That night, however, I had been wearing a slightly different style of night apparel; and the scrap of sky across which the moon had drifted, had been framed by the narrow window of my cell. By and by, when it finally disappeared from sight, I had crept back to bed and lain there most unhappily, in the darkness, wondering how long it would be before I could finally make up my mind to break with the life for which I now knew myself so unfitted, and go back again to the world.
Which brings us at last to a subject which I now confess I have been carefully avoiding since I started to write this book.
You would be surprised at the number of people who have asked me why it was that I left the convent. What is more, everyone whom I consulted while working on these pages has assured me that unless I give reasons for my exodus, half the interest of the story will be lost. All of which seems to indicate that the repugnance I have always felt for exposing this intimate page of personal history must now be overcome.
A friend of my youth (who had himself whisked in and out of a Dominican noviceship in a praiseworthy effort to test a ‘vocation’ in which no one but himself had ever believed), remarked to me on the subject that he just could not conceive how such a mistake as I had made was possible.
‘Why, surely,’ he insisted, ‘after all those years of probation—six, isn’t it? or seven?—with all the hoops they put you through to find out just the sort of person that you are, it must be possible to tell for certain whether you really have a religious vocation?’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ I agreed. ‘As it happens, my own case is the only one in which I’ve ever known a mistake to be made.’
He sat silent. (I felt sure I knew what he was thinking.) Then he said:
‘Of course, one would hate to be—well, indiscreet in any way. But it would be extraordinarily interesting, you know, if you could give one even a hint….’
I signed inwardly.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll confess the awful truth to you. But it may sound embarrassingly Group-ish. If so, you have only yourself to blame.’
The story I told him began with a Warning, which I fancy it might be well to reproduce.
Should you ever feel attracted to the idea of entering a convent, be sure and test yourself till you know for certain whether your chief motive for so doing is a sincere conviction that it is the Will of God for you. If you enter merely because you feel an attraction for the life, you may expect rocks ahead.
‘My failure,’ I told him, ‘and the hopeless muddle I’ve made of everything, was simply because I neglected to do that.’
To make this clear, I was obliged to dig up a few personal reminiscences. I give them below in a somewhat condensed form.
I was at a convent school and just seventeen years old when the idea first came to me that I wanted to be a nun. (And please notice that I have deliberately used the word wanted instead of ought to. Because, later on, all the trouble really hinged upon that.)
I suppose that without realizing it, I must have been ambitious. The things I longed for always seemed too wonderful to be realized. That may have been partly why I was so attracted by the idea of a religious vocation. Here, at last, was a sublime object which really was within my reach. It seemed to me the very highest way of living to which a human being could aspire.
‘La vocation’, as the girls called it among themselves, was discussed in an atmosphere of thrills and trepidation. To feel convinced that one had been chosen especially by God to belong to him alone, was certainly a thought to stir one’s being. (Incidentally, it also gave one an indefinable prestige with both mistresses and girls.)
But consecration to God also meant that henceforward one would have to aim unceasingly at a life of absolute perfection. And that gave the idea an element of terror which caused the more earth-bound spirits among us to regard those whom we suspected of ‘la vocation’ not so much with envy as with a kind of uncomfortable awe.
Towards the end of the school year, the headmistress—a nun of quite outstanding personality—always chose ‘La Vocation Religeuse’ as the subject of one or two of her conferences to the girls. What she said invariably produced a deep impression. She spoke well, and was held in the highest esteem and affection by the girls. It was after one of these conferences that I became obsessed with the idea of becoming a nun. I will not analyse my mental processes during the next few months in order to prove to you exactly where I went wrong. It is enough to say that, when I determined that I would go into a convent, it never occurred to me to ask myself—or indeed, anybody else—whether or no my religious vocation were a genuine affair. I wanted to become a nun: it followed, therefore, as the night the day, that God must have chosen me. Because I wanted it, it must be the Will of God for me. It was indeed a supreme example of Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut.
Now, I have always found that to set one’s heart stubbornly upon one’s own sweet will is apt to blind one. Had I considered, even for a moment, anyone else’s point of view except my own, I might have seen. For it was my plain duty, as things then were, to remain at home, and, instead of pigheadedly casting myself into a convent, to shoulder my share of certain responsibilities which I dreaded and disliked. What I actually did, however, was to tell everyone—myself included—that I had received a Call which must immediately be obeyed.
