On the Slow Train by Michael Williams Page B

must return to Ryde because I have an appointment with a monk. Not to confess uncharitable thoughts about the rather run-down state of the railway, for whose continued existence we must be grateful, but because I am to stay tonight with a community of Benedictine monks at the Grade I-listed Quarr Abbey near Fishbourne.
    I, like many other travellers to the Isle of Wight, have long held eternally sunny images of the island imprinted on my mind after being taken on holiday there by my parents as a child, and one of these was of Quarr, its pink bricks glowing in a kind of perpetual sunset. Would it still be there? I sent an email, not expecting a reply, but within a day a message had pinged back – from Father Nicholas Spencer, the guestmaster, who told me how interested he was in the Isle of Wight railways and that I could come and stay the night at the abbey if I liked. There’s long been a ‘general kinship between the religious life and the railway scene’, as Canon Roger Lloyd put it in his book
The Fascination of Railways
. Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple is said to have memorised the railway timetable of his day; Canon Victor Whitechurch of Christ Church Oxford was the creator of the vegetarian railway detective Thorpe Hazell, and the Reverend Wilbert Awdry was, of course, the author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books. Fans of the Ealing comedy
The Titfield Thunderbolt
will recall that the train was driven by the local vicar.
    So, as darkness falls, I am on the No. 9 bus along the Newport Road, asking the driver to put me off at the abbey. ‘Never been there myself,’ he says. ‘I expect you’ll find some spooky type answering the door. If you need to escape, we’re running until midnight.’ Actually there appears to be nobody around at all when I ring the bell, and after twisting the handles on the various great oak doors of the monastery and the church, I find one that creaks open into a lobby. Here too the doors are locked, but under a heavy metal bolt is a scrawled note telling me to wait. I sit in the deserted quadrangle under the cypresses as the dusk settles for seemingly ages. A pair of red squirrels play around my feet. Might I have to head back to the bus stop after all? Then a slight figure, black habit flapping, comes running out of the church. ‘So sorry to keep you.’ This is the decidedly un-spooky Father Spencer, who has been at a meeting. ‘There are only nine of us,’ he tells me, ‘in a monastery that was designed for 120. I take it you are coming to dinner? Don’t forget that we eat in total silence.’ He shows me into a vast refectory with long polished oak tables in semi-darkness. The monks sit at one end of the room and a table is set for me at the other. ‘But first you must shake hands with the abbot – who is a large red-faced Irishman with silver hair. When you have finished eating, you can get up and leave.’ The food is surprisingly good – a meat and lentil pie with red kidney beans and fragrant apples from the monastery garden – which is reflected in the speed with which the monks eat. There is a rapid scraping of cutlery on plates, and soon everyone is heading for the exit.
    Afterwards, Father Nicholas shows me round the vast abbey church of Our Lady of Quarr, built in 1912 by the French monk-architect Dom Paul Bellot, who brought a community of monks from Solesmes in France, driven out by the anti-clericalism of the time. Constructed of Belgian brick by local workmen who had never put up anything bigger than a house, it is like nothing else to be found in Britain. Pevsner calls it ‘brilliant’ and a work of international importance, comparing it with the achievement of the Catalan architect Gaudi. But I notice it is falling apart in places, with cracks in the brickwork over the nave, missing pointing and leaking gutters. ‘It’s hard work for such a few of us to keep it