Outside the High Court I met the maelstrom of press with my statement: the one I’d scribbled for the unlikely event in which I was successfully granted a judicial review. It was a strange feeling, that kind of success, though. It’s not the kind that you achieve and own; it was something that I had set in motion with a small group of others and which had now grown and gathered momentum far beyond my possession. Now I had to run to keep up with it: stepping up every time a microphone was pointed at me, letting the story be heard, and the legal arguments be made. If I had lost that day I would have been glad of the opportunity to draw attention to what was happening behind closed doors.
But instead we had been successful and the story turned international. And I wondered if I would have the energy to keep up with all the television and radio interviews that Dad and Helen were busily mapping for the coming hours and following days. By 9pm I had shared most of the evening headlines with news of the start of the trial of Ian Huntley, the Soham child murderer, and, in exhaustion, walked out of my Channel 4 News studio interview with Jon Snow through the wrong door and straight into a broom cupboard. With relief I turned round to find the comedy hadn’t been lost on the cameraman and Jon, who met my laughter with a huge grin and thumbs up. If it had happened following an interview with a particular female news anchor earlier that evening I’m pretty sure she would have leapt up to bolt the door behind me. The hostility towards what I was doing from female journalists was sometimes barely concealed, and again and again came their demand to explain why I was attacking a woman’s right to choose.
And I got it: I got the injustice that women often relentlessly and systematically suffer at the hands of men. I knew first hand, like many women do in their own particular ways, the inequality, abuse and lack of autonomy and respect that life as a woman can bring, and how this will sometimes lead to the need for safe abortion. But the triumph of feminism seemed to have got stuck there, as if abortion is the best we can do for women – a hard-won political victory that we can’t afford to jeopardise even by acknowledging the raw deal it can be for women. I wanted to say, “Hold on … is this as far as we go? Is this what we’re settling for?” For all the problems abortion might do away with, it too is a violence that the woman undergoes. Can’t we hope for something better?
My friends who’d had abortions had all had a horrible time; none of them were whooping hoorays over their right to choose. More often it wasn’t a choice so much as the only way that they were offered by the men in their lives to get out of an impossible situation.
Nothing brought this home to me more than meeting a woman in the waiting room of the obs and gynae consultant I’d gone to see the year before. I hadn’t noticed her across the room from me until she started crying. When I went over to give her a tissue she sobbed harder. As if she was relieved to have someone else there.
“Are you by yourself?”
She was.
Then she told me how she was pregnant with twins and one of them had been diagnosed with Down’s syndrome. Her husband wanted her to abort the twin with Down’s but she didn’t want to; she didn’t want to risk the life of either twin. Her family was against abortion and told her she’d be on her own if she had one. Her husband told her he would leave if she didn’t. Now she was here, alone.
Women being left in an agonizing position, facing terrifying consequences whichever decision they make, doesn’t feel like much of a choice at all; it’s still women left taking the strain, maybe forced to do something that goes against every instinct they have to protect the unborn life that they’re carrying – even though it may be missing a limb or part of its palate, or be chromosomally enhanced, or unlikely to walk. It’s not that one decision is easier than another but that the concept of choice has been hijacked by the tellers of one part of the story. It is as if the fear of naming our right to choose life and celebrating the strength it takes to do that might be too risky politically and might set back the position of women.
I wanted to find sound bites to express my doubts about the way abortion was being widely normalized in order to make it easier for women to endure. It seemed a short-sighted policy because it might equally let women down, denying them space to acknowledge their loss, and even preventing men and women from becoming a life-giving solution to what seems an inconvenience or an altogether bad prognosis.
But it’s tricky to be the one asking the questions when you’ve got journalists and photographers camped outside your front door. When I returned to Chester and found myself doorstepped by press, I was grateful for parishioners who invited me to the safety of their home tucked away along a private road, who gave me space to formulate careful responses in newspaper articles and to work out what I was going to tell Bob when he returned from Pakistan.
When he did return, to find television camera crews filming the Sunday morning service and St Michael’s now the most infamous church in Chester, he couldn’t have been more supportive. Deluged by more mail than I could open, Bob arranged for someone to help me open all the letters – and filter the rabidly hateful ones. It didn’t always work; one envelope in particular misled me with its comic depiction of an alien in biro next to the address. When I opened it up I found a card with a very definite drawing of Satan himself; underneath were scrawled the words Jepson you sit at the Devil’s feet you evil woman. I began to see the potential for decorating the walls of my downstairs loo with these letters. Visitors could be lost in there for some considerable time with images and messages like this to read.
