Built From What They Had

The chapel on Lamb Holm is two army huts end to end, which is the first thing anyone notices and the last thing anyone remembers. A caretaker was unlocking it when Polly arrived, an unhurried man with a ring of keys. "What is your job?" she asked him, and he said he opened the doors in the morning, closed them at night, and repainted what the salt air took off in between.

Inside, the huts disappear. Italian prisoners of war were brought here in the nineteen forties to work on the sea barriers, and they asked for somewhere to worship. What they got was corrugated metal. What they made of it was a vaulted ceiling, a stone chancel, a wrought iron screen and a painted altarpiece, and one of them, a painter named Domenico Chiocchetti, led the work.

"What do you need to complete the work?" is the question the camp had to answer. They asked for cement, and were given cement. Everything else came out of what the camp was throwing away. The screen is scrap iron worked cold. The candle holders are corned beef tins. The stone of the chancel is plasterboard, painted so carefully that you have to lean in before it admits what it is.

The caretaker had left a small hand tool on the sill. "Could you show me how to use this tool?" Polly asked, and he did, and the explanation went past her the first time. "Could you explain that again?" He did that too. Then he went back to his paint, and Polly looked up at a ceiling that is flat metal pretending to be a curve, and holds the pretence from every seat in the room.