Sister Mary Lioba b 24 April 1896; d May 1986

from Bridget Monahan's Walsingham memoirs I was spending Holy Week and Easter in Walsingham in the Fifties, when a former nun from West Malling was staying in the Hospice, Sister Mary Lioba. Her purpose was to explore the possibilities of coming to live the solitary life in Walsingham. So it was that a year later, I ordered a wooden structure, an anchorage, to be made in Stourport and transported and erected in the grounds of St. Anne's. I was there when the Bishop of Norwich came to install her. During the war years, she had been serving in the WAAFS and became involved in a plane crash, when she was the sole survivor. Her fiancé was among the dead. [This recollection is not entirely correct: both Sister Mary Lioba and her favourite brother, Bill, were serving in the Air Force in the Second War, and he was reported missing after a night raid on Germany.] This made her feel she had been preserved for something special and wished to spend the rest of her life in solitude, offering all her prayers in reparation. She remained there for 10 years, until ill-health took over. [Bridget later took her into her own home in Worcester and looked after her for the next eleven years.]

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