It's about 2.30 am on Saturday morning, and I still haven't gone to bed. Working too hard, not able to switch off my mind and relax. So, I'm afraid there's no Snippet today; instead, I'll have a last cup of tea, then head to bed and just lie there until my eyes decide it's OK to close.
Peter
I'm updating the publication text of various books published by my wife and myself; fixing errors spotted by readers, re-formatting sections, and so on. (Don't worry: the content and storylines won't change at all!) This is occupying a lot of my time at the moment, so I won't be posting more blog content for the rest of today. Please amuse yourself with the bloggers in the sidebar. They write good, too!
Peter
Editor Jeremy Black, already a well-known expert in military strategy, has curated a large number of articles by numerous authors into a collection titled "The Practice of Strategy: A Global History". The articles include:
Best of all, you can download a full PDF copy of the entire book free of charge! That's the best value in this field I've seen for a very long time. Don't let some early pages in Italian put you off: the full English translation of them follows.
Highly recommended to all military strategy and strategic planning buffs.
Peter
As mentioned in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, I've been reading about the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812. Among other sources, I found "When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes".
It's a long (sometimes over-long) but very interesting account of the earthquakes, based upon survivors' reports and post-earthquake investigations. I'm still busy with it, and finding it very informative.
For today's Snippet, I thought I'd pick a chapter describing the Mississippi River itself during and immediately after the earthquake. Remember that at this period in history, steamboats had not yet become commonplace, so many living near the river had never seen them or even heard of them - hence their reactions to this strange critter of the waters.
ABOUT 125 miles northeast of Rocky Hill, the steamboat New Orleans was resting quietly on the evening of December 15 [1811]. Apart from not having been able to recruit any investors for the Ohio Steamboat Navigation Company, the voyage of the New Orleans was going as well as Nicholas Roosevelt could have hoped. The boat had performed admirably at the Falls, and she was on a reasonably timely schedule. And now Roosevelt was the proud father of a son.
Like everybody else within a three-hundred-mile radius of New Madrid, those aboard the steamboat were awakened by the 2:15 a.m. shock. With the shakes continuing throughout the night, they passed the rest of the anxious time without sleep. Yet they may have been the most fortunate of everyone in the area—because of the size and stability of their boat, the water was safer than land.
As soon as it was light enough to travel, the New Orleans was able to get under way. Moving downstream, the vibrations and noise of the engine kept the people on board from feeling the impact of the ongoing shocks, including the powerful aftershock that morning. But the Roosevelts’ Newfoundland dog, Tiger, felt the tremors and alternated between whining and growling as he prowled around the deck, and laying his head softly in Lydia Roosevelt’s lap, which indicated to the humans that “it was a sure sign of a commotion of more than usual violence.”
Insulated from the quake’s effect by this awesome new vehicle of a dawning age, those aboard the steamboat calmly ate their breakfast, but as the New Orleans continued downriver, signs of the quakes became more readily apparent. The passengers saw trees swaying as if in a high gale although, in fact, there was no wind blowing. They watched as an enormous section of riverbank suddenly tore away and dropped into the river. As the boat grew closer to the epicenter, it was lifted by quake-induced waves, and many on board the New Orleans were struck with seasickness.
The boat’s pilot, Andrew Jack, who was on intimate terms with the river, found the channel altered to the point where he was forced to concede he was lost. New hazards lay everywhere, and heretofore reliably deep water was now filled with uprooted trees. Without the familiar channel, Jack chose to stay in the middle of the river and hope for the best. It slowed him down, but it was a much safer way to proceed.
As the big boat passed the small settlements along the lower Ohio, the evidence mounted. Henderson, Highland Creek, Shawnee Town, and Cash Creek all showed earthquake damage. All along the route, banks were caved in and trees were down, and the shapes of familiar islands were changed.
The following night, the New Orleans put up about six miles above the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, and not more than twenty-five miles from the Rocky Hill plantation. Not long after the crew and passengers had retired, there were urgent cries for help from the forward cabin. Assuming an Indian attack, Roosevelt jumped out of bed. He quickly grabbed the ceremonial sword from the outfit he wore for official receptions, and flew out the door of the family’s sleeping quarters.
Reaching the forward cabin, Roosevelt found not Indians but flames. Roosevelt’s mind jumped to the worst conclusion—an engine explosion, the most dreaded hazard on steamboats. But as he glanced around the room, he saw the real cause. In anticipation of the following day’s needs, the crewman who had been assigned to tend the fire had stacked up a pile of green wood near the heating stove to dry it out. Exhausted by the stress of the past two days’ events, the man had fallen asleep, and the wood caught fire. The flames quickly jumped to the finely crafted wood of the cabin walls, and suddenly the whole boat was imperiled. Roosevelt regained his wits and took command, urgently barking out orders. With Roosevelt encouraging his men all the while, the blaze was soon extinguished, but not before the exquisite paneling of the forward cabin was all but destroyed.
The following day, when the New Orleans reached the confluence of the two rivers, the water level in the big river was unusually high and the current had slackened, an unmistakable indication of flooding. When the big boat arrived at New Madrid that afternoon they found the place in a shambles. The entire town had dropped fifteen feet, down to the level of the Mississippi. A huge chunk of the riverfront, including the city cemetery, was gone, carried away by the river. Many chimneys and fences were down; others fell before their eyes. Houses were damaged. What had been a large plain behind the town was now a lake. The earth’s surface was rent by hundred-foot-long chasms. People and animals wandered about in a state of somnambulance.
As the huge boat approached, many of the townspeople fled in terror. The braver among the inhabitants, however, hailed the boat and begged to be taken aboard. Their frantic pleas for help threw Roosevelt into a quandary. There were far more people wanting to board the New Orleans than the boat’s store of provisions could possibly accommodate. Moreover, these refugees had no place to go, and when they were put ashore at Natchez or New Orleans, they would have no means of support.
The Roosevelts looked at the heartrending scene, and despite their instinct to take the refugees aboard, they knew they had no choice. Sadly, “there was no choice but to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the terrified inhabitants of the doomed town.”
* * * * *
As bad as the damage was on land, conditions were worse on the river. The New Orleans had been protected by her weight and size. The rest of the boats on the Mississippi were tossed about like toys in a bathtub.
Firmin La Roche, a sailor by trade, was the captain of a small fleet of three boats transporting furs from St. Louis to New Orleans in December 1811. (After the Battle of Tippecanoe, riverboats increasingly tended to travel in groups as protection against Indian attack.) There were eleven other men on the three boats; on La Roche’s vessel were a crewhand named Henry Lamel, a slave named Ben, and Fr. Joseph, a French priest who had been a missionary among the Osage and was now returning to France. The convoy left St. Louis on December 8 but twice in the first week was delayed en route for repairs.
On the evening of December 15, the convoy tied up about eight miles north of New Madrid, at a landing near the home of La Roche’s cousin, John Le Clerq. The boatmen ate supper and retired for the night.
At about 2:15 a.m., La Roche was jolted awake by a thunderous crash that turned the boat on its side. Lamel, sleeping in the next bed, was flung on top of La Roche, and the two men landed hard against the side of the boat.
La Roche, Lamel, Ben, and Fr. Joseph scrambled to the deck to see what had happened. The impenetrable darkness was filled only with sounds—an unidentifiable crashing and grinding, and booming explosions and ominous rumblings emanating from the depths of the earth. For almost an hour, they had no reference point until, at around 3:00 a.m., the haze cleared enough for La Roche to see thousands of trees crashing down and huge sections of shoreline tumbling into the river.
With the boat pitching and rolling, Lamel managed to cut the rope that was tied to a log near the bank. The boat had just begun to float away from shore when it was lifted by a monstrous rush of water from downstream. “So great a wave came up the river,” wrote La Roche, “that I never have seen one like it at sea.”
The four men grabbed on to whatever part of the boat they could and held on for dear life. Trying to row or steer was futile—not capsizing or being thrown overboard was the best they could hope for as they were swept along by the gigantic wave. The river rose to as high as thirty feet above its normal level, and the boat was carried upriver, toward St. Louis, for more than a mile. The mighty Mississippi was running backwards!
The angry river was surging and roiling. John Weisman, a flatboat pilot who was transporting Kentucky whiskey, reported that “if my flatboat boat load of whiskey had sprung a leak and made the ‘Father of Waters’ drunk it could not have committed more somersaults. It seemed that old Vesuvius himself was drunk.” Vessels were tossed about so violently that experienced boatmen had trouble staying on their feet.
Sandbars and the points of islands dissolved into the furious waters, taking countless numbers of trees down with them, thereby creating new hazards for already beleaguered riverboat pilots. Great quantities of long-submerged trees were also dislodged from the river bottom, freed from the depths “to become merciless enemies of navigation,” as one later report so aptly phrased it.
One man whose boat was wrecked on a planter climbed onto its trunk as his vessel went down. Grateful at least for his life having been spared, he soon realized to his dismay that the snag was slipping down into the raging river. Over the course of the next few hours, he desperately clung to the trunk, calling for help as several boats passed by. Finally, a skiff managed to row a short distance upstream of the man and float down alongside the planter. As it passed under him, the exhausted fellow let go of the trunk and tumbled into the boat.
