So I did not speak of my old life to anybody and most people assumed that I had, therefore, simply put the past behind me.
‘Much better out than in,’ Miss Griffiths, my Anglo-Saxon tutor said decisively, as we sat in her elegant college rooms drinking sherry one evening. ‘You look much better out of that habit, my lamb. And, you know, however things turn out in the future, I’m certain you made the correct decision. If you come back to me in fifteen years’ time and say “Look, five children and a divorce!” I shall still say that you were right to leave.’
This, of course, was quite true. There had been no other option. But as I looked around at the richly coloured William Morris curtains, the massive bookcases, and the oriental rug in front of the fire, I felt entirely out of my element. Every item of furniture, down to the tasteful ornaments glinting on the marble mantelpiece and the cunningly arranged lamps, had been designed for comfort and pleasure. In the convent, everything had been pared down to essentials: scrubbed floorboards, uncurtained windows, starkly positioned tables and chairs. Each was a perpetual reminder of how we too were to be stripped inwardly of any lingering attachment to the world, to people and to material objects, if we were to be worthy of God. Nevertheless, it was nice here, I reflected, the sherry blurring the room in a golden glow. Perhaps I could become a don one day, and have a pretty room like this, piled high with books. Perhaps I could dedicate myself to scholarship, as I had once devoted myself to the disciplines of the religious life.
My tutors’ comfortable, peaceful rooms increasingly seemed a haven. As I walked around Oxford, I realized that the world had undergone radical change while I had been inside. I had begun my Postulantship in 1962, just before the sexual, social and political upheavals of the 1960s. In the 50s, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties; and girls were clad in demure twinsets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. The dangers of premarital sex had been burned into my soul. And, indeed, before the contraceptive pill, it was a risky enterprise for girls. But all that had clearly changed. Girls and boys walked with their arms casually slung around one another, in ways that might or might not be sexual. Some embraced languorously in public places. They certainly did not subscribe to the old shibboleths, though I knew that my Catholic friends still agonized about how far they could go without falling into mortal sin. But the demeanour of these young people was even more startling. They had long flowing hair instead of the tidy repressed bobs of my youth. The neat sweaters and ties had been thrown out. Their attire was careless, ragged and often eccentric – flowered or ruffled shirts for the men, evening dress worn with jaunty insouciance in the middle of the day; the girls wore skirts that barely covered their thighs or long, flowing, vaguely eastern robes.
Above all, they were confident. I had just come from an institution in which young people were required to be absolutely obedient and submissive. We were never supposed to call attention to ourselves, never to question or criticize established custom, and, if you were invited to address your elders, you did so with deference and courtesy that bordered on the obsequious. We knelt down when we spoke to our superiors to remind ourselves that they stood in the place of God. These young people, however, seemed openly and unashamedly rebellious. They protested, noisily and vociferously. They even took part in events called ‘demonstrations’, where they publicly aired their grievances, a concept that could not have been more alien to me. What on earth were they trying to demonstrate? What had they got to be so angry about?
This was the spring of 1969, and I now realize that, on the international stage, the weeks that had elapsed since my departure from the convent had been momentous. Richard Nixon had been inaugurated as President of the United States, Yasser Arafat had been elected chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and a military coup had taken place in Pakistan. Palestinian terrorists had attacked an Israeli airliner at Zurich airport; Nixon had authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia, and Soviet and Chinese forces had clashed on the Manchurian border. I knew nothing of this. I had never heard of either Nixon or Arafat, and would have had difficulty in locating either Cambodia or Manchuria on the map. In the convent, we had not kept abreast of current events. In the novitiate, indeed, we did not even see newspapers. We were told of the Cuban missile crisis, which occurred a few weeks after I entered, but our superiors forgot to tell us that the conflict had been resolved, so we spent three whole weeks in terror, hourly expecting the outbreak of World War Three. Mother Walter also told us about the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Catholic president. Later, this strict embargo on the news was mitigated somewhat, but in general political interest was frowned upon. As a result, I entered the secular world completely ignorant of the problems of our time, and because I lacked basic information, could not make head or tail of the newspapers. What I needed was a crash course in the current political scene, but this was not available, and I felt so ashamed of my ignorance that I did not dare to ask questions that would have revealed its abysmal depths.
