In the Footsteps of the Ripper

He came silently out of the midnight shadows of August 31, 1888. Watching. Stalking. Butchering raddled, drink-sodden East End prostitutes. Leaving a trail of blood that led...nowhere. Yes, something wicked this way walked, for this is the Ripper's slashing grounds. We evoke that autumn of gaslight and fog, of menacing shadows and stealthy footsteps as we inspect the murder sites, sift through the evidence - in all its gory detail - and get to grips, so to speak, with the main suspects. Afterward we can steady our nerves in "The Ten Bells", the pub where the victims - perhaps under the steely gaze of the Ripper himself - tried to forget the waking nightmare. (From the Original London Walks brochure*.)

Shudder!

I plucked up courage to do the Ripper walk with my sister one icy Friday night. We started from Tower Bridge tube station. Our guide, Shaughan, led us to the sites of the murders and described them all in the grizzliest of details, conjuring up bodies and leaving them suitably disembowelled on the pavement. We were given the clues, the theories of whomightadunnit, of freemasonary, royal involvement and police complicity. I buttonholed our Shaughan at the end of the walk to ask him what he thought of Patricia Cornwall's view that Walter Sickert was the Ripper - our guide was far from convinced. (Will I bother to read the book now?)

As most of the old streets in the City (the original walled square mile) disappeared in the blitz, our corpses lay among the steel and glass towers of the commercial heart of London, but crossing a road into Spitalfields in the East End we made a timeslip, and the air was still thick with ghosts. In a narrow Victorian alleyway we listened to the account of the grusome slaying of the fifth and final victim Mary Jane Kelly: (horriblest detail: her breasts were cut off and neatly arranged on the side table by her bed!).

The walk ended at the Ten Bells pub, apparently the Ripper's local. We didn't go in for a drink. Both of us felt that it looked a bit creepy, and anyway something else had caught my eye.

There across the road was Christ Church, Spitalfields, the church I wrote about some time ago - the setting for the first part of Peter Ackroyd's terrifying Hawksmoor. I dragged my poor sister over there and told her to take a long look at it (Be afraid! Be very afraid!) because now she'd have to read the book - and yes, I found a copy for her the next day.

To further the literary connections of the evening we took a short stroll to Brick Lane (the setting of course for Monica Ali's novel) and had a curry. (Not very good. I felt nostalgic for the pre-Bangladeshi days when the Indian food was excellent. Did we just choose the wrong restaurant?)

Notes:

*Just to say that - even though I don't have a particularly strong herd instinct and hate to feel a tourist, I strongly recommend this company's walking tours. The last time I was back I did one of Christopher Wren's churches - some of them not usually open to the public, all of them deserving interpretation. I learned so much.

** The Casebook website, which I've already posted a couple of links to, is a brilliant resource if you want to know more about Jack the Ripper.

Satanic Synchronicity

Just started rereading Peter Ackroyd's chilling Hawksmoor, twenty years or so after it first terrified me.

Ackroyd moves back and forth between the eighteenth century and the present in this tale of architect Nicholas Dyer who builds churches based on satanic principles. Dyer is based on real-life architect based on Nicholas Hawksmoor who worked with Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London and constructed a number of churches in London. And there is certainly evidence of the incorporation of occult elements in the Hawksmoor churches. (If you're curious take a look at this excellent essay The Eloquence of Stone: A Long Look at Christ Church by Eduardo Zinna.)







All my own nightmares are here between the pages. Ackroyd recreates the London I search for each time I walk the oldest parts of the city, conscious of the thousands of years of history beneath my feet. Sometimes the past seems so close that you could enter it.

I am afraid of old churches too. Wake in a cold sweat dreaming of spires and the chanting of demons.

I'm leading up to a story ...

My friend Lucy taught EFL with me on Summer School at my college in Plymouth. She has a brother who is an archaeologist and has been on numerous digs, and she's always fascinated by his work. Back in the mid-80's he was involved in the first dig of a crypt of a church from the eighteenth-century. The church was Christ Church in Spitalfields, and it was one of the Hawksmoor churches.



The idea was that the crypt was to be cleared of coffins so that it could be used as a centre for the homeless of this very poor area of the East End. But there were quite a number of coffins dating from the period when the church was built and these had to be catalogued first since they would offer important insights into the life of the local population of the time.

Now at that point in time it was common to use lead-lined coffins which preserve the body from the elements.

My friend's brother and his team set about opening up the coffins to document the contents.

Maybe it was because of the build up of gases in the coffin, or maybe there was a chemical reaction when air rushed in, but as soon as the coffin lids were prised open, the bodies just ... exploded.

One woman had a corpse explode in her face and was covered with fragments of the body. She began to scream, couldn't stop. Had to be warded in a psychiatric hospital.(Apparently post traumatic stress syndrome is a very real danger for forensic anthropolgists who need to receive regular counselling).

Anyhow, Lucy heard this story from her brother when she went to visit the site of the dig in the crypt one day and she could see her brother was pretty spooked out by the incident.

Lucy later caught her bus home, decided to read on the journey and reached into her bag for the new novel she had bought that morning.

You've guessed it - Ackroyd's Hawksmoor. Set in the very same church she had just visited.

Now how's that for synchronicity?