From the nurse’s point of view, the sanatorium was not an enviable place to work. As Greta Jones writes:
Medical staff working in sanatoria had a high incidence of the disease, a fact which, together with the often depressing nature of the work, and the distance between sanatoria and the main centres of population, made sanatorium nursing one of the less popular vocations.
But that word ‘vocation’ hints at one of the reasons Julia may have wanted to work with tubercular patients. She sought good work, work that was spiritually demanding, partly as a way of punishing herself, and partly as a way of showing that, although she had failed as a nun, she was after all a good person.
For Julia, too, the fact that the sanatorium was cut off and geographically isolated made it a good place to hide. By the middle of 1943, when she made contact with her family again, she was working in the tuberculosis sanatorium at Newcastle in County Wicklow. And then the thing dreaded by the medical staff in sanatoria, the thing which happened all too often, happened to her. In the autumn of the year, Julia came down with TB.
If she had not been working in a sanatorium already, she might not have been able to find a bed in one. Space was limited, and treatment was not always available. As it was, the nurse became a patient in her own place of work. She was able to experience the only compensation that the sanatoria had to offer their patients, which was this: in terms of class, gender, and religious denomination, they were among the most mixed places in the conformist, would-be monocultural Ireland of the 1940s. The patients tended to be young, as tuberculosis was to a large extent a disease of the young. Apart from that, the sanatoria had all sorts: Protestants as well as Catholics, middle-class professionals as well as the working class, city dwellers as well as peasants, men as well as women. And it was on the wards, recovering from tuberculosis, that Julia met the first love of her life, someone who was different from her in all respects: Protestant, middle class, urban, and male.
Nicholas Royle had been in Newcastle for some time when Julia and he met. Indeed, they may already have known each other as nurse and patient before Julia became ill. Not much is known about him in Gunnigan family lore, other than his religious affiliation and that his family was said to be ‘very well-to-do’. This is another of those moments when I wish I were writing a novel, so that I could give full enough weight to the importance of Nicholas Royle in my mother’s life. There is only one photograph of him: it shows a skinny young man with a long Irish face, sitting outside on what is presumably a sanatorium deckchair. The only family member who met Nicholas was my mother’s aunt Nora (whose husband Bill had spotted Julia in Dublin, and prompted her to resume contact with her parents). Nora said that Nicholas was ‘madly in love with Julia’. They spent many of the long hours of convalescence – or perhaps, given how little the patients seem to have been helped by the treatment, that should be ‘convalescence’ – talking. By the time Julia was well enough to leave the hospital they were engaged to be married. Nicholas gave Julia a silver claddagh ring. These rings, depicting a pair of clasped hands holding a crowned heart, were a Celtic love token which has now become something of a cliché, but was much less of one in 1943. It was the first piece of jewellery that Julia had ever owned.
She was discharged from the sanatorium in time for the Christmas holidays. A photo taken of her just after she got home shows her shiningly happy, and wearing the claddagh ring. Nicholas was growing steadily better and stronger through his convalescence, and they were to be married in the spring. Julia never seemed happier than she did that Christmas. The family remember her as ‘radiant’. But then a telegram arrived at Lurgan. It was from Nicholas Royle’s sister and it carried the news that his condition had deteriorated suddenly and he had died.
‘Julia was utterly devastated,’ remembers Peggie. ‘She was in floods of tears, desperate, depressed, and of course she couldn’t talk about it in front of my parents. They didn’t want to know.’
My mother never mentioned Nicholas Royle afterwards, not once. His role in her life was oddly like that of Michael Furey in James Joyce’s immortal short story ‘The Dead’, the lost love whose absence resonates through the life of his lover for years afterwards, all the more so for its being silent and secret. As the song has it:
They say no two were ever wed
But one had a sorrow that was never said.
It makes me wonder if he was the great love of her life; or if he was the first great chance of happiness, the great compensation after her family’s devastating rejection – and so his death was a double disaster, in that it seemed to confirm and intensify that earlier catastrophe. Julia must have felt that she’d got away from home; she must have felt a justified pride at having succeeded in being able to set up in life on her own. I’m sure she would at some level have felt that meeting Nicholas and falling in love and becoming engaged were a reward for the hardships she had experienced at home. It was an acceptance to ease the hurt of her parents’ very final rejection. She would also have taken it as a sign that God wasn’t quite so cross with her after all; that he was going to allow her a happy ending. And then her fiancé’s death – well, where I would see a catastrophic piece of bad luck, it can only have seemed a heavy and unarguable judgement. God was showing her that the important thing was not what she wanted but what He wanted.
