by Robert Nye
That I was not to be allowed to advance my career on the back of that victory was made clear to me when my master the Duke started deploring my part in it. ‘The boy fell out of the rigging by mistake,’ he said. ‘Then there were these accidents with the hogsheads. He was drunk. Disgraceful in one so young. I blame myself. He was in my care. I am looking for ways to atone, and to mend his reputation.’
Mowbray took this version of that event, and he repeated it in the right ears until it was believed. In case the reader is pursuing these annals for moral instruction, I will add from time to time certain aphorisms of my own which have been distilled from a lifetime’s experience, taking care not to introduce the really profound ones at any stage in my narrative before their merit is out of proportion to my growth. Know then that after hearing Mowbray’s version of the Battle of Slugs I began to learn that truth is not a goddess or any other manner of immutable or immortal, but simply what men of power repeat long enough in the ears of other men of power. Certainly there are times when truth is more than that, but there has never been a time in the history of the world when it has been less.
Mowbray started to rabbit on about my welfare. He tugged at his twattish beard and ogled the corners of the room. ‘The boy needs discipline,’ he said. ‘He should have been an oblate.’
The word oblate sent a shiver down my spine. In this enlightened century, the institution of oblates has been almost forgotten. Four Popes in the last two hundred years have spoken against it, and the trade is dead. But when I was a boy it was common enough. Your oblate was a child – a child offered by its parents or guardians to be a monk or a nun. The age of seven was generally considered the earliest at which this gift could be accepted by the Church, although the generous Canons Regular of Porto admitted children three or four years after they had been weaned.
I seized these usual tendernesses as my line of defence. ‘I’m too old to be an oblate,’ I protested.
‘Don’t be so modest,’ said Mowbray. ‘The Supreme Pontiff is very concerned about all this business, of course. As a matter of fact, I hear he’s just gone on record that it is the oblate’s right to make his own final and irrevocable choice at the end of his fifteenth year.’
This sounded promising. Reasonable.
Too reasonable.
‘Logically,’ said Mowbray, ‘it must follow from what the Holy Father has recommended, that a boy can be made an oblate up to and including the age of fifteen. Pack your bags. Your father agrees. You leave for Hulme abbey in the morning.’
So it was, in the winter of my fifteenth year, that I found myself a nightly grasshopper ad monasterium Hulme ordinis Sancti Benedicti diocesis Norwicensis – that’s to say, at the abbey of Hulme, of the order of St Benedict, in the diocese of Norwich. I mean that I had to stridulate prayer all night long. I had also to fast daily – a terrible combination. To lift up my soul to God. To adore. To be contrite. To give thanks. To supplicate. My fare was black bread and little beans and potherbs. Cabbage without salt. O my throat. O those anthems. All I had to drink was slops and water.
There was the Litany of the Holy Name, the Litany of the Holy Ghost, the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Litany of the Saints, and the Litany of St Joseph. There was of course the Angelus and the Vespers of our Lady, and then there was the prayer of Manasses and the prayer of St Richard. There was the prayer for all things necessary to salvation. There was the Litany of Penitence and the Litany of the Blessed Sacrament. There were the anthems of our Lady, Alma Redemptoris (from Advent Sunday until the Feast of Purification), Ave Regina Caelorum (from the Feast of Purification until Wednesday in Holy Week), Regina Caeli (from Easter to the Saturday before Trinity Sunday), and Salve Regina (from Trinity Sunday until Advent).
My favourite was the Canticum Trium Puerorum – the Song of the Three Children, which the saints sang in the flaming, fiery furnace, blessing the Lord:
Benedicite, omnia opera Domini, Domino … O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord. Benedicite, sol et luna, Domino … O ye sun and moon, bless ye the Lord … O ye showers and dew, bless ye the Lord … O ye fire and heat, bless ye the Lord … O ye dews and frosts, O ye ice and snow, light and darkness, seas and floods, whales, fowls, beasts, cattle, priests, O Ananias, Azarias, and Misael … BENEDICITE!
I’ve always shouted Benedicite with all my heart, given half a chance. But it’s not so very easy on slops and water and potherbs.
What else? At Nocturns, let’s see, hey diddle diddle, and indeed at all the Hours, if we made mistakes, or nodded off, or were noticed whispering to each other in the choir stalls, we were stripped of frock and cowl, and stretched on the flogging block, and beaten soundly in our shirts. There was a Brother Mikal, who kept a smooth and pliant osier rod for this especial purpose. He used to wake us in the mornings just by touching us softly with that rod. We had then to leap out of bed, and trot down from the dormitory, and wash and comb and start in at our prayers. O the place was a windmill of prayer all right.
When I say ‘we’ I mean myself and the other oblates. There were a dozen of us. The youngest was eight, the oldest were myself and a long, sickly boy called – what was his name? – Duncan. Benedicite! It is strange how some part of the mind, called upon, suddenly remembers. I would have thought that that boy’s name was gone from my head for ever. I could have called up for you his pasty, washed-out face, and his hair the colour of tow, and the way his shoulders stooped, but until I began to speak of him a minute ago, I would have sworn that his name was something I had long forgotten.
