Long after the song was over, and the sun started to set in the sky, I remembered where I was. I had been standing in that one spot all the time, totally transfixed. This peculiar behaviour didn’t go unnoticed by the others. When the General had asked that question, there were several nuns who had looked at me curiously and were keen to hear the answer themselves. Well, they got none. And no amount of humiliation would make me stop using these escape mechanisms. Even when I was very little, I had learned how to escape into the painted woods on the ornately gilded picture in our sitting room. My father and I used to walk in the real woods portrayed there, so it was easy to imagine being on the track that led through the forest, smelling the fallen leaves as they were crushed underfoot, noticing the spiders hanging in their diamond webs, spotting the toadstools and being on the watch for fairies and gnomes.
A SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT came my way. The General gave me the instructions herself; this was most unusual. Sister Angela and I listened together and I was fascinated by this opportunity for a close-up look at the ‘orang-utan’. The resemblance was so striking that it filled my mind and the softly spoken instructions got lost in my reverie and an endless series of interruptive little burps. I didn’t think it wise to ask the General to repeat herself; besides, I believe now that she deliberately swallowed most of her words so we couldn’t possibly understand her. Her powerful presence was the only thing that stayed with me from that meeting.
I hoped that Sister Angela had listened and understood better than I had. All I had gathered was that I was in charge of picking tomatoes for distribution to all the houses, and Sister Angela was to help me. There were up to five locations to think of, including the children’s boarding school. Did the General tell us how many people were in each house, so that we could distribute the tomatoes in the proper ratio? I couldn’t remember anything more than her mumbling something about ‘Here’ and ‘There’.
Picking the ripe tomatoes with the effervescent Sister Angela (I had known her since postulant days) was pure pleasure. The smell of tomato leaves brushing against our clothes was intoxicating. Plucking a ripe tomato from its bush, with the stalk still in its centre (I did remember this part of the instructions!), and filling my hand with its healthy red roundness, felt like a little miracle each time. The hothouses held the luxury of mystique and sunny, warm light.
Our canvas bags laden with loot, our difficulties began. ‘Sister Angela,’ I said, ‘how many people do you think are staying at Stella Maris just now? Do you know how many live at the vicarage and how many elsewhere?’ Alas, she knew no better than I, so we made rough guesses and went around surprising the occupants with our gifts. Certainly, nobody knocked back any of our tomatoes!
Talking was not authorised, and I felt so guilty about breaking this rule with Sister Angela that my head was bent low when we crossed the public road. A car was cruising slowly by—probably full of sightseers lucky enough to come across a couple of local ‘penguins’—and we were both so self-conscious and kept our heads so bent down, that we crossed the road at widely different angles instead of side by side. The sight probably caused merriment in the car, but our silliness made me grit my teeth.
We had been carrying out our tomato routine for about two weeks when we found out we weren’t doing a good job. The news came via an open talk by the General to the gathered communities in the convention room. The crowded gathering was treated to a sarcastic description of our stupidity, ending with, ‘There was no rhyme nor reason in what they did. The allocation of tomatoes showed a complete lack of common sense.’
Had the whole thing been a set-up to make us look bad? I had no idea. Sister Angela didn’t seem to mind very much; she was a bouncy person, always smiling, with a wonderfully good heart and happy to have no brains, the kind who barges in where angels fear to tread. I, however, was feeling slightly desperate because I dimly realised that, in this humble institution, the only way to get a responsible job—a tangible sign of esteem—now or in the future, was by impressing your superiors.
Sister Angela and I were relieved of our tomato-picking duties.
IT WAS THE time of Vatican II and ecumenical rapprochement, which meant that Christian churches began to respect each other’s sincerity and essential sameness.
Pope John XXIII had bravely called a Vatican Council during his short reign, in January 1959, three months after coming to office. It was an extremely difficult thing to accomplish; the Council didn’t open until October 1962 and even then the bulk of Pope John’s work was not completed until after his death.
The story of how he dealt with the machinations of the scheming, self-important Curia makes fascinating reading. The spirit of Pope John somehow managed to get past conservative thinking. The result was the now famous movement called the Aggiornomento; loosely translated it means ‘bringing things up to date’.
So now we were to study the research into the Bible that had been done by the Church of England (Catholics had not been so keen on the Holy Book after Henry VIII ran off with it). Mother Clare was in charge of Biblical studies and she dealt decisively with our scandalised reactions.
‘Of course Jesus may have had brothers!’
‘Clearly it is true that he could not have been born on 25 December, because at that time of the year it is too cold for sheep in the vicinity of Bethlehem to be outside. The Wise Men from the East were probably just symbols, like their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.’
We were treated to some really eye-popping possibilities.
‘Jesus may have been the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, and that was why Joseph agonised so much about whether to get his promised wife stoned or not. That might have explained why Jesus grew up secretly with the Essenes and studied for the priesthood, which he later betrayed when he let their secrets of health and other forbidden knowledge out into the open.’
Such first-class scandalous hypothesising! This was the kind of open bravery that the Catholic church largely withdrew from when Pope John’s great spirit left the earth, and his too-frank successor died after only thirty-three days in office. After this, the politicians in the Curia succeeded in installing their puppets once again.