Of course, I can’t deny that I made great sacrifices when I gave up the world. But—in a certain sense—I wanted to make them. Or, to be more exact, the sacrifice of renouncing my longing to enter the convent would have cost me more than the giving up of all the delightful things I knew I should have to leave behind.
It now seems to me that my failure was largely the outcome of arrogance. What I ought to have done was to take advice (instead of merely listening, a little contemptuously, to what people had to say); then, fairly and squarely, to weigh up my faults, qualities and tendencies; and finally, humbly to pray that God would show me whether or no the life I had set my heart on was in reality his Will for me. Instead of which, I simply took the bit between my teeth and galloped onwards. My point of view was that because I so wanted a thing which in itself seemed good to me, it must be right. Besides, in any case, at all costs, and no matter what might happen, a nun I intended to be.
It stands to reason that religious life, which is essentially a life of sacrifice, will never succeed if it is based on selfishness. And I fear (though it deeply humiliates me to confess it) there can be no doubt that selfishness was the foundation on which my own religious life was built. From this the trouble sprang.
It must have been, I think, after about ten years in the convent that I first began to wonder, miserably, whether I had not, perhaps, made a dreadful and tragic mistake.
The idea so disturbed me that I put it aside as a temptation. I dared tell no one. It seemed to me, however, that, mistake or no mistake, I had taken a step from which there could be no withdrawing. The only thing to do was to set one’s teeth and go on with it, if not from inclination, then by sheer dogged force of the will.
The intense dislike I felt at this time for the life I had undertaken can really hardly be imagined. From dawn to sunset, almost every detail of it was savagely against the grain. Even now, after all these years, when I look back upon it, my soul is plunged in gloom.
For a time this succeeded. Five—ten—fifteen years dragged past, during which health, circumstances, and my own individual character combined to intensify my already insurmountable difficulties. Try as I would to adjust myself to my surroundings, the conviction grew upon me that I was only becoming more and more different in my ideas and outlook from the rest of the community. (And—believe it or not—were I to tell you about the lengths to which I went in my last years of despairing effort to cling to what I now hardly dared think of as my ‘vocation’, I should probably be considered mad.)
At last came a day when I knew that I could blink the truth no longer. I was no more fitted to be a nun than to be an acrobat. It was then that I final
ly made up my mind that I must
The arrangements made by the Church for the dispensation of nuns who, for valid and adequate reasons, desire to leave their convents and return to the world, could hardly be wiser or more practical. (I may add that in my own case, the kindness and consideration which I received throughout, from everyone concerned, could hardly have been surpassed. It almost overwhelmed me.)
This, briefly, is what happens.
Once your mind is made up, you lay the matter before your Superior. Your case is then examined by the Ecclesiastical Authorities. Through the hands of the Apostolic Delegate (a kind of liaison officer between the Holy See and the Catholic Church in England), it is then dispatched to Rome. Here, it is once again carefully examined: after which, should your reasons be sufficiently sound and convincing, a ‘rescript’ is granted, by which you are dispensed from your Vows and the obligations of religious life. You are thus restored to your former condition of a ‘secular’, with complete freedom to return to the world and live there, according to whatever way of life you choose.
The moral, of course, of all this, seems to be that the actual career which one selects is in itself of only secondary importance. The thing that apparently matters to God is, one’s motive for embracing it. A ballet-dancer may be—and I cannot help believing often is—quite as pleasing to God as a nun. The important thing is that one should take reasonable means to ‘fit in’ to the jig-saw puzzle of life in exactly the spot where God wants one. If one drifts, or forces oneself into a place for which one was not intended, one not only spoils that particular bit of the picture but defeats the whole purpose in life for which one was made.
And that, as the patient reader will doubtless be relieved to know, is as much as I feel disposed to relate of that melancholy and depressing story.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
(1)
WHEN my train steamed in after a long night journey back from my second stay in Cornwall, the queue at Paddington bookstall reached almost into the street.
Something, evidently, had happened.
