I read Catherine Coldstream’s very moving and compelling book Cloistered first at a gallop – it is a page-turner – and then more slowly a second time, to appreciate the beauty of the writing. I think it is a book I will return to again and again.
Catherine (it seems cold to call her by her surname, and besides, for the period covered by this book she was Sister Catherine) converted to Catholicism not long after her beloved father (and only emotional mainstay) died in 1987. She was only a year in the faith when she was accepted as a postulant (i.e. pre-novice) in a contemplative Carmelite convent somewhere in Northumberland, which she fictionalises as Akenside. It is hard to believe that any modern religious community would welcome a candidate for such a demanding way of life so soon after two such life-altering events, but the community she entered was a strange one by any standards. Most religious communities (active and contemplative, male and female) from the 1960s to the present day have undergone a rigorous overhaul of structures in line with church reforms and modern psychological insights (for want of a better phrase), and included in this were knowledge of group dynamics, experimentation with different models of authority and community, and respect for a certain degree of individuality within the parameters of the religious rules. This happened even in communities which kept the traditional habits and observed strict enclosure, but it did not happen in Akenside.
All through her time there, and right up to the end, Catherine loved the daily life of the convent (or monastery, as she calls it). The physical privations (austere diet, cold cells, early rising, hard physical work and silence) are no bother to a young, healthy 20-something-year old. Her cell is her ‘ heaven’ where she is alone with God, and she never experiences ‘desolation’ or doubt, but she also loves community prayer and liturgy, especially when it is expressed in music, her special talent. Before entering, she read St John of the Cross and the mystical writings of the two Carmelite Teresas. The daily timetable (horarium) of prayers and annual timetable of feasts are described so lovingly and vividly that the reader – this reader anyway – yearns for such beauty and meaning. Catherine fully grasps the spirit of the rules and cannot understand how the woman who entered on the same day as her, Jen, is so easily beguiled from them by small indulgences – chocolates, a break in the routine, talking out of turn. However, what Catherine finds hardest to bear is the way her own zeal and idealism is almost frowned upon. Her spiritual mentor Sister Ellen points out to her that sometimes it is enough to be in the life and to live it from day to day. The more brisk Mother Elizabeth is blunt; what they don’t want in the convent are ‘dreamers’, but strivers, seeking the ‘level and the down-to-earth’. They disapprove of Catherine’s intellectual approach (and their disapproval is wrong), but also of her zeal, which I kind of understand. While reading the book I found myself repeatedly thinking, Catherine is taking all this too seriously, then pulling myself up. Of course, one has to take one’s chosen way of life seriously. What one shouldn’t do, however, is to take it solemnly. People who marry in churches also take religious vows but they don’t spend all day every day meditating on the loved one. They live ordinary- everyday lives within the vows. Maybe Catherine was too ‘new’ a Catholic to embrace the religious life in the healthy spirit of irreverence natural to those who have been breathing Catholic air all their lives. In Antonia White’s Frost in May, schoolgirl Leonie, reared in a very traditional Catholic family, proposes to spend her religious retreat (when she should be praying), writing a novel in blank verse. And she intends to enter the convent eventually. Living the Catholic faith is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to pace yourself.
What Catherine finds hardest of all, however, is community life. It was certainly the hardest part of Therese Martin’s ‘vocation’, and one she wrote about frankly and feelingly. In fairness, there are some overly bracing personalities in Catherine’s convent – I haven’t been in a social or personal setting for over 50 years in which it is acceptable to call someone a ‘cry-baby’ when they are upset – and none of them has the slightest understanding of, or curiosity about, Catherine’s family or former life. She’s a Londoner, from an upper-middle-class artistic family, and derisive little comments are made from time to time that she probably takes too much to heart. She doesn’t understand that Geordies routinely slag off Yorkshire people (and vice versa and so ad infinitum for every region ) and that every English person who isn’t a southerner slags off southerners – it is entirely possible that she never before encountered the kind of regional teasing discourse which is the lifeblood of much casual human intercourse on these islands. More seriously, she feels overlooked by Mother Elizabeth, who treats Catherine with barely-concealed impatience and derision, and openly favours Jen.
Poor Jen goes off the rails in the end but then, so does the whole convent. A new, reforming (and democratically-elected) superior, Sister Irene (who rejects the title Mother), is rebelled against by the ousted Mother Elizabeth, and two firm camps are established in the community. The shaky foundations of the community Catherine joined are exposed, and even Irene, at one stage, physically attacks Catherine, who is one of her staunchest supporters. Eventually – and we are never told what, if any, actual incident precipitates her flight – she leaves the convent in a panic in the middle of the night and gets to her sister in Newcastle, and stays with her (wearing secular dress) for two weeks. What is very strange is that the community welcomes her back with open arms, Elizabeth in particular being very kind and understanding. Catherine gives it another two years and then she is formally dispensed from her vows, having spent ten years in the convent. She believes she did the right thing in leaving when she did, but she does not regret the religious life: ‘The monastery held me, enamoured, too long for the core of the experience to be fundamentally renounced.’ She feels privileged to have experienced that silence, discipline and joyful expectation. The reader feels privileged at being invited to share it, but also relieved that Catherine had the courage to realize how unhappy she was, in the end.
This is my favourite leaping over the wall book, maybe because Catherine is only slightly younger than I am and I can understand her world-view in a way that I can’t understand those of the other authors I’ve read, but I think mainly because it is so even-handed. There are no demons in this book and no angels either, but the book shows how easily communities can become cliques and how power can corrupt, how important simple, everyday kindness is, and how apparently ‘small things’ can loom large. One Christmas Eve Mother Elizabeth (in accordance with custom) hugs everybody to wish them a happy Christmas, and looks around and says, ‘Now who have I missed?’ and she has forgotten Catherine and nobody notices and Catherine goes off and has a little cry. Yes, it sounds like a childish thing to ‘mind’, but in the context of the life as she describes it, it is huge.
All that said, however, in a nod ( my only nod) to the breezy and practical spirit of Mother Elizabeth and Sister Ellen, I’d like to announce that I am thinking of adopting the convent’s name for the toilet – the H.O. or ‘Humble Office’.
Catherine Coldstream, Cloistered: my years as a nun (London: Chatto & Windus 2024)
Antonia White, Frost in May (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode 1933). I’ve written about Frost in May in one of the earliest blogs.
Clear Classic Books 
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