Paul Moorcraft - The Anchoress of Shere

The officer had little in common with the locals, so he was pleased to bump into the companionable, if slightly offbeat, American.

Deep in the cellar, Marda applied herself to her studies. Intellectual pursuits meant light, food and something to occupy her mind; anything was better than the hunger, the cold and the empty darkness. Even talking to him was better than nothingness; even his conversation was better than being alone, thinking of the ghosts of those who had been tormented in the other cells.

Marda retreated more and more into herself. Often she thought she was becoming insane, laughing loudly, then immediately crying with rage and fear. After a bout of utter misery, Marda was sometimes surprised by the strength of her own inner resources. She wondered whether resourcefulness was like exercising a muscle: would it grow and develop? Was it something she could use again, more easily, when she was free? Or was it a finite quality: would the strength that she had acquired be subtracted from resources that she could no longer draw on in the future?

The cinema of her mind played back old films, and she tried to remember lines from her favourite films and television dramas. She could sometimes conjure up the face of her grandmother, who had died when Marda was ten; she longed for that sense of warmth and security generated when the old woman had read her stories about Winnie the Pooh or tales from Beatrix Potter. In the dankness, she struggled to remember smells and tastes from her youth: marzipan on cakes, the hint of sherry in trifles, bacon sizzling in the mornings. She rehearsed all the little chores she would do in her flat, the exciting projects she could undertake at work. Then the fear and hurt would overcome her imagination and memory; at other times boredom blanked out everything. The boredom was occasionally relieved by random flashes of memory, but they could degenerate into waking nightmares of the dead girl in the next cell. Gradually, she learned how to control the nightmares and to use them, to turn them into plays and stories of her own construction.

Perhaps Duval sensed her new strength and his diminishing control, or perhaps he feared that madness might overcome her because-for whatever reason-he relaxed the harshness of her regime. Her cell was often lit for five or six hours a day. She was granted a small table and chair-the table could accommodate her books-and a small washing bowl when she wasn’t studying. Every lesson, if it went well, would result in some favour: a coverlet, a pillow, and, most important, heat. It was probably early November; she had been imprisoned for a month by her reckoning. He would never tell her what day it was, and laughed at her requests for a newspaper.

“Read God’s word, not the manifestos of Satan,” he said. He also called newspapers “the Devil’s dung,” and she wondered whether he had ever been the target of a press investigation.

Initially he left her grille open and passed through an electric extension cable for a one-bar electric heater. Five or six hours’ warmth helped. In the long hours of darkness, however, the cold stone soon stole away the heat. When the electric heater was removed, sometimes abruptly because of some theological mistake she had apparently made, she shivered beneath her blanket. She would construct a little tent and hide inside, helplessly smelling her body odour and her unwashed clothes.

She tried harder in her studies, and was allowed a change of clothes: fresh underwear and a clean habit. She wondered if the dead girls had worn them. Probably, but she had no choice if she wanted to live. Without them she would die of cold. After what she estimated to be five weeks, Duval gave her a small paraffin heater. It made the cell smell like a garage, but it gave her warmth.

Sometimes she received two full meals a day. The meals were eccentric mixtures, often heavily spiced and containing tastes and foods she could not identify, but generally the end result was palatable. Occasionally she would get only bread and water, as punishment for offences she could not fathom. Duval sometimes explained her alleged transgressions; at other times he would simply tell her to pray for understanding.

Yes, she prayed. Duval explained how to use a rosary, and she prayed to God with a will, fingering the beads he gave her. Some of her newfound faith was a disguise donned for Duval; part of it was to relieve the boredom. A little of it, she half-understood, was real. To avoid growing to hate herself, to hate the animal locked in a dark cage, she decided to search for God, or at least to try to comprehend what God’s love might mean. She suspected that religious mania could result from long solitary confinement, but she reasoned that a measure of real faith would help her. Total immersion in religion was madness, his madness.

She began to realise that he was also a prisoner-of his own perniciously distorted vision-but in the darkness something had to fill the vacuum. After prayer, God seemed in fleeting moments to be a presence, not just a set of ancient beliefs. She understood the hypocrisy impelling her search for religion, but time hung around her neck like an albatross, and the possibility of God, the possibility of His intervention, might help to lighten her burden. She remembered her brother saying: “There weren’t many atheists in fox-holes in the Great War.” Now she, too, was at war-with the evil that lived upstairs.

When things went well, Duval would empty her portable toilet every day, but sometimes he would refuse for a few days. Occasionally her requests for food or an extra blanket were met with polite agreement; at other times they seemed to anger her captor. She could never work out whether it was simply the moods of a deranged man or some genuine “fault” on her part. She did realise that she was being manipulated into his version of submission, so she would simulate her version of meekness.

She tried to adjust to his Jekyll and Hyde personality. At times he was polite, almost shy, and very controlled, but he was also subject to fits of intense anger. She wondered if Duval contrived the fits to frighten her into submission. Was there a conscious split between a volcanic core and the role-playing of the outwardly charming persona? At times he seemed possessed with almost medieval religious passions, and then in a second or so he would assume the mantle of a harmless country cleric.

She tried to appease his various moods, and to keep her requests to the minimum necessary for survival. Sometimes he offered her something she had not asked for. An exercise book was her first such gift. She started to keep a diary, secreting a few pages at a time in the small air vent above her bench. The diary was her only psychological contact with the outside world. Sometimes she wrote brief notes to her friend Jenny, sometimes to her mother, and occasionally to Mark. She had not corresponded regularly with him before, and she regretted that bitterly.

She pleaded with Duval, on one of the few occasions she had really begged, to phone her parents to say she was alive. But he ignored her request.

Later she asked whether she could write a note to them. She explained that he could post it anywhere in Britain, just a note saying, “I am alive. Please remember I’ll always love you.” She knew that her parents would be enduring mental agony, not knowing whether she was alive or dead. When she tried to insist, he kept the light off for two days.

She half-consoled herself by thinking that he could have agreed and simply burnt the letter.

She tried to find some meaning in her imprisonment: “At least I am learning something new-I didn’t know my Bible at all before,” she kept repeating to herself. Now she had read almost half of it. She tried to maintain some dignity, some independence, even though her whole world was controlled by that “pious, hypocritical maniac,” as she dubbed him in her first diary entry.