DEDICATED TO THE INNOCENCE
WITHIN US ALL
The grace is always there. Let the dis-grace, the idea that you don’t have grace, leave you.
PAPAJI (HLW POONJA), BOMBAY, 1975
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Epigraph
FOREWORD
PREFACE
HIERARCHY WITHIN THE ORDER OF THE FAITHFUL COMPANIONS OF JESUS
PART ONE
IT’S A CATHOLIC GIRL
SHE’S NOT PERFECT AFTER ALL
PRIMARY INSULTS
LEAF OF A WEED
WAR AND WEEKENDS
A WEED GROWS UP
GETTING OLDER AND A LITTLE WISER
LIFE IN A NEW COUNTRY
NEW WINE IN OLD SKINS
KISSING MAKES YOU PREGNANT
PART TWO
ASKING FOR TROUBLE
ASKING FOR MORE TROUBLE
ENGLAND
FORBIDDEN LOVE
SILENT MADNESS
WINTER OF BAD DREAMS
WELCOME HOME, SISTER
NOT SO FAST, SISTER
THE DIE IS CAST
PART THREE
FREE!
BUY ME
ON THE FERRIS WHEEL OF LIFE
GOD’S CALLGIRL
THE VASE CRACKS
AWAKEN, DEAD PRINCESS
THE VASE SHATTERS
YOU ASKED FOR IT, CARLA
RADICAL INNOCENCE
GOD’S GIRL
Postscript to my Father
Photographic Insert
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
IN GOD’S CALLGIRL, Carla van Raay writes with blinding honesty about her extraordinary life. I was facilitating a women’s group during 1987, and during the weeks we all spent together heartfelt feelings were shared, problems were solved and eventually our stories were told—some short, some long, with fear and embarrassment, tears and laughter. All these stories were real and moving, and releasing for the storyteller.
However, a tall, thin, shy woman with a nervous laugh held us spellbound with her tales of convent life and her subsequent, wildly improbable efforts to make some sense out of her existence. I don’t think that anyone who attended that group will ever forget Carla. We all loved her—for her honesty, for her courage, for her zany sense of humour and, most of all, for her innocence. Somehow, through the abuse, the fear, the conditioning, the wild life choices she made, Carla achieved the impossible—she remained innocent. It is a rare quality these days. Without exception, every woman in that group begged her to write this book.
As I read through these pages, I was touched again by this moving and almost unbelievable story. Then again, if you knew Carla, it would not seem unbelievable at all.
Persephone Arbour, Perth, Western Australia
PREFACE
THIS STORY WAS bitter and angry when I began to write it many years ago, a dreadful soap opera intending to expose ‘the awful nuns’. I meant to tell the world what I had suffered in a convent for twelve and a half years and whip up some anger against the Catholic Church and everything these institutions stand for.
That motivation disappeared as my anger subsided, and in 1986 I approached the then Councillor Joan Watters, a woman with influence in the city of Perth in Western Australia, whom I figured could help me with my quest to find a publisher. Armed with the proposed book’s introduction, first chapter, an outline of the other chapters and a photograph of myself as a postulant in the order of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, I had no trouble convincing her of the merit of getting my story published. At my request she made contact with the press. In spite of our best efforts to vet the piece, a sensational headline appeared in every Sunday newspaper around the country: WHY I CHANGED FROM CONVENT TO BROTHEL. EX-NUN SPEAKS OUT ON NEW ROLE.
This immediately aroused the concern of my four brothers and sister in Melbourne, who pleaded with me not to publish my story out of consideration for our parents. Not only would it hurt them deeply to read the details of their once respected and now wayward daughter’s life, but it would upset their dependent relationship with the nuns. Retired, they were still living in a house provided by the FCJs. I agreed, and let slip an opportunity when a publisher approached me.
Both my parents have since died and all ties, except friendly ones, have been severed with the FCJs. Many of the nuns involved in this story are now very old or deceased. The characters in this story are to me like roses on a bush: they bloomed brilliantly once and now many are faded and dead. This story is not about dishonouring the memory of their blooming, but about distilling the lessons provided by their actions and my own. Isn’t that what life is all about? God breathes, and there we are: rosy, alive characters, full of blood and self-importance, on a stage with narrow confines. Then God breathes again—or perhaps he sighs at the spectacle—and we are all gone, returned to the place where everything comes from.
God bless all the old roses, and me too—a rose nearing an age usually not mentioned unless unavoidable. God’s Callgirl is an honest autobiographical account and also, inevitably, a purely personal interpretation of events. Emotionally I have grown up and my story is in no way intended to hurt anyone at all. For this reason I have changed names to avoid coincidental identification of someone who is still living, and have also transposed some details. Members of my family, former members of my religious community, as well as my ex-clients in the sex industry, might well call my story fiction and that’s unavoidable.
If anyone mentioned in this story is still alive and thinks they are being unduly criticised, or feels that I’m not doing them justice, I want to make it clear that this story is first of all an exposé of myself, warts and all.
