‘Sing lullaby to Jesus, the Saviour of all’

This has been, I should think, an unsettling year for all of us.  The pandemic has been a tremendous challenge; few of us in Britain will forget that vertiginous feeling that ionised the air in February and March, as the ground under our feet was sucked and drawn away by who knew how great an approaching wave?  And the wave, when it came, broke not so seriously as to overwhelm the health service, as we had feared, but still seriously, and has returned in several successive, sporadic, unpredicted surges.  It has been a hard time for most people, and for some very hard indeed.  There has been sickness, bereavement, ruin, loneliness and fear.

Just as difficult to reckon with, in their own way, have been the strange counsels that are abroad, the contentious political ideas declaring themselves in nearly every corner of public life, insisting with alarming and hyperbolic jargon on a single new diagnosis, a single new solution for our problems.  The intentions may often be good, I know, but in many places a tendency towards intemperate language, an extraordinary willingness to rush to conclusions and sometimes an actual mirthless enthusiasm for outrage has, combined with a lack of level-headed and prudent leadership, brought about a hard, bright, livid atmosphere, one which smothers honest dialogue and, disturbingly, makes Britain feel quite unlike itself.  I think it is no wonder that people are upset and alienated when, for instance, irresponsible use is made of the positions enjoyed by cherished institutions to advocate partisan causes — many seem to have no idea how much damage they risk doing to their own reputations — and the politicisation of whole swathes of ordinary life is so relentless that there seems to be no escape.   There is even the nasty feeling that in some quarters the pandemic is being exploited deliberately for political ends.  Here, too, one feels the ground lurching under one’s feet, the lumbering of great engines of power.

But I think that much of what I mused in March still stands: even amid deepening shadow we have seen where the light is, and how brightly it shines; we have seen the light that darkness cannot overpower.  Many people have been moved to tremendous kindness and generosity, even to heroism, by this pandemic, and even by the unpleasant politics.   And there has been wisdom to glean, too: the long quarantines provided a blank background against which it was unusually easy to see how unexpectedly good days and hard days tend to arrive; how they all dawn alike.  And then there is the Church, which I think has been, in its quiet way, as alive and imaginative under this year’s circumstances as ever, or at the very least has trudged faithfully on.  And I think sometimes of the rededication of England to Our Lady of Walsingham, an event which turned out to coincide so intriguingly with the first, most frightening days of the pandemic.  Perhaps at some point I will write more about this, but it seems to tell us that England is, in the right way, worth loving for its own sake; that, amid this age of anti-patriotism, and a general deep unhappiness and listlessness of a kind that seldom ends well, even such flawed and mortal things as nations can rightly be loved and revered.

And what of ourselves?   What hope is there for us; what fundamental answer is there to the deepest question, the question we cannot even utter?  We who try to follow the Gospel, believing that truth is not merely something we construct or concoct, but is Truth itself, and comes from God, have indeed been given an answer.  It is an answer we could never have designed ourselves, nor ever thought to hope for; it is nothing so straightforward as an explanation; rather, it is a mystery, the same mystery as was given to us two thousand and twenty years ago.  Yet as sure as it is mysterious, it is by the helpless newborn Child in the manger that all the engines of power, and the kings of the earth, sickness, grief, and even death itself are undone.  Every year the wondrous truth is spoken: this is how God chose to enter the world, not by marching en masse against the foe, but by ‘sneaking behind enemy lines’, as C. S. Lewis put it; entering the world exactly like us, in weakness and woe; no less a Lord, but one who is obeyed in love, not fear.

‘Fear not’, the angel had to tell even the hardened, hill-patrolling shepherds; Heaven knows we need telling too.  Power may thrive on fear, but only for a time, and it never expects the one thing that defeats it, Love; it never expects the Baby in the manger.  And so it is by this one Lord’s law of love that the potentates of power are brought low, and, better still, that good triumphs in our very hearts, and in the end shall triumph for ever.

That shabby stable was a fortress, not of worldly might, but of Love, the real thing: it was a little citadel of Love.   I think of all the millions of such fortresses all over the world in which the feast of Christmas, even this muted Christmas of 2020, will be kept faithfully, and merriment made.  That is where hope lies.

Wishing all readers as merry a Christmas as possible after this hard year.

‘Sing Lullaby’: a setting written in 1920 by Herbert Howells (1892–1983) of words by his friend and fellow son of Gloucestershire Frederick William Harvey (1888–1957). There is an interesting article at MusicWeb International about this carol and its simple but piercing words.

The ‘Portsmouth Lines’ Once More

Passengers resigned to the sedate progress of trains running out from London via Streatham, Mitcham or Carshalton towards Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead and Dorking might be surprised to discover that, in railway parlance, these are referred to as the ‘Portsmouth lines’.  A strange name, because none of the suburban trains trundling down this way are bound for anywhere nearly as exotic.  Most are content to fizzle out at Epsom or Dorking; the furthest south any direct passenger trains get is the hourly service to Horsham in Sussex.  But this name, hidden away in the technicalities of railway operation, is a clue to the line’s past glories.

Detail (click image to enlarge) of the current railway network of south London, Surrey and West Sussex.  Most of these lines were built by the old London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.  The so-called ‘Portsmouth lines’ run south from Peckham Rye via Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Sutton, Epsom and Dorking to Horsham.  London expresses from the south coast formerly used this route between Horsham and the connection at Streatham with the main line into Victoria, but since 1978 have run via Three Bridges and East Croydon.

Because communication on the railway must always be clear and unambiguous, almost every piece of infrastructure — junctions, bridges, tunnels, signals — has an accepted name or number by which drivers, track workers, signallers and engineers alike can be sure they are discussing the right thing.  This goes for every running line on the network, too: every individual track that carries trains has a particular name.  This is usually of two or three words, and generally giving some indication of the line’s route and its direction.  On a four-track main line, for example, there is usually an ‘Up Fast’ or ‘Up Main’, the track carrying expresses towards the railway’s main centre (traditionally either London or Derby), then a ‘Down Fast’ for those coming the other way, and Up and Down ‘Slows’ or ‘Reliefs’ for stopping trains.  All over the place there are ‘Loops’ and ‘Spurs’ or sometimes ‘Reversible’ lines for stretches of bi-directional track.   All this means that tracks and routes can be recognised and distinguished from each other immediately, even at complex junctions.  It allows a driver to communicate a train’s exact position to a signalling centre miles away, or a track worker knows where to aim his pick-axe, and so on.

A diagram of Streatham South Junction from an old version of the Sectional Appendix for Kent and Sussex.  See p. 511 onwards for the entirety of the ‘Portsmouth’ lines.

As with so much on the railways, these names have often been established for decades, even surviving changes in the use of the track itself.  So it is with the ‘Up and Down Portsmouth’, which begin at Peckham Rye in south London of all places, where the lines branch off to the south-west from the South London line out of London Bridge.  The tracks keep their Portsmouth name as far as Leatherhead, the last junction on the line.  Between there and Horsham, since there is no diverging route from which they need to be distinguished, the two tracks are known simply as the ‘Up and Down Main’.

