Against the western wall, the reader in the dark oak pulpit raises a clear voice above the sound of scurrying footsteps and the soft clash of dishes and plates. It may be a passage from the Scriptures or a treatise on the virtues, or the life or writings of a saint or a pious biography: whatever it is, the Rule ordains that it must be listened to attentively. Not to do so is, therefore, a minor breach of Rule. During so gross an occupation as the feeding of the body, it is fitting that the mind should be occupied with spiritual things. That is the central idea lying behind all the elaborate ceremonial of the refectory. Every movement is regulated. Those who receive, as well as those who offer the dishes, must incline to one another with the most profound respect. As Hilaire Belloc epitomizes it, in the refectory—as everywhere in the convent—‘the grace of God is in courtesy’. Again, no one may raise her eyes. Should she who is served before you help herself to more than her portion from the dish of cherries, or the nun on your left spill soup or make sucking noises with her teeth, you must contain yourself. Silence is absolute. If you want more water or bread or salt, you may only ask for it by the official gestures. Penances are enjoined for any who make a noise or spill things. Even in the choir, the observance of decorum is not more rigorous. The refectory is a cenacle in which the taking of food is transfigured almost into a sacrament.
By the end of lunch I had learned quite a number of useful things of which I made a note as a guide to future behaviour.
To begin with, the old-fashioned habit of sitting up straight and keeping one’s hands beneath the table when not engaged in eating had apparently died out. One now leaned back comfortably or rested one’s elbows on the table, joining one’s hands as a kind of support on which to lean one’s chin. Then I noticed that I left my plate a great deal too clean for correct behaviour. (In the convent, one had to eat absolutely everything that was humanly swallowable.) Another thing—one must always remember the presence of servants. A warning glance or two had reached me across the orchids from Uncle Stan.
I went up to my room feeling not only provincial but prehistoric. The Rip Van Winkle complex had got me rather overwhelmingly in its grip.
(6)
At Astley, my education advanced with the greatest rapidity.
I had not been there long before I discovered that I had an irritating habit of opening doors so quietly that nobody knew when I had entered a room. This, of course, made people jump when they turned round and encountered me unexpectedly. One day, Uncle Stan spoke to me about it which made me feel that something must be done. Before a fortnight was ended, I had taught myself to stamp up and down stairs, rattle door-handles and bang doors in such wise as to make my presence felt by everybody in the vicinity. It was extremely difficult, as I had spent the greater part of my life in trying to be noiseless. However, by now I was growing accustomed to doing everything upside down and inside out.
My cousin, Di Kemp-Welch, who was living with her parents for the duration, opened for me a number of windows into life, through which I gazed with considerable astonishment.
She was as good-looking as anyone needs to be, with a most up-to-date vocabulary, a rollicking sense of humour, and expensive clothes. We had mutually illuminating conversations in the old nursery—now transformed into a sitting-room. Sometimes we listened to the wireless. Di liked ‘Shipmates Ashore’ and the messages to the fighting forces from their families. I learned to appreciate the sallies of Miss Doris Hare and such songs as A Wing and a Prayer. Left to myself, I think I might have liked other programmes better, but I certainly learnt a great deal that was of the utmost value to me while I listened to these items and to the comments of my witty and experienced cousin Di.
Margot, Di’s younger sister, was married to Maurice Huntington-Whitely and lived at The Old Hill, just over the borderline of the Astley grounds. She was a person of quite extraordinary vitality and although—or was it possibly because?—her conversation was apt to deal with slightly embarrassing topics (as when she described with vivacious detail the latest scientific methods of inseminating the domestic cow), she was excellent company. Her son Hugo, who was just passing from Eton to Dartmouth, took me to my first cinema. We were accompanied by Kiloran Howard (child of Uncle Stan’s second daughter, Lorna), who was also home for the holidays.
I cannot forget the solicitude with which they treated me. There was an awful solemnity about it. It was exquisite; it was also rather touching. Few elderly spinsters can have been treated so delightfully as I was by those two representatives of the Younger Generation that afternoon.
The cinema of my girlhood had not been a very enjoyable entertainment. To begin with, it had joggled rather badly and, as the talking film was nowhere near being invented, the dramas were in dumb-show and one had to read long and sometimes rather tiresome captions between almost every scene. The technique, too, was in its crude and rather uninspiring infancy. Hollywood and Technicolor were, of course, as yet unknown.
My astonishment may, therefore, be imagined as the afternoon’s programme gradually unfolded itself upon the screen.
The first film was a rollicking farce of the slap-and-tickle variety. Most of the jokes were, needless to say, rather beyond me and even those I managed to grasp, aided by the tactfully whispered explanations of Kiloran and Hugo, were not exactly my cup of tea.
(Yes, it seems incredible, but I had now reached the point when I began to use such expressions as ‘too, too dreary-making, my dear!’; ‘believe it or not’; ‘well and truly’; ‘your pigeon’; ‘I have a hunch’; ‘it’s your funeral’—and even worse. Not ‘lousy’ or ‘mucky’; one had to draw the line somewhere; and I drew it there, for aesthetic reasons, though the fluidity of their meanings deprived me of two of the most widely used expressions of the day.)
