Tom Cullinan

In 1990, when my first book was published, the novel that began what eventually became a series of nine, The Hawk and the Dove, a friend in Rye who ran a Christian book shop invited me to come over for a book signing. A trickle of people came in, but it was mainly just Anne and her parrot and me, so we had plenty of time to chat about our interests and ideas.

"You should meet Tom Cullinan," she said. "Who's he?" I asked; and she gave me his address, Ince Benet at Ince Blundell on the edge of Liverpool.

I wrote to him and said she'd recommended I look him up. He sent back a typically brief but kind note, suggesting I watch for the kairos. The what? I looked up "kairos"; an interesting word meaning both time and action — like an actor's cue, God's now moment. 

The kairos came a couple of years later when Tom and I were both speakers at Greenbelt (a Christian festival with a slant towards social justice, community, ecology and music). Excited to learn he was there, I went to find him, and rather shyly gave him a copy of the most recent book I'd written (The Long Fall, I think). It was the first time I'd put my books about Benedictine monks into the hands of an actual Benedictine monk. A few months later, a journalist writing an article about my work sought his opinion on it — and he said he was somewhat miffed that I'd managed to get to the heart of the vocation without personally being a Benedictine monastic.

Cheered by this imprimatur, I wrote to him again, asking if I could visit. This was in the days before email, and besides, Tom never had a computer or a telephone. He sent a photo-copy of a neatly handwritten sheet detailing instructions for reaching his place by public transport — a train to Liverpool Lime Street, then a bus out into the country, then a walk through the woods. So I went, and spent a few days with him, utterly captivated by the hospitality and simplicity of his home and his life.

He lived in a wood near Liverpool, where he'd been granted permission to build a house in exchange for managing the woodland. His brother (Ted, an architect, who designed the Maths building at Cambridge university) designed it for him — Tom came of a creative family full of initiative; I gather they had a lighthouse at one point, but when I knew him his mother still lived in Camden, and he used to take his folding bike on the train to visit her. Tom's house was superbly designed, open plan but with clear intentional separation of spaces into nooks that flowed easily from one to the other. It was an A-frame house, the living accommodation mostly upstairs (and there was a highly effective disability lift on a pulley system). 

The idea had been for him to establish a satellite community to Ampleforth Abbey, but the monks who came out with him didn't stay for one reason or another, and it ended up being just Tom. He had this vision for a more earthy and grounded simplicity, close to nature and in perpetual fast from the electronic revolution, that was out of step with the necessary sophistication of Ampleforth, but made an excellent retreat base for them and for the Catholic clergy in general. He kept faith with the Benedictine vision of common life, and in the absence of monastic colleagues a group of like-minded lay people formed in and around his home, helping him with the garden, keeping sheep, saying the office, sharing the Eucharist, being the body of Christ.

I went back several times to stay with Tom, and one occasion in particular remains vividly in my memory. It was while I was training for ministry, writing books, preaching and teaching, involved in a a prison fellowship, working on a voluntary basis as a free-church hospice chaplain, and being the anchor person for our family of five children, all between five and eleven years old. We kept an open house, and all kinds of people stayed or just wandered in to find us. There came a time when I was utterly exhausted, and went to spend a few days in the woods with Tom. I got there, and then collapsed, completely ill and unable to get out of bed for the next couple of days. He left me in peace, and I just rested, feeding my soul on the view of trees from the window. The room was warm and cosy because the stove pipe from his furnace in the workshop below passed through it. A very healing space.

This was the way to Tom's house.

The house was called Ince Benet.

This was the first glimpse of the house as you came through the trees.

It was just lovely.

That chimney you can see rose up from the furnace and heated everything. The window belonged to the room where I stayed when I was ill. Can you see the stove pipe passing up through the inside?

This was the bedroom —

— with its stove pipe —

— and its view of restful trees. 

And sheep.

A storage area with a freezer and rope and bottles of the delicious apple juice Tom and his friends had pressed — 

— separated the room where I stayed from the kitchen —

— which led into the eating area (I have lovely photos of Tom's friends having lunch with him, but these days, you know — data protection etc — I think I can't post them) — but here's Tom, anyway, with a child beside him —

The dining area was separated from the library and reading nook in the window, by the stairwell.

Halfway down the stairs a sloping surface acted as a notice board and display space.

This was the disability lift.

Under the main part of the house, Tom had his book binding room, guest quarters and a chapel —

— where upright chairs alternated with cushions for those of us who prefer to sit on the floor.

The first time I went there, I wanted to make a little memorial devotion for my dearly loved friend Fabian Cowper (another Ampleforth monk who had died some while before), and Tom asked if he could join in, so we did that quietly together in his chapel.

Outside the chapel, the eaves made a walkway along the house with places to sit looking across the big garden with a vegetable patch, a greenhouse and a caravan for guests making a solitary silent retreats.

The vegetables Tom grew were magnificent —

— and the herbs —

Under the kitchen end of the house was the wood store with its furnace —

— where garden implements hung neatly, and the stairs rose to the storage space between the room where I slept and the kitchen —

Outside Tom's bookbinding shop (and his own room) he kept his bike, a Sturmey Archer from the 1940s. He used it to travel out to the village churches to say Mass for them —

He taught me so much, and he inspired me. I remember him saying, "It's a good idea to want what other people don't want", and how right he was!

I loved Tom very much, but he and I saw eye to eye on almost nothing! When the Catholic bishops issued the One Bread One Body edict that put a stop to the gradual relaxing of the exclusion of non-Catholics from the Eucharist, and Tom was under obedience to carrying it out, I stopped going there, though we stayed in touch. I'd send him a Christmas stocking sometimes, with things like rubber bands and paper clips and safety pins and woolly socks, with my love. And I went back once, with my husband Bernard (an artist blacksmith), who had made a crucifix for Tom's chapel. We wrote to each other, and I kept and treasured his letters a long time, but in the end, as part of my own discipline of simplicity, I burned them. I try to keep no earthly ties. But I have kept one of his letters.

The last time Tom wrote to me was back in 2011. I'd sent him a copy of this book —

— with this dedication —

— and he wrote in response.

The next year, I heard from the abbot of Ampleforth that Tom was becoming frail. Peripheral relationships become burdensome as one grows old, and he was in his late seventies by then, so I let it be. Monastic life embraces a discipline of purposefulness, and I had nothing more to say but that he was so dear to me, which he already knew.

When I left Tom's house for the last time —

— I knew I would never go back. But I have kept these photos taken almost thirty years ago, because I never wanted Tom's place to fade from my memory.  

From time to time in these last few years, having in mind that Abbot Cuthbert said Tom was getting frail, I looked on the internet for traces of what he might be doing. Up to 2017, I found indications of him still speaking, still working. There were gaps, of course, because I relied on reports and articles and videos — Tom himself was never online.

And then I looked again today, and saw he died at the end of January. Waymarks of his passing were here and here and here and here.

May he rest in peace and rise in glory. A prophetic and healing spirit of such fire and such humility, he was so dearly loved on this earth.

Now I have uploaded my photos, I'll make a fire of the originals and send the smoke to heaven as my farewell. I am so glad I knew Tom Cullinan, and so grateful for the kind and open space he made.