It is my pleasure to publish this extract from Gillian Tindall’s novel Journal of a Man Unknown which describes a nocturnal vision that is granted to the protagonist in Mile End
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‘It was a fine night, though chill, and the stars were out. I went walking on, beyond the Spital Fields and Brick Lane, out into the countryside to Mile End and beyond, to where there were few houses along the highway, out to where the Jews have made a burial ground. (I had met a few, newcomers to London like to the Huguenots, and they were very much the same manner of decent, hard-working people, for all their Spanish names). I had my knife in my belt as usual, but there was nothing to fear that far east out of Town: no-one about at all.
The moon was shining over St Dunstan’s, out at Stepney, and I lent a while against the dead Jews’ wall, watching it. I even contemplated walking yet further, so full of a strange energy did I feel. It was as if something that had been in the bottom of my mind for years, vaguely troubling me from time to time but ever quietly dismissed, had suddenly risen to the top that evening like liquid over a fire in a pan.
Jews, I know, have their own God whose son has yet to appear on earth. The Saracens have another one, of much the same kind by all accounts. The Huguenots, Protestants, Puritans, Catholics, Greek Christians and all the rest are supposed to believe in One God and His Son, but that has not stopped them from fighting and killing each other in the most un-Christian way in every century of which I have heard account. They were at it here in England all my childhood years.
How much fervent, angry, desperate praying goes on by all sides, many of the prayer-sayers wishing damnation on the others. And how little of it ever truly produces a result, except by ordinary life chances that are then falsely claimed as ‘prayers answered’?
And in that moment I knew, in a burst of freedom, like a man before whom a door that he believed firmly locked and forbidden is suddenly open – that I did not believe in any of it, and had not done so for many years.
And as for the idea that the great Maker of the construction is perpetually watching each of us separate persons, intent on testing every one of his multitudinous subjects’ loyalty with particular troubles and griefs, like a bad tempered and unjust King doling out unmerited torments to some on purpose to ‘try them’, while occasionally and unexpectedly bestowing blessings on others no more deserving – this was suddenly revealed to me as a story for badly behaved children.
And I strongly suspected in that same moment, that a number of the men whom I had met in London, and whom I most respected, had secretly come to the same never-to-be-spoken conclusion. Unbelief is contrary to the Law of both God and Man. But surely honest.
I went on standing there for quite a while, I think, trying to take in my new-found freedom. It felt right and just. But lonely, if – from – henceforth, there were none but myself in charge of my fate. Also a sense of my consequent, helpless separation in my secret heart from all others. For a few minutes my desolation recalled my first weeks alone in London. And I had no one at that time with whom I felt intimate enough to admit my new conviction.
And then something odd happened while I stood there. One of those moments, like the one in the night before I left the Forest (which I had dismissed as a dream). Although the Mile End Road was deserted, the few cottages around shuttered and none about but a half-grown fox in the Jews’ cemetery, who had caught sight of me over the wall and had scampered away, I suddenly became convinced that I was surrounded. By houses and people that I could sense but could not see. The moon at that moment had gone behind a thick cloud, a country-dark descended. Yet I felt as if I were standing in a City street. Voices, passing by, that I could not hear properly, and footsteps on stone and other sounds of rushing or roaring that I could not identify. Such as the sound of machines. But my strongest sensation was that I was hemmed in, crowded.
Cravenly fearful, as if my ungodly thoughts were somehow visiting on me a revenge, I clutched the top of the brick cemetery wall with my hands. That at least seemed solid and of all time. Fearful of what the returning moon might reveal, I shut my eyes for a while. I believe that by habit I even cravenly and illogically prayed ‘Keep me safe, Lord!’
I opened my eyes again at last when the sounds had faded away. The moon had returned. The Mile End Road was its peaceful, deserted, night-time self. The clock of St Dunstan’s struck twelve.
Suddenly very tired, I must have made my way back to the Spital Fields, though that I do not remember.’
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