One of the Matrons said to me:
‘Haven’t you noticed? The people here are feverish. They must find some escape from the strain under which they live. We of the older sort find relief in Bridge and gossip. The younger ones chain-smoke, haunt the pictures, and get all the kick they know how to—and do they know how!—out of men.’
A little way up the road was a camp of American soldiers. This did not particularly help things. In fact, it provided opportunities for all that the authorities were trying to avoid.
Nobody could ignore the way those girls chased after the Americans. It revolted me. They would hang around the lanes, in groups or alone, and try, by means of eye-play, cock-shrieks, giggling and other alluring behaviour to attract the attention of the men.
Not that the Yankees required encouragement. They were quite as forthcoming as the ladies, though their technique was different. What they liked best was to conceal themselves in unfrequented corners of the grounds and buildings, to emerge at nightfall for appointments with adventurous girl-friends. Time and again I discovered khaki-clad Romeos lurking behind the curtains in the dance-hall, crouching in the coal-hole, skulking among the little stunted bushes at the top of the camp. As a rule, they were not difficult to deal with. It was enough to link a request for their immediate departure from the premises with a mention of the Military Police….
One day, a woman in the Catering Department whom I cultivated because she so often let fall useful information, said to me:
‘Listen. If you want to see where most of the trouble in this place starts, go and look at the Bottom Pinchers’ Parade on a Saturday night.’
‘The what?’ I said, aghast.
So she explained to me that the noble sport of Bottom Pinching (introduced, it was said, into this blameless country by the wicked Americans) was Scoreswick’s most popular outdoor game.
Its focal point was the churchyard en route to the town. Here, especially on Saturday evenings when the girls walked down to Scoreswick to the pictures, the soldiers would lie in ambush among the graves. And, as they passed by, giggling and squawking according to the manner of their kind, the men would pussy-foot after them and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, nip their behinds.
When the welkin had ceased to ring with their laughter and screeches, it was customary for pinched and pinchers to join forces and proceed arm-in-arm to spend the evening in the town.
‘Come along with me one night and watch them at it,’ my informant suggested. ‘It’ll open your eyes to quite a lot of things.’
In the end I allowed myself to be persuaded.
She was perfectly right. It did.
(6)
Once a week, every Matron had to take her turn as Night Sentinel.
This meant a twelve-hour vigil, beginning at 7.30 p.m.
Part One consisted of four hours spent in the small and stuffy Matrons’ office. One had to sign chits, answer telephone calls, give out passes and permissions, check arrivals and departures and cope with any problem that might arise.
About half an hour before midnight, you locked up the office, tucked the Log Book (in which everything that took place during the night had to be meticulously recorded) under your arm and embarked upon Part Two.
Your first job was to empty the Central Building. This meant chasing the girls from the dance-hall to their respective huts. After that, you took over the keys from various officials, extinguished the lights and shut the doors. Then, by the light of your carefully shaded government lantern, you had to go back and search the dance-hall, workshops, lounge and recreation rooms, lest Young America, intent upon amorous adventure, had attempted concealment in some ingenious hiding-place.
Only when this was accomplished might the Central Building be locked for the night.
Part the Third opened with a nerve-shattering walk across the camp in all but utter darkness. The night-noises were too sinister for words. Long, low sighs. (The wind, of course.) Faint moanings. (Girls, probably having nightmares, inside the huts.) Soft footsteps that padded after one and then scurried away into the dark. (Dogs? Cats? Imagination? Poltergeists?) Queer, scuffling sounds inside the ditches, as though someone were splashing softly in the water. (Rats? Burglars?) And now and again a blood-curdling screech which might—or might not—have been an owl. A horrible little walk. I generally covered the last dozen yards at a run.
The final and most trying part of the vigil had for its setting Cactus Cottage, near the Porter’s Lodge, by the entrance-gate. Any girl who broke rules by coming in without a permit after lock-up had to spend the night there; an arrangement intended to safeguard the sleep of those in the hut to which the offender belonged. Though not strictly speaking a punishment hut, a certain disgrace was attached to having slept at Cactus Cottage. The girls loathed it. The beds were hard, the floors rugless, and there were no mirrors on the walls.
Here, in a sort of office that smelt abominably of black-out curtains, the Night Sentinel had to spend the following seven hours, in order to deal with any delinquents whom the Night Porter might bring in.
They had to be interviewed carefully. When you had judged whether they were drunk or sober, you had to find out what they had been doing, take down the excuses they gave for their behaviour and see them off to bed.
Sometimes—though very rarely—there were no late arrivals. One then had to sit there for the whole night, reading, smoking, sometimes even dozing a little, till morning came.
The windy nights were the worst. The hut would become the centre of curious noises. Cracks and creakings in the woodwork; rattlings at the windows as though someone were desperately trying to get in; knocks and sighings in the passage; or a door would burst open suddenly, and, when you got up to close it, a sound as of softly withdrawing footsteps would send cold shivers down your spine. The whole place seemed thronged with unseen presences intent upon mysterious secret business of their own.
