My late brother left us an imagined map of a Norfolk pilgrimage – now it's a reality

Telegraph

03-03-2025

'This world is but a thoroughfare of woe and we are pilgrims passing to and fro.' The Knight's Tale, The Canterbury Tales.
In late January, 2023, I checked in by WhatsApp with my older brother, as I did most days. First, because he was always so funny and interesting. Second, because he had had a miserable time following a divorce and was staying alone in the vestry of the redundant church, which he owned, opposite his family home.
Kit did not answer my messages and after I asked a villager to check on him, events seemed to take place as if following a bomb blast. I remember the torch-lit faces of the young constables in the darkness standing outside the church, warning me against going in – 'it is not how you would want to remember him'.
In fact Kit, 65, died from natural causes, an exhausted heart that gave out. He was in the bath, listening to Radio 3, and that is where he was found days later.
The coroner noted that the blood supply to his heart was reduced to less than 20 per cent, and yet he had just completed a season of pantomime, was writing a Radio 4 drama, had almost finished an opera libretto and was performing cabaret.
Just days earlier, he had also written an anthem to accompany an exquisite processional cross created by the artist David Montalto di Fragnito, to music by Roderick Williams, and to be presided over by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
The coroner's report was all the more disturbing in that it also recorded in its internal examination that 'the brain was severely autolysed and reduced to a structureless, pale, semi-liquid mass weighing approximately 1130g'.
How could it be that a mind as curious and creative as my brother's, so hard at work, could be nothing more than a 'semi-liquid mass'; was death so reductive, so utilitarian?
After Kit was taken away, my son Henry and I went into the vestry. It was shabby and plain but extraordinarily neat. Kit had been a child chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and his sense of precision never left him.
By the bath, his silk dressing gown and a small glass of whisky. On the shelves, his Moleskine notebooks, in which he wrote his lyrics. In the nave, the piano he had inherited from his musical heroes Flanders and Swann. Open on its shelf was Kit's translation of The Bartered Bride, which he had written for the Royal Opera House. It was the passage about love.
The skies were dull but light seemed to filter into the church and the vestry. I recall remonstrating with Kit about the dingy conditions there and asking him to stay with me until he found a home, as did our sister Joanna. He replied that I had not seen the radiance of the stained-glass window in the bathroom, the place where he died.
Henry found something else on Kit's desk – a map of a pilgrimage route that Kit had been plotting across Norfolk, with detailed attention to clusters of neglected churches. Henry took it and embellished it with illustrated touches of Kit's life, including the local Indian restaurant and the repair workshop for his transit van which was forever breaking down, but which Kit regarded as his 'flying carpet'. Henry framed it and gave copies to our mourning family.
Over the following weeks, the map took on a deeper significance. Kit was a satirical cabaret singer of a libertine disposition [first finding fame performing as Kit and the Widow], yet he seemed to return to his chorister roots at the end.
When choosing the music for his funeral, it became clear to us that he was steeped in the tradition that had emerged from the monasteries and the cathedrals. And the last thing he wrote was a religious anthem about divine order, which could have come straight from the medieval age.
The youthful co-founder of the British Pilgrimage Trust, Dr Guy Hayward, is also, as it happens, a choral scholar, a cabaret singer and a pilgrim. He tells me that he feels very connected to Kit and is not at all surprised by the parallels. What makes a good pilgrimage, he adds, is a mix of coincidence, intent and, where possible, a river.
What pilgrims bring to a journey, apart from a good hazel walking stick, may be sorrow or loss or yearning or reflection. It is the intent that distinguishes a pilgrimage from a walk. Hayward's pilgrimages are also accompanied by some haunting folk songs because he sees himself in the tradition of the wandering minstrel.
One of Hayward's first pilgrimages was to Hartlake Bridge in Kent, where, in 1853, 37 hop pickers toppled from a farmer's cart and drowned in the River Medway. It was the subject of a Romany song of the times. When Guy and his companions reached the end of their journey, they met, by chance, some descendents of the hop pickers, who had never heard the song. This meandering path of coincidences is very much in the pilgrim tradition.
For my brother, music and pilgrimages were inseparable. He had studied under the composer Sir John Rutter and music was the source and ending for him. I was glad to think he was listening to music when he died. Rivers also had a sacred resonance for him. Stoke Ferry, in Norfolk, the village where he lived, was on the river Wissey. He would sometimes row his son Rollo to Ely, where Rollo was a chorister at Ely Cathedral King's Ely school.
And when he saw that a former clay pit in Ely, now a lake, which had been owned by the railways, was for sale, he pressed a friend, the producer Caroline Roboh, to buy it to save it from development. The lake has a direct view of the cathedral. In 2022 Kit dragged an abandoned boat up the river through an underpass and into the lake. It now lies in the reed beds, filled with moss and native plants.
After Kit died, I listened to The Pilgrim's Progress, music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, words by John Bunyan, in which the river is flowing between life and death. Christian is overwhelmed by 'the sorrows of death' and does not think he will see land again. Hopeful replies: 'Be of good cheer, my brother, for I feel the bottom [of the river] and it is firm.'
On a blazing summer day in late May 2023, I walked with Kit's son, Rollo, and daughter, Gus (Augusta), and some of his close friends to Kit's lake at Ely, jumping into the water after a picnic of bread, cheese and martini shots. (In a podcast interview that Kit had given in his final months, he had been asked what he would like to be asked at Heaven's Gate. Kit replied: 'How much vermouth would you like with your martini?'.)
