During my time, there was not one hired hand; all the work was done by novices and nuns, who were rostered in their time off from teaching duties by the efficient Sister Kevin. I could not believe it when I was eventually told, many years after coming out, that my family was required to pay fees for me during the years of my novitiate, and for a full total of eight and a half years until my final vows. It had something to do with not having a dowry to bring with me when I entered; all I’d had was a portion of my parents’ will to bequeath to the convent upon my death, and that wasn’t considered good enough. I had no idea about this extortion.
‘It’s always the poor people who pay up, Mrs van Raay,’ the sister who had been drafted into doing the dirty work of collecting the money told my mother. ‘The rich ones can’t be bothered; they never pay.’
It seemed that quite a few people hadn’t brought a dowry, even those who could afford it. It was the wealthy who had the wisdom not to be intimidated by demands of payment while their daughters gave their lives to God and God’s endless work.
My main job was to keep the corridors and parlours shiny and free of dust. I was shown how to strew discarded tea leaves at the head of the corridor and sweep them down methodically so the damp leaves gathered all the dust. I learned how to tame the large polishing machine that bolted away from inexperienced hands, and how to care for the carved mahogany tables, the Queen Anne chairs and every item in the opulent parlours, which made me think of the court of King Louis XIV (I wasn’t used to antique vases, and some of these were three feet high).
It wasn’t right to be seen cleaning when a visitor arrived, but sometimes it was unavoidable. I saw a fairly important-looking male visitor emerge from a parlour one day as I was mopping the corridor, and I ducked away into the Rev’s bathroom, which had a recessed door facing into the corridor. This bathroom was a spacious, hallowed place, usually out of bounds to a hoi polloi cleaner like me. The visitor, however, had exactly the same room in mind, and wanted to bolt when he saw me. Dusting furiously, I said I’d just finished and, really, it didn’t matter!
The refectory, where we had our meals, was a place of anxious feeling for me. We novices had our own refectory across the corridor from the nuns. Our mistress would usually preside and we would take our cues from her. Our foundress was French, but etiquette in her convents was definitely Victorian. It was nerve-racking. One day, she ate an apple with a knife and fork. I considered myself a total dunce at table manners and supposed that everyone else had been well brought up, except for me, a caretaker’s daughter. But who learns to eat an orange with a spoon at home, or an apple with a knife and fork? So we must have all felt pretty much the same, stealing furtive glances at each other’s manners.
We had become quite expert at not touching our apples with our fingers, when our novice mistress had the gall to announce dryly from the presiding end of the table:‘It isn’t necessary to eat an apple with a knife and fork, you know.’ She wiped her thin mouth with a large white napkin and left the room. I never did sort out the meaning of that particular lesson.
FOR CENTURIES, RELIGIOUS life had been an education in dehumanisation. Over and over again, the Church Fathers had defined religious life as a striving for perfection, synonymous with the renunciation of the world. ‘The world’ did not just mean material possessions; nuns were also to minimise contact with people. Stern is the word that comes to mind. Stern devotion. Efforts to break this austere attachment to rules and lifestyle made by Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII—who called Major Superiors from all the religious orders together in 1957, 1961 and again in 1965—were met with a bland inability to imagine anything other than the way to perfection they thought they had already embraced.
Eventually, living by the rules and daily schedule became easier—it even became a crutch. To do the right thing, we had only to consult the routine or the rules; in cases of any doubt, there was the novice mistress to consult.
‘Every little thing I do is always exactly what Our Lord wants of me at that moment, and that certainty is an ecstatic feeling,’ I wrote in my first weekly letter to my family. The more rules we learned, the easier it seemed to ‘do it right’. Until, of course, the burden of the sheer number of rules and the complexities of living them increased the chances of failure.
