1. Matraque
I woke my first morning to the sound of violent shaking, like the emptying of an oversized coal scuttle down the back stairs. It intruded with a brutality for which I was completely unprepared. I sat up, puzzled. Why coal, I thought, and why such a lot of it, and why this dramatic delivery in the middle of the night? I opened my eyes just a tiny crack. I was sure it was not yet dawn. The sound rose and grew, until it morphed into a deafening Doppler effect outside my door, then receded in strange waves, sympathetic tingles extending down my arms into my fingertips. I lay down again. Something rattled and dislodged itself on a corner shelf. Even the floor was shaking.
In the first flicker of awareness, I turned over, confused. Was I back at my aunt’s red-brick mansion-block flat in London? Were there lorries? No, Winnie had been dead ten years. Then I felt the thinness of the sheets and remembered where I was.
I found a blanket pressed up against my chin, my neck chafing at its abrasive touch. The half-empty pillow, bumpily compressed beneath my head, breathed trailing feathers, two of which drifted languidly across my neck, long-legged dancers in slow motion. I tried to brush them away, wincing, and was relieved to find that they simply hovered, did not scuttle. I’d sensed a fleeting spidery presence in the night – a horrid pattering across my face – but had held my breath, willing myself into oblivion by urgent prayer. The curious sensation had passed, the room was still; my first small battle had been won.
I opened my eyes and breathed more deeply, and, as I did so, sensed something faded and astringent, perhaps old rubber mixed with dust. Hot-water bottles, disinfectant and Vosene shampoo, and the bar of green carbolic they had left out for me the night before. But none of this was surprising; I had not come looking for comfort.
Sister Ellen had told me to lie in. Someone would come for me after six, but until then I was to wait, to ignore the noises of the night, and to rest or try to sleep. Had I been able to hear above the din I might have detected the clicking of half a dozen switches, the ignition of a stream of lights along the adjacent corridor, the padding of feet in nearby cells, the emptying of cisterns. But I was disorientated. When eventually the knock came it was a single one, brisk and strangely loud. A hovering silence ensued, as when someone unseen awaits a delayed response, and then, at my murmured greeting, the hush of soft, departing footsteps. Sandal upon stone, the brush of a habit hem along a skirting board.
On this, my first dark dawn at Akenside Priory, I turned on the hard mattress and fell into shallow sleep again, and it was almost eight o’clock when I found Sister Ellen leaning over me, shaking the rough brown bedcover, and urging me to get up quickly. ‘The appeau has gone, Catherine, you’ll be late for the procession if you don’t hurry! We can’t have that on your first morning, can we? Just throw your things on, comb your hair and come down without washing. You can catch up later on.’
The instructions were clear. I was to follow her down to the antechoir, my feet noiseless in brown corduroy slippers, a regulation pair I’d been given on arrival, and then fall into line behind the three white-veiled novices, together with Jennifer, another aspirant, and wait for ‘the knock’. This, a sharp tap of knuckle on wood, was the prioress’s signal to move, impossible to miss in the surrounding quiet. From then on it would be a case of following, watching and imitating the others. Self-explanatory, Sister Ellen said – I just ‘needed my wits about me’. In a silent order there was a lot to be learned just by looking.
She waited for me outside the cell door, then kindly but firmly steered me around endless passageways it seemed I’d never remember, and guided me down the dark panelled stairs that led to the central and enormous hall. Beyond, in the light-filled antechoir, I found the nuns lined up, starched and ready, hands hidden under thick cream cloaks, two dead-straight, veiled arrows poised and prepared for the solemn procession into choir.
Finding my place was easy. Sister Felicity stood out from the surrounding sea of habits, being taller than the rest, angular and awkward in every way. ‘Head for the front,’ Ellen had said, ‘and wait behind the tallest sister in the room. It’s usually the youngest in community who lead the way when we process in “order of religion”, so it’ll be your turn next. I’ll explain it later,’ she had whispered as we rounded the final corner.
Although she did not turn or look towards me, I knew that Sister Felicity had sensed my arrival from the tiny forward shuffle of her long, pale, sandalled feet and the unease that expressed itself only in a nervous cough, a fragile twitching around her neck. I longed to catch more than a glimpse of her face, half hidden as it was by her voluminous head-dress, but the knock had already been given and we were moving as a body towards the open door. Following the pace set by the leaders, I tucked my hands into the pockets of my newcomer’s essential baggy cardigan, hiding as much of me as was possible, and found myself merged – like a drop of water becoming one with the ebb and flow of a great ocean tide, I was carried forward. It was not long before I was seated in a wooden stall, breathing in plainchant only delicately tinged with incense.
‘Deo gratias…’ The chant rose clean and clear, brushing the air with its sweeping movements, caressing with its lulls and pauses. Deo gratias – thanks be to God. The whole rhythm was one of perpetual ascent, and seemed to carry my voice weightlessly, as though transported by transcendent light. The ancient psalm tones were intuitively accessible, profoundly expressive and easy to mould to human gratitude. I had much for which to be thankful, I already felt, not least this mercy of monasticism. Thanks be to God, I sang. I joined not only my voice, but my mind and heart and soul to the common intention. How glad I was, at last, to be behind the high, enclosing wooden bars known to us as ‘the grille’. How glad I was to be seated in a stall that felt like the most secret and special place on earth. How glad I was to be claimed, repurposed, already hidden deep in Carmel’s choir.
