CHAPTER 9

CITY OF GOD

I pace the pavements, treading prayer into stone.

There was a lot of that, then. Walking, through the parks and streets of London. The best time to walk is early, before the sun has risen but when the sky is lightening: dawn. Then the city is quiet and even the people who are professionally up at this time go about with the calm that comes of moving in the midst of sleeping multitudes. You can almost hear the city’s breath: low, slow, then quickening as the rhythm builds to waking.

There is a church in the heart of Soho, Soho Square to be precise, that presents a thin, red-brick face to the world, rising in narrow frontage to its bell tower. I was working near there, walking out for early lunch, when I heard it toll the Angelus – three rings, a pause, three again, pause once more, then a final three – and I went to find the church. Outside, narrow, slightly forbidding. Inside, opening out hugely, so it seemed a Tardis church – how could something so expansive appear so small from without?

Along one wall, three of the old-fashioned wooden cubicles used for confession. In my local parish church, these had been done away with in favour of face-to-face encounters with the priest; I was not ready for that.

A stole hung from the confessional. A priest sat ready within.

I knelt.

Through the grill, I could discern his shadow silhouette, head bowed. Without turning his head he placed us under the blessing. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” I paused. “I… I can’t remember how long it’s been since my last confession…”

And, when it was over, when I’d stumbled through my words, and the priest had asked of me what seemed a most meagre penance – surely I ought to do more than a few prayers? – he began to pronounce the formula of absolution.

“God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace…”

As he spoke the words, the memory of my eight-year-old self returned, waiting for the revelation that never came when I received Holy Communion for the first time.

“… and I, an unworthy priest, absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

I was here, but I did not really know why. In the end, I had returned to where I had begun.

And as the priest spoke those final words, I felt as if a band I had not known was there, slowly tightening through the years around my chest, had let go; I had been chained, and not known it. I had been bound, and now I was free.

I said those few, small prayers, and knew.

There was nothing earned in that forgiveness. It was nothing to do with my prayers and invocations and meditations; with my reading and thinking and doing.

It was a gift.

Later, after I had taken to hearing lunchtime Mass whenever I was working in central London, I learned that St Patrick’s, Soho, was where my parents had married in 1962.

The church itself lies on the site of Carlisle House, where one of Casanova’s mistresses, Teresa Cornelys, lived, holding soirées, masquerades, and balls to which all the most fashionable members of society came. Cornelys lived with a flamboyance to match the entertainments she oversaw, continually falling into debt and almost as frequently into debtors’ prison. Just across from the square was the Rookery at St Giles, one of the most notorious slums in London and home to thousands of impoverished Irish; with the penal anti-Catholic laws, there was no church to minister to them until the passing of the Catholic Relief Act of 1791. In response “‘a very numerous and respectable body of Catholics conceived the wise and Charitable project of establishing a Catholic Chapel’ in the neighbourhood of St. Giles’s, which was ‘inhabited principally by the poorest and least informed of the Irish who resort to this Country’”.⁹⁶ The present building was finished in 1893.

Immigrants bring their gods with them. My father arrived in 1960. He came by boat, sailing from Colombo, across the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal, before entering the calm waters of the Mediterranean and then the decidedly less calm waters of the Atlantic. He arrived in winter and, at first, he thought some dreadful blight had fallen upon this new country, for all the trees were dead.

During World War II, my father and his brother enlisted in the army. Ceylonese (as they were still, then), brown-skinned sons of the Empire, they fought for it, even though Uncle Andrew had been vehement in his calls for Ceylon’s independence. Father served in Ceylon, manning anti-aircraft guns in Trincomalee, but Uncle Andrew fought with the Eighth Army, advancing and retreating and advancing again through the countries of North Africa. I have a photo of him, in military fatigues, but with a keffiyeh over his head.

The British Nationality Act of 1948 gave right of abode in Britain to any subjects of the Empire. Uncle Andrew’s commanding officer offered to help him settle in Britain after the war, but he decided to stay in Ceylon as it moved towards independence. My father stayed as well, but as work became harder to find in post-independence Sri Lanka, he started to look abroad and, in 1960, he caught the boat.

