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PREFACE (#ulink_55821b14-1665-544e-a809-aad38cbb7906)
This is the sequel to my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, which told the story of my seven years as a Roman Catholic nun. I entered my convent in 1962, when I was seventeen years old. It was entirely my own decision. My family was not particularly devout and my parents were horrified when I told them that I had a religious vocation. They thought, quite correctly as it turned out, that I was far too young to make such a momentous choice, but they allowed themselves to be persuaded because they wanted me to get it out of my system as soon as possible. I was usually quite a biddable child but I was anxious to test my vocation immediately, instead of waiting until after I had been to university, as my parents would have preferred. My unusual resolution in the face of their opposition impressed them, and they feared that I might spend my college years in a state of mulish obstinacy, failing to make the most of the opportunities of university life, and longing for it all to be over so that I could do what I really wanted. So, on 14 September 1962, I packed my bags and joined twelve other girls at the novitiate.
Why was I so determined to take this step? The motivation behind this type of decision is always complex, and there were a number of interlocking reasons. It is true that at this time I was very shy and worried about the demands of adult social life, but even though the religious life might seem a soft option, it was tough and I would not have lasted more than a few weeks if it had simply been a means of escape. I wanted to find God. I was filled with excitement and enthusiasm on that September day, convinced that I had embarked on a spiritual quest, an epic adventure, in the course of which I would lose the confusions of my adolescent self in the infinite and ultimately satisfying mystery that we call God. And because I was only seventeen, I imagined that this would happen pretty quickly. Very soon I would become a wise and enlightened woman, all passion spent. God would no longer be a remote, shadowy reality but a vibrant presence in my life. I would see him wherever I looked, and I myself would be transfigured, because, as St Paul had said, my puny little ego would disappear and Christ, the Word of God, would live in me. I would be serene, joyful, inspired and inspiring – perhaps even a saint.
This was, to put it mildly, an eccentric career option. I was almost the first student of my convent school to become a nun. Birmingham, my home town, was a materialistic place, where money was king. Most of my immediate family and friends were nonplussed – even slightly irritated – and I, of course, revelled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit different. But I may have been more in tune with my times than I realized, since many of my generation, born in the last years or in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, had the same inchoate yearning for transformation. Post-war Britain was not an easy place in which to grow up. We may have defeated Hitler, but the war had ruined us. Britain was now a second-rate power, and food, clothing and petrol were strictly rationed well into the 1950s. Because thousands of homes had been destroyed during the Blitz, there was a grave housing crisis. Our cities were scarred with desolate bombsites and filled with towering heaps of rubble. The centre of Birmingham was not completely rebuilt until after I left for the convent. After the war, we were in debt to the United States for three billion pounds, our empire was dismantled, and, though we were fed on a surfeit of films celebrating Britain’s endurance and victory, nobody seemed prepared to look facts in the face, and decide what our future role in the world should be. Young Britons, like myself, who came to maturity in this twilight confusion of austerity, repression, nostalgia, frustration and denial, wanted not only a different world but to be changed themselves.
In 1948, 60 per cent of British people under thirty wanted to emigrate; we wanted to be somewhere else. Hence, as the music historian Jon Savage explains in England’s Dreaming: the Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991), the quasi-religious fervour inspired by the Rock’n’Roll records that fell, like manna from heaven, between 1954 and 1959 on a country that had no tradition of Afro-American music. The unabashed rebellion and sexual explosiveness of these records seemed to promise a new world. They were ‘so transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: “A Wop Bop A Loo Bop”, “Be Bop A Lula”.’ People used to say of a record: ‘It sent me!’ as though they had been magically transported, without any effort of their own, to another place. In the world conjured up by Rock’n’Roll, nobody had to do National Service or listen to endless stories about the war. People could reject the self-sacrifice preached by their parents, live intensely, run wild, have sex, consume freely and ‘do as much as they could as soon as they could’.
