Authors: Carla Van Raay
I tried to be the very best novice I could be. I made the parlours look as if no one ever used them, and the floors of the corridors shone with my waxing, polishing and endless mopping. Nevertheless, I had a recurring nightmare in which I would
forget
to clean the corridors. The dust and scuffs accumulated, and everyone knew that Sister Mary Carla had fallen down on the job. How could it be possible to do something every day and then suddenly forget to do it? Because of an inner command from self-sabotage headquarters. The more I feared it, the greater the chance of it happening.
And so came the day when I discovered lots of dust in the corridor and realised, to my horror, that I hadn’t done my job for days! Nobody had said anything. I swallowed hard. I had to cover this thing up! At the first available moment, I whipped out a couple of big mops and did an emergency swish-up. I could feel the heat of shame in my neck. My shoulders were rigid in super-tension, making me work as fast as possible.
In hindsight, this could all have been part of the dream. Sister Kevin, when I saw her years later, assured me that there was never any dust in the corridors when I was around. ‘I can vouch for it,’ she said; and if anyone could it was Sister Kevin, who was in charge of all cleaning work and very strict.
MOTHER PATRICIA CALLED
me to her side. The date for my leaving the novitiate had grown near. ‘It is time for a new postulant to take over your work in the parlours, Sister. Would you kindly show Sister Catherine how it is done?’ ‘Yes, Mother, of course.’ My status as queen of the parlours was coming to an end.
Catherine was a sensitive girl, a musician, and as keen if not keener than me to ‘do it right’. I recognised the trait in those big innocent eyes, in that long face with deep grooves already etched on either side of her mouth. Here was a vulnerable one, and she was going to get what she seemed to be asking for. I wasn’t meaning to be cruel, but Catherine wore an open invitation on her face. Besides, who was she to muscle in on my domain? Petty politics came so easily in a hothouse of dimly lit egos. We vowed to be holier than the rest of mankind, and then we abused each other, ever so indirectly.
I showed Sister Catherine the routine and what to do if visitors should arrive in the middle of it. It wasn’t a big deal, but I had written nothing down and she seemed to doubt her ability to remember the details. If she had been little less of a ready-made victim, Catherine would have written things down herself. But she didn’t; she charged around my former comfort zone in floods of tears, the silly thing. Catherine came from a well-respected and wealthy family, which made her distress even more illogical to me. She wasn’t likely to have ever been hit by her father, was she? It never occurred to me that for Catherine to behave in such a pathetic way, she might have suffered a different kind of abuse.
The novice mistress called me aside about my lack of cooperation. As required, I knelt down beside her chair and listened to her pursed mouth. ‘Sister Mary Carla,’ she said, looking up ever so kindly from her perennial piece of needlework, ‘Sister Catherine is not coping well with her new task. She tells me you are not very clear in your instructions. Would you please be more helpful to her?’
So Catherine was in a tizz and I was responsible for her misery! I looked down and had trouble not to smile. It seemed ludicrous to me that Catherine’s distress was so important, and I didn’t have it in me to commiserate. ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I have shown her the work and told her all about it. There is nothing much to it.’ Mother did not reply to that, as I had expected, and let me go.
Eventually Catherine’s face wore its beatific smile once more. How I hated her tragic saintly demeanour! Her face pulled at heartstrings, begging not to be given any task except to play the piano, please. Now she had mastered dusting the parlours and shining the floors—a simple thing. I despised her for being a mollycoddled child who
had never had to clean anything at all, and who had been overwhelmed by the challenge I found so easy. In the end, however, it was Catherine who stayed, and I who left. But she hardly ever got her hands dirty again, and is still teaching music.
When emergencies occurred that cut across the normal routine, we novices had to fill the sudden gaps. Just such a crisis happened one morning: none of the regular nuns was available to hold assembly for the girls in the primary school adjacent to Grange Hill. I was closest to hand at the time and was asked to hold the assembly in the open square until someone came to relieve me. I had no idea how to do this, except that it was necessary to keep everyone under control. I suppose we could have stood at ease in some way, but I found myself staring down at the girls with a grim determination caused by panic in case anybody moved and I would not be able to control them. As it turned out, nobody spoke a word, or did anything more than breathe uneasily. The replacement mistress eventually turned up, smiling away the tension and allowing me to disappear.
