On my last morning in Orkney I found a scrap of time to visit the little chapel on Lamb Holm, built by Italian prisoners of war during World War Two.
Before the war, Lamb Holm was an island, but it is now linked north and south—to Mainland and to South Ronaldsay—by causeways, two of the so-called Churchill Barriers. The causeways, laid across great piles of quarried white rock, were also constructed by the Italians (in contravention, as it happens, of the Geneva convention, which forbids forced labour of prisoners of war), in order to block off points of possible submarine access to Scapa Flow.
The Italians were, unsurprisingly, homesick. The land here peters away in the North Atlantic, just sporadic patches of treeless scrubland, then nothing. The prisoners were a long way from the soft airs and sheepfolds of their home.
At their request, the British camp commandant gave permission for them to build a chapel, and provided two corrugated steel Nissen huts for the purpose. The Italians begged or scrounged or otherwise located the rest of the materials necessary.
What they ended with was not a chapel, but a mirage of a chapel. The interior is decorated with trompe l’oeil marble and brickwork, there is a wrought-iron rood screen, a concrete altar and altar rail, a cement facade. They repurposed a car exhaust for the font and corned beef tins for candle holders, and covered the ceiling with murals. Wood was salvaged from a wrecked boat.
But it might at first glance all be marble and brick, born of long tradition, father-son craftwork. It is a beautiful place, utterly isolated, gratuitous; like all good and energetic settlements, it has a bit of thrown-together about it, a structure built in desperation, and in elation, on this wild edge-land.
The chapel was designated as a place to worship their god, but it must have salved their souls in other ways. Perhaps if you remove the cement, the false stucco, you will find graffiti, the age-old lament of the exile—inscriptions like the scratches at Skara Brae which will be to future civilisations incomprehensible, lunatic wayward marks warding off ancestors, guiding the souls of the deceased. But really just their names scratched into plaster.
...
All chapels and churches, in the end, are a sort of bricolage. Roman Catholic churches perhaps especially. To visit a church in Italy is to take in the decorative mania of a magpie cult, a thing of candles and votives and gilt and scrawled prayers, of mismatched architectural styles and ill-advised whims, a guano-totality of a community's anxiety and piety overloading a great sorrowful stone frame.
These churches were made, not according to orderly plans, but as-and-when and anyhow. Hugh Kenner, writing of Ezra Pound's Malatesta Cantos (nos 8-11), summarises the hand-to-mouth difficulties which Sigismundo Malatesta, lord of Rimini, had to overcome in order to furnish the great mid-fifteenth century church known as the Tempio Malatestiano:
In the Quattrocento marble came by water to Rimini, and other marble by land, bootlegged from Classe, for Agostino di Duccio to incise with incomparable reliefs. That stone too was gotten against the time's currents of power, as was the money the stonecutters were paid with, their patron at one time drawing his pay in a squabble "over a ten acre lot". Those were barbarous times, all Italy embroiled, government conducted by assassination, and a prince of the church dealing in stone he had no title to, for the men from Rimini to cart off by night. But San Francesco in Rimini ... contains carving after carving, relief after relief...
The foundation on which any culture rests and builds is just this, a heap of broken elements, a fragmentary thing, a detritus of past cults agglomerating and coalescing. And the superstructure—itself the crumbled foundation of whatever is to come—is equally scrounged, shanty. And yet somehow, also, "a tranquil vivid astonishment of stones".
That Italian chapel, then, is a form of settlement seen, not at its point of dissolution, or of distant memory, but at its point of emergence. A congregation of voices singing out of a pair of Nissen huts on a forgotten shore; a stone carver patiently drawing forms from the stone in the war-weary marches.
Build your whitewashed pretend chapel, then, and derive from it your fresh reality—transcendent, quotidian, or hovering in between, according to taste and circumstance. Or drink your Highland Park, as I do, looking out over the still harbour of Hamnavoe, caught in the midsummer harrowing between death and funeral rites. It is all one. It is all just a settlement, made at vantage alongside a road that drops off the end of the earth, leading to a home which no longer exists.
