The Medallion
Allan Shiach

Peter was born in Thurso, the most northerly town on mainland Britain where the wind and the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth carved the rugged geography of the coast. He was subsequently brought up in a large happy home in Elgin, a sedate market town enfolded by farmlands in the lea of the Grampian hills. His mother was a devout Roman Catholic, her faith inherited from a line of ancestors traceable back to the days of Mary Tudor and the Auld Alliance. Like that of many cradle Catholics, her belief was rarely reinforced by intellectual ponderings, but was a simple, natural devotion born of practice, ritual and the unquestionable comfort that came with it.
     Peter was therefore raised in the Catholic Church, his spiritual education provided with diligence and hope by priests who were members of a Benedictine monastic order. They lived nearby at Pluscarden Abbey where, with considerable hardship, the monks were restoring the ruins of a once-derelict 13th-century monastery. The Abbey – in those days a mere priory – sits in a long, lush valley sheltered by a rising hill of woodland to its north. Surrounded by arable fields, the buildings of the monastery can be glimpsed from a distance through copses of mature trees, the warm stone latticed on sunny days by the angled shadows of northern latitudes.
     Each Sunday after mass, Peter would enter one of the small, bare visitor rooms in the wooden annexe of the abbey, where Father Maurus, bustling, head shaven in tonsure and wearing the white habit of his order, offered an hour of religious instruction. Along with a couple of other Catholic boys from nearby Gordonstoun School, in his plain room decorated with a single crucifix, Father Maurus taught some of the fundamentals and mysteries of their religion and offered up strategies for arguing the defence of their faith in the face of occasionally hostile questioning from other boys who had been raised in the school of hard Knox. Children seek out difference and religion was as good a source to be mined as any other. It was during those years that Father Maurus and Peter began to develop a lifelong bond.
     Dom Maurus OSB – to give his formal title – was born Frank Deegan and raised in some poverty in Liverpool. Maurus was among the first of the Benedictine community to occupy the derelict abbey in the late 1940s. He was a man of profound faith, contemplative and rigorous, yet also gregarious and humanely pragmatic. A woman friend was once surprised to run into him on the platform of Aberdeen station, his slightly grubby robe frayed and his battered suitcase, opened to check the railway timetable, containing no more than a toothbrush, underwear, a chasuble and stole, The Rule of Saint Benedictine and a mass book. She asked where he was travelling to.

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