All Saints', Banstead

Banstead parish church was a delight to visit, though I’m quite glad I don’t have to look after it. It’s a complex, slow-growth medieval church whose compartmented space and fixed pews make it ill-suited to many modern forms of corporate worship – ‘modern’ meaning anything from a mid-twentieth century Parish Communion onwards. The parish history shows the pre-restoration building, jammed with box pews; the Victorian restorations were the initial stage in the development of an early Catholic tradition, with a daily mass being celebrated by the 1920s (according to the guidebooks it didn’t have the sacrament reserved until the 1970s, but they aren’t always right). There has been a mild reordering at some point, probably the 1980s, with new floor tiles and some of the pews being turned inward to face the centre – which is still a very awkward place to put an altar. The tabernacle is astonishing, and the church guidebook says nothing about where it came from or when it was installed. The painted crucifix over the chancel arch is the only remnant of a more extensive image, as old photos reveal.

I wanted to buy a copy of that guidebook, but had no change with me. Still, the booklet stand had a helpful QR code to facilitate payments to the church, so cheerfully I thought I would use that, congratulating myself for being so modern. At first I had to prove I wasn’t a robot, then I got sent a code to input, and finally the bank refused to believe it was me trying to make a payment (of £5!) and asked me to phone them. At that point I gave up and just took photographs from it. Sorry!

O Come Magnify the Lord with Me

For a couple of weeks our gates have been a bit low on Sunday mornings. I went through the list of the congregation and discovered that I knew why almost all the absentees were away, but that itself shows how our active membership has shrunk as a result of the pandemic, and even more so our penumbra of occasional attenders. I regularly go through little bouts of wondering whether I am doing any good, or doing any good here: the congregation would say Yes, but if it was the case, wouldn’t we be achieving more? What am I missing? What’s the key to changing things?

Curiously it was the state of the world more generally that made me think about it differently this time. I find it hard to think of the work of a parish priest in terms of rescuing souls from hell; though that might ultimately be the effect, I am too uncertain about the exact conditions of salvation in any case to be very definite about that. Instead we will need the virtues of charity, courage and faithfulness in the challenges the human race faces, and those are rooted, finally, in the victory of God. It’s sometimes hard to see the connection between what happens in a small parish church and such grand considerations, but every prayer is a weapon in the Lord’s armoury.

And in the end, like every Christian I should be focused on God and not on myself and my own concerns. Of course I have a task entrusted to me, on one level, and have to carry it out to the best of my ability, but are my hopes for my church not about God, and not even about the welfare of souls, but really about my own sense of self-respect – of stopping up the hole in the dyke of my own anxieties and insecurities? Nothing will ever be achieved that way. Only joy works, not fear.

At Malling Abbey every recitation of the Holy Office begins with a little chant from Psalm 34: one of the sisters sings ‘I will bless the Lord at all times’. She sings it on her own behalf, that though this is corporate worship, the worship of the community she belongs to and of the whole Catholic Church, it is, first and foremost, hers, in which she invites others to join. So should my worship be, full of the joy of the Lord’s presence, and if there are others there to join, many or few, all the better.

Early Summer Garden Notes

For days I have found no caterpillars on the box hedges, and there seems to be a good deal of new growth on the plants which bodes well; I’m told you should give the hedges a bit of a water at the base if they are to recover from an infestation. I did find a moth yesterday – it fluttered out of the bush straight into my hands where, I’m afraid, it met its end. The pheromone trap has also captured a couple. It does seem that this infestation is over, but box moth is endemic to southeast England now so they will almost certainly be back at some stage.

Meanwhile my three remaining adult fish are now massive, and I am wondering whether I will need a bigger pond! The water has gone bright green, but the fish don’t seem to mind this; in fact I think they may quite like it as they are venturing out a bit in the daytime, perhaps feeling a bit more secure in the murk than they would if the water was nice and clear. It means that I don’t know where the two juvenile fish are, and I don’t want to clear the water out until the Autumn when – if they are indeed still there – they may be a bit bigger and I won’t miss them!

