I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  There were also the soldier songs. In the old war I had heard them shouting Tipperary as the regiments marched past outside the walls of the enclosure. But Keep the Home Fires Burning, Roses of Picardy, and the more recent Lili Marlene I did not know. And I am not ashamed to confess that almost invariably, they still bring me to the verge of tears.

  As for the jazz, boogie-woogie and that kind of stuff—for music I cannot call it—that dance-bands play, it filled me not only with horror but with foreboding. To my unsophisticated ears it seemed just one more dreadful proof of the universal formlessness which had begun to swallow up everything which had stood for beauty in my youth. And at the risk of calling down the contemptuous anger of the initiates, I will record that to me the tuneless bray and blare of saxophones, the spasmodic, endlessly repeated rhythms, banged, thrummed, and beaten out on heaven-or-hell-knows-what fantastic instruments of torture, suggested nothing so much as noises made by a horde of debased and drunken savages midway through an orgy. It was a danger-signal, and alarming.

  What kind of a world, really, was this to which I had returned?

  About mid-June a rather disquieting restlessness began to obsess me. For one thing, I had begun to realize that I had absorbed about as much from the Royal Society of Medicine as it was likely to offer. I was also becoming increasingly aware that my ignorance of medical terms and generally gun-shy attitude towards the telephone made me hardly an asset to my fellow-workers. What was more, in the depths of my subconscious another Inward Urge was slowly but unmistakably beginning to take shape.

  This time it drove me to seize the opportunity conveniently offered by an amusing minor crisis in the Returns Office and to give in my resignation to the authorities.

  All this time I had been practising an almost quadragesimal austerity of life. I had determined to put aside every possible farthing for the cottage in Cornwall on which I had set my heart. Books, clothes, sweets, drinks, cigarettes and theatres—about the only indulgences to be had in England at that time—were severely vetoed. (The cinema I looked upon as essential to my education. Indeed, there can be no doubt that it taught me a great deal that I could have learnt in no other way.)

  For most people, this would of course have meant an intolerably bleak existence. But for me, it was different. When you have lived for close on thirty years by the formula: ‘Not What can I allow myself, but Is there anything that I can possibly manage to do without?’ your needs become extraordinarily simple. In fact, they diminish almost to vanishing point.

  For, in Religious Life, you are freed by the Vow of Poverty from all those material things which would otherwise entangle you. One might almost say that it chops off, by the spiritual equivalent of a surgical operation, one’s very capacity for possessing. Those who make it, strip themselves of everything that could hamper them, as a swimmer strips before plunging into the sea.

  But please do not for a moment imagine that taking the vow makes you perfect in poverty. To do this would be to make a very grave mistake. The highest degree of poverty only clears the decks for action. The real struggle only begins when you set your face to achieve the kind of poverty which is known as ‘spiritual’. And, as one who fared so ill in the encounter as to end by flying from the field of battle, I can assure you that it is indeed a struggle to the death.

  There are several other names for spiritual poverty. One is self-abnegation; another, detachment; another, freedom from desire. Taken by and large, I think it is fairly accurate to say that what it works out into is simply the desire for nothing except God’s Will as revealed in the circumstances of one’s daily life.

  Could anything sound simpler? Yet those few words contain the essence of exalted sanctity.

  The amazing thing is that, quite often in convents you come up against people who have, so to speak, re-attached themselves to the oddest things.

  It seems almost incredible, doesn’t it? One performs the heroic act of which the Vow of Poverty is the outward sign and then allows oneself to become entangled by a hot-water bottle, a set of breviaries, a fountain pen. Or perhaps even some small exception in the way of rest or diet which for reasons of health may have been temporarily allowed. Or a nun may become so attached to a favourite hobby that a request for help from some overworked Sister rouses feelings of acute resentment at the interference with her treasured ‘free-time’. And I once knew a nun so devoted to a particular chair in the community room that she tied a neat bow of blue ribbon to the back of it and glared with such ferocity at anyone who dared to monopolize it that people shrugged their shoulders, smiled and let her have her way.

