I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  ‘Sometimes, Reverend Mother, I can’t help thinking that it would be so much less uncomfortable if, during the hot weather the sacristans were allowed to get up early and “do” the choir before the community came in for Prime.’

  She looked at me thoughtfully. Then she said:

  ‘And do you really think it so important to remove all discomfort from religious life?’

  I said: ‘No, Reverend Mother: but to do the choir sweep in this weather means having to wash all over three times a day instead of twice. And that takes time….’

  She drew her brows together in a way that made me wish I hadn’t spoken.

  ‘I call that exceedingly unmortified,’ she said. ‘Surely you can endure the discomfort of a little extra heat….’

  I faded out.

  I spent my first morning in consultation with an architect of whom I had heard through the simple expedient of writing to the Penzance Town Clerk. He was not encouraging. There were no Cornish cottages to be had anywhere, he assured me. As for the plans which I had sketched artlessly for my intended building, he clearly considered them beneath contempt. I walked up Market Jew Street feeling considerably deflated. It seemed that even the smallest conceivable cottage would cost more than I could afford.

  The bus-ride back to Mousehole was, however, so lovely that it made me quickly forget my troubles. Beyond Mounts Bay the sea was a deep, blazing cornflower blue. St. Michael’s Mount lifted delicate pinnacles against a Mediterranean sky. From the unhastening waves and the hot hillside, the Cornish magic distilled itself, slowly, almost imperceptibly, like a whispered spell.

  (11)

  That afternoon, they drove me out to Trevelioc.

  To mention its real name would be, I feel, a betrayal. Too many visitors already break the silence of those lonely woods and desecrate the granite cliffs with orange peel and cigarette cartons. I feel, too, that any attempt to describe it could only result in further purple patches. What is more, the curious spell which the place casts over those who visit it, springs from something which refuses to be translated into language.

  So I must be content with the bald statement that of all the enchanted coves in the remote region which lies between Penzance and Zennor, Trevelioc is the most magical. Immediately I saw it, I recognized it as the one spot on earth in which I wanted to live. And although when the time came for me to return to England I had been unable to find even a foothold in the neighbourhood, I never for a moment yielded to discouragement. To do so, I felt, would weaken the intensity of my power to ‘want’. And, as everybody knows, if you fail to get what you want, it is simply because you have not ‘wanted’ it with sufficient passion and intensity.

  It was in the convent that I learnt the tremendous importance of knowing how to ‘want’ things. And as the only legitimate ‘want’ of religious life is the object for which you embraced it, the whole thing really boils down to ‘wanting’ God so tremendously that every other want fades out.

  When I was a young nun, a kind and gentle Benedictine Father came to preach the Long Retreat to the community. He spoke simply, but his words left a very deep impression. I think it was because all he said was so obviously steeped in prayer.

  One of his sermons was about mystical union with God; an aspect of the spiritual life which, under the Novice Mistress of the moment, was practically taboo. As it also happened to be the subject in which above all others I was most keenly interested, this was rather unfortunate.

  ‘You are too much preoccupied,’ she said to me one day when I had been Sent For, ‘with the whole subject of mysticism. Do remember, it is presumptuous to ask God to grant you mystical graces. There can be great danger of illusion for souls who try to force themselves along that way. The only safe way to divine union is through humility and the faithful performance of God’s Will.’

  I thought to myself: Oh, how I hate ‘safe’ ways! Aloud I said: ‘But, Mother, if mystical union with God is the end and aim of the contemplative life, like it says in Sancta Sophia …’

  ‘And how did you get hold of Sancta Sophia?’ she inquired, with a touch of severity.

  I told her that I had taken it from the Noviceship cupboard one day when, being rather busy, she had given me leave to go and choose a book for myself.

  ‘This is the bit I mean,’ I added. And, turning up the passage in question, I laid it open on her knee.

  This is what Father Baker, well known as one of the greatest Benedictine contemplatives, has to say on the subject:

  ‘The proper end of a contemplative life is the attaining unto an habitual and almost uninterrupted perfect union with God in the supreme point of the spirit … such a union as gives the soul a fruitive possession of Him and a real experimental perception of His Divine Presence in the centre of the spirit.’

  She put on her glasses, read the passage, shut the book and put it away on the shelf beside which she was sitting.

  ‘You can leave it here with me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Mother!’ I begged, ‘do let me have it back!’

  She shook her head. All this preoccupation with mystic states of prayer, she insisted, was doing me no good. Far better leave such things to God and apply myself to obedience and humility.

  Quite possibly, she was right. But I went away feeling rebellious. Surely, if union with God was one’s object in entering the convent, and if mystical prayer was the shortest way to achieve it, not to go all out to become a ‘mystic’ was simply to prove oneself a fool.

  When the Retreat came, I had a word on the subject with the Benedictine Father.

  I told him that I could never feel satisfied with just ‘talking to’ God and thinking thoughts about him. What I wanted was God himself. And from what I had read and heard, it seemed to me that by mystical prayer alone could one really reach him.

  ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Mysticism is the outcome of man’s craving for and endless seeking after some way of experiencing actual, ontological, quasi-physical contact with God.’ And he explained that what feeling was to the body, so was mystical knowledge to the soul.

  ‘It is quite possible,’ he told me, ‘that God is drawing you to mystical union with himself. But if so, I warn you that contemplative prayer is about the most crucifying thing that there is. You see, the least wilful distraction, the smallest deliberate relaxation from the incessant all-out effort after perfection will produce a sort of wall between yourself and God which you’ll find when you go to prayer.’

  One other thing he said to me which I still remember.

  I had asked him: ‘Then it isn’t wrong to want to be united to God in the same way that the mystics are?’

  He laughed. He said: ‘Good heavens, child, no! Blessed Angela of Foligno declared that the surest and quickest way of reaching it was to go on and on beseeching God to grant it, “humbly,” “continually” and even “violently” (“The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence”, you remember …) until he gave it. She even went so far as to say that one could wrest that particular grace from God by the intensity of one’s desire.’

  And it was that which first helped me to understand what an enormous amount can be achieved when one concentrates one’s whole heart, mind, soul and strength upon ‘infinite desire’.

  ‘Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut…’

  Especially—as the saints knew well—in spiritual things.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  (1)

  TREVELIOC was not, of course, the only place I visited while I was in Cornwall. There seems, however, little point in relating my adventures since none of them led to the discovery of either a cottage or a building site near the sea.

  It was a pity that shortage of cash made a longer stay in West Penwith out of the question. I determined, however, that later on I would make a second and if necessary a third expedition south of the Tamar and hunt out some temporary abode in which I could lurk until Infinite Desire had wrested what I so desperately longed for from the hands of Providence.

  I
thought all this out during the long train journey back to London. I had felt leaving the Duchy like a wrench that was very nearly physical: though the intense magnetism relaxed slightly once the train had rattled over Saltash Bridge on to the solid earth of Devon. The change in mentality which one experienced when the enchanted land of spells and sorceries was left behind was really startling. It was curious how, in Cornwall, one had always felt subconsciously aware that something was brewing which, in a world stupefied by civilization, could no longer be experienced. All along the lane that dipped and twisted towards Trevelioc, one had felt the presences and powers that haunt the woods and coves. Down there, belief in sorceries and superstitions was strong enough to give body to the Things which faded out when disbelieved in. It was useless to try and reason coldly and academically about such notions. In that remote cove, isolated from the outside world by the bulging humps and precipices of the hills and quarries, a secret life was being lived, intense, primeval, pagan. And I remembered one swift and rather thrilling moment which I had experienced just before we finally left the cove when it had seemed to me that just for an instant some bubble out of the prehistoric past had welled up and broken, releasing an atmosphere that was tingling and rapturous.

  People up in England would think one crazy if one told them about such things. Well—I reflected—let them! I knew better.

  And an almost passionate longing came upon me to get back to Trevelioc, where, in the warm, flower-scented hollow of the hillside I could find solitude and open my soul wide to the secret things that were floating like gossamer spells among the rocks and trees.

  But I couldn’t help wondering, as the train drew up at Paddington, what Reverend Mother’s reactions would have been if she could have glimpsed what was going on inside my mind.

  (2)

  My admiration for Angela Thirkell, not only as a novelist but as a woman, is such that when at a tea-party in her London garden, she introduced me to Miss Rachel Ferguson as ‘my cousin, Monica Baldwin’, I was distinctly pleased.

  The cousinship, you see, is rather a fragile connexion. Angela’s grandmother, Lady Burne-Jones, and my great-uncle’s wife, Mrs. Alfred Baldwin, happened to be sisters, so that Angela and I could easily repudiate one another if we chose.

  You may possibly wonder what I was doing at her home in Pembroke Gardens.

  Let me hasten to explain.

  After my incursion into Cornwall, Hove had seemed so intolerable that a kind cousin who owned a bungalow not far from Southwick suggested that I might be happier there.

  I accordingly moved in.

  During the next few months I worked energetically at my book, read enormously and in my spare moments amused myself with my cousin’s exquisite grey Persian cats. I also met the artist Douglas Grey and his wife—both friends of my cousin’s—and, as may be imagined, was greatly thrilled when he suggested that I should sit for him.

  I thought—and still think—that he has something closely akin to genius, though his Sargent-like habit of stripping all veils from his sitters, invading the back recesses of their personalities and revealing what he finds there by an uncannily clever manipulation of colour and light, suggests a greater esteem for truth than for popularity.

  I wish I could have afforded to go up to London to admire my portrait when it was exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. It would have roused agreeable feelings of inflation, and might possibly have heped to restore the self-confidence which my years in the convent had so effectively destroyed.

  To return, however, to Mrs. Thirkell.

  As soon as the pages of my book seemed sufficiently numerous to warrant it, I began wondering about a publisher. It was then that the notion of consulting Angela first came to me.

  Our last meeting had been a year or two before I plunged into my convent. She and her husband, newly-wed, had stayed with the Stanley Baldwins at Astley Hall at the same time as I. My recollections were of a lovely and attractive girl who had dazzled and rather alarmed me across the dinner table by the brilliance of her wit.