Nowadays this line is seldom thought of as a through route at all; no direct trains travel its whole length in ordinary service.  But its builders, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, really did have their sights set on a far prize when they completed it in 1868.  Via Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead and Dorking they established a new route to Horsham, and, by running thence onto the Arun Valley line southwards to Arundel and the junction at Ford, to the south coast: Bognor, Littlehampton and the line along the coast to Chichester and Portsmouth.  (On the approach to Portsmouth the L.B.S.C.R. ran afoul of its competitor, the London and South Western, whose rival Portsmouth Direct line offered another, quicker route from London Waterloo via Guildford and Haslemere.  Competition between the two companies had ignited into outright conflict and actual blockades in the so-called Battle of Havant in 1859.)

The L.B.S.C.R. and its successors’ expresses to Portsmouth and Bognor went via Sutton and Dorking for many years.  They generally ran to and from London Victoria, joining and leaving the original route via the spurs and junctions at Streatham where it crosses the Brighton Main Line. (This remains the principal route for trains on this line).  The highest honour in the line’s history was surely on the 2nd February 1901, when Queen Victoria’s funeral train came this way.  She had died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on the 22nd January; her body was carried from Portsmouth to London at speeds reported to have reached 80mph.

A video uploaded to Youtube by ‘Bogglesham’ of trains at Dorking (North) station in 1972, including some serving the south coast.  Update: this film can be seen in higher quality here: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-last-years-of-victoria-to-portsmouth-expresses-1977-online

Those days are almost forgotten now.  Regular expresses via Sutton and Dorking came to an end in 1978, when they were almost all re-routed, at least in part in order to serve the rapidly-expanding airport at Gatwick.  Trains coming up the Arun Valley now take the longer but faster-timed route via the Brighton Main Line, running east to Crawley, joining the main line at Three Bridges, and heading for London via Gatwick Airport and East Croydon.  Meanwhile the old line has been relegated to a back route, the service along its southern section especially being cut back to a pretty sparse offering until the improvements of the new timetable of 2018.  Yet even down here the past was not quite buried: at the junction immediately north of Horsham station, the lines to and from Dorking are still referred to as the ‘Up and Down Main’ and the busier lines to Three Bridges merely as the ‘Up and Down Horsham’.

A video by ‘thetransporthub’ on Youtube including a diverted London Victoria – Gatwick train racing through Ockley station earlier this year with that now-rare sound, the glorious percussion of wheels over traditional jointed track at nearly 75 mph.  Sadly for railway romantics, the track is likely to be replaced in August 2021.

Not altogether forgotten, then.  Memories are long on the railways, and about once a year the old route is used for diversions during engineering works, sometimes for trains serving Gatwick but at other times, as at November half-term this year, from distant, far-flung Portsmouth itself (a place whose existence is unimaginable in this pandemic year).  The normal route being closed at Crawley for the installation of a new footbridge, the Portsmouth and Bognor expresses were once again sent the old way.  Running non-stop from Horsham to Clapham Junction apart from an unadvertised call at Epsom (perhaps to pick up or set down a guard, or for a crew change) they offered the unusual sight of twelve coach trains sweeping, if not exactly at high speed, up and down to London from the south coast along a line that is now effectively a suburban branch.  After ten months without any of my usual railway adventures, it was nice to see the ‘Portsmouth lines’ regain, however briefly, a glimmer of their former glory.

Update, 30th December 2020: A shame that a landslip on the embankment near Ockley has scuppered the reprise of this arrangement that had been due this week.

A diverted up express slows for the curves at Mitcham Junction, 21st November 2020.  Ordinarily it would run via Gatwick Airport and East Croydon; today it has been sent via the scenic route.

In praise of Rumer Godden’s ‘An Episode of Sparrows’

There are some books, I realise, that we wait all our lives to discover; there are tales we have never heard that we long to be told.  For instance, I have long wished for a novel that tells of the ordinary lives of ordinary people so richly and compellingly as to make those lives seem momentous, as momentous as our own joys and sorrows are to ourselves — indeed, as momentous as they really are.  No stunts, no fireworks, no shock-tactics; simply the writer’s skill — and it would have to be a skilful writer — in depicting the heights and depths of lives the world calls unspectacular, and in showing how perfectly plausibly a miracle might, with soundless brilliance, burst into the mundane.  

Well, I have now found this book.  Somehow I had heard of neither its name, ‘An Episode of Sparrows’, nor its author, Rumer Godden (1907–1998), before I came across two articles about it (here and here) by Dorothy Cummings McLean (to whom I owe a debt of gratitude).  For indeed I have found it at last, and have spent the past week or so feeling rather as if I had been electrocuted.

Here are some of the many reasons why.  For one thing, there is the extraordinary challenge that Godden set herself from the very beginning: practically the entire novel is confined to two or three bomb-disfigured streets in the dilapidated but self-respecting London of the 1950s; specifically in a district strongly reminiscent of (though never explicitly identified as) Pimlico.  All the action, bar a few vignettes, is in or around the ‘gracious and imposing’ Mortimer Square and its more down-at-heel neighbour, Catford Street, running (with its ‘swarming vital houses’) from the High Street down to the river.  Narrow as these bounds may seem, the setting they contain is to prove more than ample.  The Street and the Square form a world of their own; even a world of worlds.  In the very opening sentence, our sense of scale is already being calibrated:

The Garden Committee had met to discuss the earth; not the whole earth, the terrestrial globe, but the bit of it that had been stolen from the Gardens in the Square.

For the briskly competent committee woman Angela Chesney, the unfolding narrative, the ‘episode of the sparrows’, initially presents simply another item to be crossed off her to-do list.  She is blind to its quiet significance, and at one moment of crisis accuses her lonely, regretful, listless older sister Olivia, who has taken a different view of things altogether, of is “making a mountain out of a molehill.”  Olivia’s answer is perhaps the crux of the whole book.  “A molehill can be a mountain to a sparrow,” she replies.  Beyond the Street and the Square many large things loom: the river, its ships and their sirens, the Power Station, the whole mass of London, the rest of the world.  Yet it is that tiny quantity of stolen earth which is to bring the story magnificently to its climax, just as a a single packet of cornflower seeds began it.

Who are the sparrows of the novel’s title?  They are the street children of Catford Street; specifically those aged between seven and about fifteen.  Ubiquitous but unnoticed, they ‘disappear into anonymity, camouflaged by the stones and bricks they played in’.  Even at the scale of this small sliver of London, their projects and squabbles merit no attention, for ‘they led a different life and scarcely anyone noticed them.’  But Rumer Godden notices them.  Moreover, she understands them; she teaches us again how to see and think as a child, as in a vivid street scene to which we are soon treated: Saturday morning on the High Street, as observed by sharp-eyed Sparkey, the newspaper-seller’s five-year-old son —

When the bus came it stopped just by Sparkey and sent out visible fumes of warmth and smell from under its red sides, it looked as if it were a real big animal breathing.  Sparkey watched the people file in; the bus looked comfortable with its paint, the pale steel of its handles, the glimpse of seats behind its glass.  It started with a harsh grinding noise, the people were carried away, and Sparkey’s mother rattled the coppers in the pocket of her big newspaper sling; she rattled them, thought Sparkey, because the conductor had rattled his in his bag.

