Following the death of her beloved father in 1987, Catherine Coldstream was plunged into spiritual crisis. Convinced she could still feel his presence, she was consumed by thoughts of the afterlife and the fate of the disembodied spirit. A three-year search for deeper meaning and “a transcendent source of love” eventually led her to the Carmelites, a Roman Catholic order based on the hermits who inhabited caves on the mystical Mount Carmel. For Coldstream, they represented a new way of living and a chance to do God’s bidding behind closed doors.
Or that was the idea. Cloistered, Coldstream’s memoir of her time at the (pseudonymous) Akenside Priory in Northumberland, home to a 20-strong community of Carmelite nuns, opens with her dramatic flight from the institution under cover of darkness. As she clutches her treasured viola, one of the few possessions she had arrived with 10 years earlier, we find her running down the gravel drive in habit and sandals and into the nearby fields with “the air slicing across my face in wild, clean shafts … I’d forgotten what night tasted like, the great dome of it, just as I’d forgotten what it was – after ten years cloistered – to run cold and wild and wet, beyond enclosure.”
Publishing isn’t short of memoirs by those who have sought to break free from a life of religious dogma. In Educated, Tara Westover recalled her escape after a strict Mormon upbringing, while in The Last Days, Ali Millar movingly chronicled her early life and marriage as a Jehovah’s Witness before she was “disfellowshipped” by the church. The difference here is that Coldstream wasn’t born into the religious life but chose it, knowingly relinquishing a life of travel, boyfriends, art, literature and freedom in favour of silent contemplation and extreme asceticism.
Cloistered vividly documents the author’s early months as a newbie nun, or “postulant”. She initially thrives in her sealed-off world, shrugging off the hunger – the nuns lived on meagre rations – and embracing the whitewashed bareness of her “cell”, which comes with a small bed, a kneeling mat and a large cross on the wall. Her life is one of seclusion, obedience, austerity, chastity and a “central and defining relationship with an invisible being we thought of as our spouse”. It also brings a new vocabulary: “of your charity” is a way of saying please, “Deo gratis” means “thank you” and “humble office” is not a sparsely furnished place of work but a euphemism for the toilet.
After an early honeymoon period, discontent begins to creep in for Coldstream – now called Sister Catherine – and not just because the newly elected, animal-loving mother superior has allowed the priory to become overrun with feral cats that pee everywhere. She starts to question Mother Elizabeth’s methods and quietly locks horns with her “twin” initiate, Sister Jennifer, whom she feels is afforded privileges she is not. There are clear schoolyard vibes in this febrile environment where small infractions are blown out of proportion and fantastical narratives spun from stern or mocking glances.
While warmth and compassion – qualities that are meant to go hand in hand with godliness – do seem to be in short supply, Coldstream’s litany of slights and wounded self-pity can feel rather relentless. Mild jibes about her being a southerner and having converted to the Catholic faith, rather than being born into it, leave her in tears; at one point she apologises to Mother Elizabeth and Sister Jennifer in the hope that they will reciprocate and is astonished when they don’t. When she complains: “I’d taken to the life of the cell as though it were second nature, but the emotional coldness of the community was a reality I had not bargained for,” you long for someone to take her aside and say: “You joined one of the strictest, most antiquated religious orders there is. What did you think it would be like?” Her book is ultimately an instructive lesson in what happens when you throw a bunch of strangers in thrall to a higher power together and leave them to organise themselves. Cliques and alliances form, power struggles erupt and some become more equal than others – all of which makes Cloistered a bit like Animal Farm, but with nuns instead of livestock.
It’s no surprise to learn that Akenside Priory has since closed and been sold off. It seems young women ready to give up their families and freedom to live in a micro-dictatorship are now few and far between. On leaving the order, Coldstream settled into a new life as a teacher and became acclimatised to the “great rush of noise” that was the outside world. And though she lost her faith in the sisters, she kept her faith in God. Her book is not about retribution but, she notes, “a story. A personal testament. A glimpse over the wall. It is an act of thanks for my survival.”
• Cloistered: My Years As a Nun by Catherine Coldstream is published by Chatto & Windus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
