I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  The idea behind all this rigorous guard of the senses was that distracting thoughts interrupt the unbroken application of the mind of God. This, of course, is the ideal of the contemplative, as the fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing knew full well, when he wrote, ‘Thou art the further from God that aught is in thy mind but only God’.

  One day my Novice Mistress said to me ‘God is a Spirit; that is why he can only be apprehended spiritually. Of course, he is everywhere—but not everywhere to us. The only place where we can really get into vital contact with God is in the centre of our own souls.’

  I asked her exactly what was meant by the ‘centre of the soul’.

  She explained to me that it was the very deepest, innermost part of you: the central core of your personality.

  Later on, when I began to read spiritual books—Tauler, Blosius, Père Surin, St. Teresa (how I disliked St. Teresa!), Father Baker, St. John of the Cross—I discovered that it was in this ‘centre of the soul’ that the real adventures of the spiritual life took place. The difficulty, of course, was how to get there.

  According to the Mistress of Novices, there was only one way. She called it ‘recollection’. It consisted in shutting off from the mind everything external, so that it might be free from all distracting thoughts. The mind was then able to enter into itself by ‘introversion’: in other words, to concentrate itself upon its own highest—or, if you prefer it—deepest part.

  The technique of recollection was quite simple. You just had to go on and on, emptying your mind of thoughts and images, so that your faculties were kept free from the memory, thought and desire of everything but God.

  Once a fortnight, all the novices had to go to their Mistress for a short private interview. It you had difficulties about anything, you could ask questions and have them explained. Your faults were also pointed out to you, sometimes with a good deal of severity.

  I disliked these little interviews quite intensely and, as often as not, came out from them feeling as though my soul had been scrubbed with prickly-pear.

  My questions were nearly always about ‘recollection’. I think my Novice Mistress must have grown tired of answering them, for one day, instead of talking to me, she gave me a little book to read. It was called Of Union with God by Albertus Magnus. I still think it one of the most wonderful books ever written on the spiritual life. The author—a man of one idea—insists that the end and aim of all the contemplative’s labours is ‘to withdraw the powers from the memory, love and thought of what is below and to fix them upon God, reposing with him in the centre of the soul’.1

  Obviously, one couldn’t go on concentrating for years upon this kind of interior attitude without its doing something to one’s mentality. What it did to me was to develop an inward habit which was as diametrically opposed to that induced by, for instance, Pelmanism, as can be conceived. Instead of observing, remembering, deducing, reflecting, my whole energy was employed upon effacing from my memory every kind of impression almost before it was received. Indeed, as a novice, my custody of the eyes was so rigorous that I must have been a menace to the community, for I remember constantly bumping into people who happened to be coming my way.

  Of course, the result of all this was, that when I returned to the world and was forced to sit up and take notice of what was going on—with the utmost rapidity and violence on every side—I nearly went crazy. There was just no means of relaxing, even for an instant, from the desperate effort to do what I’d spent my whole life as a religious in trying not to do. Even now, after nearly eight years of effort, I have not achieved it. I doubt if I ever shall. I’m still unobservant, and the life-long habit of ‘emptying the memory’ of everything one has seen or done, makes it all too easy to forget.

  (3)

  I had received two kind and most heartening letters when I told my family that I was leaving the convent. One was from my uncle and aunt à la mode de Bretagne, the Stanley Baldwins, who told me that of course I must come straight to them. The other, from A.B., my mother’s sister, insisted that from now onwards I should look upon her house in Sussex as my home.

  But before I went anywhere or did anything, I just had to go where shops were and buy the necessities of life.

  I dreaded the ordeal of shopping. All sense of the value of money had left me. I hadn’t the vaguest idea what to buy. I didn’t know which shops to go to, or even where they were to be found. My sister had promised to help me, but she was working in the Censorship and leave was not easy to get. A day and a half was the utmost she could spare me. I had a feeling, too, that she wasn’t greatly enjoying this business of launching me. The sooner I was able to stand alone, the better she would be pleased.

