A house to live in and a church to pray in

Recently a hopeful salesman telephoned.

“How old is your kitchen?” he enquired.

“Three hundred, twenty-four years,” I breezily replied.

“Er… I’m sorry?”

“Three hundred, twenty-four years,” I repeated. “It’s owned by the National Trust.”

The confused salesman took refuge in his script, and after listening to his offer of a free estimate for a nice new kitchen, I explained that I had no power to approve renovations. The house was not mine, and it was A-listed. (A-listed means that if an occupant as much as breathes on the house in an ahistoric way, a government agent comes rushing from an office with a camera and a face of doom.)

Actually, I had been a little naughty. Although the space which is now my kitchen was certainly built in 1686, the fittings can’t be much more than 10 years old. For over a century the attic floor was just an attic. In the 1820s it was turned into the nursery and servants’ quarters. (Generations of unluckier servants had slept in the cellar, which is where I do the laundry.) And when in the late 1990s the house passed from the family who had owned it since 1709 to the National Trust for Scotland, half the attic was remodelled into a two-bedroom flat. The flat is not itself A-listed, although Mark and I think long and hard before we hammer a nail to hang a picture. Below us lie two floors of A-listed Georgian grandeur.

“It must be like living above a museum,” said a visitor sympathetically, but I fussed for the honour of the house. To me a museum is half mausoleum, featuring dead remains behind glass. The house is not at all like that. Although the family who lived in it for centuries is gone, its life continues.

In spring and summer the house and grounds buzz as locals, art students and tourists are led through them. In the autumn the housekeeper is joined by a conservation team who tidies, swaths the faded furnishings in sheets and stores things away. In the winter the house is quieter, but the locals still walk their dogs in the woods and fields. And, of course, Mark and I live here: cooking and cleaning and laundering, watching television and having dinner parties, surfing the Internet and getting ready for Mass, remembering to turn off this light and that, setting the security systems and suffering through tests of the fire alarm.

Recently the house became alive in another way. A group of students at a local Catholic secondary school wrote and performed four short plays in the house, their plots based loosely on its history. In the sitting-room a coquette of the 1740s told the story of her elopement. In the dining room the woman who inherited the house in 1792 refused her only suitor. In the drawing-room an Edwardian marriage fell apart. In the cellar kitchen, a servant girl fresh from the Highlands inadvertently caused a duel. The grand old rooms seemed to embrace the bright young actors. Never dead, they seemed more awake than ever.   

Houses are built to be lived in, churches to be prayed in. Last Saturday I hopped into a priest’s car and made the short journey from Edinburgh to Torphichen. Torphichen Preceptory was once owned by the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem (better known now as the Knights of Malta); it was founded in the 12th century and finished in the 13th. After the Reformation most of it was destroyed, the stone used to build a Presbyterian church on the site. However, the central tower of the original preceptory still stands, and the first Mass to be celebrated there with the Knights of Malta since 1560 was said in 2009. The second such Mass since 1560 was celebrated last Saturday. I wore a heavy coat and scarf.  

The two 21st-century Torphichen Masses were organized by the Knights and Una Voce Scotland, an organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the traditional Latin Mass, now known as the Extraordinary Form, in Scotland. And it was extraordinary in another sense of the word to stand in that ancient grey building, to watch the procession of the vested priests and cloaked knights, and to kneel on the cold stone as a small choir sang the Latin introit. The building was no longer an artefact; it had become, like the Extraordinary Form, a part of the living present.

Spotting the elderly Anglican husband of a Dame of Malta, bundled in a blanket on a folding chair, I had offered my condolences that he had found himself in yet another cold church to hear yet another Roman Catholic Latin Mass.

“Oh, but I like it,” he said, gesturing at the grey but sunlit walls. “I like to see the stones come alive.”