Now and again the girls would come in drunk. Generally I found them easy to manage, though their language, and occasionally their behaviour, was rather embarrassing. If I found a girl impossible to cope with, I summoned the Night Porter to lend a helping hand.
I had a high opinion of that Night Porter. He had several daughters of his own, which accounted, perhaps, for his sureness of touch in the regrettable situations which occasionally arose.
One incident still makes me heavy-hearted when I think of it.
At about 2 a.m. on a certain morning of wind and rain, the Porter brought into the office a very young girl. As she had apparently passed out, he had to carry her. He said that he had found her lying in a heap, unconscious, just outside the Porter’s Lodge. He thought somebody must have dumped her down and left her. She was breathing in a queer, snoring way that rather frightened me.
Between us we carried her into one of the bedrooms. It took me some time to get her inert body out of her saturated clothes.
Everything she had on was not only drenched but torn and filthy. You would have said she had been thrown down and rolled about in the mud…. I could have wept over her.
When I went back to the office, the Porter was standing gloomily on the hearth-rug.
I said I supposed she had had some sort of accident.
He said: ‘Accident, my elbow. There’s been too many accidents of that kind since that camp got started up along the road. Takin’ them kids out of an evening—couple of ports, a doped cigarette or two, and out they passes…. And it’s nobody’s business what happens after that. Not the first time, it isn’t, that I’ve seen a young lass left there at the gate when her boy-friend’s done with her. Time something got done about it; that’s what I tell Mrs. Todd whenever we meet.’
‘What can be done?’ I said unhappily.
‘You’re askin’ me!’ he said.
Next day I reported what had happened. I was told that the authorities were ‘doing everything that they could to prevent such incidents.’
During the afternoon I looked in to see the girl. S
he was humped up in bed, her lips swollen and with bloodshot eyes. I couldn’t get a word out of her till just before I went away, when she muttered:
‘I don’t want my mum and dad to know what I done. They’d half-kill me. I can’t never go home now.’ Then she turned her face to the wall and dragged the bedclothes over her head.
Not long after, she left Flower Gardens. She wouldn’t give any address. One hates to think of what probably became of her.
Such are the by-products of war.
(7)
One day as I was whisking out of the bank in Scoreswick I almost collided with an elegant fur-coated woman who had just skipped out of a car.
‘Darling!’ she exclaimed. ‘What on earth are you doing up here?’
It was Gay.
We explained ourselves to each other and I learnt that she had only come north a few days previously to look after Maurice, her husband, who had been ill. He was, it appeared, in charge of some very hush-hush scientific research for the Government in a large country house which had been requisitioned as a laboratory.
‘Come out and see us some afternoon,’ she suggested. ‘Maurice needs cheering up and we’ve got Wim—my brother-in-law—with us on a spot of leave. You and Wim would get on.’
So, on my next day off, I accepted the invitation.
Acefield Court—the requisitioned house—stood in its own grounds on the other side of Scoreswick. It was so long since I’d seen an ancestral home that I’d almost forgotten what they looked like. This one reminded me of Albrighton Hall, the Shropshire home of my Sparrow aunt and uncle, where—in the spacious days before 1914—some of the happiest hours of my life had been spent.
As we drove through the sentry-guarded gates I saw yew hedges and neglected lawns sloping to a wide lake patterned with bronze and silver water-fowl. A boat-house like a pagan temple stood against a dark background of elms and oaks. Probably, as things were, its former owners would never again be able to live there. Certainly, the world as I remembered it was changing day by day into something very different from everything that I’d known.
Gay led me through the rather flamboyant doorway into the wing where she and her husband had their rooms.
Maurice, resplendent in a yellow Chinese dressing-gown, lay propped up with pillows on the sofa. Wim, very English and correct, drifted in towards the end of tea. I thought he looked the type who would not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. This made me apprehensive. I lay low.
I observed both men carefully. To me they were as strange and intriguing as an okapi or giant panda at the Zoo. I was much interested in Wim’s garments. He wore a rough tweed sports coat, flannel trousers and a dark periwinkle shirt with socks and tie to match. What an improvement, I thought, on the narrow-legged, sombre-hued lounge-suits in which men had encased themselves for every possible occasion when I was a girl.
I don’t remember who started it, but towards the end of tea we began talking about convents.
Gay said she wanted above all things to know what nuns were allowed to have for breakfast. (I suppose she had visualized a diet of pulse and rain-water or its equivalent for, when I told her that tea with bread and margarine was the usual fare, she looked disappointed.)
Maurice remarked primly that he’d always imagined that nuns were obliged to fast.
‘They are,’ I replied, ‘but not always. The whole of Lent—two or three days a week in Advent, nearly every Friday in the year and the vigils of all the more important feasts—it works out at quite as much as most people can manage in these difficult days. On fasts, you get only a small slice of dry bread and half a cup of black coffee for breakfast, a full meal at midday and an eight-ounce collation at night.’
I told them how astonished I’d been when I ‘came out’ to see how important a place food seemed to hold in the lives of people in the world.