It was curious that some FCJs were so open, at that particular time, and yet progress within the order slowed down and came to a halt. In Ireland in particular, FCJs loved the status quo and stuck to what had seemed good enough to them since time immemorial.
When we weren’t studying or praying, we were doing chores, and there were plenty of them. I daresay we earned our keep, working inside the house and in the gardens. We also did exquisite embroidery at recreation time. I dressed a series of dolls, and even embroidered their petticoats. I never knew what happened to them, or any of the tablecloths and doilies and napkins that we made with so much skill.
Suddenly, I landed myself a very different kind of job. Mother Mary John stopped me in the corridor. ‘Sister Carla, the sister who usually prepares the parlour for the priest’s breakfast and serves it after Mass is ill. Would you like to do this service while she is absent?’
I was asked not ordered, I noticed, and said I was pleased to step into the breach. I was surprised too, because I didn’t think of myself as having such fine sensibilities as parlour manners. Well, there was no time like the present, so I took on the job with courage and a little bit of confidence.
The job required two women: one sister to prepare the food tray in the kitchen and the other to do the serving. There was one nerve-consoling factor: everything was the same from day to day—the same food, cutlery, crockery and napkins, trays, and the same procedure of ‘this goes first and that comes next’. The only thing that ever changed were the flowers in a little vase. The best part of my job was definitely picking a little flower here and there from the lush garden for the breakfast table.
I was the server, and all was fine, except I wasn’t prepared for the possibility that the priest might talk to me. The priest that week was a human sort of guy who must have bee
n curious to get to know the new sister. He threw out the occasional small talk, which was naughty of him as he must have been aware of the tertiary novices’ rule of silence. I answered politely and briefly and so survived a week. The sick nun I was replacing either never asked for her job back or never got better, so I continued into a second week. I was really getting into the swing of things. The priests weren’t always the same, but they were normally reserved, polite and unengaging.
I was to become undone, however. One Irish priest started asking me questions about what I was going to do that day, and why was I in England. It was all very disconcerting—somehow too human, too friendly—but I didn’t think of asking for guidance from my superiors. Then one morning I couldn’t resist telling him the old joke about the Rolls Can’ ardly. He had told me a little joke and I thought it was appropriate for me to tell him one in return.
‘My father owns a Rolls Can’ardly,’ I said, with wicked pleasure in the humour I was encouraging. ‘It rolls easily down the hill but can ’ardly get up!’
The laughter which followed must have reached through the walls. The General had been having her breakfast in another parlour not far away and, inevitably, Mother Mary John called me to her side that very morning. I knelt down as was the custom and listened to her reprimand. Cracking jokes was not part of my job, I was told, and was a serious breach of silence. I was to be relieved of my parlour job at once.
Well, I wasn’t too upset—that morning of laughter would be a hard act to follow, anyway. The trouble was that the job was now the sole responsibility of my partner, and she was having great difficulty doing it all smoothly and properly by herself. I would see her rushing through the refectory with the tray of cutlery and crockery, then the tray of food, and not getting to her own breakfast till everything was cold.
This went on for days, until Mother Mary John took me aside and hinted that I should apologise and ask to get the job back. What? The notion was so preposterous that I flatly rejected it. ‘No, thank you, I will never go back to that job again.’ If I wasn’t good enough then, I wasn’t good enough now, and the fact that the other sister was struggling had nothing to do with me. If this was some strange test, I was willing to fail it wholeheartedly!
AUTUMN TURNED TO winter, the time of great winds and storms. They swept the foreland mercilessly. We had to walk from the vicarage to the main residences and back every morning and evening; the objective was to arrive without losing anyone over the cliff. Umbrellas being useless in the gale, we left them behind and held each other’s gloved hands in a row of six or so, proving that there was strength in numbers! Together we would pull each other through the wind, cloaks plastered against our bodies, plodding along in gumboots. How we enjoyed those wild and windy days! Yes, we got wet, but our cloaks were made of good serge and the plastic bonnets over our heads saved us from the worst of the rain. There’s nothing like a refreshing physical challenge to rehumanise spiritual people. Among the genteel, mollycoddled older members of the community, the Australians acquired something of a heroic status for the way they tackled nature. Well, it was something. Crossing the grounds at least four times each day between the main house and the vicarage had a cooling and refreshing effect on us; it probably contributed greatly to our relative sanity. The eyes-down rule kept me in contact with the things that grew in the ground and around our feet as we walked. Nature was my ally, as it had always been.
Christmas drew close, and so did the snow-laden skies and the cosiness of a heated recreation room. During the six weeks of Advent we chose to do extra penance, easily achieved if you suffered from the cold. However, we all did compulsory penance when the breakfast tea was served not hot, not warm, but cold. Here was a ready-made penance, we were told. Worse was to come: the General decided at lunch that no tea at all might be an even more suitable penance for the duration of Advent.