As it happened, there were students at my college who would have been delighted to take my education in hand, because St Anne’s was probably the most politically-minded of all the five women’s colleges. This was, of course, the great period of student unrest. In January, while I was preparing to leave my convent, the Czech student Jan Palach had publicly burned himself to death to protest Soviet occupation, and in Spain student disturbances had led to the imposition of martial law. In April, left-wing students at Cornell University in New York State staged a three-day ‘sit-in’ to draw attention to their outdated curriculum, while at Harvard, three hundred students occupied the campus administration building, and were forcibly removed by the police. Oxford was also aflame with revolutionary enthusiasm. But the ringleaders looked absolutely terrifying to me – unapproachable in their righteous rage. I would as soon have approached a charging bull, as expose my political naïveté to them
Almost every Saturday afternoon, I watched in bewilderment as crowds of students gathered on the college lawn, carrying placards emblazoned with slogans directed against the government, the university authorities, the syllabus, and something mysteriously called ‘The System’. They seemed furious about everything. I heard astonishing reports of violent meetings in the English Faculty Library, where undergraduates screamed abuse at the dons. They demanded that the formidable linguistic requirements of the course be scrapped, that the syllabus include contemporary literature (it currently stopped at 1900), and that the study of Anglo-Saxon be abolished. To me, who had fallen passionately in love with Old English literature, this rage was incomprehensible. When I heard some of my fellow-students at St Anne’s inveighing against the ‘tyranny’ of the dons, I gazed at them nonplussed. After the draconian atmosphere of the convent, the mildly liberal, laissez-faire atmosphere of St Anne’s seemed like paradise to me. These kids didn’t know what tyranny was! But then I remembered my last painful year in the convent, when I had been the rebel, and had argued relentlessly with my superior about the Rule. I had also been full of rage, constantly frustrated by the convent ‘Establishment’, and passionately eager for change. Perhaps I was not so different from my contemporaries, after all. We had just been fighting in different wars.
Willy-nilly, I found myself drawn into the climate of protest. Somewhat to my astonishment, I had been approached the previous term, while still a nun, and asked if I would let my name go forward as a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the Junior Common Room committee. I had been reluctant – a humiliating defeat seemed inevitable – but my supporters were insistent and it seemed churlish to refuse. For a couple of weeks I slunk past the noticeboard, wincing at the sight of my photograph, complete with veil and crucifix, beside those of my wild-haired rivals. What student in her right mind would vote for me? I looked like a creature from another planet. I scarcely dared to approach the noticeboard on the morning after the election, but, amazed, I saw the same photograph prominently displayed, informing the college that I was now the secretary of the Common Room.
So now I found that, whether I liked it or not, I was being drawn into student politics. I had to attend protest meetings in the JCR, and take part in intense committee discussions about how to bring St Anne’s into line with the 60s. The most pressing issue was cohabitation in the colleges. Until the early twentieth century, women had not been permitted to attend the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It was assumed that the effort of studying to the same level as men would blow their inferior little brains to smithereens. But some women had refused to accept this exclusion, had set up colleges of their own, and the university had eventually accepted them. The five women’s colleges of Oxford had been a Trojan Horse, smuggling the weaker sex into the male preserve of academia, but now, some believed, their day was over. All the colleges should be open to both sexes. Men should be allowed to come to St Anne’s and women should be admitted to the prestigious male colleges of Magdalen or Balliol.
The present arrangements did not penalize women educationally. All students attended exactly the same lectures and took the same examinations. Men and women competed against one another on equal terms. The college could arrange for us to study with any tutor of our choice. Fellows of St John’s and Merton had taught me, for example, and the St Anne’s Fellows, especially in the English department, which had an exceptional reputation, tutored male students. In fact, the women’s colleges often had a higher rate of academic success: because there were fewer places for women, the standard of those selected at the entrance examinations tended to be higher. During my years at Oxford, St Anne’s regularly came top of the Norrington Scale, the league tables which charted the performance of undergraduates in the final examinations. By the 1960s, therefore, women had proved that they were quite capable of holding their own in the university.
