For a while, the posh girls at the convent laughed at me: as much for my accent as because they heard rumors about my private life. There was an attempt, rather feeble, to bully me: thefts of my possessions, pages ripped out of my books by unseen hands. People say girls can be cruel, but it’s nothing a smart slap on the jaw won’t cure. Strangely, though, I didn’t have to get violent at all. One day in the lunch hour, when the whole school, rain or shine, was turned out of doors for fresh air, I saw our Top Nun walking alone, on an eminence, a raised patch of ground; she was a tiny, fierce item, horribly feared—though I did not know it—by parents and pupils both; after Malachy, she seemed to me a pussy-cat. On New Parents’ Day, we had been treated, mother and child, to a good thrash through the school rules and sumptuary laws; all uniform to be purchased from approved stockist, no hand-knitted or selfcontrived items, no jewelry except holy medals, and no nail varnish or cosmetic adornment on pain of torture and death. After this telling-off, my mother had approached the Top Nun, strung up, somewhat subdued. She was worried that I was not physically robust, that I would be found wanting: she was afraid I was not plain enough, worried that my streak of ashy hair, which once again fell to my waist, would be flouting the rules against conventual simplicity. Seeing a mother heaving in view, a parent with the temerity to make an individual approach—a parent who had been told but not told hard enough—Sister gave a pained, ironic smile.
My mother indicated me. “She can’t do games,” she said. “Or P.E. The doctor …” Sister looked me over, where I shrank at my mother’s elbow. “Gym?” she said mildly. “Well, we do find most girls are very unhappy if anything interrupts their gym.” My mother nodded and nodded, sacrificing me within seconds on the altar of Most Girls: my colics and cramps, my pains and my panics. Then she burst out with her real, eager, zealot’s question: “Long hair—is that all right. Shall I have her hair cut off?”
Sister Mary Francis stared at her for a moment, then gave a sweet giggle, like a little girl’s. It was a sound I would wait many years to hear again: Oh heavens, she said. Oh, no, don’t do that. That will be quite all right. Tied back, you know. Navy ribbon, if you must. Oh heavens … don’t cut off her hair.
We were held in a moment—my mother and I—of blushing embarrassment. Perhaps only I blushed; my mother was a woman, and had face. And I imagined Sister, that night, going back to the company of her fellow nuns, putting her feet up, rolling her eyes, and exclaiming, “New parents! What are they like?”
So now, this misty November lunchtime, sorry for her solitary state, I approached her, and got chatting. Arrival at the convent had reduced me, once again, to a very little girl, a starter, with simple easy manners; hierarchies were never obvious to me, and I felt warmly toward this tiny Top Nun whose nose and lips were blue from cold. Had she not defended my hair? For two pins, my mother would have cropped my head, and sent me out looking like a convict; the girls would have said I had nits, if—at the Convent of the Nativity—they knew what nits were, and in any case the loss of my hair would have taken away my only distinction. I may—though I don’t remember this clearly—have taken Top Nun’s tiny poisoned hand in mine.
“Hilary,” she said. (Top Nun aspirated.) “Yes,” I said; we chatted a while. Was I managing the gym, she asked? Not really, I said, I was generally rather poor at hopping and frog jumps, but I was resigned to it. “However, while very happy generally, I have a complaint. Among other items, my shoe bag has vanished. My shoes in it.”
“Have you had a good look for it?” Top Nun asked.
“Well,” I said, “to the best of my powers. Shoes don’t walk.”
Top Nun seemed to inhale her thin lips. She looked up and surveyed her constituency. We stood together while her eyes raked her charges, some four hundred girls running on the spot and blowing on their hands and chafing their blue thighs to stimulate blood flow, girls laughing and running in girl gangs and mocking and chanting, girls flashing at one another illicit pictures of pop stars, girls gossiping and flocking and crowing and ill-behaving; girls, not a few of them, stopped and transfixed and looking our way. Top Nun paused, considering. “Do you know,” she said, “I think that if you were to go and look again for your shoe bag, let’s say, after school at four o’clock … I believe you would find, Hilary, that it is exactly where it ought to be.”