Over the years, as I wrote the story of Carla—the girl who grew up in the Catholic south of Holland and came to Australia at the age of twelve, then chose at the virginal age of eighteen to enter a convent, and leave it at a virginal thirty-one—understanding began to dawn on me that it had been my inevitable choice to become a nun, then a prostitute. These were roles that I played which expressed my neurosis rather than my true self. I needed to experience who I was not in order to find out who I am. Maybe that is how life works; in any case, that is how it worked for me.
‘What we resist, persists’ is a well-known phrase. I did not understand sex, was afraid of it, suppressed it, and so it was on my mind all the time. Then, in order to understand it, I experimented in glorious and inglorious ways. This book describes the highlights as well as the lows of life as a prostitute, and the suffering caused by extreme indulgence.
The grace of the time I live in, and the help of many friends, has allowed me to become aware of my patterns and transcend them. It might not be good to indulge in memories, but it is dangerous to ignore them. So I am going to tell my story and be done with it, for I do not ever want to live this tale again!
HIERARCHY WITHIN THE ORDER OF THE FAITHFUL COMPANIONS OF JESUS
(in order of importance and authority)
Reverend Mother General
Head of the order; resides in the Mother House in England.
Reverend Mother Vicar
Presides over a region; for example, Australia (where there were four convents).
Reverend Mother/Mother Superior
Governs a convent.
Fully professed nuns
Those who have made final vows after a period of eight and a half years. Seniority among the fully professed also bestowed status.
Professed nuns
Those who have made their first vows upon graduating from the novitiate; or have renewed them three years after graduating.
Those undergoing the two-year probation period, after postulancy, before making their first vows.
Postulants
Those undergoing the first six months of probation or trial period.
Lay sisters
The main physical workers who supported the teaching sisters by cooking, cleaning and doing laundry work. They often received assistance from the postulants and novices. Lay sisters completed a similar probationary period to fully professed nuns, but never became eligible for a position in authority.
PART ONE
IT’S A CATHOLIC GIRL
I WAS BORN A Catholic girl child on 28 October 1938, at seven minutes past four in the afternoon, in a little Dutch town called Tilburg. It was my mother’s first experience of giving birth, and her most terrible. It was my first experience of original sin, meaning I was too evil to be kissed until after baptism.
It was a whimsical time to be born. Draughts of cold air mingled with warm. Leaves floated from plane, oak and chestnut trees and were shuffled noisily along pavements and into porches. Roses lingered; their perfume mingled with that of pungent chrysanthemums and the dark smell of earth on misty mornings. Summer was leaving and people’s thoughts turned to the inevitability of winter.
The house where I was born stood in a row of terraces. Each had an upstairs with a croft window set into a steep roof. There was a tiny garden in front, just big enough to grow bushes of blue hydrangeas and surrounded by a low wall finished with nicely rounded-off bricks—a perfect perch when mild weather drew people outside to talk to one another. The backyard was too small for growing vegetables, which was one of the reasons we moved after the war.
The street had the provocative name of Malsenhof, meaning ‘garden of delights’ or ‘lush garden’. It did not live up to its name, however, and is no longer there today, gone to make way for rows of undelightful flats.
Mothers had their babies at home in those days; the doctor was only summoned in cases of clear defeat. My extreme reluctance to be born was finally overcome by the doctor’s forceps of steel yanking me through a dry passage.
My beautiful mother was twenty-five, my handsome father twenty-four, but they had little idea of what they were doing, having babies. One thing they did seem to know was this: I was going to be the wonder child neither of them had ever been. Their plan was to grow me into a showpiece to impress all the family members and neighbours. It was a bigger issue for my mother, since her family had been against the wedding because she had married far below her social status.
After my first mandatory screech I was wiped clean by the midwife and given to my trembling mother for a drink at the breast. She was proud of me, no doubt about that, and proud of her achievement now that the pain was almost forgotten and the mess as good as out of the way. And I was sweet, which helped a lot. Her next thought was to get me baptised.
The Catholic culture into which I was born had a simple and totally sinister premise: human nature, it asserted, was basically evil. That meant evil from the very beginning and at the kernel of one’s existence. Religion permeated the bones and marrow of the people in the southern part of Holland where I was born. It was a staunch belief that without Christian baptism souls would go to hell.
For innocent babies there was a special place called limbo, the catechism said, where they would mercifully not suffer hellfire but they would never ‘see the face of God’ either. This fact was created by a bull promulgated by the sages of the Catholic church in some century or other, and scrapped in the late twentieth century by another bull, but in 1938 there was no doubt about limbo’s existence. So after a birth there was usually a scramble to get to church with the newborn to minimise its chance of going to that forlorn place. The baby’s mother was rarely present at the baptismal ceremony, not having recovered sufficiently from the ordeal of bringing another bundle of sin into the world. Instead, an aunt would parade down the street with the baby in her arms, surrounded by a bevy of female relatives and friends, the baby on a pillow and covered by a white shroud of satin and lace. Walking was the only way to get to church, unless you happened to own a horse and carriage or that rare thing, a motor car, and we owned neither. If it rained, the shroud would protect the baby.
