Catherine Coldstream
speaker
329 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Catherine Coldstream’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It was a rite of passage and taking a new name, taking new clothes.
These are all sort of quite, I guess, probably universal accoutrements of major life changes or rites of passage.
I mean, if you think of it, getting married is like that.
So, yeah, it did.
It did trigger a sense that you were somehow changed at quite a deep level.
I mean, putting on the actual physical stuff of the habit doesn't change you, but it does make you feel part of the community in a more complete way.
It also makes you feel very heavy and dragged down because there were layers and layers of stuff.
The main habit was made of this brown serge, which is like a rough, thick wool.
And we had sort of basically two layers of that, the main habit and then what we call the scapula, which is like an extra sort of
aprony bit on the front um and then we had under that we had a tunic which was a thick cotton thing um and then we had four layers of linen on our heads so you did feel kind of really you you felt encumbered by a lot of cloth at first and all these pins which you could easily stab yourself with and people did you're always by mistake sort of scratching and sticking the pin in the wrong bit but um
You felt weighed down, but quite quickly, like with all these things, we are a very adaptable species.
You quite quickly get used to it and find new ways of sort of, if you've got to work in the garden, you tuck up the habit and pin it up the back.
The actual right of being clothed, of course, was a great sort of transition from being somebody who was hoping to become a nun to somebody who really felt she was and belonged to the community.
And you often got given a new name.
Mine wasn't very different.
I went from being Catherine to being Sister Catherine Mary.
In the book, I just say Sister Catherine as a sort of simplification.
But my name didn't really radically change.
But some people did want to have a new name.
In the olden days, you had to have a new name and you were just given a name, often a man's name.
Showing 141–160 of 329 · page 8 of 17
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