Many people decided to cut out – and sometimes cut up – pictures of my face from the newspapers and send them to me with comments. But if this threatened to knock my confidence, a moment of integration came when two people sent me the same picture of myself within a matter of days of each other. One had written in the accompanying letter “the kindness shines through your eyes”. The other sender hadn’t written a letter at all; she just sent the ripped out page with the same photo on it and underneath had inked her tirade, you have such a cold face – you should really start letting that smile reach your eyes.
At this point I’d have expected ghosts of the past to come back; only they didn’t. Instead I felt relief, as if I’d suddenly been unhooked from an intravenous drip of reactive and useless commentary that had been feeding me untruths about myself. I lay the two photographs of myself side by side on the dining room table and looked at them. Neither sender would probably ever know who Joanna Jepson was; they were just responding, kindly or unkindly, to a persona. All that this face of the young curate in the newspaper would reflect were their own attitudes and conclusions and hope. Just like the other kids at school had seen. Only now, splashed across the front pages of national newspapers and reviled or feted on internet chat threads, it didn’t really matter, because I knew who I was, the doubts and hopes I held and, deep down, what I was about. And that, though it had been a long time coming, was a peace that I could live with.
30
Thursday Morning Crem Rota
Whilst he had given me admin support, prayer support and organized a website in support of my case, Bob did not let me off any preaching duties. Nor, a few weeks later, did he arrange for me to be quietly taken off the Thursday morning crematorium rota. Thursday morning at the crem was set aside for the funerals of foetuses aborted in late stage pregnancy. All the local clergy were asked to take their turn in providing funeral services and pastoral care for the families, but I couldn’t believe the timing of my appearance on the rota; of all the clergy, surely I would be the least welcome one to send round to these grieving families.
But Bob would hear none of my arguments about pastoral sensitivity, which was really my attempt to hide behind theological excuses. And he was right not to: occupying headlines and press sound bites was a comfortable place to be compared with sitting alongside grieving parents planning a funeral for a much-wanted baby.
And so, heavy-hearted, I went one by one to the families whose little ones would have a sl
ot on that Thursday morning list of services, hoping that they wouldn’t recognize me. And one by one I sat with these shocked, empty-handed couples, listening to them telling me about the tiny life that they had named and how they were going to try and say goodbye before they had ever had the chance to say hello.
On Thursday morning the funeral directors brought a coffin to the crematorium where I waited alone in the vestry, and opening it up they unpacked a collection of tiny white cardboard boxes that weighed almost nothing. I stood looking at the little row of boxes at my feet, each with a small name written on it. Nothing about them big enough to convey the vast grief and loss and love that surrounded each one. Just a flimsy, almost weightless box, placed on the plinth in the chapel, named and held in tears and numb prayers.
And then the words, muttered by a mother leaning over the small grave outside: “I’m so sorry.” Her husband pulled her close to him and the words gathered into the fog of sadness along with all the other words and tears and prayers that were said that day. Of course she was sorry, we were all sorry. None of us should have been there in that cemetery that day, least of all this little one. It wasn’t meant to be like this, and we all felt traumatized by what was happening.
It was only a while later, when the TV cameras and headlines cleared off after the next big story and I was called to a woman in labour, that I remembered the words of that mother standing over the tiny grave. The woman I was with had gone into labour alone and was hoping that her husband would come in time to greet this fragile life that the doctors had said was incompatible with life. The baby girl wouldn’t survive and I wondered at how this mother had the strength to go through labour knowing this.
Hours later I sat listening to the mother and father talking about hope and about how, even under the shadow of the words “incompatible with life”, they had wanted to let life take its course and have whatever time they could with their newborn. She hadn’t survived long enough for me even to baptize her. Instead the family gathered to say goodbye: a father comforting his wide-eyed older sons and an exhausted, stricken mother handing the tiny body covered in vernix and swaddling over to me to hold, and name, and bless. And while I’m praying desperately that I won’t be sick because it’s all got so hot and smelly in the room, these incredible parents talk about how thankful they are that they were able to meet their daughter and were given a few minutes to hold this loved new life in their arms.
Is this the suffering that doctors want their patients to be able to avoid? The vomit, the mess, the disappointment and the futile exhaustion, the tiny weight of a loved baby in your arms? Is it the tangibility of this grief that doctors want to enable women to avoid by offering terminations? Or are the healing possibilities of those moments that are compatible with life overlooked by medics who hope to help women avoid walking in the shadow of death for any longer than they have to? Because that night I saw the extraordinary strength and joy that life – even a few moments of life – brought; and grief clothed by gratitude instead of guilt.