He was not alone. Speak to older people. Then, it was possible to walk out of one job in the morning and start another in the afternoon, employers were so desperate to fill vacancies. Indeed, such was their desperation that they started advertising for brown-and black-skinned people to come over and take these jobs.

Do I sympathize with the people who decided to slam the door in the faces of the people who had been invited? Actually, I do. It is no easy matter to see a neighbourhood one has known since childhood transformed, and while some might welcome the change, others will not: this is not a matter of morality but the tension between the desire for novelty and the wish for stability that contends, unevenly, in everyone.

The response was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962. It didn’t slam the door, but it began to push it closed, at least against the feared wave of dark-skinned people. As the Home Secretary, Rab Butler, said in the debate on the Act:

We all know that throughout the continuous evolution of the Commonwealth, citizens of member-States have always been free to come here and stay here as long as they like. This has been a cherished tradition of the Mother Country and there is little doubt that it has been an important link binding the Commonwealth together….

The justification for the control which is included in this Bill… is that a sizeable part of the entire population of the earth is at present legally entitled to come and stay in this already densely populated country. It amounts altogether to one-quarter of the population of the globe and at present there are no factors visible which might lead us to expect a reversal or even a modification of the immigration trend which I am about to describe.⁹⁷

Father made it to the Mother Country just in time.

Italians, on the other hand, had been in London for centuries. Lombard Street was named after the bankers from Lombardia who lived there and there was a continuing Italian presence through the centuries. Shakespeare set a third of his plays in Italy and a contemporary, John Florio, taught Italian to the eldest son of James I (Prince Henry died at eighteen, leaving the accession to his younger brother, Charles – just one of many historical what ifs). But the first real wave of Italian immigration followed in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The conflict had passed backwards and forwards through northern Italy, devastating farms and livelihoods. In response, Italians started walking. Men would tramp across the mountain passes, into France and on through the long trudge northwards, setting off in the spring and returning before winter, taking what work they could find in England, and particularly London. The first immigrants were from Como and Lucca, but these were succeeded in the 1870s by men from Parma, mainly organ grinders, and the Liri valley, who were ice-cream makers.

Many of these first Italians lived in Clerkenwell and, with Catholic emancipation, they brought their God: St Peter’s Italian Church was consecrated on 16 April 1863. It still stands, all white marble and madonnas, and one Sunday every July Italians return from the suburbs to which they’ve largely moved and process around the streets, with floats displaying religious tableaux in honour of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The food’s pretty good too.

All those poor Italians opened coffee bars and restaurants in Soho and Covent Garden and, with some money made, promptly moved to the suburbs, leaving Clerkenwell to the hipsters. Something like a third of the houses in the streets immediately around me must belong to Italians – they (we) like to huddle together, and to take packs of Lavazza when venturing abroad.

It’s different for Sri Lankans. Those who came, like my father, to better themselves in the 1950s and 1960s largely did so, following the core Asian path: hard work in the first generation and hard study in the second. It was more difficult for those who came in the 1980s and 1990s, since many arrived as refugees from the civil war in Sri Lanka. The ethnic tensions that had resulted in war at home largely fractured the amity that had previously existed between expat Sinhalese and Tamils; now they live in parallel communities, rarely touching each other.

Although my father is Christian, the majority of Sinhalese are Buddhists, while most Tamils are Hindu. When I was at a low ebb – all right, my parents thought I was suicidal – my Uncle Wijeratne (not actually an uncle, but you call everyone Uncle, Auntie, or Cousin) brought a monk from the Chiswick Temple, the London Buddhist Vihara, to chant for me. I was so embarrassed I promptly rose from my depression-induced dullness before he even cleared his throat – so it worked. Nowadays, mindfulness meditative techniques derived from Buddhist practices have become important treatments for depression but I submit that a good dose of teenage embarrassment works faster.