  I had hoped to spend a few days at her flat, to get advice about the endless problems that beset me. Unfortunately, the friend with whom she then lived suddenly developed Conscientious Objections to People Who Came Out of Convents, and flatly refused to let me spend even a night beneath their roof.

  This was rather a blow.

  My sister told me she didn’t feel able to do anything about it, because she cared for the friend more than anyone else on earth.

  Finally it was arranged that Freda and I should cram our shopping into that afternoon and the following morning. I was to spend the night with an aunt and uncle who lived in London, and go down to A.B. in Sussex the following day.

  So, feeling top-heavy, self-conscious and slightly indecent in my short skirts, transparent stockings and high-heeled shoes, I allowed my sister to shepherd me and my suitcase into a Green Line bus.

  We spent the journey up to London struggling frantically with the coupon problem. How I was going to rig myself out with the number of coupons available, we could neither of us imagine. Our list contained only the starkest necessities, but even with the extra coupons which generous friends had provided, it still looked as if sections of my person would have to remain bare. I began seeing visions of myself like the Emperor in Hans Andersen’s story, clothed in lovely fresh air instead of lingerie.

  The power, speed, noise and general ruthlessness of London overwhelmed me. I suppose my twenty-eight years behind protecting walls made this inevitable. I felt like a small and dithering mouse that had strayed in among the turbines of some gigantic engine-room.

  I was completely dazed.

  Freda started by whisking me off to a hairdresser, where she superintended the transformation of my elf-locks into an Eton crop. This gave me the beginnings of self-confidence and I began to feel more capable of facing what lay ahead.

  After that, we set out on a hurricane shop-raid. We dashed up Oxford Street for shoes and stockings. We whirled into Debenham’s to buy a suit. We raced to Shaftesbury Avenue where a Bessarabian friend of my sister’s (at least, I think she was a Bessarabian—she certainly looked like it) had a dress shop. We tore like tornadoes to I know not how many places for blouses and lingerie. We flew back to Bond Street for hats. And a last rush up Regent Street was only prevented by the tiresome discovery that the shops were about to shut.

  Several months later, when questioned about my first impressions of London, I replied that what I had seen depressed me. London was changed almost beyond recognition. Many of her familiar landmarks had been rebuilt. Her blitz-wounds were still fresh, and in several places the wreckage had been so severe that I had stood still, appalled before such frightfulness.

  There were signs of war everywhere. For the first time I saw barrage balloons, decontamination centres, air-raid shelters, sirens, blast screens, trenches, black-out precautions and all the rest. I was impressed by the contrast between shop-windows as I remembered them and their present, heavily-boarded condition, with only small panels of glass let in to display the scanty wares behind.

  The change in the shapes of the cars and buses struck me as most peculiar. They looked rather as if they had been fattened up, like ducks. They had lost their angles (this, my sister told me, was ‘stream-lining’) and they carried their bodies s
o low that they almost dragged on the ground. This earthward tendency reappeared in the children’s perambulators, which I remembered as large, luxurious cradles swung high up between enormous slender wheels. The odd little sturdy low-wheeled push-cars that contained the modern infant struck me as too quaint for words.

  A thing that puzzled me was the frequent recurrence of large, tangerine-coloured balls on white poles at the edge of the pavements. These, said Freda, were Belisha Beacons. Not knowing who or what Belisha was, I wondered why….

  I was much impressed by the tidy way that the traffic kept stopping at regular intervals, apparently of its own accord. When Freda showed me the traffic lights winking miraculously from emerald to ruby and back through orange-amber into emerald again, I was spellbound. So much so, indeed, that, standing enchanted before this lovely spectacle in Piccadilly Circus, I was nearly done to death by a passing taxi. I suppose I richly deserved what the driver said to me, but I remember that, as I listened, I realized that here at least was something in London that had not changed.

