by Michael Foss
At the bottom of Lower Regent Street, Florence Nightingale with her lamp, under the grim visages of three hairy guardsmen, pointed my mother towards the door of Cox & King’s, a bank once brought to its knees by the accumulated debts of all those sad young officers smashed in the trenches of the Great War. Now this old institution was subsumed under the bulk of a large national bank but still, as it were, acting as its military branch. Here Mr Reynolds, a lively gnome with a bony bald head and heavy glasses, awaited her.
My mother was not good with money. Prodigal with her left hand, she grew guilty at expense and became tightfisted with her right hand. Costs crept up on her and took her by surprise. She had been used to the cheap prices of India, and an airy way of living. In wartime England she could never quite determine what was a necessity and what was an indulgence – a bowl of soup in Lyons Corner House, a winter vest, shoes for growing boys, lipstick in a new colour, a Penguin paperback of Priestley or Compton Mackenzie. A packet of Benson & Hedges rather than the cheaper Woodbines? Her husband started the war as a captain in an Indian regiment where the rates of pay were not calculated to support a family life in England. He remitted what he could but payments were sometimes delayed and always not enough. Adrift with two young children in the wash of war, in a land that was not hers and where she could make very few claims, my mother found herself in the midst of preoccupied people, harried by dangers, fears and worries, kind enough in intention but without the time or energy to take on the woes of others. After a struggle against her finances she collapsed into debt and appeared before Mr Reynolds in trepidation, feeling like a child caught with fingers in the sweetie-jar.
Mr Reynolds was an old-fashioned bank manager, formal in dress and speech, punctilious as to detail, calm and authoritative in decision. He was also, in my mother’s eyes, something of a saint. He took a lofty view. What was a small amount of debt, in the circumstances? There was security, in the form of my father’s regular salary, which was likely to grow with promotions, if he could avoid getting killed. A modest sum now would be enough to tide her over, even though she had the expensive responsibility of small children – food, clothes, lodgings, education, as well as little easements to compensate for sad times. Trust Mr Reynolds, he knew. In the meantime, he said, she might look for a little job, for extra income and for peace of mind. ‘Secure the home front, so to speak,’ he told her, glasses twinkling. ‘There are plenty of wartime tasks waiting to be done by smart young ladies.’
So we packed and went on. We turned our backs on the long slough of mud and misery that Lincolnshire had become for us and came to a new place of rest, standing on the up-platform of Oxford station, two scuffed leather suitcases in hand, and with a future as cloudy as March skies.
*
Then lengthening days and the change of season brought in stiff breezes and skies crinkly with driven cloud and a weak sunlight licking at the damp patches on the pavement. We wanted to take it as a promise of better days.
On a certain morning we found ourselves standing before a high iron gate. Once again I had a firm grip on my mother’s hand, edging around behind her skirts to place a barrier between me and whatever this fate might be. My bolder brother had put on the responsible front of seniority, though I could see he was frowning with his underlip nipped between his teeth. The gate before us was heavy and black, embellished with blobs of metal which, beneath the thick coats of paint, might represent fruit or bombs – pineapples or grenades. On each side an interminable wall strode out of sight, rising powerfully above the narrow pavement. We boys were in some kind of uniform, shorts and jackets in a serge cloth, long woollen socks, ties fumbled around our necks. The coarse material of the clothes made us itch. We were self-conscious, wondering what new trial or game all this stiffness and formality heralded.
Our mother tugged on a bell-pull and we heard a muffled clang within. A long pause and then the gate swung slowly inward. A lady in a coif and a black robe and a severe starched wimple stood before us. I could not bring myself to look into her face, which was withdrawn and shaded by the strange headgear. So I concentrated about the level of her waist where a large bunch of keys dangled from a thin leather belt. She reached forward to shake my mother’s hand, offering her own hand that was big and callused, with swollen knuckles. A boxer’s hand. She turned and with very few words led us into a dark panelled hall shot through with a single shaft of brightness from a statue of a gaudy lady in pink and blue plaster. It was a shock to me to see that this lady had her heart exposed in her breast with golden rays emanating from this terrible wound. Only a day or two later, with my ear twisted for my ignorance, did I learn that this sorry apparition was the Blessed Virgin, a lady in some way connected (though I had as yet no idea of the details) with God. Doubtful to begin with, I started to sink under the painful puzzle of it all. The human figures, like the statue, were remote from my experience, the meaning was beyond me. Low mumbles passed between my mother and the nun, who finally essayed a brief, taut smile.