This might seem a far cry from the convent. But, in my own way, I shared what Savage calls the ‘first time intensity’ of my generation. The raw, disturbing beat of Rock’n’Roll had penetrated my convent school, even though I was neither able nor equipped to answer its summons. I did not like being a teenage girl in the 1950s. I was awkward, plain, bookish and unpopular with boys. I looked absurd in the fashions of the day: the wide swirling skirts, pert ponytails, and backcombed beehives. In 1961, the year before I entered the convent, my parents tried to entice me from my intended course by talking me into joining a young people’s party at the Birmingham Catholic Ball. It was a ghastly affair. Encased in a stiff brocaded dress, with a skirt that stuck out aggressively, my feet squeezed into an agonizing pair of pink satin shoes with long pointed toes, I was hobbled. On the few occasions when I was invited to dance, and grimly quickstepped, waltzed and fox-trotted with a herd of others, I felt like a prisoner going round and round the exercise yard. At one point, my partner and I left the main room, and for ten blissful minutes managed to escape. We weren’t doing anything unlawful; we weren’t smoking, drinking alcohol or kissing – just sitting on the stairs and talking – but a friend of my mother’s pounced on me and frog-marched me back into the ballroom. I felt like a Victorian girl who had been compromised in some way. There had to be more to life than this.
Of course there were alternatives. We were told that, within reason, we could do anything we wanted: we could study, travel and have a career – until we got married. But even though I shrank from the appalling prospect of being an Old Maid, marriage did not look particularly appealing either, since most of the women I knew spent their lives ceaselessly cleaning, baking and washing, chores that I detest to this day. When my father had business problems, my mother took a job, and started an interesting career in the medical school of Birmingham University. I could see how she blossomed in this new environment, but the cooking and washing-up still had to be done. By contrast, the nuns seemed remarkably unencumbered. They had no men to tell them what to do, they ran their own lives, and were, presumably, concerned with higher things. I wanted that radical freedom.
I was looking for the sort of transformation that others were seeking in Rock’n’Roll, an option that was closed to me. As a convent schoolgirl, I was protected from the street culture, and lived in a separate world from most of my fellow-countrymen and women. In the 1950s, most people in Britain still paid lip-service to religion, but Catholicism was beyond the pale. Its extravagant statues with bleeding hearts and crowns of thorns, its Latinate ritual, its Irish priests, and its orientation to Rome made it highly unBritish, and therefore suspect. Catholics lived in self-imposed ‘ghettoes’: we socialized together, went to separate schools, did not attend Protestant services, and were taught to hold aloof from the ‘non-Catholic’ mainstream. As a result of this upbringing, I think that many of us have never felt entirely English, and continue to feel outsiders in British society. My head was filled with the imagery of Catholicism, with the lives and example of its saints, and the soaring theatre of its liturgy. I too wanted to be ‘sent’, to experience an ecstasy that would lift me to a different dimension, to go to another place, and live more authentically than seemed possible in the world I knew. Like my peers, who loitered menacingly in the El Sombrero coffee bar in Birmingham, I too could reject the values of contemporary society. The cloister seemed a radical and daring solution. So while my peers ‘opted out’ in hippie communes, experimented with mind-altering drugs, or tried to change the world politically, I sought intensity and transformation in the life of a nun.
Needless to say, the convent was not what I expected. I entered in 1962 as an ardent, idealistic, untidy, unrealistic and immature teenager, and left seven years later, having suffered a mild breakdown, obscurely broken and damaged. This was nobody’s fault, even though I assumed that the failure was entirely my own doing. I had embarked on the religious life at a particularly difficult moment, since my superiors were involved in a painful period of change, and were trying to decide what exactly it meant to be a nun in modern society. The Catholic Church was also seeking transformation in the post-war world. During my first few months in the convent, the Second Vatican Council convened in Rome. It had been summoned by Pope John XXIII to fling open the windows of the Church, and let the fresh air of modernity sweep through the musty corridors of the Vatican.
One of the areas tackled by the Council Fathers was the religious life, which urgently needed reform. Many of the orders were stuck in a traditional rut. Customs that had made perfect sense in the nineteenth century, when my own community had been founded, now seemed arbitrary and unnatural. Practices that had no intrinsic spiritual value but were cultural relics of the Victorian age had acquired sacred significance, and change was regarded as betrayal. The Council urged the religious orders to go back to the original spirit of their founders, who had been men and women of insight and imagination, innovators and pioneers, not guardians of the status quo. Nuns and monks should also let the bracing spirit of change invade their cloisters; they should throw out the rubble that had accumulated over the years and craft a new lifestyle that was in tune with the times.
