Sisters of the East End

by Helen Batten

BUT WHY?

  From the very beginning I was the square peg of a feisty girl facing a bit of a round hole. I look back now and I’m reminded of when you get a new pair of shoes and they need to be worn in before the blisters stop. But is it the shoe that adjusts to the shape of the foot, or the foot that has to adjust to the shape of the shoe? The problem was that in 1958 the Community didn’t bend for anyone, so if I was to stay, it was me that was going to have to fundamentally change shape.

  ‘But why?’ – the question that kept going through my head and coming out of my mouth all through that first year at the convent. There was so much that didn’t make sense, that seemed ridiculous, that was turning me from a grown woman into a child. Within days of arriving I felt like a naughty schoolgirl seeking out opportunities to subvert the system: I had arrived in a sausage factory turning out perfectly moulded, cloned nuns, and I was damned if they were going to do that to me. I had a real feeling that my self had to be preserved at all costs, even if it was disguised under a veil and sensible knickers.

  Ah yes, the knickers. Before I had even got there, all my worries were confirmed when they sent me a list of what I had to bring. It included

  Knickers: white with legs

  Vests

  Full-length navy blue dressing gown

  Full-length nightgown with buttons to the neck and long sleeves.

  You will be provided with three postulant’s dresses once you arrive, so there is no need to bring any other clothing, except to avoid waste you may bring your old night attire to use until it wears out.

  You may also bring three books of a suitable nature.

  Which sort of summed up the whole of my first year, which turned out to be a clash between the bizarre and the mundane with the seriously, profoundly spiritual.

  Knickers with legs? I had no idea what they might be and even less idea where I might find them, so I decided to take the risk that nobody was going to check and packed my current lacey things. I eventually tracked down a long, sensible Victorian nightgown in Peter Jones department store. For a few minutes I was too embarrassed to ask for one. ‘Jesus, give me courage,’ I prayed and then I told the shop assistant, ‘It’s for my grandmother.’

  The books were much easier. I took a book of prayers that my godmother had given me when I was confirmed called Daily Light. It has a simple reading for each day of the year and I have used it frequently since. I often marvel at how much the meaning of a reading has changed when I get back to it a year later, which just goes to show we are perpetually changing even if it doesn’t feel like it. I also took a book of spiritual poetry and The Cloud of Unknowing, a medieval mystical work offering guidance on how to reach God through letting go of the world and opening oneself up to whatever may occur. I guess I sensed I was about to embark on a risky spiritual journey.

  So, despite all my reservations, I was making all the necessary preparations to leave, but still something deep inside of me must have seriously not wanted to go. On the night of one of the parish Christmas parties, I tripped on the freshly polished stairs, fell down two storeys and broke my ankle. As I sat in the hospital casualty department a host of conflicting thoughts went through my head. I had a lump in my throat because I had just ruined what might be my last chance to wear a pretty dress, have a drink, perhaps even have an innocent chat with a nice young man. But even as I fought back the tears, I realised that this accident might actually offer up the opportunity for more parties. I knew that I couldn’t go to the convent in plaster, and I also knew that the Community would not take any new recruits during Lent, which usually starts at the end of February. This would give me until the beginning of the summer to remain at large in the outside world: a stay of execution, if you like. Even as I sat there in agony, I felt a wave of relief.

  The relief only lasted until the first week in January, when this letter landed on the breakfast table.

  Dear Miss Crisp,

  We were all very sorry to hear about your accident. We hope and pray that your ankle is healing. It is a shame that you have had to postpone your arrival. However it is good news that your plaster will be removed at the beginning of March. As you know we cannot accept new postulants during Lent, but because Easter is late this year, Lent starts late. So we would like to invite you to start with us on Ash Wednesday, March 10th.

  We will be praying for you in the meantime.