Then we were turned over to those boxer’s hands.
*
In this time of war various arms of the government, seeking some safety outside London, had colonized many of the towns within easy reach of the capital. An administrative branch of the Foreign Office had come to rest in Oxford, and here my mother found a position as a temporary filing clerk. The job was not demanding. A few ladies, mostly young wives bound by national solidarity and a genteel education, distributed pieces of paper and made cups of tea. My mother had the qualifications, which hardly went beyond the ability to read and write, and earned approval as an officer’s wife (the Foreign Office was notoriously snobbish). The job suited her well enough – some chatter and giddiness among the solemn civil servants of the FO persuaded a young woman inexperienced in official ways that she was part of national destiny. Her tasks filled the tedious hours of her arrested life, gave her a little extra income, and distracted her from the sense of her own unhappiness. But to take up this position she had had to get her children off her hands, and that had meant placing them in a boarding school, preferably a Catholic one.
My mother was Catholic by instinct, tradition and upbringing, but she did not care for doctrine or theology and devised her own rules of daily practice. She thought that a public acknowledgement of her Catholicism and a strong suspicion of all other sects and faiths would be enough for heaven. Here on earth she would do much as she pleased, relying on the simple morality of a peasant heart. Years later, she told me that the only time she had been to church during the long years of her marriage had been for the wedding Mass itself. Yet she had insisted, as a condition of marriage, that my father take instruction and be received into the Catholic Church. Seeing that her religion was a matter of culture and prejudice, not understanding, my father had simply given way. With some amusement and more impatience he had gone through the childish rote of the catechism while sharing a few whiskys with a benevolent Irish priest, sitting on the verandah of the parish house as the Indian sunset burned into the distant plain. Then he forgot the whole business. He remained what he had always been, the sturdy agnostic who at a young age had chosen to pump the organ-bellows of the Methodist chapel from outside rather than listen to the preaching from within.
The nuns of her convent in Ireland had been for my mother nightmare shadows in the dark dream of her childhood. Despite this, she knew with certainty that an order of nuns was the only institution fit to undertake the education of little children who were, at least nominally, Catholic. Besides, where else could she find a boarding school willing to take kids as young as four or five?
The Convent of the Sacred Heart, by the river on the outskirts of Oxford, for a suitable fee received little boys into the rigorous circle of its conviction, and released my mother into the world of wartime work.
*
From the first, the sense of space appalled me. The ceilings were too high, the doors too tall, the rooms too big. They petered out in extremities where the gloom
bunched in corners as impenetrable as jungles. Ill-lit corridors, hardly touched by daylight, ran out of sight like slow murky rivers. Sounds were dampened, a world with a finger on its lips, reduced to sighs and mutters. Overwhelmed by this scale I was afraid to look up but stumbled on with eyes on the floor, driven into place by gruff orders, digs of the elbow, or a tug on the sleeve.
From morning to night the nuns began to discipline our days. Growth requires some routine, but this weary stamp of regularity marked me beyond my tender years and I wept for my small lost freedoms. I relinquished the dozy hours of former days, when I had fed ducks in the park, kicked a tin can down an alleyway, mooched the street with a stick ringing against iron railings, or in idle moments before bed had leafed through a picture book in front of the glowing embers of the fire. For this abandoned life, I snivelled under the bedclothes after lights-out in the convent dormitory, or in the raw damp jakes, contemplating my chapped knees in the fraction of the day set aside for a satisfactory bowel movement.
The young child cries for the comfort of a mother, but we wept into the void. There was a remote and fearful figure known as the Mother Superior, but none of our tears stained the black-clad expanse of her forbidding breast.
