Several telephone calls came through while I was with her. Considerably awed, I observed the really breath-taking efficiency with which she solved each problem as it arose. After the fourth of these, during which she had straightened out an incomprehensible mix-up with a skill that would have done credit to a Cabinet Minister, I knew that my doom was sealed. Never, in any capacity whatsoever, should I dare to attempt a job in a place where so much clear-headed sang-froid and sureness of touch was required.
Before I left, however, she suggested that I should call at a place called Sardinia Street and see a certain Miss Burby, who would—she felt sure—be able to help me in my search for the right kind of job.
More telephoning followed; after which Miss Mainwaring told me that an interview had been arranged for me at Sardinia Street the following day.
I threaded my way out among the Adonises in the vestibule. They were pleasant to look upon—large, hairy, deep-voiced, muscular, smelling of khaki, leather and tobacco … as great a contrast to the beings by whom I had always been surrounded as a herd of buffaloes to a flock of canaries in a cage.
For there really are points of similarity between hen-canaries and some enclosed religious. They are both so neat, so almost identical in appearance, so perfectly content to continue hopping about from perch to perch behind their bars. Sometimes, in the very early days of my religious life, I remember feeling almost smothered by the rarefied atmosphere of undiluted femininity. I used to long madly for a whiff of cigarette smoke, the hint of a pipe in the offing, the rough, male smell of tweed. I would sooner have died than reveal these shameful thoughts to my Novice Mistress. Instead, I turned my mind deliberately to other matters; with the result that, in course of time, the memory of such things died peacefully away.
The hen-canary, however, is far from being the model upon which the contemplative nun is intended to form herself. This I tried to make clear in the sometimes rather heated arguments which I’ve had at various times with friends who did not see eye to eye with me on the subject of nuns.
Usually we started off at a gallop with some man—it was usually a man who said this sort of thing—insisting that nuns were selfish because they refused to fulfil the function for which they had obviously been created by Providence. ‘Which, of course,’ I would retort, ‘is not the case. Religious life is not founded on a series of negations. A vow of chastity is a positive thing.’
‘Do explain yourself,’ they would ask, rather crossly.
So I would try to explain to them how this particular vow, far from being a backwater was in reality a channel.
I said: ‘The solemn promise to God by which you renounce human love, marriage, children, the satisfactions of the human heart, is only meant to clear the decks for action. Nuns and monks make that vow in order that their souls may be perfectly free.’
‘Free for what?’ they would all ask, faintly irritated
And I would reply, ‘Well, union with God, if you know what that means. Which you obviously don’t, or you wouldn’t talk in the way you do about people who are willing to pay the price demanded for it.’
Then they would smile a little patronizingly, and say, ‘Oh, now she’s off on mysticism. That’s not playing the game.’
‘Why not get back to where we started,’ somebody would suggest, pacifically. ‘Wasn’t it the question of why nuns are usually so hyperfeminine?’
‘Only some of them are,’ I would insist. ‘The really generous ones, who’ve renounced self so completely that God takes the place of everything they’ve given up for him, aren’t spinsterish and diminished at all. They’re the world’s greatest lovers. Look at St. Catherine of Siena and St. John of the Cross.’
At this point, everyone usually started talking together, interrupting, contradicting and flatly disagreeing; so that, in the end, nobody was at all convinced by anybody else’s argument.
The point, however, which through thick and thin I always stuck to was, that if nuns did become fussy and spinsterish and ultra-feminine, it was their own fault. The nearness to God, which invariably results when religious life is lived fully and generously, induces a width of outlook, a depth of character, an enrichment of the entire personality, which can be arrived at by no other means.
All the same, as I trudged back along Wigmore Street in the heat-wave, I determined that I would not apply for employment in a girls’ school.
The glimpse of Young America in the vestibule at the Grosvenor Square Headquarters had put other ideas into my head.
(6)
At the Ministry of Labour and National Service in Sardinia Street—which was the address to which Miss Mainwaring had directed me—I was treated with the utmost kindness. Miss Burby—the wise and experienced interviewer who put me through my paces—declared, after careful consideration, that a post in a library was obviously the thing for me. The best war-work for people who had not much experience of the kind of jobs that most women of my age were doing, was that of filling-up the empty places left by the men and women who had been called up. Library staffs were among those which were the most depleted. Applications for under-librarians were constantly being received; so in all probability she would soon be able to send me particulars of just such a post, with a salary of, probably, about £250 a year.
And since I was so keen to make a war effort, why not take a temporary job while I was waiting? If I cared to try again for crèche work (I had thought of that, hadn’t I, when I was in Shuffleborough?) there was an excellent opportunity at a place near the People’s Palace in the Mile End Road … She would ring them up immediately, and prepare the ground for me. And in less than five minutes an interview—yes, another interview, believe it or not—had been arranged for me the following day.
