The night stair, Furness Abbey

One of the attractive things about England, for those of us who have our ancestry here, is the immediate access to history. Walking Darwin’s circular thinking path, the Sand-walk at Down House, where he lived and worked for 40 years, where he wrote The Origin of Species, for instance. Or standing in the low roofed parlour where Wordsworth (or his sister Dorothy) wrote down the poems that he had composed while walking the fells around Grasmere. And then walking the mountains ourselves. Today we had a picnic, in the drizzle, in the ruins of Kendal Castle. Two pink clad girls were clambering up and down the walls, up to the great hall, down to the cellars, oblivious of both history and safety warnings. It’s an adventure playground, part of their landscape, nothing special. Ruined castles are a dime a dozen, as are ruined abbeys. In fact I played in one as a young girl, at Bury St Edmonds.

Unlike the slow demise of the castles though, the ruin of the abbeys was historically dramatic. Between 1536 and 1541 Henry VIII dissolved over 800 monasteries in England and Wales. Most were physically destroyed: burnt first, to extract valuable lead from roofs and plumbing; stone and slate removed and recycled in new buildings; furnishings sold; tombs plundered; precious metals melted down; relics destroyed. Their libraries were simply lost. The history is complex of course, and corruption and decline at least part of the story, but having been immersed in the study of Christian monasticism over the last couple of years I find this “No” of the English church to the monastic way of life somewhat confronting! (In France the story is different, but no less torrid.) The dissolution of the monasteries reshaped the landscape of Christianity in England: it is as if the abbey ruins are scattered across the land to remind us of a wrong turn, and how the Reformation put us spiritually back on track. More cynically, they are a reminder of how Henry broke the power of the church, and helped put us on the road toward a secular state.

In the end I find the ruined monasteries sad. Christianity becomes a lonelier project I think, with the solitary village parson tending his little flock. Did Thomas Cranmer really imagine his transformed monastic offices, morning and evening prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, would be prayed together, daily in parishes? In human-sized communities of encouragement and support? Perhaps this is why a “new monasticism” just might be worth a thought.

• For Darwin’s house see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/the-home-of-charles-darwin-down-house/.


• The Wordsworth Trust runs a wonderful programme from Dove House - http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/index.asp . We managed to get restricted view tickets (behind a church pillar!) to a reading by British poet Simon Armitage.


• Furness Abbey, a Cistercian house, was the first of the large monasteries to surrender to Henry VIII. The monastery had taken part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a mass protest movement that began in York in 1536: surrender was an expedient alternative to trial for treason. Other resistant abbots were executed. http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/abbeys/furness.php .

Not Paris, a drain pipe.

I am not in Paris, yet. We have been in England now for two weeks: a few days in London, then the New Monasticism conference at Douai Abbey, near Reading, and now we are mid-way through our stay in the Lake District. Stunning country, though we are somewhat ill-equipped. Wellington boots, or at least waterproof shoes, would be helpful. It has become wetter by the day, so that the babbling brook next to Alyson’s flat has paced up several notches to “swiftly flowing stream”. No wonder the towns are full of adventure clothing stores – southerners, and other idiot visitors like us, arrive imagining that it will be possible to stroll up the hills with joggers and a fold up umbrella. Not so. John has plans for a serious walk or two. We shall see.

Being in England is, for me, a strangely disorienting experience. It is only the third time I have returned since my family migrated to Australia in 1966 (ah, how Prime Minister Gillard has wonderfully erased the stigma of being a Ten Pound Pom!). This always seems a ridiculous admission to make, in an age where international travel has become, well, so ordinary. Already my children have travelled further, lived overseas.

The disorientation comes, I think, from the layering of time and space. When I visit, it is not just a matter of leaving one space, one corner of the globe, and landing on another, which happens to be “on the other side of the world”. The distance is still a distance that you feel as the plane grinds its way around the surface of the earth. But it is time that disorients. First, there is the adjustment of one’s body clock, as, in traversing the surface of the world, you have also been winding back through time, chasing the sun to its rising.

But for me, it is time on a larger, if human, scale that refuses to behave. So I walk down my Grandmother’s street for only the third time since 1966. Then, it was full of grandmothers – the folk who had lived there since the war, through the war – the mothers of my mother and her school friends. I was a country girl then, and a visit to my grandparents’ pre-war terrace on the southern fringe of London was already another world. My grandmother would open the door, bend down and hug us tightly: “Hello my dears”. The wooden door is gone now, replaced by a double locking security one. Gone too the wooden windows, the stained glass panel, and, indeed, the low front hedge and gate. Front gardens abandoned, the street is now strewn with cars, parked within inches of doors and windows. But under my feet the crazy paving, laid perhaps in the 1930s by my grandfather, a proud new houseowner, is still there. In the back garden the same red, square paving stones form the path to the garage where the London cab, the source of the family livelihood, was preened and polished. Looking back to the house I can see the drain pipe snaking up the pebble-dashed wall, its most prominent and persistent feature, now painted a vivid blue. It appears in photographs from the first few weeks of my life: my mother had returned to her childhood home for my birth; my father, a sailor, was in Western Australia for the Montebello nuclear tests. So this was my first home.

As I walk around the house I bump relentlessly through time. I am tucked up in the box room with the bed covers pulled so tightly the mattress becomes a boat. Not sleeping, I am watching the pull light switch dangling over my auntie’s bed, still. I wake early one dark winter morning, on a low z-bed next to the gas hearth (was it ever so small?), to unpack the stocking filled in the night by Father Christmas. I switch on the light under-the-stairs: a musty cave where, I knew, my grandmother, mother and aunt, had sheltered during the blitz because the backyard bomb shelter was always full of water.

There is nothing special about such memories of course. But it is their remoteness from the life that I have had that sends my head into a spin. My aunt still lives in this house, the house of all her life. She accompanied my grandparents through their old age to their final illnesses. She has lived the changes: the invasion of the car; the first coloured neighbours; the loft conversions; the demolition of the pub (it proprietors embroiled in illegal drugs); the rise of the supermarket and the demise of the local shops.

For me, there is a more dramatic end. And I was surprised last week to find it flushed up as a story of my family’s departure. “My Mum said she would never forget the look on your face as you turned and waved goodbye.” This was the daughter of my Auntie Mabel, my grandfather’s sister. Heathrow in 1966, a door, an exit. Once that moment was closed I would never again see my Auntie Mabel, my Uncle Hugh, or my grandparents. At ten I knew the weight of the door. My relatives still refer to Australia as “out” or “over there”. Entirely other, unthinkably other. Why would you go “out there”? Why would you live “over there”? It was my father’s scheme, my mother the dutiful wife. So the story goes.

Every time I come here (all three times!) I cannot remember who I am. There is, laid out before me, an alternate life of Englishness. I look English, I find, though my skin in more weathered now. But that is it really. This place does not want or need me. After all, we left. Which leaves me wandering in a not quite alien landscape, constantly looking for bearings. I am grateful, this time, for the lifeline of email, keeping my home “out there” in view. Steadying. Reassuring. And I am grateful for God, for the transcendence of time and place that God is. My own smallness, limitedness, my shocking contingency, is here something less to be mourned than something to be held more lightly. Dust. Grass withering. And in the larger scene, if one drifts up a little higher and considers the small earth spinning in the “universe of wonders”, this is no bad thing.