God's Callgirl (22 page)

The nuns from the school often came home just in time for Benediction, and some of them joined us upstairs. And so it happened that Alice wafted in and knelt beside me once more. Up here in the choir space there was no Reverend Mother; she was downstairs with the
congregation of older nuns and the students. Alice had the rain of the Manchester autumn on her clothes and she smelled delicious. I didn’t dare look at her or smile at her. All I could do was drink in her magnificent presence, her free spirit, which I envied so much.
Oh God, this is just so delightful, and so extremely painful!
Tears began to roll down my cheeks, unhindered and uncontrollable, soaking the starched linen band under my chin. I didn’t dare take out a hanky and give myself away. I kept singing. Love made my voice even sweeter and truer. I wanted her to hear it! I was singing my love to her through a
Te Deum
and
Ave Maria
that should have broken her heart. Afterwards, in the silence of contemplation before we went downstairs, I was one with my beloved beside me, holding us in an enormous brilliant light of love, if only she could have seen or felt it.

I have few strong memories of Sedgley Park other than those associated with Alice. Of course I remember the constant hubbub of going to lectures, the large high-ceilinged rooms, the ring of footsteps on the beautifully tiled floors of the main hall. There were the bus trips and walks to Manchester University to attend lectures on Freud, among other things. I learned from those lectures that tiny children are sexually awake, and that their need for skin contact, warmth and affection, as well as their sensual explorations, are forms of auto-erotic sexuality.

The lecturer was well aware of the presence of nuns in her audience and aimed to shock us out of our enclosed naivety, or ignorance, or both. We didn’t have such fiercely opinionated and abrasive lecturers back at our college. What I remember best from those lectures is our walks back to the bus-stop, and then the convent, late in the evening. We walked in silence, keeping our heads down according to the rules. I couldn’t help but notice the houses as we passed,
their hedges and fences and gates, all evidence of ordinary human life and human relationships. I looked up from the bricks or pathways under our feet to catch a glimpse of the sky, often dark and swirly, and once my eyes caught a hawthorn tree silhouetted under a street light. I was awed by its beauty—its branches were bare and thorny, so lonely, so majestic, and so perfect in their symmetry. The tree was just there, oblivious to whether anyone noticed it, pouring out its beauty. The image burned into my heart, and I thought of it often, the way a soldier on a battlefield holds on to the picture of a sweetheart. It comforted me.

One Saturday morning Alice was entrusted with the duty of doing the rounds with an urgent message from our superior. I can’t remember at all what it was, but I was so surprised by this sudden event that I was caught utterly off guard: there was Alice, right in front of me, looking into my eyes to make sure I had heard the message, head to one side in a questioning stance. I was supposed to answer her question, I think, but all I could do was whisper, ‘
Beautiful. You are so beautiful
.’ Like a fool, I was lost in her eyes, and would have stayed looking into them for ever, except that they winced and turned green with brown flecks. But she held my gaze as evenly as she could until she knew she would get no sane answer, then left me standing there as though I had just seen a vision. Obviously, I was incorrigible! Alice strode off, conscious of my stare, her heels clipping the parquetry floor, her wide hips swaying.

The summer holidays came; they were filled with diversions, including concerts. Nuns often holidayed at other convents, depending on the powers that be to send them there. Those who stayed behind had the pleasure of devising a concert for our visitors and for the older members of the community. It was a rare time of creativity
and lots of fun. A few of our sketches were rehashed from previous years’ performances elsewhere, but for me they were all new and I laughed long and hard at the silly things we came up with. Laughter was a painful thing, I remember. It hurt my belly and my face, which were used to too much seriousness and tears. I laughed at everything, helplessly. I doubled up for the slightest reason, grateful for the relief. I ended up with a heavy head from laughing.