So to many, mixed-sex colleges seemed the next logical step. But that might take time. Women, for example, would require better bathroom facilities than the gruesome arrangements in the men’s colleges. But as a preliminary, students all over the university were demanding that the ‘Gate Hours’ be abolished. We all had to be in college by midnight, and visitors were obliged to write their names in a book at the Porter’s Lodge, and sign out before the gates were closed. Of course, people disregarded these ‘Gate Hours’. There were several places where it was very easy to climb over the college wall; everybody knew this and most turned a blind eye. If somebody were caught, he or she would suffer a mild reprimand and pay a small fine. But in these heady days of revolution, these rules seemed absurd to the more radical and, in my new official capacity, I had to attend heated meetings in which students and dons argued about them. As far as I was concerned, the question was wholly academic. There was no man clamouring to spend the night in my small college room, and the possibility of my climbing over the college wall after a love tryst was about as remote as my scaling the Great Wall of China. Moreover, until a few weeks before, I had been a very visible representative of an institution that condemned all sex outside marriage as gravely sinful.
But those days were over. I still regarded myself as a Catholic, but I was aware that its traditional teachings on sexual matters had become extremely controversial within the Church itself. Some of the nuns had been devastated the previous summer when Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae had outlawed the practice of artificial contraception. In one of our convents, I had heard, one of the more adventurous nuns had caused a minor sensation, on the morning after the papal ruling, by putting a pill (a mere aspirin, of course) on each of the sisters’ breakfast plates. Nuns naturally had no personal stake in the Pope’s decision, but the encyclical had become symbolic of the authoritarian government of the Church: by ignoring the advice of married couples, doctors and psychologists in order to reassert the Church’s traditional position, Paul VI seemed to be withdrawing from the new spirit of the Vatican Council, retreating yet again from the laity, and turning his back on the plight of those married couples who were loyal Catholics but who wanted to limit their families responsibly. The Catholic Church was undergoing its own sexual revolution, but most of those who campaigned against Humanae Vitae would not have condoned the use of the contraceptive pill by unmarried people and many of them would have expected me to take a strong line on the ‘Gate Hours’ issue and speak up for good Catholic values. A few weeks earlier, I would probably have done this without hesitation.
Now, though, I was no longer an official representative of the Catholic Church, and while I listened to the arguments from the Common Room floor, I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I felt no desire to support those students who fought against the abolition of the ‘Gate Hours’ on Christian grounds. My indifference was in part the result of an anxious preoccupation with my own personal drama. I was drained and exhausted by the events of the past few weeks, and had little energy to spare for this battle. But there was more to it than that. When I thought about the issue, I found only a question mark where the old conviction should have been. I had experienced this time and again recently; it seemed as though I had discarded a good deal of my old religious self when I had taken off my habit. Beliefs and principles that I had taken so completely for granted that they seemed part of my very being now appeared strangely abstract and remote. In fact, I reflected uneasily, I did not seem to think or feel anything very strongly any more.
I had now been studying at Oxford for nearly eighteen months, and for two years before that I had been preparing for the rigorous entrance examinations to the university. Academia had its own disciplines that were as exacting in their own way as those of the convent. One of these was already ingrained in my heart and mind: do not pronounce on subjects that you know nothing about. I had now acquired a healthy respect for the limits of my own knowledge and expertise. One of the chief effects of my education so far had been an acute consciousness of everything that I did not know. What did I know about sex? I asked myself during the explosive Common Room debates. What did I know about men, relationships or love? What did I know about the brave new world of the 60s? I knew nothing at all, and was not, therefore, entitled to an opinion. And, remembering my own protests against an outworn system only a few months earlier, I felt that I should listen carefully to those who demanded change. In the meantime, there seemed no need for me to contribute.
