My History

by Antonia Fraser

  “Bloody convert!” he exclaimed with great geniality.

  When I first started to write crime novels in the late Seventies, I tried to recreate the experience of that first autumn at Ascot. In Quiet as a Nun I proposed that the woman who would go on to be the heroine of my series, Jemima Shore Investigator (actually a TV journalist, not a real detective), had been sent as a little Protestant day-girl to the next-door Convent of Blessed Eleanor for reasons of wartime convenience. She is called back to the convent to solve the mystery of the death of one of her schoolfriends, once Rosabelle Powerstock, for many years a nun known as Sister Miriam, who has died alone in a ruined tower in the convent grounds. There were no ruined towers at Ascot amid the well-kept rhododendrons and no mysterious deaths. Still less did a ghoulish figure known as the Black Nun go prowling round the convent at night (my nuns would have made short work of him, running after him with the shiny wooden rosaries pinned at their sides jangling, as they did when supervising hockey).

  Jemima was glamorous, much admired, single by choice, no children, herself an only child, red-haired and willowy enough to wear a white trouser suit as her preferred costume. There were no parallels there. But I drew happily on my intense feelings encountering Catholicism, Catholic nuns and Catholic girls—the ones who were to be my nice new friends. I also drew on the fact that both Jemima and I experienced all this in the autumn with the trees beginning to shed their leaves in the school drive with the onset of winter. But of course no leaf was allowed to sully the drive. “The nuns must catch the leaves before they fall,” says Jemima’s mother, as she delivers her nervous daughter for her first term; it was true enough of Ascot in the Forties, the immaculate condition of everything there presenting a striking contrast to the hurly-burly of post-war living conditions in North Oxford.

  The feast of All Saints on 1 November was my first experience of full-throated female celebration with its robust hymn:

  For all the saints who from their labours rest

  Who thee by faith before the world confessed

  Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blessed…

  It was in direct contrast to my other favourite musical moment: the singing of Panis Angelicus at Benediction when the women’s voices were tender and exquisite.

  I was enchanted by the two moments every day at twelve noon and six p.m. when the bell tolled for the Angelus: we all stopped whatever we were doing and prayed. I got used to the sight of a nun who had been busily strafing the corridor with a broom suddenly coming to a dead halt and bowing her head. I even liked the ritual of being called by a nun at 7:15 (for Mass) with the words Benedicamus Domino and having to reply Deo Gratias. It seemed a very civilized way of being woken up, if one had to be woken up. After that it was black veils with our uniforms for Low Mass, and white for Benediction and Feast Days. In fact I loved all the rituals, most of all perhaps the developing ritual of the year itself in the daily Mass, the Saints’ Days and the great feasts (I am still inclined to date my letters that way—Feast of St. Catherine for 25 November, St. Lucy for 13 December, John Baptist for 24 June).

  I gave a lyrical description in my letter home of the Feast of Corpus Christi in the summer term, marked by an elaborate procession of priests, crucifixes and banners. The school carried smaller “bannerets”: red for the Sacred Heart, blue for Our Lady, lilac for St. Joseph and yellow for the Pope. They came in two shapes, known irreverently as “nighties” or “pyjamas” according to whether they were square or forked at the end; I noted that I carried a lilac nightie. This was an English summer. When the rain came pelting down, we girls were not deterred but simply continued “with measured step and (mostly) solemn face” in the direction of the chapel. The priest, however, took a short cut out of the rain.

  Unlike Jemima Shore, who remained an agnostic Protestant, I received instruction towards my conversion from the awe-inspiring headmistress “Ig,” actually Mother Ignatius IBVM (Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary). For a time these letters got confused in my mind with other ever-present initials: AMDG for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, to the Greater Glory of God, which we were supposed to write at the top of our essays. The confusion was dealt with in teasing fashion by Mother Bridget, who received the essay in question—“So you’re actually already a nun?” But she also gave me the impression, however kindly, that this sort of thing was only to be expected from a Protestant.

  Actually I was fast moving away from being a Protestant, in so far as I had ever been one, in practice as well as principle. I retained—and retain—a deep affection for the Church of England which finds expression in my love of Anglican (and Nonconformist) hymns, although many of those have since sneaked into the Catholic services. From my point of view, the instruction with Mother Ig went well and I enjoyed being presented with the intellectual arguments as a backing for my emotional determination to become a Catholic. Already doctrine interested me: I wrote back from Godolphin in my last term to report to my mother that the Infallibility of the Pope had been raised in the Divinity class; it was discussed “in a rather supercilious Protestant tone—rather as if a person safely behind bars was wondering how a lion masticated his food. I kept my own mouth shut.” Now I was encouraged by Mother Ig to open my mouth and argue, even if Mother Ig, with great zest, always had the last word. She was particularly fond of the prophet Jeremiah, who seemed to her not the hectoring killjoy of popular imagination, but a lovable man in need of understanding (hers).