At night, we slept two by two, and there would be a monkish master between each pair of us. Tallow candles were fixed on spikes in all the lanterns, so that these overlords could observe the least unruly movement of our souls or other parts. They used to come among us also, the monks, with rods in one hand and candles in the other, and if your Latin sounded vague you’d be smartly touched.
‘Boys need custody with discipline, and discipline with custody,’ Brother Mikal used to say, in his peculiar whining voice, which all came down his nose, so that every word was like a blob of snot.
Discipline with custard.
The oblates had one other litany, all our own, which we sometimes sang under our breath to the traditional tunes:
Sordidum mappale
Olus sine sale
Stratum lapidale
Stabulum sordidale
Kyrie eleison
and so on, all about Hulme abbey of course, for in good English this would go something like:
Dirty linen,
Saltless cabbage,
Stony bedding,
This filthy stable!
Lord, have mercy …
Discipline in the order of St Benedict in the diocese of Norwich meant standing a long while waiting in draughty corridors, knotting your legs when you wanted a piss, and being beaten with the osier rods, and having your hair plucked out by ecclesiastical fingers. One thing, the monks were fastidious – they never struck us with their fists or with the flat of their hands, or even with their feet.
Oblates were taught cleanliness too – that is, we were advised to wipe our hands in different parts of the one disgusting towel.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, half-mad with lack of sleep, some of the youngest boys found the singing of Nocturns hard. Then Br Mikal would give them a heavy missal to hold. The weight kept your arm awake, and the pins and needles inspired in it helped the rest of your person to pay attention.
It was a well-ordered monastery, as monasteries go, and most of the monks were kind enough, devoted to simple pleasures – prayer, pigeons, the poor. Not that I have ever found prayer easy, except when it has been wrung out of me by misfortune.
Abbot Geffrey used to speak of the whole world, I recall, as a place of exile. In his reckoning we have to regard this life as a pilgrimage to God. Travellers on that pilgrimage need places where they can stay and refresh their spirits. That was what a monastery was, he said – a spiritual inn fo
r the pilgrim soul. I liked the metaphor better than the actual inn-keeping and what went with it. Besides, the Boar’s Head was more my style.
My friend Duncan had been brought up by his mother in a convent, his father having been a victim of the plague. When he was five Duncan was removed from his mother, and taken to Hulme, it not being thought decent that a lad of his age should continue to spend his time among the opposite sex. On the way to Hulme, the monk accompanying him – the dirty whoreson old devil! – asked Duncan what the women had been like.
‘What women?’ said Duncan.
‘The women you’ve been living with,’ said the monk.
‘I’ve never seen any women,’ Duncan said.
He had called the nuns sisters, you see, and they had called each other sister, so he thought that this was their name, and he did not realise that they might also be called women – if you wanted to call them that.
The monk must have thought to himself that he had a proper idiot here. ‘Would you like to see what women are?’ he asked.
‘I think I would,’ said Duncan.
They were passing a field full of goats, so the monk pointed to the goats. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Women.’
Duncan believed it. When he told the other oblates that he had seen women grazing in the field and running about butting each other with their horns, he swore to me that some of them thought there was nothing remarkable about this. They had been educated by the same monk. This was one of the things that was wrong with the system of oblates. If boys could grow up shut away from the world and confusing goats and women, just think of the complications.
I was wearing all this while the habit of a novice, though I can tell you that I had no intention of staying in the abbey one monastic Hour later than the morning of my sixteenth birthday. Yet in those winter months I got to know the inside of a chapel pretty well, and the rhythms and cadences of the psalms were beaten into my bloodstream by Br Mikal.
Psalmus 150
Laudate Dominum in Sanctis ejus: laudate eum in firmamento virtutis ejus.
Laudate eum in virtutibus ejus: laudate eum secundum multitudinem magnitudinis ejus.
Laudate eum in sono tubae: laudate eum in psalterio, et cithara.
Laudate eum in tympano, et choro: laudate eum in chordis, et organo.
Laudate eum in cymbalis benesonantibus: laudate eum in cymbalis jubilationis: omnis spiritus laudet Dominum.
Praise him, yes.
And if you didn’t get all that Latin right, little Cyclops, it’ll be the worse for your posterior understanding.
Madam, my lady Reader, you might be thinking that this matter of bodily penance and discipline did not displease me, and certainly I was the better able to bear it than poor Duncan, who was forever weeping and blubbering under the osier rod, which of course made Br Mikal whip him the more. All the same, to tell you the truth, I had less interest in the power of the birch in that year than in any other year of my existence. Perhaps it was too much a part of the dank and draughty air of the abbey, so that there was no comparison or contrast of pleasure with which to salve its sting? A man has most benefit from the rod when his belly is full and his stomach well-drenched with wine.
There was one story which I heard in the monastery – it was Duncan’s story – which has stuck in my head as a single patch or image of colour from those dark days. I will never forget the boy’s face as he told it to me: white in the dormitory candleflame. His story concerned King Arthur. I always loved to hear tell of King Arthur. Perhaps that is why I have remembered the story all these years.
