Sanctuary
I once took a wrong turn cycling home from Chelsea, and accidentally came across a sanctuary within South Kensington – a magnificent church towering from a garden island around which roads bent and houses stood a respectful distance back. I immediately resolved that I might one day live in one of those houses, abandoning plans for habitat on Orme Court – but had stumbled across this paradise so very accidentally that I could never find it again by purpose.
Tonight I did find it again, more or less by accident again, as these things tend to go. The church has an identity, St Mary the Boltons Church, and I now know how to get there again. I first passed it under snow; tonight I passed it on a mild spring evening, and it was more beautiful again. I haven’t a religious bone in my body, but I do love churches, these awe-inspiring monuments of excess dedicated to an idea.
And like the first time I passed St Mary, I was tonight struck by the peace of this petite garden state. Turning from Brompton Road all sounds of traffic dropped away; the experience was jarred only by a policeman with his flashlight remonstrating some hapless driver for owning a vehicle with insufficient tire tread. Passing this odd couple, I came face to face with a small fox, frozen at the sight of me. It turned and leapt the iron fence, back into the garden island. Cycling all the way around the island, I was astonished to come across another fox – or perhaps the same? – squeezing through the fence away from the other side of the garden. Again it saw me, and swiftly turned tail, lithely scooting back into the church grounds.
When Diego de la Vega found a fox in a cave he had chosen to make his lair, he adopted the alter-ego of El Zorro, the Fox. When a bat unexpectedly smashed through a window of Wayne Manor, Bruce Wayne adopted the alter-ego of the Batman. I had no such moment of epiphany with my sighting of two foxes who may have been one, but I was grateful for finding this holy garden sanctuary of greater London, in which the sounds of human living drain away and animals of the night can still safely roam. And I love this city for its many secrets, sanctuaries and unexpectedly silent places.