Iffley Church

(So many of these images are in winter.) The door of the church opens, and a child enters the gloomy space. The height of the door is absurd against her size, but the light, what light there is, is drawn to her, and she hurries up the nave – not like a flame, but like a leaf in spring.

Following her is a man, tired footed, nose immediately affected by the candles’ thin smoke. The child crosses into the chancel, and through the gap in the altar rail. The man keeps his eyes on her in between glances up at the pillars and arches of the building. The child waits in front of a carving, patient, silent. When the man reaches her, she points without looking round, and says “These are the angels, Daddy.”

This was my daughter introducing me (and, a few minutes later, her mother), to a carving that she had been the very first person to see complete, apart from the stonemason himself. Her grandparents had happened to bring her to Iffley church just as the new aumbry (a cupboard for storing holy vessels) was finished. As the mason stood back, he asked her to come forward, and so she saw the fresh angels before anyone else.

This set a cap on my family’s engagement with the church. As none of us is a practising Christian, the importance of this corner of southeast Oxford to us has to be explained in other ways. I can’t speak for the others, so these are some of the things that matter to me. I can see that my daughter’s relationship with this church is complicated, deep and strong. But it’s also her own construction, built from the materials of the place, and how adults talk about it. I’ve constructed my own set of associations. Many, of course, are connected with her – for example, we always look together at the carving of the bird at the foot of one of the pillars marking the division between the chancel and the nave. Like much of the Norman and pseudo-Norman stonework all round the space, it’s very tactile. She can touch the smoothed plumage, adding her hand to that of the mason and of everyone else who has touched this image in the intervening centuries.

My daughter calls it “the Mark church” because high on the tower is carved my name (and that of the Evangelist). The building was constructed on a rise above the Thames in the early 12th century by a Norman landlord, apparently on the site of a Saxon church. It stands in a graveyard/garden behind a rambling vicarage and a high wall that hides it from the tarmac lane that runs outside. I’m not going to attempt a history here, but it’s worth saying that this church stands largely unchanged, despite the attentions of the Victorians, in a village that morphed into a refuge of the rich even as it was engulfed by the city. In the Ashmolean Museum there’s a 1930s aerial photograph of Iffley Lock on the river.

Then, the village was surrounded by fields. Now the suburb of Rose Hill is a literal stone’s throw from the Lock, and houses in Iffley flaunt grand architecture from behind high gates and extravagant alarm systems.

Apart from my name on the tower, the church also sports a dead ringer for the Gruffalo, and by its south door a moustachioed face that my daughter securely identifies as King Arthur, her mythic alter ego. There’s another, peculiar face that she says is me, and a griffin who’s her mother (I think this is meant as a compliment). In front of the west door is an ancient font, into which my daughter likes to be lifted, while Mum or Dad explains the idea of baptism.

Iffley church rises about the surrounding flood plains just south of central Oxford. Its square tower is eerily visible above the tree tops from the ring road. On summer evenings it glows with the same orange-red as the old buildings in the centre of the city. When I see it like that, it seems a constant, neither benevolent nor malicious, but simply itself, whether the road is choked or almost silent.

When I think of the interior of the church it’s always winter and either night or in deep grey cold. There’s a big square font just inside the door, with a dark stone top you can catch your hip on in the gloom. There’s a modern stained glass window whose Latin-speaking animals are hard to make out.

My daughter likes the carved lamb and angels in the chancel. I like the barred doorway – almost crevice – through which I can see steps heading up into shadow. These once led to the rood loft, from which a great crucifix hung before the Reformation, separating the parishioners from the clergy. There’s a second door high up in the south wall, and masonry protruding from the chancel arch to support the loft. Like one of Derrida’s erasures whose presence/absence resonates through the surviving text, the space between the chancel pillars where the image hung speaks to me of there being past lives that cannot be wholly understood even as I read their imprints on the world. Also, a set of steps rising and turning into darkness always seems to be offering peculiar adventure, as if in an Alan Garner novel.

Perhaps unimaginatively, on these winter visits to the darkened church, I also think of Annora peering in at the altar. Annora was an anchorite (anchoress?) who attached herself to Iffley church. Attached – almost literally. According to the guidebook her cell was built against the chancel wall, and a window cut into the flesh of the church so that she could participate in the Mass without leaving her isolation. She lived this way for about 10 years in the 13th century.
Nothing above ground remains of her cell. But there’s a sealed-up gap in the chancel wall. Below it is a pale lozenge-shaped medieval tombstone. This is supposed to be Annora’s.

I do wonder what went through her mind in all that time in contemplation. But what sustained her in her vigil is not something I could even know. I have no clear idea of who she was.

My 21st century mind is, however, able to make an irony from the circumstances of her life. A few metres from the south wall of the church is something really old – a yew. It may be 1,300 years old – more than 500 years old in Annora’s time – and was already growing into maturity when the present church was built.

The irony I’ve constructed is that, as I have read and heard, yew trees have a pre-Christian significance. It may be that they were planted, or encouraged to grow, in important places because they were poisonous to animals and so deterred unruly grazing. Their presence in many churchyards is a consequence of Christianity’s willingness to co-opt pre-existing cultural phenomena to further its acceptance among newly converted peoples. If the estimates of this tree’s age are right, it took root not all that long after Augustine brought the Roman church to Saxon England – that is, when it began it was invested with a pagan value long before it cast its shade on the roof of Annora’s cell. Of course, the vast majority of its history since then has been during Christian times. And perhaps “Celtic” Christianity already existed in what was to become Oxfordshire. All places start to become indeterminate if you look at them too hard.

My daughter loves the tree because it’s big and bristly. She can be lifted up into its aged branches to stand on the rim of the immensely wide hollow trunk, or even drop down inside, so that the wood hides her. She’s intrigued by the concrete in its base and some low-slung branches, which is holding the old thing up. She likes to play hide and seek in the huge, spiny circumference of its limbs. She believes families of foxes ought to live among its roots. Once, she and I were sitting the branches when a robin settled less than a metre away – her favourite bird. We watched it watching us for a while until it decided to peck for mites and beetles in the scaly bark. All those different lifespans in such close proximity.

It’s very hard to imagine a place as other than it is, unless you’ve seen it change yourself. I mean really imagine – the different sounds, smells, creatures, plants, and people. It’s hardest of all to see a place through other eyes – Annora’s, for example, or those of “Oliver”, the second recorded priest of the Norman church. When I think of how my daughter will see Iffley church when she grows up, I’m drawn back to a memory of my own: that indistinct leaf of a child moving through the dark and smell of candlewax towards the new angels. Something remembered and imagined with the same force.