Then we drove to Kit's All Saints Church at Stoke Ferry, where we said pilgrim prayers and played the choral music of his favourite composers, Charles Villiers Stanford and Mendelssohn. His piano was still there, a memory of composition but also that the church has been the scene of gaiety, in particular the high-spirited reeling of New Year's Eve parties.
The following day we went on a 10-mile pilgrimage to King's Lynn Minster, church of the mystic Margery Kempe, followed by a feast at the home of the historians Simon Thurley and Anna Keay. Kit had sent the couple a large folder of detailed research on his route and his reasons for choosing landmarks. Rollo, who works in finance (a complete mystery to Kit), exclaimed in wonder that his father had inadvertently created a spreadsheet.
It was definitely a pilgrimage rather than a walk. For some people, a pilgrimage means the full Camino de Santiago in Spain, which has become as popular as Rome or Jerusalem. But I noted that Hayward had refined something simpler at the British Pilgrimage Trust, which is the 'day pilgrimage'.
Many of us cannot give up weeks but are happy to get the train or car to an agreed location, link up with a varied group of people who have a shared interest in history, nature and spirituality, and to walk with them. What I found at the end of our pilgrimage for Kit was a glimpse of peace of mind. We all slept well.
This might have been the end of it, but coincidences began to come into play. King's Lynn was a natural pilgrimage but also a trade route. The waterways from Cambridgeshire through Norfolk, were, during the 14th century, busy with boats and King's Lynn was bustling with merchants from Norway, northern Germany, Holland, and Flanders, a place where corn, ale, lead, wool and cloth were shipped abroad and furs, hawks, iron, brass, millstones, marble, timber, wine, dye, spices and fish were traded back across Hanseatic routes through Germany up to the Baltic states.
On 14-15 June this year, King's Lynn will be holding its annual celebration of its Hanseatic heritage, the King's Lynn Hanse Festival, and Norfolk County Council is keen to boost its cultural tourism. Hence, Kit's merchant and pilgrim route is timely.
Kit's daughter Gus, a singer and artist, also announced a pilgrim intent. Stoke Ferry had been a place of festivities when Kit was there. He knew all about plainchant (plainsong), but he and his wife and family also held concerts and art events.
After Kit died, the church was closed and weeds grew round the entrance to the vestry, disguising the little sign which read, Sanctuary. The family home opposite was put up for sale.
But Gus, along with her partner Oz, hatched a plan to buy the house and eventually reopen the church as an arts centre, and a resting place for wandering minstrels. Everyone advised her against it. It was romantic but impractical. She should take her inheritance from Kit, shared with her brother Rollo, buy a flat in Norwich, and return the church to the diocese.
The diocese was not, of course, overly keen on a church needing extensive restoration. After a sympathetic conversation, the church moved to Gus's ownership and the first step to the pilgrimage route had been made.
Kit's proposed route included churches that were particularly endangered and it turned out that All Saints, Stoke Ferry was among them. Gus explained to me with tears of frustration that the bill for repairs amounted to £150,000, and it might take years to raise. In the meantime, she could at least realise Kit's pilgrimage map, and hope for some passing pilgrim trade ('Be of good cheer', The Pilgrim's Progress).
The second connection was with one of Keay's friends, the journalist and author Malika Browne, who, along with her husband, had taken on a magnificent 14th-century merchant house in King's Lynn. I had found an enthusiast for the area's Hanseatic heritage, who would champion the merchant side of the merchant and pilgrim route.
Browne mentioned an artistic Scottish troupe that she knew, Fingask Follies, a musical revue, and their theme for 2025 was water. The Follies would be willing to bring their revue to Norfolk and that would help mark the start of King's Lynn summer Hansa celebrations. Again, the coincidence was clear. The Fingask Follies could perform in Stoke Ferry on the pilgrim path to Ely, and the thread would be Hanseatic.
Now I just had to work out the pilgrim route…
My husband patiently laid out the Ordnance Survey map. We are in The Fens and so lack the pretty, weaving footpaths of, say, Oxfordshire. Drainage ditches could interrupt our stride. But we do have three rivers – the Great Ouse, the Wissey and the Nar – plus a train line from London's King's Cross to King's Lynn via Cambridge and Ely, so pilgrims can come and go easily if they wish to follow the route.
To keep walkers off the road as much as possible, we use three existing routes – the Ouse Valley, Peddars Way and the Nar Valley Way. The final stretch of the route takes pilgrims past Kit's lake and along a river footpath to Ely Cathedral – specifically, to the flagstone that welcomes pilgrims outside Lady Chapel.
There is a poem written by James Fenton, entitled For Andrew Wood. One verse reads: 'I think the dead would want us/To weep for what they have lost./I think that our luck in continuing/Is what would affect them most./ But time would find them generous/And less self engrossed.'
Kit loved the home in Norfolk, along with the house he built for his family in Cornwall, and he was despondent to have lost them both amidst the shattering of family life. I wish that he could have known that his daughter, with remarkable doggedness, would buy back the home in Stoke Ferry.
I wish that he had known he would have two new grandchildren within a year of his death. And I can only imagine his delight knowing that the message of the pilgrimages, of renewal, would have a physical manifestation.
I realise now that the pilgrim map was a kind of creative will from Kit. He probably knew that he would not see his ideas to fruition, so left those who loved him to follow the clues he left. We are all enriched by knowing Kit and I realise that, of course, it would be his beloved daughter Gus, above all, who would carry the torch, taking his vision but then making it her own.
When Gus and Oz looked closely at the Flanders and Swann piano at All Saints, they found to their amazement that even after two years of being untouched, it was perfectly in tune. Music will return to their lives and to our spirits.
The voice of Hopeful rings out: 'Be of good cheer, my brother, for I feel the bottom (of the river) and it is firm.'
The final leg of the Merchant and Pilgrim Route will start at Stoke Ferry, Norfolk, on Friday 16 May.