Authors: Katharine Norbury
Fountains Abbey was abandoned when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, its abbot, prior and thirty monks paid off with handsome pensions. But now it was part of a curiously polished theme park, with cafés and facilities and the heavily signposted footpath. It swarmed with people. One couple, holding hands, stared up at the carcass of the church. Then, quite suddenly, they embraced, sobbing into one another’s arms, the rough bark of their cries flat against the stillness of the trees. I pulled my sunglasses down onto the bridge of my nose, conscious that I was staring. I wondered if they were descended from one of the masons who had built the church. Perhaps they were going to get married. Maybe someone had died.
There is a children’s film about an articulated bin that saves the planet after pollution forces the Earth’s inhabitants to go into space. In the spaceship the people become obese and diabetic, and develop osteoporosis while eating junk. But the bin, which has found a plant, brings them back, so that they can go forth and multiply, and fill up the planet once more. Only this time, one has the impression, they will be a bit more ecologically aware.
Fountains Abbey felt like a stepping stone towards such a future. The manicured footpath ensured wheelchair access and an easy passage for baby buggies. Yet its primary purpose felt like the fulfilment of a Health and Safety directive, an attempt to reduce the risk of litigation. I had never seen so many super-sized people. A young girl walked towards me, her face as glorious as an angel’s. In the middle of her brow was a ridge of flesh, her smile disappearing into dimples. I imagined the size of her heart. Visitors were encouraged to shuffle along the neat path, and to stop for cake, or ice cream. None of us were encouraged – or even free – to wander at our leisure, to poke about, or climb. To sleep overnight, or to have an adventure, to camp among the cold old stones.
A tour was about to begin. A group clustered about a man who held a shepherd’s crook over his head. I watched, perplexed, neither in nor out, the guide’s words thrown like a net.
The community at Fountains was established in 1132. Thirteen rebellious monks, longing to live a simple life, were taken into the protection of Archbishop Thurston of York. He granted them this valley, uninhabited, thickly overgrown and ‘Fit, rather,’ as the Revd. A.W. Oxford put it, ‘to be the lair of wild beasts than the home of human beings.’ It is a perfect place for a community – remote and secluded – protected in its wooded valley from the winds of the Yorkshire Dales. The valley was formerly known as Skelldale, from the Saxon
skel,
meaning spring, and Old English
dael,
for valley, and refers to the many springs that rise in the woods. This woodland, and the steep sandstone cliffs of the valley walls, also provided the raw materials for construction. It seems likely that the Skelldale springs originally gave the abbey its name: St Mary of Fountains. The name ‘Mary’ derives originally from the Hebrew, Myriam, which itself means strong water. Or it may be an allusion to the ‘fountains of living water’ promised by Christ to the Woman of Samaria. Three years after they arrived, in 1135, the Yorkshire monks were embraced by the Cistercian order. The abbot of the great abbey at Clairvaux at that time was called St Bernard de Fontaines, so Fountains might have been named after him, as the monks doubtless received much help from Clairvaux. The coarse white habit of the Cistercians is made from undyed fleece and, with time, and the assistance of a community of lay brothers, the monks became wool merchants, and fabulously rich, as seems to be the way with austere orders, the Franciscans being another obviously wealthy example, despite being founded on a rule of poverty. The lands of the monks at Fountains extended to the Lake District on one side, to Teesside on the other . . .
It occurred to me that if I stayed I might learn something helpful, something about the nature of sacred wells. I had been interested to learn that Myriam meant strong water. Mary, Maria, Marie, would seem to come from the Latin
mare
, meaning sea. The lines on my palms form the shape of an M and as a child I used to look at my hands, and wonder at the mystery locked in the letter. The secret reminder of my name before my adoption:
Marie Therese
, permanent as a tattoo. But I couldn’t keep still, or bear the proximity of so many people. I made my way, alone, through the ruins of the church. High up, at the apex of a window, was an angel. On the external face, in the reverse position, was a carving of a Green Man. He seemed surprised by the foliage issuing from his mouth and encircling his furrowed brow. It was as though he had meant to speak, but the alacritous vine prevented it. On the surface the message seemed clear enough. The Christian angel was on the inside of the church while the pagan deity was out in the cold. It was surprising he had survived at all. And yet the ancient gods are often near at hand. The Dagda was said to be the father of St Brigid of Kildare. Characters change their names and shift their histories, but their archetypes remain, dense with lived experience. They rise up like grains of gold, glittering, from the silt.