This proved to be a monumentally difficult task. Nuns had to decide what was essential in their Rule, and then translate this into present-day idiom. But they themselves had been shaped by the old regime at a profound level and many found that they could not think in any other way. They could modernize their clothes, but they could not change the habits of their minds and hearts, which had been formed by a training that had been carefully designed in a different world and was meant to last a lifetime. For some, this was a time of great anguish. They saw a cherished way of life disappearing while nothing of equal value was emerging to take its place. I left the religious life in 1969, just ahead of a massive exodus of religious who left their convents and monasteries like flocks of migratory birds during the 1970s. The intense discussions surrounding the reforms had led them to call everything into question, even their own vocation. This, I believe, was a healthy development. The title of my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, comes from a text in St Matthew’s gospel, in which Jesus tells his disciples that ‘only a few’ find the narrow gate that leads to life. By the end of my seven years in the convent, I had come to the conclusion that only a very small number of people could live up to the demands of a life that requires the entire subjugation of the ego and a self-abandonment that, I realized sadly, was beyond me. I knew nuns who beautifully enshrined this ideal, but I realized that I was not of that calibre. I suspect that many of those who left during the 1970s had also faced up to this hard truth.
So I arrived at my convent at a difficult juncture, and would be one of the last people to be trained according to the old system. The reforms set in motion by the Vatican Council came just too late for me. And I experienced the traditional regime at its worst. A young nun in those days had to undergo a long period of intensive training. In my order, we spent the first nine months as postulants, wearing a sober black dress with a little white veil, and practising selected portions of the Rule. The Postulantship was a period of probation, designed to test our resolve, and about half of us dropped out. I must emphasize that there was never any pressure to stay. We all knew that we were free to leave at any time, and often a girl would be sent home because it was clear that she was not suited to convent life.
At the end of the nine months, we received the habit and began two years in the novitiate. This was a particularly testing time, and we were often told that if we did not find it almost unbearable, we were not trying hard enough. My superiors should, therefore, have been delighted with me, because I spent a good deal of my novitiate in tears. As if to fend off unwelcome change, they had appointed a particularly conservative nun as Novice Mistress the year before I arrived. In Through the Narrow Gate, I called her Mother Walter. She was unswervingly devoted to the old ways, and revived many disciplines that her two predecessors had discarded as unsuitable for twentieth-century girls. The system she devised, I now believe, was extremely unhealthy, but I threw myself into it because I was convinced that the harder I found it, the sooner it would bring me to God. Much later I was told that several nuns had been concerned about what was happening in the Noviceship during those years. As I shall explain in the early chapters of this book, the system was a form of conditioning. It was meant to change us irrevocably and it did – in my case, for the worse. I suspect that pressure was brought to bear upon Mother Walter, however, because towards the end of my novitiate, she relaxed some of her draconian innovations. A new batch of novices had arrived who were older and more worldly-wise than my own set and they simply would not put up with some of her more outrageous rules. But again, the change came too late for me.
Yet Mother Walter, too, was undergoing a painful transition, watching the religious practices that she had known and loved for so long thrown aside. It must have been a period of great suffering for her. It would never, of course, have occurred to me at the time but I now suspect that she was not very intelligent, and therefore unable to understand the effect of some of her policies. I remember once that, towards the end of my Noviceship, when she was savaging us for what she regarded as a failure in obedience, I suddenly cracked and told her that I no longer knew what obedience really was. ‘We seem to swing, like a pendulum, from one extreme to another,’ I protested, ‘from one disorder to another! One day we will be told off for not obeying absolutely to the letter, however absurd the command may be, and the next day we’ll be in trouble because we did obey blindly instead of using our intelligence and showing initiative! What are we supposed to do? What is obedience?’ I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow-novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite lost for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before.
Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for five years on 25 August 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that things could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life.