Neither of Firmin La Roche’s other two boats was in sight; one vessel and its crew would never be seen again. “Everywhere there was noise like thunder,” wrote La Roche, “and the ground was shaking the trees down, and the air was thick with something like smoke. There was much lightning … I do not know how long this went on, for we were all in great terror, expecting death.” La Roche, Lamel, and Ben knelt and received absolution from Fr. Joseph.
Finally, the great wave began to subside, and the river gradually resumed its normal direction. Near New Madrid, several boats that had been carried up a small stream just above the town were left high and dry, several miles from the river.
As La Roche’s boat was carried back downstream, the sky began to lighten. On the Kentucky side of the river the boatmen saw two houses burning. When they reached New Madrid, there were several more buildings in flames, and a crowd of about twenty terror-stricken people crowded together on the high bank, crying out and cringing in fear. The crewmen tied up to the shore, but before anyone could disembark, a nearby hickory tree suddenly cracked and came crashing down on the boat. A branch whipped into La Roche’s left arm, splintering the humerus like a toothpick. Ben was pinned beneath the tree trunk. The others rushed to his aid, but when they managed, with some difficulty, to pull his body out, it was limp. Ben was dead.
The tree had also damaged the boat, which began taking on water. Thinking they would be drowned, the men frantically climbed onto the shore, dragging Ben’s lifeless body with them. When the people on land saw a priest among the group, they all knelt, and Fr. Joseph gave them absolution as well.
La Roche’s boat did not sink, however, and the townspeople loudly urged the boatmen to return to their craft, believing they would be safer on the water. Having already experienced several terrifying hours on the river, however, the crew were of the exact opposite opinion, and they chose to stay on land. They hurriedly dug a shallow grave and buried Ben.
All the while, the shocks continued, accompanied by constant sounds issuing from the earth. As soon as it was light enough, the crew set about repairing the boat. When it was mended to the extent that they could continue, the people onshore began crowding on board and dumping the cargo of furs into the river in order to lighten the load. (La Roche later estimated his losses at $600.) Finally, when no more souls could safely fit aboard, they pushed off. Unfortunately, the boat leaked badly, and the overloaded vessel was in danger of sinking. Lamel bailed furiously, but finally La Roche insisted that the passengers be deposited back onshore.
As they made their way toward New Orleans, the boatmen saw evidence of earthquake damage for 250 miles south of New Madrid. Concerning the loss of life, Fr. Joseph wrote, “We made no effort to find out how many people had been killed, although it was told us that many were. We saw the dead bodies of several and afterwards drowned persons we saw floating in the river.”
* * * * *
Earthquakes in themselves do not usually kill people. People are killed by the secondary phenomena associated with earthquakes, which include tsunamis, landslides, fires, falling structures, soil liquefaction, and land fissures.
Fires are one of the greatest hazards in an earthquake. In modern quakes they can be caused by exposed electrical wires or broken gas lines. For example, in the 1906 San Francisco quake, for which death toll estimates range from seven hundred to three thousand people, the greatest number of casualties was caused by the resulting fire that swept through the city. In the New Madrid quakes, the burning buildings witnessed by La Roche were a result of candles or overturned woodstoves that still held embers of the previous evening’s fire.
The wave that carried La Roche and his crew upriver and created the impression that the river had reversed its flow was another deadly secondary effect. It was similar in cause and result to a tsunami. Two factors most likely were responsible. First, a large piece of land somewhere near Little Prairie was thrust up and temporarily dammed the river—quite possibly the “great loaf of bread” recorded by Michael Braunm, who observed that after the “loaf” burst, the river was running retrograde. When the water upstream, pushed along by the current, hit the wall of land, it had no place to go but back in the direction from which it had come, causing a huge wave, just as deformation of the ocean floor during an earthquake at sea displaces vast quantities of water that can result in a tsunami. In addition, enormous sections of riverbank were caving in all around—a Captain John Davis recorded seeing “30 or 40 acres” fall—and when they did, they displaced huge volumes of water, adding to the size of the wave. When the land that had dammed up the river began to erode away, which happened relatively quickly because of its soft character, the current once again flowed naturally.
* * * * *
John Bradbury, a Scottish naturalist engaged in an extensive collection of North American plant specimens, was on a boat about a hundred miles south of New Madrid when the first quake hit. He had been entrusted by a friend with delivering a cargo of a ton and a half of lead from St. Louis to New Orleans; on board with him were a passenger named John Bridge and a crew of five French Creoles, including M. Morin, the boatmaster or patron. On the night of December 15, the boat was tied up to a sloping bank on a small island near the second Chickasaw Bluff, near present-day Memphis, about five hundred yards above a shallow stretch of river so treacherous that it was known as the Devil’s Channel or the Devil’s Race Ground. Through this channel, the river rushed so ferociously that the roar of the water could be heard for miles. With the sun already having set, Bradbury determined that the channel was too dangerous to attempt and decided to wait until morning.
When the quake hit, Bradbury and the others were awakened by the noise and “so violent an agitation of the boat that it appeared in danger of upsetting.” They rushed onto the deck. The caving banks had caused such a swell in the river that the boat nearly capsized and sank.
Morin, the patron, was beside himself with fear. “O mon Dieu!” he cried, continuing in French, “We are going to die!” Bradbury tried to calm him, but Morin ran off the boat crying, “Get onto land! Get onto land!” The deckhands followed him onto the island.
Bradbury decided to go ashore as well. As he was preparing to leave the boat, another shock was unleashed. When Bradbury reached the island, he found a frighteningly large fissure. With his candle, he walked the length of the fissure and concluded that it was at least eighty yards long; at either end, the perpendicular banks had crumbled into the Mississippi. With a shudder he realized that had his boat been moored to a perpendicular bank rather than a sloping one, he and his companions would have been goners.
As the sky lightened, the horrors began to emerge. “The river was covered with foam and drift timber, and had risen considerably.” As Bradbury and his party waited for enough light to embark, a pair of empty canoes came drifting downstream on the faster-than-normal current. These canoes were of the type towed by boats and used for getting ashore and boarding other vessels, and Bradbury took it as “a melancholy proof” that some of the boats they had passed the previous day had perished along with their crews.
The shocks continued; while on the island, Bradbury counted twenty-seven more by dawn. At daybreak, he gave the order to embark, and everyone returned to the boat. Two of the deckhands were loosening the ropes when yet another powerful shock hit. In terror, the two men ran up onto dry land, but before they could get across the fissure that had opened in the night, a tree came smashing down to block their way. The bank of the island was rapidly disappearing into the river. Bradbury called out to loosen the ropes, and the two hands ran back to the boat.
Now they were once again on the river, but as the boat approached the Devil’s Race Ground, Bradbury saw that the channel was chocked with trees and driftwood that had floated down during the night. The passage appeared blocked. Equally distressing, Morin and his crew appeared to be in such a state of panic that Bradbury concluded they were incapable of getting the boat safely through the channel.
Bradbury thought it prudent to stop once more to give the men time to get their emotions under control. Spying an island with a gently sloping bank, the boat moored again, and the crew began preparing breakfast. Bradbury and Morin went ashore to get a close look at the channel and determine where the safest passage might be. As they stood and talked, the 7:15 aftershock arrived, nearly knocking them off their feet. Another tremor hit while they ate breakfast, and as they prepared to reboard the boat, there was still another, which nearly pitched John Bridge into the river, as the sand suddenly gave way beneath him.
Before giving the order to push off, Bradbury noticed that the deckhands were still in a state of fearful paralysis, so he proposed to Morin that the patron give each of them a glass of whiskey to bolster their courage. After they had drunk up, Bradbury gave them a spirited pep talk, reminding them that their safety and the safety of the boat depended on their efforts.
Finally, the boat untied and was once again on the water. Their confidence buoyed by the whiskey and Bradbury’s exhortations, Morin and the hands successfully threaded the boat through the perilous channel, making several instantaneous changes in their course in order to avoid disaster. When they had passed the danger, the men threw down their oars and crossed themselves, then gave a loud cheer and congratulated one another on having come through the Devil’s Race Ground in one piece.
Bradbury’s summing up of the total effect of the December 16 quakes was that they “produced an idea that all nature was in a state of dissolution.”
* * * * *
The crews of countless boats either drowned or abandoned their crafts to take their chances on land. The misfortunes of these men proved a source of salvation for the residents of New Madrid. In the days following December 16, the river deposited manna at their shores, as boat after unmanned boat floated down into the New Madrid harbor, bringing a bounty of meat, flour, cheese, butter, and apples. The town was still a disaster zone, but at least the people had enough to eat.
The shaking went on—as Jared Brooks wrote on December 16, “it is doubtful if the earth is at rest from these troubles 10 minutes during the day and succeeding night”—persisting throughout the course of the following days. Three days later, Stephen F. Austin—later known as “The Father of Texas”—landed at New Madrid and recorded his impressions. “The Philanthropic emotions of the soul are never more powerfully exercised,” he wrote, “than when called on [to] witness some great and general calamity … throwing a hitherto fertile country into dessolation and plunging such of the unfortunate wretches who survive the ruin, into Misery and dispair.”
