Most of the leaves have gone now. The drives and walks around Ashton Park are deep in dead leaves. The poplars have shaken themselves out and stand bare. I got detailed to work with Brother Malachi in the hothouses in the kitchen garden. We work in silence; words only for instructions. He smiles a lot, though. He points and uses sign language. He brought me a mug of tea he makes on the stove. I’m grateful for this time: the autumn air, the smells, the earth on my hands.
I’m part of this place, doing jobs J. M. did. Yes, my rhythm is his. I rise early. I follow the offices. I read his texts. I immerse myself in his journals, his life, their life, the whole story.
The whole passionate story, as Miriam says. This is the way to resurrect him, remember him.
I understand more. I feel more. I change as I write it out, as I make up the story that I hear. I scratch and read and write over his words. It’s beyond me to record the details of the theological debates, the subtleties of the moral questions. The young Aelred tried. But it is the sheer persistence in trying to unravel emotions that impresses. I admire them. They got so little help from directors or confessors in that first year. No, they got help from some confessors. There were one or two who had been through it, gone before, leaving a path. The church’s teaching is so black and white, so without understanding, with so little compassion - always sin. I remember that impurity, the obsession with masturbation. A different light falls on all this now. Today, there is still the exclusion.
And the spurious distinctions between the state of homosexuality and homosexual acts, as Joe puts it.
Of course my change has to do with Joe and Miriam. They point me to history: histories that challenge centuries of moral assumptions. Joe is a social historian. He talks about an ironic freedom, which was given to gay people in the war, and then he talks of the clampdown, in the fifties and early sixties, the linking of homosexuality with crime and the underworld.
Prejudice drove it underground.
He talks of the Wolfenden Report and the reforms that did not take place.
Hypocrisy, prejudice, blackmail, he says.
I think of how lucky J. M. and Benedict were in their cloister by comparison.
There would be raids on public toilets, Joe says. Prominent people caught, not to mention all the ordinary blokes.
Joe is so intent on me loving my brother as he was that he shoves anything my way that will clean the air, as he insists. Brush out the cobwebs, he says, with a flourish. Centuries of accumulated lies and half lies, misconceptions and misinterpretations.
I’m amazed by what I read. I get to read interpretations of Aelred of Rievaulx which were not available to J. M. This is a sort of revolution for me: a leap in time to reach my brother. I have the advantage of hindsight.
History. You mustn’t internalise the filth society has made us feel about ourselves. You must reach through that to your brother, Joe insists.
Brother Malachi broke his silence. You are the brother of the ex-Brother Aelred? he asked.
I nodded.
He smiled. A good one, he said.
I smiled.
You look like him, he said. And smiled again. It’s them eyes, he said.
I understood how much can be said in a smile, with the eyes. He put his hand under my arm at the elbow to usher me out of the hothouse at the end of the afternoon. Touch and looking; speaking with the eyes: I was getting to understand.
I walked up through the apple orchard and looked back at the barn, metallic and blue, and the flames burning down. The sky burnt, all flame over Ashton, England. I walk the paths and fields of their story, my story.
And there are the other stories which insert themselves. Extraordinary coincidence, that it is here in this English park that I’ve had to come to reflect on the colossal history of cruelty in our islands; to confront even more deeply than in 1970 for my family, what our politics, government, judicial system and trade have been founded on - what made the West Indian Estate.
Yet human compassion can confound us. It is here that Jordan met Miss Amy of Somerset. It is here that I read my brother’s journals and in them the black woman, Toinette, echoes her ‘Dou-dou, dou-dou child’ down the years. As boys, we got a lot of loving from black women. It is here that I learn my brother’s story of Jordan, a story he told himself, a story of this place, a story that told itself. Yesterday afternoon I went and looked at the portrait on the staircase. I saw the African boy. I unlearn, learn anew.
The new Abbot seems different from the one recorded in the journals. I spent a little time with him before Vespers. It’s shocking. Benedict had hardly been eating. Over the years, it seems, some times worse than others. A little to drink, enough not to draw attention to himself. It was a condition that had become worse over the years. John Plowden, the present abbot, was a novice soon after Aelred had left. He didn’t know my brother. But he spoke of him. Extraordinary: it now appears that the stories are passed down through a generation of abbots. The events in the barn; the ‘Night of the Rain.’ Aelred’s phrases are now my phrases. It was all tidied up though, in neat phrases: a mental breakdown, lost his vocation, lost his faith. Though I think this new Abbot does not wholly go along with those simplifications. They still trot them out: neat words, empty, emptied.
You must strive to empty yourself. The things we were taught.
But Benedict, fasting? Sounds more like anorexia; odd, at his age. A history of self-abuse, diminishment. Sounds almost like suicide.
The Abbot was being discreet. I could tell. There was more, much more. I did not want to ask. It shocks me, the destruction of his body, the negation, the denial, the punishment. Now it shocks. I get angry for him. What kept him going? Words. ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word which comes from the mouth of God.’
‘Domine labia mea aperies …’ ‘Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall announce your praise.’ I hear it each morning, echoing along the naves. All words now. I feed on words. I eat words.
He lived on words, his own journals. I wonder what’s in Benedict’s journals? I saw a brother clearing out what must have been Benedict’s cell. I had been detailed to polish the corridors this afternoon. He was taking out boxes of papers to an incinerator outside the kitchens. I was so tempted to rifle through the ashes for a corner of unburnt script, for a word that had not curled in flame. Oh, for a scrap of word, something left after the incineration! What’s in ashes? Sometimes the quest is too big for me. His death comes over me!
Miriam says, Everything got used: gold teeth, rings, hair, fingernails, skin. They were all used for industry.
She showed me a picture: a room of shoes. She has her story, which she returns to.
We have these stories we have to tell. Joe has his, Miriam hers. And I’ve found my story, my brother with his stories. They are stories larger than him, than us.
Deaths transfigure each other. Meanings are laid one on top the other. My grief does this.
Thank you, Amy of Somerset. There’s always one to comfort us in the most wretched of circumstances.