Once a dreadful thing happened. After a more than usually lengthy effort to elicit an answer, the Caller got worried and entered the cell to investigate. To her horror, she found a corpse lying stiff beneath the bedclothes. The nun had died from heart-failure during the night.
I woke up in my unfamiliar surroundings with a new and vague sensation of peace that deepened gradually into one of definite content. I think it arose from my realization that what I had believed in when I leapt to what—for me—was freedom was truly worth my faith. I had no regrets, no anxiety about what lay before me. In fact, I felt like an explorer on the verge of setting out. I was full of the spirit of adventure and of enthusiasm for whatever might lie ahead—an attitude of mind which still seems to me as surprising as it was fortunate, in view of the rather soul-shattering happenings of the previous day.
(5)
Freda came with me to Victoria. Here we parted, pressing cheeks, while she kissed the air for reasons connected with lipstick. And for the first time I found myself really on my own.
I was terrified. The knowledge that I should have to change twice during the journey, not to mention coping with porters—or no porters, which might be even more annoying—filled me with alarm. Freda had warned me that, owing to precautions in view of the possibility of invasion, one could not see the names of the stations. I wondered how on earth I should know when to get out. And didn’t one have to tip porters? I had forgotten to ask how much one ought to offer, and hadn’t a notion what they would expect.
I opened my purse. Unfortunately, what I found there only raised fresh problems. To begin with, instead of the nice, bright, golden sovereigns that I remembered, I found dirty banknotes and some tinny-looking florins and half-crowns. (The old five-shilling pieces, my sister had told me, were no longer in circulation.) There were also some twelve-sided coins which were entirely new to me. The silver threepenny-bits of my youth, it appeared, had gone for good.
I studied my fellow-travellers. There were some soldiers, rather red about the ears and smelling of beer and hot khaki, and two or three hatless young women with padded shoulders and purple nails. All had cigarettes between their lips. This startled me. I had never seen a woman smoke in a railway carriage before. Their skirts were of a shortness which still shocked me a little; but then, my own were, after all, nothing to boast about, if it came to that.
I looked out of the window. The Sussex countryside was ablaze with the glory of autumn—orange, cinnamon, olive, rust-red and fairy gold. On the horizon, the soft green shoulders of the Downs curved mistily. Flights of birds wheeled suddenly and swiftly, then disappeared into the clear pale sky. Somehow, however, I have never felt the peculiar spell of Sussex which has caught and held so many of my kinsfolk and their relatives. Time was when Rottingdean, Burwash, Steyning, were alive with Burne-Joneses, Baldwins, Ridsdales, Howards, Kiplings, and Mackails. I thought of them, wondering about the gaps that must have occurred among their ranks and of which, in most cases, I was ignorant. I had been gone so long that, like Rip Van Winkle, I did not know what I was going to find.
On the whole, I got through my first journey rather better than I had expected. One of the hatless young women advised me when to get out. Mercifully, the porter seemed satisfied with the coin that I offered him. I am afraid it was half a crown.
1 Elsewhere he explains that ‘it is of the greatest importance that what has been seen, heard, done or said, should not leave any traces in the imagination. Neither before, nor at the time, nor afterwards, should we foster their memories or allow their images to be formed’. And in order to arrive at this emptiness of the mind, he advises, ‘Bar the doors of thy senses, and dwell therein, guarding thy heart against all images and shapes of earthly things … draw thy powers inwards and thence lift them up to God’.
Later, I discovered that Père Surin, the greatest of the Jesuit mystics, went even further. He insists that nothing so helps to dispose the soul for prayer as the long-sustained effort to preserve oneself from what he calls ‘le défaut de la multiplicité’. This, he explains, springs from all distinct and particular knowledge acquired from contact with exterior things.
One should, he declares, train the mind to raise itself rather to what is universal, and to be content with such knowledge as is general and indistinct (cf. Surin, Catêchisme Spirituel).
2 Abbot Gasquet points out in his English Monastic Life that it is incorrect to apply the word ‘convent’ exclusively to houses of nuns. The term ‘convent’, ‘monastery’ or ‘abbey’ can be applied to any house of either monks or nuns. The use of the word ‘convent’ for a religious house of women is of quite modern origin.
CHAPTER TWO
(1)
THE little Sussex village in which my aunt lived had a dual personality. Half of it, tucked away in the twittens and behind the high stone walls of the larger houses, belonged to a bygone England. The other half, represented by the high street, where an incipient cinema had begun to show its horns, belonged to the England of to-day. My aunt’s house, in one of the more withdrawn country lanes, had somehow managed to elude both atmospheres. It was simply her own particular and personal shrine.
A.B. was a pretty old lady with soft white hair and a penchant for piety. She and the devoted maid-companion who waited on her divided their time between church-going, gardening, and the worship of a small and extremely undisciplined black-and-tan dog.