31
A Holy Place in the World
There’s something subversive that happens at the end of makeover programmes like Trinny and Susannah. It’s that bit when they pull the sheet off the mirror and the woman who has been undergoing the Trinny and Susannah treatment gets to see herself transformed: all newly clothed, made-up and glowing. That bit when the woman starts to cry. It’s so intriguing because these programmes are meant to be light-hearted reality entertainment about shopping and shoes, where we all enjoy the fond bossiness with which Trinny and Susannah prey on their subjects, and we smugly watch a public rummage through these women’s wardrobes and the ruthless cull with which they empty them. But in the end, after all the bin-bags of hideous, ill-fitting clothes have been filled, we get to the best bit: the part where the woman sees herself in the mirror. And it’s no longer a bit of shallow entertainment because you can see that something very moving is happening to that woman.
It’s as if that woman is seeing herself afresh; that she isn’t just thinking “what a lovely suit they’ve put me in”, but that she sees herself – for the first time in a long time – as someone beautiful and worth dressing and making lovely and bringing out the best in. Because usually the women who cry are the ones who start off the programme looking most in need of some attention; the ones who arrive with little memory of themselves as noticeable, beautiful, special and dignified. So these outward symbols of dignity and worth matter because somehow they also speak truth about the person within: that they matter and are important and have value. It’s like a sacramental moment where clothes become the sign of our inner humanity and dignity.
It was an idea that some people around me were almost laughing in disbelief over. “Joanna, the fashion world is just full of narcissists – why don’t you go and work with people who really need it?” But I couldn’t shake off the desire to pursue the idea and, as I moved to set up a new chaplaincy within the London College of Fashion, I heard another story that broke like unexpected light onto my preparations. It was the story of an officer who was part of the Allied operation to clear and liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. What Lt Col Gonin had found there was total horror:
… corpses piled high or just lying alone where they’d dropped dead; the living scoured by dysentery; people choking on their vomit because they were too weak to turn over. One had to learn to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day would go on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect.
So it might have seemed like a sick joke when the British Red Cross turned up with boxes of red lipstick. Seriously. Of all the medical kits and medicine, blankets and food, toiletry supplies and clean water that they were crying out for – they get red lippy. If I’d opened those boxes up I would have been too appalled by the obvious mistake to have started actually handing it out. But for some reason the lipsticks were distributed and a flabbergasted Lt Col Gonin wrote of what happened:
I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post-mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
They were recognized as someone once again. That was what the crazy gift of lipstick gave to the walking dead in a concentration camp. And that’s the gift that lipstick, clothes, shoes, dresses, suits, scarves, ties, hats and everything else we can design in the name of fashion can give us.
Which is why, when columnists scorned my new role at the London College of Fashion, I could laugh it off and carry on.
This weekend it was revealed that His plan for Joanna has seen her leave her parish to take up a position as chaplain for the London College of Fashion, where she will no doubt be drawn into important debates as to how a benevolent God could permit suffering or the latest Roberto Cavalli collection.1
One can see that there is more to the business than mere clothes – there’s the cocaine, the parties and the sex for a start – but when Dr Corner, head of LCF, suggests that it is, above all, about feeling good, and that spirituality should play its part, she loses me.2
Because comments like this were amusing, and it was true – I was an easy hit for the columnists that week. But, underneath all the quips, I couldn’t get over the power fashion has to help us express our integrity or to fracture it, tormenting us or allowing us to feel at home with ourselves.
The proble
m is, how do we find ourselves on the right side of that divide? When the images of woman that we are given to emulate are so thin and angular; so, frankly, alien to most of us. Most of us don’t look like walking coat-hangers – which is basically what a catwalk model is employed to be – and so a lot of the time we don’t look as the advertisers and magazines lead us to think we should look when we slip, or rather squeeze, into their sublime clothes. And it taunts us and tells us that our bodies are not quite right; that we look awful, that we’re inadequate. Which unfortunately is part of the game, the game that gets us chasing the dream that one day, if we just keep trying and looking hard enough, we will find the clothes that make us look good and make us feel better about ourselves.
As Lent approached one year I sat sharing a chocolate-brownie-and-popcorn-flavoured sundae with one of my parishioners while we discussed what to give up. Chocolate and alcohol have never been the real obstacles to spiritual clarity for me, but shopping or, rather, consumerism has. So I outlined to her my Lenten deal to give up shopping – complete with small print whereby I would still be allowed to purchase essential toiletries and gifts and even new shoes if I managed to get a hole in my present ones. My friend listened and didn’t say or eat anything until I’d finished. I was telling her this because I needed there to be just one person, besides God, who would know the official parameters of my Lenten sacrifice and who wouldn’t let me wriggle out with some new loophole that allowed me to go shopping five days after Ash Wednesday.
A Lot Like Eve Page 19