WE NUNS SHOWED
extraordinary devotion to priests, especially the local bishop and archbishop. For centuries, religious women had thought of themselves as less than priests, and when canon law was revised in 1917 this attitude was strengthened even more. Apart from being thought of as less intelligent than priests, nuns were also assumed to be timid little creatures. Worst of all, though, they could be thought of as a threat to a priest’s celibacy. So while nuns could venerate priests and fuss over them, they had to be careful to not overstep the mark in any way that could be misinterpreted.
Archbishop Mannix, who later became a cardinal and was very influential in the preservation of conservative Catholic thought, resided in Kew and was invited to visit Genazzano, the convent in his home suburb, on his ninety-fifth birthday. To the awful delight of the community, the revered old man accepted and naturally a welcome had to be devised. He was Irish, perhaps from County Londonderry, and his first name was Daniel, which wickedly inspired the Irish contingent among us to dare to sing ‘ Danny Boy’ for him.
The deeply greying archbishop gave nothing away as he sat and listened to the lyrics of this sentimental love song, hackneyed, yet polished up like a new penny by the musical ability and fervour of our well-practised choir. We watched his impassive face. The song was meant to convey loyalty and appreciation; had we presumed too much familiarity? Daniel Mannix held his bishop’s staff in his right hand, and when he used it to rise to thank us, our highly trained eyes detected the concession of a glimmer of a smile around his mouth. The relief that rippled through the ranks was almost audible.
ALL THIS WHILE
, life in my family home continued only a hundred metres or so away. In the cottage behind the cypress hedge, my mother was pregnant for the twelfth time at the age of forty-four. It was an anxious time; Saint Gerard, the patron saint of expectant mothers (for some reason I have forgotten), was promised that the child would bear his name if all went well. It did, and my baby brother Gary, later known as Gazza, became the proverbial spoiled child of the family. When he grew up, he was absolutely resolved never to have children of his own.
I felt for my little brother when he was hanging on to Dad’s hand one day, dragging tired little legs. Dad had just burned a rat in the incinerator. Gary’s face was red with heat, his mind seemingly preoccupied with what had happened to the rat—a nasty creature to an adult, but to a child simply an animal.
After all the glamour of becoming a novice, the ceremony of making our first real commitment with the triple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, two years later, was a simple and humble affair. Once again, the words were pronounced before the local bishop in the chapel, but this time they were said with only my religious sisters as witnesses. My life as a novice had been a time for learning the ways of the order, a two-year assessment to determine whether I really wanted to live as a nun for the rest of my life. I was nearly twenty-one and had grown used to the lifestyle; anything else was simply unimaginable by now. I genuinely loved God and the togetherness of community.
And so, on a very ordinary wintry day, when the black serge was welcome cover for my skin, I traded my white bonnet and veil for black ones, received a large set of rosary beads to hang from my belt, and a cross of the dying Jesus. The Passion of Jesus wedded to the sacrifice of Carla. Two sufferings, the better to save the world.
MADAME DE BONNAULT D’HOUET
was a widow when she founded the Faithful Companions of Jesus, and her followers continued to wear her mode of dress after she died, as a tribute to her spiritual greatness and as a sign of their pledge to follow her example. It also gave them a recognisable identity in the world.
So in the 1960s we looked exactly the same as our French foundress did at the turn of the nineteenth century, complete with ruffled bonnet and long pointed shawl. For the sake of genuine antiquity we wore a white cotton camisole underneath instead of a bra, covered with a white cotton shawl that crossed our breasts twice, thick enough to hide our nipples. Our foundress had been a truly innovative woman, way ahead of her time. Her followers, on the other hand, had managed to freeze her example and dress into a way of life, as if it were an absolute.
Although we had professed our formal vows, we would not be considered fully fledged until after another two terms of probation, each lasting three years. Such was the rigour of making sure of a person before she took final vows and could no longer be expelled.
