PADDY BURT talks to writer
and artist Jini Fiennes,
whose reaction on hearing
she had cancer was to
become a modern-day pilgrim
 

          WHEN Jini Fiennes was told she had cancer and had to be operated on at once, she felt neither fear nor panic but an immense calm.  "It was baffling," she says:  "The lady sharing my room kept saying, 'Why are you so calm?' . . . and I still don't know why."

            At 53, she is writer, painter, wife and mother of seven children, including one foster child.  All are now grown up -- her youngest, twins Jacob and Joseph, are 21 this week.  The Fiennes are a colourful family, gipsies even:  in 29 years of marriage they have moved house 15 times -- from London to Ireland, to Suffolk, to Dorset, to Wiltshire, back to London.  Where next?

            Their present flat is Dulwich, which they love dearly, is decorated in pink and turquoise.  Masses of paintings adorn the walls, many of them hers.  She has published five literary, well-reviewed novels, under the name of Jennifer Lash.  Her husband, Mark Fiennes, is a photographer specialising in art, architecture and landscape. Their eldest son is Ralph Fiennes, the actor.

            What happened to her that Tuesday afternoon three-and-a-half years ago -- when the news was broken that she had an "aggressive" tumour in her left breast -- was the realisation of the trauma that every woman dreads.

             Actually, what she dreaded most was telling Mark:  "Now, that did worry me.  But then, within seconds, it seems, the children arrived from all over London.  As I looked down at them standing at the end of the bed -- all of these energetic, vibrant people -- I knew that, whatever might happen to me, they were launched and that they no longer needed me the way they used to.  Although I worried for Mark, I suddenly realised he had all these marvelous children around him and that they all got on so well together . . ."  Now Jini Fiennes has written her first non-fiction book which will be published on 3 June.  On Pilgrimage is not about cancer as such but rather about the effects of cancer on her life and how, as a result of this experience, she decided to leave her family for three months and go "on pilgrimage" through France and Spain.

            She is a warm, attractive woman, eager and at the same time reluctant to talk about cancer for fear that her own positive attitude towards the disease could cause pain and distress in others.  She gave up being an official Catholic many years ago -- since the birth of the twins and "for all the usual reasons."

             The spiritual reasons for her journey are tucked into a few sentences at the beginning of her book.  "There is a hidden current within every individual.  It seeks and stirs, hides and yearns.  Sometimes it is bewildered, a mixture of anger and pain and uncertainty.  It may never recede, but it never escapes.  In moments of crisis it is often full of voice."

              "I'd always been attracted to the idea of getting on the road and just seeing what happens.  It's such an uncomplicated way to travel.  As soon as I began to feel better, I thought, 'I'm going on pilgrimage, goodbye everybody.'  I realised my life was up to me, not all these doctors and healers.  I decided to take my life into my own hands, in a totally different way to anything I'd done before.  But because I had by this time injured my back quite badly, I was also haunted by the idea that I was going to be the only pilgrim who didn't walk every step of the way."  (She did, despite her back.)

            Her journey began in the departure lounge of Brittany Ferries at Portsmouth, waiting for the 11:30 night crossing to Caen where she discovered somewhat to her surprise, that she was behaving in a totally neurotic fashion:  checking and rechecking passport, glasses, credit card, penknife, pencils, camera.  Then, she decided that no loss was irredeemable.  Even death would not be a real disaster -- it was, after all, the only certain thing in life.

            From Caen, she went to Alencon, the birthplace of St. Theresa.  From Alencon to Lisieux.  To Paris, to Taize.  To the great gipsy festival at Les Saintes Maries de la Mer on the Mediterranean, a week of meditation study with the Tibetan Buddhists in the Dordogne; Vezelay, Le Puy, La Chaise, Dieu high in the forests of the Auvergne, St. Giles and finally, Santiago de Compostela across the border in Spain.

            She stayed in convents, in small hotels, in retreats.  "I discovered I loved nothing better than arriving somewhere at nine o'clock at night and having no idea where I was going to sleep.  You absorb a place in quite a different way than if your're with a group of people, and some are saying, 'Let's eat here, let's go on there.'  I love mooching, wandering, staring into space."

            Coming back to London -- back down to earth -- was difficult.  "For three months I'd been in the company of people of different nationalities, all of whom were discussing the mystery of life.  I missed the silence dreadfully.  Yet everything I saw, even after a year, is like clips of a film.  Every second is vivid, every place, every bed I slept in, every floor I did my back exercises on."  As a child Jini Fiennes lived in India.  "My father was in the Indian Army and we had an English nanny.  But I was always aware of the sound of prayer, all these people praying.  It was so opposite to the Sam Brownes and the life of the club, the women with their bright red lips and shingle hairdos."

            After India came eight years in an Irish convent:  "Once again I was aware of this mysterious thing, something that was so central to people's lives."

            "Yet growing up in the Forties and Fifties within the Church you were always reminded you were incomplete.  That's a very destructive force.  It's also easy to look at all religions and say, My God, they've all caused more havoc and war and bloodshed than anything else."

             " But that's man's interpretation.  The real quality is much deeper, I think.  I'm talking about the extraordinary transforming quality of love.  Love is a word that cannot be trapped, whether it's John Lennon and All You Need Is Love or Plato saying, "The desire and pursuit of the whole is love.'  Love, everyone knows what it means.  You can put the smallest child to bed, they're just two years old, but they know which teddy bear they love . . . and you know they know."

            She pauses for breath.  "Cancer," says Jini Fiennes, "had been my friend."

            Now, in remission, she sees her doctors on a monthly basis.
 

*On Pilgrimage, by Jini Fiennes, will be published by Sinclair Stevenson on 3 June (16.95 pounds).