‘Melodramatic’ is one word Godden applies to Sparkey; even before he can read he seems somehow to have imbibed the papers’ lurid headlines, and he gleefully terrorises other children with his blood-curdling tales.  Though sickly, he also aspires to a full and active membership of the boys’ street gangs — indeed, specifically of the toughest, his hero Tip Malone’s, for all that Tip is eight years his senior.  Yet even Tip is only one of a large Irish family living at number seventeen (“There can’t be more than nine,” Angela says), and his gang scarcely lacks competition in the streets round about.  Soon, though, we meet the sparrow par excellence: Lovejoy Mason, aged nearly eleven, who in spite of her saccharine name is a tough little nut, quite capable of scrapping and biting and spitting according to the law of Catford Street — though still not as tough or hard as all that, as we are to discover.  Her mother, a singer who between her bookings lodges at Vincent’s restaurant in Catford Street, is mostly absent from her daughter’s life; her father is simply never mentioned; Lovejoy herself is looked after to an extent by the restaurant’s owners, Vincent and Mrs. Combie, but even for them, as we are told, she is a ‘little extra tacked on’.  

Nevertheless, it is inside this little girl’s head that we are to spend most of the novel, among her words and thoughts.  Insignificant even among the insignificant sparrows, unremarked-on even in that unremarkable street, the doings and feelings of this wayward ‘little extra’ are set deliberately and carefully at the story’s centrepiece.  The most trifling of trifles, the world would consider them, but Rumer Godden makes them momentous.

Godden’s depiction of childhood is astonishingly lucid.  She conveys its enthusiasms and eagernesses, its frustrations and sorrows, its humour and simplicity; but also its powerlessness, its loneliness; the impossibility of finding solitude; the primal hierarchies, the ruthlessly-enacted instincts.  Godden knows the speech, too; the ‘pecking questions from sharp little beaks’, the interrogations which their victims can never hope to withstand — 

 ‘Where d’ya live?’ 
 ‘Two-hundred-and-three, Catford Street.’
 ‘That’s the rest’raunt.  No-one lives there.’ 
 ‘Mrs. Combie does,’ said Lovejoy.
 ‘Is Mrs. Combie your Mum?’ 
 ‘No, she’s not,’ said Lovejoy indignantly. 

 ‘Where is your Mum?’ 

 ‘She’s away.’ 

 And then one of the children would cry, ‘Don’t believe you’ve got a Mum.’ 

 ‘I have,’ but Lovejoy said it too fiercely and they would know and cry, ‘There’s something fishy about her Mum.’

Rumer Godden understands the dignity of children, and in this book they are as rich in character as any of the adults, with individual and distinctive, even complex, virtues and vices.  Lovejoy’s battle against her own vanity, for example, culminating in the hard choice she makes over her red shoes, forms a tiny sub-plot, easily missed, but it is there.  We are reminded of important and easily-forgotten truths: that a ten-year-old can be nostalgic for a lost past, that children are often highly principled and serious by nature; that they notice small details and are generally able to see right through dissimulation; and again, above all, that ‘a molehill can be a mountain to a sparrow’.  She renders the relationship — or the gulf — between children and adults with the same striking realism, at one point evoking with terrible accuracy ‘the dreadful power of grown-ups, the power and the knowledge’.  There is one particular moment, at a crucial juncture in the tale, when a Literary Discussion group, the sort of thing that Godden would have known herself and her own readers to enjoy, is made to appear so hilariously, so tragically irrelevant, so frivolous — one could almost say childish — with its silly little dainty salmon sandwiches — which Vincent could have provided, you poor blind fools! — that the adult reader can perceive it as a child would.  We feel in our bones once again how unimportant and how stupid a roomful of chattering grown-ups appears to a child’s eye — especially by comparison to a mountainous molehill.

The book’s main characters are children: is it a children’s book?  Not straightforwardly so.  It is true that many reviewers on the Goodreads website attest to having read and loved it at a young age; the children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, who encountered it aged ten, says it was the first book that ever made her cry.  I could well believe it; all the same, I would not say it was primarily a book for children.  I sense that it is grown-ups who should read it most urgently; who have more to gain from it; more to learn.

There are other reviews, too, that call the book ‘sweet’ and ‘charming’ — but its taste is far deeper and more lingering than that.  Most of the time it is at least as bitter as it is sweet.  The worldly powers in the tale are real and threatening and seemingly closing in all the time; and then there are the dangers from within, people about to be undone by their own folly or short-sightedness or plain weakness.  Injustices gross and petty, self-interest, destitution, betrayal: all loom large even when they do not actually do their worst.  There are misunderstandings, too — and how acutely Godden understands misunderstandings, both the everyday and the catastrophic, the tragedy in them as well as the comedy, showing how easily hurt can be done with how few hardly-meant, careless words.  And even apart from mere misunderstandings, the tale has some truly agonising moments.  The book does admittedly now carry a sepia overtone that it would not have had when first published in 1955 — in that ‘street children’ are now more or less an extinct species in British cities, and there are now cruelties in modern Western childhood worse even than those of Catford Street — but still, this is certainly not, as it could easily have been, a merely sentimental book.  Just as easily it could have been a gritty nihilistic desolation, but the author steers adroitly in between.

It is not only the plot that lends this book its power, but Godden’s remarkable prose style.  Writing as if she herself had lived in the street for years, using the definite article and proper nouns to create a seemingly well-established and long-familiar world, she has a neat way of interlacing dialogue and description, whereby she quotes constantly from her own characters, using their words to set the scene as well as to unfold the plot.  Few of the characters are ever short of words, but the narrator deftly clarifies their meaning if needed: she and her cast seem to be helping each other to tell the story.  Some might dismiss this technique as a conceit, but to me it seemed completely natural and entirely convincing.  It has several considerable advantages: it enlivens the descriptive passages, often with a dash of humour; it whets our anticipation by hinting at future developments in the plot; it allows a momentary scene to linger for a little while without dragging; and also, over the course of the whole book, it has the effect of building up the characters so wonderfully richly that by the end we have come to know them, as we do real people, mainly through their own words — or the kinds of things they say — even if we do not quite remember exactly when or why they said them.  This makes the novel something else altogether that I have long hoped to read: a tale doubling as a tapestry of rich character portraits.  (The characters have such depth, such an aura of their own, that Godden can even speak of what they ‘might have said’ or ‘would have thought’, as one might of a real person).

And her ear for dialogue is flawless, allowing for brilliant little flashbacks and snippets of conversation which add to the novel’s beautiful depth without strain on the reader.  There is her eye for detail, too; her descriptive brush-strokes are fine and bold and unerring.  Every individual character, however minor or fleeting, has a name, and the world of the Street and the Square is lavish with smells and sounds and sensations: the barren rubbly wasteland of a bomb-site, the ‘apricot’ light shining invitingly from Vincent’s restaurant at night, or the crushing sunshine of a London summer, ‘white and mercilessly bright’.