  Another attachment is that which nuns sometimes develop for the work given to them. A Superior, for instance—especially if she has been long in office, may become so completely absorbed by her job that when the day comes for her to return to the simple routine of the community, she finds it almost impossible to settle down to so dull and inactive a life.

  But perhaps the thing from which it is most difficult to be detached is one’s reputation. Now and again one may see in a religious community some really soul-searing humiliation descend out of the blue on some perfectly innocent person’s head. If she ‘takes it’ without excuse or fuss, quietly allowing it to do its work in her, you may be sure that she has gone far along the road of spiritual poverty. If, however, she is disturbed, and reacts to the disgrace by an indignant outburst of self-justification—well, the obvious conclusion may be drawn.

  And if I have once again slithered away into what sounds like a pious homily, let me assure you that it is not irrelevant. One cannot write about nuns, whose outlook is—or ought to be—entirely spiritual—without describing what makes up their lives. And no one who has not had to attempt it can imagine how difficult it was for at least the first year after my exodus, to adjust my convent-trained outlook on earthly possessions to the point of view held by so many people in the world to-day. So accustomed was I to the religious outlook, that most of the people I met struck me as dreadfully selfish, possessive, go-getting, take-all-and-give-nothing: not only desiring, but grabbing everything that they could get. It depressed me. In fact, it depresses me a little still.

  (7)

  In the far-away, almost forgotten period before 1914, a well-brought-up girl was taught that to discuss one’s own or anyone else’s health in public was ‘bad form’. Presumably people endured illnesses and underwent operations then as they do to-day. Only, one did not talk about it. So that the complete lack of reticence with which I now heard almost everyone holding forth about their ailments really staggered me.

  A day came, however, when this new attitude was rather a relief. This was when, soon after leaving the Royal Society of Medicine, a dreadful feeling of unmeantness—I do not know how else to describe it—began to sweep over me at rapidly decreasing intervals. It used to go on, crescendo, until it reached a kind of agonizing peak: after which, for quite a long time, I used to feel as though I simply were not there at all.

  I endured it for a week or two and then began wondering dismally whether I was losing my mind. The possibility was agitating. But the prospect of consulting a doctor was more agitating still. I had never coped unaided with a doctor in my life. In the convent, an interview between doctor and patient was always conducted by the infirmarian; the diagnosis and remedies only being revealed to one after he had gone. How, I wondered, were these affairs managed in the world? Did one ask for an appointment, or just march in and demand advice? And the question of fees? How much did a doctor cost? And how did one pay him? Did one offer him a cheque? Or was it the thing to wait till he sent in a bill? I had not a notion how to proceed.

  In the end, I rang up the uncle who lived in Lancaster Gate and extracted the necessary information.

  ‘I do hope,’ he inquired politely, when my problems had been dealt with, ‘that there is nothing seriously wrong?’

  ‘Oh dear, no!’ I replied cheerfully. ‘Merely what in my convent would be described as “a Little Misery”
.’

  My uncle uttered a snort of disgust and hung up the receiver with a clatter.

  Soon after, I set out to see the doctor. He was a lean, rather angry-looking Scot, with a mouth like a razor. He sat and looked at me for several seconds before saying anything at all. Then came a machine-gun fire of questions.

  Some of them were impossible to answer unless I told him of my former life. So, after a little unsuccessful hedging, out it came. When I had finished, he leaned back, examining me again in silence.

  ‘Delayed action. Not shock, but strain. That’s what you are suffering from. It’s har-rr-dly to be wonder-rr-rd at in the cir-rr-cumstances. How long did ye say it was (he was growing Scotch-er and Scotch-er) before ye realized the mistake ye had made in becoming a nun?’

  I said that it was about ten years.