On the chant flowed, a serene undulation, words sung with inwardness and restraint by a body of twenty women, whose voices joined to form a single monophonic stream. Many of the words were comforting and familiar. Gloria Patri, the doxology circled like a refrain. The sisters, both old and young, both black- and white-veiled, bowed low at the words, as was customary at the suffix that followed every canticle or psalm or prayer. At the words Sicut erat in principio the doxology invoked not only the song of the angels one night, two thousand years ago, but also the first beginnings according to the ancient Hebrew scribes and seers, who knew about creation ex nihilo and the One True God. As psalm gave way to psalm, and to the allocated scripture reading, I tasted that gathering-inwards of the bodily senses, that harnessing of every human faculty of thought, imagination and attention that went with prayer. There was a name for it: recollection. The result was a cool yet balmy peace, an enfolding into one great wave of unbelievably perfect love.
Mother Julianna, at the top of the monastic choir, led the prayers, and I noticed the special quality of quiet that surrounded her every syllable, a halo of communal attentiveness. She had long been the community’s Mother Superior (known in Carmel as the prioress), and was as rugged as she was revered. A huge and venerable woman, she seemed to me primordial, pre-existent, connected invisibly to some heritage that defied biology. Her Carmelite roots went deep. And afterwards, as she stumbled towards the door, bent practically double on her sturdy stick, each step she took produced a rumbling. Once, she would have been a woman of striking breadth and stature. Now she was gnarled and disfigured, her back an asymmetric hump, her long black veil bobbing like the tarpaulin of a great ship’s sail as she moved, lumbering, leading the way back from the solemnity of worship to the working day.
In the hall, a swarm of habits and veils dissipated into corridors and alcoves, down passageways and into further secret spaces behind closed doors. Each moving body was purposeful and mute but for the flap of sandal straps, the pad of slippers on the tiles.
Later, Sister Ellen caught up with me in a ‘talking place’, one of those alcoves built into the original structure of the great old house where the soft exchange of a few essential words was permitted. The monastery (so-called since it was a strictly ‘enclosed’ or secluded house of prayer rather than an active convent, from which nuns typically might go out to teach) was a silent world, one where every footstep could be heard, and where those rare things, words, were weighed like gold or precious stones. Sotto voce, Ellen told me to meet her later that morning back in my cell. She had a notebook, a pencil and ‘a little list’. We laughed coyly at the comical phrase. A little list. But there really was a great deal of information to transmit and she, as my newcomer’s guide or ‘angel’, was the one to transmit it, if only in the most hushed and reserved of terms.
It was a cloudy October day, devoid of autumn charm. I made my way back to the top floor, somehow managed not to get lost, and waited for her as instructed. Soon she was knocking, then settling herself on the creaking wooden window seat beyond my bed, indicating a choice of floor or chair with broad, freckled hands. Her soft round face was gentle, her eyes a greenish blue. The window, that only partially framed her homely bulk, rattled from time to time, quivering slightly in the autumn wind. Her eyes were wide open and pleasantly enquiring. I looked around me and then chose the floor, having seen young sisters half kneeling on their thick brown habits, the bulky skirts of which were generous enough to roll into a hard, squat cushion, an improvised stool. Not yet having a habit, and being dressed in a simple skirt and top, the floor was cold, and I pulled up my feet behind me and sat on my calves. When Ellen did not react, I knew that what I’d done was seen as normal. She began to talk.
Hers was the face of a plaster Nordic saint, her skin a sandy colour brushed with cream. A few strands of fine, curly hair peeped out from where the rest was flattened beneath the close-fitting cap, which in turn showed itself under the white wimple and crisp black veil, the latter the sign of a fully professed Carmelite nun. Questioning me gently, she spoke of antiphons and doxologies, touched the gilt-edged corners of her breviary (fine, petal-like sheets of compressed spirituality) with reverential care, glanced smilingly heavenward at the mention of the holy name of Jesus, and arranged her soft lips into a perfect circle when she formed the words ‘Our Lord’, always prefaced by a slight hiatus, a glottal stop that acted as a kind of vocal genuflection.
Eventually she asked me how I’d slept.
‘Ah yes, the morning matraque is a custom that came over from France,’ she said, ‘after Catholic Emancipation,’ and we both laughed again. ‘It’s our traditional morning alarm, and different from the appeau, the bell for the Office. I must show you how it works some time, Catherine. It’s similar to a basic football rattle, but a lot heavier. It’s just a brass handle mounted on a thick slab of oak. But yes—’ and here she was detained by a mini fit of giggling, a dimple appearing on her right cheek ‘—it does make a terrifying sound if you’re not used to it. I should have warned you, but there was so little time last night. And last time you were here, of course…’
Last time. Yes, I remembered how they’d put me in a cell in another part of the building, far from the top corridor, during my trial run, a euphoric two-week summer stay. The garden was all roses and summer fruit, and I’d been in what they called the Old Infirmary. Certainly I had not heard anything from that distance, but had slept, curled and foetal, my body glad to close in on itself and shut out everything that could possibly intrude. That first room had been big and bright, and smelled of disinfectant and sticky rhododendron flowers. Now I was a postulant (from the Latin postulare), someone requesting entry, knocking on the old oak door of the order for admittance, and the mornings were dark and black as coal indeed. And this time I’d come intending to stay for ever. My cell was at the end of the long top corridor lined with cells that once had been servants’ quarters.