“These emotions I experianced when on landing at N. Madrid the effects by the Earthquake were so prominently visible as well in the sunken and shattered situation of the Houses, as in the countenance of the few who remained to mourn over the ruins of their prosperity and past happiness.”
Several days afterwards, the camp of Little Prairie refugees received word that New Madrid had survived and that food was available there. Led by George Ruddell, the two hundred Little Prairie survivors immediately set out on a three-day march and reached New Madrid on Christmas Eve.
* * * * *
As the New Orleans chugged its way down the hazard-choked river, keeping to the middle as much as possible, those on board continued to witness the aftermath of the earthquake’s wrath. Earlier in the voyage, the steamboat had always made fast to the shore at night, but with so many sections of riverbank caving in without warning, that was no longer possible. Instead, pilot Andrew Jack now anchored to any of the larger islands that dotted the river.
One night soon after passing New Madrid, with the shakes continuing, the steamboat put up on the downstream side of one such island, identified by Zadok Cramer in The Navigator as Island 32 (the islands were numbered consecutively, beginning at the mouth of the Ohio), about fifty miles below Little Prairie. In the night, the passengers were awakened by the sounds of scraping and banging against the sides of the boat. Several times, the vessel was shaken by severe blows. Conferring with Jack, Roosevelt concluded that the sounds and jolts, which would continue all through the night, were caused by driftwood that was being swept downriver. They passed the word to the other passengers and then returned to bed.
When the people of the New Orleans got out on deck the next morning, they were stunned. They were no longer anchored to the island—it appeared that the steamboat had slipped anchor and floated downriver all night.
But Pilot Jack, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the river, looked around and pointed out to the others the landmarks that showed they were in the same spot at which they had dropped anchor the previous day. The boat had not moved at all—instead, the island had broken up in the night and been carried away by the current! The sounds and jolts they had heard and felt throughout the night were caused by pieces of the disintegrating island floating up against the boat.
Island 32 was not the only one to disintegrate. Island 94, known as Stack Island or Crow’s Nest Island, about 450 miles below New Madrid and 175 miles above Natchez, also disappeared.
A tale published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1902 purported to tell the story of “The Last Night of Island Ninety-Four.” According to this account, on the evening of December 15, a Captain Sarpy was en route from St. Louis to New Orleans in his keelboat, the Belle Heloise, with his wife and daughter and a large sum of money. At nightfall, the keelboat tied up at Island 94. This island had been a long-standing lair for river denizens of every stripe, including Samuel Mason, the notorious river pirate who had been apprehended in Little Prairie a decade earlier, only to escape while being transported on the river. Two years before Sarpy’s trip, however, a force of 150 keelboatmen had invaded the island and cleaned out the den of thieves, after which the island became a safe haven, and now, Sarpy thought to use the island’s abandoned blockhouse to lodge his family and crew for the night.
As Sarpy and two of his men explored the island, however, they overheard talking in the blockhouse and, peering in the windows, listened as a group of fifteen river pirates discussed plans to fall upon the Belle Heloise the following morning. Sarpy and his crewmen hurried back to the boat and quietly pushed off, tying up at a hidden place in the willows on the west bank about a mile below Island 94.
The following morning, after weathering a night of earthquakes, Sarpy looked upstream to see that Island 94 had disintegrated—the entire landmass was gone, and presumably, its criminal inhabitants along with it.
Whether or not the story is true, Island 94 did indeed disappear.
That must have been an amazing and very frightening experience for all concerned, particularly because the science of that day was not sufficiently far advanced for the ordinary person to understand what was happening. It must have felt to many like Divine vengeance was being visited upon them for their sins.
If an identical earthquake were to happen in that area again today, with its vastly greater population and much more developed infrastructure, I shudder to think how many would be killed. It would probably be the single biggest natural disaster to strike the USA since the Declaration of Independence.
Peter
No book excerpt this morning. We have house guests, which is occupying our time, and I'm still not fully back to normal (as far as normal goes, I guess!) after all my medical procedures over the past few months. I simply haven't been able to get around to preparing a snippet.
Please amuse yourselves with the bloggers in the sidebar.
Peter
... one of the classic novels of the 20th century was published.
'Nineteen Eighty-Four' received critical acclaim from its first publication. It's never been out of print, and in 2019 was named by the BBC as one of its '100 Most Inspiring Novels'. It was also its author's swan song, so to speak: Orwell died (of tuberculosis) eight months after its publication.
In honor of the anniversary of publication, I could find no better memorial than to bring you the opening chapter of the book.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTHThe Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the livingroom and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote: April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water. audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never—Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner—she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's physique. Much more it was because of a secretly-held belief—or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope—that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced at his wristwatch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed—and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheeplike face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!', and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off: the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTHBut the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandyhaired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of 'B-B!....B-B!....B-B!'—over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second—a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of 'B-B!....B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened—if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he knew!—that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals—
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHERover and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother—He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and moved heavily towards the door.
Chilling, but also prophetic. We'll never know how many tens of millions of people died at the whim of totalitarian regimes during the 20th century. Will that total be surpassed in the 21st? It's by no means impossible . . .
Peter
As for the past couple of weeks, my pain levels preclude sitting for hours transcribing part of a book, or even reading a lot. My next medical procedure is on Monday, May 20, and I guess I'll need a couple of days to catch my breath before picking up normal blogging again. I hope the specialist will get done everything he wants to do during that procedure, but he's already warned me that if there are too many complications, he'll do a partial job and go back in a third time to finish it. Let's hope and pray that won't be necessary! I'm already tired of this . . .
Anyway, please amuse yourselves with the bloggers listed in the sidebar. They write good, too!
Thanks.
Peter
I'm getting ready for a date in a hospital operating room next week. I'm in a lot of pain, and not feeling desperately creative, either in reading or in writing (fiction, at least - there's an endless supply of news and doofidical bureaucrats to provide inspiration for regular blog articles!). Also, it's not easy sitting for long periods at the computer. Perhaps, when all this is over, that problem will go away.
Anyway, no extended Saturday Snippets for this weekend and next weekend. Please amuse yourself with the bloggers listed in the sidebar. They write good, too!
A particular recommendation this morning is to read Lawdog's latest post, "Meditations On Duty". I'll have more to say about that next week, but it's an important article, and should make any armed citizen think carefully before acting.
Peter
Several readers have asked lately when I'm going to publish more books. Following my mention last Saturday of being in a lot of pain and awaiting surgery, those questions have increased. I figured I owe my fans (thank you for being there!) an explanation. If it's TMI, I apologize, but it won't make sense without a certain amount of detail. (This isn't a pity party, and I'm not looking for sympathy: I'm just laying out the facts so readers can understand why I haven't produced much lately.)
Basically, what I'm enduring at the moment (and have been for the past couple of years) is a coming together of hard wear and tear over many years, plus injury. As regular readers will know, I had a fairly adventurous life in Africa before coming to the USA almost thirty years ago. That put a lot of strain on the moving parts, so to speak: as so many military veterans are known to say, "It's not the years, it's the mileage". That's very true. I was "rode hard and put away wet" for a while, and sooner or later that catches up with one.
The other is my injury on the job two decades ago. That left me with a fused spine and nerve damage to my left leg and hip, and I've been in constant pain (as in 24/7/365) from then onward. That just plain wears on a man, I'm here to tell you.
Put those factors together and the wear and tear accelerates. In 2009 I had a major heart attack, leading to a quadruple bypass. There was no warning that anything was wrong: it just hit me out of nowhere. The theory is that all that stress when I was younger had built up in me, and was intensified by the constant pain following my injury in 2004. Eventually things just came to a head - or, rather, a heart. Bypass surgery was successful, and I carried on with my life, now popping pills for heart health as well as for pain and what have you.
The cardiologist in 2009 told me that bypasses were "warrantied" for no longer than ten years: and, sure enough, ten years and one month after my first heart attack, I had another. This one was smaller, but was a "widowmaker" - a very dangerous one. My cardiologist here in Texas was able to unblock an artery that had been bypassed ten years before, and inserted a stent, which put me back on my feet with minimal long-term heart damage (for which, thanks be to God). That was five years ago. Is there another one on the way five years from now? Sooner? Later? Who knows? All I know is, according to the doctors, once you've had two you're almost guaranteed at least a third.
All that accumulated pain and stress has led to other systems in my body beginning to break down, slowly but surely. I lost my gall bladder some years ago, and am now experiencing kidney problems. I expect at least one surgery to deal with that, fairly soon now. Adding to that, the neurosurgeon who fused my spine warned me, twenty years ago, that I was at high risk for reinjury, and was certain to face spinal deterioration because a fusion reduces flexibility, causing discs above and below the fusion site to atrophy, creating conditions where arthritis of the spine can develop. As he predicted, that has now happened. Unfortunately, Workers Compensation doesn't want to pay for further treatment for a 20-year-old injury; but regular medical insurance won't touch it because they regard it as work-related. That bureaucratic impasse is rather frustrating, to put it mildly. I may have to launch a fundraiser to pay for the spine surgery. We'll see.