I was not allowed to remain on the sidelines, however. The college had appointed a new Dean of Discipline. For years Dorothy Bednarowska, my literature tutor, whose approach had been liberal and relaxed, had filled this post. The new Dean was Emily Franklin, a large, bovine woman who, I learned with some astonishment, was only a few years older than I. Her pupils told me that she was a fine teacher, if a trifle dull. But despite her relative youth, Miss Franklin had no time for student protest, and had decreed that not only would there be no change in the current ‘Gate Hours’, but that the gates would be locked an hour earlier. Furthermore, she had increased the fines for offenders, and, as her pièce de résistance, a barbed-wire hedge had appeared, without warning, underneath the favourite climbing-in spot. The college was in an uproar.
‘Of course, this is quite absurd’, Mrs Bednarowska said, drawing me aside one day in the corridor. ‘The silly woman is out of her mind. The Virgin Vote will be delighted, but it won’t wash.’
‘The Virgin Vote?’ I asked.
‘Oh – the conservative wing on the college governing body,’ Mrs Bednarowska replied. ‘You know who they are! They’re not all virgins, of course, but they might as well be. Anyway, the point is, my dear, what is the Common Room going to do about this?’
‘We’re sending a deputation to the Dean, asking her to reconsider,’ I said, a little dazed by my tutor’s assumption that I would take the liberal line.
Mrs Bednarowska gave her characteristic yelp of laughter. ‘That won’t work – though it’s very correct, of course,’ she opined, as she strode off with her curiously splay-footed gait to her rooms.
What I had not realized was that, as Secretary, I was expected to go with the president of the JCR to put our views to Miss Franklin. Maureen Mackintosh, a clever girl with masses of long red hair, was one of the most politically radical students in college, and I found her distinctly alarming. I always expected her to treat me with disdain, and dreaded lest she strike up a conversation about Vietnam and Cambodia in which I would certainly not be able to hold my own. And what on earth was an ex-nun doing campaigning for students to spend illicit nights together? To my relief, however, Maureen seemed untroubled by my presence as we set off for Miss Franklin’s apartment. We sat together, side by side, on a sofa in the Dean’s room, drinking tiny glasses of sherry in an atmosphere that was distinctly chilly, while the champion of the Virgin Vote sat with her back to the window, her cat Smokey purring noisily on her knee.
‘No more concessions!’ she replied, when we formally requested that the new measures be withdrawn and the wire fence removed. She repeated the phrase like a mantra at intervals during the ensuing discussion, almost chanting it in a strangely expressionless falsetto. ‘No more concessions!’
This irritated me. ‘You can’t call these “concessions”,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ve taken away rights that have already been given to us. We’re simply asking for a return to the status quo. Not for concessions.’
I might as well have kept my mouth shut. ‘No more concessions,’ Miss Franklin repeated.
‘The Common Room won’t accept this, Miss Franklin,’ Maureen replied sternly. ‘If you don’t at least restore the old “Gate Hours”, we shall have to take action. And that barbed wire is extremely dangerous. You didn’t warn us. Somebody could have been seriously injured.’
‘Then she – or he – would only have themselves to blame,’ Miss Franklin retorted smoothly. ‘You are here to be educated, not to indulge in unlicensed sex at all hours. Nor to organize childish demonstrations, at the expense of your studies.’
Maureen sighed, and again I felt indignant. The remark was entirely uncalled for. Maureen’s political activities certainly did not interfere with her work. She had recently won one of the highly coveted and prestigious Kennedy Scholarships for postgraduate study in the United States, and was going to Berkeley, which, I gathered, was the new Mecca for 60s revolutionaries. ‘I can only repeat,’ she persisted, with admirable self-control, ‘that the Common Room will have to take action.’
