Thanks to Pauline Annis's detective work in Searching for Monica Baldwin it is known that following Monica's death a private family funeral was held at the Church of Our Lady and St.John, Sudbury in Suffolk, followed by burial in the public cemetery at Clare, also in Suffolk, but unusually I could find no pictures of the grave to add to the post about I Leap Over the Wall last week.
I don't know what you think but I always feel a picture of a final resting place is an important and fitting end note to a story like Monica's.
Well, a round of applause for Melody, who e mailed to say she was visiting Clare last weekend and would happily go and look for the grave. I was a bit worried it might take all day of what was probably due to be a restful break, but armed with the date of Monica's death, and after about fifteen minutes of searching, Melody found it...
By coincidence, as Pauline Annis points out, Clare is also the location of one of the oldest Augustinian foundations in England, and Monica's twenty-eight years had been spent in various Augustinian convents thus making it a resting place of which, hopefully, she would have approved.
For the record Pauline Annis has also discovered that Monica spent the years from 1914-1919 and 1924-1934 at Our Lady's Priory in Hayward's Heath in Sussex...
This a picture of the inside of the convent (for sale on an online auction site some years ago sadly with no date). Thus Monica (known as Sister Mary Cuthbert) was not in Bruges during the First World War. She subsequently left Bruges in 1938 to join St Monica's Priory in Hoddesdon, Herts
It was from here that Monica left the order in 1941.
I too had wondered how you could possibly live in a convent in Belgium and not be aware of a raging war going on outside when the gunfire could be heard across the channel in England, let alone leave one in the midst of the next war when the country was under enemy occupation.
Mysteries solved.
And finally the most fitting epitaph for a restless soul..
Thou Hast Made Us For Thyself
And Our Hearts Are Restless
Until They Rest in Thee.
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