I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  Some of the many people who have questioned me about convents appeared to have the most fantastic notions about the relations between chaplain and nuns. In reality, nothing could be more matter-of-fact or simple.

  The priest’s business is to celebrate daily Mass, hear the nuns’ confessions once a week, administer the Last Sacraments when anyone is dying, and officiate at the burial of the dead. By special permission of the Bishop, he is allowed to enter the enclosure to visit the sick in the infirmary and to give occasional spiritual conferences to the nuns. And there his duties end.

  If any nun wishes to consult him, she may always do so, though, of course, always behind grilles. As a rule, however, both he and they have little time to spare for conversation beyond what is strictly necessary. Nuns are taught to behave with the greatest respect in all their dealings with the clergy. The keynote is struck by the practice already mentioned of kneeling to ask a blessing whenever they meet a priest.

  One of the nuns had a tale of how, going one day to the parlour to see Father Vincent MacNabb, who, as those who knew him best will assure you, was half genius and half saint, she knelt to ask his blessing. The holy old friar, however, suddenly overwhelmed by humility at seeing her thus abased before him, cast himself also on his knees on the other side of the grille and requested that she should rather bless him. Who finally blessed whom, or how the story ends, history does not relate. The whole episode, however, is fragrant with a spirit certainly not of this world.

  (6)

  Now and again a bishop visited the convent.

  I find bishops difficult to write about, because, to be perfectly frank, the three I knew inspired me with dislike.

  I am quite sure that all of them were excellent men in their way. Only—their way just didn’t happen to be mine. Which—believe me—isn’t really as arrogant as it sounds. Because, if ever a nun needed episcopal counsel, that nun was I. And get it I could not. Indeed, what earthly use was there in trying to explain things to them when everything they said and did proclaimed the fact that (1) they didn’t understand convents; (2) they didn’t understand women (indeed, if you come to think of it, how should they?); and (3) they didn’t understand nuns.

  I was once told that destructive criticism never got anybody anywhere. If you permit yourself the luxury of finding fault, you should suggest a remedy. Well, the only bright suggestion that I can think of in this connection is that a carefully selected staff of nuns—preferably not Reverend Mothers—should hold an annual Summer School which it should be obligatory for bishops to attend. Papers might be read on such subjects as Feminine Psychology; The Effects of Repression; How to Counteract the Disadvantages of Intensive Femininity in One’s Surroundings; Community Pests and How to Deal with Them; Problems Peculiar to Enclosed Religious; Tact and Sympathy; How—and Especially How Not—to Conduct an Episcopal Visitation…. Others will readily suggest themselves to those concerned.

  An Episcopal Visitation from the Bishop of the Diocese is an important event in a religious community. Normally I believe it takes place once a year. The Church’s intention, I take it, is to provide the bishop with an opportunity for discovering whether everything is going as it should. He therefore makes a detailed inspection of the church and sacristy, visits the cemetery to make certain that the graves are kept in decent order, delivers an exhortation to the religious and then interviews everybody in the community from the Reverend Mother to the youngest Lay Sister postulant.

  A wise, kind and understanding bishop can do an immense amount of good at a Visitation. Should he, however, be lacking in these qualities, his appearance is apt to be greeted with sinkings of the heart.

  I remember a bishop who always began his exhortation by telling the nuns that if anyone had a little trouble and would like to confide it to him, he would do anything that he could to help. Were I, however, to relate what happened when a certain nun rashly took him at his word and laid a difficulty before him, you would immediately understand why it is that, on the whole, nuns prefer to keep their ‘little troubles’ to themselves.

  With which venomous remarks we will abandon the subject of bishops and proceed to the three cardinals who from time to time visited the convent when I was there.

  The one who impressed me most was Cardinal Mercier. Tall, gaunt, immensely dignified and picturesque, breath-takingly humble, he might have stepped straight from the pages of a historical romance. I despair of describing him. He was the most individual person I’ve ever encountered; and individuality, like genius, is pretty well impossible to put into words. On the whole, what I remember most vividly about him is his hands. They were large and long, with curiously supple fingers; strong, delicate, powerful hands which you felt instinctively were fashioned not only for healing and consolation but for strong government and the chastisement of enemies. To me, however, they appeared above all as hands of prayer. Suppliant hands, which still might have wrestled with an angel: hands that were made for offering and pleading and pouring forth again in a largesse of benediction the good things that they had received.

  When he spoke to the community, it was always about prayer and mortification. Once, when a nun asked him how much time one ought to spend on prayer, he replied:

  ‘Il faut donner a l’oraison autant de temps que l’on peut.’

  And to another nun he said:

  ‘Ce n’est qu’après trois ou quatre heures de prière que viennent les grandes lumières….’

  A statement which carried considerable weight if there is any truth in the report that he invariably ended his long and arduous days with several hours spent in his private chapel before the Blessed Sacrament.

  A greater contrast to the Belgian cardinal could hardly be imagined than the characteristically British Cardinal Bourne, whose stocky, spectacled figure was held in such affectionate reverence by the community. His spirituality had been modelled on the lines laid down by Cardinal de Bérulle, and his conferences had about them a recognizably Sulpician ring. I remember him giving a particularly lucid explanation of a method of prayer which he himself had used, so he said, since his seminary days.