Admirable Miss Burby. Had she, I wonder, any inkling of the acute inferiority complex with which I had come into her presence? Contact with all these experienced, highly efficient persons, each of whom had achieved a certain degree of eminence in her profession, was rapidly reducing me to a nervous wreck. Every interview left me a little more conscious of my freakishness and peculiarity; to camouflage it successfully was at times quite beyond my powers … Shall I ever forget the awful moment when one of my interviewers—exasperated, no doubt, by my non-committal answers—looked me coldly in the eye and said, ‘Well, Miss Baldwin, perhaps you could tell me something in life about which you have had a little experience?’
And now, here were all my heart-sinkings about girls’ schools and exclusively feminine society swept away as by a miracle; an opulent future in congenial surroundings seemed assured to me.
I could have clasped Miss Burby to my heart.
I had never been up—or should one perhaps say down?—the Mile End Road before, and I can’t say that I found the view I glimpsed through the bus windows particularly romantic. Many of the names above the shops were Jewish; and the further one went, the more dingy and squalid everything became.
I got off at the People’s Palace. (It struck me that during the past twenty-eight years the People seemed to have come into their own in more ways than one.) There I looked about me, using my eyes and nose. In a way, it was almost more depressing than an out-and-out slum….
I will say no more of my adventures in the Mile End Road than that ten minutes’ conversation with the alarmingly competent horn-rimmed lady who ‘saw’ me (her brogue was of the kind that left deep stains behind it) caused me to walk gloomily back to the bus-stop, feeling that there must be something radically wrong with my technique.
(7)
I shall always remember the first time I had tea with my friends Gay and Barbara. It was my first ‘close-up’ of two women of my own age and class, either of whose lives—had Providence arranged things otherwise—might easily have been my own.
They were sisters-in-law, and were running Gay’s house in South Audley Street as a war-home for such of their relatives as might need one when on leave.
In the old days, when I’d stayed there as a girl
, the door had always been answered by a butler. Now, Gay opened it herself. She wore a ravishing apron made of two bandanna handkerchiefs, and explained, as I followed her up the slightly blitz-scarred staircase, that she and Barbara did most of the work themselves, as servants were simply not to be had these days.
I hadn’t seen Barbara since our school-days. Now she was lying back langorously upon what I supposed was the modern equivalent of a sofa. I noticed with interest that she wore a full-length garment of a pattern that was new to me. Tactful questioning revealed the fact that it was known as a ‘housecoat’. This information I filed carefully in the pigeon-hole of my Experience of Life, which I’d labelled ‘Clothes’.
Gay said, ‘Barbara works in a canteen all night and sleeps all day. She only got up this afternoon because she wants to ask you intimate questions about nuns. Darling, do have some tea and tell us all about how you escaped!’
Then they began to talk. And while they did so, I studied them carefully.
They interested me extraordinarily, because, quite apart from their own personalities, which I found delightful, I saw in them both uncanny glimpses of Myself-as-I-Might-Have-Been.
Or—should I?
Supposing that my life had been run on lines similar to theirs, should I have evolved into that kind of type? For types they undoubtedly were.
I observed their sleek, exquisitely burnished hair, which suggested that both of them had only just stepped forth from the hands of a coiffeur. Their admirable clothes—sufficiently shabby to be patriotic, yet—one felt—so indubitably right. Their hands—work-roughened, but beautifully shaped and manicured. Their make-up—almost unnoticeable yet just sufficient to enhance the fading tones of middle-age. Above all, their amazing poise and self-possession. Here was something which not even the most adverse circumstances (one knew it instinctively) would ever destroy.
As for their actual conversation, it was to me almost like a foreign language. Unfamiliar clichés. Amusing—and sometimes rather startling—comparisons. Lots of slang—American and otherwise. And, in Barbara’s case, much apt and occasionally irreverent quotations from the classics—mostly Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson. (This, it seemed, was an idiosyncrasy peculiar to her family.) On the whole, I think their most breath-taking effects were achieved by the curious choice of adjectives and adverbs. I sat spell-bound. It was like nothing I had ever listened to before.
Perhaps what startled me most was the constant recurrence of words which not even a man would have used before girls when I left school.
‘Lousy’, for instance, and ‘mucky’; ‘guts’, ‘blasted’, ‘bloody’ and ‘what-the-hell’.
Both of them were alarmingly competent. They seemed to have met everyone, read everything, been everywhere. And besides those endless social activities with which their pre-war years appeared to have been glutted, they had run houses, families (and heaven alone knew what that might not imply), knew how to drive, dance, ride, swim, fence, play tennis and hockey, ski, row, sail, cook, garden and make clothes. Gay played the piano; Barbara the saw. All this I gathered in an hour or so of casual conversation. Probably there were no end of other things that they could do as well….
I began to feel dizzy and bemused, and said so. Like the Queen of Sheba before Solomon, I just felt there was no more spirit left in me.
They only laughed, however, and said cheerfully that they were quite ordinary people. Nearly everyone who had knocked about the world between the wars and who possessed a fairly go-ahead husband had learnt these things automatically as the years went by. One just sort of took them in one’s stride.
