And Then There Were Nuns (26 page)

Not exactly Dracula, but his creator, Bram Stoker, the Irish-born journalist/personal assistant/business manager/novelist. Stoker had been smitten by Whitby during a holiday one year. He loved its narrow streets; the tall, skinny, imperious-looking terraced houses that loomed like disapproving aunts; the dense, rolling fog; the wild North Sea storms; the nefarious activity along the docks.

Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, also stomped through this town, and I wondered whether Stoker had come to the town to mop up some of the muse dust left by Dodgson/Carroll.

In 1885, during a storm, a Russian schooner crashed into Whitby Harbour, and the event became the catalyst for Stoker's dark tale of coffins, vampires, and a pair of innocent girls—Mina and Lucy—on a seaside holiday.

The good folks of Whitby are not the least bit offended to be associated with a blood-sucking count, and both Stoker and Dracula have pride of place in its tourist industry.

I sat down on a bench to take in the landscape and the atmosphere that had inspired Stoker. The River Esk bisects Whitby, dividing it into two steep cliffs known—none too imaginatively—as East Cliff and West Cliff. They are linked by an iron swing bridge (in
Dracula
it is referred to as “the drawbridge,” across which Mina makes a breathless dash toward the churchyard to save her friend Lucy). Directly across from me on the opposite cliff, high above the Esk, was the churchyard of St. Mary's, and behind it loomed the eerie, skeletal remains of Whitby Abbey. Seagulls soared and dipped agitatedly through the moody skies above the harbor, their high-pitched screeches sounded like screams. All that was missing was a fog machine and a bat.

Several gulls landed nearby and strutted muscularly toward me like hoodlums. As if to reinforce their territorial prerogative, they set about using the patch right in front of me for their morning shit. I moved on, their beady little eyes following me. Has anyone noticed that certain species of birds—gulls, geese, swans, pigeons, crows come immediately to mind—seem to have interbred with a biker gang?

Once a thriving shipbuilding and fishing center, Whitby, like many mid-sized towns in Britain, was floundering through the New Economy with high levels of underemployment and unemployment along with the ancillary social wreckage. Another round of job cuts to the decimated fishing industry had just been announced in the local newspaper.

With Stoker and his toothy creation in its back pocket, Whitby had repurposed itself as a tourist destination. About 90 percent of the working population now toils in the service industry.

I made my way through twisting passageways and subways, down steep steps, past Victorian brick homes with their red pantiled roofs snuggled together along quiet, wet narrow streets.

I crossed the swing bridge to Church Street, a narrow, cobblestone street jammed with quaint tea rooms, sweet shops, and jewelry boutiques selling creations fashioned with Whitby jet. There were also goth shops galore stocked with skull jewelry and vampy-looking lingerie and feather boas, and goth-inspired housewares. Looking for a set of vampire bookends or a toilet brush with Dracula's head as the handle? You will find it here. The goth-nun I had met at St. Cecilia's was right about Whitby's goth reputation.

Church Street ended at the base of the 199 Steps, which Mina clambered up on a dark and stormy night to warn Lucy before Dracula planted his incisors in her neck. I started up the steps myself. It is one of the “things” you do when you visit Whitby.

The steps—pedantic locals will remind you that “stairs” are made of wood and “steps” are made of stone—have existed for four hundred years. In the early 1800s, the wood treads and risers were replaced with stone, and handrails and landings were added to make the journey easier for pallbearers hauling coffins up to the church cemetery. Judging from historical accounts, the refurb had not entirely solved the problem: in several instances the coffin had slipped from the pallbearers' grip and torpedoed back down to the base.

At the top of the steps in the graveyard of St. Mary's Church, I wandered among the worn, battered gravestones, their inscriptions all but erased by time and the elements, and then nosed around the twelfth-century church before crossing the churchyard to Whitby Abbey, site of a thirteenth-century Benedictine monastery.

For tourist and goth potential, you could not wish for a more dramatic landmark. The ruins are noticeable the moment you enter the town, and they follow you everywhere you go in Whitby: in fact, I could see them all the way from St. Hilda's Priory. The iconic silhouette of Whitby Abbey is festooned on almost every piece of tourism material, on the ubiquitous Whitby jet jewelry, on café menus, on souvenir tea towels, and in books. In the last eight hundred years, the Abbey has been subjected to climatic battery, pillaging vandals, and war bombs. It is remarkable that so much of it is still standing. Up close, the lacey ruins of mottled charcoal stone stand like an old soldier before a cenotaph, damaged and scarred but resolutely upright.

Weeks earlier in York, I had stood near the site where thirteen-year-old Hilda had been baptized with her uncle King Edwin. Now I stood on the site where her spiritual journey had brought her, and where she had founded a mixed religious community in 657. There is nothing left of the buildings from that era—people mistakenly think the Abbey ruins are from Hilda's time—yet she is inextricably linked to Whitby, and to Northern England.

It was said of Hilda that she was a patient woman, energetic and blessed with the ability to recognize the paraclete—the spirit of personality—in people. It was Hilda who overheard a young cowherd named Caedmon singing to himself, nurtured his gift, and turned him into one of the great Celtic poets. It was Hilda who schooled five monks who eventually became bishops. And it was Hilda who hosted the first synod, the Synod of Whitby, in 664, at which a heated debate ultimately decided the way we calculate the date for Easter.

How sadly ironic, then, that the site where Britain's first recognized female priest established her community and where many believe Christianity officially took root in Britain had been appropriated by the cult of a fictional demon.

