of monuments and memorials

The mention of the words April and May have made me nauseous for months. Too many airplanes, too many days away from my new house and my family and friends, too many things that make me nervous. And now, they’re all behind me (well, nearly—there’s still a workshop on Thursday evening in Wellington that I have to be well prepared for). I’m more than 20 hours into my journey, two airplane dinners and two airplane breakfasts behind me, and the window next to me glowing dusky orange in the sunrise over the island nation I love so much. I’m nearly home.

On Monday, Patsy came to collect me from my Oxford B&B and took the train to the misery of the London rain. Of all the rains I’ve been through in Europe, London was the most like New Zealand rain in its combination of piercing drops and wicked wind. We could have done without that combination. To fortify us for our journey, I spied the perfect blend of Patsy’s Englishness and my Americanness—a Krispy Kreme doughnuts in Paddington station with a sculpture of the playful bear right in front. I treated Patsy to her first Krispy Kreme (which cost, like the rest of the things I ate/bought/slept in on this trip, three times more than I’m used to paying) and we stood moaning outside the shop. Thus calorie-laden, we hopped on the tube.

When we popped up again, we were inside a London snowglobe—all the sights ordered neatly around us as though designed for tourists like me. In one panoramic shot, I could get Big Ben and Parliament, the London Eye enormous Ferris wheel, and Westminster Abbey just around the corner. The rain pelting down didn’t have quite the charm of the glitter in a snowglobe, but it was authentic London weather nonetheless. We were off to Westminster Abbey. Here, Patsy treated me to an admission ticket (a ticket for a church—we won’t even talk about how much that cost!) and we headed out of the wet and into the crowded and magnificent abbey.

I have been inside an amazing variety of churches on this little trip. The gothic elegance of the Milan cathedral, the Baroque gilt of the Bergamo church, the ancient frescos of the old church in Lugano. In these Swiss and Italian churches, I have been awed by the scale, the grandeur; even the tiny church at the top of the hill near the closED casTle was ornamented and lovely, a doll’s house of a church. It wasn’t until I walked through the Litchfield Cathedral with Patsy’s husband Steve, though, that I realised that I had been missing a huge part of the experience. All the plaques in Italian on the walls and floors had been images rather than words, and seeing the words in English changed my entire relationship to them. Not just plaques with vague scratchings, but monuments to something—to people, dead and missed, and soldiers lost in battle. In Litchfield, I was moved in an entirely different way by the epithets, the tiny pieces of a memory of a life carved into stone. There was the woman who described her dead husband as a stern friend to those few who deserved his friendship. He sounded like a joy to have around, eh? And there were others with descriptions of perfect lost husbands and wives and beautifully-sad images of serious mourning. There was a statue of two children, curled up together—sleeping? dead?—that filled my eyes with tears. These walls were history pages sculpted in granite, marking love and death and mourning and status. In a little village church outside of Oxford, the floor was covered with tombstones, sometimes with an actual skull and crossbones and a warning to those reading the words of the “good man mouldering here” and the certain knowledge that “all ye shall follow him to the grave.” I thought that was just in pirate stories!

So it was that I was used to the twin gifts of magnificent sculpture and architecture along with touching epithets when we took our damp bodies into Westminster Abbey in the first place. And this is the grande dame of all such combinations. Goopy swirling carving, gilt everywhere, long and flowing praise and listing of accomplishments—these were CVs more than anything else. I was awed by the opulence, and also, I have to say, numbed by it.

But then, after passing the tombs of kings and queens, statesmen and soldiers, we came to the whole reason I went to the abbey in the first place, Poet’s corner (click here to see pics--no cameras inside) . There, on the floor, Chaucer’s name, and there was Milton, and there Shakespeare and Tennyson and Dickens. I got down on my hands and knees and traced their names with my fingers. I found I was suddenly crying, tears rolling down my cheeks—I tear up again at the memory of it. All these other people were buried here too, nobles, kings, just general rich folks. But it was the writers who captivated me. Those people I know; I’ve learnt from their stories and I’ve taught their words. Their characters have been my friends, their ideas on love and life have been my guides. Their images are my images, and there I was, close to them in this totally unexpected way. I cannot explain the power of it, cannot know why it was that the tombstones and memorials of these story writers would move me more than the tombstones and memorials of the history makers. But I know that after I touched these stones, the rest of the abbey was done for me. I wandered, reading nothing more, until we were back in the rain together, off to see Buckingham Palace.

And now I’m here at the Auckland airport, one tiny little flight and I’ll be home. I need a shower and a change of clothes, and I need to walk on the beach and stand in the sun. It’s sunny here, and warmer on this autumn day than any of the spring days I’ve had in the last two weeks. These two months are over. Now all that’s left is figuring out what the ripples of these months will do when they wash over into my regular life.

(Pics today random--more soon: the first two from Oxford, the other from the Litchfield cathedral)