Alice Under Discipline, Part 2

by Garth ToynTanen

  “You really must try to control all this wailing and hysterics my dear, be careful of that voice of yours. A voice like yours is so easily damaged through overuse, you know - and we don’t want that, now... do we?” So saying he drew back his arm once more, satisfied to see her wince, satisfied that now it was not only limited to the anticipation of the coming sting. “Perhaps if I were to offer a couple more for each time you made a sound it would help? Hmmm?” The air whistled around her; the cane, when it landed across her wriggling, convulsing bare behind stung her then like a wasp, the pain magnified a thousand fold by the knowledge she dare not cry out... But of course she did - who wouldn’t have - the sound reverberating off the walls and flagstone floor and deafening even herself... “Two more strokes then... to be added on at the end, of course.” Not that he’d necessarily inform her at what point that ‘end’ might be reached. That throat did sound sore now, though... yes, what a shame. But she’d have the night to rest - after serving her time in the workhouse performing her labours and then the school-room sessions after that - so those vocal cords would be given at least a little time to recover. But he’d have to have her back in for a ‘practice session’ again on the morrow, perhaps after evensong; one had to exercise the voice if one wanted to hold down a career as a singer... But ambition and aspiration were forms of sin, expressions of another form of vanity... Oh well!...

  ***

  Outside, in the saintly priory grounds, all was idyllic; dovecot doves cooed, leaves rustled gently on the branches, penned sheep bleated and somewhere in the distance a cockerel crowed, awakening the sleepy. From the distant hay meadow a skylark soared as if to conduct the morning chorus, taking it on itself to take the twittering lead part, rooks sang along in their baritone barks from up in the great oak at the rear of the church and a late-pairing greater spotted woodpecker drummed for a mate, or to claim territory, a green woodpecker laughing back from the top of one of the slender poplars that picked out the line of the outer perimeter wall some half-mile distant. The house martins were already swooping back and forth from their inverted bee-hive-like mud dwellings tucked away under the eaves of the outbuildings, their off-white bellies flashing under swept-back blue-black wings, their high-pitch cries splitting the silence.

  The mid-June sky was a cloudless purplish-blue, welcoming, beckoning dawn, but as yet still devoid the great yellow sun disk it missed and craved. Presently represented in jagged rose pink bands on the horizon interspersed with piercing gold rods the sun would ascend the cliff escarpment to the east in its own good time. Already a few eye-blinding shafts were fanning out across the dry-stone-wall-enclosed fields lying outside the abbey walls as if God’s hand were sowing seeds of redemption upon the land, having overflowed and poured through distant saw-toothed rocky gaps. One such soul searching spotlight beam had already found the grey stone foils and cusps, the tracery, outlining the great stained glass window filling the abbey church’s eastern apse illuminating the central nave with over-flamboyantly rich colours and projecting the image of the cross down the central aisle, as happened every mid-summer’s morn; later as the angle steepened, around midday, the beam would alight upon the altar itself like a door opening from heaven, as if validating the structures consecration. This precise orientation with the lowest, narrowest ‘V’-shaped gap in the distant rocky escarpment was unlikely to have come about by chance and had more to do with the ‘old religion’ - as was still whispered about locally, surviving in the form of various traditional superstitions and annual celebrations - than with Christianity.

  Not that there were many native to the area left resident; most had long ago departed for the promise of the towns and cities. Those handful (if that) still resident, unfortunate enough to have been born locally, owed their livelihood to the priory; and their allegiance to the Church, with a capital ‘C’, their very survival in this harsh land, devoid of even of rabbits to poach, dependent on the institution that owned the flocks that grazed, and the sparse pasture they grazed upon. Even the cluster of natural springs high up in the rocks that fed the stream running through the grounds were owned by the abbey. The few sea trout that ventured into the lower reaches (and perhaps a few eels - though their numbers were declining faster than an inner-city church congregation) might have been fair game, though strictly speaking the Church owned the fishing rights, but the upper reaches, that stretch above the dam situated in the priory grounds, had been netted out long ago; not so the plentifully-stocked abbey pond though.

  Yes, a poor, scratchy barren land indeed, yet a destitution strangely belied by the richness of the ornamentation to be observed around the priory and its grounds. Stonemason-crafted gargoyles, exquisite tracery, an obscene acreage of stained-glass, gold-leaf embellished saints, painted statuary - all the paraphernalia that elsewhere would have vanished with the coming of the reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries had somehow survived here intact. With little by way of natural resources to plunder, not much in terms of visible industry outside of the wool harvested off the scraggy hardy sheep and the odd stand of barley, the priory’s continued existence raised the vexed question of patronage: Just whose deep pockets were funding all this? Why, if not for the solitude, the peace, isolation and the solitude?

