Sisters of the East End

by Helen Batten

  I started training at the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The problem was you had to go where you were sent and they wanted to send me off to India for five years. Suddenly I wasn’t sure, the one thing I knew was it would kill my mother. I stalled. Then one day I went to the wedding of one of my church friends. Drifting round the reception in a rather smart outfit I felt a hand on my arm. I looked round. It belonged to a handsome young curate.

  ‘I say, I do like your hat. Will you come and work for me?’ he said.

  I blushed. He was rather extraordinary, but I liked the cut of his gib. ‘It depends what kind of work you are offering,’ I replied.

  ‘Something that will change your life,’ he said.

  I needed no more encouragement. When my theological education was complete, I started a new job as a parish worker for All Saints Church in Poplar.

  However this wasn’t a case of ‘living happily ever after’. In fact it was a long time before I felt happy at all. On my first evening in the parish I put my suitcase on my bed and burst into tears.

  Poplar was full of docks, and I was surrounded by a level of poverty that I had never seen before. Until I had got used to it, it was quite intimidating, even for a working-class girl from Camden Town. It was also hard, hard work. The parish of All Saints was huge. We were expected to get up early and work very late. Saturday was our day off, but we still had to stay up late to clean up the church hall after whichever wedding reception or dance had hired it, and get the hall ready for church activities the next day.

  My main job was visiting the parishioners and helping to run the South Poplar Youth Club (or Spy). It ran six nights a week and had over 300 members. In some ways this was fantastic, we were an important presence in a really deprived area and we were doing a lot of good work in the community. But my heart ached for some of the tatty children – they were dirty and sometimes shoeless. In Camden Town, everyone had shoes, even during the war.

  Tenements like Canada Buildings were awful. You went in them and there would be little furniture, but plenty of unwelcome wildlife; insects I’d never known existed. They made our council flat look like a palace. I didn’t understand why sometimes these homes were quite so unclean. There were a lot of unconventional happenings among the community. I’d never even heard of incest before I arrived in Poplar. It was an education, really.

  But as I got used to the conditions, I began to see that beneath the grime and poverty, the people were extraordinary. They were a tight-knit community that generally looked after each other, a closer community in fact than we’d had in Camden Town. The people were warm, friendly and funny. If they accepted you, which generally they did, they would do anything for you. Of course it was fun too. We were a crowd of young people working together, all from different backgrounds and different parts of the country. That was also part of the education. The handsome young curate was right – my new job was starting to change my life.

  One of my weekly duties was to go round the parish with the Reverend Granger, helping him to give Communion to those parishioners who could no longer make it to church. It was a cheery late spring afternoon when we set off to see Old Sue. Everyone greeted us as we walked along – working men tugged their caps, women in their overalls called out ‘Hello, Father’ from their doorsteps and shoeless children trotted behind us. Despite the bombed-out ruins, the stray dogs and the litter strewn across the pavement, it was difficult not to feel happy. I was beginning to sense the value of feeling welcomed, accepted and maybe even respected in this friendly community. Since being at All Saints I had pondered my father’s belief that some people had too little and some people had too much. Too much or too little of what? He was talking about money, but I was no longer sure that was all that mattered.

  Old Sue was a well-known East End ‘character’. Rounder than she was tall and always saying something forthright, she lived in one of the old tenement buildings. She didn’t have much of a life – she couldn’t get out and was effectively trapped in her flat. It was a pretty squalid flat too, never cleaned and with a lavatory right in the kitchen. I had a morbid fascination with this toilet. Old Sue was lucky to have one at all – many people had to share the communal lavatories on the ground floor. But still, a toilet stuck randomly in the middle of the kitchen? I wondered about privacy and food preparation, but Old Sue was far too fierce to ask and I thought the Reverend might not appreciate my curiosity.

  With the benefit of experience I had come prepared with a packet of mints. There were certain people’s homes that smelled so foul I could only enter with a mint between my teeth, otherwise I might be sick. Old Sue’s was one of those places.

  As the Reverend knocked on the door I popped a pepper-mint puff in my mouth. No answer. I was thinking ‘Hurry up, Old Girl, or I’ll have to use up another mint’. The Reverend knocked again; still no answer. He was starting to look worried.

  ‘Katie, go and grab that bobby over there and see if he can help us force this door. I don’t like the look of this.’

  So I ran down the stairs after the policeman. He was only too pleased to help and it didn’t take much of a shove to force the front door open. There was Old Sue lying on the floor, struggling. As we knelt down beside her we could see one side of her face had collapsed. She was trying to speak but her face was so twisted we couldn’t make out the words. Reverend Granger didn’t waste any time. ‘Go and get one of the Sisters, quick,’ he said.