A clap of hands at an early hour brought us awake in the dimness of the dormitory. Speechless, we dressed, then formed a silent line of midgets in ill-fitting clothes (in those days of rationing, to make clothes last longer, our suits were bought a size too big). At a sharp order we shuffled off, hair still unkempt, kicking the heels of those in front.
‘Eenie, meenie, Mussolini,’ we hissed behind the nun’s back, ‘hurry up you silly ninny.’
‘Silence, children,’ snapped Sister Mary Bede. ‘We do not make a noise as we approach the House of God.’
A ragged line of shrunken figures we clumped downstairs in heavy shoes so insecurely tied that half the laces dragged. Our footfalls on the worn parquet floors made a dull, lowering clatter, leaden with hesitation and regret.
‘Move along now, children. We haven’t got all day. You, slow-coach, get up here with you, or it’ll be the worst for you.’
And Sister Mary Bede, taking a powerful pincer grip on the ear of some poor laggard, would drag him forward wailing into the refectory.
Watery tea poured from large tin pots. Only one teaspoon of sugar per cup was permitted. Sister’s eagle eye was on us.
‘Stir your tea clockwise,’ she warned. ‘The other way is the devil’s way.’
The rules of the table were exacting. Backs straight, no slumping on the benches. No elbows on the table. Chew each mouthful twenty times, mouth closed, hands folded quietly on the lap. A thin spread of marmite on the bread was allowed at breakfast, a scrape of jam at tea. The jam, roughly of a strawberry type, was rumoured to be made of marrow, artificially flavoured, with little pits added for effect. On Sundays, there was a sticky but pleasant stuff called peanut butter. Porridge with horrid lumps was a detested staple. Nothing could be refused, and all food had to be eaten.
‘Remember the starving children of Europe,’ Sister admonished. ‘What wouldn’t they give for such delicious food? Don’t let me see as much as a crumb left on your plate.’
War could not afford the luxury of waste, and to express a preference in these times was a selfish act bordering on the sinful. When one of the parents brought in an iced birthday cake, to be shared among the children as an exceptional treat, Sister descended on those who left the icing and the marzipan to the last and swept the longed-for delicacies from their plates. ‘God,’ she sniffed, ‘does not send His gifts for you to pick and choose.’
Every act was measured against the iron rod of religion. At the centre of our lives stood the mystery of faith. In the convent, the chapel dominated the buildings and regulated all the activities of the day. Everything we did circled round it or pointed to it. For me, it became a place of dread. When the great oak door opened, with a stealthy quiet that belied its bulk, the unwholesome perfume of stale incense pinched my nostrils. The wink of the sanctuary lamp – a wizard’s eye – made the heart skip with apprehension. In the cave of the church sombre light drifted onto heavy fittings, lying like dark dross between the pews. Pushed into those pews in rows we clutched at one another for support, forgetting our usual bickering and glad for once of human contact. From the hard bench I watched the strange man in the vestments mouth at the altar the magic Latin words that we did not understand. His gestures were languid and mournful, while the servers in lace-fringed white surplices soft-footed around him in a slow but difficult dance.
In the small morning hours, or in the tired dusk of evening, it was hard to take it all in. Solemnity is a drug of a kind, a hypnotic. Even so, our attention often wandered. A tired child would fall into a doze, head lolling on a neighbour’s shoulder. Others gaped into the great spaces of the roof, or stared at plaster saints with haloes of tarnished gilt. Candles in clusters, gummed with molten wax, waited to be lit by the matches of suppliants.
Then, with the climax of the Mass approaching, the nuns drove us to our knees with fierce whispered reminders or with a knuckle poked in the back of the neck. The priest raised the Host in the air to the tinkle of a tiny bell. I did not know what this gesture meant. It looked like some petition or pleading. But I recognized in the weight of the uplifted arms a sadness beyond tears but also beyond my understanding.