  The shops left me speechless. The larger ones had been rebuilt; their size and splendour made me think that they must be Government offices or luxury hotels. Not so their contents. I was, of course, prepared for the war-time shortage of everything; what staggered me was the appearance and behaviour of the personnel. Gone were the frock-coated myriads of shopwalkers who had once thronged one’s path like obsequious black-beetles; gone the satin-gowned moddoming ladies with swishing trains and incredible coiffures. Instead, a few rather disdainful elderly women and scornful blondes in their teens had taken over. Their costumes were as unorthodox—at least, according to pre-1914 standards—as their behaviour, and it was just the hardest thing in the world to get them to take any notice of you at all. Occasionally, however, if you were really persevering, you might induce one of them to pause for a moment in her conversation with a friend. But even then it required the exertion of almost hypnotic powers on your part before she would condescend to sell you some fantastically high-priced substitute for what you actually required. The older ones treated you with condescension: the younger, with unconcealed contempt.

  And nobody ever said ‘Moddom’ to you at all.

  The Londoners, on the whole, gave me a lot to think about.

  To begin with, the ‘leisured classes’—as I remembered them—had completely disappeared. I’ve never been able to discover what has become of them. Like Atlantis and the Dodo, they have simply vanished away. In their place, London was thronged by what looked like the lower-middle and working classes—a vast multitude with strained faces and tired, blitz-haunted eyes. There were foreigners everywhere. One heard French, Polish, Russian, Czech, American in streets and buses. There were also an astonishing number of Jews. The few men in circulation struck me as very much the same as those I remembered twenty-eight years ago. Their trousers were baggier and some of them wore a new kind of baby toothbrush moustache. I noticed one youth wearing quite the most hideous garment I had yet encountered—a pair of elongated knickerbockers, ending off about half-way down the leg. I pointed this out to my sister in some excitement. She murmured, ‘plus-fours’. I had no idea what she meant.

  With the women, however, things were different. The type had altered. When I left the world, Lily Elsie and Gladys Cooper had set the beauty standard: rounded faces; large, melting eyes, soft mouths and low-piled hair. But these women appeared to belong to a different civilization. They had narrow faces, high cheek-bones, wide, heavily-painted mouths and slanting eyes. Their chins jutted. Their noses were strong and short. Their hair—invariably waved or curled—hung loose on their shoulders. And most of them had terrible, claw-like, purple-painted nails.

  Among their faces I noticed a curious similarity. Their features differed, but their expressions were the same. It suggested that the same environment had moulded them; that they thought the same thoughts, looked at, listened to and were influenced by, very much the same things.

  Oddly enough, I believe that what most impressed me on that first astounding day was the spectacle of London without her railings. It was almost like seeing Queen Victoria without her clothes. And not only the parks, but the sacrosanct squares and the fronts of the houses were all now flung open to the vandal incursions of children and dogs.

  Lately I have begun to revise a good many of my opinions; my first impression was, however, one of profound dismay. The disappearance of those railings seemed like a rather sinister portent of things to come.

  (4)

  My sister parked me finally at Portland Place, where I was to spend the night with an uncle and aunt.

  Their house had been damaged when the B.B.C. nearby was bombed, and the ballroom and drawing-room were uninhabitable. Rolled-up carpets and stacks of furniture were dimly visible in the shadowy light from boarded windows; brocaded hangings showed, torn and blackened by blast and smoke. A depressing spectacle.

  My aunt and uncle were kind to me: nevertheless, I could not help feeling—as I was to do later on with so many of my relations—that my return to the world was not greeted with unmitigated enthusiasm. Oddly enough, it was just those who had reproached me most bitterly for Going In in 1914 who expressed the sternest disapproval of my Coming Out in 1941.

  Some people are curiously difficult to please.

  After dinner, somebody turned on the wireless.