‘No more concessions!’ Miss Franklin sang implacably, turning away from us to give her attention to Smokey, and crooning endearments in his ear as he tried to climb over her ample bosom to the windowsill. I studied her with perplexity. All my life I had accepted the fact that some opinions were right and others wrong. And yet how deeply unattractive such a stance could be. Nothing we could say would cause Miss Franklin a moment’s doubt. Her mind was closed to any other possibility. She reminded me of those virginal saints in the Catholic legends who were utterly impermeable: wild beasts fell back from them in terror; swords could not pierce their invulnerable flesh; even when they were thrust into brothels, they proved impenetrable. They seemed to be surrounded by an invisible shield, a barricade that preserved them in a world of their own. In the convent we had sung hymns to the Virgin Mary, which compared her to a ‘garden enclosed’ or ‘a well sealed up’. I had been proud to take my vow of chastity, but I knew that right now I was no longer on the same side as the Virgin Vote.
I turned to Maureen inquiringly. She nodded and rose to her feet. ‘I don’t think we have anything more to say to one another,’ she said.
That night, under cover of darkness, I accompanied Maureen and a group of other students to the college wall. Each of us carried a pair of wire-clippers. Grimly and methodically we demolished the barbed-wire fence, and deposited it in a heap of ten-inch fragments on the lawn outside Miss Franklin’s window. I seemed to have thrown in my lot with the sexual revolution.
But a few days later, when I went to my first party, I was not quite so sure. Yet again, when I walked into the murky, smoke-filled room, the noise almost knocked me sideways. The parties I had attended before the convent had been sedate, elderly affairs. Under the benign but hawk-like gaze of our elders, we had lurched around the room in pairs, trying to match our faltering steps to the polite strains of waltzes and quicksteps. Bored, I had to admit, almost to stupefaction. But nobody seemed bored here, I noted, as I groped my way uncertainly to a corner where I had spotted Jane with her boyfriend Mark and accepted a glass of wine. I sipped it gratefully, hoping it might have some anaesthetic effect, as I stared, dazed, at the scene before me. The room was as dark as an underground cavern, the gloom relieved periodically by flickering lights that transformed us all into granite-hued hags. Jane’s skin looked blanched, her lips black. On the other side of the room, I could see Pat and Fiona, their pretty, fresh faces also drained of colour, their animated expressions curiously at variance with their corpse-like pallor.
‘You look stunned.’ Mark, a tall, solemn young man with the regular good looks of a male model, bent towards me solicitously. He had to shout above the din of a jangled crashing that I was trying to identify as music. Amplified male voices screamed, guitars thrummed, cymbals clashed and, beneath it all, a drum beat a primitive, disturbing pulse.
‘No. No, not at all,’ I yelled back, politely. It would have been so much easier, I now realize, if I had admitted how strange this new world appeared to me, had shared my confusion and dismay and let people in. But I seemed quite unable to do this. In my own way, I was quite as impenetrable as Miss Franklin or any Virgin Martyr. I wanted people to believe that I was taking it all in my stride and that leaving a convent was as easy as falling off a log. I didn’t want to be the object of pity or curiosity, and the convent habit of reticence was now almost reflexive. I tried to take an intelligent interest. ‘Who are the singers?’
With a unanimity that was almost comical, Jane and Mark both did a double-take. ‘The Beatles, of course!’ Jane exclaimed. And then, as I continued to look blank, she added, a little more tentatively: ‘You have heard of the Beatles, haven’t you?’
I had. Just. My sister had mentioned the group to me on one of her visits, and the name had cropped up occasionally in the conversation of my fellow-students. But even though it was now 1969, I had no idea who the Beatles really were, no notion of their extraordinary impact on British society during the 60s, had never encountered Beatlemania, and had certainly never knowingly heard a note of their music. Jane and Mark tried to explain to me what the Beatles meant for their generation, but I took little in. I could see that they were slightly alarmed by my ignorance. Jane was looking at me thoughtfully, though I made her laugh when I asked, in some perplexity, why the band was named after those rather unpleasant black insects. On my other side, Mark was reciting the lyrics, which shocked me by their unabashed expression of naked need: ‘Love, Love Me Do!’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand!’, ‘Please, Please Me!’ I could not even have admitted to myself that I had such needs, let alone shouted my yearnings aloud in such wild abandonment. Yet the words touched some raw place within me, making me aware of my loneliness in this crowded room. All around me I noticed feet tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words of the songs, glances exchanged as though a phrase had a special private significance. The Beatles were a current that united everybody at the party; a thread that bound the room together. They were the spokesmen of their generation, but even though they must have been about my own age, they could not speak for me. I was present at the party, but only as an outsider. The ease and confidence with which the Beatles simply said what they wanted appalled me, and yet I longed to be able to do the same. Even today, more than thirty years later, when I have come to appreciate their real genius, I find their songs almost unbearably poignant. Those desires had been schooled out of me, and yet the painfully direct appeal of the lyrics made me realize that I wished that I had them. I felt my throat swell with unshed tears: ‘All You Need Is Love’.
