be splendid to have a few more!

Putting Clergy in their Place at Shamley Green

In rather a companion piece to the last post, my travels a couple of weeks ago took me to Shamley Green to inspect Christ Church, a church which was built on land donated by the uncle of its first incumbent, appointed in 1881. Those were the days in the Church of England. Architecturally and liturgically Christ Church is a modest place, advancing in a moderately Catholic direction over a long while: its Lady Chapel was created out of the south aisle (the usual pattern) in the late 1940s, a modern statue of the BVM arrived in 1958, and the aumbry wasn't installed until 1994. However the great treasures of this little building are the reredos and eastern wall paintings, designed by a pair of sister artists, Mary and Eleanor Dacres, in the 1870s and 1890s. They aren't works of wondrous quality, but have a charm. 

The parish history contains short pen-portraits of previous incumbents, and among them are quite the frankest statements I have ever read in texts of the kind. The hapless Mr Alexander who was vicar in the 1940s is described as 'well-meaning but inept ... He had the ability to get people's backs up without meaning to, a process to which his wife unfortunately often contributed'. Makes you wonder what they'll say about you when you're gone.

Des Res

Back in the ancient, far-off days before I came to Swanvale Halt, I applied for the incumbency of Aybourne, a living with a former vicarage which was so colossal it now houses an entire junior school. The existing parsonage house was substantial enough, but it didn't tempt me (it didn't help that the previous vicar had given his dogs free run of the first floor and it wasn't quite clear what would be done to make good the damage). Aybourne, though, is not the only Surrey church whose priest used to live in some style. 

A couple of weeks ago I visited the church at Ewhurst whose incumbent lives in a nice post-WW2 house. I complimented the nice arched window lighting the stairs landing to be told that they'd had to have a blind put over it as otherwise from the churchyard you could see straight into the upstairs loo. The rectory replaced what is now the Old Rectory, a care home and which, when first built in 1874, looked like this:

In fact the Old Rectory has been expanded a bit to suit its current role, but it's pretty substantial. However, the 1874 building replaced an earlier one which, when I saw a print of it in the church history booklet, positively made me gulp:

What on earth inspired the Revd C.A. Steuart to have a slightly humbler version of Strawberry Hill constructed at Ewhurst we don't know, but its tragic demolition was blamed on its 'dilapidated and unsafe' condition - surely an excuse for his successor who for some unaccountable reason scorned living in a set from a Gothic novel.

Tailoring Tale

My cassocks have served me well, really. I had them made while I was at theological college so they have lasted the better part of seventeen years before the cuffs have started to look a bit worn. To be fair, I look a bit worn after seventeen years too, but I can do something about the cassocks.

Mr Taylor (appropriately enough) made my cassocks. He used to have a shop on the Cowley Road in Oxford which was convenient both for him and the theological students who found their way there, but a few years ago he decamped some distance away to Eynsham Sawmill. 'I hoped that things would get a bit quieter, but they haven't,' he told me, which is a surprise considering that students can no longer literally walk across the road from where they live to buy clerical shirts, collars and stoles. 

The nearest railway station to Eynsham Sawmill is Hanborough, about a mile and a half away. Miss T lives nearby and gave me a lift from the station before we went for a coffee, so I outsourced some of my carbon emissions. Mr Taylor has recreated his shop within the smaller and somewhat rougher surroundings of the sawmill outbuildings, though I didn't spot the antique till he used to use in picturesque fashion. 'It'll be a while before I can get the work done,' he apologised, blaming the company that usually supplies his Russell Cord for dragging its feet. 'They did a load before Christmas but then mucked up the dyeing'. 

Miss T realised that she knows one of the other businesses working out of the mill. Corset-maker Julia runs Sew Curvy, a couple of units down. Apparently Mr Taylor occasionally gives her offcuts of dramatic ecclesiastical fabric to be turned into very upmarket underthings.

I made sure we went through the right door.