I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  All this has been analysed in detail by St. John of the Cross in his classic The Dark Night of the Soul. It is, however, unlikely that anyone who hasn’t actually known at least the preliminary stages of the soul-searing happenings therein described will be able to grasp what it is all about.

  Now, whether the fit of depression that so suddenly came down upon me in Holborn had or had not anything to do with the Dark Night of the Soul, it would be difficult to say. But there could be no doubt at all that for me it was the beginning of a very Dark Night indeed of everything else. For the next month or two I had to struggle on bereft of that spirit of adventure which had hitherto helped me to overcome every obstacle. Instead I was left feeling as though a cold sponge had been inserted into the space between the waistband and the heart.

  Long experience had taught me that there was only one thing to be done in such circumstances. This was to set one’s teeth grimly and just carry on by the will, without paying the slightest attention to how one felt.

  And this I more or less successfully now endeavoured to do.

  (4)

  Next morning, my uncle, who almost always followed up cantankerousness by kindness, rang up and suggested some addresses as a stand-by in case the Guildhall job fell through.

  The first of these landed me in the London Library, where a harassed librarian regretted politely that the vacancy I was after had just been filled. Should, however, any other suitable post in the Library fall vacant, he would certainly Let Me Know. I was, of course, a member of the Library Association? … No? … In that case, he was very much afraid …

  I drifted out again into St. James’s Square.

  Address Number Two was in Oxford Street. It took me a long time to get there as I had stupidly left my map of London at home; I was therefore reduced to interrogating passers-by. All of these appeared to be foreigners. A policeman in those days was rare as a dodo, and all the directions given me seemed to be contradictory. I had, moreover, no idea which bus to take. Just to make things more difficult, it was raining rather heavily. Evidently, it was going to be One of Those Days.

  The place, when at last I found it, turned out to be a sort of bureau in which women who wanted to join the Forces went through a preliminary sorting. The people who ran it seemed, for once, even more anxious to get hold of me than I was to join them; which made me, not unnaturally, suspicious.

  A heavily made-up girl in khaki—I forget which branch of the Services she represented—sat at a table conducting interviews. She murmured:

  ‘Ow! You reelly ought to join up, you know; they do (pronounced ‘dee-oo’) give you such wizard pyjamas!’

  But even had this bait succeeded, it would have been useless, for I was past the age limit. I withdrew, feeling even more on-the-shelf and obsolete than before.

  Incredible as it may sound, the Times Book Club in Wigmore Street didn’t appear to want me either, though they promised me that should a suitable vacancy occur, they too would be very pleased to Let Me Know.

  By this time I was beginning to feel that if anyone else promised to Let Me Know, there would be murder….

  Not knowing in the least how to conduct myself, I drifted into a shop in Oxford Street and nervously treated myself to lunch. (Should I ever learn how to walk into a proper restaurant and command a meal as nearly worth the eating as could be obtained in war-time? I doubted it.)

  The third address on my list was a well-known firm of gramophone makers who had advertised for an assistant in their record library. Unfortunately, the place had been bombed only the evening before and chaos reigned. Judging that it would be futile to seek employment in a building that mainly consisted of rubble, I withdrew.

  The last address on the list had been culled from one of that morning’s daily papers. It was for an assistant in what was described as a ‘photographic business’ in St. John’s Wood. As previous experience was stated to be unnecessary, I thought I might perhaps stand a chance.

  I hadn’t visited St. John’s Wood since the spacious days before the First World War; but the name still held memories of thrilling happenings at Lords. The house I sought was in a heavily bombed locality and when found struck me as quite the most unprepossessing in the long, dull, deserted road. With its shuttered windows and neglected garden overgrown with blasted-looking shrubs, it appeared to me as the sort of house in which positively anything might happen if the wrong sort of people were to get together inside.

  Long after I’d pulled it, the old-fashioned bell went on echoing through what sounded like perfectly empty rooms. Most creepy. I began to regret that I’d ever come.

  I regretted it even more when after a long wait, the door was opened by a Quilp-ish looking person with the shape and movements of a gorilla. He led me into a dark, damp room without so much as a chair to sit on. When he opened the shutters, I observed that the dingy paper hung in strips from the damp and leprous-looking walls.

  ‘I gonduct my business in ze basement,’ he informed me, with the guttural intonation that one associates instinctively with villainous types. ‘Gome! I vill show you!’ and he led me down a flight of dark and twisting stairs.

  The big room which he unlocked at the bottom had blackout screens across the windows. It was lighted by green, heavily shaded electric bulbs. A large table which filled almost the entire room was covered with trays full of evil-smelling chemicals in which floated photographic negatives and prints. The atmosphere was poisonous.

  ‘You vill help me mit the photographs down here,’ explained Mr. Quilp, ‘effery day from nine till six. I vill gif you four pound effery week. It is good pay.’

  I objected that the smell would make me sick.

  ‘Ach, you soon get use to dat,’ he assured me,

  Then I asked him what the photographs were. This appeared to amuse him.