The guide, and his group, wandered back into earshot.
One of the first poems written in English – found carved into an Anglo-Saxon cross – is called ‘The Dream of the Rood’, meaning rod, or upright post. In the poem, the Rood tells how it came to be felled, separated from its fellow trees, and forced to play its part in the crucifixion. The Rood is an object of veneration because, without it, the Passion could not have taken place. The tree sang: ‘They drove me through with dark nails. On me are the marks, Wide-mouthed hate dents.’
Iron into wood. A tree that sang. I wondered, vaguely, about the relationship between mystical Christianity and trees. There was an early medieval Irish/Welsh alphabet known as the ogham script, whereby each letter corresponded to a tree. St Joseph was a carpenter. And the Rood, yes, well, that was a tree. Books were made of paper. I felt I had bitten off more than I could chew, although the idea of a mutually beneficial relationship between woodland and people didn’t seem far-fetched as a place to start. A very holy priest I once knew, Father Tony Storey, planted over four thousand trees during his lifetime – rowan, hazel, oak and birch – the trees of the English forest. ‘The two most important things in life,’ he maintained, ‘are to love, and to plant trees.’
I walked beneath the Green Man, moved beyond him. I was back on the lawn, which was clipped, like shearling fleece, for as far as the eye could see. The river had been diverted in this section of the valley and ran as straight as a zipper. The footpath passed on either side of the Skell. There was a bridge next to a ruined house. Beyond that, like a selvedge, neat woodland hemmed the valley. I crossed the river and turned back on myself, facing the way I had come, but on the opposite bank.
And then I saw it.
The prissy path, which had so irritated me, was in fact a garden footpath. The grass had been clipped because it was indeed a lawn, and the crumbling abbey a giant folly. The whole valley had been landscaped into a surreal vision: the Studley Royal Water Garden.
The river ran in a liquid avenue down the centre of a formal garden in the neoclassical style. At the end of the valley it was dammed into a bean-shaped pool. I felt like a pantomime character to whom the audience had been shouting:
It’s behind you!
The cupola of a temple was visible above the trees. I abandoned the church and the abbey buildings and followed the river – or rather the canal – downstream. It was swollen and brown, spotted like a seal. On either bank a tidemark of sweet wrappers, bottles, cans, leaves and grass cuttings marked the place where the river had flooded – a Hansel and Gretel trail – parallel to the water’s edge. The greensward, which ordinarily should have been the bank, veered out of sight beneath the water. A slow-moving scum covered the surface and I thought of Maxpax hot chocolate, a powdered drink popular in the 1980s that always came out watery, the dried milk never quite dissolving but floating in viscous bubbles. The footpath on my side curved away from the river, passing into woodland. People crowded the opposite bank. I contemplated cutting through the wood to the furthest extent of the garden, where I might be able to cross the river, and then walk back, on the other side, beyond the surging people. But I seemed incapable of leaving the Skell. I hugged its shore, as though following an invalid, waiting for someone to fall. Two blond children played on the far side. They threw sticks into the water. One of the sticks was sucked under the surface, disappearing into a scummy whirlpool. My anxiety followed it, dipping like a mallard, and reappeared, all but unseen, downstream.
When the river opened out onto the bean-shaped lake, it became apparent I was in the wrong place. The bank was wet, and slippery. I made muddy prints as I circumvented the water, windmilling my arms in an attempt to remain upright, the soft mud beneath the grass deceitful as ice. After a while I came to a bridge, and joined the proper path. The river-canal, as it left the lake, was ruler-straight. A right-angled bend afforded a glimpse of further pools, but the footpath again forsook the bank for the trees, and this time I followed it. A bird, as big as a pheasant, but bald-looking, crossed my path. And then two more – the first wildlife I had seen – but they weren’t like any bird I knew. A tree rose above me, tall, very tall, a Scots Pine. I thought of Winnie-the-Pooh, and Christopher Robin, and the bees.