I could sense a few hackles rising around me, especially from the resident lay sister in charge of the laundry, who year after year had been thwarted in her bid to get warm water to rinse the washing. She had been at Stella Maris for some years and the mystique of the place had apparently rubbed off a bit. She had a loud voice too. ‘We’ll all get sick!’ she shouted.
And she was right—people started to display all kinds of withdrawal symptoms. Hot tea was reinstated after a week, much to everyone’s relief. We were all thoroughly addicted to it. How ordinary we were, in spite of our grandiose ideas of leading lives of detachment.
On Christmas Day we waited expectantly for festivities to begin. The long ceremonies in the chapel were over and we were all congenially crammed into the recreation room, eyeing the many little bowls of sweets on the table, waiting for the General to appear so we could wish her a Happy Christmas and get stuck into the chocolates, humbugs and boiled lollies.
The General had a real fear that we took too many things for granted. Mother Clare swept into the room like a broom on fire and swiped all the bowls off the table. The sweets gone, the General came in and planted her large frame squarely in a chair at the head of the table, one hand on her knee, a forearm draped over the table, like the King of the Castle.
‘Jesus,’ she said (pause), ‘was born in a cold stable (pause) and we (pause) are His Companions. Indulgence in sweets is not a proper way to celebrate Christmas!’ Her manner was impeccably choreographed and impressive. Eyeing all of us around the room, she added, ‘There are many starving people in the world. Let us think of them today.’
It was this sort of superior-sounding wisdom, this bold way of stating her truth, that for many years had earned her a special respect. It takes nerve to come out with persuasions like hers, and a certain flair to impose them on others. She spoke softly and intently, with many pauses, conspiratorial half-smiles and knowing eyes. She made you believe that if you did not understand what she was saying, you were stupid. Small, intimate groups like ours were her little playground.
WINTER WAS ALSO a time for colds and flu. For a while I helped out when others fell victim to influenza, then succumbed to something mysterious myself. I developed such a raging fever that someone was assigned to watch over me and administer medicine at certain times. She was a young nun, who was rather obviously anxious about something other than her present job. I had my eyes closed, but I could sense her restlessness. Finally, she spoke up.
‘Listen,’ she said earnestly, ‘can you take those tablets yourself?’and mentioned a time. In my delirium, it seemed perfectly fine for me to believe that I was capable of taking the tablets as instructed, and I said yes. After a while, alas, I had no idea what I had and hadn’t taken. Had I swallowed the tablets or only imagined it? What time did she say they were to be taken? I decided to take the tablets I could see on the saucer close to me. My guardian came back, seemingly only moments later, and was aghast. Why hadn’t I looked at the clock properly, she wanted to know. She ran away again, very agitated, but I promptly fell asleep.
I woke during what I thought was the middle of the night, needing to go to the toilet. It was pitch dark. I couldn’t make out a thing, but knew where the toilets were, so groped my way out of the dormitory into the passageway and into a toilet. I switched on the light, I thought, but there was no light. I went into the next toilet and tried the light there, again with no luck. There was a power failure, I presumed, or else all the globes had blown. I managed to use a toilet, made it back to bed and fell asleep again. When I woke up and opened my eyes, I still couldn’t see. My world was pitch black but I knew it was daytime from the noise of people around the place. Whatever those tablets were, they had sent me blind.
Someone came to question me about the taking of the tablets, reprimanded me for being stupid, and left me alone. I had no idea if I would stay blind or not, and was curiously resigned to whatever might happen. For days I woke up in darkness, checking for sounds to see if it was day or night.
Then, one morning at dawn, my eyes saw the world again, softly. I was on the mend. I asked for little jobs I could d
o in bed as I improved, like peeling potatoes or apples, or shelling peas. The amazing hothouses in the garden produced vegetables all year round.
The sister who had made the mistake came to apologise, as was her duty, and that was that. All in all I enjoyed my illness as a respite from the daily round of tensions.
I BECAME BADLY constipated again, like I had been back in Australia when I was a novice. Laxatives didn’t work this time, so I was given a big cup of the sweetest tea ever and was made to lie down on the infirmary table, on my side, buttocks exposed.
The infirmarian looked at me as if she wondered if I knew where all this was going to end, but her rule of silence apparently prevented her from explaining anything to me. She put on some gloves, swirled a hand in a pot of Vaseline, and approached the end of my intestines as if she was holding a gun. I watched her face during all this: she kept it turned away from the work at hand, watching me in her turn, but her expression gave nothing away.
When the strategy started to work, I finally caught signs of relief and disgust before I was told to slide down onto a commode. I decided then that it might be a good idea to leave penitential salt out of my tea in future, and take a lot of sugar instead.
Later in the year, my periods stopped. I was unconcerned, having experienced a similar hiatus as a postulant in the convent at Genazzano. Kneeling alongside Reverend Mother Winifred’s armchair, looking up into her large face, I had shyly come out with an issue that was bothering me. ‘Reverend Mother,’ I began shyly, ‘I haven’t had my period for four months.’ Her body had rocked in her chair, then she had replied with all the surety of bluff, ‘It means absolutely nothing, Sister Carla.’ But for the nuns at Stella Maris, it was another matter entirely!
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