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.