The sudden irruption of an elderly niece of almost unprecedented mentality into this quiet household must have been something of a trial. If this was so, A.B. certainly dealt with it in the grand manner. She flung wide her boxes, her cupboards, her wardrobes, her chests-of-drawers, and proceeded to clothe the very-nearly-naked with a generosity which must surely have won her a great reward in the world to come.
During these peaceful weeks in Sussex—exteriorly so uneventful—a great many quite important things happened to me within my mind.
At first I felt so exhausted that I could do little more than behave like a vegetable. Some such reaction was, I suppose, inevitable, for the last years before I left the convent had been a time of very great strain. Little by little, however, I felt that life was slowly creeping back to me. I tried to do some constructive thinking, and deal with a few of the problems that were lying, piled up like left luggage, on the doorstep of my mind.
The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn. I started going for long lone country walks among the spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end, giving myself up to the earth-scents and the sky-winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul.
The first question, of course, was, What was I going to do with such years of life as might remain to me?
I thought about this till my head ached. Finally I shelved it. It seemed to me that until I knew something about the world in which I was going to live, it was clearly impossible to know the kind of life I wanted to lead.
On one thing, however, I was determined. For the first few years, I would change my occupation and surroundings as often as possible. I would experiment with places and people. I would explore different layers of society. In fact, I would try to acquire Experience of Life.
Next came the money problem. Canon Law—which is to the Catholic Church what Civil Law is to the State—lays down that the dowry brought by a nun at the time of her religious profession must be returned to her if she should be dispensed from her vows and leave the convent. Unfortunately my dowry was overseas, and, owing to war conditions, untouchable for the time being. By special arrangement, however, the interest would now be paid to me. It was not very much, but with the small—though rather uncertain—income that came to me from other sources, I might just be able to make ends meet. I determined, however, that while the war lasted I would join the ranks of the workers. This, if I were careful, might also enable me to save a little to fall back upon in time of need.
But above and beyond all my own little petty personal problems, there was the gi
ant nightmare of the war. Trying to sort out my thoughts and marshal them into some kind of intelligent order, kept me miserably awake at nights. I have no new ideas about war and, as yet, no logical theories. I don’t know enough about its causes. All that I do know is that, with all my mind and heart and soul and strength, I hate and detest it as the most cruel, evil, devilish, but above all stupid way of settling difficulties that has ever been known.
It came home to me when one day I met a detachment of the Canadian regiment then quartered in the village. They were marching off to some exercise on the Downs. I have seldom seen a finer set of men. Young, good to look at, magnificently developed, they swung past with a grace and poise that caught and held my eyes till they were out of sight. A month later, what had become of them? Here is the answer: I cut it out of some daily paper and kept it near me. It helped me to say my prayers for the fighting forces with greater intensity before I climbed into my comfortable bed….
‘War to-day is not what our forefathers understood by battle, but a filthy mechanized business of hatred and destruction on a scale hitherto undreamed of by man … Smoke, reek, roar, din, ravaged faces, torn, tormented bodies, mangled limbs … gangrened, perhaps, to be sawn off in hospital, leaving a hideous maimed trunk where so much beauty had been. Nervous systems, shattered by noise and shock beyond all hope of ultimate recovery; bombs, shells, machine-guns, spattering broadcast the blood and brains and bones and bowels of the youngest and finest of the race.’
Why did all this splendid youth and strength have to be slaughtered in that maelstrom of horror? Whose was the responsibility? What could be done to prevent such idiot frightfulness from happening again? Why, why did God permit it? How could a God who was Love and Beauty allow such things?
War and cruelty to animals are two subjects on which I have felt at times that it might be difficult to keep my sanity. Sometimes I wonder whether—in this life—there is an answer to these problems or whether it is not futile to speculate about such things. To understand the ways of God would make one his equal if not his master; may it not, perhaps, be arrogant for the creature to try to understand the Creator’s mind? How could a snail expect to understand the workings of the human intelligence? And yet the gulf between snail and man is at least measurable, while that between God and man is infinite. ‘As the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are My ways exalted above your ways, and My thoughts above your thoughts.’ Had one a deeper sense of God’s transcendence, instead of revolting, one would—I suppose—make acts of heroic faith and trust in God’s wisdom and love. ‘Though he should slay me, yet will I trust in him.’
I cannot say that these reflections gave me a great deal of consolation but they at least provided me with something to hold on to when the things I read about in the newspapers made me feel physically sick.
I determined that I would cast the widow’s mite of my unskilled service into the war effort. Unfortunately, I possessed no qualifications for the kind of work on which most of the women of my age and class were employed. Probably a munition factory would be my fate—illogical as it might appear. It seemed clear that the only way to stop the killing was to speed up the output of weapons and so get the whole bloody, horrible business ended with the utmost possible rapidity. Never had I been faced with so urgent a necessity for doing evil that good might follow. In my opinion, however, the end more than justified the means.
(2)
I found the wireless instructive.
A.B. switched it on thrice daily for the war news, which taught me many things; unfortunately, she did not care much for anything else. I could have sat there, listening and learning, from dawn to dusk. One can’t, however, indulge these passionate cravings for miscellaneous information in somebody else’s house.