  I also enjoyed the special attention, marking me out from anyone else in the school; this was responsible for my decision to be received in full grown-up fashion in front of all the girls in the chapel and furthermore to vanish before their eyes into the sacristy to make my first (Catholic) confession to the priest within. A less public alternative was offered for this confession but I rejected it. As it is, I cannot remember the sins I confessed; I do remember being determined that this would not be a speedy process; my sins in the eyes of the school must be long-drawn-out and worthy of the event.

  This took place on a Saturday. The next day, Sunday 1 December, my longed-for First Communion took place. It was the Feast of the Forty English Martyrs, as I would discover later, foremost among them Blessed Edmund Campion (later canonized), the Elizabethan Jesuit who had been executed on this very day in 1581. This was a most appropriate date for one who would now become increasingly obsessed by English Catholic History.

  The actual founder of the Order of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an English Catholic woman called Mary Ward, had been a fanatic for female education, which had sadly dipped with the disappearance of the convents at the Reformation. Born in Yorkshire in 1585, Mary Ward came of a prominent recusant family: two of her uncles were involved in the Gunpowder Plot. Mary Ward first went abroad to join the Poor Clares at St. Omer, where she later founded a boarding school for English girls. She also came back secretly to England with her female associates to support the recusants: together they became known as the Apostolicae Viragines or more light-heartedly the Galloping Girls. Mary Ward’s real contribution at this date was her conviction (which has a very modern sound) that women, just like men, could do “great things”: in this respect there was no difference between them. As for the Catholic religion: “It is not veritas hominis, verity of men, nor the verity of women, but veritas Domini”—the truth of God. She added, after citing the example of the female saints: “And I hope in God it will be seen that women in time will do much.”

  Studying the life of this remarkable woman for my book on woman’s lot in seventeenth-century England, in the 1980s, I was gloomily unsurprised by the fact that Mary Ward and her new order ran into trouble with the Papacy. It was not until 1703, long after her own death, that the congregation received papal approval. Finally in 1951 Pope Pius XII described Mary Ward as the outstanding pioneer of the lay apostolate of women and beatified her. In any case, the tradition which she founded remained and I benefited from it: the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary put education first in a way that
not all Catholic girls’ schools appeared to do at the time. At Ascot in the Forties, nuns believed that it was not only for the Greater Glory of God that we should go to Mass every morning, but also concentrate on our lessons, work hard for exams and see to it that our essays came in on time.

  There was an explosion in my study of Catholic literature, or rather literature written by Catholics. G. K. Chesterton had been known to me in Oxford, more for the Father Brown detective stories than anything else. Now I explored it all, the paradoxes, the pleasures, with enthusiasm. Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses had formed part of our nursery lore but not his histories. The rhymes were always a delight. There was Lord Lundy for example:

  “But as it is!…My language fails!

  Go out and govern New South Wales!”

  We learnt with some pleasure that our father’s generation had not been permitted to recite this one aloud, since their grandfather, Lord Jersey, actually had been sent out to govern New South Wales. Later the histories came to trouble me as a would-be historian when I studied Belloc’s James II as background to my biography of his brother Charles II; the Catholic partisanship was so blatant and yet so vigorous that I feared to be seduced even as I muttered with Whiggish disapproval. At the time I found Belloc’s historical work in the convent library and gorged on it.

  I also discovered a new favourite poet to replace Keats: this was Gerard Manley Hopkins. Learning the onomatopoeic lines became a spare-time hobby, although my favourite, suitably enough under my new circumstances, was “Heaven-Haven: A nun takes the veil”:

  I have desired to go

  Where springs not fail,

  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail

  And a few lilies blow.

  And I have asked to be

  Where no storms come,

  Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

  And out of the swing of the sea.

  It still remains a refuge in times of stress. I even inserted a small picture of Gerard Manley Hopkins as a young man in my Missal, along with the other holy pictures. The collection of miniature holy pictures for this purpose was a practice which I much enjoyed; even if, as a Protestant convert, I was a late starter and it was a long time before I could emulate the Missals of my friends, stuffed with the memorial cards of their grandparents as well as pious portraits of the saints.

  Not everything about Catholicism was quite so easily assimilated. My first Catholic Easter was spent at school. There was a retreat: three days of silence, four sermons and holy reading. I boasted to my parents in a letter of getting through eight lives of the Saints and Martyrs to one read by everyone else: St. Antony of Padua (my patron saint), St. Margaret of Scotland, St. Frances of Rome and so on. But for all this, it was a matter of more concern among us girls whether Franz Werfel’s The Song of Bernadette, which was such a great read, counted as being holy enough: I have an awful feeling that I put another book’s ostentatiously holy cover over the original one, just to make sure.

  All of this was exciting as well as exacting. It was when we came to the Good Friday litany, a long list of people we prayed for, that I was temporarily disconcerted. We prayed, we knelt, we rose. Then came the moment when we were asked to pray for “the perfidious Jews.” We did pray, but we remained standing. I was deeply shocked, as much by the fact that we stayed on our feet as by the use of the word “perfidious.”