Alice was especially playful at these times, although she seemed never to notice me. Only once did we come face to face again, in the theatre wings where a few of us were fooling around. She was caressing a silky piece of material, holding it against her face and trying it on for a headdress. The silk was a purplish colour but she called it by its proper name: magenta. It was exactly the same colour as a rhododendron bush I knew in the grounds. I was stunned by the picture before me: the magenta perfectly set off the darkness of her eyebrows and eyes. She had turned into a gypsy! She saw my stunned admiration and my weak attempt to smile appropriately. She threw the silk on the floor and turned her back. I felt mortified and close to tears. It was wrong, I told myself again, to be so obsessed with Alice. I gave myself a new punishment, which was to never again set eyes on the magenta rhododendron.

FOR THE NEXT
two summers, I was sent elsewhere for the holidays, and enjoyed the magnificence of the English countryside. I walked with my companions along tall hedges full of different kinds of wildflowers, picking posies and filling baskets with blackberries. I sat under ancient trees on large stately lawns and read or sketched. My favourite subjects were trees—I sketched them with
charcoal and pencil.
They were so beautiful! Their proud naked trunks, their bare muscular arms, the folds in their white flesh, their whispering leaves…
As in the chapel when Alice came near, my body convulsed with pleasurable ecstasy. I let it happen here, where nobody saw.

Being with a community of strange nuns during summer holidays was really no easy matter. The English niceties that came so easily to my companions as they talked with one another, even the décor of the rooms, had a frightening charm that made me thankful for the usual rule of silence. Since I knew no one there, I was left alone to silently absorb the expressions of a culture that was so different from the Dutch and Australian ways I had grown up in.

One tiny incident stands out from those summers with nuns whom I never got to know long enough to remember by name or face. I was sitting at a long dining table among a hubbub of excited women who were, for once, talking with unrestrained pleasure to friends. Being a stranger in a strange land, there was no ‘Oh, hello! Great to see you again!’ coming my way, but somebody there noticed my aloneness. She was an old and wizened nun but quick on her feet. I would never have noticed her; she was in the background, filling up cake plates and not participating in the talking. What she did was simply place one kind hand on my back, between my shoulders. It was such a warm touch, so extraordinarily good, that I never forgot it. It melted and relaxed me; a touch that spoke to my inner soul, reminding me that I was loved and that everything was all right. I always blushed very easily, and of course I blushed then at the suddenness and intensity of the feeling that washed through me like a blessing. I turned and caught her smile and then she was gone, an angel in the shape of an old wizened silent sister.

At college we were nuns first and foremost, and so we were excluded from the social activities organised for students, and didn’t mix much at all with them or with the lay staff. All this changed dramatically when Sedgley Park became flooded after a downpour that went on for days. Panic built up as the water level began to rise over the gardens, lapping against the walls of the inner courtyards, then started coursing over the college floors.

Why was it impractical me who guessed what was going on—namely that the drains were blocked by summer debris? Water kept rising, and was soon at waist level outside, so I decided to do something. I was in a corridor with my English lecturer, Mrs Green, who was in her fifties—a strong character not given to sentimentality—and her younger friend, also a tutor.
These people are mature enough, surely, to realise that nuns are just people, with bodies like their own
, I thought, and took off my shawl and black bonnet and handed them to them. The plan was to climb through the window and duck under the water to grope for the drains. I couldn’t afford to ruin the delicate stitching and ruching of my bonnet, and my shawl would have hampered my arm movements. I must have looked like something out of a comic strip with my hairless head inside a white undercap, and they were aghast.
Never mind
, I told myself, lifted up my skirts, clambered through the window and promptly submerged myself in search of drains. I found one, then two, in a relatively short time, removed the debris, climbed back in, dripping wet, to retrieve my dry bits of clothing. The water level dropped immediately, at least in that section of the college, so I had every reason to feel satisfied with myself. I put the dry bonnet and shawl over my wet clothes and walked, wet to the waist, past other nuns, staff and students as they were bailing out with buckets. I felt like a
heroine, but nothing was ever said to my face about my ostensible heroism.
Well, the less said by anyone, the better!

