Catherine Coldstream seems, on the face of it, an unlikely person to have become a nun. She grew up in a bohemian household in north London, daughter of the distinguished painter William Coldstream, who was, for 26 years, head of the Slade School of Fine Art. And when we meet on a February afternoon in Oxford, in the university rooms of a friend of hers, it is easy to picture her in a younger version, because she still, in a sense, resembles an arty north Londoner.
In her early 60s now, she has a keen, bright, boyish face, glasses with fashionable blue frames and neat beige boots with little heels. Her blouse is quirkily patterned with capering bears and antique gramophones. She comes across as a free spirit, which makes it all the more unfathomable that in 1989, aged 27, she should have joined Akenside Priory (not its real name) in Northumberland and remained there for more than a decade. In addition, she is so animated that it seems inexplicably punitive that she should have chosen to join a silent Carmelite order where conversation was permitted only once a day, confidences frowned upon and enthusiasm discouraged. I admire her blouse. âDo you like it?â she exclaims, delighted. What is missing in her is any obstructive piety. I feel she is someone I could have been friends with for years â I am no longer sure who it was I expected to meet.
The overarching question, though, still holds: how did Coldstream â who spent her youth reading Russian novels, lived in Paris, worked for a modern music publisher, fell in love with âunsuitable propositions in dark polo necksâ and discussed Sartre and Stockhausen in French â turn into someone willing to sacrifice her life to God? It is a question answered in her beautifully written memoir, Cloistered, which one reads with fascination, empathy and mounting alarm. The book surprises because, while it describes stillness, silence and contemplation, it evolves into a spiritual thriller in which the experience of being a nun unravels into a nightmare as the monasteryâs internal politics sour. An unseemly power struggle ensues, a schism between two prioresses and their followers. Good behaviour turns bad and Coldstream, violently turned upon and against, eventually takes flight. Unsparingly, she asks herself many of the questions we might pose ourselves. But what needs emphasising â in case I have given any misleading impression of her as fickle â is that when she flees the monastery, she is not in flight from God. This is a devotional memoir about two fathers, the heavenly one and her own.
She describes her childhood as âvery dysfunctionalâ. Her mother, Monica, was âa beautyâ, an actor and singer who turned up in her fatherâs life as his model. Her father was 28 years older and this was his second marriage. He and Monica had three children (he had older children from a first marriage). But her parents were soon to prove incompatible. âWe grew up in a beautiful Georgian home in Canonbury â tall and stucco-fronted. It would be seen as terribly posh and gentrified now but it was shabby then. There were no carpets but it was airy and there were lovely wooden floors and rugs.â It was a house âbursting with character and bristling with tensionâ. As a child, she thought of her mother as a âfrightening, volatile person we needed to please and cheer up and comfort all the time. I had to manage her moods. My father felt very bad that his first marriage didnât last, he wanted another go at family life.â Her parents had âseparate bedrooms and led separate livesâ. Catherine, the eldest child, became the peace-maker.
She describes her father as âadorable â everyone loved him. He was charming and funny. He was not an argumentative person â he was conciliatory. My mother probably resented that he got recognition as a painter while she was at the kitchen sink â and I understand that.â Monica seems, however, not to have lingered at the kitchen sink. She was often away on tour and permanently on the edge of career breakthroughs. Aunt Winnie, her fatherâs sister, was imported to look after the children. A wearer of cornflower-blue cardigans, Winnie is affectionately described in the memoir and seems to have been an influence because, although not a Catholic, she was an âincredibly devoutâ Protestant, modelling the consolations of religion. And one can imagine how religion for Coldstream must have come to equal security.
In the memoir, she alludes to her mother having childhood traumas and refers, without elaboration, to âparental abandonmentâ. What happened? âIt was monstrous â she was given away by her own mother to an orphanage when she was only two, which is worse psychologically than being given away as a baby because you would feel the rejection. I donât think she ever got over that.â Coldstream spent the last year of her motherâs life âvery closeâ to her but her mother had become âvery difficult to readâ. She hoped to have conversations that made sense of their past but: âMy mother couldnât wrestle with her inner world, it was too painful.â
I suggest that her mother did not know how to be a mother and Coldstream agrees. She evidently lived her life through beauty â even in extreme old age, she would be reaching for her scarlet âlippyâ. The orphanage into which her mother was cast had been a Catholic one â and Coldstream sometimes wonders about the significance of that for her own story. How did her mother react to her converting to Catholicism? She said: âYou do know it is strict, donât you?â That sounds slightly indifferent I suggest, as if she were not interested in what you were doing. âShe wasnât,â Coldstream replies.