The London Buddhist Vihara was established in 1926 as the first Sri Lankan Buddhist monastery outside Asia, starting in Gloucester Road before moving to Chiswick: first Heathfield Gardens and now The Avenue. A visit for the Vesak celebrations on the full moon of May, when the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and Parinirvana (passing into Nirvana) are celebrated, is memorable for the garlanded gold statues of the Lord Buddha and the mix of matter-of-fact Sinhalese and earnest Western converts. In the 1990s there was much talk of Buddhism’s advance in the West and a number of high-profile conversions (the best known of these was the Italian footballer Roberto Baggio). Many of my friends became interested in Buddhism and started attending talks and meditation sessions, thinking to find the ancient serenity of the East. To further his knowledge of Buddhism, one of my friends decided to come out to join me in Sri Lanka when I spent a few months there in the early 1990s. I still remember his slowly growing shock on the trip back from the airport as the serene and mystic East hit him full force with all five senses and some he hadn’t even suspected he had.

The 2011 census recorded 82,026 Buddhists in London, 34 per cent of the Buddhist population of England. In comparison, for London the census found 3,957,984 Christians, 411,291 Hindus, 148,602 Jews, 1,012,823 Muslims, 126,134 Sikhs, 47,970 people of other religions, and 1,694,372 of no religion.

It’s impossible to give an accurate figure for the number of Sri Lankans or people of Sri Lankan descent in the UK as the government lumps us all together as South Asian – an even broader generalization than lumping all Europeans together. If I was inclined towards taking offence, I probably would.

Instead, I attend my local parish church on Sunday. It was built in the 1930s; it’s no architectural marvel – the architect’s original ambitious plan was cut off halfway through when funds ran out and the builders, building from the altar and chancel outwards, simply ended the church where they’d got to, losing the planned basilica-style entrance and bell tower – but at least it doesn’t set out to actively sabotage prayer and undermine worship, unlike some modern churches. I’ve even grown fond of the huge statue of the Risen Christ that the previous parish priest commissioned and had installed in the chancel – the hair, spreading like that of the best professional shampoo model from his scalp, apparently represents Christ rising from hell upon the breath of the Holy Spirit.

It’s an ordinary north London parish served by priests who don’t claim to be anything other than priests. The congregation is… well, people. The mix, running through all social classes and ethnic groups, is what you find in churches. It’s no elite organization, there are no secret teachings and, really, it’s pretty ordinary. But I meet God there. I meet him whenever I go to Mass, in the silence of sacraments, beyond words, in the real, physical presence of this world and the next: bread, wine, water.

I began this book beneath the belly of a whale. I will end it by walking, pacing prayer into the stones of this city of God. My life has been one of small compass, lived up and down the Piccadilly Line. I will walk from the centre to my home, from St Patrick’s in Soho to Our Lady of Lourdes in the suburbs, looking to see the signs of God in the city of the world.

Well, that was pretty gruelling. Not the walking, although twelve miles on hard pavements was enough to leave muscles aching and a knee sore. No, it was the ghosts. I didn’t expect them. But they swarmed around me, moths of memory, flapping across my sight and through my mind. The boy I was, the boys I knew; they walked with me although they are all dead.

This is, I see now, a city of ghosts. We, the living, are less substantial than they; we drift through them.

It was as well that the old Foyles is closed now, awaiting the redevelopment that is washing through the whole area around Tottenham Court Road Tube station in anticipation of Crossrail; if it had been open, or accessible, the whispering, the murmur of all those books would have held me tighter than memory.

Books have ghosts too, you know. Curiously, these ghosts are not particularly apparent in the second-hand bookshops on and off the Charing Cross Road; in these shops, the books wait in expectation. But go to a charity shop or, even more so, a restaurant or hotel that has bought books by the yard to fill shelves and then you will feel the ghosts, as words and stories coil in upon themselves.

From Leicester Square, I walked past the bookshops, sometimes touching a spine or a jacket with a trailing finger for the feel of paper and the benediction of words: remember, books were my first church and here there are many chapels. I went to Foyles, the new Foyles: light and airy and spacious – as far from the cramped and crabbed space of old as is possible within the confines of still having lots of books on shelves. A fine bookshop, I suppose, and they do have my books for sale, but too much like everywhere else.