  And if isolation and the solitude were to be assigned some kind of monetary value - well, this establishment’s wealth was assured. Isolation and solitude were certainly attributes the priory and its surrounds possessed in spades. But could one export isolation and solitude, make a commodity of such abstract concepts, - or perhaps exploit something to be made of these attributes instead? But then such establishments had ever been masters of exploitation in one form or another - that was ostensibly the reason old King Henry, Henry (VIII), had supported the reformation, closed so many of the great houses, pulled so many of these places to the ground. But this had been considered a quite minor house back then in the late 1530s, merely an annex to one of the great houses of Ireland. That, its lack of value - having little to offer to line the king’s pockets - and its remoteness had saved it... The place had come a long way since the seesawing machinations of the Tudors.

  The first couple of swallows had now arrived over the carp pond - more would arrive later - their forked tails trailing behind, wheeling, twisting and turning above the weeping willow before swooping low, blurring through the gaps between the golden flag-topped rushes and yellow-flowing water irises. Glancing off the surface, plucking insects from the water, or as close to it as makes no difference, they left ripples in their wake streaking and spoiling the biscuit box imagery of the modest abbey church’s small crenulated spire, the great stone cross standing defiantly before it and the gnarly old wooden fence all painted within the irregular circle of white-flowered lily pads and yellow and white butter-cup-flowering water crowfoot. Dense mats of the latter spread out in a pincer movement from stronghold deltas of green yellow and white sited either end of the expansive, roughly oval, pond, where the stream feeding it -and dammed in antiquity to create it - flowed in and out, the latter point being by way of an aged sluice gate, crooked and in dire need of repair.

  As with the just-flowering lilies, the late-breeding woodpecker and the casual arrival of the swallows, the crowfoot mats had only of late erupted into bloom, rushing into flower in a hurried chain reaction like ignited paraffin blazing across the water. Spring arrived late in these parts; those fauna and flora that did best were those best able to make up for lost time; industry was everything here. Despite the early morning chill, clouds of midges circulated maddeningly, bumble bees droned and groaned low long and hard from any sunny surface they might find, shivering urgently, actively warming their flight muscles. Predatory stiff-winged green and blue dragonflies perched on overhanging twigs and stems patiently awaiting the sun to warm them through.

  Closer to home, coal-black and virgin-white clad nuns, rosaries clicking and clacking between slender lily-soft fingertips, wandered meditative
ly amongst the flickering leafiness of the apple and pear orchid, the air still fresh and cool with the earthy scent of early-morning dew, ghostly powder-puffs of steam rising from murmuring lips, rising like diffuse bubbles of prayer towards the heavens. Meandering apparently aimlessly back and forth, in their white headdresses - or wimples - the women, some flicking through wrinkled black prayer books, looked like contented magpies eager to spread out their wings on the sheep-cropped grass, hoping to rid themselves of parasites under the all-cleansing rays of God’s own light. This latter impression was one that could only be encouraged by their hooded headdresses which rising to a near-point at the apex at the rear of the crown, swept downwards and exaggeratedly outwards to either side at shoulder level like a pair of dove’s wings.

  Possessing a tight band around the forehead, the wimple left only the fresh, well-scrubbed, central circle of the face uncovered, the eyes, nose lips, cheeks and chin, adding to the depersonalising, dehumanising effect. Yet there was still something very human about them, a straight-backed poise and grace in the way they glided to and thro. Close up, each radiated a sort of self-conscious, almost smug, superiority, authoritative as much as pious, humbling as much as humble; flashing eyes and a tight-lipped determination that commanded - no, demanded - respect, that bordered on the domineering. It was a state each could confidently justify as emanating from a much higher authority, one for whom they acted by proxy thus validating their actions, however harsh those actions might seem to the outside world. This was something reiterated daily over and over by the Abbess herself, the credo imparted through readings and prayer in the chapter house and at mealtimes in the refectory. Below this calm exterior lay a conflicted state of mind, then; human, vulnerable and as corruptible as all the rest.

  These same aspects of pause, self-confidence and authority could hardly be applied to the slope-shouldered snaking line of brown-clad figures just visible in the distance beyond the flint-walled triangle of fruit trees and the lichen and moss covered headstones that lay beyond that. A single file brown serpent, headed and tailed by a black-and-white tented figure, could be seen winding its way along the worn stone path tracing out the transept’s southern wing - the irony being, this was a land supposedly devoid of snakes and serpents; those creatures that slithered on their bellies banished in legend before history itself had begun. Shuffling along silhouetted against the light-beige stone of the abbey church, the overtly feminine outlines of the line’s members could momentarily be made out, one at a time, picked out in fringed orange under the oblique side-on rays of the morning sun as the line negotiated the outermost arm of the transept before slithering into the transept’s shadow, practically disappearing from view.

  Moving closer, trim heads could be seen tentatively twisting, glancing this way and that with widened inquisitive eyes set deep-circled within sun-starved pasty faces, as if amazed and intrigued by even the most common place sights and sounds of nature. It was a furtive curiosity and quickly curtailed by the strident voice barking from the rear, the terse command to “keep looking straight ahead... and no talking” ringing out and reverberating coldly off the stone walls, bringing all necks to erect stiffness and all heads to face forward, the addendum “... and three swipes of the cane for the next girl I see misbehaving” betraying the secret of the snake’s contrite obedience. And then the next command, this coming from the serpentine line’s head, exasperated and long-suffering and prefixed by a long overly-dramatised sigh: “That’s it... Hands on heads... That’ll be six strokes of the tawse bent across your bench, each and every one of you, once we get inside!” From somewhere within the body of the snake a sob can be heard, elsewhere a sniffle, a snuffle - someone has a cold, a dripping nose she dare not catch, not with her hands planted firmly on her head; and Mother Superior herself bring up the rear, tapping her cane against her robe and the side of her foot..

