THE BITCHDOWN CHOIR
Winter
was a wretched time for the inmates of Bitchdown Monastery. The place
might have been designed as a house of torture for those foolish enough
to wile away the cold months within its leaky stone walls. My ancestor
Paul of the Owongle family was one of them, and to make sure he suffered
enough he was instructed to leave off his horsehair vest and wear a
cotton rag instead, under his desperately thin habit, when the weather
was at its coldest.
They
all had to dress like that. Pain and suffering, they were told,
guaranteed a sure route to Heaven. If blood was involved, followed by
septic sores, so much the better. The agony made the voice rise higher
in salutation to a God they barely understood when they were chanting in
a language they certainly did not understand. The novices and monks of
Bitchdown Monastery were hardly educated and none of them could even
read a word of their native tongue let alone enjoy the sense of verses
in classical Latin.
But
that didn't matter. The singing itself was a reward even though the
choir was really very small. And membership of that august body meant
they weren't forced out into the extensive gardens trying to coax
reluctant vegetables to grow in the December soils. It meant they were
within looking distance of the Father's one flickering candle and could
feel, via the gift of sight, a suggestion that each flicker might
involve warmth.
And
that was their only warmth. It had to be. Luxury was forbidden as it
was quite clearly a tool of the Antichrist. Misery was to be applauded.
It was holy. It was something through which Eternal suffering might be
achieved once life had flickered out on this Earth.
Paul
was reasonably content to be where he was. After all, despite the
physical discomforts piled on him, it seemed, from every direction,
there was one certainty. He had been assured times many that he was
surely closer to the gates of Heaven than were the workaday folks in the
cosy cottages outside the tumbling walls of Bitchdown, or their warm
and cuddly lean-to shacks with blazing fires corrupting the flesh, and
sharing it with a woman who, it was rumoured, might offer to their lives
more than might be suggested by the word “wife”.
Paul
didn't actually know what was suggested by the word “wife”, though he
thought it might involve food on a platter. He knew nothing about the
sexual component of relationships and if asked to draw a woman would
almost certainly have provided her with a willy.
He
had been told, or seemed to recall that some Holy Father might have
mentioned, that wives did the cooking whilst the husbands did the
eating. He was told that was the normal and God-given order of things
for those not lucky enough to be celibate in a monastery, though he had
no idea what celibate meant.
He knew nothing about normal life because, and wasn't he blessed, he'd
been the bastard son of an ungrateful Holy father and a miserable slip
of a nun from the convent, and mustn't he suffer for it for the
remainder of his days?
And his suffering was great.
Brothers
were sent into the garden in December, with frost thick on the ground,
to labour at impossible tasks and get sore hands, frost-bitten fingers,
black and blue toes sticking out of their sandalled feet and were
consequently rendered deliciously close to Heaven as a consequence of
all the pain they suffered, and then had the delight of a beating by the
Holy Father for failing to produce a single turnip from the rock hard
ground, followed by a hungry supper time because there were not enough
turnips to go round, which was their fault.
But
he wasn't one of those fortunates. Because of his ignominious birth he
was ordered to the chapel where the choir went through its Latin psalms.
His punishment for being a bastard was that he suffered less and
consequently would probably never gain entry to the eternal suffering of
Heaven when he died.
And
dying wasn't such a rare thing. Few monks lived past their thirties, so
it was best if they made adequate preparations for a future beyond the
grave, and this was only achieved via the gift of endless pain and a
life dominated by excruciation and torture.
Some
of them may have looked back occasionally with a kind of yearning when
they thought of the old gods worshipped by their ancestors, because
there was less pain involved in worshipping them. But that yearning
itself was a mortal sin that had only one consequence: a good lashing
when they confessed to the Holy Father.
So Paul was a member of the choir.
His
voice might best be described as a hybrid, because sometimes he
squeaked as though he'd been turned overnight and without warning into a
castrato, and sometimes it sunk into the very depths of sound. It was
widely praised for being different and his range was much admired,
though he was often cursed for being tuneless.
You
might have thought he would be happy in the choir, and if you did you'd
be wrong. He hated it, mostly because he missed out on the agonies to
be found in the furiously frosted world outside, but partly because it
marked him as being different.
There
were only three of them as regular choir members, all bastards, and the
other two were less regular than him because often he found himself to
be one of two. And during odd moments he was even alone, singing his
heart out as the holy Father dosed behind his flickering candle. And it
was when he discovered why the other choir members (Matthew and John)
weren't there that a plan began to form in his mind. And that discovery
was a consequence of him overhearing a whispered conversation in which
the word nunnery featured prominently.
They
went, it seemed as far as he could tell, to sing with the nuns of the
nunnery, and he gradually decided that he wanted a bit of the action
too!
© Peter Rogerson 05.10.12