When people talk about planting more trees to combat climate change I always reflect that my problem is stopping them. My garden is perpetually in danger of being overrun by unplanned hazels, oaks, ashes and sycamores. There is no tree I love more than the rowan, but that seems to seed in the least convenient places too: the other day I pulled one out of a crack in the tarmac of my drive. I’m going to leave the copper beech seedling near the top steps: it’s made quite a journey to be there, as there aren’t any copper beeches anywhere nearby.

The Vortex of Opinion

The great Terrance Dicks, referring to the time he was Script Editor of Dr Who, pointed out that the show had nothing like a continuity guide at that stage: ‘continuity was what I could remember of my predecessor’s shows, and what my successor could remember of mine’. I rather yearn for those days, before the series became run by uberfans endlessly dropping in references to a line in an obscure story from 1984, and then not even the good bits. I was almost tempted into commenting on a series of videos posted on Youtube by a young Dr Who fan who clearly knows far more about it than I ever will, and who was trying to prove that some plotline or other was foreshadowed back to the Hartnell era: this, in a show that often can’t maintain a consistent narrative across one episode, let alone sixty years. But I reasoned that they are looking for different things in a TV series from me, and refrained.

It struck me, facetiously, that Christians arguing about the Bible, or US lawyers debating what is or isn’t in the Constitution, are a bit like Dr Who fans discussing continuity, only less acrimonious: it’s just as well they don’t have access to ballistic weapons, I can tell you. All three groups are, in similar ways, working to resolve a problematic text, to draw conclusions from it about cases which are not necessarily explicitly mentioned in it.

Now I’ve enjoyed Dr Who since I was a child, if you can describe as ‘enjoyment’ being reduced to a quivering wreck watching the end of the first episode of Pyramids of Mars in 1976 as Marcus Scarman kills Namin by apparently roasting him from the inside out (‘I bring Sutekh’s gift of death to all humanity!’ – unsuitable for almost anyone, let alone children); I have of course a professional interest in scriptural theology, and a fascination with law and the role it plays. In all three areas I find myself something of a moderate textual conservative: I would prefer at least to begin from what’s patently in the text, rather than draw in matter from elsewhere or use the interpreter’s own preferences. I like canon to have clear boundaries.

When, about a year ago, I decided to look up what the 1973 US Supreme Court judgement in Roe v. Wade actually included, I was rather shocked at how tendentious it seemed to be. Clearly abortion itself couldn’t have been explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, and I realised the Court’s decision rested on reading into that two-century-old document a right of privacy. Was that right really there? Not in so many words, of course. I found I had some sympathy with what has eventually, and inevitably, emerged as the 2022 Court’s criticism of its predecessor of 1973’s analysis: you must rely predominately on what is explicitly in your legal text, or you hand far too much authority over to the opinions of justices arbitrarily sampled at any particular moment. It’s also a very bad move for a polity to delegate decisions on contested matters to courts because the politicians can’t or won’t reach a judgement about them: that generates resentment and powerlessness, and you can see where it takes you.

But equally clearly you can’t be too much of a textual conservative. The US Constitution’s very opening words, ringing as they are, about all men (sic) being created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, were never intended to apply to black people, for instance: they were penned and signed by cheerful and unrepentant slaveholders. You can’t simply rest content with what that document’s drafters either actually wrote, or intended by what they wrote. As time goes on, our interpretation of what those words mean and imply changes, and changes quite legitimately; which means there has to be some means of bringing those developing insights to bear on the text.

The 1973 Court relied on the knotty and very contested doctrine of ‘substantive due process’, which I think I only just about understand. The 5^th and 14^th Amendments to the Constitution both state that citizens shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property without ‘due process of law’. This tiny but momentous phrase is understood to have two applications. First, ‘due process’ means, very basically, that all such deprivations must be valid, fair and impartial, decided by legitimate authority and properly enacted. There is plenty of scope to discuss what that actually means. Secondly, such deprivations must be ‘lawful’: that is, not just procedurally correct, but in accordance with the whole body of law. It’s that concept that allows the Constitution to be interrogated by changing ideas derived from legal precedent or legislative action, and prevents the legislature from simply doing anything it wants (I’m not sure UK law, controlled as it is by the idea of Parliamentary sovereignty, contains such a safeguard). The 1973 Court decided that US law, taken as a whole, did contain a right to privacy and therefore to procure termination of pregnancy, which, given the state of the various legal provisions across the States at that time, was quite a leap.