I wondered how best to tackle the problem of my self-education. I determined to read a few books by as many as possible of the more representative authors of the period I had missed—1914 to 1941. It appeared that, after the last war, the predominant form of literature was fiction. So I hunted about among my aunt’s book-shelves and in the local library to see what I could find.
The first book I tackled was As We Are by E. F. Benson. I chose it because the title-page described it as ‘A Modern Revue’. This, of course, was exactly what I needed. It interested me because, while I was still inside the convent, Uncle Stan—who at the time was Prime Minister—had come to see me and had told me things which had given me a lot to think about. I can still remember his explaining to me, for instance, how, when the 1914 war was ended, the world had run completely mad. This book filled in the details—or at least some of them. As I read it, I felt my eyebrows lifting till I knew they must have disappeared into my Eton crop.
The first words of the opening chapter increased the Rip Van Winkle-ish sensation which was gradually turning into a rather tiresome complex in my make-up.
‘Across the chasm which, in 1914, split time in two, making, for the space of a generation at least, a new era, A.B. or Anno Belli, from which to date our chronicles, little glimpses of a world, very distinct, but immensely remote, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, occasionally flit across the field of memory.’
So that was how the people of to-day looked back upon the world that I lived in—the only world I knew, and to which I belonged with such awful completeness just because no more recent civilization had ever blurred the sharp edges of the only imprint I had ever received! It was grim. As I read the words, a curious cold sensation of isolation swept across me. I felt myself to be a monstrosity—unique de mon espèce, as if I had just dropped out of the moon.
The last novel I had read before entering the convent was Sheaves by E. F. Benson. It gave an exceedingly faithful picture of the manners and customs of that far-away period before the old world war. The first novel I read on coming out was Miss Helen Ashton’s Mackerel Sky. I compared them and, for the first time, realized how tremendous a change had taken place in the relations between men and women in the twenty years or so which had elapsed between the publication of these two books.
It was interesting to wander round the libraries and discover what the various authors had been up to while I was away. Mr. Compton Mackenzie, who, if I remember rightly, had just published Carnival at the time of my departure, appeared to have been extremely busy. So had Mr. H. G. Wells, whose Ann Veronica I had, as a girl, been forbidden to read. Sir Hugh Walpole, too (how I had raved over Fortitude in 1913!) had not been wasting his time. And there were rows and rows of new Kiplings and Chestertons and Galsworthys; and some books by a recent arrival, Mr. Charles Morgan, whom I sampled, but found curiously dull.
I began to wonder how I should ever manage to catch up on such an output, especially as I still did not know even the names of the newer authors whose works must be explored.
Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh made me gasp and wonder what the world was coming to. So did Ordinary Families by Arnot Robertson. Next, I stumbled upon a book about the atom, by an author whose name I forget, but which informed me that nothing but mutual bumpings, at the rate of eight million bumps a second, prevented the countless billions of atoms of which my chair was composed from rushing to China and back in a second or two. Faintly appalled, I observed that Science, as well as Literature, had been hard at it while I was away….
The books of Miss Rachel Ferguson made a profound impression upon me, especially A Harp in Lowndes Square and that astonishing piece of virtuosity, The Brontës Went to Woolworths. As for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, I can only say that it opened my eyes to a number of things that I had hitherto ignored.
After a fortnight or so of this kind of reading, I found myself wondering whether I should ever acquire the point of view of the people who looked at life like this.
Reading the papers always made me feel particularly idiotic, especially the Observer and the Sunday Times. The writers of the book reviews and leading articles used clichés and allusions which were incomprehensible to me. I had never h
eard of the Unknown Soldier, Jazz, Isolationism, Lounge lizards, Lease-Lend, Cavalcade, Gin-and-It, Vimy Ridge or the Lambeth Walk; neither did the words Nosey Parker, Hollywood, Cocktail, Robot, Woolworth, Strip-tease, Bright Young Thing, convey anything to my mind. Unknown names, too, were always cropping up: Epstein, Schiaparelli, James Agate, Greta Garbo, Picasso, D. H. Lawrence and Dr. Marie Stopes….
It was really most disheartening. I decided that the only thing I could do about it was to concentrate desperately upon the present moment, trying, bee or vampire fashion, to suck from it the very last drop of Experience of Life that it could possibly hold.
Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be much experience to be sucked from the surroundings in which at that time I was planted. All my aunt’s friends were dear old ladies of over seventy: somehow I felt that they were not quite the ones to teach me the sort of things I needed to know.
(3)
One day I summoned all my courage and took a big green bus to Brighton.
The white road curves like a river between the great humped shoulders of the Downs: on either side stretches country, over which the shadow of something the Sussex folk call ‘ellynge’ still seems to brood.
All my life I have felt far more alive to the past of the places I have visited than to their present: everything that is seems to be somehow overshadowed by what it has been.
I Leap Over the Wall Page 3