On the corner of Soho Square is the House of St Barnabas. Once a hostel for the homeless, it was founded in 1846 “for the relief of the destitute and the houseless poor in London”. Its two principal objects were “to afford temporary relief to as many destitute cases as possible, and to have a Christian effect on the poor population,⁹⁸” and William Gladstone was among its sponsors. It continued its charitable work throughout the twentieth century, at one time providing beds for 800 women, but the hostel closed in 2006. And it became a private-members’ club. A supremely trendy private-members’ club, with founders including Jarvis Cocker and Gilles Peterson, it allows all the networking creatives to feel really good about themselves by using part of their subscription to fund its employment and skills programme for the homeless and unemployed. Walk past any lunchtime and, if you stand near the old pipe chute that allowed passers-by to make anonymous coin donations, you’ll be almost overwhelmed by the smell of roasting lamb.

That’s modern charity for you: doing good while eating well. (My relatives in Sri Lanka, in the aftermath of the tsunami, all noted how the NGOs first secured the best hotels in the island before moving on to disaster relief. After all, why should a commitment to change be linked to personal poverty?)

St Patrick’s was a relief. Fr Alexander Sherbrooke, the parish priest, has overseen the church’s transformation: not only has he masterminded the renewal and renovation of its interior, but he has founded a school for evangelization, leading young people out onto the streets of Soho to spread, through speech and procession and prayer, the news of hope. After all, what more does Soho (or, indeed, twenty-first-century Western culture in general) offer than an unusually wide range of people with whom to have sex, and the newest iPhone? In such a world, hope is not a luxury, it’s an escape.

The Radha Krishna temple of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) is around the corner. Earnest devotees will sometimes press books on me by their founder, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and they regularly bring great juggernauts of the gods out onto the street, flower-garlanded and vivid with chant. It’s as if the sound paints the figure with light, however dull the day.

When I worked on the TVs, delivering and repairing televisions and videos and driving round London every day, I’d be up and down, up and down the North Circular as the boxed retail corporations set up warehouses along its length: Tesco, Toys R Us, Ikea. We’d turn off the North Circular at the Ikea junction if we had jobs in Harlesden or Neasden and that’s how I got to see the building of the Neasden Temple, or BAPS Shri Swaminaryan Mandir to give it its official title. Much as I love London’s suburbs – roll on the day when a row of 1930s semi-detached houses with their front gardens as yet untarmacked is given Grade II protection – even I have to admit that the North Circular spread something of a grey blight around its circuit. That is, until 1992, when volunteers started building the temple from white marble that had first been shipped to India to be carved and then brought to England for assembly. It took two and a half years to build, a progress so quick that it only added to the dream-like nature of the building. Even today, although the early blinding white of the marble has been streaked by twenty years of London rain, the temple still appears as a vision on Brentfield Road.

At the bottom of Tottenham Court Road is the Dominion Theatre. I saw Dexys Midnight Runners play there in 1985, with Kevin Rowland doing push-ups on stage to the apparent bemusement of his bandmates. The theatre was home to the Queen musical, We Will Rock You, between 2002 and 2014. When Freddie Mercury died, I saw some footage of his funeral and in among the preening mourners of the rock and entertainment worlds were two diminutive Indian figures, traditionally clad: Mercury’s mother and father. They were Parsis and it was a Zoroastrian funeral.

Since 2005, the Dominion has hosted the Sunday services of Hillsong Church, the London branch of the Sydney megachurch. And it is mega. There are four services each Sunday, filling out the theatre. When I went, and spoke to some of the people attending, it was remarkable how much their lives had been transformed by faith. “Church is everything” was a typical response to my question, “What is church?”

But what was remarkable for me was the complete lack of traditional Christian iconography. This was Christianity reimagined for people who wouldn’t be seen dead in an ordinary church, and it was working. The place was packed.

