A Day and a Life by Penelope Wilcock

Author:Penelope Wilcock [Wilcock, Penelope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782642008
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2016-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Not everyone experiences None as a maddening interruption of vital work. To some men sometimes, this brief space of prayer and chanting feels as though you just threw them a lifeline. As it does to Brother Damian today.

This all begins earlier in the day when he says he can manage without Brother Josephus in the abbey school, since Brother Stephen is looking desperate about extra hands still needed up on the farm. Normally Brother Tom will help out until the grain is all threshed and stored, but the abbot has sent him off on some errand that will fill up the entire day. Colin is handy and practical, but Father Theodore says they can’t have him today because Father Gilbert needs him to practise his singing and his refectory readings. When Brother Josephus says he’ll go up to the farm then (reluctantly), neither he nor Brother Damian realize that Father Gilbert wants two of the novices as well as Colin, and one of those is Brother Cassian, which leaves Brother Damian on his own in the school.

The boys are in boisterous spirits, having spent most of the last three weeks picking fruit and generally larking about on the farm. Brother Damian is put to it to get them even sitting still and paying attention. One particularly over-excitable juvenile, given to pinching his neighbour and causing much hilarity among his classmates by finding it necessary to fall off the bench, or drop his stylus, or sneeze explosively, or shriek when the boy next to him pinches him back, eventually exhausts Brother Damian’s patience.

Attempting nothing more taxing than teaching them, line by line, the Apostles’ Creed, he finds the task made untenable by this delinquent’s relentless and asinine interruptions. And in the end he loses his temper.

“Ah! Damn it, child!” he blazes at him. “Whatever devil of hell took up lodging in your brainless skull? Are you out of your right mind or didn’t anyone ever teach you how to behave? Were you dragged up in a barn, you confounded little wretch? Can you not sit still for two minutes together? One more word from you – I mean it; one more word, and by the Mass you’d better believe it – and I’ll have that birch down and really give you something to squawk about!”

Now, this threat quickly proves unfortunate. Consumed with gruesome childish eagerness to see one of their company tortured, from this point on the rest of the class spare no effort to goad the lad in every imaginable manner. Every time Brother Damian turns his back, or even takes his eyes off the boy, someone tweaks the lad’s clothes or tugs his hair or pulls a mocking face at him. Not a placid individual at the best of times, he’s beside himself under this concentrated torment – all of it covert, sly, and most artfully concealed from their infuriated schoolmaster. Twizzling and thwacking, exclaiming incontinently, for no good reason that the master can see, the young scamp generates such mayhem that in the end Damian is ready to make good on his word.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.