Nowadays those who take a liberal view of abortion rights would almost certainly rely on different arguments from those of fifty years past; we might talk about the notion of ‘bodily autonomy’ as a fundamental principle of law in a free society, and I suspect it would be far easier to discern the outline of that in the legal practice of the US than a right of ‘privacy’ even if, in this practical case, they amount to the same thing: of such nice distinctions are legal arguments made. Even if the 2022 Court has criticised the 1973 one for its quasi-legislative investigation of the gestational process, any bench grappling with this issue would still have had to decide what the Constitution thinks ‘life’ means, and would have to do something very similar to what happened fifty years ago.

I did cast an eye over the 2022 judgement, and I’m afraid the Court reveals its true colours when Chief Justice Thomas includes the 63 million abortions carried out since 1973 in the ‘harms’ wrought by reckless application of the ‘substantive due process’ doctrine. Beneath its superficial concern for judicial correctness, and no matter what sympathy I as a ‘textual conservative’ might feel for its arguments, the 2022 Court is a partisan bench selected for partisan purposes, or rather, for this one purpose, posing as a defender of juridical purity. It has no interest in uncovering a principle of bodily autonomy in US law, as a more liberal bench might, even if it might be there. 

We all know that interpretation of Biblical texts, especially about sexual and gender matters at the moment, is conditioned by what people want to find in them. In the same way, the young Dr Who fan I almost tackled on Youtube has decided that whoever queries the current trajectory of the series, no matter what reason they may state, is in fact a sexist bigot covering up the fact that they can’t get past a woman being cast as the central character. That fan may well, in many cases, be right. The interpreters of your legal code also bring their own ideas to bear on it, and how you choose who you get to do it - in the US, one single elected politician abetted by a gerrymandered legislature, or, in the UK, basically the legal profession as a whole - is perhaps even more important than who decides where the Doctor’s fezzes fit in the narrative.

Distance Learning

One of the few boons of the pandemic period was that we all became accustomed to online meetings. Although they are, in form, horrible, they can sometimes be a great mercy: you don't have to drag yourself to a distant venue with all the palaver that entails, especially when rail strikes mean the alternative is driving to Woking, dumping the car somewhere, and sitting in a bleak independent church for an hour listening to the speakers at the Bishop's Study Morning. Had I been at home on my own with all the proceedings beamed in on my laptop I would have got on with some sewing, but, as it turned out, going to the neighbouring parish of Tunfield and sitting in Fr Jonathan's ancient church with him and retired SSM Jean in front of his laptop wasn't all that bad. 

The theme was 'Leadership and the Abuse of Power'. The first speaker, Debbie Sellin, used to be an incumbent in Guildford Diocese, but is now Bishop of Southampton and in fact Acting Diocesan Bishop for Winchester after the forced resignation of Bishop Tim Dakin. Frustratingly, if understandably, she wouldn't say anything about that. Nor would the next speaker up, Marion Peters, talk in any detail about her experience of 'spiritual abuse', just her reaction to it and what it felt like to be a victim. Finally our own Bishop Andrew came on to talk about Christian leadership styles with the aid of pictures of gardens. It was all completely irrelevant until the very last couple of minutes, when he mentioned accountability mechanisms, before running off the platform so that, we all agreed, the Director of Mission couldn't pray for him as he had for the other speakers before and after they spoke. Can't we give the Lord an occasional rest from our jabbering? 

I, Jonathan and Jean agreed three things. Firstly, and positively, it was remarkable that the Church was even dealing with this subject in such explicit terms: we couldn't imagine it being done even ten years ago. Secondly (and less positively), we noted the the focus on experience rather than theology which does seem to epitomise the approach of the Church to a whole variety of issues currently. Thirdly (and linked to the second point), there was very little analysis, and therefore very little advice. We thought it would have been good to have a psychologist, or a management consultant, to talk about exactly why and how abuses of power happen in church contexts, and what might be done about them. Instead - as the Church seems reluctant to draw on the insights of anything outside itself - the only advice we got was 'be more like Jesus', which is pretty useless as advice goes: we know that, thank you.