I had met a man over the summer, on Porth Dinllaen beach, who told me his father once had an affair, and that a child had been born of it. This child had been adopted. It was a little boy, and he was never named. The man and his brothers and sisters knew him only as Christopher Robin. The man’s sister had left a message on the Adoption Contact Register and this said, quite simply:
Searching for Christopher Robin
. But if he had never been named, how would he know that it was him?
In Ireland Brian had asked me if I had ever found my natural father. All I knew him by was the hyphen on my birth certificate. In order to learn his name I needed first to locate my mother. Over many years my searches had turned up nothing, beyond the date and place of her wedding. I had made that discovery after hours spent riffling though the marriage records in St Catherine’s House, in London. But after that initial, hasty victory, the trail ran cold. My searches were sporadic. For the most part I didn’t think of it, but from time to time I would find myself looking. In the 1980s I leafed through phone books, in later years I scanned the electoral register. For a while I had been employed as a professional researcher, and had access to a number of databases. But there was never a note for me, or a message from a private detective, although I left messages for her, in all the obvious places – the Adoption Contact Register, and also in some of the less obvious ones – with the current owners of the farm that had been given on her marriage certificate as her home address. In 1792 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was forced by protocol – for which she didn’t much care – and her husband, who told her that he’d prevent her from setting eyes on her legitimate children ever again if she didn’t cooperate with his demands, to give up the baby daughter she had borne to the future Prime Minister, Charles Gray. The child, Eliza, was raised by Charles Gray’s family. Georgiana visited her daughter in secret whenever she could, and gave her small gifts, although she never revealed her identity or was able to give her money. The Cavendish family later destroyed many of Georgiana’s letters, embarrassed by the scandal confirmed in them. But a poem made its way into Eliza’s effects. It ended:
. . . should th’ ungenerous world upbraid thee
For mine and for thy father’s ill
A nameless mother oft shall assist thee
A hand unseen protect thee still.
I reached my own hand towards the tree, aware of a pain between my eyebrows, an aching heat behind my eyes. A flat weight, hard as a coin, pushed into my sternum. It is a common theme in the stories of displaced children that their absent parent thinks of them, that they somehow continue to care for them, and keep a flame burning through the years of separation. The Greek myths are full of tales of gods who softened the paths of their demi-god children, who in turn grew into heroes: Theseus, Perseus, Achilles, Helen of Troy. When I was a child Mum told me that my birth mother had been unable to keep me, but that she loved me, and that she had done the very best she could by me. In which case, why had she never contacted me? I was fighting to control my breath, to smooth the contours of my face, but I couldn’t. So I sat on a low wall at the edge of the manicured path, and wept for all that Christopher Robin means.
On the other side of the wood, the footpath rejoined the canal. Ahead was a sort of aquatic ha-ha, which must once have been a waterfall, but about ten yards short of it the river had been diverted. The naked mechanism of the man-made watercourse was visible, the paved and slimy riverbed, the sluice gates, and the iron wheel that moved them. I thought momentarily of a mechanic’s garage, a car raised up, the unexpected aspect of the vehicle’s workings, and was taken aback by the crack in the façade, the realisation of impermanence, and artifice.
I crossed the empty riverbed at the place where the waterfall had been. A lake was to my left, inhabited by nodding swans; there was a café, but I wanted nothing. I continued to follow the riverbank and passed beneath a bough of yellow honeysuckle, shot with indigo, the petals curled like fingers or little traps, the glossy stamens sore. They were the first flowers I had seen in the garden, but I didn’t stop. I regretted it immediately, and went back. The scent was hardly discernible in the dying flowers, but the piquant rot of an early autumn gave an unexpected subtlety. The impression of colour, of lightness, was instant.