  ‘La prière’, he once quoted—I forget from whom, though the words made a dint in my memory—‘est plus forte que Dieu. Never forget that, you whose lives have prayer as their raison d’être.’

  One day, when the Cardinal was paying a visit to the convent, the nuns, with the Prioress at their head, were just about to enter the choir after saying Grace. At that precise moment, a mother mouse, followed by a family of almost microscopic mouselings, appeared suddenly from nowhere and proceeded to trot, with an air of almost indescribable pomposity, into the choir. The spectacle of these minute creatures bustling along in single file was so comic and unexpected that the nuns, startled out of the usual reactions, paused until the absurd procession had gone by. When, however, I knelt down in my stall, I found that one of the mouselings had taken refuge there. It made no effort to move, so I picked it up and took it with me when I went to my cell. I fancy it must have been the runt of that particular litter, for it was quite the thinnest mouse I’d ever seen. It lay perfectly still in the palm of my hand and showed not the slightest desire to escape. I was just wondering what possible substitute I could find for mouse-milk on which to nourish it when, to my horror, I heard the ‘tings’ sounding for me in the cloister below.

  I may here mention for the benefit of those who are not familiar with monastic customs that the ‘tings’ are used to summon a nun who might otherwise be difficult to find. They consist of two bars of steel, about six inches in length, which when struck sharply together give out a clear, bell-like sound that can be heard all over the monastery. Each nun has her own morse-like combination of ‘knocks’ and ‘tings’, to which, when she hears it rung out by anyone who may need to summon her, she must immediately reply in a voice loud enough to be heard by whoever has ‘tinged’—or, if you prefer it, ‘tung’—her, the mystic words: ‘Deo gratias!’

  Mouse in hand, I went
forth to be told that the Cardinal had sent for me. He had, it appeared, just met or was about to meet my uncle, who had recently become Prime Minister. And he wanted some detail about him corroborated. I forget what it was.

  As I couldn’t think what on earth to do with the mouse, I took it with me. And I still remember the quiet interest with which the Cardinal examined it when I shepherded it very carefully through the grille into his hand. When it washed its minute whiskers with an infinitesimal paw, we both sat spellbound.

  The Cardinal, as he returned it to me, said:

  ‘And to think that there are people who refuse to believe in the existence of God…. How could anything so mirrraculously’—he had a curious way of pronouncing his r’s—‘small and perfect have come into being unless it were the concept of an infinite Mind!’

  I’m afraid that the excitement of that interview was too much for the mouse, because it died that same afternoon, still curled up in the palm of my hand.

  Anyhow, it is nice to think that its last hours were spent in such exalted company.

  The third on my catalogue of cardinals was Cardinal Hinsley.

  He visited the convent during the First World War. In those days, he was still a bishop. But although I had already-begun to develop what Mrs. Angela Thirkell would call ‘a thing’ about bishops, I felt somehow that this one was ‘different’.

  The Second World War was in progress when next he came to see the nuns. Now he was a Cardinal, a Prince of the Church. Monsignor Elwes (son of the famous singer, Gervase Elwes, and the indomitable Lady Winifred) was in attendance.

  The Cardinal sat at the top of the long, polished table in the community room, looking exactly like the portrait painted of him by Neville Lytton. On his left, tactful and self-effaced, the discreet Monsignor sat in silence until such time as his services might be required.

  ‘Those Nazis … those Nazis!’

  The Cardinal’s voice had an almost anguished ring in it as he pronounced the words. His strong, bony face was creased into an expression of indignant suffering: behind his spectacles his eyes flashed. Something about him, while he was talking to the nuns about the war, suggested an avenging archangel standing, sword in hand, ready to strike down the hosts of darkness into the abyss from which they were endeavouring to rise. This Cardinal, it appeared, was a man of action, a fighter, even, for all his deeply spiritual outlook upon life.

  Presently Monsignor Elwes approached a faintly hawk-like profile to the Cardinal’s ear.

  ‘Eminence …’—(I wondered why he so carefully pronounced it ‘Emeenens’)—‘we are going to be most dreadfully late for supper if we don’t start soon.’

  But it was only after I had left the convent that I really got to know him.

  It is a pity that the subject-matter of our three conversations can’t be reproduced, because it would show, so much better than anything I could say about his kindness, that it had to be experienced to be believed. He had a way of turning his whole attention on to any problems submitted to him which was immensely reassuring when it came to asking him for advice.

  The last time I saw him, however, he said something which I should like to record. He told me, quite definitely, after hearing and examining all the circumstances, that the step I had taken was, in his opinion, the only one that it was possible for me to take.

  I felt enormously encouraged to face the various difficulties that lay before me when I heard him say those words.

  I walked back to my aunt’s house late that night feeling both thrilled and apprehensive.

  The thrill was due to an invitation from the lady in the fur coat to stay with them in their Cornish bungalow; the apprehension to the prospect of the new adventure which was to begin the following day.

