Chapter 3
Take the single-track right turn just over the bridge.
You will think you are headed the wrong way, but this is quicker than the way the official brochure takes you, and also picturesque if you like dappled hedgerows.
Eventually the road widens out and you will begin to see, peeking between tall trees, signs of life rising on the hilly land to your left.
Up ahead you will see a tiny wood-clad bus stop, also still working—if one bus in either direction a day counts as working.
Just before you reach the bus stop you will see the entrance sign for Coopers Chase on your left.
They began work on Coopers Chase about ten years ago, when the Catholic Church sold the land. The first residents—Ron, for one—moved in three years later.
It was billed as “Britain’s First Luxury Retirement Village,” though, according to Ibrahim, who has checked, it was actually the seventh.
There are currently around three hundred residents.
You can’t move here until you’re over sixty-five, and the Waitrose delivery vans clink with wine and repeat prescriptions every time they pass over the cattle grid.
The old convent dominates Coopers Chase, with the three modern residential developments spiraling out from this central point.
For over a hundred years the convent was a hushed building, filled with the dry bustle of habits and the quiet certainty of prayers offered and answered.
Tapping along its dark corridors you would have found some women comfortable in their serenity, some women frightened of a speeding world, some women hiding, some women proving a vague, long-forgotten point, and some women taking joy in serving a higher purpose.
You would have found single beds, arranged in dorms; long, low tables for eating; a chapel so dark and quiet you would swear you heard God breathing.
In short, you would find the Sisters of the Holy Church, an army that would never give you up, that would feed you and clothe you and continue to need and value you.
All it required in return was a lifetime of devotion, and given there will always be someone requiring that, there were always volunteers.
And then one day you would take the short trip up the hill, through the tunnel of trees, to the Garden of Eternal Rest—the iron gates and low stone walls of the garden overlooking the convent and the endless beauty of the Kentish High Weald beyond, your body in another single bed, under a simple stone, alongside the Sister Margarets and Sister Marys of the generations before you.
If you had once had dreams, they could now play over the green hills, and if you had secrets, then they were kept safe inside the four walls of the convent forever.
Well, more accurately, three walls, not four, as the west-facing wall of the convent is now entirely glazed to accommodate the residents’ swimming pool complex.
It looks out over the bowling green, and then farther down to the visitors’ car park, the permits for which are rationed to such an extent that the Parking Committee is the single most powerful cabal within Coopers Chase.
Beside the swimming pool is a small “arthritis therapy pool,” which looks like a Jacuzzi, largely for the reason that it is a Jacuzzi.
Anyone given the grand tour by the owner, Ian Ventham, would then be shown the sauna.
Ian would always open the door a crack and say, “Blimey, it’s like a sauna in there. ” That was Ian.
Take the lift up to the recreation rooms next—the gym and the exercise studio, where residents could happily Zumba among the ghosts of the single beds.
Then there’s the Jigsaw Room for gentler activities and associations.
There’s the library, and the lounge for the bigger and more controversial committee meetings, or for football on the flat-screen TV.
Then down again to the ground floor, where the long, low tables of the convent refectory are now the “contemporary upscale restaurant.”
At the heart of the village, attached to the convent, is the original chapel.
Its pale cream stucco exterior makes it look almost Mediterranean against the fierce, Gothic darkness of the convent.
The chapel remains intact and unchanged, one of the few legal concessions won by the executors of the Sisters of the Holy Church when they had sold out ten years ago.
The residents like to use the chapel. This is where the ghosts are, where the habits still bustle, and where the whispers have sunk into the stone.
It is a place to make you feel part of something slower and gentler.
Ian Ventham is looking into contractual loopholes that would allow him to redevelop the chapel into eight more flats.
Attached to the other side of the convent—the very reason for the convent—is Willows, which is now the nursing home for the village.
It had been established by the sisters in 1841 as a voluntary hospital, charitably tending to the sick and broken when no other option existed.
In the latter part of the previous century it had become a care home, until legislation in the 1980s led to the doors finally closing.
The convent then simply became a waiting room, and when the last nun passed away in 2005, the Catholic Church wasted no time cashing in and selling it as a job lot.
The development sits on twelve acres of woodland and beautiful open hillside.
There are two small lakes, one real and one created by Ian Ventham’s builder, Tony Curran, and his gang.
The many ducks and geese that also call Coopers Chase home seem to much prefer the artificial one.
There are still sheep farmed at the very top of the hill, where the woodland breaks, and in the pastures by the lake are a herd of twenty llamas.
Ian Ventham bought two to look quirky in sales photos, and it got out of hand, as these things do.
That, in a nutshell, was Coopers Chase.