The Whispering Swarm

  I was familiar with Carmelite Street, Whitefriars Street and Blackfriars Bridge, of course, but they had no more religious significance than St Pancras, Charing Cross, Kings Cross or the Temple tube stations. They were names, like the ‘gates’—Aldgate, Brookgate, Bishopsgate—nonexistent barriers to barely distinctive districts. If I hadn’t met Friar Isidore, I might have taken ‘Carmelite’ for something you spread on bread like Marmite or Nutella. For all I’d known, The White Friar was a trade magazine run by a man who liked to go to work in his dressing gown. Yet Friar Isidore had such an air of genial dedication, even, if I dare say it, godliness, that, one autumn afternoon, I felt confident enough to ask him what the magazine was about.

  He answered with perfect good humour. The white friars were Carmelites, he said. A celibate religious order, they vowed to serve God in poverty, serving outcast and downtrodden people. Like me he was also editor and proofreader of their magazine, which mostly debated theological matters, usually in Latin. He chuckled when he added, ‘Well, I am also the chief trugmoldy.’ This was clearly a bit of a joke but, when he saw that I was unfamiliar with the word, he explained. ‘I go up and down Fleet Street, selling it in the taverns. It is how we’ve paid up to now for its publication, though we do have a small endowment. You might have seen me at the entrance to the caverns, too—yes, yes, those ill-smelling Underground stations, I should say. I sell it there. Taverns and caverns. Wherever light might help.’ He smiled as if for my approval. I was now trying to place his accent. Was it rural? Some kind of American? It sounded old-fashioned.

  ‘So you’re a bit like the Salvation Army,’ I said. He nodded vaguely. I assumed he was local, though I wasn’t entirely sure where monks lived. St Paul’s? I asked him how long he had been in the area. He responded with what might have been amusement. The priory was long established, he said. It had been continuously inhabited since the thirteenth century.

  I told him this was fascinating. ‘I had no idea!’ I wasn’t kidding. Religious stuff was mostly new to me.

  I think he spoke next partly from a sense of duty, as if to a pagan ready for conversion!

  ‘Perhaps, if you have time, we could talk over a cup of tea? I might explain a little.…’

  History had always fascinated me. At that time I was more familiar with Sir Walter Scott and Ivanhoe or Quentin Durward, Dumas, Hugo, Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood or Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel; Harold Lamb, whose stories I read in second-hand pulps, wrote about Erik the Red and the Crusades: Richard the Lionheart; the noble Saladin. Needless to say, I preferred my history dressed up with a bit of romantic action but it had already occurred to me that I might be able to run a series on London history in Tarzan. Would Friar Isidore be the man to do us such a series? Crusaders and Saracens sounded okay, too. There was a new line of toy soldiers I’d seen in Gamages, Holborn. Crusader Knights and Turks. Theology? I didn’t know much about that. Perhaps we could angle it on the folklore of either side? I had featured several pieces on old Irish mythology by a friend of mine. Though fascinated by the colour and pageantry of war, I had no interest in war itself. I didn’t collect historical lead soldiers, just bright Imperial troops of the kind you could build up into mighty panoramas of Rorke’s Drift or even the Charge of the Light Brigade complete with running Highlanders and Russian troops behind the gunners (not that you could ever afford them all). I had a couple of sets of crusaders and ‘Arabs’ in my toy soldier collection and had already run a series about collecting model soldiers called ‘Commanding Your Own Army.’ Maybe I could interview this vicar bloke and get material for a series about battles on the Thames?

  So that was the ignorant muddle which served me for a decision-making brain when I accepted his invitation. We walked down Old Bailey and round the corner to grey, drizzling Ludgate Hill, as always crowded with busy messenger boys, sergeants-at-arms, girl typists, salesmen and wandering journalists. The Hill’s tall, dark, gilded-glass shop fronts displayed stationery, smoking accessories, coffee beans, sandwiches, books, model ships. Down under the railway bridge the street ended with the Old King Lud on one side and The Kwik-U-R, a rapid-service restaurant, employing a lot of staff to get your food to you as fast as possible. You could eat three courses there in fifteen minutes. Then came Farringdon Road and the tall modern concrete offices of Amalgamated Press, following the bed of the old Fleet. Once, Holborn Viaduct high overhead might easily have crossed a river. The traffic flowed around Ludgate Circus and on over Blackfriars Bridge to Southwark and beyond, turning left to continue into Fleet Street and a thousand newspapers, journals, magazines and comics. But Friar Isidore and I stopped at the ABC Teashop across the road.