My mother’s younger sister hurried me off to church and duly had me baptised and given Latin names as tradition required. My parents must have felt I needed at least three saints to ward off the devil: I was named Carolina Johanna Maria.
The names also represented my forebears. My first name was after my father’s German-born mother, Carola. I was never called this particular derivative of Carolina, because my brave mother, who disliked, no, hated all Germans (barring my father) and snubbed her nose at her husband’s family, said, ‘Carola over my dead body!’ She saved the day by making a minor change in the spelling, and a big change in its implication, and named me Carla.
Carla meant ‘strong woman’, which was just as well, given the karma that awaited me. My mother loved to call me Kareltje when she was in a good mood; a diminutive of the male Karel, from the Dutch word, kerel, meaning ‘strong man’.
Being a Catholic baby generally wasn’t too bad, if you were breastfed like I was. I was breastfed until my sister came along fifteen months later. But times were about to change. Holland would soon go to war. More significantly, there were also family wars looming, those private battles that happen within the walls of houses where children are growing up.
My mother was a buxom but not overweight woman with rich auburn, kinky hair swathed in waves around her head, gracing her smooth forehead and fair face. Her brown eyes were slightly hooded, her eyebrows a perfect arch and her lips full. She had been brought up by devout and genteel parents, and had studied and gained diplomas in sewing, tailoring and teaching. During the war her work as a seamstress on the black market helped to keep us all alive. As a teenager it worried my mother that her family was well off while others around her were so poor. It was a problem easily fixed: she married a man who didn’t have much more than a violin and a handsome face.
My father’s good looks were of the breathtaking kind: he was tall, muscular and perfectly proportioned. His face was remarkably regular. He had a fine, straight nose and grey eyes set in a face without lines. His jaw was chiselled square, his mouth—well, determined might be the best way to describe it. He had a practical mind and knew a lot about how to make things, how to grow plants in a garden and how to mend shoes.
My father was one of many children; by the time he was born his parents no longer bothered with a crib or cot—they kept him in the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers. He used to tell this story with a touch of wry humour, but the experience seemed to have left him with a never-ending sense of shock and grief.
His birthplace was Kranenburg, a town so close to the Dutch–German border that the inhabitants spoke the language of both countries, although his family preferred German. They were able to settle in Holland without any trouble when my father was seventeen and claim Dutch nationality.
When war threatened to break out my father was twenty-five. He was conscripted into the Dutch army, where his loyalty was briefly questioned. He had no qualms about fighting for Holland: after all, this was the country that now gave him his bread and living. My father translated his gratitude into enthusiasm for defending the country he now truly considered his own.
His extended family, unfortunately, did not feel the same way. The relatives in Germany, in particular, saw my father’s unreserved allegiance to his new country as an unforgivable betrayal. His own younger brother, Anton, enlisted in the Dutch army but became an informer for the Germans. My father was heartbroken at his brother’s attitude, but unflinching in his loyalty.
World War II broke out less than a year after I was born. My mother became a bundle of nerves, but gradually eased off as the occupation of Holland became an accepted way of life and my father came home from work again in the evenings. The war was just something that happened to
people and little children.
AN INHERITANCE FROM both my parents’ families was guilt about sex—nothing unusual in the guilt-ridden Catholicism of that time, but worth a mention.
My mother’s family line went back to French nobility who had escaped the guillotine during the French Revolution by fleeing the country. In status-conscious Holland they had set themselves high above the assumed looser morals of the hoi polloi, so when passion overtook my courting grandparents, resulting in a pregnancy, they married in a hurry. My mother told me this when I was about to get married myself (though I was not in the least pregnant), but there was more. My grandmother was walking alone in the fields one day when a thunderstorm rumbled up. She had started on her way home when a terrible thing happened: a bolt of lightning came down right beside her, split a tree and scorched it as black as soot. That was the last thing my grandmother ever saw. She became blind, either because the lightning flash had scorched her retinas, or from shock, or both. Whatever it was, she never recovered and gave birth to her daughter (and later to three more children) as a stone-blind woman.
It isn’t difficult to imagine what they said to themselves: it was God who had punished my grandmother. God had made her blind because her child had been conceived in lust. This was against their fine Catholic sensibilities, which dictated that sexual intercourse was not for pleasure but for the sole purpose of procreation. Yes, God had punished my grandmother in this mortal life so that she would be spared hell hereafter. Her husband, an earnest man, shared the guilt bravely, without having to be struck by lightning. Instead, he had to pay dearly for the nannies to help bring up their children.
My mother, therefore, considered herself ‘a child of lust’ and never felt good about her own sexuality. The uncanny thing is that she too ended up having premarital sex—a repeated act of damnable lust! She confessed all this to me as she grew older and longed for a confidant other than the local priest. The feeling of guilt, an insightful friend wrote to me recently, looks for a way to justify itself. She married my father, a healthy, handsome, poor and lustful man. Her faith and vows of holy matrimony told her to obey him—and to obey him meant to submit to his lust. In all other things, it seemed, he obeyed her, and so they had their trade-off, the basis for many a successful marriage.
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