And at first, things did go well. After the Noviceship, we left the Mother House in Sussex and went to London for two further years of training, known as the Scholasticate. During the novitiate, we had concentrated on our spiritual lives. We had spent most of the time learning about prayer and the meaning of our Rule. Ironically, considering my aversion to domesticity, we also spent our days doing simple, manual tasks, though in the second year we had been permitted to read a little theology. In the Scholasticate, however, we began our professional training. Since our order was dedicated to the education of Catholic girls, most of us were destined to become teachers in one of the society’s many schools. I had already completed the matriculation requirements for college, and it was decided that I should now prepare for the competitive entrance examinations to Oxford University, where the order had been sending nuns ever since women had been allowed to take degrees. For the next twelve months, I attended classes and tutorials at a ‘crammer’ near Marble Arch. My subject was to be English Literature. That meant that I had to take two three-hour papers in literature, one paper in English language and philology, two translation papers – one in Latin and the other in French – and a paper on topics of general interest. I loved it. I am a natural student and like nothing better than immersing myself in a pile of books. After the years of dreary domestic toil, I was in heaven. I also took a correspondence course in theology, scripture and church history.
In the autumn of 1966, I sat the entrance examinations for St Anne’s College, Oxford, passed the first round, was summoned to interview, and to my own and my superiors’ intense delight, succeeded in winning a place. In 1967, the Scholasticate completed, I arrived at Cherwell Edge in South Parks Road, the Oxford convent of my order, to begin my university studies. And my life fell apart.
Intellectually, everything was fine. I lived at the convent, but attended lectures and tutorials with the other students and did very well. I got a distinction in the preliminary examinations, which we sat in the spring of 1968, won a University Prize, and was awarded a college scholarship. So far, so good. But as a religious, I felt torn in two. My elderly superior was bitterly opposed to the new ideas, and I fought her tooth and nail throughout the entire year. I am sure that I was quite insufferable, but I found it well-nigh impossible to think logically and accurately in college, where I was encouraged to question everything, and then turn off the critical faculty I was developing when I returned to Cherwell Edge, and become a docile young nun. The stringent academic training I was receiving at the university was changing me at just as profound a level as the religious formation of the Noviceship, and the two systems seemed to be irreconcilable. I was also increasingly distressed by the emotional frigidity of our lives. This was one of the areas of convent life that most desperately needed reform. Friendship was frowned upon and the atmosphere in the convent was cold and sometimes unkind. Increasingly, it seemed to me to have moved an immeasurably long distance from the spirit of the gospels.
Nevertheless, I struggled grimly on. To say that I did not want to leave would be an understatement. The very idea of returning to secular life filled me with dread. At first, I could not even contemplate this option, which was surrounded with all the force of a taboo. But the strain took its toll and in the summer of 1968 I broke down completely. It was now clear to us all that I could not continue. Everybody was wonderfully kind to me at the end and, in a sense, this made it even more distressing. It would have been so much easier to storm out in a blaze of righteous anger. But my superiors let me take as long as I needed to make my decision. I returned to college, and after a term of heart-searching, I applied for a dispensation from my vows, which arrived from Rome at the end of January 1969.
Writing Through the Narrow Gate some twelve years later was a salutary experience. It made me confront the past and I learned a great deal. Most importantly I realized how precious and formative this period of my life had been, and that, despite my problems, I would not have missed it for the world. Then I attempted a sequel: Beginning the World was published in 1983. It is the worst book I have ever written and I am thankful to say that it has long been out of print.
As its title suggests, this second volume attempted to tell the story of my return to secular life. But it was far too soon to write about those years, which had been extremely painful, even traumatic. I had scarcely begun to recover and was certainly not ready to see this phase of my life in perspective. Yet there was another reason for the failure of Beginning the World. At almost the exact moment when I sent the manuscript off to the publishers, my life changed completely in a most unexpected way. I started on an entirely new course, which took me off in a direction that I could never have anticipated. As a result, the years 1969 to 1982, which I had tried to describe in this memoir, took on a wholly different meaning. In that first, ill-conceived sequel, I had tried to show that I had put the convent completely behind me, had erased the damage, and completed the difficult rite of passage to a wholly secular existence. I had indeed ‘begun the world’.
