November 2024
AND THE SPIRIT OF GOD
MOVED UPON THE FACE OF THE WATERS
by Allan Mallinson
About twenty years ago one February, I was driving south from our Highland home. At the last minute – Perth – I decided not to take the usual Jacobite route, but the Hanoverian (east cost) one, even though much of the Great North Road in the Borders was then single carriageway. I wasn’t in a hurry.
Just south of Berwick I saw the signs to Lindisfarne. Never having been there, I decided to take a quick look. The causeway was dry and I wasn’t going to be long – twenty minutes or so.
The island was deserted. Out of season, evidently. So I went straight to St Mary’s church. And there, Fenwick Lawson’s life-size wooden sculpture The Journey – six monks bearing St Cuthbert’s coffin on its peregrinations, eventually to Durham – took me wholly aback. I’d not known of it. The church was empty but I was there with six monks and Cuddy’s remains. They compelled contemplation.
Then after a brief look at the ruins of the Norman priory, it was back to my car to continue my own journey.
Ah, but meanwhile “the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth.” And the one thing I knew was that you couldn’t race the tide. (Well, you could, but you couldn’t beat it). I turned round disconsolately and after exploring the rest of the island – realising now why it was empty – sought solitary refuge in an inn.
I’m not a poet – I earn my bread in prose – but at that moment I felt moved to try some verse, so took out my notebook:
LINES ON LINDISFARNE
I am held captive on a holy island
By a sea that rose behind me
On the causeway, and which
Will bar my leaving a full five hours.
For seeing the water so low, I did not
Study the tide table before I crossed,
Intending just a passing look
At the place of the saints whose names
Had shaped my youth:
Bede, Aidan, Cuthbert, Chad.
Now, though, I must pay them longer reverence.
Was it because I’d never come before
– affront to those holy men who’d sought
Solitude here, braving storms and Norsemen
To cradle the faith that nurtured me
And sustains me still, but whom I dishonoured
By so short a pilgrimage in my hurry south?
Though the time was my choosing,
Was it God’s hand that bid the water
Move thus, and will again to part the waves
So that I might leave –
Chastened, enlightened;
But above all, blessed?
***
Last month my wife and I took a cottage for a few days on Lindisfarne. I’d not been back, and she’d never been, despite her Northumbrian heritage. We overnighted en route from Wiltshire with friends in Lincolnshire and set off promptly at 9 o’clock next morning. Two hundred miles said the RAC route-planner, three and a half hours. But having been a soldier, I added 10% for “margin of error” and two hours for contingencies. (It takes twenty minutes to change a wheel, fifteen for a “comfort break”, etc). But what I hadn’t (couldn’t) factor in was any pile-up on the A1(M), for how long is a piece of string?
It happened, near Durham. For two hours we sat motionless. My wife watched a film she’d downloaded on her iPad. I did emails (which I’d have had to do anyway at the cottage). I also took to Twitter to see if anyone knew what was happening. Canon Woodward didn’t know, of course, but he “Liked” the tweet – not schadenfreude, I was sure, but the mention of Lindisfarne. So I sent him my Lines.
When eventually we began to move, the satnav said we’d make the remaining 75 miles to Holy Island (it didn’t recognise “Lindisfarne”) with fifteen minutes to spare. But satnavs calculate best case; they don’t know about tractors, and there were lots of them north of Morpeth.
It kept recalculating: 10 minutes to spare, 5 minutes… “How much leeway do you think there is?” asked my wife. I didn’t know, except that (surely) tides can’t be predicted precisely to the minute – the wind, for one thing?
By the time we turned off the A1 for the causeway we had two minutes to spare and three miles to go. Then the barrier came down on the level crossing on the East Coast mainline. (Expletive deleted). It seemed perverse that, having once barred my leaving the island, the tide was now going to prevent my getting there.
A minute later, a train raced past. “Please don’t let there be another.”
The barrier rose. We were now five minutes into the “Unsafe Period”, with two miles to go and not another car to be seen.
Eight minutes into peril we pulled up at the causeway, where water was already lapping both sides. “It’s miles!” gasped my wife, seeing the distant castle. “Four miles, yes, but the dangerous bit’s just the first mile,” I said, which was true, for the causeway then runs along the dunes, flooding more slowly.
But still a dangerous mile. Yes, we had AWD (all-wheel drive), but bigger AWDs had come to grief here.
Prudence was about to overcome me when a little tradesman’s van drove past and swished on to the causeway. Not a tourist, surely? A local?
The old hunting maxim kicked in: pluck takes you into a fence; boldness takes you out of it.
I put my foot on the accelerator: “Lead, kindly light van!”
***
Next morning an email came from Canon Woodward: my verse had minded him of a pilgrimage to Lindisfarne in his youth, led by the bishop of Durham and his suffragan, Jarrow. The highlight of the day, he wrote, “was walking along the short section of beach where Cuthbert’s hermitage was situated. I had the most extraordinary sense of the liminality of the place and the truth if you like of a gospel that stretched backwards across the centuries.”
And he asked if I’d write something for the blog piece on the college website.
Two days later, on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, we walked the Pilgrim Route to the island – three miles across the sand and mud at low tide, the way marked by tall wooden poles, with a few refuge towers for those not heeding the warning “Never cross at dusk or on a rising tide” (and the added one, “under adverse conditions advancing seawater can reach the top step.”)
Halfway across and not another soul to be seen, we came on a car wheel-trim. Just the normal flotsam, doubtless, but it was like coming on the doleful remains of an animal in the desert. A vivid imagination could picture a car at dusk on a rising tide: “And the waters returned, and covered the chariots…”
It was good to reach the dunes, even with hours to spare before the tide did, and to have followed so exactly in the footsteps of the saints.
We had been ad limina, and shall do so again.
===
Allan Mallinson is a former soldier, historian and journalist.
His historical novel The Passage to India, which opens in Salisbury Cathedral, was begun during a sabbatical at Sarum College.
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