By James Mustard, Canon Precentor
If I’m honest, I’m glad to see the back of July. To bid farewell to a Dean, welcome another, and say goodbye to a School—all within a single week—made for an emotional roller‑coaster, none of it helped by searing heat and the inevitable frayed tempers that followed.
Knowing it would be a trying month, I took myself to Dublin in June for the annual meeting of the Elizabeth Bowen Society. I’ve written before about her novel The Heat of the Day, set in blitz‑blighted London. Bowen (1899–1973), an Irish author who divided her life between Bowens Court in County Cork and England (mostly London and later Hythe), carried into her writing the imprint of a childhood marked by her father’s mental breakdown and violence, and her mother’s early death when Bowen was fourteen. She was subsequently raised by a “committee of aunts” (one of whom was my great‑grandmother) against the backdrop of the 1916 Easter Rising, the War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War.
One of Bowen’s most striking qualities as a writer is her instinct to invest emotional energy in places rather than institutions. Her peripatetic childhood unfolded in the houses of Protestant families—descendants of Tudors, Cromwellians, and Huguenots—whose Italianate architecture and inherited names, like “Bowen’s Court,” set them apart from the local population. In her ghost stories (a genre in which she was an undisputed genius), even the most benignly named houses—“Rose Hill,” for example—become central characters, layered and storied, often more so than the people who pass through them.
Bowen confronts the impermanence of things, or rather the fragility of the permanence we think we have secured. When solid things are exposed as vulnerable, we reel. John Banville, speaking at June’s conference, described her as “the wartime writer par excellence.” Wartime London offered her a canvas of destruction and disorientation. She wrote of the Second World War:
“The search for indestructible landmarks in a destructible world led many down strange paths… The violent destruction of solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attached to bulk and weight, left us all, equally, heavy and disembodied.
Inevitably, I have found myself looking at the buildings of Exeter Cathedral School and feeling not only the sadness of losing an institution and the people who served it, but a deep disorientation. The bulk and weight remain, but everything has changed—and with it all of our choir routines from September. There has been much planning, and Exeter School has been a fantastic partner, but the loss of place as well as institution has been keenly felt.
And yet, we are in a moment of stillness. The heat of August. Waiting for September. A new school, new choristers, new families waiting in the wings. It has been remarkably helpful to have an interim Dean arrive now, because—by coincidence or providence—he can be fully present in this moment and can only take us forward. This month feels like Holy Saturday: watching and waiting, resting and regrouping. And, like Holy Saturday, we can only guess at what will come next. We have our expectations. But, as the Easter story reminds us, the bulk and weight of human expectation are always exceeded by God’s new work of Resurrection.
I am hopeful—more than hopeful—that September will be a Resurrection moment for our choir, our choristers, their families, and our Directors of Music. Not a return to what was, but the beginning of what can be: familiar, but re‑imagined, and full of new life.
In her later years, widowed, having sold Bowens Court and moved to a villa in Hythe, Bowen lived a bohemian life teaching in the USA. Reflecting on her relationship to the past, she wrote:
“We must not shy away from the fact that we cull the past from fiction rather than history… history, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.”
As we stand between what has been and what is about to begin, I find her words and her commitment to place both grounding and strangely encouraging. The past may not be romantic, but the future—if we allow ourselves to hope—can be.