Sister Breda of the Carmelites

     SISTER BREDA OF THE CARMELITES

That afternoon I drove south. At lunchtime I had touched base with that windy desolate coast, and I saw the great white ball that is Sizewell B. It was a dismal day. The air was full of threat and portent. By three the sky was a bruise of blue and green and purple, and the darkness was closing in on it. Leaving the shore I saw a last church white against the sky and there was a corposant adhering to its steeple. This alone may I save, said some Lord. The wind got up. A strand of poplars was bent double like a row of whipped virgins. The hare in the field blinked in my headlights. Then it rained so hard that every leaf and hedgerow was drenched, and water cascaded from level to level. The pylons played games of parallax with me. Lightning flickered in the ionised air and I knew I was driving into the storm.

I went back towards the sealine along lanes splattered by the rain. Was any soul out there tonight in that maelstrom? On that of all nights. Beware what you do on Candlemas for you will be condemned to do it forever more. I was late into the village- the shop was closing and I lost sight of the man as he walked away from it, hunched and bent against the wind and the rain. The place was deserted now. Except that up in the churchyard above I thought I saw a figure looking down at me. How many churches, how many burial grounds? For who knows the fate of his bones or how often he is to be buried? Sir Thomas Browne, the flatland seer, the bittern keeper. I had to quell my mind, purge it of connection.

I left the car behind the shingle and advanced towards the sea. Would she come? I listened for church bells in the deep. What might come crashing down tonight? The sea within- we are but aqueous illusion for the most part- the sea without, playing with our lives. Then I saw something in the waves- some black cloaked figure bent double liked the whipped virgins of the windbreak. It was a young woman, pulling, heaving with all her might on some stringy rope that she bore over her shoulder. And the wind blew and the sea roared and the waves piled upon each other as spume and spray rose into the dark air. Her cloak was blown outwards, a flat canopy, and underneath it her frail young body existed like a hermit crab.

I wanted to help her with this Sisyphean task. But I couldn’t get her measure. I could not get close enough. For the space she occupied was not the space I inhabit. She spoke but more to herself than to me.

“The church, the church. I must save the church. There is none other than me can do it.”

“Sweet lady”, I said for she was making little progress through these waves. “Please. They built a second church long ago and then a third and even a fourth”.

And each time the villagers watched as the next church tumbled into the water, and the land and humanity retreated a little further.

“No, no”, she said. “Get away from me. Deliver me from temptation, oh Lord, for mine was the last and I the youngest, and the lame in body and mind and soul must have succour”.

She took me for the Devil; I realised that. I was not material.

“The church, the church, it is perfectly preserved. I need but the strength to pull it from the sea. They hear the bells still.”

Aye I thought. Did you hear those chimes at midnight, good Sir Thomas? Did the bittern croak on such a night?

It was not to be. She faded with her efforts. I felt uneasy. I felt something behind me. I turned and I saw him. No eyes before had ever pierced me like his. He was not tall but he had a way with him and he unnerved me, standing above me on that keen-winded sea shore. He made no move nor did he speak and I walked out of the sea and past him. I treated him like a wild dog, determined not to show fear or to run.

I slept in the car. He was around all night, sometimes trying the lock or rocking the vehicle. I got two or three hours sleep. There was no sign of him when I woke and there was now just a breeze and an iodine smell that was both fresh and tawdry. Down on the beach there was a long tangled piece of seaweed, different strands knotted together. I tried pulling on it but it was caught on something heavy and very secure. I did not touch the huge flatfish lying next to it, its two eyes both on the top and staring at me.  

Back in the village I checked dates. I read of the last Catholic order on the site- old discalced conventuals except for one, a young novitiate in orders for less than a year. When the storm came that night- that dreadful Candlemas near five hundred years ago when human agencies also stalked the land to remonstrate with the old ways and the old faith- they huddled together around the reredos, praying to niche and triptych, as the very ground beneath them crumbled away and sent them crashing to their fate.

It was said that bones were washed to shore, young bones. Then young Breda appeared to herring fishers. She was standing on the water, arms outstretched looking upwards at the loss, the gap, the crumpled stones. Haunted infirm men arrived, scrabbling a livelihood among the herbs that still grew there. Cromwell’s Reformation zealots would not easily crack the cult of Sister Breda of the Carmelites.

And this is not history. This is among us still. What care in the community where the community no longer cares? Old sanatoriums close, but the inmates return and hide in the ruins muttering as the builders move in with their huge metal lizards and all is reduced to dust. Dust to dust. Apartment blocks rise for the new affluent, the ones who know the rules of the game. They lock up their imaginations and believe fantasy to be a subdivision of sex, controlled foreplay.

But the likes of me we know what we are; we are one third dream, one third imagination, one third memory.  We are buffeted by wind and storm and we cling on to what we have. I am in the little cemetery and in this secular age where we have stopped counting the number of angels on a pin this Reformed church has laid aside a grave for Sister Breda and on the headstone it is written “She Spoke To Strangers”.

“There are no bones in that grave you know”

This time he didn’t make me jump; I was expecting him. His stare was less electric; the storm seemed to have neutralised him as indeed it had me. I nodded.

“Was it dream or imagination or memory last night?” I asked softly.

He shook his head. It was nothing so commonplace. It was a vision, and that happens but two or three times in a man’s life.