What I felt, privately, was extreme anguish. I thought that my parents could not afford to replace my shoes, or anything else that was lost; what was worse than this thought, was the thought of breaking it to my mother that in this place the girls also stole, that shoes walked, that books ripped themselves, that you were powerless against the wider society or against what ghosts did when your back was turned: that we had come to a new town, a new house, and that we were still not safe and unmolested. I didn’t want her to know that this place was like that place; she was hoping so desperately that all places were not the same, she had staked her name on it, she had picked us up and run with us to a place that now looked no safer than the one where we’d been before. Thank you Sister, I said politely. I’ll have a look. Well, you know, she said. If all is not well, Hilary. Her glance flickered again over her charges, now moaning in a slashing icy drizzle, pulling their sweaters over their heads and scurrying into lines to be let into afternoon school. If all is not well, I shall be very surprised. She spoke with an accent like the queen’s, but her upper lip was long, in the Irish style. She turned it up—blue as it was—into a tiny sadistic smirk.
It was well; of course it was. My shoe bag, by school-out time, was hanging on my allotted peg. My books were never torn again. It took me years to understand how the trick had been worked; that bold girls out to terrorize were so afraid of a sarcastic little sister that they were reduced to infantile compliance at the thought that she might be looking their way. I was learning, always learning: power is negotiated, acquired, given away, in more subtle ways than I had understood when gun law and the power of the sword were all that prevailed in my world. We must break down the barriers of deference, as Tom Paine tells us; this can be done quite politely, so that people don’t see that you are dismantling the things and discreetly sneaking them away. My convent years left me a legacy: a nervous politeness, an appearance of feminine timidity which will probably stand me in good stead if I am ever on trial for murder.
As for Top Nun: I learned her ways, she mine. When I was in my last year at the convent, pupils and staff voted me in, democratic, no deals, no bribes: Top Girl. I was entitled to a gown of scarlet with a gold stripe, which I wore with an air of sarcasm. Every morning—this was the ritual of the Convent of the Nativity—I stood on the stage of our vast assembly hall—so big that it was hired out to Protestants for the Mayor’s Ball and vast civic junkets—and at nine o’clock, as Top Nun took the stage, I would say, on behalf of us all, “Good morning, Sister Mary Francis.”
Sometimes I was tremulous, because of things that were happening at home. Sometimes I was breathless, from belting in at the last minute, plunging my arms into the gown held by an underling, and vaulting onto the stage. Sometimes my tone was warm: if I’d had a good weekend. My hymn book sometimes had love letters tucked inside it: from Catholic boys, of course. I always, whatever, tried to greet her as if I meant it.
And she, speaking to me as if I were plural, and gazing out over the school, gazing into space, would reply, “Good morning girls.” She spoke into empty air, neutral, faint: as if she were biting on some edgeless, metaphysical glass. She was beyond shame, beyond embarrassment. After Vatican II—the great church council during which the sainted John XXIII told nuns to get hip and raise their hemlines—the whole school saw her sparrow legs, encased in thick stockings but somehow naked to our gaze; we didn’t even make jokes about it. The nuns, too, were told to get out and about, and so Top Nun tried to learn to drive. She should have crushed her instructors, her examiners, with force of will; we could not believe—word leaked out—that she had to take her test again and again. When finally s
he passed, I surprised her, after morning assembly, with a huge, rather vulgar bouquet. You girls should not have known, she hissed at me, before accepting the flowers with an injured, ungracious simper.
One day when I was seventeen, almost hatched, almost ready to fly, I was standing at dusk in one of our cloakrooms, brushing out my hair. We were off in fifteen minutes to an afterschool function, to be bussed to Manchester to some other school—I can’t remember which, and little it matters—for some interschool debating torment, tournament, something of that sort: I was our chief combatant, and because of this I had to show up in my uniform and all my friends—oh, sob, sniff—had gone home to change into their miniskirts and put on their eyeliner. I was feeling sorry for myself, and doing the one thing I could: so narcissistic that I was almost melting into the mirror, I was brushing out my hair. I planned to wear it loose; who would say I couldn’t? I sighed at myself: who is like me? Nobody has hair like this. Oh, what they would give! Brush and brush. I prolonged the strokes so that each segment was drawn out by the brush to its fullest length, before I released it, and let it fall to join the fading light. Then I saw behind me, in the mirror, a black-and-white dwarf. It was SMF, Sister Mary Francis, Top Nun, crouching like a court freak in the top of the frame: as if Velazquez had painted us. Her eyes locked into mine. “Ready?” she said, unpleasantly. “I was just …” my voice faded. Her coldest curl of the lip said, she knew what I was just. Just admiring myself, just doing a fair old Magdalen impersonation. I felt caught out, diminished; yet made real, fleshy, sordid.