The powers that be (which never consulted us) decided that some professed novices would go to Latrobe University in Melbourne; and that six of us, a mixed bag of recently professed and older nuns, would be sent to the order’s teacher-training college at Sedgley Park, just north of Manchester in England. Since I hadn’t completed my last year at school, and so wasn’t university material, I was to go to college.
We were to travel there by ship. Passport photos were needed and the photographer came to the convent. My passport was still Dutch, since I wasn’t with my family when they became naturalised Australians in 1958, the year after I entered the convent.
As part of the preparations, I was sent to the doctor to have my ears tested. Mother Mary Luke, my erstwhile primary school principal with the wry smile and the bustling manners, and another nun accompanied me. I hadn’t complained about my ears; others had complained about me for apparently not hearing things. I was often too wrapped up in thought, which can be a bad thing when someone sticks their head inside the room to make an impromptu announcement. My tendency to get things not entirely right or to understand instructions a little differently than intended had been observed several times, and had certainly been annoying to some.
The doctor was not simply to examine my ears—he could have done that during any of his visits to the convent—but was instructed to wash them out. He did so reluctantly because, in his opinion, my ears were not dirty, let alone so caked up that they obstructed sound. It was then that I caught the sly smiles of my two companions, and I understood: this was a charade, a highly embarrassing punishment intended to make me learn to listen up! I
sighed with dismay. I was vulnerable to embarrassment, but they had demeaned themselves by stooping this low to strike their message home. Nothing was said on the way back on the trams.
We were to travel to England on the P&O ship,
Oriana
. Reverend Mother Winifred—the one with the Cheshire Cat smile who harboured a particular dislike of me and who was a stickler for the rules—was to be our chaperone. But not even she was going to stand in the way of the excitement the six of us felt about travelling across the wide, wide ocean. And I was to retrace much of the journey I had made as a child migrating to Australia, nine years earlier.
A jolly march played as the ship moved slowly away from the wharf at midday, and we huddled together to say a prayer for the safety of ourselves and our fellow travellers. This five-week trip was to be a first-class adventure, though we would have little, if anything, to do with the other travellers.
We had two large cabins to ourselves on D deck; I shared one with three others, sleeping on the top bunk. The floor was thickly carpeted, the porthole beautifully curtained with chenille, and the ship’s soap was a welcome change from the plain yellow Velvet we were used to. The rule of silence was relaxed so we could talk to one another about what we saw, but not to the extent that we could communicate with passengers. We had a map so we could identify all the islands and places we passed.
There were four travelling priests on board, who said Mass together every morning and attracted a dozen or so passengers. We nuns prepared the altar and ironed the vestments for the priests provided by the ship. They had to be pinned onto the senior priest, who took central stage on the altar, as everything was size XL, which he was definitely not.
We had a dining room to ourselves, complete with our own waiter, a short young chap whose eyes boggled at the inane conversation of nuns. I think it blew his reverent Catholic ideas about religious women and their supposed composure and intelligence. He couldn’t believe our blithe ability to order things without knowing what they were. We hardly ever consulted him about the meaning of words on the extensive menu, which presented us with unaccustomed choice.
‘Gorgonzola; that’s an interesting name. Shall we ask for some? Everyone agreed?’
Our waiter boy lifted his eyes to heaven and shifted from one foot to the other in a hopeless attempt to let us know that this was an unwise choice for the uninitiated, but he must have had instructions not to speak to us, let alone contradict us.
The gorgonzola arrived, and we examined the strange-looking cheese. ‘Why does it have blue veins in it?’ someone had the good sense to ask. Our young attendant’s tongue was untied at last. ‘The mould creatures,’ he began enthusiastically, ‘gradually creep through the cheese as they eat away at it. They multiply their numbers as they go and…and…’ He hesitated, as if weighing up whether to inform us or not, and then seemed to decide it was his duty to tell us the truth in the politest language. ‘They
defecate
as they go along as well. It gives the cheese its unique flavour,’ he hastened to add. It was a good enough description to have the cheese sent back.