champing
My father was obsessed with churches. I spent much of my childhood being dragged around the country lanes of south east England to look at examples of unusual fonts and interesting stained glass, often thwarted by locked doors or out of date guidebooks. I could never understand how my parents could find half an hour’s worth of interest in a brass tomb, or how an arch could merit a 40 minute diversion when we could already be looking at piglets at my godmother’s farm. As I got older I started to grumpily insist on staying in the car with my book if there wasn’t a tower to climb. I hated churches and as soon as I grew up I would never set foot in one again.
These days I drag my own loved ones round any church we stumble across, and will seek out interesting examples whenever I travel. For my 30th birthday I was taken away on a church-themed holiday. And this weekend my long suffering friends and partner sacrificed their precious backs to voyage into the ex-marshland of Dickens’s Kent and camp overnight in a church.
St James’s Church in Cooling was made redundant in 1976, crowded out by a glut of local churches serving sparsely populated villages. Its graveyard inspired the first scene of Great Expectations with 13 sad little tombs to infants from two local families. Its vestry is lined with cockle shells and its aisle with rugged medieval benches. The key is very large and the interior very compact; there is colourful stained glass, shelves of second hand books and playstation games, and surprisingly few draughts.
The surrounding landscape is a mixture of industry of all kinds, the marshes long drained but their memory remaining in roads that wind and tesellate along old waterways. While looking for lunch we come across a pub with a zoo attached, and pay £5 each to see otters playing with their pet stone and a large grey owl that looks like it has seen a ghost. Low tide on the nearby Isle of Grain reveals a kilometre of swampy beach, the outline of an old fortress bleak against racing clouds. The view is desolate and the sky feels infinite, and on the walk back through a tunnel of branches the wind sounds like distant men yelling over each other.
We return to our church with the setting sun, thrashing branches casting golden shadows that migrate across the walls and tiled floors. The font is bathed in multi-coloured light that shifts and flickers across its base and down the aisle. The roar of the wind is so loud that we’re able play ABBA at great volume and dance up the chancel. We chant some of the bigger tunes from an ancient hymn book but give up trying to accompany ourselves with the wheezing organ, most of whose keys are stuck and whose notes degrade on their journey into the vaulted ceiling. We eat cherries and drink fizz and light all the electric tealights and lock the huge timber door.
As we brush our teeth in the dark cavern of the south porch, an indigo sky fills with silhouettes of bats. Their cartoon wings beat against the wind as they flit between the tower and the yew tree that emerges from the dead trunk of an ancient predecessor. A fox slips between gravestones, a smudge of grey in the last of the twilight. Burrowing into my brought-from-home duvet I am glad that people with strange hobbies are able to assist in extending the shelf-life of places like St James’s - although the memorial table to a late local woman is a reminder of what would be lost if this church was surrendered to the elements.
In the morning we’re woken by the dawn streaming from above the altar. We cheerfully roll up our bedding and replace our unused hot water bottles, wash up in the sunlight and return the giant key to its box. A churchwarden stops by to ask if we’ve had a nice time. We drive back to London via a vegan cafe and incense shop on the edge of the ominously-titled “eternal lake”.
The poet John Betjeman was obsessed with architecture, founded the Friends of Friendless Churches and dragged his own daughter around the crumbling parishes of the UK to the point of tantrums in the middle of naves. By the end of her life she was blogging about her great love for churches. She was memorialised on her death by the Churches Conservation Trust, which continues to keep the churches in its care alive through the champing scheme. I imagine John Betjeman would probably be pleased with that outcome. And although my dad would have found a fold out campbed in front of an altar ridiculous, I imagine he’d be pleased with my desire to seek it out.