The next item was a super-gangster thriller in broad American. Its shootings, rescues, kidnappings, and double-crossings left me dazed and bewildered. Kiloran and Hugo translated as much as they thought good for me. I was thankful that it was not a great deal. Finally a Donald Duck of the most shattering variety. In all my life I had never dreamed of such lurid colours, undreamed-of situations, or amazing technique. People ought not to be taken to see their first Disney film without suitable preparation. The shock is too overwhelming. I sat there with my tongue cleaving to my dried-up palate, and my eyes popping out of my head.
I was more or less in the condition of a mental stretcher-case when my two young cousins—though I doubt whether they realized it—conducted me home.
One of the things that I most enjoyed at Astley was my daily breakfast tête-à-tête with Uncle Stan. (Aunt Cissie and Di appeared later in the morning.)
At that hour the average Englishman is apt to be morose and taciturn. Not so Uncle Stan. He was then at his wittiest and best. I could have listened to him indefinitely, held captive by the interest and fascination of his talk. How I regret the endless opportunities for asking questions which I missed through sheer stupidity! But for more than a year after my exodus from the convent I was in such a condition of daze and bewilderment as to feel temporarily bereft even of such intelligence as I possessed.
It was during these breakfast conversations that I first began to glimpse something of the stupendous changes that had come over the world as I remembered it.
In 1914, Europe had been a tidy chessboard of kings and queens and emperors: a Czar in Russia, a Kaiser in Germany, an Emperor in Austria, a King in Spain. Greece and the Balkans still had crowned sovereigns to rule over them; the Ottoman Empire had a Sultan-Caliph and Persia a Shah. Japan (‘those brave little Japs’, as we called them enthusiastically in those days) had recently become an Eastern power through waging war successfully on the wicked Russians; and as for China … well, one had known vaguely that some terrific upheaval had rent her for a year or two, but as to what it really was all about…
Whereas, now …
Everything that I had looked upon as static and invincible appeared to have been swept away. Thrones had toppl
ed, dictators had arisen. Massacres, blood-baths, purges, pogroms had followed one another with a ruthlessness and ferocity for which there appeared to be no precedent. Entire sections of society had been ‘liquidated’ (another of those old words with slightly sinister new meanings) because they had stood in the way of one man working out his own idea.
The very map of the world had been remodelled. Entire countries had disappeared. In their places, others with new and fantastic names had been constructed. Even those which remained had changed their outlines and been sliced away in unexpected places or made to bulge where they had never bulged before.
One day Uncle Stan lent me Virginia Cowles’s Looking for Trouble. This gave me my first ‘close-up’ (another new word that had to be explained to me) of the dictators—of Fascism and Communism and, incidentally, of our present-day selves. I liked none of them. It was my first real glimpse of the sinister power that seemed to be sapping the very foundations of the world that I had known.
CHAPTER THREE
(1)
M E (lamely concluding a slightly impressionist sketch of my Plans for The Future): So you see, all things considered, I do really believe the best thing would be for me to try for a job in a munition factory.
UNCLE STAN (from his armchair on the window side of the fireplace): …
AUNT CISSIE (from a cushioned corner of the sofa): …
DI (from the window-seat): …
The scene of this devastating outburst of silence was the White Parlour at Astley, where it was customary to foregather in the evening after the nine o’clock news.
All day I had been steeling myself to tackle the perplexing subject of my future; and immediately the news was ended, I had drawn a deep breath and begun. When I paused, it had been to encounter this streamlined silence. It needed no outstanding gift of intuition to perceive that my suggestion had not met with the approval that I had hoped.
The trouble, of course, was that I lacked all qualifications for the jobs which might otherwise have been found for me.
I had, I suppose, received a more or less average education, first by governesses and then at a Continental finishing school for what in those days were called rather pompously les jeunes filles de la société. But as there had then been no question of my having to earn my living, I had never bothered about trying to matriculate or provide myself with any of those useful diplomas which unlock the doors of every worth-while post. And, as I was entirely ignorant of shorthand, book-keeping, car driving, cooking, or the care of infants, it was not much use my answering the advertisements which filled long columns in The Times or Daily Telegraph.
It was true I knew how to typewrite; but the ‘experienced stenographers’ required by heads of firms appeared to be incomplete unless they were experts at shorthand as well. So that was ruled out.
I also knew a little about libraries. Books had always been to me the breath of life. As a nun, I had for some years held the office of Librarian, and had classified, indexed, and catalogued the convent library, which was of quite a reasonable size. The snag here appeared to be that you must possess a diploma from the Association of Librarians—or whatever it calls itself. Without this, no Librarian would look at you.
I might possibly have secured a teaching job without much difficulty. I had taught for a good many years in the school which belonged to the convent1 and had found it enthralling—but in no way conducive to the contemplative life. But I knew that to do this would mean sequestration in the ultra-feminine atmosphere of a school for girls. I felt that I had had enough of this, and needed mixed company. Men interested me profoundly because I knew nothing about them. I wanted to study their manners and customs; to discover the way their minds worked; to find out the kind of things they did and talked about; to watch the way they behaved.