I sat and stared at them. By now I was feeling completely sub-human. There really seemed nothing left for me to do except disintegrate. What chance could I ever hope for, anywhere, or at anything, if such standards as those of Gay and Barbara were looked upon as average?
After tea, they stuck long slim cigarette-holders into their beautifully lipsticked mouths and began talking about their husbands. (Gay’s was a rather important scientist; Barbara’s something weighty at the Admiralty.) To these they referred by faintly opprobrious nicknames, using tones that suggested affectionate mothers discussing the slightly absurd behaviour of small boys in the nursery.
Over their daughters, both ladies tended to sigh a little. But neither made any attempt to conceal the fact that upon their sons they doted unashamedly.
As for their grandchildren …
But at this point a thought darted suddenly into my mind which both startled and staggered me.
If I had married and had children, I, too, in all probability, should at that moment be a grandmother.
And yet, here I was, wandering round on the face of the earth with the outlook and mind of a pre-1914 school-girl. I, a Potential Grandparent.
It was fantastic.
How in the world was I to cope with the problem of Being My Age?
In some ways, the convent had certainly tended to keep one static with regard to mental development. Nothing, of course, could be more enviable than a truly child-like spirit; but I’ve seen more than one young nun in her early twenties relapse into a kind of second childhood after a couple of years or so in the Noviceship. It depends very largely upon whoever happens to be Novice Mistress. I remember one, who so inculcated this spirit of child-like simplicity that her novices continued to rejuvenate till their mental outlook was almost that of eight-year-olds.
Gay and Barbara were not specially helpful when I asked them for suggestions as to how I could most swiftly and successfully acquire the mentality of a Grandparent. They hooted with laughter. Gay assured me that only Experience of Life could help me. Barbara thought that twelve months more of trial and error might add perhaps a decade to my age. Gay said that, provided I went in for fairly riotous living, I might—by the time I was sixty—be somewhere about thirty-five.
Then Barbara said, ‘Look, shall I be quite quite frank with you?’
I said: ‘Please!’
So then, between slow puffs of cigarette smoke, she was very, very frank with me indeed.
She said that the impression I gave was not that of young-mindedness, but of a really appalling immaturity. Because I’d never used them to live with, whole chunks of my personality had become completely atrophied. She told me that I reminded her of a piano, half of whose keys had gone dumb for want of use. And I ought, absolutely, to do something about it. The best thing would be to start living as hard as I possibly could, with all the bits of myself which had hitherto been ignored. Only thus could I hope for the restoration of balance in my personality.
Gay said, ‘You ought to go to all sorts and kinds of places and meet crowds of different people. Especially men.’
The idea of my teaching in a girls’ school was turned down as being too absurd even for consideration.
‘My God, what a notion!’ said Barbara. ‘Why, the one thing you ought to avoid at all costs, for the rest of your life, is herds of women! Look here—why not come here and stay with us for a while?’
Unfortunately, this attractive idea was found at the moment to be impracticable, owing to an influx of family expected on leave that very evening. Later on, however, they made me promise that I would hand myself over to the two of them for special treatment.
Gay thought that two months of their society, in which I should meet their friends and share their lives as much as possible, would do more to equip me with Experience of Life than any other plan which could at the moment be devised.
‘Though of course, my sweet,’ said Barbara, as we finally parted on the doorstep, ‘what would really do you good would be six months on a battleship.’
(8)
The next few days were depressing.
London was like an oven.
It made me long madly for the country. The scorched eternal pavements and imprisoning rows of houses were a nightmare. I craved for the feeling of grass beneath my feet, the smell of new-mown lawns, the song of birds in a garden after rain. I began to
feel that unless I got away soon from the suffocating London atmosphere, I might start doing all sorts of peculiar things.
What was worse, Gay and Barbara had rather upset me.
They had so utterly destroyed me in my own opinion that I simply hadn’t the face to apply anywhere for a job till I had acquired more of that essential yet curiously elusive commodity, Experience of Life.
It was difficult to decide what to do next. So, for a day or two, I sat and brooded, much oppressed by claustrophobia and the heat. Then, once more—this time in the form of a letter from Miki—Providence intervened.
I had known Miki as a fuzzy-haired scrap in her early teens. When I left the convent, she had sent me a delightful invitation to come north one day and see the home, husband and family with which she had provided herself in the interim. And now here was another letter, asking urgently for news of me and wondering how long it would be before we met again.
Here, obviously, was the solution of my difficulties.
To judge from her letters, Miki had grown up into a young woman of the most lively and up-to-date type. I felt sure she would be able to teach me all sorts of things I didn’t know. In return, I felt that just possibly I might be of some use to her; for, like everyone else one heard of, she appeared to be struggling with shortage of staff in her efforts to run her home.
I wrote to her.
Her reply was instantaneous: a trunk call, followed by one of the warmest, most welcoming letters I’ve ever received.
Four days later, I shook the dust of London from my feet at Euston station and went roaring up to Scotland by the night express.
CHAPTER SIX
(1)
I Leap Over the Wall Page 13