THE BITCHDOWN MONASTERY

THE BITCHDOWN MONASTERY

Grey days are depressing wherever you are, but I suppose there can be few places where they're more depressing than within the hard-rock stony cloisters of the long-gone Bitchdown Monastery. And what a good job that it's long gone. Even its stones that are spread over a wide area, they say, contain trapped within them, whispering echoes of misery.

Paul toiled there. Paul Owongle, though his surname was never used on account of the fact that he must always, at all times, be referred to in apostolic terms, had breathed its turgid air since his infancy when he had been born in the very nearby convent as a consequence of an illicit bit of hokey pokey between Sister This (yes, that was her name) and Father That (believe it or not, That was his monasterial name! He had long been teased because the other monks, to a one, cackled aloud when they were permitted to make any vocal sounds at all and called him a bit of This and That. He didn't like it, but what could he do? His father (That) was an Owongle, and an Owongle is what he would have loved to be known as, but it was not to be. Within the walls of Bitchdown he was Paul, son of This and That.

He was, of course, an ancestor of mine, though he hadn't a clue what he was. He barely knew the facts of life, so he had no notion how anyone came along. The Holy Father (not the aforementioned That, who had been shown the door after an outbreak of sodomy had threatened the faith of the novices, but a seriously severe replacement with only one eye) explained that they were all given their life by God. Apparently the Good Lord moulded clay into the shape of men and women and breathed life into them and, hey presto, they were alive. It answered a few questions, though not many.

The building itself, a miserable creation of timeless stone and marble pinched from old Roman villas once their owners had fled back to Rome, was the very pits. Not one roof existed but that it leaked. Not one wall was totally impervious to the wilder winds that swept over the seas and lashed the building with vicious regularity. Anything remotely comfortable had been stripped out by a succession of Holy Fathers who believed that the flesh should be eternally flayed as a reminder that flesh made of clay is an aberration and that anything that remotely appeals to it should be banished. So horse-hair undergarments were the order of every day, except Sundays when as a concession to the Sabbath small metal hooks woven into a Holy Vest were allowed.

Next door (or about half a mile away) was the convent (Knicker View) where Paul Owongle's mother had been wooed and wasted by the Holy Father who had discovered rather too late for it to do him much good what erections were for.

It was a much lighter place in that it actually had windows, some of which were semi-glazed with fragments of ancient Roman windows and where the nuns lived relatively joyous lives until Sundays came round, when they had their bottoms firmly smacked by the flat (and sometimes gentle) hand of the Mother Superior who was confused by all the feelings that fluttered through her entire body whenever she caught sight of an inch of young female flesh. So she slapped them, liking the way they glowed. It was a perversion that they all, to a frustrated woman, approved of.

And that was the neighbourhood. A convent and a monastery and a wild windswept moor, and then the vast and rolling ocean, all stirred up by an indecent amount of bad weather.

You might be curious as to what my ancestor did with his life in Bitchdown Monastery, and what follows and the succeeding few episodes of this narrative might go some way to explaining.

His life was what many today would call empty.

He lived at such a time (not long before the Norman Conquest in what many refer to as the Dark Ages because so very little is known of what went on back then) and not so long after a few isolated characters had landed on our shores and were doing their utmost to destroy what was seen as the one true religion and replace it with idolatry, or the worship of a new fangled thing called Christianity in the form of agonised images of a man hanging on a cross and weeping. The new faith attracted the attention of hardy beings who thought life ought to have more pain and blood-letting in it, and was rapidly so established that the odd building (like Bitchdown) was sprinkled with Holy Water and said to be consecrated.

There are always men and women willing to dedicate their lives to the unusual, so Bitchdown was soon echoing to the sound of the gnashing of teeth and the weeping of the freshly punished as well as the melodic chanting of prayers in a language that none of them could actually understand.

The Knicker View convent next door was similarly populated, though ladies, being of a more delicate nature, did less actual punishing and a great deal more snogging. They snogged each other, they snogged any tramp who should chance to pass their gates, and any member of the monastery who was sent to pray with them was guaranteed a really good snogging. After all, it's what caused my ancestor Paul Owongle to come into existence.

So now that I've set the scene I'll pause and continue soon enough with more detailed accounts of Paul's life and hopes and – er – punishments.

© Peter Rogerson 04.10.12