That day, a ghost-grey mist hung over everything. It was a special kind of mist: you felt that there was nothing that it might not conceal. Behind it, all sorts of strange and terrifying things might be happening; I remembered The Knife and the Naked Chalk, beloved in childhood; the Beast who waited hungrily for the flocks by the dew-ponds; the Men of the Long Barrows who hunted boar and wolf with leaf-shaped arrowheads and little axes made of flint. I almost fancied I could see them peering back at me out of the mist: men of small stature, half-naked, scarred with wolf-bites, shaggy-haired and with stupid, scared little eyes. Perhaps they were just setting out to explore the great black swamp that was London. I pictured them fording the Thames and beginning to build their causeways over the marshy jungle of the Strand. Didn’t it all happen about the time that Abraham arrived in the Land of Canaan? I wished I could leap back four thousand years and talk to them. I doubted whether I should have felt more at sea in their London than I did in the London of to-day.
On the whole, I was not impressed with my visit to Brighton. It looked bomb-scarred and dingy and not at all like the gay and glittering town I remembered more than thirty years ago. The sea-front was a mass of wire entanglements and the streets a jam of tanks, tommies and bare-legged young women with painted lips and canary-coloured hair.
The wind was icy. I grew hungry, but was nervous of going in anywhere alone for lunch. When at last I had gathered sufficient courage to enter a café, I could make neither head nor tail of the dishes listed on the bill. At last, in desperation, I ordered something called ‘ravioli’, which, when it appeared, might have been anything from cats’ meat to fried spam. After that, seeing ‘Ices’ incredibly advertised, I ordered one. I imagine it must have been the last in England. I was thrilled. I had not tasted one for twenty-eight years.
In the shops I fared badly. A.B. had replenished my stock of coupons, so I bought some gloves and was eyed despisingly by the blonde who sold them to me because I had no idea what size I wore. I also bought a dress. It was quite the most non-committal garment I have ever encountered. The shop-assistant assured me that it was equally suitable for morning, afternoon or evening wear. This seemed to me a remarkable achievement and I paid the three guineas which was its price (if it had been thirty, I should hardly have noticed the difference, so vague was I concerning the value of money), feeling that I had done something worth boasting about.
(4)
One of the things I found it hardest to get used to was the smallness of people’s houses. Even A.B.’s, which was quite a reasonable size, felt like a mousetrap. I suppose this was because the convent where I had spent most of my life was so large.
Built originally round a small open courtyard, it had grown with the centuries till it lay like a long, grey, sleeping lizard, clutching two other courtyards and a cloister garth between its claws. In winter, the cold cut into you like a knife. The pale light crept in through deep-silled, leaded windows and was frozen immediately into the same wan blue as the white-washed walls. You might have been standing in the heart of an iceberg, so strange it was, so silent, so austere.
Out of the cloister, heavy oak doors led into the rabbit-warren of the kitchen quarters; to the Infirmary; to the Refectory; and to the great damp vaults below.
The Refectory was the oldest part of the building. To the last, I never entered it without an instinctive feeling of reverence. The wide, open space in the middle was paved, like the cloister, with grey and white flagstones, worn irregular by daily contact with generations of heavily-shod feet. The massive, beamed ceiling was ornamented with sacred monograms in low-relief, and delicate mouldings whose sharp outlines had been blurred by the repeated white-washings of centuries. The unglazed paintings on the walls were such as one sees in Continental churches: a Nativity, a Flemish grisaille of the Adoration of the Magi, a Marriage of St. Catherine, and, behind the Prioress’s table, a great, tragic canvas of the Crucifixion, with weeping child-angels who held chalices beneath the wounds of the tortured Christ. Under the pictures, a dado of plaited rushes hung behind the narrow benches. Long, massive, polished tables, dark with age, stood, like the benches, on a platform of boards raised a couple of inches or so above the level of the floor.
Nothing here had been changed since it was built three hundred years ago. The same thick-paned latticed windows overlooked the same high-walled garden; the same bare, oak tables were set with the same plates of dinted pewter and brown earthen mugs at each one’s place. Above all, the same quite indescribable atmosphere of silence, aloofness, and a kind of spiritual intensity hung in the air like some delicate, distilled fragrance from another world.