  But why should such a scene as this be thought so unusual - given the context? One might think not; after all these establishments were ever known for their values of discipline, chastity, devotion and obedience. A group of novice nuns, then? But this browbeaten group being herded between the dormitory and the workhouse do not necessarily fit with the common image of the novice nun. There is the odd way they are garbed for example - all that brown; brown, brown and more drab damming penitent brown. Brown shoes, brown stockings, brown high buttoning and long-sleeved button through dresses, cuffs tightly buttoned around spare wrists, fingers interlocked on short-shorn heads retaining only just sufficient coverage to sport a boyish, side-parted style. An occasional, intermittent flash of gold-yellow is the only real colour to be seen outside this pale-faced sepia-tinted crocodile line, this emanating from the convent crest or motif and name embroidered on the single breast pocket of each dress.

  All in all, a medieval scene of disciplined, repressed tranquillity. And well it might be; certainly there are few clues present to argue against it: But there are few pointers to raise the eyebrows. And it was in the style of dress it would have been most obvious; not in the nuns’ attire, for their regalia had not changed for centuries, but in the garb of that snaking line there was definitely something wrong, given the assumption of the mediaeval or immediately post-mediaeval periods . Those dresses: As the line wound closer still any person having previously guessed at the mediaeval period would certainly have seen there was something wrong with the styling. Here was an anachronism that notwithstanding the relative brevity of the skirt - the Victorians would never have shown the ankles, let alone the calves - bordered on Victoriana. It could be seen in the high-buttoning collar, in the fuller-that-strictly-functional skirt, the waspish waist secured by a buttoned belt of the same fabric, fitted tailored bodice and puffed ‘leg-of-mutton’ shoulders which tapered down into deep-sectioned cardboard-stiff buttoned cuffs. There was also an aspect of the juvenile too - after all the Victorians would never have allowed display of the ankles, let alone the calves... unless designed for a pre-pubescent school child! But by the figure alone, the bodily profile, it would have been clear that here was a group of girls and young women of early marriageable age.

  Then there was that lustre, that slight silky sheen possessed by those severe, drab chocolate-brown knee length dresses, the glassy-looking rubbery buttons, the similar smooth shimmer just barely detectable in the matching waist aprons or tabards some wore over the top: It would hardly be likely that some element of silk would have been incorporated within a form of garb so clearly intended to withstand the rigors of hard menial graft. To the modern eye the mystery would be less unassailable: It all went to suggest some manner of hardwearing, washable, manmade fibre - and that assumption pushed the clock hands still further forward.

  Looking up through the apple tree canopy and already, this early on, the brightening, bluing sky out to the east and south would not now be entirely pristine; two or three high diffuse feathery streaks would be scarring the sky as if drawn across by some heavenly quill pen, one perhaps still growing, a tiny silvery nib glinting at its high-altitude head. So... contrails... The hands of the clock are wound even further forward. To be sure only very few are ever seen here, but always there are a few each day; a few in the morning and a few in the early evening; and only ever at high altitude. These are long-haul flights setting out and returning. Rarely is anything low flying seen here, nothing low enough to make out any detail; no airliner at least; it is all passing stratospheric traffic - there are no airports nearby. It is if the modern world is rushing past, both oblivious and unheeded - well, almost.

  There is, however, a single solitary airstrip nearby, but a grass airstrip Only quite recently constructed - with money from the Church - and controversially swallowing up one of the only few level patches of useable pasture in the vicinity, it is really only suitable only for single-engine light aircraft.. When the wind blows in a certain direction the orangey-yellow wind sock can sometimes be glimpsed distantly beyond the western perimeter wall, despite the eig
hteen-foot-plus of stone blocks and the wire-guarded top. When the wind comes in along another bearing, the perceptive detect the tang of salt on the air and the herring gulls circle - as today - and the distant guillemots can be heard crying; then you can be sure there is a storm brewing out at sea: How long then before it ventures inland?

  The airfield occupies a plateau area, sited higher up than the sheltered valley occupied by the priory. But nevertheless, somewhat tellingly, there is no point so high within a sensible distance of the perimeter from which the privacy of the priory might be violated by cameras or binoculars or the carryings-on within its high walls overlooked or otherwise witnessed. And this is a good thing, given the hysteria igniting within the pages of the United Kingdom’s tabloids; given the press revelations of late regarding abuse - sexual or otherwise - allegedly carried out by various entertainment celebrities under the noses of those supposedly in authority, and the almost daily reports of various atrocities carried out and covered up within the Catholic church, the privacy of such an establishment as this was becoming an increasingly fragile thing.