  He fixed me with a fierce little Scotch blue eye and almost shouted: ‘Ye mean to tell me ye went on for another eighteen years, knowing all the time it was not the life ye were intended for?’

  I nodded.

  He made an angry little clucking sound and shook his head.

  ‘The wicked waste of it!’ he muttered. ‘Throwing away the best years of your life! What possessed ye not to come out before?’

  I tried to explain that in my eyes a Vow to God was a very solemn matter. The discovery that one had made a mistake hardly seemed sufficient excuse for backing out of what one had taken on.

  He said ‘Ah’ thoughtfully and went on staring at me.

  ‘I would be glad to know,’ he said presently, ‘what it was that made ye finally come back to the world again.’

  I said: ‘I suppose I’d reached breaking point. Anyhow, I knew that if I stayed there any longer, I should go mad.’

  He said: ‘But how was it that ye didn’t find out sooner that it was not the life for ye? Did they not give ye a time of probation to try things out?’

  I assured him that they did. I had had every opportunity of testing my vocation.

  ‘Then how’—and again that piercing little blue eye bored through me—‘can ye explain how ye came to do it?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said unhappily. ‘I suppose it must have been—well, just one of those things.’

  The doctor snorted.

  Wandering homewards along the Bayswater Road in scorching sunshine, I reflected that it must have been the tendency towards instability in the modern character that caused the Catholic Church to revise her laws concerning the taking of Vows in recent years.

  Before that, a member of the religious orders whose Vows were ‘perpetual’ made them at the end of their year or so of noviceship. After that they were fixed, irrevocably, for life. To-day, however, the taking of a life-vow is a much more complicated affair. In fact, if all the preliminary stages were prolonged to their utmost limits, six years, or even more, might elapse before the novice was allowed to take her final Vows.

  In my convent, the upward ascent began with the reception of the postulant’s habit. This took place as soon as possible after one’s arrival. The ‘habit’ was a thick black serge gown reaching to the heels and caught in at the waist with a narrow belt of its own material. Though the sleeves were long and loose, a second pair, longer and even more enormous had to be worn over the first on Sundays and feast-days as well as whenever the postulant went to the choir or parlour. The long, black, skewer-like pins which secured them to the shoulders were concealed by one’s ‘kerchief’—a large, curiously pinned-and-folded piece of thick white linen, stiffly starched and faintly suggestive of a combined helmet and cuirass. A long dark blue cotton apron was worn for going about the house and garden. Whenever the postulant went to the choir or parlour this was removed, folded carefully according to a particular method and carried in one of the vast pockets which, rather like a pair of saddle-bags, were slung beneath the habit round one’s waist.

  In most cases, a postulant observed the Rule in a somewhat mitigated form, new arrivals being ‘let down’ rather easily.

  Normally, the postulant period lasted from six to eighteen months. In exceptional cases it might be prolonged for a few months more. While it lasted, no vow or promise of any kind was made. A postulant, being ‘only a secular’ might leave quite freely or be dismissed if considered unsuitable for the life.

  The second stage was that of white-veiled novice. It was preceded by the Clothing ceremony and lasted for a year and a day. The novice now counted as a ‘religious’; the black serge gown and linen kerchief were exchanged for a white veil and habit closely resembling that worn by the nuns who had made their Vows. The Rule now had to be observed in all its strictness; and since this year was essentially a time of trial, the novice was deliberately tested so that those in authority might see and judge the stuff of which she was made. If undeterred, however, by any hardness, she still persevered, at the end of this period she would be allowed to take triennial Vows.

  It was extremely rare for this white-veiled period to be extended. Almost invariably, the novice either left or made her temporary Vows twelve months and a day after she had been ‘Clothed’.

  She now wore the short black veil of the ‘Temporarily Professed’ and for three years was bound by the four Vows of Poverty, Chastity, Obedience and Enclosure. She still remained under the care of the Novice Mistress, though a certain amount of communication, prohibited to the white-veiled novices, was now allowed with members of the community.

