The Country Life script with heart

You will laugh, but the abbot has finally let me drive the lorry down to Hexham market on my own, and I came back with a bull calf that Brother Anselm has already named Dorothy. He says I am no longer permitted to call this place a retreat. It is a working farm with prayers attached, he says, and I am beginning to think he is right.

The cloister path runs round the orchard and then doubles back through the herb beds, so that by dusk we are always crossing our own footprints. Brother Anselm calls it the figure of eight. He says the first novices who laid the stones were not thinking of holiness at all, only of keeping the sheep out of the lettuces, but that every loop returns you to the same gate with a little more sense in your boots. On the stone by the byre door someone has cut a small heart, and beside it, in letters so worn you have to trace them with a thumb, the words The Country Life. I asked who wrote it. Nobody knows.

I found the ledger in the cellar last week, the one the first lay brothers kept for the milk and the tithes. On the first page, in brown ink, a man named Thomas Coull wrote that he would stay one year and then go home to his mother in Carlisle. Underneath, in a different hand, someone had added, Mother died in the spring. He stayed.

I have started my own page in the back. Today's entry says one calf, one stone wall mended, one letter to Nell unsent for another week. Yours, with muddy hands,

Tom