Unbeknownst to him, Bishop Andrew had already provided us with the high point of the event before he even began his talk by saying, invisibly and therefore completely out of context, 'I can never remember which way up these things go'.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Review, PJ Harvey, 'Orlam' (Picador, 2022)

When Polly Harvey was four, she found a dead lamb in the woods near her house: the crows had pecked its eyes out. At home, her parents had just bought Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and had it on the turntable endlessly. Thereafter, she said, that record never failed to make her feel physically sick; though it took until the 2010s before she would admit in interviews why it did. Harvey takes this horrible experience and spins out of it her second collection of poetry, Orlam.

Her protagonist Ira-Abel Rawles is nine, and lives in the fictional Dorset village of UNDERWHELEM – in the text, it’s always capitalised, as though in a print transcription of Domesday Book. It’s a place where females and animals are never safe from predation of different kinds. Not that Ira thinks of herself as female, as her double name suggests – she’s a ‘not-gurrel’, she insists, a ‘wether on the nether-edge’ who should have been born a ‘tarble tup’, and who identifies with Joan of Arc as well as the lambs she has a reluctant hand (literally) in castrating. That sexual ambiguity will not protect her. All this also opens out of Harvey’s childhood, though I hope not much of the rest of the story does, or I doubt she’ll ever be able to show her face in her home village of Corscombe again (1).

I say ‘story’, and that is what Orlam is – a verse novel spanning a calendar year and written, as the quotes so far make clear, in old Dorset dialect mainly lifted from William Barnes’s 1886 Dictionary; so the ‘tarble tup’ Ira imagines she might have been is, in what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, a ‘tolerable ram’. Readers should not imagine that Harvey would actually have heard much of this during her real 1970s Dorset upbringing, beyond perhaps the odd word: instead it’s a very conscious anachronism that allows the author to prise open Ira’s experience, its earthy Anglo-Saxon shapes generating a very particular relationship between that, the landscape, and the people around her. The dialect doesn’t entirely lift us away from West Dorset in the 1970s – the jerrycans and sheep-dip chemicals see to that – but it gives that setting a depth and resonance which makes it seem a landscape of myth.

Ira creates her own myths, to cope with the horrors she encounters. The dead lamb’s eyeball becomes Orlam, her guardian spirit, floating over the fields on its trailing optic nerve; in the only place she finds refuge, Gore Woods, she meets the bleeding Civil War soldier Wyman-Elvis and his entourage of ghosts, and the Ash-Wraiths, the shades of every child who has ever played there. She ‘scratches’ out her myths, her sorrows and enmities, writing to take control of what she undergoes. She needs these spectral allies, because she has few enough among the human residents of Underwhelem. She loves her mother, but her mother is neglectful and absent; she loves her grandmother (called Mary, like Harvey’s own), but Mary is dead, and hovers over the hollow lane; she adores her elder brother Kane-Jude, but he betrays her (predestined by his names, Cain and Judas). The rest, from Ira’s drunken, inadequate father Chalmers-Adam, to Emerson-Dogger Bowditch who rapes her in the Red Shed, are deserving objects of her scorn and hatred. She casts spells against them (apparently successfully in her father’s case), and makes songs to defend herself. It’s a mythology woven from plants and wildlife, the details of sheep-rearing, Shakespeare, pop songs and weather rhymes, Christian imagery, and Dorset folklore (2), and makes a heady enough mix – though the intoxicant isn’t good old Dorset cider, but the cheap whisky and Palmer’s bitter served up in Underwhelem’s grotty pub, the Golden Fleece.

I often find that I have to reorientate myself to get into a new PJ Harvey album, and this book turned out the same: it took me three reads before it really gelled. It isn’t hard to read: you can tackle it quite quickly, and in fact I think it helps to read it quickly, once you’re familiar with the rich but restricted vocabulary of the dialect. Polly’s mentor Don Paterson’s simultaneous ‘English’ translations of her words are best ignored as they will mislead you into one particular reading of a multivocal text. I found at first that the poem’s conventions, such as the capitalisation of placenames and the fabricated names of the characters, separated me from the emotion it should have contained, but after repeated readings those distractions faded. And they may only be Ira’s imaginings anyway, though Harvey has been rightly non-committal about that. So I got there, in the end.