But I had done no such thing. As I am going to try to show this time around, I have never managed to integrate fully with ‘the world’, although I have certainly tried to do so. Despite my best endeavours, I have in several important ways remained an outsider. I was much closer to the truth at the end of Through the Narrow Gate, when I predicted that I would in some sense be a nun all my life. Of course, it is true that, in superficial ways, my present life is light years away from my convent experience. I have dear friends, a pretty house and money. I travel, have a lot of fun and enjoy the good things of life. Nothing nunnish about any of this. But although I tried a number of different careers, doors continually slammed in my face until I settled down to my present solitary existence, writing, thinking and talking almost all day and every day about God, religion and spirituality. In this book I have tried to show how this came about and what it has meant.
As soon as it was published, I realized that Beginning the World had been a mistake and that I would probably have to rewrite it one day. It was not a truthful account. This was not because the events I recounted did not happen, but because the book did not tell the whole story. The publishers were concerned that I should not come across as an intellectual. So I had to leave out any kind of ‘learned’ reflection. There could be no talk of books or poems, for example, and certainly no theological discussion about the nature of God or the purpose of prayer. I should stick to external events to make the story dramatic and accessible. I was also told to present myself in as positive and lively a light as possible, and, as I was still very unsure of myself as a writer, and assumed that my publishers knew what they were doing, I went along with this. But most importantly, I wanted this cheery self-portrait to be true. It was, therefore, an exercise in wish-fulfilment, and, predictably, the result was quite awful. Today I can hardly bear to look at Beginning the World, which has a hearty, boisterous and relentlessly extrovert tone. It is like reading my life story as told by Ruby Wax.
The reality was very different. During those years, I did in fact live a great deal inside my head, and approached the world largely through the medium of books and ideas. To an extent, I still do. And I was not a lively, positive girl. Much of the time, I was withdrawn, bitter, weary, frightened and ill. And while I was writing Beginning the World, I was particularly scared – with good reason, because, yet again, my latest career had collapsed, and the future looked most uncertain. The book was badly conceived, and could be nothing but a distortion of an important and ultimately valuable period of my life.
And so I have decided to try again. We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter. Reviewing my own story has made me marvel at the way it all turned out. I am now glad that after all I did not simply ‘begin the world’. Something more interesting happened instead – at least, I think so. T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, a sequence of six poems that trace the process of spiritual recovery, has been central to my journey. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent. Catholics have ashes sprinkled on their foreheads to remind them of their mortality, because it is only when we have become fully aware of the frailty that is inherent in our very nature that we can begin our quest. During Lent, Christians embark on six weeks of penitence and reflection that lead to the rebirth of Easter – a life that we could not possibly have imagined at the outset.
In Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and phrases, apparently making little headway, but pushing steadily forwards nevertheless. My own life has progressed in the same way. For years it seemed a hard Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter. I toiled round and round in pointless circles, covering the same ground, repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going. Yet all the time, without realizing it, I was slowly climbing out of the darkness. In mythology, stairs frequently symbolize a breakthrough to a new level of consciousness. For a long time, I assumed that I had finished with religion for ever, yet, in the end, the strange and seemingly arbitrary revolutions of my life led me to the kind of transformation that, I now believe, was what I had been seeking all those years ago when I packed my suitcase, entered my convent and set off to find God.
Note: Some of the characters in this memoir have their own names. Those who prefer anonymity have pseudonyms.
1 ASH WEDNESDAY (#ulink_35d35e33-954e-5f21-bb46-6d6d613c630e)
I was late.
That in itself was a novelty. It was a dark, gusty evening in February 1969, only a few weeks after I had left the religious life, where we had practised the most stringent punctuality. At the first sound of the convent bell announcing the next meal or a period of meditation in the chapel, we had to lay down our work immediately, stopping a conversation in the middle of a word or leaving the sentence we were writing half-finished. The Rule which governed our lives down to the smallest detail taught us that the bell should be regarded as the voice of God, calling each one of us to a fresh encounter, no matter how trivial or menial the task in hand. Each moment of our day was therefore a sacrament, because it was ordained by the religious order, which was in turn sanctioned by the Church, the Body of Christ on earth. So for years it had become second nature for me to jump to attention whenever the bell tolled, because it really was tolling for me. If I obeyed the rule of punctuality, I kept telling myself, one day I would develop an interior attitude of waiting permanently on God, perpetually conscious of his loving presence. But that had never happened to me.