  God’s blessings be with you,

  Mother Sarah Grace

  So there was to be no stay of execution, and – more sinisterly – I was being summoned to enter the religious life on Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the day that marks the beginning of Lent and 40 days of fasting and abstinence. It is traditionally a day of repentance and the day when a cross of ash is put on the foreheads of the faithful to remind us that, just as we come from dust, we will return to dust. It seemed like a brutal reminder of the seriousness of the step I was about to take, not to mention the end of any party plans.

  So at the beginning of March 1958 I packed my small bag with long nighties and vests. I gave away my more frivolous books to my niece, divided my nail varnish between my sisters, and gave my clothes to my girlfriends. I did, however, hold back my favourite party dress: a wool suit and a cashmere twinset. I secretly hid them at the back of a wardrobe in my mother’s house as an insurance policy, just in case I didn’t make it. My Plan B.

  Meanwhile, my local bishop had a rather intuitive wife. A couple of weeks before I was due to leave she rang me.

  ‘Hello, Katie, how are you? How’s your ankle?’

  ‘Oh, not bad, not bad at all. Plaster’s off and I’m nearly walking normally.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. And I also hear that you will be off to the Community soon?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it seems that they can admit me on Ash Wednesday.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I’d heard. Look, I’ve been thinking: the Bishop and I would like to invite you over for lunch, a sort of celebration if you like, on your day of departure and then we could take you to the station and put you on the train. Save your family having to do it. Give you a really good send-off.’

  I paused to think it through. I had a feeling she was really saying, ‘Save you and your family the distress of seeing you off ’. I appreciated her kindness and accepted her invitation. So, on the day of my departure I went to lunch with the Bishop and his wife and then they both took me to the train and cheerily waved me off. What might have been an agonising moment is now a happy memory.

  Two hours later I found myself on the platform of Hastings station with an elderly nun in a blue habit slowly working her way towards me with her arms outstretched.

  ‘Hello, dear, you must be Katie. Welcome.’

  She placed her hands on my shoulders and studied me. I felt embarrassed by the intensity of her gaze and her long silence, as if she could see straight to my doubts and shallowness, and the thoughts of nail varnish and parties. It took some effort not to look away. Then the spell was broken.

  ‘I’m Sister Clemence. I’m very lucky, you know. There are only two of us who can drive, which means I get to do the station run and get out.’

  I thought I detected a twinkle in her eye.

  In the car park was an old yellow Morris Minor. It was going green at the edges and had a ‘Jesus Lives’ sticker in the back window. Sister Clemence struggled into the driving seat. She turned the ignition and the car proceeded to lurch forward with a horrible grating sound – ‘Whoops! The handbrake. Silly me!’

  She released the brake and the car shot forward and bumped into the parked car in front. Sister Clemence didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned. We advanced to the Mother House at 30 miles per hour, lurching in second gear into the centre of the road, with cars scattering to avoid us. Sister Clemence chatted away to me, oblivious to the hooting drivers and shocked pedestrians.

  ‘So dear, we have 16 sisters, four novices and, let me think,’ she swerved and hit the kerb, ‘just one other postulant, Cecilia, in the hou
se.’

  I wasn’t worried by Sister Clemence’s driving – her complete serenity was infectious. I wondered whether this was what a lifetime of working on your faith brought you. I was also trying hard not to laugh.

  ‘Here we go. Welcome to the Mother House.’

  Up a long drive banked by rhododendrons was a large Victorian house. It had big windows, turrets and wings, but it was not imposing. Perhaps it was the large windows making me think of kindly eyes looking out on the world or the borders creating a welcome path. It was surrounded by lawns, with protective woodland encircling them, and looked like a comfortable Victorian country estate, which men in plus-fours and ladies with parasols might appear from at any moment. I was filled with emotion.

  The Mother House is the name given to the headquarters of a Community of Sisters, because it’s a family home. When you enter a Community you give up your own home and enter a new home and family, probably forever. A home is a place where you go out from and return to, a place of safety. Home should be a place where you can be yourself. Could I be myself here? It was a long way from where I had grown up in Camden Town. I had been worried that the Mother House might look like a prison, but it didn’t. This house was drawing me up and into its arms.