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Order of the Holy Paraclete

Whitby, England

A MONK'S LIFE SHOULD
always be like a Lenten observance.” So declared St. Benedict. No wonder his monks tried to poison him.

Lent is the desert season, an intense, bleak period requiring more spiritual vigilance, deeper introspection, and greater resistance to self-gratification than is demanded during the rest of the Christian calendar. The grand reward is spiritual transformation.

From a liturgical point of view, I could not have chosen a better time than Lent to continue discerning my vocation to be a nun. From a psychological point of view, it almost did me in.

I have always thought the church misses an opportunity at Lent to encourage people, regardless of their faith, to use the forty days and forty nights as a personal challenge—to quit smoking, lose weight, volunteer in the community, and otherwise set goals to change or improve their lives.

Lent appeals to the part of me that likes rigorous self-improvement, so when one sister cautioned, “If you can survive Lent in a convent, you can survive anything,” my reaction on the morning of Ash Wednesday was,
No sweat, baby,
followed by a cavalier chuckle. That blithe attitude lasted until suppertime, when I discovered that the bun-and-tea menu from breakfast would be repeated at supper. Almost every night. Until Easter.

At first I was stoic, but by the second day, I was ready to bail. Now I was cold
and
hungry.
This isn't Lent; this is the gulag! This is Scott's expedition to Antarctica!

After compline, I sat on the edge of my bed in flannel pajamas, pulling on multiple pairs of socks to cover my feet and hands and whimpering for a hot water bottle and a steak.

I had made two Lenten vows—to give up the Internet and to read the New Testament—but by Day Two, the first one was out the window, though this was Sister Gillian's fault.

“That's a rather impractical vow.” Her smile showed more than a trace of concern. “You need the Internet and email because your work for us involves visiting the sisters in the branch houses, and how are you going to arrange your visits without email and without the Internet to check the bus schedule?”

I could have suggested to her that I use the telephone, but frankly no one, not even a nun, gives up the Internet these days. I could also have done a swift amendment to the vow and given up chocolate digestive biscuits, but my rampant consumption was keeping a factory in Harlesden in business, so as I saw it I was doing my bit for the economy.

Lent also meant that the liturgy would be changing. When Sister Margaret Anne dropped the new prayer book on my prie-dieu I felt my resistance mounting.
Why can't things just stay comfortably familiar?
It was like arriving at work and being told you had to learn a new computer system. No one expected me to know the lay of the liturgical land as well as, say, Sister Margaret Anne (who had been a sister for thirty years) knew it, but my own high standards insisted on it.

Sister Margaret Anne wordlessly took my books and methodically began juggling various binders and inserting bookmarks into specific pages to help me navigate my way through it all. Even then I lost my place, and she had to point to the page number in her book to get me back on track.

All this demanded the sort of mental agility that put my self-confidence in question. Maybe Sister Prudence had been right: maybe I
was
too old to be a nun. I might just as well have laced up a pair of toe shoes and presented myself to the Royal Ballet.

It would have been easier had there been someone with whom to commiserate about all this. I could have gone to Sister Dorothy Stella, but she had her hands full enough with nearly fifty women to placate. The last thing she needed was a wimpy aspirant clinging to her ankles.

As for the others, they swept into chapel for the offices and then vamoosed until mealtimes. Sometimes I would come down from my cell to see if I could button-hole someone, but there was no one about. Were they watching
TV
? Having secret nun meetings? Praying?

The nuns were all genuinely kind, like a coterie of caring maiden aunts. They offered smiles in the corridors, the odd wink of greeting in the chapel, light conversation in the kitchen and the parlor, but that was it. I needed more. Silence and solitude were beginning to have a shelf life as far as I was concerned.

Perhaps a walk was what I needed. I went into the coat room to fetch my coat from its hook. Sister
KT
was there zipping up her jacket.

“Going outside?” she asked. “Has anyone showed you the new trail? No? I will then. It's really lovely.”

Yes! Someone to talk to! I was glad it was Sister
KT
. The other day, she had been helping me in chapel to mark the pages for the next office when we came across a bookmark that showed the statue of a black angel. We had paused to admire it, and turning it over I read aloud the name of the gallery where the statue was exhibited.

“I know that place,” Sister
KT
had casually remarked. “My ex-husband worked there.”

Ex-husband?
I hadn't said anything at the time but I was dying to ask her about her transition from divorcée to nun. What had led her to religious life? Had she tired of the bar scene? Given up on Internet dating? Couldn't find a satisfactory responder to her
SWSCF
(single, white, straight, Christian, female) profile? Or had she been scratching at the crannies of her personality?

But now that we were on the trail together, I was afraid to ask her anything in case my questions scared her off.

She mentioned her divorce again and said that she had decided to enter religious life after her marriage broke up.
Out of anger? Out of pain? Out of a long-held longing to wear a habit? Because convent life was unthreatening? Had she been in an abusive marriage?
There were so many possibilities, but it felt smarter to let her take the lead in the conversation.

“You'll never guess what I did before I joined this place,” she said.

“Um, were you a truck driver? A doctor?”

She snorted.

“Oh, I know... a fashion model!”

“Get outta 'ere. Hah!” She gave me a good-natured shove. “You're trying to take the mickey out of me, aren't you?”

“
OK
, so you weren't a fashion model. What were you?”

“A secretary.”

I pictured her in a pencil skirt and black heels, her slim legs crossed beneath a desk as she typed something for the boss, her posture erect, just as it was when she sat in her choir stall.

“And were you a good secretary?”

“Oh yes, I quite enjoyed it.”

I'll bet she was one of those secretaries that everyone liked, the kind who teased and got the others in the office laughing.