  (7)

  I suppose I had only myself to thank for my next adventure.

  The woman at the Labour Exchange had warned me that the job would be hard. But I was too inexperienced even to guess at what this hardness might involve. Could I have foreseen what was coming to me, I should never have attempted it. For a job more unsuited to the peculiar and uncomfortable creature that I felt myself to be would have been difficult to find.

  Indeed, the qualities required by a British Army Canteen Service hand were just those that I most conspicuously lacked.

  The physical strength of an ox, for example. The hide of a rhinoceros. A gift for the kind of back-chat that makes, I should imagine, the most successful kind of barmaid, with sufficient knowledge of the speech, habits and general outlook of the ordinary British private to safeguard one against becoming hot and bothered in the canteen. Most essential of all was, perhaps, the peculiar brand of courage that can take not only bombs, shells and flying shrapnel in its stride but remains undismayed at the appearance and subsequent attacks of—(well, sooner or later the things must be mentioned)—fleas, bed-bugs and lice.

  The austerity of religious life had accustomed me to many kinds of hardness. But austerity and ‘roughing it’ are two very different things. What is more, the Vow of Enclosure segregates nuns so completely from worldly happenings that when I found myself hurled into the back-kitchen, rough-and-tumble life of a barracks canteen, I felt like a toy boat of folded tissue paper tossed about in an Atlantic gale.

  It was a grey December afternoon when I arrived at Wist-haven.

  At the station, a kindly policeman demanded my ‘papers’ (what, I wondered, could ‘papers’ possibly consist of?) and identity card. I fumbled clumsily in my handbag. An inexperienced traveller, I had none of those business-like habits which distinguish the woman of to-day.

  The policeman, probably concluding that such a bewildered half-wit was beneath suspicion, glanced cursorily at the travelling instructions provided by the B.A.C.S.—the only ‘papers’ I could produce.

  ‘Bus-stop just up the road,’ he called after me as I drifted out of the station. ‘Canteen’s at the Royal Barracks, two miles outside the town. Tell them to put you down at Joker’s Lane.’

  Wisthaven, huddled untidily along the white cliffs of Kent, stares grimly out of a war-ravaged face across the sea at France. On that particular afternoon, the place made me think of an Early Flemish grisaille. Grey sea; silver-grey gulls wheeling and swooping against a sky the colour of ashes; the sea-wind blowing icily from the harbour to whirl grey clouds of rubble out of shell-holes where shops and houses had been standing only a day or two before. It seemed an earthquake-stricken scene.

  An unconscious relapse into my inconvenient habit of keeping my eyes turned earthwards caused me nearly to miss the bus-stop. Annoyed, I reacted so violently with the technique I’d acquired in the taxi-queue in Glasgow that when the bus eventually arrived, people made way for me with respect. Once inside, however, I was assailed by an unpleasant feeling of deflation. Physically, there could be no doubt that I had succeeded. But—spiritually—?

  I was not so sure.

  After dragging my heavy suitcase for about half a mile along Joker’s Lane, in which camouflaged army-lorries made queer clots of darkness under the faintly moonlit sky, I reached the Barracks.

  Continuous bell-ringing at various wrong doors brought me finally to a long, low building with a two-storied house at one end of it.

  I tried again.

  A girl answered the door, blinking doubtfully among the shadows in a carefully blacked-out hall.

  Yes, this was the B.A.C.S. billets. Expecting me? No, nobody hadn’t been told nothing about my being sent. (She examined the travelling instructions.) She’d have to ask Maudie about it. If I liked, I could wait there while she went to find out what was to be done.

  Maudie—with whom she presently returned—struck me as a particularly nasty piece of work. She had a mean little face and wore thick glasses through which she looked me coldly up and down. She appeared unimpressed. The Commandant, she explained, had gone out, but if I cared to, I could come in and wait till she returned.

  ‘Though when that’ll be,’ she added nastily to the other girl, wh
o giggled sycophantishly, ‘seeing that it’s her afternoon off, I’m sure it’s not for me to say.’

  The kitchen into which I followed them was bright and cosy. Two girls were rolling pastry in front of an old-fashioned range; others sat round a bare deal table, talking and laughing together over their tea. As I came in, they glanced up but took no further notice of me.

  I stood there for a while, feeling faintly idiotic. At last, advancing to the table, I asked politely what I was supposed to do.

  This produced an embarrassing silence. Then Maudie remarked:

  ‘It’s the new ’and. Better give her a cupper tea, girls.’

  A blonde girl with an appalling squint in one eye then made room for me beside her. The conversation continued as before.

  As nobody spoke to me, I felt it was wiser to keep silence. Unaccustomed to look after myself, I’d not thought of providing food for the journey and in consequence had eaten nothing since breakfast, seven hours earlier in the day. I therefore quietly consumed enormous quantities of tea and buns, examining the girls meanwhile out of the corner of my eye.

  They looked to me extremely young. From their language and behaviour, I judged that most of them belonged to the class from which kitchen maids—in the days before such luxuries became legendary—were usually drawn. They wore overalls of blue drill, with scarlet buttons and an arm-band with the B.A.C.S. monogram in red.