Everybody felt larger than life now, for we belonged to ‘the community’. For a young woman struggling to have any identity at all, this was something to glory in. My ability to ‘please God’ seemed guaranteed. I had successfully transferred my need for approval from my parents to anyone in a position of authority within the convent hierarchy, the ‘mouthpieces of God’. Such transference was openly encouraged; even the titles Reverend Mother, Reverend Mother Vicar and Reverend Mother General were a blatant claim on childish loyalties. These titles have now been abolished.
Our Reverend Mother was made much of. She had a lot of organising to do and was cosseted like a queen bee. The rank and file were also encouraged to love the regional Mother Vicar, whoever she might be at the time, and, most of all, the Reverend Mother General, affectionately known as ‘Notre Mère’. She was the hardest to get to meet or know as she lived in Broadstairs, in England. We were taught to send letters of affection to this unknown, respected mother figure, assuring her of our constant prayers and our loyalty and love for her.
Reverend Mother Winifred had a mouthful of large teeth, but after the initial wide smiles at my reception she appeared to take a chilly dislike to me. She didn’t have much time for postulants and novices in general, and luckily only made an appearance now and again to read the rules or give an impassioned pep talk called a dissertation. This she delivered with eyes down on her prepared written statement, while we youngsters sat in two rows at right angles to her, eyes staring at our folded hands in our lap.
Once in a while, though, we had to make a personal report to her. One by one we knelt beside her in the hallowed atmosphere of her private office, which reeked of rebukes, disciplinary measures, reiterated rules and regulations, regrettable decisions, humiliations, exhortations and admonitions—all of which I suffered myself, over time, in that room.
Reverend Mother sat in an armchair so that a kneeling postulant like me could look up at her large face. I think it was my particular brand of naivety that tended to upset her. She would twitch her large nose involuntarily and those bushy eyebrows would come down darkly as she answered my questions unsmilingly.
WHEN MOTHER PHILOMENA, our elegant novice mistress died, we were temporarily left motherless. She died of cancer without any of her ‘children’ there to witness her passing or to mourn by her bedside. As was the custom, Holy Masses were offered for her soul, six in a row on the first day, performed at double and even treble speed, making me wonder why we couldn’t do it like that every morning and save heaps of time. After a week or so, we were appointed another mistress.
Mother Rosa was younger and much more emotionally expressive. She had kind eyes, and thought it her major duty to try and cheer us up, even if she didn’t feel so bright herself sometimes. Mother Rosa had the unfortunate experience of having one of the older novices fall violently in love with her. I say ‘violently’ because Sister Miriam had very loud, disrespectful arguments with Mother Rosa, and even swore. Miriam was reluctantly sent home to her respectable parents after almost two and a half years of being in the novitiate. She left without saying goodbye to us.
Mother Rosa tried hard, very hard, to do her job, poor thing, but she cried too much at her own incompetence, and so we were given a third novice mistress, Mother Immaculata, a woman with large glasses that made her eyes sparkle deceptively and a prunish mouth set in a square jowl. Her beguiling upturned nose belied her nature. She was impish all right, and had a cultivated bright manner, but her nervous habit of constantly pushing her glasses back up her nose and the way she remained prudish even when smiling, should have made somebody think twice. There wasn’t anything obviously wrong with her, except that she had no idea what she w
as doing. She had a blind faith in a God who spoke through her superiors. Her superiors had told her to be a novice mistress; it didn’t matter that she knew nothing about the job, her faith told her that she would be miraculously guided. She was a holy innocent. She was also a child—every bit as I was. Trained in primary school teaching, she was used to dealing with other little children, and now she had a few bigger ones under her wing, that was all.
During this time, the mysterious and awe-inspiring Reverend Mother General came from England to visit her three houses in Australia. We didn’t have enough time to knock up a concert to welcome her, so we simply had a religious reading for her in our common room, followed by a chat, during which she asked several questions in a crowd interview. A message got back to us later about her impressions: she wouldn’t give sixpence for the lot of us! We bit our lips and giggled and snorted at the news. Surprisingly, the insult did not make us feel bad—it was so insulting as to be ridiculous. We simply couldn’t believe that in such a short time she could have made an honest judgment about our worth or worthlessness.
