Authors: Carla Van Raay
Sister Marian and I were taken by car to sleepy Benalla, a country town in Victoria with one Catholic church and two adjacent schools, both taken care of by the FCJs.
That day—the first in my new community of eleven teaching nuns and one lay sister—was a chance for a new life, a productive life at last, a life with no history, or so I thought. Only two people—Sister Anna, who had entered a year after me, and Sister Madeleine, a year older than me, and both of whom I could trust—had known me before. Sister Marian had been my companion on board ship, but I discounted that short time. The Reverend Mother had never seen me before in her life.
There were such things as personal reports, of course, with the power to establish a view of someone as yet
unknown and unproven in a new community, and such a report naturally had preceded me. In my keen expectation of a new start in convent life, I had forgotten that this would be the case.
At the first evening gathering around the common-room table, which concluded with some practical announcements, Reverend Mother Clare ended with, ‘We need someone to take on the job of waking us at 5.30 am. Is there a volunteer?’ I saw an opportunity for proving myself willing and useful. ‘Yes;
I
will,’ I said quickly, and wondered why my offer was not taken up immediately. Reverend Mother Clare smiled ruefully, but not at me, and then said to all the listening ears, ‘All right, Sister Mary Carla will be given the bell. We can expect anything to happen now.’
My heart stopped. Why had she said this? A soft murmur of giggles went through the gathering. They had understood the joke, which was obviously based on information shared before I had even arrived. A young person’s reputation was of no importance to the Reverend. She wasn’t intentionally cruel, just pressured from being in charge when she wasn’t well suited to the task. My heart sank, but I knew that I would do this job perfectly.
THE CONVENT WAS
on a small acreage, a couple of hundred kilometres north of Melbourne, and inland. The winters were chilblain frosty. ‘Our Lady of the Angels’ was carved in stone relief on an archway over the front porch. In front of the building was a garden large enough for a car to turn full circle; at the back was the playground for the schoolchildren and the convent’s vegetable garden and chicken yard. The small size of the community fostered friendly interaction; the beauty of the rooms and their
brightness induced a feeling of homeliness and relaxation. It was such a change from the comfortless spaces the nuns had to put up with at Genazzano.
The thirty or so boarders were farmers’ daughters whose homes were too far away for daily travel. There were also a few boys, but they were day pupils. All the dorms were upstairs, accessible by two sets of stairs: one at the back of the building, used by the boarders and young or able nuns, and a beautifully polished and curved wooden staircase close to the chapel door, used only by the superior and the senior nuns, to spare their legs. Apart from Anna, Madeleine, Marian and myself, the household was middle-aged or older.
Sister Marian was the infirmarian, but a number of nuns were trained to look after the sick in order to minimise contact with male doctors. Sister Madeleine was a small, sweet nun, with rotund, pale cheeks, beseeching eyes, a shy little smile and a soft voice. She was given to hiding in a corner. She and Sister Anna—who was more robust than Madeleine in every way, bright, fairly tall, talented in English and sewing—became my friends. We shared a freshness of mind because of our youthfulness, and would later team up against the forces that mistrusted youth.
The oldest nun in our community, Sister Imelda, was a wispy woman with rumpled hands who worked magic on the piano and organ. She was the unassuming elder of two music mistresses. She could hardly see, had wrinkles all over her kindly blind face, a large, spongy nose and a very wide smile. When Sister Imelda spoke, which wasn’t often, it was music that came out of her mouth: she had the proverbial melodious voice. One of the things she never wanted was to be in charge of anything. Whenever she was asked to take on authority, such as in the temporary absence of the Reverend,
she would always smilingly shake her head, never even uttering the word ‘no’.
As I was the newest arrival, it immediately became my job to keep the corridors and the common room spotless and shiny. I’d had plenty of experience in this sort of thing! And because I had gained craft skills at college, I was given the delightful task of dreaming up themes for festive days and making the decorations. The convent became a hive for one feast day: bees galore festooned the refectory, attached by strings to the rafters, and everyone had to choose a card with a message beginning with B, such as ‘Be happy’ or ‘Before it is too late’. Next came a wondrous butterfly theme; and on another day, an ocean made the refectory swim with magic fish. The immediate effect of this kind of happy occupation was that I was no longer constipated; after more than ten years, my intestines were suddenly perfectly functional again. I felt a precious sense of usefulness.