When I had received the papers from the Vatican that dispensed me from my vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, I was halfway through my undergraduate degree. I could, therefore, simply move into my college, and carry on with my studies as though nothing had happened. The very next day, I was working on my weekly essay, like any other Oxford student. I was studying English literature, and though I had been at university for nearly eighteen months, to be able to plunge heart and soul into a book was still an unbelievable luxury. Some of my superiors had regarded poetry and novels with suspicion, and saw literature as a form of self-indulgence, but now I could read anything I wanted, and during those first confusing weeks of my return to secular life, study was a source of delight and a real consolation for all that I had lost.
So that evening, when at 7.20 I heard the college bell summoning the students to dinner, I did not lay down my pen, close my books neatly and walk obediently to the dining hall. My essay had to be finished in time for my tutorial the following morning, and I was working on a crucial paragraph. There seemed no point in breaking my train of thought. This bell was not the voice of God, but simply a convenience. It was not inviting me to a meeting with God. Indeed, God was no longer calling me to anything at all – if he ever had. This time last year, even the smallest, most mundane job had sacred significance. Now all that was over. Instead of each duty being a momentous occasion, nothing seemed to matter very much at all.
As I hurried across the college garden to the dining hall, I realized with a certain wry amusement that my little gesture of defiance had occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. That morning, the nuns would have knelt at the altar rail to receive their smudge of ash, as the priest muttered: ‘Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’ This memento mori began a period of religious observance that was even more intense than usual. Right now, in the convent refectory, the nuns would be lining up to perform special public penances in reparation for their faults. The sense of effort and determination to achieve a greater level of perfection than ever before would be almost tangible, and this was the day on which I had deliberately opted to be late for dinner!
As I pushed back the heavy glass door, I was confronted with a very different scene from the one I had just been imagining. The noise alone was an assault, as the unrestrained, babbling roar of four hundred students slapped me in the face. To encourage constant prayer and recollection, our Rule had stipulated that we refrain from speech all day; talking was permitted only for an hour after lunch and after dinner when the community had gathered for sewing and general recreation. We were trained to walk quietly, to open and close doors as silently as possible, to laugh in a restrained trill, and, if speech was unavoidable in the course of our duties, to speak only ‘a few words in a low voice’. Lent was an especially silent time. But there was no Lenten atmosphere in college tonight. Students hailed one another noisily across the room, yelled greetings to friends, and argued vigorously, with wild, exaggerated gestures. Instead of the monochrome convent scene, black and white habits, muffled, apologetic clinking of cutlery, and the calm, expressionless voice of the reader, there was a riot of colour, bursts of exuberant laughter and shouts of protest. But, whether I liked it or not, this was my world now.
I am not quite sure of the reason for what happened next. It may have been that part of my mind was absent, still grappling with my essay, or that I was disoriented by the contrast between the convent scene I had been envisaging and the cheerful profanity of the spectacle in front of me. But instead of bowing briefly to the Principal in mute apology for my lateness, as college etiquette demanded, I found to my horror that I had knelt down and kissed the floor.
This was the scene with which I opened Beginning the World, my first attempt to tell the story of my return to secular life. I realize that it presents me in a ridiculous and undignified light, but it still seems a good place to start, because it was a stark illustration of my plight. Outwardly I probably looked like any other student in the late 1960s, but I continued to behave like a nun. Unless I exerted constant vigilance, my mind, heart and body betrayed me. Without giving it a second’s thought, I had instinctively knelt in the customary attitude of contrition and abasement. We always kissed the floor when we entered a room late and disturbed a community duty. This had seemed strange at first, but after a few weeks it had become second nature. Yet a quick glance at the girls seated at the tables next to the door, who were staring at me incredulously, reminded me that what was normal behaviour in the convent appeared to be little short of deranged out here. As I rose to my feet, cold with embarrassment, I realized that my reactions were entirely different from those of most of my contemporaries in this strange new world. Perhaps they always would be.