Further along the cloister, important-looking double doors opened into the Community Room. This, though more homely than the Refectory, had none the less a severe and simple dignity of its own. The light from its long row of—alas, almost invariably closed—windows poured in upon what was practically the living-room of the nuns. White-washed walls; a bare-boarded floor, scrubbed to an unbelievable degree of spotlessness (the Mother Subprioress could be thoroughly unpleasant to people—especially novices—who came in from the muddy garden without wiping their feet); an ugly, carved Renaissance altar with twisted barley-sugar columns and a display of aspidistras, and a series of narrow oak tables set close together in a long line just under the windows, where sixty nuns or more could have sat comfortably side by side.
Against the walls, a row of heavy rush-bottomed chairs alternated with plain oak cupboards and massive chests, in whose deep, coffin-like drawers the nuns might keep their books and work. Above, the score or so of Prioresses who had ruled the convent looked down from unglazed canvases—stern, ascetic faces, pale, tight-lipped, tranquil, under their mediaeval coifs of fine starched linen and shadowy veils.
Here the nuns sat sewing from nine till eleven in the morning and from half-past one till three; and again from four to five in the afternoon. It was always ‘out of recreation’, which meant that nothing that was not absolutely unavoidable might be said. No wonder that the walls seemed saturated with the silent aspirations, the unspoken joys and sorrows—sometimes agonies—of so many human hearts. For nuns, after all, are only human; and until a kind of mystical death has taken place in the earthly nature, resulting in the triumph of what is spiritual over what is merely natural, suffering cannot be avoided. It has been truly said that suffering is the price of sanctity.
Here, too, the community assembled for recreation. This took place in the evening, after supper. The Prioress sat at the top of the long row of tables with the nuns down either side. The rule of silence no longer held; the walls echoed with laughter and conversation. The Community Room was indeed a kind of sanctuary of the Common Life. A grave room, so large that even when the entire community were assembled it never seemed crowded. Order and decorum produced an impression of space.
Quite at the end of the cloister was the Library. This was the largest room in the convent. What an enchanted kingdom for anyone in need (as I, alas, so often felt myself to be) of an escape. From the floor of dangerously polished parquet to the ancient ceiling-beams, were stacked tier upon tier of books—each in its way a magic casement opening on the foam of—sometimes—perilous seas. Here were Didon’s lovely romantic Life of Christ and the more modern and realistic study by François Mauriac; Fouard and Le Camus, besides the many-volumed masterpieces of Le Breton, Lagrange and de Grand-maison. There were commentaries on the Scriptures; books of reference (shall I ever forget the day I discovered Adrian Fortescue’s racy articles on certain of the Fathers of the Church in the Catholic Encyclopœdia); lives and writings of the saints and mystics (I detested St. Teresa, but was profoundly attracted by St. John of the Cross); the complete works of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, which made marvellous meditation books when prayer was arduous. St. Bernard, for example, in his exposition of the Canticle of Canticles soars to heights which, I should imagine, have hardly been surpassed in mystical exegesis; and St. John Chrysostom with his exquisite images and hi
ghly realistic descriptions of fourth-century Antioch. There were volumes on biblical topography (H. V. Morton’s In the Steps of the Master nearly saved my reason once during a period of quite appalling inward strain); Church History—one of the most fascinating subjects I ever embarked upon, especially during the first five highly controversial centuries when the great heresies were raging like dragons in the rapidly disintegrating civilization before the Fall of Rome; spiritual biographies from the Prophets to Teresa Higginson, taking in Joan of Arc and John Knox—from the Catholic point of view—on the way; mystic and ascetic theology; (I was happier with The Cloud of Unknowing than with St. Thomas’s Summa Contra Gentilium); treatises on the virtues, Church music, sacred art (alas, some Victorian-minded religious had seen fit to clothe all the reproductions which she considered in need of it with neat little perizometas or flannel petticoats of chinese white. One or two pages in some of the more beautiful collections of pictures had been considered unfit for contemplation and had been stuck together with paste). The Library contained, in fact, everything that could possibly be needed for instruction or enlightenment upon every possible aspect of the spiritual life.
