The Last Time I Kissed Bridget Hænning

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Crossposted to r/ImaginaryLondon

Near to where I grew up, in Bermondsey, there used to be a bronze statue of a woman named Bridget Hænning.

As her surname might suggest, she was not a native of the British Isles. She had been born in Silkeborg, in central Denmark, In 1936, she emigrated to East London, with the intention of marrying a seaman named David Lyme. After the engagement fell through, she remained in the Capital.

On the 5th November, 1940, she was making her way to a cellar dance when the air-raid sirens sounded. A squadron of German bombers had slipped into London airspace unnoticed. Seconds later. the first bombs found their indiscriminate targets.

In the ensuing chaos Hænning successfully guided a large group of children to an air-raid shelter, but was killed by flying masonry before she could also get to safety. She was 25 years old when she died. If her sculptor is to be believed, she was a very beautiful young woman. It is said that, when her body was recovered, despite the cause of her death, she bore no visible external injuries.

Hænning might well have been forgotten, had it not been for the popular Docklands preacher, John Waller, who made her a figurehead in the sermons that he delivered on street corners, in public houses and in the warehouses that lined the wharves on the south bank of the River Thames. Waller was also responsible for placing Hænning's actions in a religious context. In the churning wake of his Bible-thumping zeal, the unofficial mantle of local sainthood was bestowed upon the courageous nurse by the population of Bermondsey, while a stream of itinerant sailors carried word of her heroism with them back to their own countries. I have seen shrines to St Bridget in many homes in this part of London. I have seem images of similar tributes in homes as far afield as Singapore.

The small alley church of St Maurice in Bermondsey, that faces sidelong onto Wefere Street (rechristened 'Where For Street' by the local authority in 1996, for God only knows what reason) once incorporated a shrine to St Bridget in a narrow alcove between its external buttressing. The church officials would not formally acknowledge its existence if you asked them, but were apparently happy to at least tolerate its presence, along with the votive offerings that were left there, just so long as they did not spill out onto the pathway. The tiny, high-walled churchyard, which is no bigger than the front room in my parent's house, is paved with graves stones. In one corner the slabs have cracked, forming a depression that has been transformed into a small pond – home a fluctuating population of goldfish, that swells in number whenever the fair is in town. When I last passed through there, a church volunteer was clearing out Hænning's nook and depositing the ornaments and the spent candles into a carrier bag from a nearby supermarket. This was done periodically to keep these tributes from building up. My friend, Elsa Taberer, claims that she once witnessed a raven attempting to drag a small statue of St Bridget from the alcove. In hindsight, we should have regarded this as a portent of things to come.

The statue Bridget Hænning, on Spinks Walk, was erected in 1968, having been funded by a sum of money left behind by the late John Waller, who had died the year before. In his will, he had requested that a statue be raised to honour the brave nurse, so that her memory might endure when he could no longer tell her story himself.

The sculptor, Rita Beehag, chose to acknowledge the social engagement that Hænning found herself unable to attend, by posing the nurse as if she is dancing with an invisible partner. A pair of brass footprints, facing towards her, invite passing members of the public to temporarily assume the role of her companion. Anyone who has ever succumbed to this overture will know that the folds and contours of her clothing are ingeniously sculpted in a manner that guides your hands into position, freezing the pair of you in a moment of time that never occurred.

~

When I was nine years old, I was caught kissing the statue of Bridget Hænning by some friends. It was not the first time that I had done so. In my defence, her head is tilted to one side and her lips slightly parted, as if in invitation. Years later, I met a girl named Rosy Moss who had lived in Bunce House, on the Rundle Estate, around the corner from where I had grown up, though we never met. She confessed to me that, in her youth, she had also kissed Bridget. Afterwards we would refer to her as our first girlfriend.

On the occasion when I was caught in the act, I had been on my way to school. It was a dark winter morning. I was standing on tip-toes in Bridget's cold embrace when I heard laughter from behind me.

These were more innocent times and I was well below the age of sexual maturity. The mockery of my classmates focused on me having any interest girls at all, rather than the misplaced romanticism of a young boy kissing a statue. The truth was that I had fallen in love with Bridget – in that strange unformed way that the very young will sometimes develop emotional attachments – not knowing her name, or why her likeness had been selected for immorality in bronze, while others lay underground in beds marked by cold stone, or were scattered anonymously on the wind.

~

A few months prior to the pandemic, Bridget Hænning vanished from her plinth.

For a while there were rumours linking her disappearance to statues that had been toppled elsewhere in the country. People said that she had been thrown into Pepper Wharf; that she was lying on her back in the soft bed of the Thames, and that she could sometimes be seen staring upwards through the water when the tide was low. One man claimed to have seen her arm projecting from a mound of scrap in a Stratford junk yard that he passed everyday, on a slow part of the line, during his rail commute to work.

All that was left of Bridget were the smudged outlines of her feet on her plinth, and the brass footprints that had acquired a surreal air in the absence of their counterpart. The last time I visited the site somebody had been using them as twin ashtrays.

Around the same time, the shrine to Bridget, at the church of St Maurice was permanently removed and the gaps between the external buttressing filled-in.

It was a retired catholic priest named Mcbrearty who enlightened me in regard to the truth of Bridget's absence:

“The church has its own ways of dealing with informal saints,” he reported, ominously. “You probably won't have heard of 'Deus in manu hominis'. It means 'God in the hand of man'. It entertains the possibility that common folk might identify saintlike qualities in a figure who has been overlooked by the church.

“When that happens, a relic of the individual is taken and then moved to different locations around the world, and watched closely for evidence of miracles. Whatever occurs, young Bridget will make her way home to Bermondsey, I would say in about seven years time. Either it will be with the formal glory of the church behind her, and the slow-turning wheels of canonisation doing their work, or in a manner of a contestant who has been ejected from one of those TV talent shows.”

However things go for Bridget, I will welcome her when she does return, assuming I am still around to do so. I feel I will be making my own journey soon.

In the meantime, I am happy to imagine her as she pirouettes and heel-turns across the world, perhaps pausing to perform miracles along her way. Maybe, at points in her journey, there will be others who will dance with her.

~ Sam Redlark

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