All this takes place, too, against a backdrop of countless vividly-drawn contrasts: between the rich and the poor, the large and the small, cleanliness and dirt, strength and weakness, noise and peace.  And between still profounder opposites: age and youth, Adam and Eve, the spiritual and the earthly, innocence and guilt, power and love.  The contrasts are not simplistic, either.  For instance, the faded Square is no longer as rich as it once was, nor is the Street quite as poor.  Nor even is it simply the case that the children are innocent while the adults are guilty.  The young characters are quite capable of duplicity and manipulation, to say nothing of violence.  We hear Lovejoy described variously as a ‘marauder’ and a ‘tyrant’; Tip as a ‘dictator’; we laugh, but Godden is only half-joking.  With an extraordinary subtlety the novel records how the tense, serious, fastidious Lovejoy (whom Mrs. Combie’s dreadful sister Cassie even mocks as ‘an old woman’ at one point) actually recovers an innocence that almost nobody realises she had lost, shedding age that has grown over her before her years, so that she becomes something like a healthy child again.  Tip has had a happier start to life than Lovejoy, and received a stronger moral formation, but even this brings with it unexpected and insidious temptations: to vindictiveness, even to a kind of pharisaism which is depicted with extraordinary subtlety.  And yet, in spite of the hardness of their surroundings, in spite even of themselves, and in a way without realising it, these two bring into being something ‘careful and innocent’, as Olivia is to call it.  The Garden of Eden is almost remade in Catford Street.  One of the many things this novel does is to affirm the tenacity of innocence and wonder, growing green and fierce against the forces of cynicism and nihilism.

Finally, this is also, in my view — though Rumer Godden was not received into the Church until fourteen years after writing it — a profoundly Catholic novel.  It contains that rare thing (in English-speaking literature at least), a recognisable and reasonably sympathetic portrait of the Church.  The church of Our Lady of Sion, having been bombed in the war, now consists merely of a ‘makeshift and gimcrack’ substitute put up hurriedly amid the ruins.  The parish is hopelessly short of money, materially on its beam end — and yet it is exactly where it should be, down among the poor and the poorest of the poor: the sparrows, whom Olivia remembers are sold for three farthings, ‘and yet not one should fall to the ground without your Father knowing…’  And there are other lines of Scripture, not all explicitly mentioned, that come to mind: ‘the kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed’… ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’… ‘a sword shall pierce your heart also’…  The sacramentality of plain objects, the earthiness of the miraculous, the gently chastening wisdom, the keen moral sense equally alive to justice and to mercy, the obstinate concern for the smallest and humblest… all suffuse the book with an unobtrusive but unmistakeable spirituality.  

All these qualities this novel has — its masterful craftsmanship, its piercing and compassionate morality, its cinematic detail, its rejoicing in particularity — and yet there is a curious weightlessness about it.  It is never prim or ponderous; it wears its profoundness as lightly as spring leaves.  So natural are its pace, its dialogue and the cadences of its prose that we hardly notice them, and meanwhile its understated brilliance and quiet urgency creep up on us, waiting to dawn silently but overwhelmingly in the mind and heart.  Is there anything at all wrong with this book?  If there is, I will write about it once I have come down to earth — earth about which I shall think differently from now on.

The Burning of the Leaves

Fingers of fire make corruption clean on Mitcham Common, 18th November, 2020.

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

from ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ by Laurence Binyon (1869–1943)

Season of Mists

        It is a time of year that’s to my taste,
        Full of spiced rumours, sharp and velutinous flavours,
        Dim with the mist that softens the cruel surfaces,
        Makes mirrors vague.  It is the mist that I most favour. 

from ‘Autumn’ by Vernon Scannell (1922–2007)

 

Fanfare for Allhallowstide

Fresco of the Communion of Saints at the Baptistery in Padua, Italy. © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0

     How shall we pilgrims keep the law of love?
  How shall we follow where the Lord has led?
  The saints know how: they point the way ahead;
  They watch the road to Heaven from above.

  The saints were young or old; were great or small;
  However they were called, one thing they knew:
  Whatever works of woe the world may do,
  The Lord shall never let the faithful fall.

  So we on earth, we should be saints as well;
  It is us pilgrims whom the saints invite
  To blaze with love; to set the world alight;
  To join them in the joy in which they dwell.

  As we must one day die, they also died,
  But live now as we hope we too shall live.
  To all our friends in Heaven let us give
  Our joyful greetings at Allhallowstide!

Astonishing Gigapixel image of Exeter Cathedral

Part of Peter Stephens’ navigable gigapixel image of Exeter Cathedral, looking west from the crossing.  Reproduced by kind permission.

The other day someone sent me a link to this extraordinary three-dimensional image of Exeter Cathedral, taken right under the crossing of the nave and transepts.  The photographer, Peter Stephens, has produced a navigable 360-degree ‘gigapixel’, that is, an image consisting of over a billion pixels.  To see what that means, try zooming in — and keep zooming in! — to reveal its incredible detail.  The glass in the west window, the carving on the organ screen, the masonry in the roof (which is the world’s longest continuous medieval vault)… all can be brought in a flash to stunningly close quarters.

Most astonishing to me is the eye-watering clarity with which the roof-bosses, right up in the heights of the vaults, can be seen.  It is impossible to see these in any detail from the ground with the naked eye, but this image reveals the care and skill with which they were nevertheless carved and painted.  The workmanship is no less accomplished for its remoteness from mortal eyes — and why should it have been?  It was meant for Someone else to see.

The gigapixel also offers a chance to admire the wonderful fourteenth-century minstrels’ gallery up in the triforium on the south side of the nave (on the right when looking towards the great west window).  Behind the twelve carved angels with their beautiful instruments is concealed a chamber large enough to accommodate dozens of singers.  To the medieval pilgrim, hearing but not seeing the choir, it must really have seemed angels’ music.

A remarkable image of a treasured cathedral, which I must visit again once this pandemic subsides.

Update: Peter Stephens writes here about the considerable amount of work that went into making this image.

A fourteenth-century roof-boss high in the vault of the nave.  Reproduced by kind permission.

Ten Years Since Benedict’s Visit

Pope Benedict leaves Lambeth Palace for Westminster, 17th September, 2010

Already it has been ten years since Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.   Ten years, then, of tea twice daily from my souvenir ‘Papal Mug’ (I make that over seven thousand cups), and ten years, too, that my life has been on the course on which those four days confirmed me: a course with a particular direction, with a particular confidence, in the service of a particular Person.  I cannot be the only one for whom the whole experience helped to affirmed and clarified all that matters most in life, and indeed what life really is.  So, not least because it also happened at a formative time for me, on the threshold of university, I remember the Papal Visit with great happiness, and continue to draw strength from its memory.  It will remain a high moment for the rest of my days.

The long-serving Papal Mug

This had not always seemed likely, however.  One way and another, the months before the visit constituted a rather unpleasant prelude, in which whole swathes of the press and media engaged in an eight-month campaign of hostile publicity not simply against the idea of the visit, but often explicitly and unashamedly against the person of the Pope and the Catholic Church as a whole.  The opposition, overwhelmingly secularist-atheist in character, often went well beyond legitimate criticism of the Church’s institutional failings, or reasonable scrutiny of public expenditure, and curdled swiftly into ill-veiled hatred of the Christian faith itself.  Commentators who ought to have known better indulged in highly personal attacks on Pope Benedict’s character, or fulminated against caricatures of Catholic teaching, or simply ranted against religious belief in general.  Crazed calumnies about Joseph Ratzinger’s supposed corruption or Nazi sympathies or authoritarianism, all nonsense and all child’s play to refute, were sent gleefully off to the printers instead of the compost-heap where they belonged.  Deep down, of course, what these commentators really disliked was Benedict’s resistance to moral relativism; his quiet insistence on the absolute truth of the whole of Catholic Christianity, including those aspects that our age finds difficult.

