Authors: Carla Van Raay
I would wake up with pounding heart, but there was also a tiny flicker of triumph. The cat had fared badly (by my own hands), but it hadn’t been
entirely
skinned.
THE BEGINNING OF
postulancy was sweet: it was summertime; at first there weren’t even schoolchildren around; and there were no harsh demands. We were given a lot of leeway to help us gradually get used to the rules of silence, and I had the comfort of the company of other souls who were just as new as I was.
The novitiate was a large square sunny room with a creaky floor, lined with large wooden desks. Each of us had her own desk in this friendly room, where we studied the rules of the convent, the scriptures, the life of our foundress, Madame de Bonnault d’Hoüet, and the lives of the saints. It was where we wrote our letters, and kept our missals and rule books.
A statue of the patron saint of novices stood on a pedestal decorated with fresh flowers. There was another Saint Stanislaus in our dorm sharing the honour with Saint Anthony, patron saint of all things lost, and therefore a favourite saint. Why did we feel that we were always losing things?
Every day we came together at recreation time, for a full hour after lunch and half an hour in the evening before prayers. Two large tables were placed together in the middle of the novitiate so we could all sit around them, postulants and novices together. Whenever the weather permitted we would go outside, walking leisurely to the friendly shade of a large tree, or watering two little oak trees we had planted in the horse paddock a short distance away. We adopted three pumpkin plants in the compost heap, but discovered one day that two had been pulled out by my father, the gardener. I complained about it in a letter to him, and received a reply explaining that only one could use the space. My father wasn’t a sentimental man.
Our sense of fun was sharp in those days. Humour prevented the strange and unusual becoming macabre. All
the same, the first time we joined the nuns in the common room for the daily reading session, and a nun knelt on the floor, accusing herself in a loud voice of some misdemeanour and asking her superior and us to forgive her and pray for her, I turned scarlet. I felt I was doing something indecent, just in witnessing this exposure. I stumbled into the chapel afterwards. Once there, I was in for another shock: nuns were kissing the chapel floor upon entering and leaving! Later, I saw nuns kissing the refectory floor—I never understood why—and, on especially penitential occasions, kissing venerable old nuns’ shoes—most often those of the Reverend Mother Vicar, grabbed by grovelling hands from beneath her skirts.
A distinct feeling of having gone back to the Middle Ages overcame me. I was shocked to see a novice take her meals while kneeling on the floor, making her chair into a table. She was a little removed from the others and therefore from the possibility of serving herself. I came to understand that this happened quite frequently and was a sign of voluntary removal from the community for having broken a rule. To be fed by a compassionate volunteer meant that this humble apology had been accepted. Sometime during the meal, the superior would allow the sister to rejoin the community and take up her place at the table again. You could always count on being fed and forgiven, so the exercise was really a tame ritual.
Our first novice mistress had an act of cultured grandeur about her because of her very straight back, her age, her gaunt looks, her powers of observation, sense of humour, intelligence and fortitude. Mother Philomena was slowly dying of cancer, which gave her a chance to sort things out in her very astute mind. Once she had been feared as a strict disciplinarian in the school, but she showed us a rare
compassion. She took us for slow walks around the convent grounds, made magnificent by the huge conifers, oaks and elms, and the dedicated work of my energetic and resourceful father. She knew the names of all the trees and taught them to us. Mother Philomena was full of stories of life in other convents in other countries and the women who had lived in them.
She loved our exuberance, although she made us keep the rules. Only one person was allowed to speak at a time. In her magnificently mild-mannered way she saw to it that everybody got a fair chance to contribute to our lively conversations.
We had many sunny days to spend outside at recreation time, and I was happy. To me, recreation felt so
civilised
; it was unaccustomed civilisation, the nearest thing to the genteel ways I had read about in E M Forster’s
A Room With a View
, wistfully reminding me of my mother’s lost heritage. Often, we’d take chairs with us and sit under a shady tree to do our embroidery or our mending. Poverty meant we had to mend our clothes. Doing it for the glory of God meant mending them to perfection; our darned stockings were worthy of a needlewoman’s craft. Our embroideries too were works of devotion. They were sold to God knows where or given to God knows whom, and we learned the virtue of detachment by handing over the work of our hands and hearts without question. Later, much much later, I was astonished and angry to find out that my family had been paying their hard-earned money for the things I was embroidering.
