It is one of those places you go past every day and never notice. Then when you do notice it, it is a thing of sublime beauty and history. A church, a particularly beautiful yet stubby thing, no soaring spires, squatting between the decaying bed and breakfasts, Victoriana in decline, paint peeling home-made ‘vacancies’ signs blowing in a sudden surprising wind, astroturf yellowing in the salty blow from the sea.
Across the road is the timeless view across Morecambe Bay, hills and mountains fading ever more gently and faintly behind each other like an old fashioned watercolour painting someone forgot to finish.
A sign outside flutters. ‘Open.’
I must enter.
Through a door down the side and then a sudden surprising leap into a room filled with cheap shampoo, free things, 50p things, strange things, incontinence things, a charity shop with no borders and high ceilings. And an abundance of cheap Colgate toothpaste. High street brands battle with old china ornaments (free!) and you feel rich with a fiver in your hand- and beyond lie more treasures, the second-hand clothes, the jewelry, the unknown reaching into the vast musty cavern. I clutch my hoard of non-scented 50p Nordic shower gel.
Then a tap.
An elderly man with excited eyes wearing a hoodie featuring a crucifix and he wants to show me the secrets that lie beyond.
At this point it is like being in an episode of ‘The Box of Delights’ and thus I enter after reluctantly putting down my Aussie conditioner (£1.00)
He shows me the peeling plaster in the kitchen,tells me how they are trying to fix the infrastructure and about all the good things the church does with the homeless people of Morecambe, how they can come and get anything for free. There is a woodburner and sofas and chairs and tables where there used to be pews.
‘There is more!’ he tells me, tapping my arm again, his eyes twinkling like a Disney faun and we walk further into the dark.
I was not expecting this. I hope my conditioner will still be there and my car will still be outside, I have always been rightly suspicious regarding fairy forts and I am concerned I might leave this place to find all my loved ones are dead and my car has been replaced by hover vehicles.
And I won’t get my £1.00 Aussie shampoo.
He expects me to have working knowledge of the history of liturgy, Latin and Hebrew and at one point speaks in Aramaic. It is thrilling and terrifying.
‘Now this is a thin space-do you know what a thin space is?’
Its a question I have been waiting to answer all my life.
‘It is the liminal area between the worlds of the dead and the undead.’
I was not expecting to talk about the liminal area between worlds in a dark empty church at 11am in Morecambe this Saturday.
And then he talks about the ghosts.