Besides the Great Cloister, there were two others, wide, lofty, cool, with their chill atmosphere of perpetual silence; the stern, sombre Chapter House leading through the stuffy Lay Sisters’ Chapel (ten minutes of it was enough to send me speeding away in search of oxygen) to the domed Renaissance church with its altar of apricot-coloured marble and the stained-glass windows, where the light poured through two not over-successful compositions—one a symphony of grey and indigo, the other, rust-red and copper-gold.
High up, at the back of the Church and over the Lay Sisters’ Chapel, was the long, beautifully proportioned Choir. It had a fine, wrought-iron grille before it, and the double row of dark carven stalls on either side was reflected in a parquet floor, so highly polished as to suggest the sea of glass in the Apocalypse.
Throughout the convent—except in the nuns’ cells, which were as small as possible—one was met by the same atmosphere of cold, clean spaciousness. The place breathed silence and consecration. In fact, living there was rather like being perpetually in church.
(5)
Early in January I travelled down to Worcestershire to stay with the Stanley Baldwins at Astley Hall.
I had not been there since the coming-out dance which they gave for me two years before I entered the convent, though Uncle Stan had been to see me several times while I was a nun. I remembered a big, grey, stone house—rather Jacobean in character—with a drive that curved upwards through a park where oak trees drowsed in pools of shadow and tall, wrought-iron gates led into a garden that overlooked what Uncle Stan declared was one of England’s loveliest views.
When last I stayed there, the house had been overrun by a flock of cousins; Diana, Lorna, Margot, Oliver—who was at Eton—Windham and Betty, still in the nursery. I remember, too, John and Elsie Kipling, and the tall, extremely good-looking Denis Mackail.
Memories of Uncle Stan, as he was in those days, are many and vivid. Chiefly I remember him standing, pipe in hand, before the fireplace in the library, giving me fatherly advice about how to write a cheque, and the kind of people not to make friends with when one was travelling in Italy.
The library had a fairy-tale frieze of white-sailed ships that lay at anchor in a sea of pure cerulean blue. In the foreground were chalk cliffs, suggesting the coast at Rottingdean, where the family had spent so many happy summers. When first I saw it, Uncle Stan told me of how, when he sat there, reading in the evenings, a sea-breeze sometimes blew through the room and, looking up, he would see the white sails bellying and the waves tossing and then, one by one, the little ships would go sailing by….
Once, many years later, when my cousin Windham came to see me in the convent, I asked him whether the white ships still sailed round the library at night. Apparently they did; and he had the room photographed for me. It was a long time since anything had given me so much pleasure.
Uncle Stan was waiting for me at Worcester station. ‘Waiting’ is the perfect word, for the train was at least an hour late. I thought he looked faintly apprehensive, but, all things considered, this was hardly to be wondered at. I observed with interest that he gave sixpence to the porter who carried my suitcase. This caused me deeply to regret my thrice-repeated largesse of half a crown.
During the drive out to Astley I experienced the kind of thrills that fill British bosoms when, after long sojourns on the Continent, the cliffs of Dover once more appear out of an English mist. I am Worcestershire born and this was my homecoming. Despite my antiquity, something within me began to show signs of wanting to dance and sing.
I must here explain that to me, who still looked upon the briefest taxi-ride as supremely exciting, this nine-mile drive in the large, luxurious Rolls was an adventure of the most breath-taking kind. The countryside sparkled in the frosty sunshine; the upturned Worcestershire soil was sorrel-red. At my side, Uncle Stan pointed out half-forgotten landmarks: Hallow, Grimley, Shrawley … the curving Severn … and, on the horizon, the lovely well-remembered shapes of the Malverns, with Bredon Hill, Woodbury, and Abberley.
In spite of Aunt Cissie’s warm welcome, the excellent lunch to which we immediately sat down was rather an ordeal.