The big oak door opened again and let us out, from interior dark to the grey light of ordinary day. Going back and forth between these two worlds I learnt that there were two Gods (the third one of the Trinity was a conundrum beyond even our powers of belief). The first, the grim emaciate on the Cross above the altar, all wounds and bones, was the Inflexible Judge, the Prince of Rigour, the Frightener of Souls, served by hard-minded monitors with rods in the hand. The second, the one whom Sister Catherine called Gentle Jesus, was the obverse of the divine coin, the Redeeming Comforter, the Balm for the Hurt. It was for the sake of this Gentle Jesus that Sister Catherine urged us to give our few pennies of pocket money towards the upkeep of the African missions.
‘Who’ll give thruppence to save a black piccaninny?’ said Sister Catherine to our class with cheerful red-faced enthusiasm, waving a kindly arm across the broad expanse of the African map.
I loved to see how Sister Catherine’s ample flesh jounced when she was jolly and excited so I gave all my thruppenny bits for Africa. I was convinced (since money had no relevance in our lives beyond paying for a sweet or a glass marble) that I had purchased a number of black babies – a little family flock that was mine – and this thought gave me warm feelings of friendly possession and belonging that I longed for but lacked in the convent. Gentle Jesus had sent me my own imaginary companionship – a squall of tiny jungle tots – to compensate for the cold harsh discipline imposed under the agonized stare of the Judge on the Cross.
Our only hope for relief from this severity was to hide beneath the cloak of Gentle Jesus. But the way to forgiveness was not easy to find; it was hedged and blocked by the thorns of observation. The black monitors were ever-vigilant and He on the Cross was not deceived. The nuns were very free in their interpretation of His displeasure:
‘God does not love naughty children.’
‘Nose-picking in church is an insult to heaven.’
‘Only a sinful boy scribbles on his picture book.’
‘Neglect your prayers and you’ll get no blessings.’
‘Every act of disobedience is another wound in His side.’
‘The fires of hell await little liars.’
‘God punishes bed-wetters.’
And if admonition and threats had no effect, then came the clinching argument against which there was no appeal. ‘What Sister says, child, is God’s law.’
Though heaven demanded so much, the rules of conduct here on earth, even if certain, were obscure. Both punishments and rewards flowed from the Church, imposed, granted or withdrawn by inscrutable religious authority. My brother, leaving his pew to
follow a small trail of fellow pupils to the altar rail for their First Communion, was stopped in horror, hauled away by the shoulder with much finger-wagging, and returned at once to the ranks of the sinners, because he had not yet made his First Confession. As a punishment, his advance to the altar rail was put off to some unspecified time. He remained among a graceless herd while smarter boys put an early foot on the road to heaven. In another case, when in a playground fight I split my brother’s forehead with a brick, I was removed from the group of boys learning to be Mass-servers. I was denied the holy foppery of lace and candlelight, incense and bells. In this way I was prevented from giving my fullest service to the Lord. This was a dire punishment for any faithful son of the Church. It was true. I was not much of a servant for the Lord. I was sad and bemused and given to fits of violence. The nuns, with their threats of divine displeasure, somehow failed to cure my outbursts of temper. I wanted my mother.
*
‘What would you like to do today?’ said my mother in a hopeless voice we had come to know so well.
We never had an answer to this, but it did not matter to us that we were drifting without much purpose. The important thing was that we were away from the convent for the afternoon. If the day was fine we would wander. Nowhere in particular. Magdalen Bridge to Carfax. Peeping in the austere wartime shops of the High, past crouching pubs with low, battered doorways and windows of bottle-glass. Amusements for children at this time were in short supply. We took in the modest stock of sights – Radcliffe Camera, Sheldonian, Bodleian, Ashmolean – those pompous names for quite innocent institutions. Then we made our way towards open spaces, under a sky that seemed always more welcoming than the wan pall of grey or watery blue that hung over the convent playground. We skirted the Botanic Gardens into Christ Church Meadow, or aimed for the Parks in a green, almost drowned landscape, strange territory where rivers seemed to change their names at will and a place called Mesopotamia lay, as it were, offshore. But best of all for us were the gardens of Worcester College, which revealed, though I did not know it then, a view of the subtle artifice of the European imagination.