But Sister had a lot invested in the debating competition. For the first time, our little school was on the way to winning. You didn’t pick your subject, or your side. On the night when Sister caught me, I was preparing to debate the proposition we had drawn out of a hat: “Karl Marx has done more for humanity than Jesus Christ.” I walked it. The final, everyone felt, was a formality; the strongest opposing team had been trampled into the dust.
Back at school, where our bus set us down, my friends pulled me to the convent door. Emboldened by three vodkaand-limes, a comrade studded her finger on the bell. The door fell open, nuns fell out, some of them with young and eager faces. “Did ye win?”
Oh yes, my friends said. Communists one, Christians nil. Sister Mary Francis whisked around a corner, like a nasty sprite, and put her hand on my sleeve, and looked up into my face; once again I heard that giggle, sweet and clear as a running stream.
Here are some things that Jack did not agree with: breakfast, sport, and illness.
He himself went out of the house in the morning on just half a cup of tea, which, my mother said, he could barely stomach.
Weaker people—that is, me—were allowed tea and toast.
Sport was rubbish, except for professional wrestling, which he watched on TV. History was bunk. Illness was bunk. In the entire course of his school career, he had been “never absent, never late.”
But now Mr. Neverill had become stepfather to Miss Neverwell, which was unfortunate for both of them. Jack had forgotten his colic, the colic he’d had something chronic. I had almost loved him, so long ago when he had told my mother to let me stay home. It was a near thing, quite near to love; that momentary tenderness, when I was nine, my baby body pausing at the foot of the slope of womanhood. But now he said, when I came downstairs one Monday morning, my uniform tie skewed, my flesh gray, and my teeth chattering, feel ill, do you? Easy for you to say! I also feel ill on a Monday morning! But I have to bloody work, don’t I? Have to do it!
I sat down at the table. Surely my mother would see what ailed me? It was the war between men and women; she had to pick sides, and I could tell by her face that she wouldn’t be picking mine. It was already a weakness in my case that I was hanging about, that I was sitting down and no doubt wanting some toast; for Jack was perfect and so was his morning nausea, a spiritual quality I should try to emulate. Accordingly, she drew back in her chair and frowned at me, her eyes running up and down my body, and found fault with my appearance altogether, my lank hair which was without its ribbon and the run in my stocking that I had twisted to the inside to disguise it. Could it possibly be true, she said, that the school said I should wear stockings? Mm, I said, s’true; perhaps my hand fumbled for the copy of the rules I kept always in the bottom corner of my satchel, the folded paper creased and worn and dyed a pinkishtan where the color of the leather had bled into it. She didn’t think it could be true, she said while I rummaged around among my books. She couldn’t see Sister taking that line at all. Should I not, at my age, still be wearing the uniform woolen kneesocks, for which she had paid so dear at the approved supplier when I was in Form I?
It was a humiliating question. The answer was no; I was, by the rules, now graduated out of kneesocks. Once you’ve graduated you can’t go back to them, any more than you can reverse your age and undo puberty. The difficulty in my life was that stockings were a continuing, unforeseen expense. I had no income of my own. I had savings in a money box, from what my grandparents gave me. But the box was not there for my own use; it was for my mother to crack open, when Jack was in too bad a temper to be asked for ready cash. Stockings or tights should be at least 30 denier, the school rules said, and of the approved shade. My mother was unwilling to invest in such durable garments. Bet your life Cinderella never wore 30 denier. She gifted me her cast-off nylons, the threads already running at the toe; and here we were, Monday morning, locked in common hatred, the tea cooling, the little boys banging above as they flopped out of bed, and Jack pushing back his chair from the table, muttering, his eyes downturned, perhaps wondering, as I did, how did we get into this? I shuffled back my own chair to give me space, like someone about to stand up and start a fight. I considered the expression “for two pins.” For two pins I’d land a punch.