But it is brutal. ‘Sex and death all roundabout/Sonny with ‘es eyes pecked out/Scoff the vlesh vlee and the yis/This is how the wordle is’. Ira excepted, all the living characters are grotesques, who seem to exist only to cause others pain, notably her. The miasma of horror barely lifts, whether it’s the dramatic hideousness of the pervert forester John Forsey dressing as the Dorset Ooser, or the more prosaic terrors of the new school term, which Ira dreads so much she throws up on her teacher’s shoes. The Christ-figure (that’s how Harvey describes him, not me) Wyman-Elvis hands The Word to Ira – in Presley’s phrase, love me tender, a marker of hope amid the evil, but she finds it hard to hold onto it. For all Orlam’s skill, its near-relentless morbidity is wearing, as though Harvey is working through something. Mind you, if this still doesn’t represent the mature outworking of her poetic voice, what might be to come?

The book ends with a recapitulation of its first lyric, ‘Prayer at the Gate’, in almost Christian terms:

So look before and look behind

At life and death all innertwined

And teake towards your dark-haired Lord

Forever bleeding with The Word.

By now, the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, Ira’s mother seems to have resurfaced, her father appears to have succumbed to the curse Ira laid on him, and the ghost of her childhood has joined the Ash-Wraiths while she carries on into a more knowing near-adolescence. And that’s as optimistic as Orlam gets. It is, I think, a brilliant achievement, but hard to take, and even harder – for me, yet – to love.

(There haven't been that many reviews of Orlam yet, either because people don't know what to make of it, or hate it but are too polite to say so. You can have a look at this one, or this, or this.)

1.Earnest Pollywatchers heard drafts of these poems as far back as 2017 when she read them at King’s Place in London. They've hardly altered, but where they have it's weakened the specific local references. So the early version of ‘Black Saturday’ described Ira and her brother playing war in ‘Luther’s Coppice’, a real location in Corscombe; in the book, this has become ‘Blaggot’s Copse’.

2.I especially like the references to the Red Post which in the book is ‘UNDERWHELEM’s hanging post’ (p.75). There are four real Red Posts in Dorset, roadside waymarkers, and because nobody really knows why they are coloured red, you can make up what you like. I think of them as the mystic axial points around which the county revolves, which rivet it into its past. The nearest to Corscombe is at Benville Bridge. 

A Visit to the Home of Time

This afternoon I visited someone in hospital for the first time since the pandemic started. It's relatively easy now, though inflexible: you wouldn't be able to remember another parishioner in a different ward and just pop to see them on your way out. Now every visit has to be booked in. I was seeing Dol, who was anxious to know 'all the scandal, who's misbehaving'. In fact she was so keen she asked me this repeatedly. The truth is that nobody at all connected to the church is misbehaving, and in fact barely anything is happening at all.

So I will instead put up some photos from my trip to Greenwich with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen on Friday, which encompassed St Alfege's Church, the Junk Shop (an aptly-named emporium offering items ranging from Windsor chairs to a traffic light), the Observatory, and the Foot Tunnel. I had never actually seen the Meridian before: it was amusing to find that while you have to pay to get into the famous Observatory courtyard across which runs the metal line from which Time is measured, there's a free bit accessible by a path around the hilltop for plebs. The Foot Tunnel has wood-panelled lifts as though to recall its Edwardian origins (not very nice wood-panelling, but still). Looking across the Thames at the Naval College and up to the hilltop you get some dim impression of what might have been had the Stuart government decided to go with Nicholas Hawksmoor's ruinously expensive plan to turn Greenwich into an English Vatican, combining royalty, science, the military and religion, including a Chapel Royal with a dome big enough to fit St Peter's Basilica's inside it. I was taken with Gothick Trinity Hospital vastly overshadowed by the old power station, and will have to investigate it one day.