THE BITCHDOWN CHOIR

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