Two pins were often necessary to secure my drooping sanitary arrangements; certainly they would be today. Jack was still muttering as he flung himself out into the morning, to take out his feelings on the poor car standing shivering in the drive; to twist its key as if he were twisting its ear, to stamp his foot on the gas and make the engine snarl, to grind the gears. Our cars were always starting mutinies in those years, coughing to a stubborn halt at the roadside, blowing their tires and careering downhill. A machine, as far as Jack was concerned, was like a fellow human, and could be terrorized in the same way. Show it your fist, the bloody bastard: that will bring it into line.
Jack seldom swore, except at what was inanimate. He cursed the fire when it wouldn’t light, come on, you bloody bastard, come on. If any household object stuck, jammed, snapped, or came to pieces, it could expect no quarter from Jack. I said to my Polish friend Anne, whose calm intelligence I valued, “You see, I am never like that. I don’t get unreasonably angry—only reasonably so. I would never, ever be beating up the furniture, or cursing the step if I’d stubbed my toe, or shouting at the tires because the road has worn them bald.”
“Well, Hilary,” Anne said, her sardonic glance sliding sideways: “I think that’s very fair-minded of you.”
My mother and I had a vacuum cleaner, mail order from a pay-as-you-go catalogue. Hoover Constellation was its name; when it was young, its cylinder—a novelty then—bobbed behind you like a puppy. We listened to its every note as you would to a baby’s cry, we stopped it before its engine overheated, we soothed it and pampered it and fitted it with new bags, and when its hose split we mended it with sticky tape, till there was more tape than the original hose. By these means, we made it run for many years. But the Constellation was our one big success; our domestic arrangements were always on the verge of collapsing.When we moved into our house at Romiley, Jack made the purchase of an automatic washing machine. It was the latest technology, and so it soon broke down. We were not allowed to call in a repairman, for they are all cheats. So we did the washing in the bath, my mother and me. In those days when the world was polluted men and boys wore their shirts for three days till the collars were black inside an
d filmed with a sort of industrial grease. The only way to get rid of it was to rub so hard you abraded the fibers, wearing out the garment in the process. I never minded this; I was a short-term thinker. But rub with what, was the question? My mother would not purchase a block of laundry soap, only the powder with which she had fed, so briefly, the Wondermatic machine. Our hot water was not hot enough to dissolve the powder; it clumped on the gray-white pockets of my brothers’ shirts, around the collars and hems, so that I had to flick it away with my fingers, shake it off as I lifted their dripping garments; which now, lengthened and weighted, looked almost priestlike. The Wondermatic stayed on show, to impress any stray visitor. In time my mother flung a tablecloth over it, so that it was raised from perfect uselessness to the dignity of table. Then Jack built a sort of house for it, a hinged flap which covered its top and gave us extra working space. How did we wash our blankets? I don’t know that people ever did. My smallest brother developed allergies, blue-faced coughs and wheezes; my mother responded by heaping more blankets on him, and placing a plug-in radiator by his bed, so the dust mites could breed better. She and Jack moved their double bed into his room for a time, so they could give him medicine in the night and share the benefit of the extra warmth. I lived in the healthy cold of the box room. Once, experimentally, I set up a thermometer, bringing it downstairs when I was twelve and still naive, to say look Mum, almost freezing point!
When my future husband came into our lives, he observed the problem, bundled up me and the washing, tipped us into his student’s car and took us to the Laundromat. My mother marveled at the results, though she seldom funded our trips; she seemed to think it all happened naturally.Waiting for the cycles to finish, I learned how the wet heat exacerbated the pains in my legs. Go to the pub and get a Guinness, I’d urge my boyfriend, while I wait for this lot to dry. I was happy to send him away for the sheer pleasure of seeing him again. One night, slumped on the slatted wooden seat, I looked up from my novel as he came back through the swinging glass door. I said, this book I’m reading says that Johannesburg has the most perfect climate in the world. The woman, the character, she is sitting on her balcony, it is midwinter, the sun is shining, she worries about politics, her conscience tells her she should go into exile, but. The world’s most hateful regime, I said, has the most beautiful climate.
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