To make matters more interesting, along came COVID-19. I've had at least two, and probably three bouts with it. Thanks to Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, I was able to shake them off, but the after-effects linger, as many of you have experienced for yourselves.
So, for the past couple of years, I've faced an accumulation of health problems and increased pain levels that have effectively stopped me producing nearly as much work as I'd like (particularly of what I consider an acceptable quality). However, I am still working, even though I find it hard in my present state of health to produce creative writing that I consider of a suitable standard for publication. I discard a lot of work while editing it, because it's just not up to the standards I try to meet. In an effort to counter that, I put a lot of effort into making this blog relevant, interesting and entertaining, in an attempt to force myself to remain in the "writing groove".
My plans right now are to complete my Civil War naval trilogy, which is making good progress at last. I plan to release it in rapid succession, one book a month over three months, hopefully kicking off in 2025. I also have the sixth volume of the Maxwell Saga almost ready to publish. I hope that will happen later this year (although that depends on surgeries and their aftermath - that may push it out to 2025 as well). I'm very sorry for the delay (not least because I rely on income from my books to survive!), but I'm doing my best. I hope you understand.
So, there you have the state of the author. I'll keep on plugging away, and I truly hope I can get through and past my current health problems to where I can produce more work, more often. Prayers, as always, are appreciated.
Peter
I'm afraid I haven't had time or energy to prepare a Saturday Snippet this morning. I have surgery coming up later this month, and I'm in a fair amount of pain, so just keeping up with the daily round and common task is difficult for me at present. Prayers for health and healing will be gratefully appreciated.
Meanwhile, please amuse yourselves with the bloggers in the sidebar. They write good, too!
Peter
Rumer Godden is perhaps not as well-known a novelist in America as she was in England, where she was one of the most popular novelists for many decades.
One of her best-loved novels is "In This House Of Brede".
Based upon and informed by her decades-long friendship with the Benedictine nuns of Stanbrook Abbey, the novel tells of the entry into religious life of Philippa Talbot, and her struggles to adapt to an enclosed contemplative community. It's been one of my favorite books ever since I read it, and has remained in print since it was first published in 1969.
To introduce you to the book, I've chosen to skip over the introit and go straight to the first chapter, where Philippa has been in the community for four years, and is about to make her formal entrance into lifetime vows. It's also a moment of transition for Brede Abbey.
The tower of Brede Abbey was a landmark for miles through the countryside and out to sea; high above the town of Brede, its gilded weathercock caught the light and could flash in bright sun.
The weathercock bore the date 1753 and had been put there by the Hartshorn family to whom the Abbey – in those days the Priory of the Canons of St Augustine – had been given after the Reformation; it had then been the Hartshorns’ private house for more than two hundred and fifty years. When the nuns came they had thought it prudent not to take the weathercock down – ‘Brede wouldn’t have tolerated a Catholic nunnery here in 1837,’ Dame Ursula Crompton told the novices. ‘We had to disguise ourselves.’ The cross was below, a stone cross interlaced with thorns – and it had known thorns; it had been thrown down, erected again and stood now high over the entrance to the church; it was said to be nearly a thousand years old; certainly its stone was weathered but, though the wind from the marshes blew fiercely against it and rain beat in the winter gales that struck the heights of Brede so violently, the cross stayed unmoved, sturdily aloft, while the weathercock whirled and thrummed as the wind took it. Dame Ursula had pleasure in underlining the moral, but then Dame Ursula always underlined.
The townspeople were used to the nuns now. The extern sisters, who acted as liaisons between the enclosure and the outside world, were a familiar sight in their black and white, carrying their baskets as they did the Abbey’s frugal shopping. Brede Abbey had accounts at the butcher and grocer as any family had; the local garage serviced the Abbey car which Sister Renata drove; workmen from Brede had been inside the enclosure, and anyone was free to come through the drive gates, ring the front door bell which had a true monastic clang, and ask for an interview with one of the nuns; few of the townspeople came, though the Mayor made a formal call once a year; the Abbey’s visitors, and there were many, usually came from farther afield, from London or elsewhere in Britain, from the continent or far overseas, some of them famous people. The guest house, over the old gatehouse, was nearly always full.
From the air, it would seem that it was the Abbey that had space, the old town below that was enclosed; steep and narrow streets ran between the ancient battlements and its houses were huddled, roof below roof, windows and eaves jutting so that they almost touched; garden yards were overlooked by other garden yards while the Abbey stood in a demesne of park, orchard, farm and garden. Its walls had been heightened since the nuns came, trees planted that had grown tall; now it was only from the tower that one could look into the town, though at night a glow came up from the lights seeming, from inside the enclosure, to give the Abbey walls a nimbus.
The traffic made a continual hum too, heard in the house but not in the park that stretched away inland towards the open fields; it was a quiet hum because the town was quiet and old-fashioned; besides, no car or lorry could be driven quickly through its narrow cobbled streets. The sparrow voices of children, when they were let out of school, were heard too, but the only sound that came from the Abbey was dropped into the town by bells measuring, not the hours of time as did the parish church clock, but the liturgical hours from Lauds to Compline; the bells rang the Angelus, the call to Chapter and the Abbey news of entrances and exits; sometimes of death. There was a small bell, St John, almost tinkling by contrast; it hung in the long cloister and summoned the nuns to the refectory. The bells of the Abbey, the chimes of the parish church clock, coming across each other, each underlining the other, gave a curious sense of time outside time, of peace, and the only quarrel the town had with the Abbey now was that the nuns insisted on feeding tramps.
A winding stone stair led up to the tower, going through the belfry above the bell tribune where the hanging bell ropes had different coloured tags. Though the bells were numbered, they had names. ‘Dame Ursula says they are baptized,’ said Sister Cecily. Dame Clare, the zelatrix, Dame Ursula’s assistant, was more exact. ‘There is a ceremony in the pontifical which is called baptizing the bells; it is, rather, a consecration,’ but to Cecily they seemed personalities. Well, they are the Abbey’s voice, but she did not say it aloud – already she suspected that this Dame Clare, so cool and collected, thought her, the new postulant Sister Cecily, whimsical; but the bells were the Abbey’s voice and its daughters knew the meaning of every change and tone, from the high D of Felicity to the deep tone of the six hundred pounds weight of Mary Major; when this was rung, it made the whole tower vibrate.
The stair came out on a flat roof that had a parapet on which tall Philippa could rest her arms and look far out, over the marshes and the river winding through them, to the faint far line of silver that was the sea. I shall never see the sea again. That thought always came to her up here on the tower: ‘I shall never see the sea.’ She whispered it aloud. The silence the nuns kept most of the day for concentration and quiet sometimes made Philippa long to use her tongue, even to herself. But then I’m still new, as religious life goes, not quite four years old, new but with the dragging disadvantage of old habits. ‘I shall never see the sea,’ but Philippa said it with content. Four years had gone since she had made her solitary journey across the marshes, four years except for two months and a few days. If all went well she, Sister Philippa, would make her Solemn Profession next summer, take her vows for life in this house of Brede.
Philippa had discovered the tower in her second week at Brede, when Burnell, the Abbey’s handyman, had pulled a muscle in his leg, leaving it stiff, and Dame Ursula had called on her strong young novices and juniors to do some of his tasks: chopping wood and carrying it in for the common-room’s great fire: carrying kitchen swill for the pigs: cleaning out the deep litter of the hen houses for old Sister Gabrielle, the poultry keeper. Philippa, neither young nor strong, had volunteered to go up and sweep the leaves out of the church tower gutter. ‘Very well, if you have a head for heights,’ said Dame Ursula. Philippa had, and, as a reward, had discovered the high platform, ‘where I can get away,’ she would have said – after only two weeks, she had wanted to get away. ‘I can imagine you living with ninety men,’ Richard had told her, ‘but not with ninety women.’ Yes, it’s somewhere I can breathe, Philippa had thought of the tower and, in spite of Richard, breathe before going on.
From where she stood now, she could look down on her Abbey – it had become ‘her’ Abbey – look over its precincts, over the buildings, the outer and inner gardens and park to the farm outside the walls. The Hartshorns had pulled down most of the old priory, though they had left the L made by the refectory and library wings above the cloister that had been paced by those Augustinian Canons of long ago. The cloister, called the long cloister, was of stone, beautifully arched, its grey weathered, while the new cloisters that ran round the other side of the garth, as the inner court was called, were of red brick, with glazed windows – Lady Abbess shuddered every time she saw them. Another grief to her were the Victorian additions to the church in the sanctuary and extern chapel – ‘Abominations of mottled marble,’ she said. The choir itself was exquisite, part of the Augustinians’ old church, with pointed stone arches and delicate tracery that matched the chapter house; the Hartshorns had kept that intact but used it for breeding pigeons. ‘Pigeons in a chapter house!’ said Dame Ursula. ‘I rescued it from worse than pigeons,’ the Abbess had said, ‘from what our nuns did there when they got some money! they lined it with pitch pine and put in a plaster ceiling!’ It was Abbess Hester who had restored it, uncovering the delicate arches that met at the apex of the roof. ‘All that beautiful stone,’ said Abbess Hester, glorying.