  “But I thought we were the perfidious ones?” I said in bewilderment. In a confused manner, I was alluding to everything I had recently learnt about the war, the camps and the Holocaust. Technically, of course, the Latin word perfidus can also mean without faith—the Jews being obviously without Faith in the Catholic sense. But the first meaning to English ears is undoubtedly “treacherous”: a message underlined by the ostentatious refusal to kneel. It is also significant that Pope John XXIII, that valiant man now rightly a saint, removed the word from the litany in 1959, four years after the gratuitous omission of kneeling was ended.

  At the time, coming from Oxford, where there were so many Jewish refugees, as has been noted, all treated with sympathy and respect for the sufferings which had caused them to flee their native country, I simply did not understand this extraordinary apparent gap in the thinking of the wonderful Catholic Church. Nowadays I am aware that my heart still lights up whenever I read about the Catholic priests and nuns who chose to hide away the Jews in the countries where they were being tormented.

  The winter of 1947 was famously hard, as though the weather was determined to underline the perilous economic situation of the country. It also lasted an extremely long time. My mother’s letters in early March are full of accounts of taking two and a half hours to dig out the car from the snow one day, and then having to do it all over again the day following. There had been five hours of electricity switch-off, as she put it. Everything was frozen inside and out: not a drop of running water in 8 Chad. For a whole week heavy buckets had to be carried back and forth from next door. Then a slight thaw meant that an unwelcome torrent flowed down from the cloakroom ceiling and the cracked nursery radiator belched out a lake of stinking black liquid. The plumber only came two days later.

  I prayed earnestly in the Ascot Chapel for St. Jude, patron of Lost Causes, to come to the aid of the beleaguered household. But I rather preferred my mother in this vigorous, disaster-coping mode to the mother who wrote me impatient letters about my failings, as in the following: “I found in your bedroom a perfectly good stocking without a single hole or darn in it but a ghastly rent right across the ankle behind the heel…not the first. Your dragging it on to your leg without the slightest care and simply tearing it in half must stop at once, otherwise…” She did not specify the reprisal but did sign herself “Mummy Ogress,” the nickname I had once given her. I continued to receive these letters and others like them without, so far as I can recollect, altering my conduct in any way.

  Fortunately Elizabeth had the great distraction from both freeze and family of Frank’s burgeoning political career. He was made Minister in Charge of Germany, under Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary, and paid his first visit in this same icy spring of 1947; in the next two years he would make twenty-five more visits. Conditions for the civilians there were appalling. But conditions had been of course appalling for millions of others, innocent people, throughout the war, to say nothing of the atrocities committed. It was a war which had ended less than two years earlier. Nevertheless I was deeply shocked when my father was execrated in the Beaverbrook press for announcing: “I shall pray for the Germans night and morning.” (Didn’t Dada pray for everyone night and morning, including Vicky the corgi, if he remembered?) From Frank Pakenham, it was an utterly natural comment, just as it was natural for him to learn enough German to read the New Testament. And as a matter of fact, the other feature of his arrival in Germany—his rash jump from the aeroplane, unaware that steps were on their way, leading to a heavily bleeding forehead in all the photographs—was equally in character.

  What followed, his attempt to do something to help the German civilian population, was probably the most important episode of his life, before he dedicated himself to penal reform. I was reminded of it fifty years later: after my father’s death I received out of the blue a letter from a German who had been a sixteen-year-old girl at the time; she wrote of her gratitude to the one man who had made her feel that Germans were not all, as she put it, lower than beasts.

  Frank did not confine his interest in Germany to the interior of the country. He gave an order—one of the very few he personally gave concerning our education—that his elder children were to learn German. From my encounters with a German nun at Ascot, I now received something more than lessons on the importance of Heine and Goethe. For Mother Hilda, or Mutter Hilde as she had once been, burst into tears on my arrival in the tiny tucked-away room designated for our special lessons.

  “I haf thought I vill nefer teach German again,” she sobbed. Mother Hilda was quite small and of a certain age
(it was difficult to tell the age of the nuns with their black wimples covering their hair and bands across the tell-tale forehead). Although she had wisps of white hair showing delicately on her upper lip in an incipient moustache, there was no question of her looking anything but female, and a respectable female at that. Nevertheless instantly into my mind came the stories of parachutists masquerading as nuns, which of course the credulous (like me and Thomas) were delighted to believe, which coupled with Mother Hilda’s strong German accent might well have led to some unpleasant experiences. I began to have a dim understanding of what it must have been like to be an alien in our country in the past war, even one manifestly dedicated to the service of God. As my correspondent expressed it to me fifty years later, not all Germans were lower than beasts; or to put it another way, not all Germans were Nazis. I had to step back from my conventional total condemnation, based on newspapers and films.

  I was extremely happy during my two years at St. Mary’s, a fact borne out by my letters home, and not unconnected to an announcement early on: “This school is COMPETITIVE I’ll have you know, you were wrong about that.” Clearly, for all the need for nice Catholic friends, my mother had felt worried—wrongly—about the level of education in a convent. But the major happiness was created by the discovery of a History teacher who felt as I did about the subject, if possible more passionately. This was Mother Mercedes, IBVM. It was at this point that History stopped being a private matter of enjoyment and became an academic subject—an enthralling academic subject.