But love in this context? I stared bemused at the dancers. These new acquaintances of mine had obviously never heard of the quickstep. Instead, they were leaping, twisting, gyrating together in pairs. Some even danced singly, and no one followed any predetermined pattern. They shot into the air, waved their arms, swung out legs at odd angles. Doing what came naturally. But it was not natural for me. For a second I felt a pang of pure envy. I would love to be able to do that, I thought, and to be so wild, uninhibited and free. These students were living fully and intensely, in a way that I could not. When Mark, kindly, asked me if I would like to dance, I shook my head. I could no more fling myself around like that than fly.
For years, I had been trained in absolute physical restraint. Nuns had to walk smoothly, at a moderate pace. Unless there was some dire emergency, they must never run. At first all this had been difficult. Most of us were young and it was hard to quench the impulse to run upstairs, two steps at a time, or to hurry to a class when late. But gradually I had learned to keep myself in check. I had, however, never fully mastered these rules of ‘religious modesty’ which were supposed to regulate a nun’s demeanour. I was, and am, clumsy and badly coordinated. I never quite achieved the noiseless, gliding carriage of some of my fellow-novices, and I was always hopeless at ‘custody of the eyes’, the quaintly named monastic habit of keeping one’s gaze fixed on the ground. I like to know what is happening, and if I heard an unusual noise or somebody entering the room, I found it almost impossible not to check it out. I was often reprimanded for staring boldly at my superiors, instead of casting my eyes down humbly. I did not mean to be disrespectful, but I had been brought up to look people directly in the eye when I spoke to them. Yet for all these failings, some of this convent discipline had rubbed off on me, and to this day I have never been able to dance. I have often fantasized about being a disco-girl, imagining an alternative Karen, able to leap about, let go, and disappear into the music. It must be a marvellous feeling. But it has never been possible. At a very impressionable age, my body was schooled in quite other rhythms and it has, for better or worse, taken the print.
As I watched the dancers, I felt completely out of my element. I could see that this kind of dancing was unabashedly sexual. It reminded me of the ceremonial dances performed by Africans that I had seen occasionally on documentaries or newsreels. It was interesting, but had nothing to do with me. I tried to look nonchalant and at ease, but felt miserably that I must look as out of place as the Queen, in her suburban, matronly clothes, carrying her ubiquitous handbag like a shield, staring with a glazed smile at the ritual dances performed in her honour during a tour of the Commonwealth. I had found, to my considerable sorrow, that even though I no longer belonged in the convent, I didn’t belong out here either.
Looking back, I can see that, during those first few months, I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine or Zimbabwe, and migrate to a Western country. The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of ‘home’ is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away, and becoming insubstantial. Their ‘world’ – inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos – has literally come to an end.
Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my ‘home’ in the convent of my own free will, and was not languishing in a camp, but I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the 60s’ world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction, not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St Anne’s, where we bought newspapers and sweets.