Recreation was also a time for sharing tall stories, asking sly questions about the nuns, and much laughter. We laughed a lot—we were young, full of repressed mischief, and needed relief from the anxious business of adjusting to a new life. Laughter was the great tension-defuser, the thing
that kept us sane and restored healthy blooms to our cheeks. My natural sense of humour found scope in those daily sessions when everybody listened to you when it was your turn. It was only in the third year of my novitiate, after my new novice mistress told me to be sure to cultivate my sense of humour or I might lose it, that I started to forget to laugh. She had triggered some warning about pride—it was like winning too many marbles.
Before this unfortunate reminder, I learned to tell jokes with flair, and wrote down the new ones to send home for the family to have a laugh.‘
God looked over the walls of heaven at the souls in hell, who were writhing in terrible agony while the demons poured pitch over them and goaded them with red-hot pokers
,’ began a joke of Scottish origin (perhaps it was one of Bertrand Russell’s, who must have told it better than I did). ‘
His eyes searched out the souls among the flames and smoke
. “
Oh, God,
”
the souls agonised,
“
we didn’t a-ken it would be this bad
.”
God looked them over and said:
“
Well, ye ken it noo, doon’t ye?
” ’
I always thought this was a very risque joke; in it there was such a firm belief in hell and the eternal wrath of God. We must have felt pretty smug and secure to laugh at these sorts of in-house jokes. Somewhere inside me a key turned, but I hardly noticed it. Laughter has a way of banishing the devil, if only temporarily.
Throughout my twelve and a half years of convent life, it was always the laughter and the togetherness that made any part of the experience seem worthwhile. The shared laughter created a camaraderie, a solidarity; the one thing that truly gave us a common identity. We even created a common noticeboard for jokes to be posted, anecdotes that everyone could read, not just the possies and novices. It was a friendly communication device between the two camps of the fledglings and the fully fledged. ‘
A housewife found a little live
rabbit in her Westinghouse fridge one day. When she asked him what he was doing there, he said
“
Just westing.
”“
Just resting?
”
she queried.
“
Yes, isn’t this a westing-house?
”’
Sometimes I would catch sight of one of my little brothers. Once, my two-year-old brother Peter came wandering along with a teddy bear in his arms, looking for his daddy. I sent him on his way, not sure myself where Dad was, and he grinned and blew me kisses as he went. A few weeks later, during one of our outdoor recreation times, he sat nearby on the cement kerb, content just to be there. Every minute or so he’d say, ‘Allo, Ca-la!’ and smile. I was allowed to kiss him and send him home, pulling up his trousers because his belly was exposed. ‘I can’t find Mummy anywhere, Ca-la,’ he said. Poor little boy.
The end of recreation time usually filled me with a feeling of great loss, even doom. Why couldn’t we continue to dream, to recreate the world, for a few more hours? Why this forlorn obedience to a clock? But 2 pm spelt sudden silence, like sudden death. The time was up; eyes down, hurry off to work duties.
There was plenty of work to do. We postulants and novices must have saved the convent from massive cleaning bills. We worked hard in the laundry, in the kitchen, in the chapel, in the linen room—sorting clothes, making new ones, doing large mending jobs with sewing machines, in the dormitories; in fact, everywhere in that enormous place.
During my time, there was not one hired hand; all the work was done by novices and nuns, who were rostered in their time off from teaching duties by the efficient Sister Kevin. I could not believe it when I was eventually told, many years after coming out, that my family was required to pay fees for me during the years of my novitiate, and for a full total of eight and a half years until my final vows. It had
something to do with not having a dowry to bring with me when I entered; all I’d had was a portion of my parents’ will to bequeath to the convent upon my death, and that wasn’t considered good enough. I had no idea about this extortion.