‘In the convent,’ I explained, trying not to sound priggish, ‘you feed your body enough to get a certain amount of work out of it. If you eat things just because you happen to like them, it’s considered gluttony. And one is taught in the Noviceship to mortify one’s palate at least once during every meal.’
Gay said: ‘How do you mean, mortify your palate?’
I explained that you could eat something that you didn’t like or refuse something that you did. Or, if you were thirsty, you could put off drinking till the end of the meal or even not drink at all. Then, as an extreme case, I told them how I had once seen a nun transfer to her own plate the bits of fat, gristle and other horrors from the ‘scrap-plate’ which was passed round once during each meal to collect what nobody could eat.
‘And what,’ Gay asked breathlessly, ‘did she do with it?’
‘Swallowed it,’ I replied.
They all looked so shattered that I wished I had not told them. The horrified silence was broken by Gay. She said:
‘Darling, of course it may be most frightfully holy and all that to go about devouring garbage, but to me it seems simply too, too revolting. And how it can possibly benefit anybody is quite beyond me.’
I tried hard to think of some common ground on which to base an explanation. I could find none. It was like trying to discuss radar with a goldfish.
I said, despairingly, ‘Well, you see, the nun who did it believed that grace—if the term conveys anything to you—can be “won” for souls by acts of self-conquest and self-sacrifice: the principle being that Christ saved the world by allowing his human nature to be crucified. Another motive for mortification, as it’s called, is that the graces you receive in prayer depend largely upon the generosity with which you have mortified yourself between the times of prayer. Anybody who “goes in” for prayer at all will soon discover this. The saints’ lives were full of these “self-crucifying” acts. Francis of Assissi kissed a leper; St. Francis Borgia, when he had to sleep on the floor of an overcrowded inn, deliberately chose to lie by the bed of a consumptive who didn’t know he was there and who spent the whole night spitting on the saint’s face. (And I may mention that when, in the morning, somebody discovered what he’d been enduring, he only said as an explanation, that he couldn’t imagine a more suitable place on which anyone could spit.) And St. Margaret Mary’s “acts of mortification” were so appalling that they’ve only recently found their way into print.’
Gay said: ‘Sounds completely bats to me. Also—forgive me for saying it, darling, quite too repulsive and unhygienic for words. People who do such things ought definitely to be shut up.’
‘Quite a lot of them are,’ I replied brightly. ‘You’d be surprised at the number of nuns with ‘missionary vocations’ who deliberately enter enclosed orders. They feel, you see, that they’ll find more opportunities for self-sacrifice there than on the mission field.’
And I quoted Bishop Hedley, who insisted that conversion was not brought about by human means but by the grace of God; and that what really went to the root of the matter was ‘the prayer and self-sacrifice of a truly humble and crucified soul’.
There followed another slightly uncomfortable pause.
Then Gay said: ‘Of course, my sweet, it’s quite too marvellous, the way you hold forth about it all. But I’m afraid it leaves me merely baffled. You see, your line of approach to saying prayers and all that and mine are so, so different. In a fairly hectic existence, I’ve discovered that even a murmur to the Powers That Be about wanting or not wanting anything to happen, is more than enough to start them coercing one in every imaginable way. Sort of perversity fixation, don’t you know what I mean?—like the Air Ministry and the weather. And as for trying to convert sinners by swallowing other people’s bits of gristle—well, it strikes me as being just the tiniest bit far-fetched, because one does so feel, doesn’t one, that after all those millions of aeons—or whatever they’re called—that They have been in charge of things, They probably know better than we do what’s the best line to take; and anyhow, who can possibly hope to stop Them, once They’ve decided what They’re going to do, especiall
y when you think of all the people who are sure to be praying, just as hard as we are, in exactly the opposite direction. That is, of course, always supposing that there really is anyone there who has the slightest control over anything; which, when one looks at the shatteringly bloody mess that everyone has made of everything in the world to-day, oneself included, one feels definitely inclined to doubt.’
With which interesting, if slightly involved, statement of her religious beliefs, Gay selected a cigarette from the blue enamelled box on the table, applied her jewelled lighter with a dash and elegance that filled me with envious admiration, and subsided into her chair.
The next attack was launched by Maurice.
He couldn’t, he declared a little crossly, understand the mania that nuns appeared to have for shutting themselves up. If you wanted to live a good life, why fly from your fellow creatures to spend your existence skulking behind walls and bars?
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Nuns don’t “skulk”. Silence and solitude are such a help to a life of prayer that surely anybody who feels called to it is justified in securing them? Even scientists work better in peace and quiet. It’s so difficult to combine contemplative life with life in the world that few people even attempt it. That was why so many fled into the Egyptian desert when the Roman Empire was at its most corrupt….’
Maurice insisted that to do that was in itself a confession of weakness.
‘But of course!’ I said. ‘Human nature is weak. It’s because nuns are trying to lead a life in which yielding to weakness spells failure that they have to guard against it so ferociously. Hence the walls and bars.’
‘Sheer escapism!’ said Maurice. ‘They should stay in the world and face their responsibilities. Good God! I’d like to know what would happen if everybody were to sneak off and hide away behind bars!’
I Leap Over the Wall Page 17