The most enthusiastic opponents organised themselves into an outfit calling itself ‘Protest the Pope’ (American style — they didn’t even have the decency to protest against the Pope in the British and prepositionally proper manner!).  It was extraordinary to see how much they loathed the Church, or at least what they mistook for the Church; it was both sobering and instructive for us to hear things said and left to stand which, if uttered against almost any other visitor to this country, let alone any other religious leader, would have been seen by all for the smears they were.  The ‘Protest the Pope’ gang was from the outset both very silly and very small, but it received such disproportionately generous airtime from the media that things at one stage began to look serious.  Would Richard Dawkins and his accomplices actually attempt a stunt like a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of Pope Benedict, ridiculous as it sounded? Were they seriously going to ruin the whole thing?  It is by inducing such anxiety that many bullies work, intimidating others as much by their threats as by their actual deeds.  Even in March there was a sense that the whole visit might be in jeopardy:

Some would oppose this proclaimer of peace;
Some disbelieve what he wants to increase;
Some would believe that the world has no hope;
Others know why we must welcome the Pope.

Some have more interest in money than God;
Some are content to give anger the nod;
Others, who know what is built on this rock,
Welcome his peace.  Let him come to his flock.

Well, in the end, this prayer was answered, thank God.  For at last the day came, and the moment Pope Benedict landed in Scotland, the mood changed utterly.  No sooner had all and sundry seen what he was really like, and the public’s true attitude became clear, than the press changed its tune.  The hatred and opprobrium vanished; it was shown to have been over-amplified, even illusory; it was gone with barely a whimper.  ‘Protest the Pope’ simply ceased to be relevant.  There was no longer anything to fear, and we bore our disparagers no ill will.  The BBC, transformed, began excellent and thorough coverage of the visit.  (It is so often the way with the Corporation that it does come up with the goods in the end, when it knows the world is watching!).  Above all, Pope Benedict received the warm and triumphant welcome he deserved, and there followed in succession four days of remarkable gestures, images and experiences.

What strikes me, in retrospect, is to see the different ways in which these moments worked and touched us: though always the same man, he was visiting us in various different guises.  Here was a head of state, a pastor to guide his flock, a thinker with ideas to contribute to our cultural and social conversation, a missionary to a land forgetful of God, and a priest entrusted by Christ with His authority and consolation.  He was both ‘world leader’ and ‘humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord’, and a figure of interest even to non-Catholics, even to non-Christians, including some of my own friends.  This many-layeredness was evident from Pope Benedict’s very first engagement, his meeting with the Queen in Edinburgh.  This being a state visit, the first of any Pope to the British Isles — St. John Paul II’s 1982 journey having been technically a ‘pastoral visit’ — Benedict was, formally speaking, Her Majesty’s guest and counterpart.  But, in the very same moment, the head of the Church of Rome was greeting the head of the Church of England, and the healing of old religious as well as political wounds was continued.  Most simply, and perhaps most importantly, we saw two people who understand and believe the Christian faith and share its hope, who know both the burden and the importance of duty, offering by their steadfast example quiet encouragement to millions of people.  So it was that, even within the first hour, Benedict had touched the people of Britain in the national, the ecclesiastical and the personal spheres.

The day in Scotland concluded with a Mass in Bellahouston Park (with a specially-composed Mass setting by James MacMillan), and the next day, the seventeenth, the Pope came down to London.  That afternoon a group of friends and I went to see if we could catch a glimpse of him leaving Lambeth Palace on his way to Westminster.  Now at last I could see for myself just how mistaken the media had been in the months beforehand.  The mood among the waiting multitude on Lambeth Bridge was one of unalloyed excitement; open delight was alive in this city that is often so jaded and cold-shouldered.  The anticipation steadily grew and grew, until a ripple of cheers rose to our right… all at once the Pope-mobile was in view, sweeping rapidly towards us — and there he was!  A wave of jubilation accompanied Benedict across the bridge in the twixt-season afternoon sunlight.

Only an hour later, the Pope was giving his remarkable speech in Westminster Hall, a speech which remains no less urgently relevant a decade later:

The role of religion in political debate is […] to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves.  And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion.  It is a two-way process.  Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.  Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.  This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation.  In this light, I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. […] I would invite all of you, therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.

Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the Representatives of British Society, 17th September 2010. <http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100917_societa-civile.html>

Then came the first visit by any Pope to Westminster Abbey, and sung Evensong.  For those who love England and long for Christian Unity, it was greatly moving to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope embracing and kneeling side by side in prayer before the shrine of St Edward the Confessor — and then what a sheer treat to hear the music of Herbert Howells thundering from the organ, and the beloved hymn beginning — 

All my hope on God is founded:
He doth still my trust renew.
Me through change and chance He guideth,
Only good and only true.
God unknown,
He alone
Calls my heart to be His own.

Some readers might wonder: why all this excitement for one man?  Well, of course, the Pope is a mortal like all of us.  But the office he holds goes all the way back to Christ; the first of his predecessors was St Peter himself, to whom Christ turned and said ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’.  So he is Christ’s earthly representative — though the authority entrusted to him is not simply raw power to do with what he likes; rather, his is the responsibility of the hand on the tiller and the eye on the horizon.  He keeps the Church together on the straight and narrow through time and space, so that the one eternal Gospel can be proclaimed anew in every age.  This responsibility remains whether or not the Pope himself is a good or a bad man — though it obviously helps if he is a good one.  That Benedict himself is a kind and gentle man, blazingly intelligent and perceptive to the crises and opportunities of our time, only gave us more reasons to love him when he was Pope.

Procession of parish banners in London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

The summit of his 2010 visit was to be the beatification of the much-loved Cardinal — now Saint — John Henry Newman, at Cofton Park on the outskirts of Birmingham.  But it was the vigil the evening before in London’s Hyde Park that was the high point in my book.  As on Lambeth Bridge, it was the atmosphere that made this gathering extraordinary.  The first hint was at at Victoria station, where a proliferation of the distinctive yellow bags with which we had all been issued drew my eye to a large group of fellow pilgrims.  There was a feeling of recognition, of fellowship, of deep togetherness, not in the least bit oppressive, but refreshing and liberating, which only swelled as we converged on Hyde Park.  As we realised how many we were, the great cultural headwind subsided, and another, sweeter spirit took its place.  Eighty thousand of us all together — I had never been in a gathering that size — and with no need of an enemy for our unity.  Yet for all that volume of people, it felt rather like a family gathering, which of course is exactly what it was.  It was such a simple thing, for us all to meet like that together, but even then I knew the memory would be so happy that it would last for years.  Great assemblies of people can be joyful or they can be ugly… but here we had all fallen in with a very good crowd.