  At the end of the three years, her Vows expired. She was now free and for the last time was given the opportunity to leave. If, however, she still wished to persevere, she made her final Vows at the ceremony of Perpetual Profession. By these Vows she was bound for life—unless, as in my own almost unprecedented case, she turned out, after all, to be so unsuited to the life as to find it impossible to continue in the convent. In such circumstances, she could apply to the ecclesiastical authorities for a dispensation by special rescript from Rome.

  All of which goes to show, in my opinion (and I really do feel that I know something about it) that when, through some tragic misfortune, a square peg finds itself wedged tightly into an agonizingly round hole, the blame cannot be laid at the door of the Catholic Church.

  And if you ask me at whose door I think one ought to lay it, I can only reply that I haven’t the slightest idea.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  (1)

  WE have now reached a point where we are confronted by a serious difficulty.

  This is because the next eighteen months or so, though filled with what appeared to me as highly exciting happenings, would, if recorded, strike the reader as both trivial and dull.

  I therefore think that the best way to proceed will be by a series of kangaroo leaps, pausing only when anything sticks out sufficiently to seem worth while.

  After leaving the Royal Society of Medicine, I thought it might be a good idea to try the War Office. To tell the truth, two things had roused my feminine curiosity. I longed to know something about the inner workings of the war machine, and I was determined to discover why a Civil Servant was always looked upon as a legitimate butt for every kind of gibe.

  Now, I have been warned that I must be terribly, terribly careful over what I write about the War Office. This is a pity. For I managed to get myself whisked in and out of at least five different sections, and had many amusing glimpses of the way in which things were done.

  If I were to write what I thought about the military branch to which I was first directed, I should get into trouble. So I will merely state baldly how much I detested the place, work and people, and how intense was my relief when, after six gruelling months, I got myself transferred.

  My plans for the future began to crystallize during this rather unpleasont period.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that I finally cut out Skye for Cornwall because of a radio play to which I listened by chance one Sunday evening. It gave me, however, a tremendous list in that direction. It also helped to divert my thoughts from the news that the R.A.F. had just dro
pped 2,500 tons of explosive on Hamburg. This, said the papers, was the heaviest bombing raid of the war….

  The play, by a new writer, Frank Baker, as yet unknown to me, was entitled Challacombe. It was a Cornish fantasy. I thought it enchanting. Indeed, it impressed me so much that I wrote to the B.B.C. and asked whether other writings by the same author were to be obtained. The answer was vague and unhelpful. This, however, in no way damped my enthusiasm; and I plunged into a kind of Cornish orgy, reading, thinking and making dream-plans during every spare moment of the next few weeks.

  It ‘sticks out’ in my memory almost as though I had gone down to the Duchy on a summer holiday.

  I set about my Cornish orgy with method. First, geography. Cornwall, it appeared, was only prevented from being an island by the little three-mile neck of land between Severn-mouth and the squashy bog in Morwenstow from which the Tamar oozes. North, west and south, the Atlantic breakers roar or ripple according to the season.

  To me, this seemed almost too good to be true. You see, I have always thought of an island as an ideal setting for romance (Shakespeare knew it when he chose Prospero’s Isle as a background for The Tempest). I felt, too, that it helped to explain the ‘differentness’ of Cornwall from the rest of England. She was more than just one more lovely English county; she was a country apart, whose people had every right to call folk from the other side of Tamar ‘foreigners’.

  I discovered, too, that even the dry geographical bones of her were shrouded with romantic legend. There was the primeval forest that had been swept away when the sea rushed in and overwhelmed Mounts Bay; the shifting sands of the north coast that had piled themselves above the ancient churches. And, loveliest legend of all, lost Lyonnesse, whose lands once stretched from where the Longships Lighthouse stands to-day over to the Scilly Isles and eastward right away to Lizard Point.