‘It’s always the poor people who pay up, Mrs van Raay,’ the sister who had been drafted into doing the dirty work of collecting the money told my mother. ‘The rich ones can’t be bothered; they never pay.’
It seemed that quite a few people hadn’t brought a dowry, even those who could afford it. It was the wealthy who had the wisdom not to be intimidated by demands of payment while their daughters gave their lives to God and God’s endless work.
My main job was to keep the corridors and parlours shiny and free of dust. I was shown how to strew discarded tea leaves at the head of the corridor and sweep them down methodically so the damp leaves gathered all the dust. I learned how to tame the large polishing machine that bolted away from inexperienced hands, and how to care for the carved mahogany tables, the Queen Anne chairs and every item in the opulent parlours, which made me think of the court of King Louis XIV (I wasn’t used to antique vases, and some of these were three feet high).
It wasn’t right to be seen cleaning when a visitor arrived, but sometimes it was unavoidable. I saw a fairly important-looking male visitor emerge from a parlour one day as I was mopping the corridor, and I ducked away into the Rev’s bathroom, which had a recessed door facing into the corridor. This bathroom was a spacious, hallowed place, usually out of bounds to a hoi polloi cleaner like me. The visitor, however, had exactly the same room in mind, and wanted to bolt when he saw me. Dusting furiously, I said I’d just finished and, really, it didn’t matter!
The refectory, where we had our meals, was a place of anxious feeling for me. We novices had our own refectory across the corridor from the nuns. Our mistress would usually preside and we would take our cues from her. Our foundress was French, but etiquette in her convents was definitely Victorian. It was nerve-racking. One day, she ate an apple with a knife and fork. I considered myself a total dunce at table manners and supposed that everyone else had been well brought up, except for me, a caretaker’s daughter. But who learns to eat an orange with a spoon at home, or an apple with a knife and fork? So we must have all felt pretty much the same, stealing furtive glances at each other’s manners.
We had become quite expert at not touching our apples with our fingers, when our novice mistress had the gall to announce dryly from the presiding end of the table:‘It isn’t necessary to eat an apple with a knife and fork, you know.’ She wiped her thin mouth with a large white napkin and left the room. I never did sort out the meaning of that particular lesson.
FOR CENTURIES, RELIGIOUS
life had been an education in dehumanisation. Over and over again, the Church Fathers had defined religious life as a striving for perfection, synonymous with the renunciation of the world. ‘The world’ did not just mean material possessions; nuns were also to minimise contact with people.
Stern
is the word that comes to mind. Stern devotion. Efforts to break this austere attachment to rules and lifestyle made by Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII—who called Major Superiors from all the religious orders together in 1957, 1961 and again in 1965—were met with a bland inability to imagine
anything other than the way to perfection they thought they had already embraced.
Eventually, living by the rules and daily schedule became easier—it even became a crutch. To do the right thing, we had only to consult the routine or the rules; in cases of any doubt, there was the novice mistress to consult.
‘Every little thing I do is always exactly what Our Lord wants of me at that moment, and that certainty is an ecstatic feeling,’ I wrote in my first weekly letter to my family. The more rules we learned, the easier it seemed to ‘do it right’. Until, of course, the burden of the sheer number of rules and the complexities of living them increased the chances of failure.
Everybody felt larger than life now, for we belonged to ‘the community’. For a young woman struggling to have any identity at all, this was something to glory in. My ability to ‘please God’ seemed guaranteed. I had successfully transferred my need for approval from my parents to anyone in a position of authority within the convent hierarchy, the ‘mouthpieces of God’. Such transference was openly encouraged; even the titles Reverend Mother, Reverend Mother Vicar and Reverend Mother General were a blatant claim on childish loyalties. These titles have now been abolished.
Our Reverend Mother was made much of. She had a lot of organising to do and was cosseted like a queen bee. The rank and file were also encouraged to love the regional Mother Vicar, whoever she might be at the time, and, most of all, the Reverend Mother General, affectionately known as ‘Notre Mère’. She was the hardest to get to meet or know as she lived in Broadstairs, in England. We were taught to send letters of affection to this unknown, respected mother figure, assuring her of our constant prayers and our loyalty and love for her.