Sirens whined, traffic honked. Blocking the buses and the cars, was a long religious procession. The image of Our Lady, borne shoulder high on a bier, teetered forward. Little girls threw flowers. From the doorway of a Brazilian bar a heavily lip-glossed waitress, with cascades of raven hair and 5cm of mini-skirt, made the sign of the cross.
The nutters in the procession, who included myself, sang, “Ave, Ave, Ave Maria!” Behind the 250 people were an army of clergy in exotic rig, and the rear was taken up by two prelates arrayed in costumes that would have been a bit on the dressy side at the coronation of Pius IX – yards of lace, gauntlets, and jewels the sizes of over-ripe strawberries on their hands. One was the Suffragan Bishop of Whitby and the other the Dean of St Paul’s, who preached an excellent sermon at the Vespers of Our Lady that followed the procession and bun-fight. For we were not in São Paulo, or Lourdes, but in Kentish Town. And the clergy at this May Devotion were (just about) Church of England – what writer John Osborne in a superb joke called “Walsingham Matildas”.
These beautiful ceremonies are only the cherry on the pudding – the rest of the time the inspired and inspiring parish priest who is responsible for them is a key figure in the local primary school, tireless in his local knowledge and care for all of us, from the lonely alkies (and that’s just the writers) to the schoolchildren, the criminals and the housebound. Community may be an overused word but it isn’t an overused phenomenon. What else in today’s Britain could bring together people of so many varied ethnic and social backgrounds?
Perhaps the answer is the car boot sale. Ruth, and Georgie, with whom I share my life, howl whenever I buy a tiny CD or comparatively small book, claiming that I’m “cluttering” the place. But they themselves think nothing of acquiring furniture, lamps, works of modernist sculpture, caged hamsters spewing sawdust, ceramics or clothes by the armful. Every now and then a clear-out is a desperate necessity and this time we drove to a school in Battersea where the Sunday car boot sale is a good one.
Ruth made a cool £500 for her load of junk and even 11-year-old Georgie, with a lorryload of worthy wooden toys, given by childless friends, dud Tamagotchis and no-longer-enjoyed Helen Dunmore novels came home 60 quid the richer. For an hour or so I manned the stall while they went round the other car boots, accumulating yet more clobber. Two things struck me – that most of the people at the sale belonged to the social class about which politicians and journalists are most alarmist and patronising – new immigrants and poor whites. There was also a large contingent of Russians. Only one customer (white English lower-middle) was nasty. One of the reasons we came home in a glow of happiness was, naturally, that we’d cleared the house of so much clobber. But another was the quite extraordinary variety of human pleasantness encountered.
The previous week, a kind friend took us to a brilliant performance by the London Children’s Ballet of Snow White at the Peacock Theatre. The performers, all schoolchildren, are not (except for those in the lead roles) in any sense aspirant professionals but the level of skill is astonishing.
One reason for going is the brilliance of the child-dancers. The other, if you are dingy north Londoners such as ourselves, is to gawp at the other members of the audience. It is fairly safe to say that almost none of them had ever attended a car boot sale in Battersea (or a May Devotion procession in Kentish Town).
This is the David Cameron class en masse. They live in Notting Hill and have a place in the country. Their voices, clothes and hair are beautiful but a little bit frightening. This year, looking at them, I felt they were quite powerful enough without being in government as well.
Does this mean that for once in my life I shall make up my mind how to vote in an election?
At the unmissable Van Dyck exhibition at Tate Britain, there they all were again, these yummy mummies. The faces of the Englishwomen in the entourage of Charles I are identical to those of the Notting Hillbillies. Proust, in an early story, wrote that a snob was a historical romantic who read, in the place settings of a grand dinner in 1890, the same names as appeared in the array of battle at Crécy.
We likewise can see those extraordinary upper-class genes reasserting themselves. Those who, in lace collars, awaited the return of Sir Hooray Henry from Edgehill now, in their Brora cardies, risk parking fines as they crunch their Saabs and four-wheel-drives against the Chelsea kerb.
To lunch with Nicolas Stacey, a former Olympic athlete who was the director of social services in Kent for 10 years. Most of us sit round talking about the state of the world. Stacey has actually done palpable good to his fellow mortals, not least as director of an Aids policy unit when panic about the disease was at its height, and as a prison visitor with a particular gift for helping the perpetrators of sex crimes.
He tells me that after quarter of a century voting Labour, he has no doubt where his vote will be cast at the general election. “Tory!” he says loudly. It is a good lunch and much is drunk, so I can’t tell you all the details of his reasoning. But here is the gist of what he said: many prison governors – about a third, he reckons – are much more stupid than the prisoners. The hospitals, staffed by brilliant doctors and nurses, are administered by dud “administrators”. Good teachers try their best in the comprehensives but the headteachers – not all, but too many – are duds.
What he seems to be saying – but, as I say, it was a very good lunch and the details are hazy – is we need a return to the “governing class”. We need to lure efficient unselfish people back into public life. But where will we find the prison governors, the hospital administrators, the headteachers of the future?
Stacey is a priest of the Church of England, as well as all these other things. A priest friend of his who went to conduct a retreat at Eton (admittedly before the credit crunch) discovered, upon talking to the young there, that they all wanted careers in finance. None said they wanted to go into public life.
I look at my own life – a bit less exalted than this but privileged and middle class. I have no civic sense. If the schools, hospitals, prisons and social services are crap, I know that is partly because clever people of my generation preferred either to go into the City or to pursue an arty career in the media.
No wonder the country is run by Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears. Nicolas Stacey is a throwback to the Victorian idea that people of privileged backgrounds “put something back” into society. He is now in his 80s. Where are the equivalents today?
AN Wilson’s most recent book is ‘Our Times’ (Hutchinson, £25)