I probably generated some interesting conversation in the lecturers’ common room. I was one of Mrs Green’s favourites, since I displayed the kind of sharp, analytical mind in class that she admired. She found more and more difficult passages for me to read aloud, whole paragraphs written as one sentence, more convoluted than legal language. I had the feeling that she was running bets with other staff on how soon I would begin to lose the plot during a passage, but I enjoyed the rare delight to have my mind stretched. I was entered for a Special Mention, but let her down awfully in the exams, omitting a whole section that I thought was optional but wasn’t, thus dragging down my total mark. The disapproval that followed naturally hurt me, but it sat more comfortably upon me than praise.

DYING AND DEATH
happened at Sedgley, and a certain kind of madness.

We had a few elderly nuns in the community, perhaps to balance the large number of very young people. They were retired teachers and old lay sisters. Lay sisters were often women who had had a limited education and who served God and the community with supposedly intellectually undemanding work, such as cooking, running the laundry, cleaning and ironing.

Because the class system in England is so strong, and snobbery ingrained and unquestioned, there was no guarantee that such feelings of superiority wouldn’t apply in a convent. The lay sisters often had a humiliating time of it; they just didn’t have the credibility in daily life that the so-called educated mothers and sisters enjoyed.

One of the lay sisters, Sister Jeromy, complained about a pain in her chest for days and weeks. She was old—perhaps in her late seventies—and short of breath. She had rough hands, a short bent body, and a big wrinkly mouth in a coarse wrinkly face. She had been brought up somewhere in the muddy countryside of England, and had a pathetic way of insisting that she wasn’t well. Lay sisters were usually the most silent and unnoticed of all. They were there to serve and never be seen if possible, let alone heard. So Sister Jeromy’s pleas went largely ignored, dismissed with irritation. The infirmarian clearly had no remedy for her condition, and a doctor was never called.

After Mass, as we climbed up the broad staircase that led to the refectory, Sister Jeromy, who had been hogging the railing with her bent back, slumped to the stairs and stayed there, face down. Everybody filed past her, including Mother Superior, who no doubt resented such dramatic malingering. And that’s how Sister Jeromy died, there on the steps. She lay in a casket on the landing for two days, so we could pray for her and show her our respect, which she never received while she was alive. I knelt beside her stern figure, which was relieved at last of the burden of constant hard work, humiliation and pain, and bent over to kiss her cold folded hands. A musty taste stuck to my lips that I shall never forget. I screwed up my face and ran away to spit it out, together with all sentimental feelings for dead nuns in caskets.

Shortly afterwards I witnessed the horrible demise of another community nun. She was in a room at the top of the stairs, beside the landing and not far from the refectory, so we passed her frequently. She was extremely restless when I visited her, breathing hard, rolling her eyes, unable to speak but apparently aware of her state and her
surroundings. On the little table beside her was a bottle of glycerine and a dropper, to relieve her dry rasping throat. I took the dropper and moved it over to the dying nun’s face. She saw it and opened her mouth like a starving fledgling bird. She couldn’t get enough of the glycerine and kept opening her mouth for more.

One of the others there said, ‘Don’t give her too much, it’s not good for her!’ I respected her opinion, thinking she had medical knowledge that I didn’t. The dying body on the bed did not seem to agree. Her eyes grew wilder, her mouth gaped wide open and her breathing became even more laboured.

I could sense her utmost fear, and realised with cold surprise that whatever she had learned from her religious life meant nothing to her in the very real face of death. Any thought of eternal reward for her life of sacrifice appeared to be wiped from her mind; any feeling or conviction of being loved by God, gone. In her hour of dire need, her beliefs seemed to crumble and count for nothing, her sacrifices had been egotistical nonsense that had not schooled her in true surrender. She was abandoned—or so it seemed to me. Her tens of thousands of pleas to the Mother of God in every Hail Mary, to pray for her in the hour of her death, seemed to have gone unheeded.

We had no skills for the process that is death, no ability to help this woman, one of our sisters. We could only mutter platitudes and exclamations of horror—‘God, how awful!’, ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph, come to her aid!’—and the banal recitations from the daily prayer book.