History Of Religion: Brooke waits at the lights and then crosses to St. Alfege’s, which is said out loud like St. Alfie’s, regardless of how it looks when it is written down. Philosophy is actually quite easy. She will perhaps study it when she is at university, if she does not become a person who sings in musicals like on Over the Rainbow on Saturdays on BBC1. She runs round to the front of the church. The door is open. The church is empty. Inside she looks up, like she always does, at the painted wooden unicorn rearing his front legs. Unicorns are imaginary. She looks at the picture of General Wolfe in the window. He was something in a war. Then she goes to the table with the historic photocopy on it of the Viking axe head which was once found in the Thames and is from the 11th century, and is now in the British Museum. That makes the British Museum kind of like a sort of river too, full of things that have been found like that in, say, real rivers. The axe head is supposed to be like the one — in fact it might even, it is actually possible, be the one — which a kind man who had been baptized by St. Alfege used to kill St. Alfege after a Viking brained him with the head of an ox and pretty much killed him, just not outright. So the kind man hit him in the head with his axe. Moved by piety to an impious deed is what it says on the bit of paper under the photo of the axe. The axe blade looks really blunt and rusty. What happened was: Alfege was a man who decided he didn’t want any wordly possessions so he went into a monastery in the 11th century. But the monastery was too full of wordly possessions so then he became an anchorite in a bath, or maybe in Bath. Whichever, so many people came to ask him things, because he was so religious, that he stopped being an anchorite and founded a monastery of his own, and once on his way to somewhere in Italy he was attacked by robbers but the robbers while they were attacking him heard that their village was burning to the ground, and it only stopped burning when they stopped attacking Alfege. Then he was Archbishop of Canterbury (like the author Samuel Beckett who was stabbed to death on the altar) and he converted a lot of Danes. Some of the Danes he didn’t convert took him to Greenwich as their prisoner and they put his feet in irons, the historic kind not the clothes kind, and locked him in a cell full of frogs which was apparently geographically right here where this church is now. The story goes that he conversed with the frogs and the frogs spoke back to him miraculously as if they were all old friends. And even though he could miraculously communicate with frogs and even though he could miraculously burn down places and also miraculously cure a lot of bad stomach problems the Danes had, the Danes still wouldn’t let him free unless someone paid them a lot of money, and no one, not even one of the people who had come to speak to him for advice when he was an anchorite or anything, would pay his ransom for him, so one night the Danes were having a feast and they started for entertainment just throwing the bones they were eating at him, and one of the bones was the whole head of an ox. But after he was dead, he carried on causing miracles, like if a dead stick was stuck in the ground and sprinkled with his blood, then the stick when you looked at it the next morning would be covered in leaves. There is a book in this church over by the organ keyboard for people to write things in. Today it says Please help dads friend Tim rest safely in hevean because my family and I miss him much Thanks God Amen. God, please pray for my mum and close friends, for them to stay healthy and be happy Thank you for all the nice things happening in my life. Pray for me to stay in good health thank you. Sat 3rd Dear God — Please help MARIO RINGER be calm / patient whilst he is at home awaiting for his broken ankle (which has been pinned and plated) to be mended Thank you. There it is, the pencil lying longways down the middle of the pages. It is a red one and it says on it Longitude 0° 0 00. It is one of the kind they sell at the Observatory. Brooke knew a pencil would be here. It is why she came into the church. There is nobody else in the church. She is just borrowing it. She turns while she is putting it in her pocket and pulling her jumper over the top of it and pretends while she does this that she is looking at the famous keyboard which is in behind glass or perspex so no one can play with it. It is called a console. This is funny, if you think of a computer console, and also because of the word that means make people feel better. She reads the history of it next to the console on a notice: This eighteenth-century console came from the organ when it was rebuilt in 1910. Experts believe that some of the octaves of the middle of the keyboard are almost certainly from the Tudor period and therefore likely to have been played by Thomas Tallis and the princesses Mary and Elizabeth when they were living at Greenwich Palace. Brooke can imagine them really easily. It was before the Princess was the Queen and wore the red wig and had rotten teeth that went black, and wore so many jewels that she could hardly walk. It is from when her hands were small and were young hands. It is quite easy to imagine her. What is much harder is to imagine all the hands of all the people who will have played this console but who the notice doesn’t mention. There must have been some. Brooke imagines just anybody’s hands playing on the old yellow keys. She imagines wrists on the hands, and then if it is a lady she imagines a sleeve of a dress, blue, and if it is a man a sleeve of a jacket, brown and tweedy. Then Brooke imagines the Queen, but alive right now, and really young. She has just run across the park and sheltered under a tree because it was raining. It was just any old tree. Now her sheltering under it has made it historic, and all the paparazzi people come up from the Lees’ house where there is no point in them being any more, and take photos of it and of Walter Raleigh putting his coat on the puddle for her and her stepping on it, they make her step on it several times over so they can get the best photo. Now the Queen is sitting in front of a screen. There are a lot of courtiers asking her things and she is ignoring them because she is in the middle of playing Call Of Duty. She is aiming her gun at a window and looking through the telescopic sights. That is like Amina, the girl in the year ahead of her at school who everyone knows came from a warzone and is way Christian, and says she became it and believed in God the very moment a bullet that was fired at her missed her. When she talks about it happening she draws a line in the air close to her head for where she felt the bullet go past her. From the moment it missed, she says, she has believed in God. Well duh. But what Brooke wants to know is what about the people who were hit by bullets and died? Does that mean that God didn’t like them? Or that they didn’t believe in Him or It? Or that they believed in the wrong God? Or that they did believe but that God just decided against them? What do the dead people feel about believing in God? But that is just a lot of rubbish because dead people can’t feel or believe anything. They are just dead, like the old lady, in the ground, or some are ashes if they have been cremated. Brooke leaves the church, past all the stones with the dead people under them in the ground not having to believe or feel. She will bring the pencil back when she is finished using it. She walks past Straightsmouth, then stops. Would it be best to start writing the History Moleskine here or down nearer the River Thames? Which would be the better historic place? The pencil says on it This pencil is made from recycled CD cases NMM London 2007. It was made when she was still only seven and still went to school in Harrogate, not here.