I WAS ECSTATIC
to be assigned the job of teaching art and craft to several classes of children of different ages. It was so good to have direct human contact and feel useful. I noticed, however, that I was not made a class mistress, and was never trusted with the responsibility for the wellbeing of any particular class. Even in times of dire need, or if anyone was sick, I was never even temporarily placed in charge of a class. Was it an order from above? Whatever it was, I tried not to think about it. It might have been more helpful had I been encouraged to grow in confidence, but self-affirming psychology wasn’t a strong feature of religious life. Unavoidably, as a result of this unspoken and unbending mistrust, I was never fully integrated into the community, in
spite of my best efforts and in spite of the otherwise happy environment.
I soon discovered that my training at Sedgley College had not prepared me for secondary-school dynamics, nor given me any organisational skills. We had been taught content (what to teach), and the principles of learning (how children learned). Thank goodness I had gained some practical experience in the schools of Manchester, watching veteran teachers at work and having a crack at teaching myself.
That was two years ago. Now I had to learn as I went and I enjoyed the challenge. After all, maintaining discipline among Catholic girls was a cinch. These girls were so passive! In art classes I had trouble stirring up any kind of passion in them to get them to express themselves in paint and colour. I brought a tape recorder to class and played evocative music, but they just looked at me helplessly and could only produce shadows of the ideas I put before them. They were practical farmers’ girls with an ‘I-hope-this-willdo’ attitude to creativity. The older the children, the lower their ability to be experimental. I went for bold colour instead, and at the end of the year we managed to put on a bright exhibition.
My other responsibility was needlework and I had a rich store of experience in this field. I loved creating with stitches and fabric. The farmers’ daughters, unfortunately, took badly to fancy needlework—broderie anglaise, shadow work and such—which was done only for show. They would have been better off learning how to put together overalls and aprons. The standard I elicited from them was questioned by a visiting inspector. I don’t know what pieces he criticised since I wasn’t there when he examined their work. He left without giving me any ideas
on how to improve the situation. Maybe he was the apron and overalls type too.
In time, I became almost like one of the family. A precious camaraderie flourished among the members of our small community in spite of the rule of silence. We cleaned the chapel as a team, well organised by the nun in charge. On a sunny day, we would all lift the pews together and take them out onto the front lawn. The old wood was cleaned and polished, the floor dewaxed and waxed anew, the stained-glass windows washed, and all the silver and copperware for the altar polished. To keep our arms free, we tied up our shawls and aprons. I became acutely aware of my inadvertently revealed figure at those times and those of my sisters. A travelling salesman happened to call in during one of our cleaning sprees, catching a number of us outside in working mode. He caused a fast retreat and was left standing alone among our undusted pews.
I settled into the feeling of belonging to a group of people whose lives, like mine, were dedicated to God, and who were mostly kind and humorous. My perception of how convent life might be was realised at last, in this little place in the country. For many years after leaving, it was this intensified and idealised feeling of community that I searched for in my dreams. I had a recurring dream in which the nuns I looked for were standing in the vegetable patch. As I approached they looked up and said to each other, ‘Here she comes again; I wonder how long she’ll stay this time?’ I would wonder, then, how many times I had indeed been back, and why I had left again and again. I would fall on my knees and tell them how much I loved God and wanted to serve him, and they always allowed me to try again. I wore a strange mixture of habit and secular clothes in those dreams, and once I was there, I would
wonder why I had returned. When I got really close to the nuns, a dark cold chilly energy, like an angry wind, would hit me and I knew it couldn’t last.