Our giggles were accepted as a postulant’s way to discharge pent-up tensions and they were tolerated for a time. The giggles would get hold of us in chapel, because we weren’t used to prolonged silences, even though our meditations were initially for only twenty minutes. After a month, the time was extended to half an hour, after two months, to three quarters of an hour. Our quick, youthful minds could not cope with the suppression of thought for so long. One of us might start to snigger silently and helplessly, then the rest would soon join in sympathy, shoulders shaking so violently that the vibrations could be felt through the wooden kneelers. All of a sudden, someone would explode into laughter. The shocking release of energy would calm us all down, as if our collective tension had found a way out through one of us.
On hot humid days we would simply go limp and suffer in perfect silence. The black cloth of our dresses stuck to the back of the bench if we dared to lean back instead of sitting bolt upright as was expected. One morning I had been leaning back for as long as five minutes when the Reverend Mother came up and asked me if I was sick, but I had merely wandered off into my thoughts and forgotten where I was.
The meditations were boring to the extreme. They were always read from the same book, in archaic language, on topics such as the Resurrection of Lazarus, the Last Judgment, Saint Patrick, the Devil and the Guardian Angel, the Glorified Body of Christ, the Eucharist, Silence, how the body would look and feel like after the Resurrection of the Dead…etc. After a few years, it became easier in a perverse sort of way, because the meditations remained the same, repeated time after time after time!
At breakfast we always listened to excerpts from the Imitation of Christ, even after the shocking news that Thomas à Kempis, the esteemed author, would never be canonised. This was because he was found, after exhumation, to have died with his teeth sunk into one of his shoulders. He must have despaired of God after being buried alive and coming to in an airless coffin, and no saint would do that.
During the hushed bustle of serving and eating lunch, there were readings from the writings of the foundress, until such time as the superior would say the magic words, ‘Praise be to Jesus!’. This was the signal for a few minutes of animated conversation, one person speaking at a time, while others behaved and kept in what must have been dying to come out. Only the lay sisters, who had not taken the same vows and usually sat the furthest away from the superior, broke the rule of one person at a time. Often they couldn’t follow the in-house drift of the conversation, so chatted quietly among themselves, and were usually given an ineffectual rebuke by the superior. On feast days the reading could be counted on to be very short, creating delightful relief. At dinner, more readings and no talking at all, because after the washing-up came recreation time.
There was a strict routine to the evening supper reading, before chapel and dinner. Twice a week we were treated to the writings of Alphonsus Rodriquez. He had written several books in a series called The Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtue. The books had a transparent sincerity and we readily absorbed their peculiar reasonings and admirable solutions to living a Perfect Life. No other books could have shown us so adequately how miserable and worthless we were as human beings; how filthy, vile and rude our human bodies were, to be beaten into the habit of ‘following the Spirit’.
On other days, the readings were from a shortlist lives of favourite saints, handed down from generation to generation. After the visit from the General, books by Abbot Marmion were thrust under our noses for some months, glorified by being the personal choice of the General, who admired the Abbot’s scholarly phraseology. Ordinary brains like ours had difficulty understanding his ideas. Occasionally we had a fair thriller—such as the life of a humorous missionary in Africa, whose name I have forgotten but who at least made us smile. Then there were stories of male saints like Aloysius, who never looked at a woman, not even at the face of his mother; and the story of Father Petit, who would never touch an apple because of its connection with original sin set loose in the world by Eve. Father Petit asked for his pure heart to be cut out upon his death and preserved for Sister X, a friend of his. Nobody thought of ridiculing these stories; we took them as a patient takes a remedy: they tasted bad, but they were supposed to do you good.