  The ABC Teashop, with its busy clatter and smart, modern, art deco silver, chrome and glass, was fairly empty at this time. Before we entered, Friar Isidore stopped in the street’s bustling pedestrian flow and asked embarrassedly if I would mind if we bought our own refreshments. He couldn’t really treat me. He was close to tears. ‘The white friars are a poor order. Anything we spend comes out of the common purse. I have my brothers to consider.’ Then he might have blushed.

  When I offered to pay, he smiled his gaunt thanks and shook his head. ‘It was my suggestion. But I appreciate the thought.’ We went inside. Here was the world where 1984 was conceived. The Aerated Bread Company’s teashops all had a smell, largely disappeared from the English culinary landscape, of weak, overboiled tea, grease, brown sauce, sweet pastry, what used to be called spotted dick and thin vanilla custard. As we picked up our metal trays and joined the line, the friar looked around the crowded cafeteria as if experiencing it for the first time.

  Reaching into his habit, the monk took out a worn, nondescript leather bag with drawstrings, holding it tightly as we moved down the line, picking up a plate with a toasted bun on it, a thick cup of milky tea, all as if he did not quite understand what he was looking at. He checked the prices carefully before counting the big pennies from his bag to his hand. I was aware of people making jokes about him, a girl sniggering. In comparison he had an air of artless dignity. At seventeen, of course, I felt awkward on his behalf and angry at the other customers. Remembering how he behaved, I now think he knew exactly what was happening.

  We carried our trays to the nearest glass-topped table. At his request, I told him a little about myself. He didn’t seem surprised that I was editing a magazine at such an early age. But he had not heard of any of the writers I liked until I mentioned a recent favourite book, absurdist Ronald Firbank’s The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.

  The name seemed familiar to him. ‘Oh, really? Are you acquainted?’ He meant, I thought, did I actually know Firbank.

  ‘Well, not personally, of course. He died so long ago. Before I was born.’

  He seemed startled. ‘Surely?—’

  ‘I’m not certain when.…’ I was puzzled by his puzzlement. I then mentioned Charles Williams but this produced confused babbling from him about theology so I gave up. I thought later he might know a Cardinal Pirelli.

  He sipped his tea glancing towards the plate-glass window and the busy traffic of the Hill, at a Number 15 bus, all red-and-gold enamel, splashed with the city’s filth, purring and quivering and steaming as it waited at the stop. ‘We lose touch with the world so easily in the abbey. You must forgive me if I seem a little stupid.’

  ‘Not at all. Do you like him? Williams?’

  ‘I fear we are a little restricted in our reading. Might I ask when you were born?’

  I told him January 1940 and he laughed. ‘How foolish of me. I should have realised. I have absolutely no sense of the passage of time out here.’

  ‘Surely you’ve lived in this area for a while? The whole of Fleet Street around you. You’re not exactly far away from the sources of news.’ I then became apologetic. I had sounded rude to my own ears. But he was shaking his head.

  ‘Surprising as it may be, Master Michael, we are pretty well shut off from this world.’ He glanced down at his cup,
wetted his little finger and rubbed at what was probably a smudge of lipstick on the rim. ‘Close as it seems!’

  I said that I envied him his solitude.

  At this, he shook his head again. ‘Oh, it’s not exactly solitude in the world of the Sanctuary.’ I think the sound he made was a chuckle. ‘Only if you’re lucky.’

  This was the first time I’d heard him use the term. When he noticed my enquiry, he added, ‘You probably know the Sanctuary better as “Alsacia”.’ And when I shook my head, he gave a small shrug. ‘I forget. We’re a little off the beaten track.…’

  ‘I was born in Brookgate,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d explored all the local back streets. Perhaps you could point your abbey out to me sometime. I’ve probably passed it on a hundred occasions and not noticed it. There are parts of London that are really rural, whole fields, like the ones behind Sporting Club Square. All the allotments. They’re disappearing. I’ve been trying to teach myself to be more observant.’

