THEY weren’t the only ones going to church. Snow had not begun yet, but the air had the smell of it, the chill intoxicating null smell of the clouds above, dense with soft crystals nearly ready to fall, and along the dark streets towards the river, the silhouettes of other Chelsea-ites were in motion, all tugged along in the same direction.
They had passed the Malayan rubber-farmer in the foyer, wrapping a scarf round his neck and puffing his pipe. The woman from the basement shelter with a laugh like a horse was somewhere behind them, laughing like a horse; but hers was the only loud voice.
Otherwise the night was hushed, with the hush of the imminent snow. Swathed by it, swaddled by it, protected by it — at least, that was what it felt like — from the murder noises of the wartime night. The sirens had not sounded. If they did, Iris was not sure what they would do. Run for home? Hope for a deep crypt to shelter in, in the church? But they had not sounded yet; and perhaps they would not, at Christmas. Perhaps the Luftwaffe crews at the airfields in northern France were drinking Glühwein and singing “Silent Night” instead. Perhaps.
THE Old Church, on the Thames embankment, couldn’t welcome people with a blaze of lights in its porch because of the blackout regulations. Tiny slits of brightness had to guide the way. And then there was a confusion of blackness between the two sets of doors, outer and inner, filled with murmuring and stamping feet. But on the inside, the church was alight with candles, burning in heedless banks with flames the colour of daffodil and topaz, blue-hearted like the stone on her ring.
She had never been in before, and it was a surprise. The outside of the Old Church was sturdily Georgian, a respectable barn of a place with wide brick arches, but inside was old. Old and strange. They were under an ancient vault shaped like a barrel, and flickering with shadows on its whitewashed walls. Above, a row of curved skylights pierced upward through the thickness of the stone, blocked with blackout fabric now but still punctuating the white roof with dark shafts. It was as if they were all gathering within the tube of a musical instrument: in a flute, say, and looking up at its finger-holes, waiting to see what would be played on it.
All around, crammed in in coats and mufflers, were denizens of the Chelsea streets. The grand ones, who by day she might have taken primarily as a challenge to her vowels: the old ladies in jewels; the aged military men with thread-veins bursting on their cheeks like poppies in a wheat crop; the platinum-rinsed younger ones who bought the clever little tins to make canapés; the men on leave for Christmas in ten different kinds of officer’s uniform; the old bohemians with shaggy hair who, these days, had symphony orchestras and academies of art and newspaper columns at their disposal. But also the shopkeepers; the shop assistants; the housekeepers; the cleaners; and some of their sons home for Christmas in much less flattering battledress. (Geoff was in civvies.) And the careful nondescripts too, female and middle-aged male, from whose good clothes you could tell nothing about the places from which they were rising without trace: the chancers, in short, like herself. And a bunch of railway workers over the bridge from Battersea, who had come to this midnight appointment straight from the pub.
Kinds of people not usually crowded together, but commonly marked now — if you looked closely in the candlelight — with the strains of the last months. Shadows under most of the eyes, nervous twitches widely distributed, the retired general with skin as grey and rough with fatigue as the meat porter’s. The common flesh declared itself, and for once the different clothes looked more like costumes, all of them looser and worse-fitting than they had been before, picked arbitrarily off the rack and flung to the first person who caught them. Who’ll be the general tonight? Who’ll be the dustman? Who’ll be the duchess? Who’ll be the draper? Pull on your glad rags for the social game.
IT HAD such real stakes, of course, even now with random and democratic death falling from the sky. The number you drew dictated whether you saw out the raids in the basement of the Ritz or in a piss-swilled public shelter. That was why she meant to pass her life in the Ritz, if she could. But, here and now, there seemed to be a kind of truce on offer, in the pews: a chance, just for a moment, to see through the game and put aside her own chameleon campaign within it, and look with eyes temporarily wiped of class and status and aspiration at what the candelight disclosed. Smiles between strangers, an awkward good will. A speculative suspicion, travelling from eye to eye, that there might be some other way altogether, some essential and uncostumed way, of seeing these rivalrous animals you stood among, this rivalrous animal you were yourself. Some other thing they all were, or might be, if you could but know it.
And then the choir came in, and they all began to sing.
In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone.
Chelsea Old Church could muster only two or three boy choristers for the midnight service of 1940 — the rest must all have been evacuated — but some of the young officers home for Christmas were musical and had put on surplices; the genteel ladies who taught harp and piano off the King’s Road had come to sing alto and soprano; and there were advantages to living where opera singers did. At the back of the scratch choir, a leonine bass came processing, rumbling out the bottom line.
Ah, that was the tune the stone flute was to play. Topaz-light and daffodil-light on singing faces; the blue bead-points of the wicks. Iris knew the words without even having to try. Childhood supplied them: they came up to her mouth and out into the candleshine from deep time.
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would give a lamb.
If I were a wise man,
I would do my part,
But what I can I give Him —
Give my heart.
TEARS ran down her cheeks, and she didn’t try to scrub them away. Geoff squeezed her hand. She looked to see if he was mortified, and he was not. But why am I crying? she thought. It wasn’t the old story of the baby in the manger; not directly, anyway. Nor was it babies in general. She wasn’t pregnant, and had no plans to be for a good long time, if ever. It was something about a new thing beginning in a bad time, in a hard winter. A tender thing, a delicate thing, just come into the world and as little able to protect itself as a newborn with a bubble of milk on its lips.
None of this is protection, she thought, and went on thinking it as the vicar read the lesson about the shepherds watching their flocks in the fields. The robes on the vicar and the choir, the midnight-best outfits of the posh congregation and the less posh congregation — all of it would rip and burn or, if it lasted through the war, would fade and tatter, undone by time as thoroughly in the end as it would have been by blast or flames. The barrel-walls of the church themselves, that seemed so solid, would shatter at a direct hit like anything else.
“Peace on earth, good will towards men,” said the vicar. They were putting their faith, Iris and Geoff and everyone else there, in promises they didn’t know could be kept. Promises with no guarantee of safety, or of happy endings, any more than there was a happy ending for the baby in the manger. And yet they were trying to trust them anyway.
Iris thought of the way the whole of the Mariner Building had quaked under her, hesitating between liquid and solid. We’re breakable, and our walls might as well be made of glass. Anything might happen. Moment to moment, anything at all. But by now, she thought, glancing at the faces, everyone here knew that. This was hope, not delusion.
Francis Spufford will be speaking at the 2025 Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. Tickets available from faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk. His books include Light Perpetual (Faber & Faber, £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99)) and Cahokia Jazz (Faber & Faber, £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99)). Nonesuch will be published by Faber & Faber in the spring.