DUNCAN’S TALE
There was once a Bishop of Winchester who was mad about hunting. He went hunting before breakfast and by moonlight. He went hunting even when he should have been saying Mass. One day, in the Forest of Arden, his beaters dispersed, the Bishop found himself riding down a long sunlit glade towards a house that he had not seen before, a house that was all shining. As he drew near, marvelling at its fineness, he was met by servants in clothes of gold, with green silk cloaks. ‘Come, my lord,’ they invited. ‘Come without delay and eat meat at the banquet of our King.’ The Bishop excused himself. He protested that he had no garment with him in which a bishop could sit down to dine. The servants turned aside. Beneath an oak there was a wicker basket. They opened the basket and immediately produced the correct mantle and smoothed it about the Bishop’s shoulders and brought him to the house and into the King’s presence. The Bishop sat down at the King’s right hand. The banquet began. The Bishop had never tasted food more delicate or drink more delightful. When the meal was done, he asked his host where he was.
‘I am Arthur,’ said the King, ‘the King who was and is to come.’
The Bishop rubbed his hands for joy. ‘Then is this Paradise?’ he said.
‘It is not,’ Arthur said. ‘It is only Camelot, my house, where I await God’s mercy. But before that day, there will be another, when England will need me, and when I shall return to her.’
Now this was all very pretty and impressive and patriotic, but the Bishop – after the way of bishops – began to wonder who would believe him when he went back to Winchester and reported that he had seen and spoken with King Arthur. He started muttering about his anxieties.
Arthur cut him short. ‘Close your hand!’ he said.
The Bishop closed his hand.
‘Open it!’ said Arthur.
The Bishop opened his hand. Out flew a butterfly.
Then Arthur said: ‘All your life you shall have this memorial of me. At any season of the year, when you tell men how you met me, you have only to close your hand and open it again and one of these creatures will fly out as a token.’
And this came true just as King Arthur promised. The Bishop of Winchester’s butterflies became so notorious that in time men begged him for a butterfly for a benediction, and he was known as the Bishop of the Butterfly.
‘What does it mean?’ cried Duncan. He would clench his fist and stare at it. His eyes burnt for a butterfly. The butterfly never came.
Worcester, can you guess what Arthur was trying to teach by this sign? No. Firk me, then, I’ll tell you what I was bloody taught by it. It was that in the darkest days of my caterpillarhood, as a reluctant novice, an oblate desiring nothing less than to continue as a monk for the rest of his life, I still had hopes of a wider, wilder world of colour and sun and creatures as gay and meaningless and wonderful as butterflies, those same butterflies which once I had attached with threads to my fingers and run through the Caister corn with them streaming behind me like a plume above my shoulder. In the middle of the night, singing Nocturns half-asleep in the abbey chapel, the candles flickering on the faces of the monks and my young companions, I would clench my fist in the shadow of my robe – and imagine that if I opened it at the sign of the cross a butterfly would fly out …
If it had, Br Mikal would only have smashed it with his osier rod.
No butterflies came. My clenched fist was full of sweat. I lost my voice with halloing and singing of anthems. Abbot Geffrey agreed on the morning of my sixteenth birthday that there could be no future for a crack-voiced Br John, who claimed that only sack could mend his throat.
At the age of sixteen, then, I emerged from Hulme abbey, my possessions in a tight pack on my back, the whole world like a football at my feet. Never was air so clear and good as the air I breathed as I came over the hill and away from Hulme.
‘Remember this world is a place of pilgrimage, a place of exile. Your true home is elsewhere,’ said Abbot Geffrey.
‘Remember me,’ said Duncan, my brother oblate, on the night that he lay dying. The monks had given him a regular robe to lie in, and promised him that when he was dead they would bury him in it, as a special favour. But Duncan did not want to die a monk. When the brothers found him in the morning he had struggled out of the robe. He was lying cold and stiff and naked among the candles.
I was my own butterfly. Benedicite. I flew.
Chapter Eightee
n
About Badby & the barrel
17th April
The day before yesterday’s talk of cooking the cook and yesterday’s talk of monks has reminded me of a monk I once saw roasted on a spit. The behaviour of flesh in fire is unpredictable. This man was lean and dim and covered with a mildew of religiousness. I swear his flesh part melted from him in the flames, leaving the white skeleton exposed for a moment to the air. He looked then like a fish or a fine coral. That appearance lasted a bare minute. Once the flames got to work on his bones they blackened and cracked and before long there was only ashes. But the moment when his skeleton stood clean and clear like a white cage dragged up through blue fathoms to the sun comes back and flashes on my mind’s eye now. Also the moment when his skin melted, dripping and splashing down on the ground. This was in France.
The smell of burning flesh is much the same anywhere.
I have seen burnings in England too.
Badby and the barrel – the story will be lost if I don’t tell it. It is a story that tells you all or most of Harry Monmouth, whatever way you look at it.
There was a heretic that was called John Badby, who did not believe in the sacrament of the altar, and he was brought to Smithfield to be burnt according to the statute De heretico comburendo. He was put in a barrel.
And Harry, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester, was standing there in Smithfield, and in gold shoes he counselled this Badby to hold the right belief of Holy Church.