The great manor house bore all the hallmarks of the ancient family who had built it, spacious rooms arranged around the black-and-white-tiled central hall, which was overlooked by a panelled gallery on the one side, and by a sweeping carved staircase on the other. Majestic stained-glass windows rose alongside the deep, gloomy wooden stairs, and the light that danced there was multicoloured. Once upon a time there must have been stags’ heads, shields and ancestral portraits on the wall, but now – ever since it had grown derelict following the war and was then as good as given to the nuns – it was bare and stark, the only decorations on its surfaces being crucifixes and the odd holy picture. Over each of its doors the word JESUS was drawn in gothic, calligraphic print. Other than that, there was a kind of emptiness; the main thing you noticed was the echo.
The place was indeed cavernous and lofty, with corridors that connected up unexpectedly with other corridors, confused here and there by several sets of stairs – front, back and spiral – not to mention the annexes and outbuildings that sprawled in all directions. But the beauty of it was its bareness, the views over the lake, the grounds that encompassed orchards, lawns and meadows, leading to untamed woodland regions and finally to a high-walled kitchen garden. Beyond that was the Mere, a broad reservoir of water that formed an effective boundary to our thirty acres of Eden. Who knew what lay beyond it, what landscapes might be found there apart from the bending trees? None of us, I suppose, because once you had immersed yourself in the Life, everything Outside – including its most innocent landscapes – merged into one simple, rather distant blur. Inside was where it was at. Inside was where we believed we could experience life to the full.
‘You probably noticed how quietly I knocked before I entered, Catherine?’ Ellen said. Her wide eyes were soft with gentleness and concern. I nodded.
‘That is because the cell is very much your own private space. Yours and the Lord’s. It is the fundamental unit of the eremitical – that is the ‘hermit’ – life. It’s sacred, and no one but you, and in exceptional circumstances the prioress, can ever enter it.’ She noted my puzzled look, and added, ‘Yes, and of course me, as your angel in the early stages. I’ll meet you here weekly while you find your feet.’
I thanked her. The intensity of the cloister held huge attraction for me. It was the presence I had sensed so powerfully my first visit, and that again now was calling to me, urging, pulling, pushing me to a response. But still, I needed someone to show me the ropes, and help me get to grips with the timetable. From rising at the matraque before dawn (and washing in a bucket of icy cold water with a frayed flannel), to the snuffing out of the last candle after night prayer, or Compline, to the extinguishing of every light for sleep, the day held its own complexities. Finding your way from A to B was only part of it.
‘It’ll take you some time to get used to everything, Catherine, and no one can run before they can walk. We know you are keen, and that you have a genuine attraction for prayer. You feel God is close beside you. That is good. But you have only been a Catholic for a year and, well – you are still quite inexperienced. Many of our ways of thinking will be strange to you, as a convert. Our separated brethren, the Anglicans, mean well … in their own way, of course. But this is different. Here, you have been guided to the very fountainhead of truth. You will be taught each afternoon with the others in the novitiate, and those instructions will continue daily, except for Sundays and feast days, until you are deemed ready to take your final vows.’
The mention of final vows sounded exciting to me, and she noticed my smile and added firmly ‘But let us not run ahead. You are here in good faith, and the Lord has his own special plans for you. It’ll be another six months before you are admitted formally to the novitiate, by the ceremony of “Clothing”, at which point you will be required to cut your hair in preparation for the habit. That is, if you are approved by the chapter.’
I nodded. It was important to demonstrate my acquiescence. Important to avoid presumption, and to make myself ready and available for whatever trials and reversals might lie ahead. However strong the pull towards the cloister, however powerfully I felt the call, it was important to remember that God’s inscrutable will was everything.
‘Once the chapter – the body of finally professed nuns – have voted (and, please God, you’ll be accepted) it’ll be another year before you are ready for first vows.’
Her look was kind but just a little distant for a moment. She seemed to be checking something, counting, or making a mental note.
‘Then, as you know, it will be at least another three years before you are eligible to take vows for life, and then only, of course, Deo volente – if God so wills.’
It seemed a distant prospect as I sat there on my calves, my ankles tingling, but even then I knew that the taking of vows was only the beginning. On the farthest horizon was the beatific vision, the delightful union of the soul with God, and the happy basking in his presence for all eternity that awaited those who were faithful to their calling to bear witness to his love and glory in this world, and to draw others after them. To know my soul safe, I thought – safe, and to have saved others, that was what it was all about.
Copyright © 2024 by Catherine Coldstream
Copyright © 2014 Helen MacDonald.
