Near neighbours
MY HOME in Dorset is as near a church as any vicar could wish. In 1968, I went in search of a house in the country, and found the 14th-century house with its adjoining church of the same date in a small village near Sherborne.
A year earlier, Kevin and I had been married in a lavish Roman Catholic ceremony in Farm Street Jesuit church, in London. Both of us were cradle Catholics, Kevin an altar server at seven, when there was no breakfast until after communion — of which he was inordinately proud. Looking back, it seems strange that we felt the church of another denomination an added glory; the graveyard, with its peaceful dead, a reminder of the inevitability of death.
Now, the ashes of both my eldest son and my husband lie in the graveyard, their memorial stone set in the joint wall with our garden. My eldest daughter was married in the church, with a service held jointly by the Vicar and the local Roman Catholic priest. So I go to evensong there, and listen joyfully to the sound of Sunday morning bells calling the faithful, even if I then drive off to mass in Sherborne.
One of the happiest arrangements for me was when the Anglicans and Roman Catholics took turns holding services at St John the Evangelist, Milborne Port, founded in Anglo-Saxon days, only two miles away. What is a church but the house of God? Now that I have put our house up for sale, I shall always be grateful for 57 years under the shelter of All Saints’.
Heaven sent
FOR more than 30 years, in my position as associate editor and reporter for Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisons, I have been going behind bars and into very many churches or chapels, although seldom for a service.
My church is made more beautiful by the countryside around it. The green hills, the mauve valleys, the exuberant trees, the primroses in March, and the ox-eye daisies just coming into flower — all decorate it in a way only nature knows how. But, in prison, the chapel must make its own beauty. My overall favourite is in HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs. The largest prison chapel in England, and the most ornate, it was designed by Edmund du Cane, and built using convict labour. The stained-glass windows are particularly impressive, depicting — in saintly guise — some of the workers’ fellows.
Last time I was there, a wonderful violinist, Kerenza Peacock, had been persuaded by her friend Adam Green (who runs the Prison Choir Project) into giving a concert. She played, and talked to the music — Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven — explaining that the Beethoven was the fifth movement from the composer’s last string quartet, and had been sent in a capsule to the moon. “Like a prayer,” as she commented.
The men were held throughout. One of them, Bill, told me: “It was wonderful . . . a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Game changer
MOST recently, I was at HM Prison Pentonville, where I heard a discussion to celebrate the publication of a pamphlet, Identity: A journey from within, written by the men inside. Ricki writes, “Soulless searching for a path/ Questions asked/ Where do we fit in?/ It’s your identity./ You decide.”
Prison choirs play a big part in keeping chapels in the service of God. When I went up to HM Prison Stafford, a sex offenders’ prison, the choir was rehearsing to sing in their chapel. I sat in a miserable Portakabin with 15 miserable men — but, when they began to sing, they were transformed.
It’s not Shakespeare, nor even a hymn, but looking out of the window through coils of barbed wire, I found tears in my eyes: “I believe for every drop of rain that falls — a flower grows; I believe that somewhere in the darkest night — a candle glows; I believe for everyone who goes astray someone will come to show the way. . .”
When the editor of Inside Time, Ben Leapman, and I, interviewed our embattled Prisons Minister, James Timpson, at HM Prison Isle of Wight, in April, he commented: “Wherever you look, there’s problems, problems, problems.” I wish he could have heard those singers.
Creative force
THE influence of the chapel extends to the chapel wing. My latest visit to HM Prison Guys Marsh took me into a little studio where men bring their lyrics, or rap, to my good friend Toby Langton Gilks, who records them to a background of music created together. I sat in on a session, and when, after a couple of hours of concentrated effort, Toby produced a disc and handed it over to Adam, I felt like clapping.
I doubt if many CDs are produced under such circumstances, but some of the men involved do go on to professional rap- and music-making, and all of them enjoy the satisfaction of creation.
Song cycle
EARLIER this month, I went to the opening night of the Dorset Music Festival, in Sherborne Abbey. Every pew was filled as the magnificent fan vaulting poured back Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave and Haydn’s Te Deum. In the second half, the whole of Mozart’s Requiem was played, under the expert baton of Paul Ellis.
Paul was working at Sherborne School when my son was a music scholar there; so it takes me back to those days when Caspar was singing and playing in that great space. “All to the honour and glory of God” — or, as we wrote at the top of every page in our exercise books in my convent school, “AMDG”.
Body armour
THIS weekend, I’m taking part in a symposium in the Messums West gallery with the title “Does Art Work?”, which I assume to be following the trend of “seeking well-being” and “meaningful activities”.
I’m not sure that religion qualifies, although I can’t see why not — perhaps because, of my 40 books, children’s religious books make up most of the non-fiction. I have concluded that it isn’t just “Art”, as in the visual arts, that “works”, but all the arts, with writing and poetry coming very high up the list. For every issue of Inside Time, I choose two pages of poetry written by prisoners.
Here are the final lines of a poem from HM Prison Hindley, printed in the May issue:
This loneliness has many a face
I have come to recognise them all
No matter my journey
I will always have companions.
It is humbling that men who often cannot spell, and have never read a poem, let alone written one, turn to poetry. Poetry, it seems, provides them with a form that gives a sense of freedom and security, and enables them to express their deepest feelings in a way that would not normally be possible.
It is similar to the way in which a novelist draws on their own feelings and beliefs, but cloaked in the faces and voices of others. Art — whether painting, poetry, novels, or music — becomes a kind of protective code, or disguise. And, after all, how many of us these days would say “Lord, have mercy” if we weren’t inside a church?
Rachel Billington is an author and journalist, and a trustee of the Longford Trust and The Tablet. Her memoir, A Writer’s Story, will be published on 12 June by Tandem Publishing.