There may have been another reason why I kissed the ground that evening. Ever since my dispensation had come through, many of my fellow-students and tutors had made a point of congratulating me. ‘You must be so relieved to be out of all that!’ one of them had said. ‘It never seemed quite right for you.’ ‘How exciting!’ others had exclaimed. ‘You can start all over again! You can do anything, be anything you want to be! Everything is ahead of you!’ It was true, in a sense: now I could fall in love, wear beautiful clothes, travel, make a lot of money – all the things that, most people assumed, I had been yearning to do for the past seven years. But I didn’t feel excited or relieved. I didn’t want to do any of the things that people expected. I had no sense of boundless opportunity. Instead, I felt, quite simply, sad, and was constantly wracked by a very great regret. When I pictured that dedicated Lenten scene in the convent, it seemed unbearably poignant because it was now closed to me for ever. I mourned the loss of an ideal and the absence of dedication from my new life, and I also had a nagging suspicion that if only I had tried just a little bit harder, I would not have had to leave. There had been something missing in me. I had failed to make a gift of myself to God. And so I felt like a penitent and, perhaps, when I kissed the floor that night, I had unconsciously wanted – just once – to appear in my true colours to the rest of the world.
In Beginning the World I described how I had threaded my way through the tables, flinching from the curious gaze of the other students, until I was rescued by a group who had become my friends and who had kept a kindly but tactful eye on me during the past difficult weeks. There was Rosemary, a cheerful extrovert, who was reading modern languages; Fiona, a gentler, more thoughtful girl; her constant companion Pat, who had been a pupil at one of the boarding schools run by my order; and finally Jane, who was also reading English. All were Catholics. All had some experience of nuns. Jane retained a great fondness for the kindly semi-enclosed sisters at her rather exclusive school. Pat had actually known me as a nun, since I had been sent to help out at her school in Harrogate. There were other people at the table for whom Catholicism and convents were alien territory and who clearly intended to keep it that way. In Beginning the World, I made them all tease me good-naturedly about my gaffe, question me about convent life and express shock and horror at such customs as kissing the floor, confessing faults in public and performing elaborate penances in the refectory. Maybe there was some discussion along these lines; certainly people were curious, up to a point. But I doubt that anybody was really very interested.
These young women had been quite wonderful to me. It had been Rosemary, Fiona and Pat who had marched me down to Marks and Spencer a couple of hours after my dispensation had come through and helped me to buy my first secular clothes. Rosemary had cut and styled my hair and all three had escorted me to dinner, my first public appearance as a defrocked nun. But they were probably wary of prying too closely into the reasons for what they could see had been a traumatic decision. I certainly had no desire to discuss the matter with them. In the convent we had been carefully trained never to tell our troubles to one another and it would never have occurred to me to unburden myself to my peers. And these girls had their own concerns. They too had essays to write; they were falling in love, and trying to juggle the demands of concentrated academic work with those of an absorbing social life. They were making their own journeys into adulthood, and now that the drama of my exodus was over, they almost certainly assumed that I was happily revelling in my new freedom, and were content to leave well alone.
I also knew that they could not begin to imagine my convent existence. Occasionally one of them would express astonishment if I inadvertently let something slip. ‘My nuns weren’t a bit like that!’ Jane would insist stoutly. ‘Your lot must have been abnormally strict.’ Pat would look even more bewildered, because she and I had lived with exactly the same community, but her perspective, as a secular, was different. ‘They were so modern and up-to-date, even sophisticated!’ she would protest. ‘They drove cars, were starting to go to the cinema again, and were changing the habit!’ Both girls would look at me reproachfully, because I was spoiling a cherished memory. Nobody likes to be told that things were not as they imagined. But I was quite certain that my own order had not been particularly austere, and agreed with Pat that it had been far more enlightened than many. Most nuns had observed these arcane rituals, had kissed the ground, confessed their external faults to one another, and were forbidden to have what were known as ‘particular friendships’, since all love must be given to God. That was why the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were so necessary.
I also knew that, taken out of context, such practices as kissing the floor or reciting the Lord’s Prayer five times, with your arms in the form of a cross, would seem sensationalist, exaggerated and histrionic. But in reality they became as normal to us as breathing, a routine part of our lives, sometimes even a little tedious. To speak of these things outside the convent would give a false impression. I had not left the convent because we had to do public penance, but because I had failed to find God and had never come within shouting distance of that complete self-surrender which, the great spiritual writers declared, was essential for those who wished to enter into the divine presence.