  Her reply to my letter could hardly have been kinder. And not long after, when I met her at the house of mutual friends in Sussex, I liked her so much that I readily fell in with her suggestion that I should stay for a while with her in London and lend a hand with the reopening of the house in Pembroke Gardens after the war.

  Some quite interesting pages might be written on the subject of that visit, which in many ways added considerably to my Experience of Life. To be quite frank, however, I found it a little alarming. The intellectual standard of Angela’s circle was so much above my level that I soon gave up any attempt to be more than an admiring listener and looker-on. Indeed, apart from my dealings with Angela herself which were always delightful, I think my happiest hours beneath her roof were spent in the society of Me Wang, my newly acquired Siamese cat.

  (3)

  The story of Me Wang is short and tragic. I mention it because she was the one great love of my post-conventual life.

  She was a long-promised present from Wim and Barbara. And when, one day a telegram told me to call for her at South Kensington Station (I was still staying with Angela at Pembroke Gardens), I set out with a green silk pocket-handkerchief to bring her home.

  She was hardly larger than a sparrow. Her long, coarse coat suggested goat’s hair: the colour deepened from oatmeal to sepia at the ears, nose, paws and tail. Her dazzlingly blue eyes were set in an enormous head rather like something out of a Buddhist monastery, and her short thin tail had a kink as though someone had crimped it with a pair of curling tongs.

  I wrapped her carefully in the green silk handkerchief and slipped her into the front of my coat. Upon which, she immediately started to screech at the top of her disproportionately powerful voice, and continued for three days without drawing breath save for those few too brief hours when, from utter exhaustion, she was obliged to sleep.

  Her name (I believe it is that of a river in Siam) was bestowed upon her by Angela: and I have reason to think that the creature was no less devoted to me than I was to her. Be that as it may, for three delightful months she filled my rather lonely life with an absurd amount of happiness.

  Then came the dreadful day when a hot nose and hideous cough made me realize that things were going ill with her. It was Cat Influenza. And Siamese, for the first few months of their lives, are not robust.

  I did what I could for her. But it was of no avail.

  Her last gesture (I was kneeling beside the chair on which she lay dying) was to lift herself and, with a supreme effort, creep to my shoulder and push her little black muzzle against my ear.

  Since then, I have never had another Siamese.

  (4)

  I believe it was Oscar Wilde who declared that one should never repeat an emotion. I thought of this as I set out on my second expedition into Cornwall. I need not, however, have worried. It turned out to be even more delightful than my first.

  This, I fancy, was partly because I had been steeping myself to the eyebrows in Sir Thomas Malory, and partly because, what with buzz-bombs, pre-invasion of Europe agitation and the just released horror tales of concentration camp atrocities, life north of the Tamar was really becoming a fright.

  My aim was to find a cottage in which to live while waiting for my summons from Trevelioc. (That it would come, in course of time, I was perfectly sure.)

  Spring was slowly slipping into summer when I started. My goal was the Lizard, which, so legend declared, was the eastern end of the lost Land of Lyonesse. This would make it an ideal background for a little day-dreaming about Sir Tristram and La Beale Ysoult.

  Owing to my long years of enclosure, I still looked on every inch of unknown country with an eye of wonder. It was a thrill when the bus, zigzagging madly down the long green and gold peninsula of the Lizard, passed the turquoise waves at Poldhu, and the white foam that splashed wildly round the savage rocks at Mullion. After that came the long flat stretch of the Goonhilly Downs, where the
hot scent of gorse, luscious, heady and nut-flavoured, came drifting from golden hollows and mounds on either side of the road.

  If you have ever been to Cadgwith, you will remember how one climbs down from the bus at tiny Ruan Minor, where the tower of the doll’s house church is no higher than the village cottages. From there to the cove a steep green lane curves downwards, ablaze with celandine, rose-campion and at least three kinds of lovely fern.

  It was at the bend in the lane where the sea comes into sight that I felt the Cornish magic once more beginning to weave its spells. The very air seemed filled with strange and hidden presences. I stood still. (This, of course, was exactly the sort of thing for which I had come to Cornwall.) The oddest sensation started to creep over me. It was as though I had slipped back into contact with some experience that I had undergone in another existence long ago. I felt enraptured. But it was also just a little creepy. And of it some secret instinct warned me immediately to beware.

  Shaking myself back into reality, I hurried down towards where the first cottages of Cadgwith clustered at the bottom of the road.

  (5)

  That night, before getting into bed, I stood for a long time at the window of the cottage in which I was lodging.

  A heavenly fragrance of pinks and mignonette floated up from the garden. The world lay in dream, lulled by the soft splash of small waves on the shore. An enormous biscuit-coloured moon hung low above the horizon, tracing a path of palest gold across the sea.

  I have observed that moonlight tends to induce a mood of introspection. Or is it only so with older people? Anyhow, as I stood there, a sudden bitter shaft of memory stabbed through me. On just such a night as this I had gazed—let us not enquire how many years ago—into the bland and baffling face of just such another biscuit-coloured moon.