Her father moved out of the family home three years before he died. âThat was a terrible time. He lived with older relatives and was in the neurological ward at UCL for months and ended up in a home. There had been a decline and he had got into a depression â we had already, in a sense, lost our wonderful, lively, charismatic Dad.â She was 24 when he died and it was at her fatherâs deathbed that she had a visitation that would change the course of her life: âIâll never forget it. When I got to the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital in Queenâs Square, I went up to the top floor where there was a chapel where they put people when theyâve died. A nice nurse opened the door. I hardly dared look down. Seeing my fatherâs vacant body was a huge jolt. I thought: heâs not there any more, itâs not him. And then he was just present in the room. It was a classic religious experience, there was a massive sense of presence which I associated with him but I immediately started praying the Our Father and the experience became transcendent, a godly thing.â Before her fatherâs death, she had experienced âno glimmers of Godâ except in music (she sang in a choir, played the viola) but she took this new faith with her when she left the chapel. âItâs never gone away,â she says.
What would her father have made of the decision to become a nun? âI used to ask myself that when I was inside,â she says and tears come to her eyes. âI got this sense he was somehow smiling down on me. Heâd have been pleased to see me dedicating myself to something in a demanding way â the discipline of The Life was good for me because I was very highly strung and emotional and devastated after he died and the family disintegrated.â She conveys, in the memoir, the austere rapture of the place. She fell in love with the beauty of the grounds, the patchwork fields, the mere, the birdsong â it was a setting for a romantic poet. And her cell was filled with light: âThere was tremendous beauty in this shifting brightness,â she writes. At the start, her expectation seems to have been that the nuns would be saintly types. But this gets challenged right away. âJenâ [not her real name], the novice who joins at the same time as Coldstream, is instantly jarring. In a Jungle Book top, she joshes raucously about how she and Coldstream are going to be the âterrible twinsâ. It is an early warning of unsisterly sisters ahead â or at least not soulmates under the same roof.
Early on, did she harbour any doubts or fears about her calling? âOnly that I was afraid I wouldnât be able to bear it because of the sheer endurance involved. The other fear was that they would not accept me because, at every stage, you have to be voted through.â Her story makes one wonder: what is the ideal temperament for a nun? âYou need to be robust because The Life can be bruising. The people who survived best were grounded, practical, with a little worldliness. I was utterly idealistic in the aftermath of my fatherâs death and yearned for too much reclusion.â
I enquire about the oddity of being cooped up with other women while not being permitted to be on close terms with any of them. How did she subdue her curiosity? âI had to work hard at it. Part of the ethos was that you silenced your mind. Your memory had to be cleansed, put aside. You were not supposed to have judgment about your sisters. You got to know one another in a very surface way.â Coldstream was equipped, she feels, for the âextremity of solitude in the cellâ having developed âself-reliance from my dysfunctional backgroundâ. She embraced the ânot leaning on othersâ because it âfuelled my drive for prayer. I went back to prayer with that great need for God, which opens you up to a deep experience that is incredible and has changed who I am. I have a strong sense of being loved by God. Thatâs what contemplative prayer is.â
As she is talking, it occurs to me that the earlier description of her childhood home as âbursting with character and bristling with tensionsâ could equally be applied to Akenside Priory. And Coldstream is, in the bookâs most horrifying chapter, beaten by one of the prioresses. She is abused for being the devoted person she is and for expressing her opinion, when asked, about the communityâs need for reform. Would she now say that âIreneâ, the prioress aggressor â supposedly a progressive â had become unhinged? âIrene was pushed too far. She assumed everyone would go with her and there was a mutiny. She became a jelly and spineless and started trying to please everyone. I think she lost her moral compass⦠Iâve never known why she beat me. We didnât have conversations about it.â And, unexpectedly, Coldstream now returns to the question of what her father would have made of her story, admitting that he would have been âhorrified later on when I was having suicidal thoughts. Heâd have said: âGet out.ââ
For anyone with a fragile psyche, the severity of The Life could prove a tipping point: âA lot of people were sitting on mental disorders. There were a lot of breakdowns but you often didnât know until it had gone too far. It was a hothouse and tensions festered. For everybody, there was a danger of breakdown. It was not a balanced life.â Whatâs more, emotions were not confined to the monasteryâs occupants. A fraught chapter describes the fateful day upon which Coldstream, after five-and-a half years of training, took her vows at a point where she had reason to doubt the wisdom of going ahead. Friends and family turned up to witness the ceremony and she was shocked to see her sister, Frankie, a reserved person who had seemed ânonchalantâ about her decision to become a nun, âin torrents of tears along with everybody else I knew â they all seemed to be cryingâ.