  ‘Please God, can it be a home and not a prison,’ I prayed.

  Sister Clemence interrupted my reverie. ‘So what do you think of your new home, Katie?’

  ‘I feel a bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, when she comes out of the forest and sees the Emerald City for the first time.’

  ‘Oh goodness, I hope we can live up to your expectations. You are a poet!’ she exclaimed.

  As the car crashed over another bump and swerved to avoid the rhododendrons, she chuckled, ‘It’s a pity Dorothy didn’t have a Morris Minor – it might have saved her a whole lot of trouble.’

  I wasn’t so sure.

  When we arrived I was taken straight to see the Mother Superior, Sarah Grace. I walked down the corridor behind Sister Clemence with not a little trepidation. Like my first encounter with the Mother House, this first meeting with the Mother Superior seemed very important. Would I like her, and would she like me? Could we do business together?

  It’s no accident that the head of a female religious community is usually called the Mother Superior. She is elected by the Community to have authority over them. She is expected to show strong leadership, to be the chief interpreter of the monastic rules and a prophet of God’s will for the Community. She is supposed to be a mother to you, who guides and protects you; but also to be obeyed in all things. She sets the boundaries. There’s something of a test of faith at the heart of your relationship with the Mother Superior, faith that, even when it might not seem like it, she has your best interests at heart. I had to ask her permission for everything I now wanted to do. And with no money, anything I wanted or needed, even down to the smallest tube of toothpaste, I had to write and ask for. I’d had more freedom when I was ten years old.

  This maternal role was set out very clearly by the founding fathers of the Community. In their original mission statement they stipulated that the Mother Superior had to be over 35 years of age and a member of the Church of England with a baptismal record to prove it. She also had to be able ‘to conduct all things to the honour and glory of God, showing kindness without weakness, firmness without severity, and act in all things with sincerity, truth and love, in a spirit of self-denial and resignation to the Divine will’.

  However, just as in those times a family was seen to be incomplete without a strong father at the helm, the Community was to have a Master. Not only was he to take the three services a day, but constantly interview the nurses and sisters privately at the end of each day, keeping in mind their individual weaknesses, questioning them as to their conduct to make sure it was done with holy reverence. It was made very clear that he had ultimate authority over the Mother Superior.

  The first Mother Superior they found, or rather who found them, was Mary Jones. She arrived on the convent doorstep one day offering to be a paid housekeeper. At first the governing council refused. It was a principle of the sisterhood that ‘the Sisters set an example of Christian humility for the working-class women by working without pay’. Within a week the council had relented and given Mary Jones a salary of £20 and within a year she had been appointed to be in charge with the Chaplain. She wrote,

  ‘I am most fully resolved, for our safety and our credit and our comfort, to have the rules literally obeyed, and that too, willingly and cheerfully. Anything in the shape of disobedience or insubordination shall be instantly repressed.’

  So Mary Jones was strict with her nurses, but, like a good mother, she was also hawkish in protecting them. She believed that seven hours’ sleep was not enough for the night nurses and insisted they should have eight. She also asked that the night nurses be allowed a candle on night duty as well as the low gas light and she encouraged them to knit.

  ‘It is dreary work indeed to watch in a large ward with only the glimmering of the gas turned down very low,’ she said.

  Sister Mary Jones was somewhat legendary in the Community. The Bishop’s wife had looked out a photo of her for me – all stiff white bonnet, stern face and buttoned-down bosom. She had been best friends with Florence Nightingale and they used to go on holiday together. Indeed in a letter to Florence Nightingale, Sister Mary Jones said that a Mother Superior should have a ‘mother’s feeling for, and sympathy with, her nurses’. She should be ‘a large-hearted, loving Christian woman, clear-sighted and firm – but forbearing and patient’. I wondered how Mother Sarah Grace would measure up.