The buildings held spaciousness in refectory, libraries, workshops, though the cells in their long rows on the first and second floors were narrow. Across the outer garden a glimpse of the Dower House, used as the novitiate now, showed among its trees and, dominating the whole, the church with its tower on which Philippa stood.
* * * * *
The Abbey was hushed this afternoon in a hush deeper even than its normal quiet; though the nuns went about their work and the bells were rung at the appointed time, and the chant of voices came, as always, from the church, the hush was there, a hush of waiting. The parlours were closed. ‘No visiting today,’ said Sister Renata when she answered the front door. She and the other extern sisters went softly in and out, but they did not go into the town, where the news had spread. ‘The Abbess is dying: Lady Abbess of Brede.’
This was the community recreation hour but, looking down, Philippa could see only two figures instead of the many, habited in black and white and as alike as penguins, that would usually at this time have been gathered in the park, or on the paths or pacing together in the cloisters. The prioress and senior nuns were keeping vigil in the Abbess’s rooms, the others had withdrawn, some to their cells, most to their stalls in choir, to pray while they waited – Philippa, still renegade, seemed to pray best up here – but the life of the monastery had to go on and Dame Ursula had as usual sent her novitiate to the tasks they undertook in the afternoons for the community; gardening, helping the printers in the packing room, sewing or taking messages to relieve Dame Domitilla whose office as portress was arduous. The two small figures below were silently mulching the rose beds.
By their short black dresses and short veils Philippa knew they were Sister Hilary, a postulant of two months’ standing, and the new postulant, Sister Cecily Scallon, who had arrived only yesterday afternoon.
‘It is strange,’ Dame Beatrice Sheridan had said when with Mother Prioress and the other councillors she had waited for Cecily at the enclosure door, ‘strange how often an entrance coincides with a death in the house. One comes, in faith and hope, to make her vows, as the other reaches their culmination – or should have reached it,’ she could have said.
Lady Abbess Hester, old and mortally ill, was lingering – unaccountably; the inexplicable waiting had gone on now for thirty hours, all yesterday from the morning, through the night, all this morning and into this windless but chill October afternoon, a day and a half, and still it seemed she could not die. ‘Why can’t she?’ The question was spreading and dismay growing through the grief, the stupor they all felt, ‘What is troubling Mother? Why can’t she die?’
Abbesses of Brede Abbey were elected for life and Abbess Hester Cunningham Proctor had ruled Brede for thirty-two years; she was now eighty-five but, up to yesterday, had still been active and filled with power – sometimes too much power, her councillors felt; headstrong was the right word, but they dared not use it. The community knew that their Abbess could be as wilful as she was clever and charming – and lately there had been favourites, that threat to community life – but still their trust in her was infinite, and her small black eyes, so filled with humour and understanding, had still seen ‘everything,’ said the nuns, and she seemed to know by instinct what she did not see. She had grown heavy for her height and she limped from a hip broken ten years before and that had never properly set. ‘It was never given time,’ the nuns said, but, ‘no more oil in my bones,’ said the Abbess. Her hands, too, shook; of that she had taken not the slightest notice.
As Dame Hester she had made her mark as a sculptor; it had been such a mark that, when she was elected Abbess, her friend Sir Basil Egerton, art critic and a keeper at the British Museum, had written: ‘This is absurd. What time will you have now for your own work?’ ‘I have no “own” work,’ she had written back. ‘I do God’s work.’ It would seem that God had also endowed her with a genius for friendship, warm and lasting. All her adult life, she had worked and prayed only in the Abbey – ‘I entered at nineteen’ – and yet, from its strict enclosure her influence had spread far.
‘Her life is a beacon,’ Dame Ursula told her novices, ‘that sends its rays all over the world and to unexpected places, unexpected people.’ The Abbess’s friends came from every walk of life from dukes to chimney-sweeps. The cliché happened to be true though the nuns had no inkling that the Duke of Gainsborough often came to see the Abbess, nor that she had a good friend, a woman chimney-sweep, ‘who has often given me the most sane advice’. Happenings in the parlours, letters and telephone calls were, for every nun, strictly private. Some of Abbess Hester’s friendships had ripened through decades – as with Sir Basil – from conversations in the parlour, where a unique mixture of wit, learning and humour had come through the grille, from thought ‘and praying’ the Abbess would have said – and from letters. ‘Her letters ought to be published,’ said Sir Basil.
‘I suppose,’ said Dame Maura Fitzgerald, the precentrix, ‘we had taken it for granted she would live for ever.’
‘No one lives for ever,’ Dame Ursula made her usual truism.
At first it was difficult for the nuns to understand what had happened; they only knew that yesterday morning young Sister Julian Colquhoun had gone to the Abbess’s room and had, of course, been admitted. ‘Sister Julian who can do no wrong,’ as Dame Veronica Fanshawe, the cellarer, said bitterly, Dame Veronica of the wistful harebell-blue eyes whose chin trembled at the Abbess’s slightest reproof. Dame Anastasia, the nun telephonist who was at the switchboard next door, had heard Lady Abbess’s, ‘Deo Gratias,’ giving permission for the Sister to come in, and then Sister Julian’s blithe, ‘Benedicite, Mother,’ as she shut the door. Half an hour later Sister Julian had come out and had – she said – gone straight to the church where she had said the Te Deum. ‘I was so happy,’ said Sister Julian. A few minutes later Abbess Hester had had a stroke.
‘But she can’t be dying,’ Sister Cecily had said yesterday when she was met with the news: ‘I had a letter from her this morning.’
‘We would have put you off,’ Dame Emily Lovell, the prioress, told her, ‘but you have had such a long struggle to get here that we felt we shouldn’t.’
Cecily had had constant shivers ever since – shock, thought Philippa; as a senior in the novitiate, Philippa had been asked to take the new postulant under her wing. Before she came to Brede, Philippa had not been close to young girls – Joyce Bowman had dealt with them – except perhaps Penny Stevens. Penny, Philippa thought, must be the same age now as this Sister Cecily, twenty-three, young girls, still at the beginning; they had not had time to be spotted and stained, chipped and scarred, thought Philippa with a pang of envy. There was an innocence about Cecily that reminded her of Penny; they had the same humility, probably because they had both been bullied – Dame Clare had told Philippa a little about Cecily’s mother – but Cecily Scallon was beautiful as Penny certainly was not. Cecily was tall, not slim but giving the impression of slimness, because she carried herself so well. Her hair was ash-blonde, so flaxen fair that it was only when sun or lamplight caught it that it gleamed pale gold. ‘People bleach their hair that colour,’ said Dame Veronica, but Cecily’s hair was natural and naturally curly. ‘But it won’t grow,’ said Cecily who detested it; it showed under her postulant’s veil in short feathery rings like a child’s. Her habit of veiling her eyes by exceptionally long lashes gave her the look of a child too, a shy child. The eyes when she lifted them were dark, not black but dark brown. ‘Striking with that hair,’ said Dame Veronica, ‘and that wonderful skin,’ while Dame Maura, the precentrix, said, ‘She looks like a seraph.’ That was misleading: Cecily was too tall and too feminine to be a seraph – or a child.
There had been nothing misleading in Penny; she was stubby, grey-eyed with dark hair that always looked tousled, but Penny was firm – ‘All of a piece, all through,’ as Joyce Bowman used to say – and her eyes were as openly trustful as a dog’s, while Cecily veiled hers from any direct gaze. Two girls, but utterly different and not only in looks and character; fulfilment, for Penny, lay in loving Donald, however he might treat her, Donald and, one day, Donald’s children; while for Sister Cecily … up on the tower Philippa said a prayer, not for the dying Abbess but for the new postulant.
The novitiate of any convent or monastery is, in a way, a restless place with its entrances and sudden exits. ‘They comes and they goes,’ Sister Priscilla Pawsey, Brede’s old kitchener said, ‘but mostly they goes.’ In Philippa’s four years there, she had tried to keep her eyes down, her thoughts on her own purpose, as Dame Ursula directed, but she had not been able to help casting a professional look over her fellow novices and juniors. ‘Haven’t I sat on selection boards for years?’ Even in her first days, – Sister Matilda won’t stay, she could have said. Sister Matilda had kept the Rule with scrupulous fidelity – scrupulous exaggeration, thought Philippa. No bows had been as exact as hers, no books marked as correctly, no one else obeyed with such alacrity. By reason of nine months’ seniority, she had been kind to the new postulants, always setting them right, ignoring the fact that Julian had a lifetime’s knowledge of Brede and its ways. ‘And I should let Sister Philippa manage her own Latin,’ said Dame Ursula. ‘My poor girl!’ Julian had told Matilda afterwards. ‘Sister Philippa took a “first” in languages at Oxford.’ Everyone had been glad when Sister Matilda was sent away; Sister Angela too: ‘She sits about, waiting for someone to put a halo on her,’ Julian had said. ‘She certainly doesn’t make much effort,’ Philippa had to say. ‘Only in trances,’ said Julian, scornfully and, ‘We don’t put much faith in ecstasies here,’ Dame Ursula had told them. ‘The nun you see rapt away in church isn’t likely to be the holiest. The holiest one is probably the one you would never notice because she is simply doing her duty.’ Sister Angela had left after four months, but there were many who persevered in the life: Sister, now Dame, Benita, once a teacher of art: Sister, again now Dame, Nichola, daughter of a chemist – ‘He lets us have drugs at cost price.’ Sister Sophie, just senior to Philippa: Sister Constance, tiny and quick as a bird, who had come in Philippa’s third year, as had Sister Louise whose father and brothers were miners.