  ‘Well, it’s surely best when you have a guide,’ he told me. He seemed to reach an important decision, his expression changing markedly. He frowned to himself. ‘Would you care to see it today? This would be an ideal moment. The abbot…’

  ‘I’m free.’ I finished my teacake. ‘This would be a good time for me, too. They don’t expect me back at the office today. I mean, if it’s no trouble.…’ Should I have trusted him so readily? Had he already slipped something in my cup?

  ‘Never any great trouble for me,’ he said. ‘You always do need a guide, I fear. At least at first. I, of course, had mine.’ Now his chuckle was spontaneous, self-deprecating. ‘It’s practically impossible to find the Sanctuary’s gates without help. But you must be prepared for a surprise or two.’

  ‘The other monks won’t mind?’

  ‘That’s never the question. We welcome to Alsacia all who discover us. We have done so almost since we were founded. Our articles demand we turn none away. Noble or commoner. Saint or sinner. Man or woman. That is the nature of our calling, to provide sanctuary for any who needs it. The wealthy give us donations. The poor and the needy benefit, for they can hide here as well as work. Just as we took vows of poverty, to follow the example of the Nazarene, so, too, do we neither judge nor seek to punish. We are bound to forgive and to pray. To take in all who suffer. All who are in danger of persecution.’

  I was impressed. This was the first time I had encountered such an idea. I realised how ignorant I was about church institutions. ‘Well, I’m not exactly…’ Maybe there was a brochure. I got up and followed him from the teashop, out into the grey press of Ludgate Hill. We turned together down New Bridge Street and crossed over to stand at the intersection of Fleet Street and Ludgate Circus. I looked back up the hill to where St Paul’s stood washed by the rays of the late-afternoon sun. Suddenly a silence fell over the busy streets. I found myself mesmerised by the sight of the great cathedral, remembering the stories I had grown up with, of the Blitz, the miraculous failure of the Nazi incendiaries to do anything but minor damage, while the surrounding streets all guttered and howled.

  As we waited for the traffic lights to change, I asked him, ‘Did your abbey suffer much during the Blitz?’

  We began to cross Fleet Street. ‘Oh, not at all,’ he replied. ‘We were always singularly blessed, you know. The Plague. The Great Fire. It’s believed our covenant protects us.’

  ‘Somehow Brookgate didn’t get much damage either,’ I said. ‘A few people called that a miracle.’

  As we walked he told me how the Carmelites had originally lived on the slopes of Mount Carmel, near Haifa, mostly inhabiting caves and shacks, before being expelled by zealous Saracens in the thirteenth century. They had no saintly founder like the Dominicans and Franciscans. Other orders sometimes questioned the Carmelites’ religious credentials. Happily, Christian kings wished to show their piety by giving them lands, especially in Britain and France. They had found homes for their order in various parts of Europe, including Amsterdam, Paris, London and Oxford. They were called white friars because of their robes, just as the Dominicans, with their dark habits, who had arrived in London at about the same time, had been called black friars. Both orders had been granted the land under Royal Charter, by devout noblemen.

  With passersby occasionally glancing at us, we continued past the Punch, the Old Bell, the Cheshire Cheese, the Tipperary and all the other many pubs which served the street’s journalists; past the offices of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, News Chronicle and half a dozen other national newspapers. It seemed strange that such a pious man should have his home in what was, after all, a pretty impious place. I didn’t notice which side street we turned into. Perhaps Bouverie Street, where that least godly of newspapers, the scandal-mongering News of the World, had its offices, possibly Whitefriars Street. Another side street and then we were crossing a small Georgian square, one of the minor Inns of Court, where lawyers had their chambers. Then Friar Isidore stopped in another old square, an Inn of Court I wasn’t familiar with, and stared at a big, battered oaken gate, one of a pair, bound with huge strips of black iron, on massive hinges. Worn, grimy, weather stained, it seemed as old as time.

  ‘That must be more ancient than most of the City,’ I said.

  ‘You can see it?’ He seemed enormously pleased.

  I laughed. ‘Well, of course I can. It’s massive.’

  He stepped forward and pushed hard at the gate, ushering me through.