  All Saints Church was on one side of a large Georgian square in Poplar. On the other side of the square was an old Mission House, where five or so nuns and a handful of nurses lived. I really didn’t know much about these women, except that for the last 100 years this Anglican order of nursing sisters, the Community of St John the Divine, had been caring for the local people from cradle to grave. I had watched them coming and going on their bikes, heavily laden with medical equipment, but I had never felt the urge to introduce myself. I was slightly repelled by the Sisters’ blue habits and all they represented. Only the month before I had been sitting on a train when a nun came and sat down opposite me. ‘Oh crikey! I hope that never happens to me,’ I thought. She looked perfectly content, but I felt slightly anxious sitting next to her, like if I got too close I might catch her vocation.

  Now I had no choice but to come face-to-face with them. I ran down the streets and for the first time, pulled the bell on the heavy door of the house. It seemed all locked up and quiet. I pulled the bell again. Then I heard slow, echoing steps getting closer. There was a jangling of locks and the door slowly opened. In front of me was an old nun, with the palest of skin. My eyes were drawn to the enormous silver cross hanging round her neck. It seemed like a declaration of total confident faith. I also noticed the gold ring on the third finger of her right hand, a sign of her consecration to Christ. This was Sister Dorothy.

  ‘Good afternoon, Sister, I’m sorry to disturb you but Reverend Granger has asked me to come and get you. It’s Old Sue. We found her collapsed in her flat. I think she’s had a stroke.’

  Sister Dorothy peered over the top of her glasses with what, if she hadn’t been in Holy Orders, I might have taken to be a look of disdain. ‘Oh, diagnosis as well,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll get my bag and you’d better take me down there, hadn’t you?’

  We walked along in silence. I felt too intimidated to speak and Sister Dorothy obviously didn’t feel the need to. When we got there, she pronounced that Old Sue had indeed had a stroke and sent the Reverend off to fetch an ambulance.

  ‘All right, young lady,’ she said, ‘you had better help me get these clothes off.’ I was slightly dismayed. I really didn’t want to touch Old Sue. She was wearing lots of layers that didn’t appear to have been removed for months and the smell was overpowering. But as I slowly and gently helped to undress this sick old lady, my revulsion evaporated and I was filled with a sense of compassion that I’d never experienced before. It was then that I had my vision.

  I saw myself dressed as a nun.
I was wearing a blue habit with a white veil covering my long hair and there was a heavy silver cross hanging from my neck.

  ‘No, no, no,’ screamed the voice in my head. ‘I like nail varnish too much!’

  But even as I had the thought, Sister Dorothy turned around and looked at me, and said, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it then?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Well, I think we both know, don’t we?’

  I’d never wanted to become a nun. It seemed like such an extraordinary loss of freedom; something I could never see myself doing. I was young. I wanted to do what I wanted, when I wanted; and anyway, I liked nail varnish and everything it stood for – clothes, parties, and yes, men – far, far too much …

  But then I had just seen myself, with my own eyes, and Sister Dorothy had obviously seen it too. It sent a cold feeling of dread to the pit of my stomach. But when I got back to the parish house and heard that Old Sue had died, I was filled with a sense of gratitude that I had been able to help her in her last hours. The act of making her feel comfortable as she passed from this world felt like a privilege and my faith felt stronger, as if I had just taken just a small step closer to the Divine.

  But not that much closer to the Divine. The next day I had my regular weekly meeting with my spiritual director, Father David. These meetings were supposed to be a discussion about my progress as a parish worker. Instead he opened the conversation with a surprise question, ‘So, Katie, have you considered becoming a nun?’

  I felt cornered. I hadn’t said anything to him. How did he know? I felt as if there was a heavenly conspiracy going on and I didn’t like it. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m the right material at all,’ I said.

  He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Are you sure? Do you even know what the right material is? Might there be something to be gained by a little further investigation. Just to make sure …?’

  I sensed a challenge. ‘Oh, all right then. I’ll give it a little further investigation – if only to prove I’m utterly unsuitable.’

  Father David smiled enigmatically.

  In the absence of knowing any other nuns, I found myself writing to Mother Sarah Grace, the Mother Superior of our neighbours in the Mission House.

  The Community of St John the Divine was set up with the express purpose of nursing the poor. It’s hard to believe now, but back in the early Victorian age the reputation of nurses was quite unsavoury – think of Dickens’s ‘Mrs Gamp’ and picture a low-class woman of dubious character, dirty and drunk. This was the public profile of the early nineteenth-century nurse. They were seen as grasping and thieving; there were even reports of nurses offering immoral services late at night in the male wards for financial reward. So it certainly wasn’t the kind of profession that would either attract or be permitted for respectable ladies. When Robert Bentley Todd was appointed a professor of King’s College medical school, he came to the conclusion that despite the new innovations in medicine, his patients were still dying because of the appalling standards of these nurses, not least their lack of hygiene. Very much a man of his time, Todd believed that professionalism at work came from a person having a strong religious and moral underpinning. The Victorians loved the saying ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’. So Todd decided that if he could only impose the moral discipline of the religious life on his nurses, their work would be transformed.

