Friday 18 September 2015

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross



When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

There’s a chap who lives on the estate who has for years been nagging me about our war memorial. The war memorial is technically a wayside Calvary, that is a statue of Christ on the cross (under a little canopy) standing beside the street outside the church; it was erected in the 1920s to the designs of Martin Travers, who was the leading furnisher of Anglo-Catholic churches at that time. It’s a fine example of Travers’s semi-baroque style and a noble monument, but at the moment it's undeniably scruffy. 

The trouble is that Travers was neither an architect nor an engineer (though he did actually build a couple of churches) and in constructing our Calvary he committed a significant error. The figure of Christ is in cast iron (and was originally gilded) and hangs from a heavy oak cross, which emerges from a plinth on a stone bench, constructed  against the low brick retaining wall. Now if this was all happening in a churchyard it would be simple, because the foot of the cross would be buried in the ground, presumably sheathed in lead and sunk in concrete, but that’s not how it is here. The retaining wall, which is part of the church’s structure, closes an area which serves as a light well for the sacristy, which is below street level, so there is no ground in which to bury the cross; there is a sheer ten-foot drop immediately behind the retaining wall. Travers’s solution to this problem was to take down the retaining wall and rebuild it with a large cast iron beam at its base, into which he fixed the foot of the cross. That is all the fixing that the Calvary has.

Travers’s error was really twofold: the figure of Christ was so heavy that it would gradually pull the wooden cross forwards, and the cast iron beam would eventually rust. If he had provided another fixing point, anchoring the upper part of the crucifix to the wall of the church, then the whole structure would have been given much more stability, albeit at the expense of beauty, but he did not. Some fifteen years ago the Calvary was observed to be leaning forwards over the pavement and it was discovered that the cast iron beam had rusted badly, causing cracks in the brickwork of the retaining wall and the stone of the bench. The temporary solution was to erect a cradle of scaffolding to hold the Calvary up. That lime green painted scaffold has remained, a constant reproach to those of us who in the meantime have had to raise money to give the church a new roof, new electrical installation and new drains (all of which were felt to be more pressing than a war memorial). It looks really scruffy and gives quite the wrong message, and I don’t blame the chap who gives me grief about “not looking after Jesus”. Now, though, we are in the middle of securing the funding, not merely to make the war memorial secure, but hopefully to restore it to its former glory. I’ve tried to tell the chap this, but he sees no action taking place.

A few weeks ago I was pushing Helen across the Green in her wheelchair, on our way back from a pleasant outing in the Park, and I spotted the chap, who started haranguing me. He shouted to me that he commanded me to make Jesus look nice again, and that I shouldn’t paint Jesus gold, but black, because my house was full of gold, which was a bit of a surprise. He angrily denounced me for “profiting from a prophet” and yelled that he would pray that someone in my family should get cancer. Helen replied, “You’re too late! I’ve already got it!” but he didn’t pay any attention to that. He stalked off, still shouting abuse. Clearly he hadn’t been taking his medication, or something had upset him, and he was particularly unwell that morning, but the encounter was unsettling, and of course very upsetting to Helen.

A couple of weeks later, when Helen was in hospital, as I cycled off to get the morning paper I thought I saw something odd about the war memorial, and made a mental note to check it out when I got back. As I crossed Bourne Terrace my attention was struck by what seemed to be a tall, tanned lady with long black hair and bare feet, wearing an asymmetric black dress, and I thought, “Never seen her before.” When I came back with my paper I saw that the scaffolding around the war memorial seemed to be hung with washing, which seemed odd but harmless, so I didn’t investigate further. As I passed by later I spotted someone sleeping on the pavement in front of the war memorial, and assumed that explained the clothes. It was a sunny morning, and I thought it was hardly necessary to wake them up. At lunchtime I saw the clothes were still there and thought I really ought to investigate later, but my lunch was interrupted; the chap came hammering on my door and shouting, “There’s somebody has hung up his washing all over Jesus, and it’s a disgrace! You’ve got to do something! It’s disrespectful! It’s terrible! I’ll tell him he can’t do that!” To which I replied that I was busy just now, but he had my permission to say that to whoever it was, so he went off to do just that. A few minutes later came another knock on the door, this time from the owner of the clothes.

He turned out to be from Tenerife, very tanned, and with attractive, wavy, shoulder-length black hair, and his name was Luis. He told me that he had been cycling along the canal towpath the previous night when he had fallen into the canal. Obviously all his clothes were soaked, and he had looked for a suitable place to bed down for the night, and had (somewhat unwisely) chosen the bench in front of the war memorial. The police had found him there, and finding him neither drunk nor stoned had given him a blanket. Clearly it was him I had seen, presumably draped in the blanket, on Bourne Terrace. I said his clothes were not a problem, but asked him to be very careful and not to climb up on the scaffolding because it wasn’t safe. I apologised that the chap had given him a hard time, and he said it didn’t matter, as Jesus Christ had given him the grace to accept people as they were. “And I think he is … mentally ill,” he said, touching the side of his head in the international gesture. I concurred and silently gave thanks for charity and gentleness. He assured me he would be moving on when his clothes were dry, and sure enough he was gone by teatime.

I do hope the engineer comes soon to secure the war memorial, though.