One thing that I felt I did know something about was the ancient art of illuminating manuscripts. During the whole of my life in the convent I had been employed intermittently in this fascinating work. It was my business to turn out books of devotion, decorated texts, and ‘holy pictures’ by the dozen, to serve as book-marks for the breviaries, missals, diurnals used by my own and other religious communities.
Up among the rafters in one of the garrets was a tiny room which had been given to me as a scriptorium. Here, for many hours a day, I used to work in solitude. Here, too, I was allowed to keep the tools of my trade. Boxes of hand-made paper, cut into every imaginable size. Sheets of milk-white vellum, used for the more important and elaborate kinds of work. Parchment, carefully pressed between weights, upon which each nun would write and sign her Vows when the time for her Profession arrived. Brushes of every conceivable texture and shape and size. Pencils of almost metallic hardness, used for tracing designs on to vellum, from which not the slightest mark can be erased. Saucers and shells of gold and silver. Agates for burnishing. Cases of gold-leaf. Gum arabic for mixing with powdered gold and paint. Dusted pumice, with which to remove all grease from the surface of vellum and parchment. Bottles of ox-gall and gouache. And paints, in little cakes and tubes and pans and bottles; scarlet and emerald and peacock-blue and flame and olive-green—colours that made the stiff pages glow with the brilliance of gems.
Every old monastic house has its Ceremonials, which are brought out for the Bishop’s use on state occasions such as Clothings, Professions, and Jubilees. These Ceremonials are exquisitely-bound volumes whose every page represents weeks of intense application and arduous work. Here, at last, was a subject about which I felt I did know something. But who, in these days of battle, murder, and sudden death, wanted illuminated addresses or initial letters from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berri, or the Book of Kells? Such luxuries belong essentially to times of peace.
It was a pity I could not turn my nursing experience to some account. In the convent I had for some time held the office of Apothecary, which meant that it had been my business to look after anybody who might be suffering from cuts, burns, bruises, or what are known in religious communities as petites misères. This rather ambiguous term has always struck me as one of the most convenient in the language. Who cannot call up in their imagination some small, unpleasant bodily infirmity which they would greatly prefer to leave unspecified? How infinitely more convenient to state vaguely that one was suffering from a ‘Little Misery’ than from any of those faintly revolting minor ailments which one always prefers to conceal.
I loved nursing. I’d seldom enjoyed myself more than when an influenza microbe decimated the community and I had been allowed, in my official capacity, to distribute a few little comforts and to tuck the sick nuns snugly into properly warmed beds.
But here, as in everything else, my way was blocked by the lack of any official training. I had not so much as a Red Cross diploma to fall back upon.
Finally—and this was far and away my best line of country—there was St. Augustine. (I refer, of course, to the author of the Confessions, not the Angles-and-Angels saint.)
For the last ten years before I left the convent I had been a St. Augustine specialist.
It had come about like this.
I was given by my Superiors a piece of literary work to tackle, which can best be described as the construction of a historical background to the life and works of the saint. Anyone who has more than a superficial knowledge of the writings of that enchanting personality will have realized—especially if they have attempted the City of God or the two hundred and seventy shorter Letters—that it is practically impossible to appreciate them unless one knows a good deal about the times in which their author lived. There is hardly a page that is not packed with allusions—historical, classical, and contemporary. And unless you are aware of what was going on in the minds as well as the lives of his contemporaries, a very large part of what he wrote about will have little meaning for you at all.
So I was set by my Superiors to make a detailed study of the entire Roman Empire during Augustine’s life-time. This covered the years between A.D. 354 and 430.
I was given the opportunity of reading every history, biography, and monograph which could in any way throw light upon the period; even articles from French and English books of reference were obtained for me. I studied the lives of the Roman Emperors from Constantine to Honorius. I followed the campaigns of Julian the Apostate from Northern Italy into Gaul. I watched the gradual disintegration of the Empire while the barbarian invasion swept down through Europe across into Northern Africa. The behaviour of Jerome the Dalmatian—his treatment of the noble Roman ladies and the amazing conception of Christian charity revealed by his quarrel with Evagrius, made me wonder how he obtained his place in the Calendar of Saints. I marvelled at the Fathers of the desert—St. Antony of Egypt and St. Simon Stylites on his terrible pillar—pioneers of that movement which spread so swiftly from East to West. The romantic adventures of Galla Placida enthralled me; so did the doings of the Manichees and Donatists. In Britain, too, there were exciting happenings; Rome was withdrawing, and in the dark years that followed, the heroic figures of King Arthur and his fellowship were beginning to take shape in the dim mists of legend and romance.
At the end of ten years or so of fairly intensive study, I had amassed a surprising amount of extraordinarily interesting information. This I sorted out and collated into a highly detailed historical biography, inserting every contemporary happening that I could discover into each year of St. Augustine’s life.
And I was up to the eyes in this perfectly enthralling occupation when untoward circumstances—some of them connected with Hitler’s earlier incursions into Europe—brought my unfinished labours to an end.
I Leap Over the Wall Page 5