From a fresh

spot to an old
bone yard
CI IA RTERHOUSE will be trailing disconsolate behind the rest of the Catholic Herald to our new home near Bunhill Fields. Perhaps in future it will be called the B mhill Chronicle which has a nasty, dainty whimsey about it Over my dead body, but then there'll be plenty of them about anyway where we're going.
Bunhill Fields on the edge of the City of London was the first great graveyard for radical dissenters who could not bear to be buried in ground consecrated by the Establishment. it was also the place where they buried many cart loads of old bones taken from the charnel houses of the City churches of London in the reign of Elizabeth I.
We are doing a flit from Charterhouse Street which is not perhaps the most elegant street in London, but it is the only one I know where the gutters literally run with blood. For it stands opposite that noble temple to meat called Smithfield Market.
This is as vast as a metropolitan railway station, as grand as a cut price cathedral in a former colonial capital. At its corners are turrets topped with glass gazebos where mad meat barons sit dreaming of competitive prices within reason above the welter.
It is richly decorated with stopped clocks and allegorical statues depicting rude plenty, compound interest, the spirit of butchery and Britannia with her trident held out ready for a rump steak. But it was wildly though rather exclusively alive.
At one end of our street of course was the old Charterhouse itself from where the first Henrician martyrs came. The Catholic Herald was about half way down.
This was on two floors two stories up. They were murderous stairs and learned priests with their contributions to Truth ill typed on transparent paper, mounted them very carefully and slowly. So did 1 when I had to.
The office itself was hardly visible for dust and discarded paper. It was, of course, Dickensian, but Dickens in a hurry and pressed for money. It had no room for everyone at once. It had a malevolent tea machine that could never distinguish between tea and coffee. It had an extraordinary, shady km shaped like a comma. Even the briefest visit required a visit to this room for a surgical scrub up.
Its windows had views over lovely, desolate London, of the backs of buildings whose backs are better than their fronts. It looked over a wide expanse of electric railway that ran through a magnificent Victorian brick gorge. Goodness knows what they will find when they excavate these offices. I think most people there are rather sorry to leave.
Bunhill Fields has its disadvantages. True, there is a convenient graveyard. But think what will happen if all that lot rise together at the last trump.
The crowd will be Intolerable. There will be disorders as people search for their old bits and pieces. And most of them will be a pack of canting 17th and 18th Century puritans, intolerant and self righteous Enthusiasts, all praying down
their noses In the old dissenting whine and extempore and at great length. It will be no place for a Catholic on that day.
They may be resentful, at Smithfield we used to burn that sort for their beliefs. Still, I'm told we are bettering ourselves and there won't be that class of stairway to stop the heart of a reverend gentleman bent on earning an honest guinea. But I have yet to see the promised land.