Birgitta’s Cell

(A teacher, Annie Perrin, is taking a school outing of Year Eight – 12-13 year olds – around the Norfolk Broads. We hear her voice addressing the kids:  her inner voice in her own person, and the voice of Birgitta from her cell):

Annie (North London Irish,  very slight traces only):The mini-bus is stopping here because there’s no parking nearer as the town centre’s been pedestrianised. Then it’s a short walk to Friday Market Square. It’s called that because for hundreds of years the fruit, flower and veggie market has happened here on Fridays. Snce the days when Friday meant Freya’s day… Friday, Frigg, Freya, the Venus of the North. Anyone know the gods the other days of the week are named after?
Thor, Thursday, that’s war. Yes, Jason, it’s true, thunder and war. The Vikings sailed across the North Sea to this part of England, and landed here and imported their gods and goddesses. But there’ve been traces of human activity since the Stone Age, as well as Romans and Anglo-Saxons and Normans and, nearer our times, Dutch.

Brigi (undertone, very low, and sounding as from a tightly enclosed space):
− Summer and winter sounds are as different as flowers in their seasons – as poppies from holly, meadowsweet from yew… They used to call me the Flower Maiden. They said I was made of broom and loosestrife and cornflowers and poppies…

Annie:
− We’re lucky today’s Friday – it wasn’t planned as the Farmer’s Market only takes place once a month. The driver’s going to let you off and then he’ll be coming back for us – when? In two hours, and he can’t wait so don’t miss him! Over there are the old Hospice and Almshouses – the Lottery gave a lot of money to convert them into a Centre where we can bring back the past so we can all experience it as it was. So we can  see how everything was different then. And here’s the statue of the local benefactor who made a fortune and put up the fountain and the cattle troughs – why? Stephen! Why do you think he did?
− Yes, good, quite right, farmers drove their stock to market then. No, they weren’t any veggies then. If you were vegetarian then, like you, Emma, it was because you couldn’t afford to eat meat.

− Anyhow this local boss generally beautified the town which
he pretty much owned lock stock and barrel.
Watch out for the traffic – market vehicles are allowed and they’re a law unto themselves and I wouldn’t want to lose any of you and have to tell your parents – or the school governors – that there had been a nasty accident with a white van.
     Now look carefully at the wall of the church and see – there – where the brickwork changes… no, Katie, up a bit – as high as you could reach standing on tiptoe, at that horizontal slit – it’s really narrow. That’s where the cell of a woman used to be. They walled her in and she lived there for… See if you can find out how long – there’s a plaque as well with her name. I’m not going to say any more. You put down your answers on your sheets – where it says, ‘anchorite’. I’m interested to hear what you discover… It’s one of those weird stories, a kind of a sinister fairy tale, but it happened, it’s a real living tomb and she was a real person. They fed her through the slit which you could only reach by stretching on tiptoe.
   You couldn’t see in and she couldn’t see out.

Birgitta (whisper):
− I was so sweet in perfume that honey made by the bees that sipped at me was prized above all other honey.

Annie:
− They say an owl has haunted the chimney there ever since.
− No, Brad, of course it’s not the same owl. Just the place has stayed a favourite haunt. Birds often go back to the same nest, you know, generation after generation.
Sometimes in the daytime you can hear an owl scuffling and shifting in its roost – they only come out at night: have any of you see one fly?
− Yes, they’re not exactly inner city birds: you have to come  to the country like here to find one!

Annie to herself :
− Birgitta’s cell really belongs in one of those stories that are old and plain and get inside your head from when your Nan used to tell them to you, the kind of stories I’ve always known but never seem to think about until something like this, when it involves someone who’s part of real life… Nan used to mind there were so many that began with the mother dying or disappearing. (Stronger Irish) ‘Why for the love of God,’ she’d say, ‘Couldn’t there be more about all those fathers who do a runner? Like yours, my pet, like yours.’ That’s why we all came
over to England – I was born soon afterAll on the quiet.