Our lay sister at Benalla was a tiny woman with a harelip, whose eyes shone mischievously through round metalrimmed glasses. Sister Antoinette was no longer young when I knew her, but in spite of her size and middle age she was undaunted by any task. She was the cook-in-charge and prepared meals for all the nuns and boarders with panache. She was Irish and missed her homeland sorely, having been sent to Australia when she was only twenty. As the sole lay sister, she was doubly lonely. She wasn’t included in any of the discussions about the main business of the convent—the running of the boarding school or the parish primary school. She was just a workhorse.
Sister Antoinette and I became good friends. I enjoyed helping her out in the kitchen. One week she and I made ginger beer. The recipe was deceptively simple, and for eight days or so we added sugar and ground ginger to the ‘plant’. Finally, it was time to put the liquid into the bottles we had scrounged from all around. So far, so good.
While we were having breakfast a few weeks later, an explosion rocked our silent thoughts. It came from the kitchen cellar, and one glance at Sister Antoinette told me what was going on. I caught her looking helplessly at Reverend Mother, with a twinkle in her eyes in spite of the tragedy going on below us.
The first explosion was followed by another a few moments later, and soon there was a veritable barrage. Breakfast continued in silence as if nothing were happening. All we could do was wait until it was certain that the last bottle had exploded and then deal with the mess. Sister Antoinette did not have to ask for help for this job—
everybody pitched in to remove the shards and slivers of glass embedded in our vegetables and cheeses, as well as in the walls. It was a mammoth task. Ginger beer-making was never attempted again, not least because it proved to be alcoholic instead of a pleasant-tasting ginger-lemonade.
I would have done anything for Sister Antoinette because she was humble and ordinary, friendly and non-judgmental. She also had a reliable sense of humour. She often helped me to laugh at myself, God bless her kind soul. In the end, she was forced to watch me grow distressed beyond redemption, looking on in her quiet way. But she was always there for me, she always prayed for me, and her prayers were genuine; her heart never judged.
We both loved the garden and the chicken run. The vegetable patch could never keep up with the demands of nearly forty-five people, but the chooks laid all the eggs we wanted and more. Many an hour was spent spreading Vaseline over the shells to preserve them for future cakes and other recipes when the chooks went off the lay. I asked Sister Antoinette to show me how to make patty cakes—I still have her recipe in my scrapbook of favourite things.
‘Sister,’ I said one day when I had some time on my hands, ‘I’ll clean the kitchen windows for you.’
‘Don’t you worry about that, now,’ came Sister Antoinette’s swift reply. ‘The windows are dirty because they are much too high up and nobody can reach them.’
It was true; the windows reached nearly to the ceiling, which was very high up indeed. They hadn’t been washed for years, the top parts perhaps never, and this meant the kitchen never felt as sparkling clean as a good kitchen should.
Antoinette knew it wasn’t possible to stop me from carrying out a good deed once I got hold of the idea, but
she tried to warn me. ‘Take care, now, Carla.’ She eyed the wooden ladder I’d dragged inside. ‘Those steps get slippery when they get water on them. So don’t get them wet. And make sure now that you don’t touch the sides of that hot urn.’
I climbed up with a bucket of water in one hand and a cloth in the other. I looked down—Sister Antoinette was praying for me, I could tell! Just below to my left was the large electric urn, full of water and close to boiling.
I was near the top of the ladder when my lace-up shoe with its shiny leather sole slipped. The bucket left my hand and dropped violently, and I came down just as swiftly, the sleeve of my habit catching the boiler’s frame. The boiler let go of me—as if by a miracle—but my body landed
sideways on the edge of the large stainless steel washbasin below.
The commotion attracted the attention of the infirmarian. My upper right leg was severely bruised; the flesh visibly impacted by the fall. ‘Get yourself into a bath and soak in it,’ prescribed Sister Marian, in her casual manner.
Well, it was better than nothing, given her attitude of ‘no malingering in
this
convent!’ An application of arnica, even some Epsom salts in the bath water, might have done some good, but alas, convent infirmarians were no herbalists. Herbal wisdom, once the province of monasteries and convents, had been neglected due to the new reverence given to science. My thigh retained a deep dented mass of damaged scar tissue. For a few days I had a limp, then forced myself to ignore it, the same as I tried to ignore the rest of my body.