I saw it again in the eyes of Sister Mary Sylvia, a nun in my college. She had recently come from India to take a degree in English literature, and was living in my old convent at Cherwell Edge. In India, apparently, she had earned a first-class degree, had run schools, and held high office in her order. But the move from India seemed to have unhinged her completely. She was quite unable to write a coherent essay, complete the simple procedures that enabled her to take books out of the college library, or remember the times of lectures and seminars. I knew about this all too well, because – as one familiar with the arcane ways of nuns – I was constantly called to the rescue. When I tried to help Sister Mary Sylvia with her essays, I noticed that she simply could not take in what I was trying to tell her. One day when she failed to turn up to the philology class that, as usual, was being held in the small seminar room, I found her sitting all alone in the dining hall with her notebook, smiling benignly, while puzzled college servants tried to work around her, waxing the floor and laying the tables for dinner. She was clearly in shock, could make no sense of her surroundings, and had entirely lost her bearings. I was in better shape, but I sensed something of what she was going through. Deprived of the familiar, I too seemed to have lost my way in a world that meant nothing to me. When later that year, I watched my namesake Neil Armstrong make his ‘giant leap for mankind’, and jump on to the pitted surface of the moon, the utterly bleak, dark and eerily empty lunar landscape epitomized exactly what Planet Earth had become for me.
It was little better when I returned home during the vacation. My family gave me a wonderful welcome, but they were expecting the daughter and sister who had left home seven years earlier. My parents were tremulously eager to resume normal family life, but they seemed almost strangers to me. They had been allowed to visit at six-monthly intervals and I had been permitted to write to them only once every four weeks. These communications had, to put it mildly, been unsatisfactory. Visits to the convent parlour were starchy and artificial. Nuns were not allowed to eat with ‘seculars’, so my parents had some appalling meals surrounded by a bevy of nuns pouring out tea and making polite conversation, while I went off to eat with the community in the convent refectory. My sister Lindsey, who was three years younger than I, had hated these visits. As she watched us process into the chapel, genuflecting before the altar with near military precision, and kneeling motionless in the pews, the underlying tension, the humourless rigidity, and the fear that somebody might ruin this perfection by making a mistake so petrified her that, to the amusement of some members of the community, she often passed out, and had to be carried outside, even though she never fainted anywhere else. My letters were little better. We were never allowed to speak of what happened inside the convent, and since for years I scarcely left the enclosure, I had to confine my remarks to anodyne descriptions of the countryside or reverential accounts of church services.
My parents, therefore, had no idea what my life had been like for the last seven years. At a deeper and more worrying level, I found that I simply could not respond to their affection. I shied away from any intimacy, could not bear to be touched or embraced, and could speak to my family only in the rather formal, distant way of nuns. Naturally my parents were hurt, I felt bad about hurting them, and there was an impasse. The training seemed to have worked, after all. My capacity for affection had either atrophied or been so badly damaged that it could not function normally. I felt frozen and could see what people meant when they said that their heart had turned to stone. I could almost feel this new hardness within, like a cold, heavy weight. I had become a person who could not love and who seemed incapable of reaching out to others. Whether I liked it or not, I was now a garden enclosed, a well sealed up.
Leaving the religious life in those days was not like changing your job or moving house. Our novitiate had not simply provided us with new professional skills, and left our deepest selves untouched. It was a conditioning. For about three years, we were wholly isolated from the outside world, and also from the rest of the community. The door of the Noviceship was kept permanently locked, and we spoke to the other nuns only on very special feast-days. This meant that the novitiate became our whole world; no other existed for us, and the whims and moods of our Mistress acquired monumental importance. When we were punished, it seemed a cosmic event; when we were lonely or miserable, there was no possibility of comfort. The atmosphere was frigid, and sometimes even frightening. At night in our long dormitory, we often heard one another weeping, but knew that we must never ask what was wrong. We lived together in community, cheek by jowl, but were so lonely that we might as well have been living in solitary confinement. We became entirely dependent upon our Superior’s every move, and accepted her worldview and her opinion of ourselves as gospel truth. I was so young that I could draw upon no experience to counter this regime. So the world receded, and the tiny dramas and cold values of Noviceship life filled my entire horizon.
