January 2009

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Although raised in Laleham and educated at Eton and Oxford, his son, Algernon Okey Belfour, knew Geddes from Belfast, where, as an erudite Anglo-Saxon scholar and linguist, he had lectured at Queen’s University since 1909.15 After being wounded and taken prisoner of war, he became something of a recluse, travelling into Belfast from Larne, where he would have known Geddes’s recently erected memorial window at St Cedma. He chose Geddes because of her work’s vigour: ‘I felt that a window to my father’s memory required above all things a certain degree of “punch” (this term I owe to the artist).’16

The window is dominated by the powerful figure of St Christopher, whose blazing red-robed muscular body is supported by his miraculous palm-tree staff as he battles to remain upright in the surging water through which he must ferry not only the Christ child, but also the whole world, its Creator and all its sins. His perilous journey recalls those made by local travellers crossing the ancient ford between Staines and Laleham, whose ferry house was beside the church. Jacobus de Voragine’s 13th-century account of the saint’s life in The Golden Legend, which Geddes is known to have used as her principal source,17 describes ‘Christopher, a Canaanite, [as] a man of prodigious size, being twelve cubits in height, and fearful of aspect’.18 His intensely concentrating form, caught in mid-action, recalls William Blake’s earliest original engraving, of the similarly titanic Joseph of Arimathea (1773) on Albion’s shore, based on the brooding foreground centurion in Michelangelo’s Pauline Chapel Crucifixion of St Peter.19 Christopher’s stance also recalls that of the onlooking lance-holding soldier in the background of that fresco, and that of St Peter in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgment.20 His weather-beaten, lupine countenance contrasts with that of the pale, knowing child who clasps his wild black mane of hair and wraps his small legs gracefully around the superhuman neck and bushy beard (Fig. 3). Above, the giant man turns to the tiny, purple-clad Child, ‘who asks to be carried over’ as Christopher (literally ‘the Christ carrier’) ‘warms himself at a watchman’s fire on the river bank’;21 they are separated by a burning tongue of flame that flares up from the cross that intersects the deep blue globe surrounding the Child’s glowing magenta halo.

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