THEY weren’t the one ones going to church. Snow had not begun yet, however the air had the smell of it, the nippiness intoxicating null smell of the clouds above, dense with soft crystals nearly able to fall, and along the dark streets towards the river, the silhouettes of other Chelsea-ites were in motion, all tugged along in the identical direction.
They had passed the Malayan rubber-farmer within the foyer, wrapping a shawl round his neck and puffing his pipe. The woman from the basement shelter with amusing like a horse was somewhere behind them, laughing like a horse; but hers was the one loud voice.
Otherwise the night was hushed, with the hush of the approaching snow. Swathed by it, swaddled by it, protected by it — no less than, that was what it felt like — from the murder noises of the wartime night. The sirens had not sounded. If they did, Iris was undecided what they’d do. Run for home? Hope for a deep crypt to shelter in, within the church? But that they had not sounded yet; and maybe they’d not, at Christmas. Perhaps the Luftwaffe crews on the airfields in northern France were drinking Glühwein and singing “Silent Night” as a substitute. Perhaps.
THE Old Church, on the Thames embankment, couldn’t welcome individuals with a blaze of lights in its porch due to the blackout regulations. Tiny slits of brightness needed to guide the best way. And then there was a confusion of blackness between the 2 sets of doors, outer and inner, full of murmuring and stamping feet. But on the within, the church was alight with candles, burning in heedless banks with flames the color of daffodil and topaz, blue-hearted just like the stone on her ring.
She had never been in before, and it was a surprise. The outside of the Old Church was sturdily Georgian, a good barn of a spot with wide brick arches, but inside was old. Old and strange. They were under an ancient vault shaped like a barrel, and flickering with shadows on its whitewashed partitions. Above, a row of curved skylights pierced upward through the thickness of the stone, blocked with blackout fabric now but still punctuating the white roof with dark shafts. It was as in the event that they were all gathering inside the tube of a musical instrument: in a flute, say, and looking out up at its finger-holes, waiting to see what can be played on it.
All around, crammed in in coats and mufflers, were denizens of the Chelsea streets. The grand ones, who by day she might need taken primarily as a challenge to her vowels: the old ladies in jewels; the aged military men with thread-veins bursting on their cheeks like poppies in a wheat crop; the platinum-rinsed younger ones who bought the clever little tins to make canapés; the lads on leave for Christmas in ten different sorts of officer’s uniform; the old bohemians with shaggy hair who, today, had symphony orchestras and academies of art and newspaper columns at their disposal. But also the shopkeepers; the shop assistants; the housekeepers; the cleaners; and a few of their sons home for Christmas in much less flattering battledress. (Geoff was in civvies.) And the careful nondescripts too, female and middle-aged male, from whose good clothes you might tell nothing concerning the places from which they were rising without trace: the chancers, in brief, like herself. And a bunch of railway staff over the bridge from Battersea, who had come to this midnight appointment straight from the pub.
Kinds of individuals not normally crowded together, but commonly marked now — should you looked closely within the candlelight — with the strains of the last months. Shadows under a lot of the eyes, nervous twitches widely distributed, the retired general with skin as grey and rough with fatigue because the meat porter’s. The common flesh declared itself, and for once the various clothes looked more like costumes, all of them looser and worse-fitting than that they had been before, picked arbitrarily off the rack and flung to the primary one who caught them. Who’ll be the overall tonight? Who’ll be the dustman? Who’ll be the duchess? Who’ll be the draper? Pull in your glad rags for the social game.
IT HAD such real stakes, after all, even now with random and democratic death falling from the sky. The number you drew dictated whether you saw out the raids within the basement of the Ritz or in a piss-swilled public shelter. That was why she meant to pass her life within the Ritz, if she could. But, here and now, there gave the impression to be a sort of truce on offer, within the pews: a likelihood, only for a moment, to see through the sport and put aside her own chameleon campaign inside it, and look with eyes temporarily wiped of sophistication and standing and aspiration at what the candelight disclosed. Smiles between strangers, an ungainly good will. A speculative suspicion, travelling from eye to eye, that there is perhaps another way altogether, some essential and uncostumed way, of seeing these rivalrous animals you stood amongst, this rivalrous animal you were yourself. Some other thing all of them were, or is perhaps, should you could but realize it.
And then the choir got here in, and so they all began to sing.
In the awful midwinter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone.
Chelsea Old Church could muster only two or three boy choristers for the midnight service of 1940 — the remaining must all have been evacuated — but a number of the young officers home for Christmas were musical and had placed on surplices; the genteel ladies who taught harp and piano off the King’s Road had come to sing alto and soprano; and there have been benefits to living where opera singers did. At the back of the scratch choir, a leonine bass got here processing, rumbling out the underside line.
Ah, that was the tune the stone flute was to play. Topaz-light and daffodil-light on singing faces; the blue bead-points of the wicks. Iris knew the words without even having to try. Childhood supplied them: they got here as much as her mouth and out into the candleshine from deep time.
What can I give Him,
Poor as I’m?
If I were a shepherd,
I might give a lamb.
If I were a sensible man,
I might do my part,
But what I can I give Him —
Give my heart.
TEARS ran down her cheeks, and he or she didn’t try to wash them away. Geoff squeezed her hand. She looked to see if he was mortified, and he was not. But why am I crying? she thought. It wasn’t the old story of the child within the manger; in a roundabout way, anyway. Nor was it babies basically. She wasn’t pregnant, and had no plans to be for a great very long time, if ever. It was something a few recent thing starting in a nasty time, in a tough winter. A young thing, a fragile thing, just come into the world and as little in a position to protect itself as a newborn with a bubble of milk on its lips.
None of that is protection, she thought, and went on considering it because the vicar read the lesson concerning the shepherds watching their flocks within the fields. The robes on the vicar and the choir, the midnight-best outfits of the luxurious congregation and the less posh congregation — all of it could rip and burn or, if it lasted through the war, would fade and tatter, undone by time as thoroughly in the long run as it could have been by blast or flames. The barrel-walls of the church themselves, that seemed so solid, would shatter at a direct hit like the rest.
“Peace on earth, good will towards men,” said the vicar. They were putting their faith, Iris and Geoff and everybody else there, in guarantees they didn’t know might be kept. Promises with no guarantee of safety, or of comfortable endings, any greater than there was a comfortable ending for the child within the manger. And yet they were attempting to trust them anyway.
Iris considered the best way the entire of the Mariner Building had quaked under her, hesitating between liquid and solid. We’re breakable, and our partitions might as well be fabricated from glass. Anything might occur. Moment to moment, anything in any respect. But by now, she thought, glancing on the faces, everyone here knew that. This was hope, not delusion.
Francis Spufford will probably be speaking on the 2025 Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. Tickets available from faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk. His books include Light Perpetual (Faber & Faber, £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99)) and Cahokia Jazz (Faber & Faber, £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99)). Nonesuch will probably be published by Faber & Faber within the spring.