Julia could not face going back to work in Dublin after Nicholas’s death. She was not in perfect health herself; she was depressed and in shock. Since recovering TB patients were specifically told to avoid shock, there were grounds for concern about her physical well-being. So she stayed at home in Mayo, in the terrible atmosphere of her parents’ disapproval, and grieved. She spent a few months at Lurgan, mourning Nicholas and asking herself what she should do with her life. And then she chose to do what might seem the least sensible, least logical, least likely thing. To understand her choice you have to see that it was how my mother made the tragic early death of Nicholas have meaning. If his death was just something that happened, just a piece of bad luck to add to all the other bad things that happened, that would be too much to bear. If it was a judgement from God, a sign of his will, it was cruel, harsh, petulant – but at least it meant something. So Julia had a choice. She could see Nicholas’s death as meaningless – sad, tragic, devastating, and full of consequences for her, but finally, as a token of how the universe was arranged, meaningless. Or she could see it as a sign of a higher order – and pay the price, which was to accept that God had a plan for her. She chose this latter path, which seemed to her the path of meaning. When the family heard her decision they were astonished. For my part, though, I’m not astonished. Her choice makes sense to me, because it was the only way she could make sense of the world and of what had happened to her. In the spring of 1944, Julia announced her intention to become a nun. She was to become a postulant again and join the convent of the Presentation Sisters in Tuam, about thirty miles away from Lurgan, just over the border in County Galway. The family reaction was ‘again, general rejoicing and cries of relief all round’.
SISTER EUCHARIA
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It is difficult to comprehend the full extent of the submission demanded by a religious order such as the Presentation Sisters in the years before Vatican II.
I am aware that some people don’t see the changes brought about by Vatican II as having been reforms. All I would say to them is that they are lucky they never expressed that view within earshot of my mother. Her extensive direct experience of the world of the old Church was that it was, in terms of how women in particular were treated, a scandal. ‘You sometimes get people saying they are nostalgic for the old days,’ she once told me. ‘Particularly English Catholics who never experienced what it was really like. They have no idea.’
Two things stand out in all accounts of life in the convent before the reforms of Vatican II. The first is the sheer extent, variety, and magnitude of the restrictions on the nuns. Julia had already lived through the first stage of this, as a po
stulant with the Good Shepherds. It is probably fair to say that the first six months of her time as a Presentation Sister did not come as too much of a surprise. She knew that all property was held in common and that she was now no longer allowed to say ‘my’ in relation to anything. The postulant mistress would talk about ‘our’ cell and ‘our’ crucifix to make the point that nobody owned anything, and that all possessions (and, later, ‘offices’ or jobs) were rotated to prevent any sense of ownership from developing. Julia knew about the day divided into instalments. She knew that she would have to kneel to ask for a blessing from any priest she saw. She knew about the weekly ‘chapter of faults’ when she would have to kneel in front of the community, and she knew that she would have to kneel when reprimanded by a superior. She knew that the penances were performed at mealtime and might involve such mortifications as having to kiss the feet of all the professed nuns. She knew that she would not be allowed to swing her arms or move rapidly. She knew that she was not allowed to look up, when walking or outside or at mealtimes; she would have to keep ‘custody of the eyes’. She knew that she would regularly have to perform an ‘act of self-conquest’ in doing things she found difficult or repellent, and that she would regularly and routinely have to mortify herself by seeking out all possible opportunities to experience shame, humiliation, and self-abasement. She knew that these were holy states, because they emptied out the self, and the emptier you were of self the more room there was for God. She knew that she could not speak at mealtimes, or eat with anyone besides other members of the community. She knew that it was her duty as a nun to die as an ego, as a self. She knew that she might at times be encouraged to flagellate and otherwise ‘discipline’ herself. She knew that she would have to wear a complicated set of basically medieval clothes for the rest of her life, and that her undergarments, like the rest of her, would be washed only once a week. She knew that she would be forced to sit, stand, and walk in a particular way, and to keep to that way for the rest of her life. She knew that for the rest of her life ‘recreation’ would mean the hour a day when she was allowed to talk to other nuns. She knew that she was explicitly forbidden to make friends and that if she found herself liking another nun it was her duty to avoid her. She knew that all her letters would be read and that she would never again have privacy. She knew that, throughout her novitiate, her faults would be pointed out to her, energetically and on a daily basis. In the words of Karen Armstrong, who lived in an enclosed order in the 1960s, these reprimands ‘were a daily occurrence in the noviceship. A tiny incident could reveal so many of your faults, faults that you’d never dreamt you possessed until an unguarded word or action revealed them all.’ In Armstrong’s view, ‘it had unfortunately become customary to train young nuns by making them excruciatingly aware of their failings. This meant that most of us lived in a state of … acute anxiety and preoccupation with ourselves.’ Julia knew that for many hours of every day she would have to preserve silence. She knew that she would have to give up all her old tastes and habits and cultivate a permanently sustained attitude of renunciation to all her former pleasures, indeed to everything connected to her former self. She knew that she would have to experience, in the words of Monica Baldwin, who left an enclosed order in 1941 and described her experiences in I Leaped over the Wall, ‘the absolute subjection, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, of one’s free will to the exigencies of the Rule’.