Pope Benedict arrives at London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

And we young people present could see for ourselves, by our own sheer numbers, that we were not as alone in our beliefs and hopes as we might feel in ordinary life.  We all went wild when Pope Benedict arrived, of course, but the hush that descended at Adoration was more memorable, and more unique.  What else would bring about such a moment?  Who else could deliver such a lucid, sincere, quietly but deeply stirring address, with that way of calling us ‘Dear young friends…’ as no mere celebrity or political ideologue would do?  Here was a man who knew how seriously young people want to take life, who knew the depth of our hunger for truth and wisdom, who would not patronise us, offering us a serious speech which was also a message of great joy.  He called us not to mere comfort or apathy or fruitless self-indulgence, but to truth and to greatness and to love — the real thing, measured not by the world’s standard but in a higher currency.  Quoting the same John Henry Newman he was to declare a near-saint on the morrow, he urged us to see dwell deeply on our vocations.  He gave us not the off-hand secular doctrine that drawls at us to do as we please, but the call first to discern and then to follow the true path that God has in mind for us, and thereby to discover the only way to real happiness and real greatness:

Here I wish to say a special word to the many young people present.  Dear young friends: only Jesus knows what “definite service” he has in mind for you.  Be open to his voice resounding in the depths of your heart: even now his heart is speaking to your heart.  Christ has need of families to remind the world of the dignity of human love and the beauty of family life.  He needs men and women who devote their lives to the noble task of education, tending the young and forming them in the ways of the Gospel.  He needs those who will consecrate their lives to the pursuit of perfect charity, following him in chastity, poverty and obedience, and serving him in the least of our brothers and sisters.  He needs the powerful love of contemplative religious, who sustain the Church’s witness and activity through their constant prayer.  And he needs priests, good and holy priests, men who are willing to lay down their lives for their sheep.  Ask our Lord what he has in mind for you! Ask him for the generosity to say “yes!”   

Pope Benedict XVI, Address at Hyde Park, 18th September 2010. <https://thepapalvisit.org.uk/home/replay-the-visit/day-three/the-holy-fathers-hyde-park-vigil-address/>

Perhaps it was then that I knew I belonged to the Benedict Generation.  Most thoughtful young people do indeed hunger for some great mission; they do want to be called to marriage or to make some great vow of love; they are drawn to authenticity and integrity; they yearn for worthy and meaningful lives and to pursue truth and goodness; they want to know how to help others, and how to understand the world and the mystery of life.  

There could hardly have been better words ringing in my ears as I began the adventure of university.  I was to encounter the spirit of the Benedict Generation again at Fisher House, the student chaplaincy, where I learned that the Faith is intelligent as well as beautiful.  I was to find it in new friends I have made in the years since.  I was to see it in churches and at lectures.  I know I was not alone in this — it is alive in the articulateness of Catholic Voices, and in the lives of many Catholics now in their twenties and thirties.  It is also worth mentioning Paschal Uche, who delivered an address to Pope Benedict on behalf of all young people in Westminster Cathedral’s Piazza the morning before the Hyde Park vigil.  Since his ordination last month he has been Father Pascal: the call he discerned was a vocation to the priesthood.  In short, we in the Benedict Generation know what we learned from our German Shepherd, and will draw strength from that treasure-store for ever.

The Hyde Park vigil begins

So it was that those four days made certain things very clear to me at an important moment.  Whereas I had already been well aware that that the Christian faith was hardly the in-thing in the twenty-first century, the visit’s prelude showed me that a significant cohort of fashionable secularist Britain, not content with mere mockery, hated it outright.  But they did not have the last word, nor did they even speak for most ordinary British people, who remained their usual tolerant (or at least rather apathetic!) selves.  For the visit itself revealed the groundlessness and weakness of the hatred — of all hatred — before the strange strength by which inner goodness and holiness drive out evil; the way in which (to quote Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’s step-son) ‘Christianity simply works.’   

How could people hate a man so gentle as Benedict?  The situation presented a clear choice to me.  Whose side was I on?  Was I to go along with fashion, or to be loyal to my Church and my faith, even if this meant dissenting from the spirit of the age?  Yes, I would be I was on Benedict’s side, the side of the Church, and the side of Him whom the Church worships.  I knew where my loyalties lay, and I have never since had cause to regret that choice.  Even when Catholic life requires courage and hard work and unwanted conspicuousness, and however clumsy my efforts, it does not call on any strength that it cannot also supply.  It is the only way.  As they sang in Westminster Abbey, 

Christ doth call one and all:
Ye who follow shall not fall.

Thank you, dear Pope Emeritus Benedict!  May God bless you!  And, as you asked on arriving in our land, “may all Britons continue to live by the values of honesty, respect and fair-mindedness that have won them the esteem and admiration of many.”

‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ returns to Rzeszów

One of the many casualties of this year’s pandemic was the annual ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ open-air hymn-concert.  It is usually held in the city of Rzeszów every Corpus Christi — and had been without fail since 2003; not even the rain-storm and flash floods of 2010 could defeat it  — but this year there was an obvious reason why forty thousand people could not gather in the city’s Sybiraków Park to sing into the night.  The organisers (or JSJD ‘family’) were resourceful enough to prepare and record an online version to stream on the feast itself, but now plans have been made for a ‘real’, open-air concert to be held — and streamed online — on the 20th September at 8 p.m. Central European Summer Time); 7 p.m. BST for readers in Britain and Ireland.  There won’t be so many there as usual — attendance is regulated by ticket — but I don’t think we are in a position to complain, and it will doubtless be uplifting all the same.  Dziękuję organizatorom!

Update: the concert can now be watched here: https://youtu.be/3AiUnLM0SSA?t=2700outu.be/3AiUnLM0SSA?t=2700

Cab Ride to Liverpool

I came across the video above on YouTube this week.  It was taken on Thursday, 30th May, 1985, and records the view from the cab of a class 86 locomotive (86257 ‘Snowdon’) hauling a morning express from London Euston station to Liverpool Lime Street.  It is a nice opportunity to see the West Coast Main Line before the modernisation of 2004–2008, and also the ‘old’ (1902) Crewe station only days before most of it was levelled for complete remodelling, not to mention the electrified catenary whose installation my grandfather had a hand in overseeing in the 1960s.  I was a little taken aback by the blasé attitude to safety on the part of the permanent-way gangs, ambling around in the four-foot, right in the path of trains bearing down on them from various directions — see for instance the departure from Watford Junction! — but it is otherwise rather a relaxing way to spend the best part of three hours. 

It is enjoyable to see so much of the old British Rail traction out and about that is almost all now long withdrawn and scrapped, though I believe a few class 86s survive on freights.  It is good, too, to see the line so busy with trains and the stations with passengers, for in many ways the railways were in the doldrums in the mid-1980s.  The Beeching Axe had dealt its mortal blows to a third of the network only twenty years before, the motor-car’s supremacy was uncontested, and British Rail, being a nationalised industry, was scraping by on grudging Government subsidies.  The revival of the new millennium was still a good way off.