The life of the foundress was on the reading list, of course. She had led an unusual, courageous and mysterious life, full of inexplicable coincidences towards the end, like being in two places at once, hearing voices and foretelling events which later came true. She was a pioneer of education for the girls of non-affluent parents, realising that education was the way to emancipation from the narrow roles women found themselves in during the early nineteenth century.
In 1820 she founded her first convent, followed quickly by four others, all in France, and before long more were established in England and Ireland. The first Australian convent was in Richmond, Melbourne, established in 1882, twenty-four years after the foundress’s death. Were she alive in our time, the 1960s, when education was available to everyone, she would surely have packed up the schools and done something more useful. But this was inconceivable to the FCJs. The relevance of the teaching nuns was almost completely non-existent towards the end of the twentieth century, and vocations dwindled. It was all blamed on the godlessness of the times rather than on the lack of timely initiative.
SIX MONTHS OF postulancy sped by, filled with excitement, horror and humour, and soon we were ready for the next step: the awful thrill of shedding our simple black cotton frocks and net caps for the wildly professional-looking habit of the novices.
This took place in a formal ceremony meant to impress our families with the growing seriousness of their daughters’ choice to live their lives for God, in God’s house.
ASKING FOR MORE TROUBLE
THE SOFT SELL of postulancy ended on 8 September 1957, the day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. To mark the change there was a public ceremony in the chapel, formal and impressive, which our families and friends all attended. What they wouldn’t see was the backstage crudeness when it came to hacking off our hair.
We six brides of Christ walked solemnly down the aisle, our hair still intact and covered with the same veil we had used as children at our first communion. Our hands were joined at the fingertips and held in front of our chests as we walked with bent heads. My pseudo-wedding gown had been sewn by my mother; it was made of thin white satin with a little dot in the fabric—needless to say, it had no plunging neckline or bare shoulders. I imagined I looked like Maria Goretti, or one of the saints from my holy pictures.
The chapel was crowded with the relatives of the six girls gliding over the red carpet towards the sanctuary. A few senior schoolgirls thought to be potential future ‘entrants’ were also allowed in. My parents and a sister were there, somewhere.
The chapel was filled with the scent of many flowers, predominantly white: white roses, white carna
tions, lilies, gladioli, gypsophila and lily of the valley. Strange to think of it now, but the scent of the flowers, which I can so clearly recall, was a reassurance to me then. Their fragrant presence carried the message that everything was all right. Everything was all right—not because I was assured of ‘doing the right thing’ to please God, which I wasn’t, because God doesn’t need to be pleased—but because I was doing what I felt I had to do then. In time, there would be different things to do. I had friends; I was being watched over.
We had rehearsed our lines for renouncing the world, asking for the habit we were going to wear, and declaring our willingness to be a bride of Christ, a Faithful Companion of Jesus.
The bishop asked each of us the ceremonial questions as we knelt before him.
‘My child, what do you ask?’
‘My Lord, I ask for the mercy of God and the grace of the holy habit of religion,’ we replied.
‘Do you ask it with your whole heart and with a free will?’
‘Yes, my Lord.’ Our words reached the many listening ears in the chapel.
‘I espouse you to Jesus Christ, Son of the Eternal Father, in the Society of the Faithful Companions of Jesus. May God grant you perseverance, my child.’
And so, having wedded us to Jesus, the bishop placed the neatly folded nun’s habit over our outstretched hands. When we had all received our new clothes, we rose and proceeded demurely back down the aisle, our heads bowed, heading for the door at the back of the chapel.
Once out of the chapel, we lost our sedate tempo and raced to the room we had dubbed the bridal chamber. Jesus had been given six more brides that day; this was a mystery I accepted as easily as the notions of the Holy Ghost and ejaculations. The cutting of the hair had to be done quickly, so that each bride could return with her head encased in a white bonnet and veil, the rest of her body enveloped in voluminous black, without making the whole congregation wait too long.
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