Birgitta (slightly less whispery, with a hint of excitement):
− After I was taken to meet him, meet the man I was to be married to, we were left together in the main bedroom of his house on one of the side streets off the Friday Market. He was a merchant from Flushing, across the sea in Holland: my father had met him in the bulb trade. He was renting a pretty house with gabled windows at the back and the front, and the sunlight slanted across the floor through shutters and dappled his body – I laughed at the sight of him and he caught me up into the patch so I was dappled too.

Annie to herself:
− I came across the plaque about Birgitta on the school trip five years ago, that was the first time I’d taken Year Eight. I was standing near the wall where it says, ‘The Dutch anchorite Birgitta Torval retired to this cell inside the cavity wall of this church and lived here in penitence and the love of God for five years. She died aged 23 in AD 12 hundred and something…’ I thought of Birgitta’s shame and of those times when you couldn’t be up and off on the boat for Liverpool, not like my mum who brought me up on her own with Nan’s help…
 I was thinking this, and I swear I began to  hear Birgitta whispering to me from inside the wall…

Birgitta:
− So they said I was made of wild flowers, of clover and honeysuckle, dogrose and cornflowers, loosestrife and stitchwort and ladies’ bedstraw as well as poppies, picked in the meadows and the wildwoods, from along the edges of streams and the tangled hedgerows– and they presented me like a bouquet to the man I was to be married to, the one my father chose for me. 
− He was my first love. For a time we were happy, we were very happy, he could not have enough of me, sinking his face into my body. “Oh, the scent of flowers, the flowers!” he’d say.
− So I can’t tell why what happened later happened or why I did what I did except that I was young and curious: Was the happiness we enjoyed like the happiness of others? Did other couples feel love differently? Could I experience the same things in another way?

Annie, aloud:
− Have you all got your entries for the Museum? Those of you who want to, stick with me. But the rest of you can go off on your own as long as you’re back, remember, at the bus at 12.00 o’clock. You’ll know when it’s time because the bells will start ringing for the daily service.
− Now you’ve all got your sheets, so fill in as much as you can – remember there’s £10 top-up on your phones donated by your long-suffering parents for the best journal kept on the trip.
− You’re off to find

• -the stone arrow head

• -the sole of a Roman sandal that was preserved in the bog outside the town

• -a pair of donkey baskets  _ creelsmade from reeds cut on the marshes between here and the sea

• -the meaning of ‘anchorite’

• -the name of the person who was shut up in the wall

• -the chimney with the owl’s nest that’s been there since anyone can remember… and the kind of owl it is…protected now because they are getting increasingly rare…

So switch off those mobiles NOW – yes, I mean it! You can’t take photos inside.

Annie (interior voice):
− Her merchant husband traveled across the sea, often leaving her for days at a time in his house off the Market Square, and one day Gerald, Count of Utrecht, came clattering down the streets one day looking to water and provision his horses and the Flower Maiden fell for him, fell for him badly…

Birgitta:
− It was because of Gerald, Count of Utrecht, that I turned my face to the wall and wanted to keep to the dark,, and live here till all my flowers withered and my colours whitened without the sun to paint and fill them.
What Gerald made me do brought me here; what the feelings I had for him made me do. I wanted him to come to me more, more often, stay with me longer, and I resented the man I was married to even though I loved him.
Because he was there. Because he was in the way.
Gerald would send word he was coming, and then he’d fail to come, sending word again that he had business keeping him in another place. He gave his horse more care and attention than he gave me. I envied the plate with the food he fell on so ravenously. I was jealous of his glass, too, and the way he drank from it. I wanted to be the reins he held with such grace in his hands.
Honey, the golden work of the bees, a flower maiden’s closest company – they became my accomplices.
One afternoon in our garden, a swarm fastened on my husband and stuck to him; the writhing, buzzing mass swathed him from head to foot. He flailed at them wildly at first but the poison worked quickly on his limbs and soon, he couldn’t struggle. They stunned him and felled his great strength like a mast cracking. No beekeeper reached him to divert the swarm, nobody came in time to lift the pulsing mass of insects from his stricken body.
 I was a widow.
−I was alone at last.

Annie (interior voice):
− So she waited for Gerald, Count of Utrecht.