This type of isolation is central to the rituals of initiation, practised in the ancient world and in many indigenous societies today. On reaching puberty, boys are taken away from their mothers, separated from their tribe and subjected to a series of frightening ordeals that change them irrevocably. It is a process of death and resurrection: initiates die to their childhood and rise again to an entirely different life as mature human beings. They are often told that they are about to suffer a horrible death; they are forced to lie alone in a cave or a tomb; they are buried alive, experience intense physical pain (the boys are often circumcised or tattooed), and undergo terrifying rituals. The idea is that in these extreme circumstances, the young discover inner resources that will enable them to serve their people as fully functioning adults. The purpose of these rites of passage is thus to transform dependent children into responsible, self-reliant adults, who are ready to risk their lives as hunters and warriors, and, if necessary, to die in order to protect their people
Our training had been an initiation. We too had been segregated from the world, deprived of normal affection, and subjected to trials that were designed to test our resolve. We too were to be warriors of sorts – soldiers of God, who practised the military obedience devised by St Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, whose Rule we followed. The training was designed to make us wholly self-reliant, so that we no longer needed human love or approval. We too were told that we were to die to our old selves, and to our worldly, secular way of looking at things. Of course, we were not buried alive in a tomb or anything of that sort, but we were constantly undermined, belittled, publicly castigated, or ordered to do things that were patently absurd. As Ignatius’s Rule put it, we were to become utterly pliable to the will of God, as expressed through our superiors, in the same way as ‘a dead body allows itself to be treated in any manner whatever, or as an old man’s stick serves him who holds it in every place and for every use alike’. Dead to ourselves, we would live a fuller, enhanced existence, as Jesus had promised in a text that we liked to quote: ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will remain nothing but a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit.’ On our profession day, while the choir sang the Litany of the Saints, we lay under a funeral pall, symbolically dead to the world, and to our greedy, needy, selves that clung, infant-like, to ordinary, worthless consolations.
Now, it seemed to me that I had indeed died, but I was certainly not bringing forth much fruit. I felt as though I had entered a twilight zone between life and death, and that instead of being transfigured, as I had hoped, I had got the worst of both worlds. Instead of being full of courage, fearless, active and protective of others, like the initiate of a tribal rite of passage, I was scared stiff. Unable to love or to accept love, I had become less than human. I had wanted to be transformed and enriched; instead I was diminished. Instead of becoming strong, I was simply hard. The coldness and frequent unkindness, designed to ‘toughen us up’, had left me feeling merely impaired, like a piece of tough steak. The training was designed to make us transcend ourselves, and go beyond the egotism and selfishness that hold us back from God. But now I seemed stuck inside myself, unable either to escape, or to reach out to others. An initiation prepares you for life in the community; I had left the community that I was supposed to serve, and was inhabiting a world that I had been trained, at a profound level, to reject.
One of the most difficult things about returning to the family home was that at every turn I kept meeting my former self – the undamaged, seventeen-year-old Karen, who had been vital and full of hope. In my bedroom, I remembered how I had sat in this very chair, and lain on that very bed, full of excitement about the great adventure I was about to begin. When I took down a book from my shelves, I remembered my wonder and delight when I had first read this novel, or come across that poem. There were boxes of letters and postcards to friends, full of affection and an easy intimacy that I could no longer imagine. That person had gone; she had indeed died under the funeral pall. I felt bereaved – full of grief as though for a dead friend. This, I knew, was entirely my own fault. My superiors had not intended this to happen to me; they had not meant to push me into this limbo. I had not responded properly to the training. I had been too feeble to go all the way, to let myself truly die. I had kept on hankering for love and affection, and wept because I was too weak to endure these robust austerities. I had attempted something that was beyond my capacities, and been injured by my presumption – like a little girl who, in her impatience to become a ballerina, insists on going en pointe too early, before her feet are properly mature, and hobbles herself for ever.
Love was beyond me; even friendship was difficult. But at least I had my work. I knew that I was good at academic study. Despite the upheaval of leaving the religious life, I had done very well at Oxford so far and was expected to get a first-class degree. With that under my belt, I could become an academic, engaged in full-time study and teaching the subject I loved. So I returned to Oxford for the summer, full of renewed determination to do even better and make this prospect a reality. If I had lost one cloister, I could immure myself in my studies and find another.