  In 1848 Todd summoned a meeting of great and good gentlemen (including some of the bishops of the Church of England) to discuss forming a religious community in which women would receive not only clinical training, but also be educated in his words, ‘to regard their work as a religious one affording special opportunities for the exercise of Christian love and womanly tenderness’. He wanted to develop a class of nurses who would regard their work as a religious calling. At this time the Roman Catholic Church still inspired enormous fear and suspicion throughout the population, so Todd and his colleagues were determined to ensure the Sisters of St John looked very different to Catholic nuns. It was decided that there would be ‘no vows, no poverty, no monastic obedience, no celibacy, no engagements, no cloistered seclusion, no tyranny exercised over will or conscience; but a full, free and willing devotion to the cause of Christian charity’.

  Also, in keeping with the rigid class divisions of the time, it was decided that the Sisters could only come from the upper echelons of society. To ensure this, the Sisters were not only unpaid but had to give £50 a year (the equivalent of around £3,000 today) to the Community. They would live in a house under the supervision of a master and lady superintendent and were to train working-class women to be paid assistant nurses.

  The new Community was surprisingly radical for its day. It actually offered the first opportunity for an upperclass woman to have a full-time working career without losing her status as a lady. To me, in 1958, becoming a nun seemed like a big sacrifice of personal freedom, but for a mid-Victorian lady it was the only opportunity to legitimately escape getting married and the dangerous business of having endless numbers of children. Instead it allowed women to lead an independent life, do constructive work and live in a comfortable home where they could make their own rules. It also offered the working-class nurses they employed one of the few routes to improve their social status. This meant that from the start, the Community of St John tended to attract rather pioneering, wilful women – women who today we might call feminists. Perhaps I was more suited to the Community than I first realised.

  However, the Sisters of St John were first and foremost nurses, so when I wrote to the Mother Superior expressing an interest in knowing more about her Community, I was pretty confident that she would tell me to go away and come back if and when I had managed to become a nurse. But this is the letter I got back:

  Dear Miss Crisp,

  Thank you for your enquiry regarding the Community of St John the Divine. I am delighted that you would like to get to know us better with a view to testing your vocation to the religious life.

  You are quite right that in the past it has only been possible to accept into the novitiate ladies who have already been awarded their General Nurse’s Certificate. However at our Chapter meeting this week we voted to change this rule, and from now on it will be possible for ladies to both train to be nuns and train to be nurses at the same time. Perhaps this is an example of Divine Providence? It certainly seems that God is smoothing your path to us. With this in mind I would like to invite you to come and join us, initially for a year. Unless I hear otherwise, we will expect to see you at the Mother House in Hastings, on January 25th. In the meantime we will pray for you.

  May God bless you,

  Mother Sarah Grace

  I was slightly wrong-footed by this letter and the phrase went through my head ‘you can run, but you can’t hide’. I was a bit shocked but it did seem as if this really was my calling. But I still had to face one last obstacle: my family.

  I took a day off especially to go and see them. I was dreading it, but tempting as it might be, I couldn’t see how I could go to Hastings and enter the novitiate without actually telling them. Running away to become a nun didn’t seem to be starting off on the right foot.

  However, Mother just said, ‘Well, that’s not news. I’m just surprised it took you so long.’ That was it.

  My siblings were more difficult. ‘How ridiculous!’ Edward snorted. I knew he was actually embarrassed by me. But it was my biggest sister Elsie’s reaction that was most upsetting. By this time she was married and had settled down happily with her husband and two children. She put her head on the kitchen table and sobbed.

  ‘Oh, Katie, please don’t! Everything you will give up. Such a waste. Please think again.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I really can’t – I don’t have a choice. I know this is difficult for you to understand but I believe God has called me.’

  ‘Oh, stop it! I won’t hear it. I think you are going mad, Katie. Mother should have taken you to the doctor or something
years ago. Please don’t do it.’

  It was horrible, but it was done and nobody ever said anything again. They didn’t need to. I knew they disapproved, but I also knew that they still loved me. The way was now open for me to travel to Hastings and to the Mother House.

  There’s a popular misconception that a nun becomes a nun because that’s something she’s always wanted to do. Perhaps when you see a nun you see someone who was not brave enough for the world, someone who wanted to escape. But usually it’s quite the opposite. A nun, before she became a nun, probably had the same kind of hopes and dreams for her future as you do. She probably didn’t want to escape the world but rather to escape from God. But over the years I’ve seen it happen many times – when God calls, you can run and run, but He’ll always catch you in the end.

  This is the way that He caught me.

  CHAPTER TWO

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