She had no idea her sister would react this way. They were used to speaking four times a year in the formal setting of the parlour âon either side of a grilleâ. It was only later that Frankie was able to explain how, when she entered the chapel, there had been âpiles of what looked like funeral leaflets. The symbolism of taking vows is that you move from a white veil to a black to show you have died to the world.â To her sister, it felt like a funeral.
âIâve had a huge amount to process over the past 20 years,â Coldstream reflects. She has been writing about her experiences, on and off, ever since. âFor the first few years, I was thinking about it all the time.â A first draft, straight out of the cloister, in biro and on A4, was âcatharticâ. Then she had an attempt at turning her experiences into a novel. It has been a âreliefâ to complete the memoir. Although it took her three years to write, it is only now that it is being published that she feels there can be a âletting goâ.
The return to âordinaryâ life seems to have been at once a blessing and a challenge: âThe thing I found most difficult was the noise. I love the quiet. The Life makes you hypersensitive â it makes you a very good listener to birdsong.â She found âthe mess, dirt and feeling of being in a chaotic placeâ difficult. âI still miss things like knowing exactly which drawer my shoe-cleaning kit is in â in the monastery, everything had its place and you hardly owned anything, it was an ordered life. Part of me likes that.â But she loves no longer having to get up with the lark and the âlie-insâ and the âlong bathsâ. The amount of choice, though, remains problematic â including her decisions about what to wear â and after leaving the monastery she took matters into her own hands: âI found a huge bit of material in the loft at Akenside which I dyed with Dylon and made myself a green habit. I had the idea that I was going to go to a remote bit of France and start a new community there.â That sounds wonderfully eccentric, I say. What stopped her? She says she went to Oxford and took a degree in theology instead.
She explains that although the âfeeling of freedomâ has been a âgreat reliefâ, it has been mixed with misgivings because her identity is tied up with having being a nun. And there was guilt too: âIt was very painful â for a long time, I felt Iâd made a huge mistake but couldnât go back because of those people who had made me feel so rejected.â She maintains that her âfaith in the institutional side of religion has taken a massive denting but I make a distinction between my faith in the Catholic religion and my faith in God. The worst transition was when I felt he was angry with me and I was going to be punished. That was during my last few years inside when I was feeling conflicted over the vows. I started losing the joy, started to feel I was failing in my vocation.â
Today, Akenside Priory still exists but as a âmuch reduced group of women trying to live the Carmelite life together. Many of the sisters I knew have died and quite a few have left since my time. The remnant now lives in a new, purpose-built monastery â they sold the old house years ago.â And has there ever been any apology for their mistreatment of her? âNothing like that seems to have been offered. No acknowledgment of dysfunction or harm. I used to talk a bit with âFr Gregoryâ (a benign but infrequent visitor at Akenside) about the old days but he just used to say things like âWeâre only humanâ and âThat was a long time agoâ⦠a typical response in the Catholic church.â
Sometimes, she wonders about a parallel universe in which she might have opted to stay on in Paris: âIâd be completely naturalised by now and three times divorced,â she laughs. Nowadays, she is married, lives in east Oxford, sings in a choir and is working on a family memoir â and she marvels at a life in which she has found âhappiness in a domesticated relationshipâ. But does she feel any regret for the way her youth vanished and for those years out of the slipstream? âAbsolutely none. Itâs the great love story of my life. It was the great event.â And we walk out of the college together and continue to chat on the street corner until she pulls on a peaked cap and, like a blameless version of the artful dodger, vanishes from sight.