Julia knew all that. She had been most of the way through a postulancy once already. It helped that this time she was closer to her family. Tuam was not far from Aghamore, and two of her sisters, Peggie and Dilly, were being educated there by the Sisters of Mercy. On free days they were allowed to visit their postulant sister, which helped Julia feel less cut off than she had as a Good Shepherd. (Later, her youngest sister, Jane, was to be one of her pupils at the convent school in Tuam.) The postulancy with the Presentation Sisters lasted for six months, and she finished it with the sense that, this time, she was sure of her vocation. After that six months, a postulant ‘took the veil’ and became a novice. Postulants wore a white veil – ‘veil’ here in its technical sense, for which I am indebted to Elizabeth Kuhns’s history of nun’s clothing, The Habit:
‘Habit’ refers to the ensemble of clothing and accessories that make up religious dress. It can also mean specifically the robelike tunic or dress that is the main garment worn over the body. The ‘veil’ is the long cloth worn on the top of the head, extending down the back. Some veils are designed to be pulled forward over the face, and other veils are designed as thin linings to wear beneath heavier veils. The veil is usually attached to a cap underneath, or ‘coif’, which is a close-fitting cloth headpiece that conforms to the shape of the skull and often ties under the chin. A ‘wimple’ or ‘guimpe’ is the fabric piece that covers the neck and chest, and sometimes extends over the chin. A ‘bandeau’ is the piece that stretches across the forehead, often attached at the ears behind the veil. A ‘scapular’ is a long apronlike garment that is worn over the tunic and extends down both the front and back of the tunic. A ‘cincture’ is a belt worn around the waist of the tunic, and a ‘Rosary’ is a string of prayer beads and other objects attached to the cincture and worn at the side. A ‘cappa’, cape or mantle refers to a cloak worn over the tunic.
In the Presentation Sisters, the tunic was made of heavy black serge, falling in folds, with long sleeves. The wimple and bandeau were of white linen, the cincture of black leather. The ceremony during which these clothes were first put on was modelled on the marriage service: during it, a nun became married to Christ. After their final vows, the Presentation Sisters wore wedding rings on their right hands to announce their betrothal. After the service the new novice, accepted into the order by her new Sisters, was allowed to mix with her family.
The whole family came to Julia’s clothing ceremony. There is a photograph of the occasion. It was the last time all the Gunnigans were together. Pat and Molly Gunnigan look proud, and everybody looks happy. Julia is not the only ‘clothed’ novice in the picture: her sister Mary had just passed through her postulancy as a Sister of Mercy, also in Tuam. Julia stayed in Tuam for the next stage of her training, at the central novitiate of the Presentation Sisters. She and her younger siblings found the thought of separation hard. She had a new name now: from this time on, Julia Immaculata Gunnigan was to be known as Sister Eucharia.
The name Eucharia refers to the Eucharist. Julia chose it to point to the central attraction of the religious life for her: the closeness it brought to Christ. The daily celebration of the Eucharist was, for a believing Catholic, a daily encounter with the magic of the Incarnation. The changing of wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ was a miracle, and Julia lived through, experienced, that miracle every day. That was the centre of her faith, and the centre of the consolation the convent brought her. Allied to it was the amount of prayer, several hours daily, in which the nuns engaged. This too was an encounter with the divine; a strenuous one, in which days and months and even years could pass without a glimpse of contact with God, but it was an effort Julia was more than willing to make, a path she was committed to taking. These and the consequent austerities were not the hardest things about the life she encountered as a novice. She knew that at the end of the novitiate she would take the three great vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. For Julia, the hardest thing about being a nun was the finality of the submission involved in the third vow, that of obedience.
In the back row, Mary (then Sister Emanuel), Pat, Molly, Julia (as from that day, Sister Eucharia), then in the front row Noreen, Dilly, Peggie, Jane, Bernie
The aim of religious training is, in a sense, death. It is the death of the would-be religious’s former self. Obedience is crucial to the process of killing off that old self. It is through obedience that you learn to ignore your own impulses and wishes, your habits and tastes and desires, and to replace them with the external commands of the order. Through that process, the monk or nun becom
es free: the idea is that in giving up your conditioned former self, which in most of us is at least half the product of socially imprinted needs and wishes, you attain the freedom to serve God – in this view, the only real freedom there is. This isn’t a line of thought one hears much about in the contemporary world, given that it would bring the whole modern edifice of commerce, the media and public life crashing down. Which is perhaps one of the most appealing, or arresting, or at any rate different, things about it. So even the most disobedient and secular of us can see the appeal, if not to ourselves, then at least to somebody else, of this line of renunciation.
The trouble – for many people, my mother among them – came with the effort to put this attitude into practice in the actual institutions of the Church. There, and especially in the religious orders, the sacred duty of obedience meant absolute, unquestioning submission to every order of a superior, extending to every aspect of life, however apparently trivial. And ‘unquestioning’ not only meant not asking questions out loud, but also involved a complete internal submission. Your own common sense and intelligence were specifically forbidden from being engaged, let alone anything as debased as your own wishes or preferences. The less you agreed with what you had been told to do, the better, since it showed how effectively you were emptying out your self; the more obviously stupid and wrong and self-contradictory what you had been told to do, the better, too. The order of a superior was a direct expression of the Will of God. This was not a metaphor, it was the literal truth. God spoke through one’s superiors in the order. Monica Baldwin wrote:
Family Romance Page 8