St. Cuthbert in Our Time: The Wind Eye and Cuddy

Angels are fashionable these days, but saints are not. Angels, if we are to believe the popular media, are concerned, helpful, and above all, decorative; saints tend to be demanding, otherworldly, altogether too holy for our secular society. So it is all the more remarkable that two award-winning British children's writers have produced books, set in the modern world, in which St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (or Cuddy) is an influential character. A comparison of Robert Westall's 1976 The Wind Eye and William Mayne's 1994 Cuddy demonstrates what happens to the medieval view of the spiritual and the miraculous in the context of the unbelieving, scientific twentieth century.

For most of Westall's characters in The Wind Eye, St. Cuthbert is a frightening, ghostly figure not that different from the violent ghosts that characters in many of his other books must lay to rest. (The Watch House, for example, has an exorcism involving the teenaged girl protagonist, her friend, and both a Roman and an Anglican priest; physical destruction is required to dismiss the ghosts in The Scarecrows and The Promise). The Wind Eye is about a modern "his and hers" family on holiday near Lindisfarne: Bertrand, a Cambridge academic; his daughters, Beth and Sally; Madeleine, his unconventional wife; and her son, Michael. Madeleine sets the events in motion by putting her foot on St. Cuthbert's tomb, as much to shock pious Beth as to defy the superstitious old man who is showing her around Durham Cathedral: "Nothing moved; nothing fell. But in that instant Beth knew that someone had become aware of them" (14).

After this spooky beginning, each member of the family, parents included, encounters the saint in his or her own way. Sally, the youngest, sees him first and is not frightened by him, and Madeleine only feels a touch and is calmed, but the others are more actively involved as they travel back in time by means of an old boat controlled partly by Cuthbert's power and partly by their own desires. Bertrand, Mike, and even Beth see Cuthbert as an opponent to be defeated. Beth, the only churchgoer in the family, thinks he has abducted Sally and says, "He seems more like some horrible old wizard than a saint" (123); Mike, too, interprets the strange events as evil magic and thinks, "His mother had been got at, by the Thing on the island" (118). Bertrand, the atheist, sees the healing of Sally's burned hand as a plot, "as bait to catch me. Once I acknowledge it's a miracle, the Church can move in and do a takeover" (133).

By the end, however, each character realizes that a self-centered desire is the opposite of what each really wants. Madeleine describes her transformation in modern terms: the saint's touch makes her suddenly calm and happy, "as if I'd swallowed a whole bottle of tranquillisers" (116). Beth's ordeal on the island, climbing nearly naked over rocks slippery with rotting fish and bird-droppings, resembles the ascetic life of the saint but shows her that she wanted to be a nun only to escape conflicts and choices. The ordeal and Cuddy's words, she says, emphasized "making me responsible for myself" (203). Her father recognizes the violence in himself, stops fighting Cuddy, and moves away from needing to find a rational explanation for everything. Michael, having "realised for the first time that he was not the centre of the universe," thanks Cuddy for saving him "from his own suicidal wish to be nowhere" by showing him what nowhere feels like (156). And Sally, too young for such internal conflicts, leaves Cuddy's island with her burned hand physically healed.

The events of the book illustrate what Beth explains early on when she compares a diving gannet to a Christian: "Christians plunge from what they can see into what they can't. It's called having faith—it's dangerous" (51). Madeleine's explanation of the book's title puts the same idea in secular terms. Wind Eye, it turns out, is Old Norse for window...