London is lonely. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to remark on this or to know this. The ghosts had reminded me of the deep loneliness of the past. But at Hillsong, after the worship music – rather loud and lacking in polyphony for my taste, but well done – everyone in the congregation/audience was enjoined to turn and talk to the people around them; to talk to the people they did not know. Barriers were broken, conversations entered, and lonely people engaged. Then the minister came on stage. His name was Pete Wilson and I met him later at the Hospital Club (a private-members’ club founded by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft), where he did not look at all out of place among the self-consciously cool media types scrolling through their iPads. Wilson was dressed in a black leather bomber jacket and he proceeded to give a tour de force performance in holding an audience with words, while examining a verse from the Bible – I’m ashamed to say I cannot remember which one – and showing its applicability to people’s lives. If I had walked in from the street at one of the crisis points in my life, his exposition would likely have served to give me hope.

I had never understood the appeal of Pentecostalism before, nor how it could have gone from barely existing at the start of the twentieth century to claiming over 250 million followers by the end of that century, but now I began to see some of its appeal.

The key that opens the heart to grace is different for everybody; the stripes the world lays upon us are such that sometimes it becomes impossible for a person to appreciate the truth under its clearest forms. Then God must write crooked, that the person might yet read.

Walking north, my ghosts whispering my way, I passed almost the whole panoply of religious belief today: the Scientologists on Tottenham Court Road; the American International Church further up the road; Camden Town Methodist Church; St Michael’s Church, Camden Town; the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of All Saints on Camden Street; Holloway Seventh-Day Adventist Church on the Holloway Road; the Al-Risaalah Mosque on Parkhurst Road; St John the Evangelist Church on the Holloway Road; and, just a bit further up, St Gabriel’s of childhood memory, now much improved within (there’s not much that can be done with the exterior save tearing it down and building afresh); halfway up the hill, St Joseph’s Church; Christ Church, Crouch End; Jubilee Church in the Vue Cinema in Wood Green; Zion Church of Christ Apostolic in Perth Road; the Palmers Green and Southgate Synagogue. If my legs hadn’t been pretty tired by the end, I could easily have added the Nanak Darbar North London. This chimes pretty well with my experience: around where I live, it seems almost everyone goes to church, mosque, synagogue, gurdwara, or temple. And this in the Great Wen, the city that first gave the finger to God, secure in its wealth and power. But God sneaks in under the radar. Think on this. Of all the movements of armies and emperors in the centuries of Roman rule over what seemed the whole world, the most significant movement was that of a handful of Jews leaving their homeland. No Roman historian noticed a Jew called Paul tramping their roads, but his journeys, and those of the other apostles, proved of more importance than that of any emperor.

The same is true of London today. The city’s movers and makers, the talkers and mediacrities that fill screens and pages with prattle, remain blithely unaware of what is going on around them, so secure are they in their bubbles of influence. For London, seemingly without anyone noticing, has become over the last twenty years the most religious part of Britain. Church attendance has risen from just over 620,000 in 2005 to just over 720,000 in 2012 (when the last comprehensive survey was completed). Even more unexpectedly, the percentage of twenty-something Londoners going to church is almost double that for the rest of England. A further 120,000 people attend midweek church activities, which means that all together over 10 per cent of Londoners attend church weekly. And it’s not just congregations: the number of churches is growing as well, with a 67 per cent growth in the number of churches in Inner London between 1979 and 2012, and a 25 per cent increase in Outer London over the same period.

This does not surprise me. Years of driving and walking down streets that our modern media figures would never visit have shown me that churches are opening up all over the place, particularly in the Victorian zone of expansion, but often in new and unexpected places: cinema complexes, disused industrial units, closed-down shops, houses. Seeing this fills me with hope: the early Christians had to make do with such make-do premises; watching this happen again suggests that God, yet again, might be pulling one of his bait-and-switch moves on human expectations. The century that was, yet again, supposed to see his end might yet give unexpected birth to rebirth.

Will the country follow London or London follow the rest of the country? History suggests the former: where London has led, England has generally followed.

As have I. This story began under the belly of a whale. It rambled through history and took an unexpected turn abroad, before returning to where it started. A suburban church, with no great pretensions, and a priest who claimed to be nothing other than a priest, an imperfect man in service of a dangerous God, sitting behind a screen and hearing my confession.

And when I finished and he, “an unworthy priest”, said the words of absolution, I felt a band drawn tight around my chest, a chain I had not even known was there, loosen and let go.

I pace the pavements, treading prayer into stone.