  My first impulse was to fly from the room, shrieking ‘Witchcraft!’, for the gramophone had been in its earlier and most excruciating stages when I went away. However, I controlled my emotions and was rewarded by rather an odd little coincidence.

  It so happened that the last music I had listened to on the night before I left my home for the convent had been the haunting Tchaikovsky waltz from Eugen Onegin. It had always enchanted me and I had imagined that something sombre, almost fateful, lurked in those slow, downward-running octaves with which the melody is so subtly interwoven near the end. And now, after all those years, here it was, waiting to greet me on the threshold of the new world into which I was about to step. Out into the room it poured, billowing about me and over me in wave after wave of wild, romantic music, stirring me strangely and awakening poignant long-forgotten memories.

  I listened, wondering that, at my age, such music still had the power to unlock the secret places in my heart.

  Anyway, it was considerate of the Powers That Be to supply me with such an attractive signature tune.

  It was, I suppose, inevitable after the austerity of a monastic2 cell that the room in which I was put to sleep appeared to me, despite the blitz damage, almost palatially luxurious.

  A nun’s cell is so small that there is only just room for herself, a tiny chest-of-drawers and a prie-dieu, one chair, a minute folding table and a hard little bed. I remember, as a novice, how much difficulty I had in getting accustomed to the rough woollen sheets, which—incredible as it may seem to modern notions of hygiene—were washed only once a year.

  There is no washstand; instead, a small earthen jug and basin stand in a corner on the floor. Bare boards and plain whitewashed walls intensify the atmosphere of austerity. No one may enter your cell except the Superior, or, should you fall ill, the nun who holds the office of apothecary.

  The cell is always a place of silence. Drawers, doors and windows must be opened noiselessly. Outside in the dormitory, white-habited figures move up and down like shadows. Not a sound must break the stillness—neither the sound of voices nor of passing feet.

  And now, here I was, tucked into a nest of pillows in a downsoft bed between delicately fragrant linen sheets. And the room was large and high, with tall wide windows; and there were pictures on the walls, and mirrors everywhere. The thick pile rugs struck a note of rich and satisfying colour; and for washing there was a great, deep, blue-veined marble basin, into which hot and cold water cascaded from elegant and highly-polished taps. In the convent I had been used to going to bed by the light of a tiny oil-filled lamp like a small glass ink-pot, with a wick
that could only be manipulated with a pin. Now I found an amber-shaded electric reading-lamp at my bedside; and there were switches which set other lights burning miraculously in various parts of the room. I leaned back, marvelling at the luxury of my surroundings. It seemed almost like a page out of the Arabian Nights….

  I have always felt that the moment when first you wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn’t, matters not one jot. The possibility is always there.

  Even in the convent, I almost invariably experienced this rather childish thrill on first awakening. It helped me to bound out of bed when the calling-bell clanged ruthlessly at a quarter to five a.m. And nobody who hasn’t tried it can imagine quite how disinclined one feels for bounding at that uninspiring hour, especially in winter, when one’s sponge is a frozen fossil and one has to smash the ice in one’s water-jug with the hair-brush handle before one can wash.

  I myself was once appointed to do the calling for a time, which meant getting up half an hour earlier than the rest of the community. It gave one an odd, ghostly feeling to tiptoe about all alone in that long, dimly-lighted dormitory of sleepers; one was almost afraid to break the night’s tremendous silence and set in motion the complex machinery of another long monastic day.

  After ringing the heavy iron bell, it is the Caller’s duty to go round from cell to cell, opening each door just wide enough to hear the answer when she utters the morning salutation of Deo gratias. It always amused me to study the different reactions of the various nuns to this stern command of duty. Most of them were already splashing by the time I got to them; but a few—one knew instinctively which they would be!—needed quite a volley of Deo gratiases before they could be persuaded to grunt a sleepy answer from beneath the clothes. The really heavy sleepers were apt to be tiresome. Sometimes you had to stand, saying Deo gratias at their doors till you were nearly hoarse.