  The Reverend Mother’s study was small and sparse. The only furniture was a bureau and a desk, and there were no photos or pictures on the wall, only a simple crucifix. The room was dominated by the large window with its view across the lawns to the forest beyond. Mother Sarah Grace was a small, fragile-looking woman, with an aura of calm and that struck me as real holiness. Right from the start I was in awe of this tiny, serious person. Like Sister Clemence, she regarded me intently in a long moment of silence. I felt myself blushing once again. Was I supposed to speak? In the end she broke the silence.

  ‘Welcome, Katie, we are so pleased to have you here at last. I hope you will find that the Mother House becomes a home for you.’

  ‘Yes, Mother, I am glad to be here.’

  I hoped I sounded like I meant it. I thought I meant it. Anyway, I was determined to give it my best shot. She continued.

  ‘New members bring the potential for new life and talents to our community.’ She paused; I didn’t know whether I was supposed to speak. Was I supposed to offer an opinion of what talents I might bring? My mind went blank. All I could think of was my stamp collection. Luckily I held back this thought and she went on, ‘Your time as a postulant will be the first test of your vocation. It will mean taking part in the life and duties of the sisterhood, so you and I can discover if you have the spirit and wisdom to set out on the path of holy growth.’

  Path of holy growth? I began to feel scared.

  ‘The road to life profession is a long journey. We need to discover if you are genuinely called to our way of life and have the basic qualities necessary. We will seek to find out if you have a love of Our Lord, a desire to pray, a call to ministry, and flexibility in all things.’

  I thought those qualities might apply to me (although I wasn’t entirely sure about the flexibility); but what about all my other ‘qualities’ that weren’t mentioned? My humour, my temper, my scattiness – where might they fit into this new home?

  ‘So, Katie, you have taken the first step on the very bottom rung of the long ladder that takes you towards becoming a Sister, your life vows, and a journey towards grace and deeper communion with the Almighty Father. This journey could take at the very least seven years, for some it takes longer and many never make it at all.’

  She paused so I could take this in.

  ‘Anyway, for now let’s just co
ncentrate on your first step. After six months of being a postulant, if it seems right, you will be offered the opportunity to take the next step, that is, to be accepted as a novice. I will be your Novice Mistress and guide you during these early days. Is everything clear?’

  ‘Yes, Mother, I understand.’

  What I understood from this was that I was about to be judged, and I could feel myself already getting rebellious.

  ‘One last thing – you will no longer be known as Katie. From now on you will be called Catherine Mary.’

  With that I was dismissed.

  Sister Clemence was waiting outside to take me to my room. She looked at me quizzically.

  ‘So, Katie, what am I to call you now?’

  ‘Um … Catherine Mary, I think.’

  She looked at me sympathetically.

  ‘Well, Catherine Mary, I expect you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed. Don’t worry, we’ve all felt that way. You’ll get used to it, it’s about getting into the rhythm of the place. It will become your rhythm before you know it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. One day you’ll wake up and realise it’s all second nature.’

  On that note, she cheerily opened the door to a room with two beds in it. It was small, but warm and cosy and I could again see it was dominated by the view of the forest stretching out across the horizon.

  ‘You’re sharing with our second newest recruit, Cecilia. She’s working at the moment, but she’ll be back soon. Unpack, my dear.’

  She went to leave, then spun round.

  ‘Oh yes, in the next day or so let me cut your hair. Don’t delay, otherwise Mother Sarah Grace will do it and it will be a right old hatchet job. I promise you I’ll cut it so that if you decide to leave, you can still walk in the outside world without a hat.’

  I was horrified – my lovely, long, blonde hair! I’d thought I could just pin it back behind the veil. Before I could stop myself, I blurted out: ‘But why?’

  ‘Why, dear? Well, otherwise it’s going to escape from your veil and then you’ll get in no end of trouble and she’ll just cut it off anyway. Best take matters in hand yourself. No room for vanity in this Community, I’m afraid.’ Then she turned on her heel and left.