From the beginning Julian had seemed to be set apart as a leader. In the novitiate it was Julian who calmed troubled waters and never seemed to have any troubles of her own; who somehow made a cross person less cross and who encouraged the others when a tedious task flagged. ‘Let’s all get at it,’ she would say; her energy was infectious. ‘She wants to put the world to rights,’ but Dame Ursula had said it in affectionate amusement, and, ‘How much better it is to curb than to prod,’ said Dame Clare, who as zelatrix was Dame Ursula’s right hand.
When the Abbess paid one of her frequent visits to the novitiate, it was Julian who had sat next to her, sometimes at her feet and the Abbess had allowed it. She would put her hand down and let it rest against Julian’s cheek as she talked. If they were in the garden or park, Lady Abbess would lean on Julian, ‘I need a strong young arm.’ The others walked around or ahead of them, but it was Sister Julian who was close, whose laugh rang out; she seemed to give the old woman new life, but Philippa, by habit and long training, was cool; she made her own judgements and every now and again she had found herself wondering why Sister Julian had chosen to be a contemplative nun. Could it have been propinquity? thought Philippa.
Julian had first come to Brede when she was four years old; the same Julian, stocky and strong, with the same dark curly hair and bright brown eyes. She was the daughter of James Colquhoun, one of the Colquhoun Brothers of the building firm, who had built the new cloisters. Often, when he had come to inspect the work, Mr Colquhoun had brought his small Barbara, the future Julian, with him. Even at that age she had wanted to stay. ‘But nuns have to work,’ said her father.
‘I can work,’ said four-year-old Julian.
‘What can you do?’ the Abbess had teased her; even then, the community said, Julian had been Lady Abbess’s pet.
‘I can laugh and I can sing.’ The Abbess had been delighted. ‘A perfect Benedictine!’ she had told Mr Colquhoun, and fifteen years later Barbara became Sister Julian. It had not stopped at Julian; her brother John, the only son, was a monk. ‘Two out of three are a lot to give,’ the Abbess told the Colquhouns.
‘If God wants them, who am I to say “no”?’ Mr Colquhoun had said and, ‘We still have Lucy – perhaps she will give us some grandchildren. I should dearly have liked a son to come into the firm – maybe it will be a grandson.’
Julian Colquhoun should have made her Solemn Profession in February of the coming year. ‘February the 19th, to be exact,’ said Dame Domitilla. ‘Sister Philippa is due next, on the 1st of July.’ Dame Domitilla, as portress on the ‘turn’, knew all the comings and goings of the Abbey, took in the post and sent it out and, with the years, had become like a reliable clock, telling the exact time or date of any event in Brede Abbey. Her memory was phenomenal and the nuns vowed she could recite the register: ‘June 19th, 1953. Entered, Barbara Colquhoun as choir postulant, in religion Sister Julian, elder daughter of James Colquhoun and his wife Helen Baird. Born August 24th, 1934. ‘January 1st, 1954. Entered, Philippa Talbot (widow née Sweeney) as choir postulant, in religion Sister Philippa, only daughter of the late Giles Sweeney and his wife Isabelle Cayzer, deceased. Born June 30th, 1911.’
‘And no two entrances could have been more different,’ said Dame Domitilla.
When Julian came, the Abbess had taken her, as it were, from her father’s hands. Father, mother, brother – the young monk John – and the little sister Lucy had all come with Julian, spending two days at the Guest House, and though there had been tears and embraces before she knocked at the great enclosure door, it was with pride that they saw her go through. Mr Colquhoun had made handsome financial arrangements for her; it was all sure and firm. Philippa, that uncertain prospect, came alone; she had given her briefcase to Sister Renata, the extern portress, to send through the ‘turn’ to the Abbess. It contained transfer notes for shares worth round about five thousand pounds, ‘to go on with,’ Philippa told the Abbess and the cellarer, Dame Veronica. ‘There may be a gratuity to follow in lieu of my pension. There would have been a gratuity if I had married ordinarily – but will this qualify as a marriage? I don’t know. My friends are looking into it for me. It’s a tricky point.’ She had added, ‘I thought I should make the investments for you; I didn’t know how good your man was.’ Dame Veronica had given a little gasp, but Philippa did not realize that she had been presumptuous and the Abbess only said gravely that the money seemed well invested.
* * * * *
Abbess Hester had sent for Philippa yesterday – ‘Only yesterday,’ whispered Philippa now on the tower – and told her it had been decided to bring her into the community for the last six months of her Simple Vows. ‘It’s absurd to keep you in the novitiate any longer.’ She had put her hand on Philippa’s shoulder. ‘You have fought a manful battle, as I knew you would.’ She had said that yesterday morning; indeed, it had been as Philippa was leaving the Abbess’s room that Julian had come so blithely towards it.
Julian’s brother John had spent the weekend before at Brede – ‘Providentially,’ said gentle Dame Beatrice to whom most things were providential. ‘If he had not come, Sister Julian might have made a terrible mistake.’ Brother John Colquhoun had changed his Benedictine Order for a missionary one in India, the Brown Brothers, and at the end of his year as a novice there, had been sent back to England to take a year’s course in hydrostatics.
‘What on earth’s that?’ asked Hilary.
‘Water engineering,’ said Julian and she had said, ‘You shall all see him,’ as one granting a rare privilege. ‘Mother says he will talk to the whole community this Saturday in the large parlour about his province in Bengal – the work and problems there. You can’t imagine what it is like,’ said Julian, with shining eyes.
‘I can. I once lived there,’ said Philippa. Now and again Sister Philippa lifted the curtain over these – to the others – tantalizing glimpses of her past. ‘I believe Sister Philippa has been everywhere,’ declared Sister Constance, but if Philippa had, she did not say a word about it to Brother John and he had breezily taken it for granted that there was no one in his audience who had been out of Britain except Dame Thecla, the Ethiopian who, to the least observant eye, was not English, and he had explained things, ‘not exactly in one-syllable words, but very nearly,’ as Dame Agnes said.
‘Wasn’t it deeply interesting?’ said little Sister Constance.
‘Not deeply,’ said Philippa.
‘Oh, Sister!’
‘It couldn’t be; he is not a deep young man’ – any more than Sister Julian is a deep young woman, Philippa had wanted to add, but refrained. Not yet ordained, Brother John was only twenty-four and exactly like Julian – or as Philippa had sensed that Julian was. He looked like her, thick set, cleanly, with the same bright brown eyes, the same enthusiasm. His hair was crew-cut, his cassock short. ‘John’s a worker,’ said Sister Julian proudly.
‘And he thinks we are not.’
That had been evident, evident too that Lady Abbess had not been entirely immune from the missionary fever that was spreading. ‘Brother John thinks you would be interested,’ she told her senior nuns on the Sunday following the talk, ‘to meet him for an informal discussion in the parlour, perhaps five or six of you at a time. He asks me to say there will be no gloves on. That’s good because we have a great deal to learn.’
‘Hasn’t he?’ they had wanted to ask, but were silent.
‘Shall we say after None in number three parlour?’
There was another silence, then, ‘Yes, Mother, if you are interested.’ The Abbess had felt the silence and over-rode it. ‘I am interested and you should be too – unless you prefer to shut your minds.’
‘Why do we have to waste our time with this young whipper-snapper?’ Dame Agnes Kerr, the tart old scholar, had asked when the Abbess had gone. ‘Why?’
‘He is Sister Julian’s brother.’ That was Dame Veronica. She and Dame Agnes were seldom in sympathy but over this, for different reasons, they were at one.
‘Mother is building too much on that girl,’ said wise Dame Agnes. ‘Far too much,’ and wondered why Dame Veronica’s harebell-blue eyes had looked at her, with such fear? thought Dame Agnes uneasily.
To Dame Agnes, Sister Julian and her brother with their new-fangled ideas were like woodpeckers busily making holes until the life of the tree was destroyed. ‘They don’t care a rap for history or tradition, and are completely ignorant of them. They won’t even listen.’ It was the beginning of the restlessness, the growing power of the young.
‘I don’t like to see these,’ Brother John had said, tapping the grille of the parlour. ‘I look forward to the day when the bars will come down and you can mingle freely with your guests – perhaps even wear lay clothes as they do.’
‘Just as we did a hundred years ago,’ said the young councillor Dame Catherine Ismay.
