We have come back to the house where his grandparents lived. The house they bought in 1933! It is an Old Rectory, so English and so full of memorable items and places. The library has the books they put it, the furniture is the same and he, my husband, spent most of his summers here with his cousins who now live in it, letting it to help keep it going. His uncle, a war hero, married a Belgian Resistance heroine who was a staunch Roman Catholic and whose faith was central to her. The first time I stayed here, there was a book of Letters from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Priest who had been accused of plotting to kill Hitler. This was a milestone book, I was 24, with 2 children and had never really considered the importance of life really, it just rolled along happily and certainly I had never thought of spiritual life being something more than going to Church. I had never considered that each individual must stir themselves at some point and decide if they are spiritual beings or just human beings.
We are in the dear old aunt's bedroom which looks out over fields towards the sea. It is open to the outside and that is a characteristic of the house, it seems to have grown from the outside, it doesn't resist it, it somehow exists together with it. I love to think of the aunt rising each morning here and looking out at the same view. She didn't have an easy life in many ways but this view and her spiritual life were her comfort.
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