Two months as a monk

Kieran Viljoen’s life sounds like a parable. Not long ago, back in South Africa, he spent his days in the depths of the ocean searching for diamonds. But for the past two months he has been living the life of a Benedictine monk.

He is one of two interns at Quarr Abbey, a monastery on the Isle of Wight. The internship scheme, the first of its kind, is billed as an abridged gap-year experience: two months of living, praying and working alongside the monks. When I arrive, the scheme has just finished. Kieran, 23, and Michael Edwards, 26, from Liverpool, are leaving the next day. That evening the monks are treating them to a farewell dinner. ‘It could range from fancy dress to a hardcore dance party,’ jokes Kieran.

Father Luke Bell, who is in charge of the scheme, meets me at the ferry. A former English lecturer, he has a way of not looking at you when he talks — something common among deep thinkers, I think. He hoicks up his habit as we walk through mud. We pass a piggery, and he explains that’s where a press photographer wants the interns to pose later, alongside the pigs. ‘The media like the pigs,’ he says dryly. Beyond that is the abbey itself, which is breathtaking: a masterpiece in red brick.

In the common room Kieran is making tea. He is wearing flip-flops, even though it’s freezing cold. He and Michael are tanned and bearded, like gap-year travellers, and seem very relaxed. The two of them worked at the abbey for four hours a day. They chopped wood, trimmed hedges, cleaned the cloister and picked apples. The autumn apple-picking, Michael says, was idyllic. ‘Everything was golden.’ Afterwards, inspired, they printed off Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’.