  ‘Look, I show you vone!’ he said, then held up a negative against the light. It was the most disgustingly indecent thing that I had ever seen.

  I didn’t say anything, because I could think of no remark to make. I suppose Quilp misunderstood my silence, for, still chuckling, he began holding up other choice specimens of his art for me to admire.

  I forget what excuse I eventually made to get away, but he was not pleased about it and began muttering at me rather threateningly.

  I scuttled up the stairs and across the hall, murmuring something about having to catch a bus, and had just got the front door open when he put out a hand to detain me. At that moment, by the mercy of heaven, the postman opened the garden gate and came up the steps.

  I fled past him and a moment later was scurrying down the street as though the hounds of hell were at my heels.

  That incident rather put me off applying for jobs advertised in newspapers. Henceforward I confined myself to addresses recommended by Sardinia Street.

  A whole chapter might be written about the interviews and adventures that filled the next few days. I became quite an adept at the art of form-filling and at evading inconvenient questions as to what I had been up to in the years before the War.

  In between times, I scoured the streets of London—unsuccessfully—for lodgings. And every day my mood of black despondency grew more profound.

  (5)

  There came a day when it was unmistakably borne in upon me that the time had come for me to evacuate the spare-room in my uncle’s house in Portland Place.

  I had taken my courage in both hands and gone down to Winchester on a wild goose chase after a job as receptionist to a partnership of doctors who saw their patients in a dank old house full of telephones and stairs.

  On that particular day, when I returned to Portland Place rather late in the evening (I had taken the wrong bus at Waterloo and got lost in the black-out—an experience I shan’t easily forget)—it was to find a domestic crisis on the verge of bubbling over. In the course of this, I realized that my departure had already been too long delayed.

  Once again, therefore, I packed up my few belongings, and set out next
morning, grimly determined to find another roof to shelter me before night fell or die in the attempt.

  According to Dalton’s Weekly, there seemed to be three localities in which lodgings were most likely to be found; Bloomsbury had refused to be my washpot; over Kensington, therefore, I would now cast my shoe. Failing that, there would still remain Victoria, though the glimpses I’d had of that neighbourhood during my wanderings in London made me feel that it was the last region in which I’d care to live.

  Over my adventures in Kensington we may draw a veil. They were not very interesting and by two o’clock in the afternoon—I had been knocking at doors since soon after eight in the morning—the marble hardness of the pavements and the indignant refusals of the eighteen landladies whom I’d tried to persuade into lowering their extortionate terms had entered rather deeply into my bones. It was, of course, raining, and to say that I wished myself dead would be an understatement of the way I was beginning to feel.

  The worst of London is that the distances between place and place are so enormous. By the time I’d bused from Kensington to Victoria Station, the streets were already beginning to grow dark. However, a lodging had got to be found, so, black-out or no black-out, I had to continue my search.

  Now, I don’t suppose that the streets and squares and terraces round Victoria are in reality much worse than any other collection of old-fashioned, blitz-scarred houses that have obviously come down in the world. My remembrance, however, of the whole locality is of a neighbourhood so dreary, depressing and dingy that my mood of desolation seemed to be reflected back from everything upon which I looked.

  St. George’s Drive … Eccleston Square … Belgrave Road … up and down I wandered, footsore and weary, past the long bleak rows of drab front doors through which, whenever I pressed a bell or rapped a knocker, unfriendly faces scowled upon me, naming terms which were far beyond what I felt I could pay.

  (I don’t know why I had such a desperate fixation about economy. I suppose it sprang from the cold fear that used to haunt me lest I shouldn’t be able to find a job and that my income would prove too small to live upon. When you lack Experience of Life, you have no standard by which to measure things. I therefore counted my halfpence like a miser, going without everything except the sheerest necessities. I even walked everywhere instead of taking buses, till I discovered that shoe-leather was the more expensive item of the two.)

  The climax of this odious day occurred just as it was growing dark.

  I had drifted into one of those dingy terraces off the sinister Wilton Road and was standing near a street-lamp, so footsore that I felt incapable of taking another step. I had found nothing and it appeared unlikely that I should do so. To cast myself upon my family was unthinkable.

  What in the world was I going to do?

  Now, if this book were one of those pious biographies which infest the shelves of convent libraries, what followed would probably be described in such words as these:

  Recollecting herself profoundly, she placed herself devoutly in the presence of her Creator, and, inspired by the remembrance of the many occasions on which, in answer to fervent prayer, the aid of Heaven had been vouchsafed, she once more invoked the Divine Assistance with earnest confidence and hope.

  Well, of course, if people must write about God like that they must. But I wish it could be prevented. For, to write about anything from, that angle automatically invests it with an atmosphere of dullness which is too deadly to be endured. Isn’t it bad enough to think of God as an inconveniently omniscient Old Gentleman in a cope, cloud-enthroned, only waiting till people start really enjoying themselves to leap out on them and spoil the fun? Or as a meek, white-night-gowned Personage with long hair, neatly parted down the middle, looking out upon the agonizing world with an expression of pained melancholy? And yet, dreadful as are both these crimes against the truth, there is another which strikes me as the worst of all. It is, to surround the idea of God with an atmosphere of dullness.

