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‘Let the porteress be mature in her manner of acting, discerning, and of a suitable age. Let her remain in an open cell without a door during the day.’

From the Rule of St Clare

HISTORY

The Poor Clares in Arkley make their living from the sales of homemade marmalade and jam. This seems to be something of a speciality in the English order of Poor Clares, and a very successful one. They also make church linen, church candles and greeting cards – a hive of cottage industry. The community moved here in 1970, and an important aspect of their work is in running retreats for people who live in parishes within the Diocese of Westminster.

When Sister Bernadette, the porteress at the Poor Clare Monastery in Arkley, opened the door to me, I told her that I had an appointment to see Inky, the community’s cat. She goggled at me, and shut the door firmly in my face. Luckily Sister Francesca, the monastery cook, and Inky’s keeper, had been listening out for my arrival, and came to the rescue.

Inky’s arrival at the monastery of the Poor Clares in Barnet, North London, is a tale of Dickensian poignancy. On a bitterly cold Christmas Day, with an iron hard frost and cold wind sweeping in from nearby fields, Sister Francesca was busy preparing the festive lunch for the whole community. Looking out of the kitchen window, she spotted an unkempt and underfed black cat, looking out from under a nearby bush at one of the bird tables that the sisters maintain. Followers of St Francis and St Clare have a particular affection for animals – though more than one person has commented, rather unfairly I think, that if St Francis had really cared for birds, he might have done better to preach to cats!

Inky likes to walk with Sister Francesca

Sister Francesca was concerned for the cat, though also for the birds that were busily feeding at a pile of breadcrumbs that she had put out earlier. She was on the verge of going to find something to eat for this poor Christmas orphan of a cat, when to her horror she saw the cat streak across the open lawn. Reaching the bird table, he leapt up; thinking that the cat was after one of the birds, Sister Francesca closed her eyes in horror. When she opened them again, the birds had scattered in alarm, and Inky was ravenously tucking into the breadcrumbs. A tin of sardines was found and opened, and placed out on the grass – but Inky had disappeared like a shot at the first sound of a door being opened. After a while she emerged again, nose uplifted and twitching: she crept over to the opened tin, looked around, and dived face first into her first ever Christmas delicacy as if she was trying to get inside the tin. No one can recall when the transition between Inky the furtive visitor and Inky the resident took place. She had been eating all the food put outside for her, and then suddenly she was inside. Inky took a further three months to become at all sociable with Sister Francesca – but now clambers up onto her lap. She has realised whose hand it is that wields the can opener.

The work of the Poor Clares at Arkley is chiefly that of prayer. Following austere rules, the whole community meets at midnight for Matins (although an exception is made for Inky), and then rises for the day at 5.30am – although nobody can persuade a sleeping cat to get up against its will, without resorting to force or violent noise of some kind – behaviour that would be unseemly and out of place for the Poor Clares. However, Sister Francesca has encouraged Inky’s compliance in this case by feeding her at 5.30am. Inky has some odd rituals too: on regular walks with Sister Francesca, Inky will accompany her on a long circular path. She’ll go round this three times only. Then she goes to the centre point of the circular walk, slowly rotates on the spot, and then rejoins Sister Francesca on the path, and walks in exactly the opposite direction, three times only. Perhaps it is as Garrison Keillor once commented, ‘Cats are intended to show us that not everything in nature has a purpose’.

A cat that prefers the company of the sisters

I was curious about Saint Clare. ‘Whose patron saint is she?’ I asked Sister Francesca. I was told that she is the patron saint of television production, and shares the job with the archangel Gabriel. The story of how she came to be the patron saint of such a modern and thoroughly secular medium is that Clare was in very poor health, which prevented her from being moved from her sick bed to the chapel even for Midnight Mass at Christmas. In despair at being unable to attend the mass, she lay back in her bed, and gazing at the wall, she saw an image form, of the mass that was being celebrated some way off. But I don’t think this means that watching television is generally accepted as offering similar spiritual benefits to partaking in the Mass!

Inky: the cat who came in from the cold