As well as the view ahead, I also found the conversation of the three men in the cab thoroughly absorbing — especially the running commentary provided by Traction Inspector Peter Crawley with the sort of articulate, measured voice that is seldom heard these days.  As well as being able to explain the ingenious solutions to the intricate puzzle of running a railway, he clearly knows and loves the line itself, the southern half especially, and is able to point out many interesting sights — everything from the Norman castle at Berkhamsted to the M25 motorway under construction at Kings Langley, from the reputed hauntedness of the slow lines’ tunnel at Watford to the factory of Armitage Shanks, renowned manufacturer of bathroom fittings!  There are the three spires of Lichfield Cathedral, Izaak Walton’s cottage just north of Stafford, the majestic crossing of the Mersey at Runcorn, and the dramatic final descent through the hewn tunnels into Lime Street.  We even encounter the Royal Train near Hartford in Cheshire.  On the approach to Crewe, Inspector Crawley points out how alarmingly near the station the Coronation Scot had got when it reached its record speed of 114mph in 1938, and therefore just how late the driver left it to slam on the brakes (too late, in fact, for the crockery in the dining car).

These days YouTube abounds with oodles of excellent modern-day cab-ride videos, many with highly informative captions: some of the best for British routes are supplied by Don Coffey, Ben Elias, ‘emmo999’ and Richard Griffin, who is one of the group maintaining the preserved ‘Hastings Diesel’ multiple unit.  But there is also something highly satisfying about this older, comparatively rudimentary film and the spontaneity and immediacy of the commentary.  It is almost as if Peter Crawley is reciting an old, familiar tale: for him the railway is no mere ‘transport artery’, but a corridor of associations and memories and jokes, with lore lying around every curve.  The film would be simply a non-stop miscellany of facts and trivia, if it were not held together by the thin bright narrative threads of the twin steel rails.

Railways are romantic because they tell stories as they go; they cannot help turning the landscape into the setting for a grand epic poem.  Whereas a motorway tramples amply wherever it will, railways are mindful of their surroundings as they weave their way ahead — regardless of their respective engineers’ intentions, good or ill, this is how it seems to be.  This is why, on long rail journeys, I often find myself putting my book aside in favour of the other, wordless narrative unfolding outside the window.  I find myself watching it all unfold, trying to learn England, so that it will become for me, as for Peter Crawley, a known and beloved land, full of fond sights; a gift to be passed on to others.

Poem in July 2020

Entered for a poetry competition organised by my parish.

  And we were once again the Israelites,
  Lost in the desert, driven with our tents
  Into lean lives for forty days and nights,

  With fear for foe.  But from that lengthiest Lent’s
  Bright soundless skies
  There fell strange manna, semi-sacraments:

  Unsullied sunlight, bolder birdsong, the surprise
  Of spring’s long-hoped-for leaf-burst jubilee;
  New green, new gilding, seen with clearer eyes.

  And more: the Gospel-truths shown differently,
  How we are all one body, and how light
  In shadow only shines more radiantly.

  Let quiet thanks, although there is in sight
  No end of troubles in the years ahead,
  Be given for the easing of our plight,

  And for our brethren, all whose souls were led
  Out of this world of mingled grace and vice,
  Let Requiems be said,

  That by the Lord’s love, and His sacrifice,
  They may see Paradise.

Vaulting above One Island Pond, 29th May, 2020.

Ruth Gipps: new recording of Clarinet Concerto

Yet more good news concerning the music of Ruth Gipps!  A recording of her Clarinet Concerto (op. 9, 1940), whose world première in London last November I so thoroughly enjoyed, was released on a new disc last Friday.  The record is called ‘Reawakened’ and is catalogue number CHRCD160 on Champs Hill Records.  It features several other neglected clarinet concerti by Iain Hamilton and Richard Walthew, as well as John Ireland’s Fantasy Sonata.  Robert Plane is the soloist, and he is accompanied by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins.

The slow movement was broadcast this morning on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Record Review’, and can be heard here for a month from now, about 1 hour 39 minutes into the programme.  It is a beautiful rendition.

‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’: online edition

The feast of Corpus Christi, which was celebrated in Poland yesterday, is usually the occasion for the great ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ hymn-singing concerts (about which I have written here and here).  This year’s, however, has gone the way of all large public gatherings: yet another casualty of the Coronavirus pandemic.  

The organisers did not admit complete defeat, however!  They put together an edition of the concert to stream over the Internet so that, although the Sybiraków park in the city of Rzeszów lay empty, where it should have been full of tens of thousands of people, the music at least could carry on.  It’s not the same as the real thing, but definitely something to cheer us all up.  See below to watch it, or click here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f9V3DJ_9gU>.  

Trinity Sunday

Lord, who hast form’d me out of mud,
 And hast redeem’d me through thy blood,
 And sanctifi’d me to do good; 

Purge all my sins done heretofore:
 For I confess my heavy score,
 And I will strive to sin no more. 

Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in me,
 With faith, with hope, with charity;
 That I may run, rise, rest with thee.

       George Herbert (1593–1633)

Happy Trinity Sunday!  This jewel-like lyric makes its meaning perfectly plain on the first reading, but then — a revelation to which I owe John Drury in ‘Music at Midnight’, his unforgettable biography of Herbert (London: Penguin, 2013) — notice all the threes wrapped up so tightly in it.  Three stanzas of three lines each; the first giving one line each to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the second to the past, the present and the future, and the last having three elements in each line, thrice three.

Fr. Mark Langham preached another wonderful homily this morning from Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy of the University of Cambridge.  The Mass can be seen and heard here; Fr. Mark’s sermon begins 18 minutes and 23 seconds into the video.

Lincolnshire Towers: St. Wulfram’s, Grantham

The steeple of St. Wulfram’s church first caught my eye, as it must many people’s, at about 105 miles per hour, the speed at which non-stop express trains hammer through the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, shooting out onto the high embankment across the town, leaning into the curve — and there, soaring above the chimneys and rooftops flashing jaggedly by in the foreground, there is Wulfram’s tower, with the same serenity with which it has weathered the seven centuries of its age; and the spirit soars with it.  The vision hangs and swivels, lingering for perhaps fifteen seconds, and is gone, and the train is pressing on towards Lincolnshire’s borders and London, or Yorkshire, or Scotland.

There are those who call the East Coast Main Line dull and boring, mainly because, south of County Durham at least, it runs relatively straightforwardly through England’s flatter counties.  But there are more than mountains to be seen from the window of a train.  For this line, as much as any other, I am sure, is proof of the poetry conjured up by that conspiracy if churches and railways.  Four medieval cathedrals — Durham, York, Peterborough and Lincoln — can be spotted to varying degrees at various points along its length, and plenty of other fine churches greet the eye as well, from the fifteenth-century spire of St. Mary Magdalene at Newark-on-Trent to Doncaster Minster’s Victorian Gothic, or handsome St. Peter’s at Offord D’Arcy.  But of all these, save perhaps only Durham, the sight of St. Wulfram’s at Grantham is surely the most thrilling.  Here the line speed (105mph beats ninety at Durham!), the eye-level view from the embankment, the church’s proximity to the railway, and, above all, the sheer beauty of the steeple, all conspire to lend those few seconds of the journey a meaningful, harmonious, unforgettable form, that of a theatrical scene, revolving like a snow-globe.  In other words, they turn Grantham into a poem.

St. Wulfram’s spire from a passing London train, 6th June 2017

Other travellers have noticed this before me.  For the writer Peter Hitchens, who ‘normally make[s] a point’ of looking out of the window whenever he comes this way, this is ‘one of the loveliest steeples in all England’.  And, according to the BBC programme Songs of Praise, which came to Grantham in 1980, ‘a certain Fr. Stanton’ would apparently stand up in the middle of the compartment to raise his hat in honour of the spire and its builders, and request his fellow passengers to do the same.  For myself, I resolved one day to visit Grantham properly, and to savour the poem more slowly, more closely, and from within.