That took him aback.
‘Didn’t you know?’ asked Dame Beatrice, sweetly. ‘When we first came to Brede that was how we had to live. We could not wear our habits, and were not allowed enclosure until 1880. We had to fight to get our grilles.’
‘One who informs, ought to be himself informed, not?’ Dame Colette, who was French, asked of the air.
‘But then you could open a hospital, run a school,’ he argued.
Dame Maura, the precentrix, rose with a swish of skirts. ‘I have an organ practice,’ she announced and left the parlour. Dame Maura was privileged – and did not believe in wasting time.
‘We kept a school in those days. Now, thank God, we don’t have to,’ said Dame Agnes.
‘Why thank God?’ he had bristled.
‘Because it took us away from our proper work.’
‘Which supports the likes of you.’ Dame Perpetua, Brede’s stout, steady, subprioress, was always forthright.
It was the old argument. ‘Our Lord taught and healed …’ said Brother John.
‘And prayed; withdrew into the mountain or the wilderness to pray,’ said the nuns.
‘Do you not believe in prayer?’ asked Dame Colette.
‘Of course – but if you are shut away it must be limited.’
‘Or concentrated,’ said Dame Catherine Ismay.
‘Brother John, you want to be a missionary,’ said Dame Agnes. ‘Then you might reflect, Brother, that the greatest missionary of modern times was, and is, little St Thérèse of Lisieux who never, even for five minutes, left her cloister.’
* * * * *
John Colquhoun, though, had become likeable when he talked about his work, ‘his, not ours,’ said Dame Agnes. The Brown Brothers were called ‘Brown’ – ‘not because we have Indian priests, though I’m glad to say we have many, but from the coarse brown clothes we wear’. They were Indian clothes, a kameeze, loose tunic shirt, and loose trousers coming in to the ankle, ‘much more practical for manual work than a tunic and scapular.’ The mission was a new venture in India’s ‘moffusil’ or countryside and was formed, not to open schools or hospitals, but for agriculture and irrigation. ‘Farms and wells,’ said Brother John.
‘What could be needed more?’ asked Lady Abbess.
The Order lived as the peasants did; their centres were village huts; the brothers slept on charpoys, Indian string beds; ate Indian food. ‘And we need sisters’; his eyes had swept over the ranks behind the grille. ‘Sisters for the women, to teach them hygiene, how to look after their children and feed them better; how to make the most of what they have: plant vegetable gardens and rear chickens and bring back the village handicrafts. Every minute counts.’ His face had burned with zeal and there had been an answering fire in the eyes of many of the nuns, especially the young ones. ‘Wonderful, wonderful work,’ said Sister Constance as they had all talked of it in the novitiate during recreation. ‘If one could do it, but it must be terribly hard.’
‘Is it harder than ours?’ asked Philippa.
‘Of course it is,’ said Julian but Philippa had shaken her head. ‘Is it easier to “be” than to “do”?’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’ The blood had risen in Julian’s cheeks. ‘Those poor poor people. Look at our clothes, our habits,’ she had cried. ‘They ought to be made of the cheapest serge.’
‘Why?’ asked Philippa. ‘We weave our own, and hand-woven cloth wears better than serge, especially cheap serge.’
‘Yes, I have had this winter habit for thirteen years,’ Dame Ursula had put in.
‘But our white linen. Our shoes.’ Julian had been up in arms. ‘We should be barefoot like the Poor Clares.’
‘The Poor Clares do more manual work, less study,’ said Dame Ursula. ‘With our long hours of stillness, bare feet would not be practical.’
‘They would be exaggerated,’ said Dame Clare.
‘I still feel ashamed.’
‘Did Mary feel ashamed for not helping Martha?’
Philippa still had not learned to let an argument go, or temper it; she still used the quick riposte, ‘and we haven’t a chance against her,’ muttered Julian but, ‘The Church needs many, many Marthas,’ Dame Clare had said gently, laying her hand on Julian’s.
‘Yes!’ cried Julian. ‘Look at the state of the world.’
‘Which is why she needs a few Marys too.’
* * * * *
Philippa had undoubtedly been right but she had had a rebuke from the zelatrix. Brother John Colquhoun had left Brede on the Monday after that memorable weekend; he had telephoned Julian that evening and later that night she had gone to Abbess Hester and asked permission to telephone her father and mother. On Tuesday morning she went to the Abbess again.
Kneeling by her chair, Julian had told her she would not now be taking her vows at Brede. ‘I see where my real vocation is.’ She would be joining the Brown Sisters, ‘as soon as John can arrange it.’ Her father and mother approved and they would write to Lady Abbess. ‘It will be work, real work, and with John. I shall have to start all over again.’ Julian had had a new humility but her face was radiant; this undoubtedly was the path for Julian. She thanked the dear Abbess and dear Dame Ursula and Dame Clare for all their love and care. ‘For all you have taught me, and I know, dearest Mother, you will give me your blessing.’
The Abbess had succeeded in blessing and kissing her – until then she had not said a word – and Julian had danced away. Twenty minutes later Sister Ellen, who looked after the Abbess’s rooms, had found Abbess Hester slumped and unconscious in her chair.
But, no matter what the affection or the hopes, thought the nuns, a great Abbess does not die because a junior nun leaves, even one as dear as Sister Julian. ‘It doesn’t happen,’ they would have said, but it was happening now. ‘Yes, she’s defeated this time,’ Doctor Avery had said. He had been the Abbey’s doctor for a score of years and had come at once. The Abbess was paralysed, except for the smallest movement of her head and fingers, and unable to swallow; Dame Joan, the infirmarian, had stood by the bed, hour after hour, constantly moistening the strangely swollen lips. Abbess Hester was plainly dying – ‘A matter of hours, perhaps even an hour,’ Doctor Avery had said.
The whole community, the choir nuns in their cowls, had lined the long cloisters, each carrying a lighted candle, and knelt as the enclosure door opened; escorted by the sacristan, Dame Beatrice, softly ringing her little silver bell, and by Dame Agnes who, as mistress of ceremonies, bore a lighted candle before him, Dom Gervase, Brede’s young chaplain, had carried the holy oils and the Blessed Sacrament to the Abbess’s cell. The nuns followed after, singing the ‘Miserere’ and knelt, as many as could, in the Abbess’s rooms, the rest on the bare floor of the corridor. Dom Gervase put down the ciborium on the table, ready with its white cloth, candles and crucifix and came to the bedside, but Abbess Hester had motioned him away by the restless movement of her head, while her fingers plucked feebly in distress, at the sheet. Her lips formed the word ‘No’, though only a distorted sound came through; then the prioress, bending over her, thought she heard the word ‘want’ welling up from the mind below that thickened speech, ‘Wa-ant.’
‘I am here, dear Mother,’ said the prioress as she had said day in, day out, all these years.
‘Wa-ant.’ It went on after Dom Gervase had gone away. ‘I shall be waiting, every minute,’ he had said, ‘but I think we should send for Abbot Bernard.’ Abbot Bernard Rossetti was Abbot of Udimore Abbey, twenty miles away, companion monastery to Brede; for years, he had been Abbess Hester’s trusted counsellor and friend; he had come at once but she had given him no flicker of recognition.
‘Wa-ant.’
‘Want something or someone?’ The prioress, Dame Emily, bent low. ‘Is it Dame Veronica?’ she had asked, selfless, as always.
Mother Prioress looked as white and strained as if it were she, not the Abbess, who was dying, and – how thin she has grown, thought the nuns, almost emaciated.
As subprioress, Dame Perpetua was below, holding the reins, the guiding strings as, since she took office, she had held them a hundred times when Abbess and prioress were locked away in the Council or other business. ‘But not business like this!’ said Dame Perpetua. Dame Perpetua was as simple as she was downright and she had not tried to stop the tears running down her cheeks as she went about her work; the work was carried out as usual from her room or in the refectory or choir, and, ‘She’s the only one of us who can sing through tears,’ said the nuns. ‘We don’t usually lament over a death,’ they would have said, ‘but this is worrying.’
Next to prioress and subprioress in importance was the cellarer, Dame Veronica of the harebell-blue eyes that were ‘always brimming’, as Dame Agnes said in irritation. Dame Veronica was the most baffling of all Abbess Hester’s appointments; the Rule of St Benedict lays down that a cellarer should be ‘wise, of mature character, not a great eater, not haughty, not excitable, not offensive … not wasteful’. ‘Well, Dame Veronica is not a great eater,’ said Dame Agnes.
The cellarer before had been the younger Dame Catherine Ismay, who had held that office for six years and who seemed to have all the qualities needed; Dame Catherine was capable, unhurried, noted for her evenness, and sturdy, perhaps too sturdy for the Abbess. Three years ago when the day for Distribution of Offices had come round, contrary to all expectations Dame Veronica Fanshawe, pliant Dame Veronica, had been appointed in Dame Catherine’s place, though it had not been done without arguments from the Council, arguments produced with reverence and politeness, unshakeable, but of no avail. In those days, Dame Perpetua, in whose eyes Abbess Hester was the pattern of wisdom, had been on the Council; she and, as always, Dame Emily as prioress, and Dame Beatrice, who saw only the best in everyone and would not go against the Abbess, voted with her for the appointment. None of the arguments had been repeated to the community but, in the way of communities, the nuns seemed to know about them without being told and, when Dame Perpetua became subprioress, leaving a vacancy on the Council, the community had elected Dame Catherine Ismay.
