Bred of Heaven (6 page)

‘Like this!' I keep at it and lo, the coracle nudges forwards. I have inadvertently done something right. I try to do it again but the paddle is clumsy in my hands. More rotation. ‘Not like that!' Bernard's thin voice carries across the water. I try to repeat the motion
without error and, yes, now the coracle responds to the correct coaxing.

‘Come to me,' flutes Bernard, like a wizened siren, and I do. The river between us disappears. He proposes that we paddle downstream with the current. And so I scoop and slice the waters, scoop and slice, scoop and slice. Bernard is to my right.

‘Now I want you to row with one arm.' He shoves the handle end into his right armpit, then grips the shaft with his right hand and coaxes the blade through the water at the side of the boat. This is harder, and I lose direction. With each spin I overcompensate, with the result that the bow is like a spectator at tennis, head switching left and right. I am lured towards a thicket of branches overhanging the river. ‘You don't want to bloody go in there!' I resume the two-handed technique and escape. ‘Try again.' Oddly, if only for a few strokes, the boat succumbs. Suddenly I see it. We are several yards apart, Bernard on the north side of the river, me on the south. We are each paddling with one arm, leaving the other free to hold the net between the two coracles.

‘You've got it, boy!' Bernard calls, his voice reedy and infirm. ‘You've got it!' The river drifts underneath us. Further down I can see a stately bridge, the end of Bernard's half-mile of river. Beyond it Bernard would never dream of going. The sun blesses the green banks of the Teifi. Our paddles caress the ancient waters. I am doing the oldest Welsh thing of all, reaching back to the very beginning of Welshness. ‘You've got it, boy!' I am afloat.

‘BEFORE THE DAYLIGHT
shines abroad, come, people …'

It is half past three. In the morning.

‘… let us praise the Lord …'

We are not far beyond midsummer, but in this corner of Wales the dawn is not even a twinkle in the eye of the Almighty.

‘… whose grace and mercy thus have kept the nightly watch while we have slept.'

Not that I got much kip. Through the thick monastery wall came the bone-shaking rumbles of a snoring priest. I was granted probably two hours. Now here I am at vigils, singing along with ten monks robed neck to ankle in flowing white. It is, I repeat, half past three
in the morning
. No one, surely, loves God this much.

It's less singing than chanting, featuring those small but
surprising musical intervals that occur only in plainsong. There are no crashing major chords in the Cistercian songbook. Or indeed chords at all. It sounds like the harmonic line to a missing melody: up a tone here, down a minor third there – you never quite know where the next note is heading. It is calming, though. Verily, it could smooth the corrugated brow of a furious insomniac.

‘O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good': Psalm 105. We are operating a call and response system. The monks in the right-hand stall sing one verse, then the monks on the left sing the other. I am directly behind the abbot, bald and bespectacled, who has his back to me. There are two others with me in the pews: priests. One of them, I'm not sure which, is the snorer. They are here for a week's worth of retreat. Which, in pursuance of Welshness, is sort of why I am here too. Only not for a week. One day in the life of a Cistercian will do for me.

We reach the end of Psalm 106. ‘Glory be to the Father,' they chant, and as they do so they solemnly bow their heads. ‘And to the Son.' It really is abominably early. ‘And to the Holy Spirit.' I only ever get up at this hour to catch dirt-cheap flights from Stansted. ‘As it was in the beginning …' They raise their heads. ‘… is now and ever shall be …' The brothers are here every day of the year. ‘… world without end …' Every day of their lives. ‘Amen.'

One of those brothers is my uncle. His name nowadays is Teilo, after the Welsh saint. Upon entering the monastery, and in order to avoid having the same name as another monk, he changed it from the one my grandparents gave him. Brother Teilo has been on Caldey for a decade, initially as a novice. Having resigned from the priesthood as a young man, he made his solemn profession at the age of seventy-three. Others joined somewhat earlier: one monk has been in the abbey since 1948. The Cistercians themselves have occupied it since 1929. It was the first monastery of
the order to reopen in Wales since Henry VIII dissolved the lot of them in the 1530s.

Gerald of Wales, writing in the twelfth century when the Cistercians were still quietly spreading their benign influence through Wales, approved of the order:

From the eleventh century until the Reformation, the Cistercians were everywhere in Wales. The tourist board is eternally grateful for the abbeys all over the country, which people still flock to see – Tintern, Strata Florida, Cymer, Valle Crucis, Neath and Margam and so on. There are thirteen of them in all. None now have so much as a roof between them, or indeed many walls. But here in these remote fastnesses is where the Cistercians left their footprint. They were the Welshest order, supporters of Welsh poets and kings. The grave of the greatest Welsh bard, Dafydd ap Gwilym, is at Strata Florida. In the early 1400s they put their weight behind Owain Glynd
r in Wales's last glorious battle for independence. Give or take a 400-year moratorium in their activities, they are still here, praying and working and keeping themselves to themselves. And Brother Teilo is one of them.

‘O Lord, open our lips,' chants a monk, also classically bald, to the right of the abbot. While you're at it, O Lord, perhaps you
might open mine eyes. In every sense. I am Godless, not to mention sleepless.

I arrived on the last boat the previous afternoon. Fishing vessels act as ferries for tourists from the docks at Tenby. The last one chugs out of port at three in the afternoon. It's always empty and if you're staying at the abbey there's no charge. The crossing can be the purest bliss. Gulls squawk, the engine chugs, the wind caresses your cheek, and as the sun beats on Caldey Sound you can look along the soft slopes of Pembrokeshire towards the Gower off in the east. The beckoning island fills the horizon, beside it to the west the lumpy crag of St Margaret's Island. The abbey from afar is white-walled and red-roofed. Above and behind is a lighthouse which at night-time winks its warning to boats in the Bristol Channel. Fields and woods fan out on either side.