That resolution was to be fulfilled one brisk autumn day in 2018. The train had pelted headlong from London, so it was barely mid-morning when my sister and I alighted half-way up England, under shredded bands of cloud scudding intermittently across the face of a kindly sun.  Off we set, through a pleasing warren of terraced houses immediately east of the station, down to where the Great North Road swoops in.  Even now it is not difficult to imagine the stage-coach days, with the inswooping mail trailing its column of dust, all wheels and thumping hooves and harnesses ajangle.  Not far along the road we found the majestic Victorian Guildhall, a building worthy of a major town on the Great North Road, with a statue of Isaac Newton outside, and a bustling local writers’ fair inside.  I was warming to Grantham already, sensing a certain self-respect that did not need to give itself airs (or maybe a down-to-earth-ness, appropriately enough for Newton’s home patch).  But there was no time to linger, for there was business to attend to.  Our plan was not to head straight for the church, but to hare up Hall’s Hill, the rise bounding the town to the east, in order to admire the great steeple from afar.  Hindered only by a bush full of angry wasps, which we doubled back to avoid, we climbed up high enough to be able to look back down on the town, and watch the sunlight and shadow cascading over it, and the fast trains hurtling through in the middle distance.

The view westwards from Hall’s Hill, 3rd November, 2018.

There in the autumn noon stood the tower that has been the glory of this broad, shallow valley of the young Witham since about the year 1320.  We were looking at a sight instantly recognisable, by this one essential feature, to twenty generations before us.  Briefly this was England’s highest steeple, until within ten years Salisbury Cathedral’s spire overtook it.  The two projects were not in fact unconnected, as Julian Flannery explains in his peerless Fifty English Steeples (Thames & Hudson, 2016), because Grantham actually belonged to Salisbury diocese: clearly one spire was not enough!  In any case, according to Flannery’s comprehensive theodolite surveys, St. Wulfram’s remains England’s fifth highest surviving medieval steeple after Salisbury and Norwich Cathedrals, the fellow Lincolnshire steeple of St. James’ in Louth, and St. Michael’s in Coventry (that is, the ‘old’ Coventry Cathedral).  It is worth mentioning in passing that three of the four highest medieval steeples of English parish churches are to be found in Lincolnshire: Louth amid the dreaming Wolds (287 feet), Grantham in south-western Kesteven (274 feet), and fen-defying Boston (266 feet).  This is to say nothing of Lincoln cathedral, once the tallest building in the world by virtue of its 520-foot central spire.  (Even after this spire collapsed in 1549, and the two others at the west end were taken down in the eighteenth century, Flannery believes that what remains of the central tower ‘may just exceed’ St. Botolph’s at Boston.)

The spire seen from Park Road.

But I am day-dreaming.  St. Wulfram can be put off no longer; it is time to go down the hill, threading through the suburban houses and the park — all almost conspicuously unpretentious, as if the town thinks the tower is showing off enough! —  to see the great church at closer quarters.

The west front.

So this is the steeple before which Ruskin swooned.  Here, as well as anywhere, it is possible to see the glory of the Gothic: the sheer verticality of everything, every little detail doing its bit to add to the upthrust of the whole.  The whole structure is straining towards Heaven, and the wide traceried windows let in Heaven’s light.  Flannery pointed out the one major mistake made by the builders in the staircase at the south-west corner, which was built too far out at the bottom, and which unfortunately, by becoming more pronounced as the tower tapers with height, throws the whole slightly off its symmetry.  Yet this lesson was learned here once and for all; the error was not repeated in any of the later great English towers.

Looking west from the chancel.  The tower stands right over the west door.

Considering the steeple’s emphasis on verticality, there is an interesting contrast waiting inside the church: the enormous and spacious width of its interior.  The two side-aisles are each almost as broad as the nave: John Betjeman even declares that the ‘power of the grand interior is horizontal rather than vertical’ (Best British Churches, Collins, 2011 edition, p. 400).  The church impresses us first by its height, then by its breadth.  In the north wall an alcove is visible where St. Wulfram’s relics are likely to have been displayed.  I wonder what grand processions there have been through this church over the years.  One spectacle that has been recorded for posterity is the visit of the BBC programme ‘Songs of Praise’ in 1980, which, for all sorts of reasons, in texture, language and content, seems caught at a curious, fascinating position, between the old Britain and the new.

We were, I think, about the only visitors at that point on the Saturday afternoon, but there were quite a few townsfolk pottering around.  Chairs and parts of a dismantled stage were being cleared away and loaded into a van after a secular awards ceremony the previous night, and a youngster no more than ten years old was being given a lesson on the mightly organ.  (I hope he will one day support a mighty surge of singing, as in Songs of Praise above!)  I bought a tea-towel showing the great spire (it has to be a particularly large tea-towel to fit the tower in) and we took our leave.

From the south-west.

This being a non-party-political blog, no party-political allegiance should be read into the detour we then made to see the building where, on October 13, 1925, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, was born.  This red-brick corner shop is, I think, revealing about her character, even though it is no longer Roberts the greengrocer but a chiropractic clinic.  This must have been, as has often been pointed out, and which seems in common with Grantham in general, an unpretentious but decent place to grow up; plain and unvarnished but dignified and unbowed (and is even raised slightly above the level of the road).  The Methodist church where the Roberts family worshipped is only a few doors down.

Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace, North Parade, Grantham.

It seems arguable that this building goes some way to explain both Margaret Thatcher’s sympathy as a politician for those who worked hard to earn their living, which aided her electoral success, and her apparent lack of sympathy with those who were not capable of doing so, which is generally acknowledged to have precipitated the end of her premiership.  I was also struck by the shop’s position actually right on the old Great North Road, and not far at all from the railway either; she must, as she was growing up, have felt London and the wide world beckoning to her the moment she stepped outside the front door.

Almost directly opposite Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace is one of the most curious Catholic churches I have ever seen.  From outside, St. Mary the Immaculate is a solemn, sober early nineteenth-century neo-classical edifice.  Inside, however, it is completely different: the church seems to have been altogether transformed in the 1960s, so that the altar now faces north, not east, along what must once have been the length of the church, rather than its breadth.  I don’t think I have ever seen a church with an interior differing so dramatically from the exterior.  This surprise certainly competes with the contrast between horizontal and vertical in St. Wulfram’s!

Inside the church of St. Mary the Immaculate, looking north

Daylight began to fade as we drank hot chocolate in Cafe Leo along Westgate, and so the time came to take our leave of this reserved, unshowy town with its ardent steeple, and of the unsung, wide-skied county in which it is set.  But not for long, for another tower further east, that of St. Botolph in Boston, was soon to beckon me back to Lincolnshire.

Postscript: Writing this at Whitsuntide, I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.  Poetically at least, this week is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the journey it records.  It was down this line that Larkin’s train came that ‘sunlit Saturday’.  He would have passed through Grantham, and one of those weddings may well have been solemnised in St. Wulfram’s church.  Truly England is a poem.