Birgitta:
− At first Gerald came to me and he was glad and full of wonder at my courage in this sudden bereavement. He wanted to protect me he said. But his feelings for me weakened, I could sense it. The more I struggled to keep them aflame and strong, the more he listened to the suspicion gathering around me… and I could count our time together running down.

Annie to children:
− No, Emma, anchorite doesn’t mean a woman who kills her husband. Anyone else have an idea what it means?
− Someone who wants to stay at home?
− That’s not quite it, but closer… Birgitta Torval was anchored here, so to speak, after she was walled up…
− Yes, Brad, well done. Anchorite means a woman who becomes a hermit.
− And why was she walled up? Katy – do you know? Yes, Sophie? Mmm, was it a way of making up for what… love… made her go and do? That’s right, up to a point. But they were different times – religious beliefs were very harsh.
− Well, Jason, it is a bit gruesome. But it’s history. It’s the way some things were. We can’t go through life not seeing what can happen and not caring what it is when it does. The limits of my knowledge are the limits of my world, that’s something a great philosopher said. Just remember that.

Interior voice:
− She went to the priest here at the church on Friday Market,

and confessed. He wouldn’t bless her.
− That hadn’t changed much with the years: my Mum was a wicked girl, they told her, who had led astray a good man – oh, a man like my father’d not have sullied his immortal soul if it hadn’t been for her wicked wiles… she should be shunned, an adulteress like her.

Birgitta:
− The priest said to me, ‘There is one creature -  hardly made by God though all things are -  a bird all others find abominable. When it draws near, other birds rally together to cry out and warn one another. They mob it if it comes any closer to keep it away from their children. Like you, it once committed an act of depravity for which it will not be forgiven. Like you, it must hide its shame under cover of darkness.’
− He cursed me.  He said to me:
‘You belong to the dark and all other living things will shun you. You are abhorrent to creatures of light and air, to all that is made of colour and laughter. Screeching will be your music, and others’ leavings your nourishment. You will foul your own nest.’
And I understood. And I decided to live here in the wall, isolated like an owl

Afterword to Birgitta's Cell  

I was asked by BBC Radio to write a story on the theme of Greta Garbo's famous line, 'I want to be alone', and it so happened that I was visiting Utrecht and a local anchorite was mentioned in a guide book I had.  I am fascinated – and appalled – by anchorites, but all forms of female holiness/profanity are irresisitible to me and I tried to find her cell - the 'anchorite hold' in a church nearby. But when I walked around the area on the map,  the church had been swallowed up in municipal buildings and the streets and alleys around them didn't allow me to enter. I kind of liked this impossibility: the way the holy woman – whose name I have now mislaid – had been closed up again.
     East Anglia and Holland used to trade, and I  grew up in Cambridge; the fenlands' lumpy clay suits melancholics and mystics: they thrive there  like eels and frogs and sticklebacks (you could say W.G. Sebald is the most recent). Julian of Norwich dominates the history of this women's way of being utterly alone.  I first read Julian via T.S. Eliot, who is full of her cadences,  and she has haunted me ever since. But when I was looking for her much less prominent Dutch counterpart in Utrecht, I began thinking of someone who wasn't a mystic or in charge of her choices, as most anchorites seem to have been.  East Anglia and Essex are also areas where the fears of witchcraft and the energies of witchhunters brought many women – and men – to the gallows; one of them is remembered in the coastal town of King's Lynn, once a  great port, now a remote  though still pretty town with little of its former international trade (but I have seen a Russian tanker loading grain on the dock there – a cascade of gold flowing free into the hull.)
  These figures of the past – the anchorites and witches of East Anglia – combined with another image whom I have always wanted to write about: Blodeuwwen, the Flower Maiden from the Mabinogion. If you know your Welsh myths and legends, you will recognise her story in mine.  And as a final element to crystallise what I was trying to do, the artist Kiki Smith the artist gave me a few years ago a statuette she made called Owl Girl, showing herself with a huge owl straddling her shoulders  - both a hideous burden and a wonderful weird familiar.