I was slightly alarmed by the display of glass and silver round the centre-piece of toad-coloured orchids on the luncheon table. (In Sussex A.B. had suppressed the stove in the dining-room, owing to the war-time shortage of fuel, and our meals had been served very simply at a little table near the sitting-room fire.) I wondered how on earth I should ever know which of those many knives and forks and spoons I ought to use for what. In the convent, one of each had to serve for everything. You had your own: they were kept in a small leather sheath round which your table-napkin was tightly rolled and pinned when not in use. Between meals they lived in little cupboards under the table at each one’s place. It was the custom to use a small piece of bread—Continental fashion—with one’s fork. This had to be swallowed after being used to clean one’s usually very greasy pewter plate. This made me feel slightly sick until I got used to it. (There are, indeed, very few things that one cannot get used to if one perseveres.)
I determined to seek salvation by keeping my eyes fixed firmly upon Aunt Cissie and doing in all things exactly as she did.
I felt oddly embarrassed, too, by the knowledge that I was being scrutinized by eyes which, however kindly, were none the less alarmingly experienced. What were they thinking about me—strange, freakish creature that I knew myself to be, after my long encagement behind those walls and bars? There I sat, clothed largely in other people’s raiment: a hat of my sister’s, a coat of my cousin’s, a dress of my aunt’s. And I was only too painfully conscious that my interior make-up was even odder—a great deal odder and more unprecedented, even, than anyone had any idea. The Rip Van Winkle complex began to steal over me like cold ink into blotting-paper. Between me and these kinsfolk of mine who had lived so thrillingly, so fully, an abyss yawned. Whether or no I should ever be able to bridge it remained to be seen.
Probably no one who has not lived long in a convent will be able to form any idea of the contrast between my first luncheon at Astley and meals as they are served in the Refectory of any large religious house. Of these, the Lenten collation is perhaps the most characteristic.
In Lent, those who fast have their principal meal at midday. After Compline—that is to say, about six p.m.—a second, light meal, called collation, is served. (The amount consumed may not exceed eight ounces for those who fast.)
Nothing could be more other-worldly, monastic, austere, mediaeval, than this meal as I so vividly remember it. The Refectorian, clanging the deep-voiced iron bell that hangs in the cloister; the nuns, genuflecting two and two as they leave the choir; the slow, dignified procession descending the great wide staircase into the purple darkness under the cloister arches, unlighted save for the tiny crimson flame of a l
amp that burns before the image of some saint. And the refectory—long, cold, severe and sombre, its windows shuttered and curtained to keep out the icy evening mist; and the guttering candles in their ancient battered candlesticks of burnished copper—two to each table—casting weird, grotesque shadows that leap and shudder over the ceiling and across the walls. It is extraordinarily beautiful; and when the long line of white-garbed nuns files in, each inclining profoundly to the great crucifix that hangs in the gloom above the Prioress’s table, it seems as though the stage were being set for some strange, mystic drama, some solemn court ceremony of a bygone age.
When the whole community is assembled in two long rows one down either side, the Prioress gives the signal. The reader steps out of the shadows into the middle of the refectory.
‘Jube Domna benedicere …’
The age-old request for a benediction which the Church sets on the lips of her official lectors breaks the silence; then the blessing is given: ‘May a tranquil night and a perfect end be vouchsafed to us by the Lord Omnipotent.’ The quiet white figures incline once more to the crucifix and go noiselessly to their places. A Pater and Ave for benefactors are then recited in silence: the Prioress touches the small brass bell suspended over the table and the meal begins.
The Refectorian rises from her knees—an aproned figure in a pinned-up habit—bows ceremoniously before the Prioress and goes to the hatch at the far end of the refectory. Here—framed in the opening like a three-quarter-length Holbein portrait—the Cellaress stands, busily wiping the jugs and dishes that a lay-sister brings in from the kitchen quarters before handing them in through the hatch. There is little enough—perhaps a few dishes of boiled potatoes with great jugs of vegetable soup. The Refectorian ladles it out into the little pewter porringers set at everyone’s place as she passes by. The rest of the food is already prepared on the tables; loaves of coarse brown bread, butter and cheese, perhaps a dish or two of figs or dates….
I Leap Over the Wall Page 4