  After all, wouldn’t you yourself prefer to know that the thought of you roused fear or even dislike in other people, than that they simply looked upon you as a crashing bore?

  The fact that so many people can still say, even after the Incarnation (how often, indeed, I’ve heard them!): ‘Sorry, but I’m just not interested in religion’, seems to me to indicate that the devil has done his job extremely well. I had not been many months out of the convent before it became evident to me that if you discussed art, books, music, sport, sex, films, clothes, ghosts or personalities, you could always be sure of a response from someone. But mention God, and a vague atmosphere of discomfort immediately made itself felt. Rather as though you had dropped some sort of social brick. People simply weren’t interested. And yet—wouldn’t you have thought dullness was the last quality to be associated with the Man Who Made the World?

  Even in the convent, where God permeated life almost like the air one breathed, its vestiges occasionally appeared. A nun’s vie intérieure—known colloquially as her ‘spirituality’—could be devastatingly dull. Some of the priests, too, who came to give Retreats (though to be honest, this was the exception) generated a spiritual atmosphere that was dry as desert dust. They were such bores that it was all one could do to sit still and listen to their sermons.

  After long reflection, I have come to the conclusion that this spiritual dullness must be the outcome of having little or no ‘personal relations’—if that is the proper name for it—with God. The boring preachers were those who, instead of discussing God’s ways and works as a man speaks about the doings of his friend, dished up second-hand material and served it up with rhetoric as sauce to hide the staleness of the taste. Just the difference between someone who reads aloud extracts from a book of travels and somebody who has actually visited the spot.

  The fact is, the closer you get to God and the more intimately you know him, the more thrilling and absorbing does he become. It is only those who do not know him who find him dull.

  What I actually did on this occasion was to send out as desperate an S.O.S. to Heaven as I had uttered for quite a number of years.

  The result was what would have been described in the convent as ‘a miraculous answer to prayer’.1 For, believe it or not, I was suddenly inspired to look round at the house behind me. And, as I did so, a hand drew back the lace curtains of a ground floor window and put up a large card on which was printed the one word which of all others in the world I most desired to see:

  APARTMENTS.

  I dragged myself up the steps to the blitz-scarred front door and rang the bell.

  (6)

  I can still think of no explanation as to why the landlady asked so small a sum for the room she let to me. I suppose it was just part of the miracle.

  She was a Lithuanian, yellow-haired, blue-eyed and married to an English ex-butler whose dazzlingly respectable appearance filled me with awe. Both of them were so kind to me that I gave them a permanent place on my list of Wingless Angels.

  Though my small room was dark and gloomy, it had excellent furniture. The only snag was that they couldn’t supply me with food. So, three times a day I had to trot out—almost invariably in rain or sleet—to the Empire Restaurant near Victoria. Here I stood patiently in the cafeteria queue for my breakfast, lunch and the tea-supper which was one of my economies.

  I doubt whether my meals cost more than half a crown a day. Yet I felt sure that if I could ‘do for’ myself, I should be able to live on even less.

  The first Sunday I spent in my new surroundings is a day I shall never forget.

  I had been to Mass at Westminster Cathedral and had felt overwhelmed by the beauty in which that greatest of all Acts had been enshrined. The vast building was flooded with rose-coloured light that streamed in through the sanctuary windows from the fiery, fog-veiled disc of the January sun. The dim side-chapels and the dark roof-space behind the gigantic crucifix were realms of sombre shadow, against which the pale clouds of ascending incense showed like
drifting veils of mist. An unseen choir chanted from behind the altar, the unaccompanied plain-chant of the Kyrie and Gloria in Excelsis rising and falling like voices from another world.

  Out in the street, the cold stabbed through one like a rapier. Bemused and dizzy, it seemed to me that a cup of hot coffee was the most desirable thing in life.

  It was, therefore, rather a blow to discover that not only the Empire Restaurant, but apparently every other place at which food could be obtained was shuttered and barred.

  I suppose that if I’d had the wit of a worm I should have gone to a hotel. It was, however, the first time I’d had to fend for myself on a Sunday in London and the idea didn’t occur to me. I took it for granted that the same law applied everywhere. Depressed and frozen, I wandered back to Bettingdon Terrace.

  It was unfortunate that my landlady and her husband had gone out for the day. It seemed that there was nothing to be done but to tighten my belt and endure.

  Just about what should have normally been tea-time, I suddenly remembered some pea-nut butter that I had brought from Portland Place. The trouble was that, as I didn’t possess a spoon, I couldn’t imagine how to eat it. In the end, I decided that my shoe-horn would have to be used as a substitute. So I said my grace, sat down on the bed and set to work.

  I will make no attempt to describe what I felt like on waking the following morning. Instead, I will utter a warning. Should you ever, after a fairly long fast, feel inclined to replenish your interior with shoehorn-fuls of pea-nut butter, take my advice and DON’T.

  The next few days were taken up with intensive job-hunting. Some of my adventures were diverting; all helped to enrich my Experience of Life.