The Abbess had been quick to catch the unspoken criticism and it did not make her like Dame Catherine any better, though Dame Catherine had had no choice but to accept what had happened to her: to be displaced as cellarer, when, because she held that office she had automatically been a councillor, and then to be elected councillor again. Now she was the youngest on the Council as she had been the youngest cellarer ever appointed at Brede but she took it with her accustomed quietness. ‘Quietness or aloofness?’ asked Dame Agnes. It was hard to tell.
As Dame Catherine knelt now, she was bigger, taller than the rest, except for the immensely tall precentrix, Dame Maura. Dame Maura was slim and with her height gave the effect of a mast in a ship scudding before the wind, perhaps because she always moved too fast. Dame Catherine, proportioned like a Brunnhilde, seemed more the figurehead of the ship, first to breast calm or storm; now her face was shut in prayer and an almost visible strength flowed to the tormented figure on the bed.
Dame Beatrice Sheridan knelt closer; though as sacristan her work was exacting, she had been appointed a councillor by the Abbess, whose right it was to appoint three out of the requisite six, the community electing the others. The Abbess had chosen wisely because Dame Beatrice was much loved; no one had ever heard her say an unkind word of anyone. ‘She’s not of this world at all,’ said Dame Veronica.
‘Which will make her of singularly little use on the Council’; that was Dame Agnes.
‘Perhaps we need her to keep the peace,’ was Dame Maura’s retort.
Dame Maura Fitzgerald and Dame Agnes Kerr were the two most prominent nuns in the community, prominent because they were outstanding. ‘I think of them as twin towers,’ Philippa said once, ‘which is odd because Dame Agnes isn’t tall.’
Dame Agnes Kerr was little and bony, even her shoulders looked sharp. She had a red lump on her forehead that the younger nuns said was a third eye, seeing even farther than the other two that, with their red rims and sandy lashes, were so shrewd they stripped away all humbug and pretence. Brede was proud of Dame Agnes. ‘She is our acid test,’ said Dame Maura. When Dame Agnes was working, she was like a terrier down a foxhole. ‘And she will always get her fox,’ the Abbess had said.
Dame Agnes was not only a classical scholar but also a mathematician; she had been Eighth Wrangler at Cambridge and, since coming to Brede, had specialized in Anglo-Saxon; she was writing a book on the history, in art, literature and devotion, of the Holy Cross, ‘been writing it for fifteen years,’ said Dame Veronica who, herself, wrote poems.
Dame Maura Fitzgerald, precentrix in charge of all music and Brede’s first organist, was equally noted. ‘People come from all over Britain to hear our chant,’ Dame Ursula told her novices.
Dame Ursula was not kneeling in the Abbess’s room; as mistress of novices her first duty was to the novitiate; Dame Ursula was called Ursa, the Great Bear, or Teddy according to her moods, ‘though we’re not supposed to nickname,’ Hilary warned Cecily. With the councillors knelt French Dame Colette Aubadon, mistress of church work: Dame Camilla, the learned old head librarian: Dame Edith of the printing room. Dame Mildred, gardener, while Dame Joan Howard, the infirmarian, stood on the other side of the bed from Mother Prioress.
‘W-ant.’
‘Is it Dame Veronica?’ but Dame Veronica seemed as if she too had had a stroke and was semi-paralysed. ‘She hasn’t once been in the proc’s room since Mother fell ill,’ said Dame Perpetua wrathfully. The proc’s room was the procurator’s or cellarer’s office where Dame Veronica’s ‘second’, young Dame Winifred, was trying to fill her place. At her name, Dame Veronica looked up, white and cowed as if she were terrified, and the nuns had to push her forward, but when she knelt by the bed and quavered, ‘Mother,’ the Abbess’s restlessness increased, the fingers plucked in torment. ‘W-ant.’
‘Want Sister Julian?’ When the prioress asked that there was a sudden stillness in the old body and, ‘Send for Sister Julian,’ said the prioress.
Sister Julian did not want to come. ‘She’ll try and make me change my mind.’
‘Don’t be silly, child,’ said Dame Perpetua who had gone in person to fetch her. ‘Mother cannot even speak.’
When Sister Julian was defiant, her underlip stuck out and, with her tear-stained face, she looked like a cross child, but when she came to the bed, all her inherent kindliness warmed her into pity, deep sadness and regret for this ruin of her dear and august friend. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to do this. I didn’t mean to,’ she whispered, shrinking against the prioress and, kneeling by the bed, ‘Dear Mother. Dear, dear Mother,’ she said, over and over again, but the head still moved, the fingers twitched and, ‘Want,’ came again. Then it was not Sister Julian.
Dom Gervase tried once more, his dark young face tense with the anguish of his grief. Lady Abbess had been his lifeline but, for all the upholding power of his office, he could not reach past the trouble that tormented her, nor could Abbot Bernard; even he could not soothe her, but towards that evening another word had come welling up, forced out by great effort. The prioress thought it was ‘tell’. ‘Want. Tell.’
‘You want to tell us something, Mother?’ but the Abbess could only say ‘tell’. ‘Why?’ asked the nuns. ‘What could she have to tell?’ ‘Why should she be so troubled? She cannot be afraid.’ No true nun is afraid of death. ‘I wish I knew when I was going to die,’ ninety-six-year-old Dame Frances Anne often said, ‘I wish I knew.’
‘Why, Dame?’
‘Then I should know what to read next.’
In the early hours of the morning, those hours of low ebb when so many souls slip quietly away as if all resistance were gone, the ‘want’ gave way to ‘sor-ry’. ‘Sorry.’ The prioress knew the Abbess’s every shade and tone – she would have believed she knew her every thought – and her quick ear had fathomed that this ‘sorry’ was not only regret; there was contrition, deep contrition. ‘Then it is not only Sister Julian; it is something Mother has done, for which she cannot forgive herself.’
Mother Prioress had not said that aloud but the infirmarian had caught the ‘sorry’ too; Dame Emily and Dame Joan looked at one another and, as if it were a contagion, deeper qualms spread through the monastery: ‘something Mother, our Mother has done.’
There had been, they all knew, no suggestion of impropriety, even in thought, with Sister Julian. In the last years there had been favourites but never inordinate love. ‘Lady Abbess has loved more people than most of us could begin to know.’ Dame Ursula often said that and, ‘we have only one love to give,’ Abbess Hester had told the community at one of the conferences she gave twice a week. ‘We don’t give bits of our hearts but love everyone with the love we give to God. That keeps it safe.’ That was how she had loved Sister Julian; though often she had not been exactly wise over her, the nuns knew and trusted that. Now it was as if the Abbey trembled. Something – and Sister Julian’s defection may have been the spark that lit it – something had been brought home. ‘Sorry.’ The word was clearer now though it still seemed to come from a depth they could not reach; tears slid down from the Abbess’s closed eyes and soaked the pillow. Abbot Bernard came to the bed again. ‘Dear, dear friend. Dear child …’ but again the head moved in refusal and again the effort welled up from the Abbess, ‘sorry.’ As the second afternoon waned, it seemed to the waiting nuns that the weary word would never end.
It was Dame Catherine who stood up. She was always strong and, though now she was as white and worn as any of them, resolution shone in her hazel eyes, such resolution that Dame Joan made way for her. Dame Catherine stilled the Abbess’s fingers by taking the shaking hands in her own firm grasp; her voice was strong as she spoke. ‘No matter what it is,’ she said. ‘You have said sorry. We have all heard. No matter what it is, we shall deal with it. Dear Mother, there is no more you can do now. Lay it down.’
She knelt and kissed the Abbess’s hand and went back to her place with such swiftness that when the Abbess’s black eyes opened it was only the prioress, Dame Emily, she saw.
She looked at her, a look of gratitude, affection and respect; then the Abbess gave a sigh, closed her eyes, and head and fingers were still.
Back in her corner, Dame Catherine felt her face burning; she thanked heaven for the wimple that hid the nervous patches on her throat and the veil that shadowed her face. ‘What made me do that?’ she asked herself. She, the most contained of creatures? And a voice in her, the same voice that had impelled her forward, answered, ‘Someone had to,’ and to do anything else would have been a betrayal of what she had clearly seen as duty. ‘They may think it was Dame Emily,’ she comforted herself. ‘Mother herself thought it was,’ and, ‘as long as it was done, what does it matter who did it?’
* * * * *
Up on the tower, Philippa, lost in her prayer, felt a vibrating under her feet as soft-toned Michael began to ring; it was the Passing Bell.
I hope you enjoyed that snippet into the life of a contemplative order in the "old days" before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Stanbrook Abbey, on which the book is based, is still in existence, but has moved to a new location in Wales.
Peter