  I expected to find myself in the courtyard of an old ecclesiastical building. Instead, as the door closed behind me, I saw that I was in a cobbled street, like several you could then still discover in the area. I was struck by an unusual smell, completely different to anything I’d ever experienced and impossible to identify. The smell was at once earthy and sharp, more like a market at full pitch, a mixture of vegetables, fish, fruit, cooked food, spice, malfunctioning lavatories and all different kinds of smoke. On both sides of the narrow alley leaned tall half-timbered houses, their second, even third storeys pitched at crazy angles out above their ground floors. Such houses, too, could still occasionally be found in my part of London. An entire stretch of them stood minutes from where I lived in High Holborn. Others were at the western end of Fleet Street. Most were all rather too tidily preserved. These buildings, however, had a different air to them, at once decrepit and full of vitality, with crooked wooden blinds, some hanging by a single hinge; paint peeling on doors and woodwork; part of the plaster exposed to reveal lathe or brick; creepers, vines crawling up, over and through tiles missing from roofs out of which also jutted crooked stone chimneys gouting sooty clouds into the damp grey air.

  The cobbles were grubby and I was just able to avoid stepping into horse droppings directly in front of me. Apart from the gypsies, the Brookgate and Holborn dairies’ nags and the occasional policeman’s mount, I had never seen a horse in the Fleet Street area. Even more astonishing to me, a couple of fat, red-combed white chickens were pecking at the dung. They were dispersed, clucking and flapping, as a woman in a long, nondescript skirt, wearing a grubby cap on her dirty hair, came running from the house with a shovel and bucket, to scoop the stuff up. I remembered my Uncle Fred doing this when he followed the milkman’s cart down Leather Lane during the war, bent on getting the manure for the little rose-and-vegetable garden he tended behind our house in Fox Street.

  An early autumn afternoon fog was darkening a day not yet lit by gas. Behind some of the thickly glazed windowpanes yellow light began to flicker and bloom. Their blinds and curtains drawn, a number of windows were patched with oiled paper. Most others had green-tinged ‘bottle-glass’ panes. Maybe they had been blown out in the Blitz and not yet replaced? This was still austerity Britain emerging from that long, grey, hand-me-down period. Some parts of London, too, had either resisted government improvements or been overlooked. The yellow glow grew warmer, steadier, either from candles or oil lamps and not gas, as I’d originally guessed. I began to wonder how on ea
rth I had failed to discover this quaint bit of London as a boy. It was extraordinary. The smell alone, being so much like one of the big London markets, was acrid, sweet, musty, ancient, intense, impossible to identify. Why did I feel uneasy?

  From hidden alleys came shouts, the occasional cry of a child, coarse grunts and elaborate curses. I was reminded of the old public slum courts and Peabody estates that still survived around Brookgate, where our narrow lanes wound through to Grays Inn Road. I tended to avoid those blocks of flats in case I was challenged by one of the ‘court cliques’ which metamorphosed into the 1950s Ted gangs. Luckily they fought mostly among themselves from echoing court to echoing court. They barely bothered you if you were an obvious neutral.

  I couldn’t see any gangs in the Sanctuary. A lot of people crowded together here but no more than in, say, Leather Lane market on a Friday. They could belong to some religious sect, judging by their old-fashioned clothes. I saw them strolling, gossiping, chatting on cobbled corners, seated at open windows. We passed a massive coaching inn, with servants’ or guests’ rooms built out above the central stone-and-red-brick archway. Overlooked by balconies, there was space in the inn’s cobbled yard for a full-sized express coach and team, or three modern buses. The odd picture on its sign was explained by the tavern’s name: The Swan With Two Necks. What I could see of the stables looked new enough but logically had not been used in half a century at least. Dull brass, black leather, dark green paint, black beams and whitewashed walls, almost fresh. I could even see some tack. Recently dressed up for something. The coronation, probably. Around the time Queen Elizabeth II had been crowned, there had been a lot of ‘New Elizabethan’ nostalgia for the glorious days of Good Queen Bess. Days that never really were, of course. New myths for a new age. Above was a gallery of leaded glass behind which someone moved swiftly, lighting candles. The entrance’s signboard showed the mythical swan encountering three happy greybeards seated in a row on a bench with huge two-pint ‘shant’ tankards on their knees. It might have been painted by Tom Browne or Phil May, those master-draughtsmen of Edwardian London. I was surprised I had never heard of the place. From it came a smell of strong beer, shag tobacco, frying chops.