25th June 2008 – The Invisible Garden

Here, the topiary – the heart stabbed through with the cross, like a sailor’s tattoo – and the ghostly shapes of Geese gone by…

 

And how we can’t tell where the Invisible Gardener’s work ends and the INVISIBLE GARDEN just happens – how we have to get out of the way and serve it and let it transform itself through us and us in the process…

 

On the afternoon of 17^th June 2008, John Crow showed Jimmy Cauty and Z. aka Mrs Redcross around the Invisible Garden. 2 JCs and a Z. Crow had come upon them flyposting Cauty’s Geese and Bones poster on the wall of the former burial ground.  Jimmy especially liked Crow’s Shrine for Dangerous Helpers with its broken gin bottle and cigar tin, its black feathers, its hairy patron Saint of Addicts and verses giving thanks for being set ‘free from mental slavery’.

 

Later, in the walled garden of the Ragged School, over tea and mango tart home-baked by Mrs R., they discuss how artists might contribute works to help establish Cross Bones as a site both of historical and living cultural importance, to save it from destruction by developers. J Crow urges J Cauty to become the Cross Bones icon painter. J Cauty says: ‘We should get BANKSY to do something on the concrete and tarmac, so they can’t dig up the bones without destroying his work.’

 

How John Crow – urban shaman and showman, The Bard of Southwark, servant of The Goose and curator of her Cross Bones Graveyard – came to be showing Jimmy Cauty – iconoclastic iconographer, co-founder of KLF, the artist who burnt a million quid – around this post-medieval prostitute’s cemetery in the heart of London…

 

is but a small part of the story at the very heart of all the stories to be told here, as you shall hear.

 

23rd June 2008 – Solstice Vigil

On the evening of the 23^rd June, the Friends of Cross Bones held our Solstice vigil. We gathered, as we do on the 23rd of every month, at 7pm at the Memorial Gates in Redcross Way – the iron gates of the works-yard adorned with ribbons, necklaces, flowers, totems.

 

All Friends affirmed that they were entirely responsible for their own actions, behaviour and safety, before embarking on a brief tour of the site. John Crow led the way in through the secret doorway, a battered old building-site door graffitied with the invitation to: ‘TOUCH FOR LOVE’. Stewards in reflective tabards (‘The Goose Samurai’) guided the 50 celebrants around the safe pathways.

 

Crow shows us ‘The Shrine of the Lost and Found’, a circle of bricks surrounding a primitive stone cross with a red lantern at its centre. On the bricks are arranged a fragment of a jawbone, a plastic lizard, a broken pair of glasses, half a scissor, a green comb, a tangle of tiny coloured wires – objects found during a previous clean up of the site by these informal ‘Friends’ of Cross Bones. Crow says it reminds us that people too can be lost – and found.

 

The pyramid is a creation of the invisible gardener, 10-foot tall and allegedly housing an antlered god-head composed of the branches and twigs – half a tree! -  of mistletoe that had appeared the Yule before last, hung on the memorial gates, a suffusion of leaves and berries with a red ribbon inviting us to: ‘TAKE A PIECE OF ME!’ – an early sign of the Invisible Gardener – this now-bare antlered branch now sealed up by the Invisible gardener in the hollow heart of the pyramid – his folly.

 

(Though IG assures me: ‘One day, Crow, you’ll be glad of that pyramid.’ True. I already am: pleased to have it – and IG – on our team. Though I had to put up with some bitching from some cross Cross Bones witches, concerned about signs of the intrusion of dominator culture into their place of the wild feminine.)

 

John Crow explains the sensitivities surrounding the Invisible Garden – how it had appeared to have been called into being by Jenn envisioning a garden and Crow affirming that it was already there. Then the Invisible Gardener had appeared out of the blue one Saturday morning in early 2007, had walked up to Crow and shook his hand and said: ‘Hello, John Crow, I’ve been watching you for some time. I’m not going to rain on your parade… Only I think you should know there already is a garden in there – and I’m helping it grow.’

 

(And this was only one of a concatenation of miracles surrounding The Goose, The Crow and their Cross Bones portal which has led, among many other hidden doors opened and Secret Histories revealed, and friendship and acquaintance with the highest and lowest of the living and the dead, to John  Crow being given a key to the secret door into an ancient burial ground for paupers and prostitutes.)

 

And Crow shows us the knot-garden, ablaze with poppies, in the shape of an eternity sign – or more precisely a double-diamond <><> – walled with rubble cleared from the site, enclosed with broken bricks and concrete chunks retrieved, by the Invisible Gardener and his trusty sidekick Sidney,  from the aftermath of a previous Museum of London excavation. One of the larger chunks – from a more recent impermanent structure on the site – clearly shows bones and the crown of a skull protruding from the concrete foundations that must have ripped them from their resting places. This evening bathed in the light of the setting sun the gardens are vividly stained with red and black poppies…

 

‘To honour… To remember…’

 

 

Cross Bones

A post-medieval burial ground in The Borough, Southwark, London.  It is bounded to the east by Borough High Street, west by Redcross Way; to the south is Union Street, with Southwark Street to the north. The graveyard was already regarded as “ancient” in the 16^th century, when it was known as ‘”the Single Woman’s churchyard”. This was a reference to the ‘Winchester Geese’, the prostitutes licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to work within the Liberty of the Clink. The tradition of a prostitutes’ graveyard persisted through to Victorian times – by then it had become a pauper’s burial ground known locally as ‘Cross Bones’.

Cross Bones was closed in 1853, described as being “completely overcharged with dead… further burials… [would be] inconsistent with a due regard for public health and public decency”  The site was then used as a builder’s yard. Its proposed sale for development was declared null and void under the 1884 Disused Burial Grounds Act and it was abandoned as derelict land.

In the 1990s the ground was dug up during work on the Jubilee Line Extension. Museum of London archaeologists removed some 150 skeletons – 1% of an estimated total of 15,000 burials. In 1996, the writer John Constable revived the legend of Cross Bones, specifically identifying it as the source of his cycle of mystery plays performed on Easter Sunday 2000 in Shakespeare’s Globe and Southwark Cathedral. This work, ‘revealed by The Goose to John Crow’ also gave rise to the annual Halloween of Cross Bones festival, which has been celebrated at the graveyard every year since 1998.  Cross Bones has become an inclusive pilgrimage site. There is a long established shrine at the gates in Redcross Way, and work is progressing on a memorial Goose Garden in the southernmost part of the site.