It's pissing down when I cross. I must bear it, I tell myself. Acceptance of rain is a key ability in the Welsh skill set. Acceptance of chill is something the monks have learned too. Caldey is a Norse name gifted by marauding Vikings: Cold Island. The brothers wear a lot of layers under those white robes.

I set the alarm for 3.25 a.m., rise, dress and slide downstairs. Across the glassed-in cloister, figures in white drift through the darkness towards a double door in the corner. I follow, along another corridor and right into the chapel. The monks turn and bow to the altar. When in Rome, does one follow suit? I look up and note that the monks all seem to be in a private space, so I scuttle furtively past to my pew.

A thin, white-haired monk with voluminous sleeves pads over in sandals to give me a ring-bound folder, helpfully opened to the correct page. He points without speaking. I nod. ‘They fashioned a calf at Horeb'. I've never so much as dipped into the psalter, but here it is in my hands, each psalm assigned to a particular day of
the week at a particular service. ‘Flames devoured the rebels.' They reckon to get through all 150 psalms each fortnight. Some of them are deucedly long and are diced up and parcelled out across the schedule. ‘They did not destroy the peoples,' we chant. After each psalm the monks bow once more. Glory be to the Father. Then there's a reading from the monk with the sleeves. As he nears the lectern he holds his hands up to avoid being engulfed by cloth. I do my absolute level best to listen to the story of how Jonah fetched up inside a whale, and am rewarded for my tenacity. ‘Jonah was asked, “Where do you come from? What is your country?”' A good question, brother, and pertinent.

We pray. Or they pray. Standing, all facing the altar. The Lord's Prayer. Some monks turn inwards to the wall, as if they dare not send private thoughts directly up the aisle towards the image of Christ fixed high on the rear wall. This manifestation of humility is intensely moving. After Psalm 66 – ‘I shall offer to you burnt offerings of fat beasts' – a monk exits stage left and a bell clangs vigorously. Someone else switches off the lights. Vigils are over, officially.

It is now four o'clock in the morning, with no sign of dawn. Some monks process out, bowing; others stay, among them my uncle. Silence is absolute. They are still praying. It seems seemly to hang on and await developments. My uncle is deep in prayer. Would it be rude to go? Bed is a temptation. Ten past. No sign of my uncle shifting. He has a list of 2,500 people he prays for, he tells me. If I leave now he might see me not bowing to the altar. Am I on the list? I could just slip past. His eyes are probably closed.

Sometimes your body decides without consulting your mind. I get up and tread purposefully out of the church, through the still-dark cloister and up into the monastic guesthouse where bed beckons. Right now I could sleep through powerdrilling. I set my
alarm for 5.55. Next appointment: lauds, 6 a.m. ‘Little and often for us,' says Teilo. Cistercians began living like this in Wales a millennium ago. Now it's my turn.

Christmas Day began at six, or thereabouts. That's when you'd awake to the certain knowledge that an inundation of gifts was heading your way. So it was good to get an early start.

In Mount Hill we slept in a garret room, up a creaking staircase. The sloped ceiling bore down on three serried beds. My older brother had the big one nearest the door. I was in the middle one. My younger brother was exiled up to the sharp end, next to a deep dark alcove that tended to unnerve the junior mind. For years we imagined all manner of bad shit going down in that corner. We'd discuss poltergeists long after lights out. It was presumed that things lurked behind hatboxes and old leather suitcases. My younger brother grew up stoical.

It was a curious room, full of those strange things you find in grandparents' houses. Awaiting us on the bedspreads were two uncuddly toys once sent back to Wales by someone on the Australian branch of the family tree: a koala and, weirdly, a duck-billed platypus. There was a toby mug on a shelf; flowers, framed and pressed by my grandmother, hung on a wall. A door gave onto a dusty attic storeroom, where we once found wildebeest horns mounted on a board. It's how I imagine all bedrooms of visiting grandchildren should be: semi-familiar, a little bit wonderful, cluttered with random exotica.

Through the gable windows you could see little but the sloping roof. At six on Christmas morning, you couldn't see anything. The noise of footsteps on the stairs, however, would carry.

‘Back to bed now, boys.' My mother would creep up from their bedroom. ‘It's not time to get up yet.' We'd settle for about a
minute. Then gradually resume our uproar. Next time the footsteps would be heavier.

‘Shut up, the lot of you.' My father.

‘Can't we open some presents?'

‘No.'

‘But …'

Slam.

Eventually we'd be allowed down the stairs to where three small piles would await us at the foot of our parents' bed. We'd rip stuff open, marvel at it acquisitively, then cast it aside and thunder downstairs to my grandparents' bedroom. The majority of the house was a big sort of bungalow. On the ground floor, my grandparents slept next to the kitchen. We didn't quite burst in. My grandfather – he was called Bert, short for Bertram – was a forbidding figure, not given to smiling or indeed talking much. He had a thickset frame and a heavy square head, from which white hair had receded, leaving a trim peppery moustache to hold the fort. No one has ever looked less unimpressive in his pyjamas, which I imagine were silk. He was a dandy who shone his shoes every morning and would as often as not wear plus fours and, outside in the Christmas chill, a deerstalker. I never felt quite comfortable in his presence, in the bedroom least of all. The enamel chamber pot under his side of the bed was disturbing.