I bought a paper. The front page displayed a ghastly photograph of the dead body of Mussolini. He was hanging, head downwards, from a rope attached to his ankles, the other end of which had been hitched up to the roof of a garage runway in Milan. A dead woman, also head downwards, hung beside him. Descriptions of the hideous saturnalia following the double murder filled the remainder of the page.
It was clear that I had returned once more to civilization. I felt slightly sick.
My disappointment over having still found no Cornish cottage as a temporary refuge was forgotten in the rush of tremendous happenings which crowded the next few days. The death of Hitler; Germany’s unconditional surrender; and on 8 May—Feast of St. Michael the Archangel—VE Day and the announcement that war in Europe was at an end.
The next few months were in some ways rather bleak. Having no home, there really seemed nowhere for me to go. Cornwall, where I intended to settle, had, for the moment, barred its doors against me. And I felt no Inward Urge directing me as to how and where I should mark time.
So that when Lady Anne Lytton—a friend of long years’ standing—reappeared rather suddenly on my horizon and whisked me away to beautiful Porlock Weir and the house of friends with whom she herself was staying, I could not have been better pleased.
In that almost forgotten period of history when Anne (who is several years my junior) and I first met, it was she who tended to do the questioning, the answers being laboriously supplied by me. Now, however, the positions were reversed. My attitude was that of the pupil, who, hungry for information, hangs with ears a-prick upon every word that falls from the teacher’s lips. Like all the Lyttons, Anne knew how to tell an excellent story. I listened, entranced, to intimate details about the breeding, behaviour and private lives of Arab horses; gasped with admiration at modestly recounted tales of prowess at squash (the record of her championships and ‘runnings-up’—if that is the proper word for the things—revealed to me my own almost fantastic ignorance of everything to do with sport); and laughed till the tears rolled down at her tales of family, friends and happenings in the years between the wars. Sometimes we gossiped over supper in the pleasant country kitchen; sometimes we wandered through the woods at Ashley Combe. But whether it was by a stormy sea at midnight or an autumn evening when the hunter’s moon poured in a surge of silver through the long black branches of the trees, Anne’s companionship was always entertaining. What is more, the Experience of Life which I gained from her could not, I think, have been acquired by any other means.
From Porlock I made a third incursion into Cornwall. This time I stopped at a cottage in Trebah Wartha near the Helford River. The estuary was enchanting but it lacked the wild mystery of the Lizard, and Land’s End. However, when the kind Vicar of Mawnan and his wife offered me on their glebe land an ideal ex-army hut on an ideal site for an almost incredibly ideal sum, I jumped at it delightedly.
Sad to say, the Commission for Town and Country Planning—if that is the name by which it calls itself—had views on the sacredness of that particular region which were anything but ideal. So once more my hopes were dashed. I returned to Porlock Weir feeling cross, tired, depressed and in the mood to bite off everybody’s head.
(2)
I left Porlock on New Year’s Eve with a premonition that I was in for a particularly dismal period. And I was right. The world, like the elephant, has a wonderful memory for affronts. Trample it beneath your feet—as I did, when I stepped, rather disdainfully, into my convent—and it will take it out of you when—and if—you have the temerity to return. The waters had closed very definitely over my head in 1914. In 1945, they showed not the smallest sign of opening again.
To know that there isn’t a corner on earth where you are wanted or even needed, can have an almost influenza-like effect on your morale. And an endless wandering from place to place, camping temporarily in other people’s houses, can be quite as tiresome for you as it is for them.
In my case, the difficulty about doing anything, or indeed, even making up my mind about what I intended to do, was that I simply knew nothing at all about anything. This sounds absurd; but it was literally the case. Even the odds and ends of information that I had picked up on my wanderings since I left the convent were almost more of a hindrance than a help. For instance, immediately I had thought up a line of action, someone invariably remarked: ‘Ah, yes; but what about so-and-so?’—communicating some vital fact of which I had till then been unaware. This, of course, promptly threw all my values into confusion so that I had to abandon everything and start again to rearrange my universe.
And the more things they told me, the more I realized I didn’t know—and must absolutely learn. And yet, of what use was it to try and find out anything about anything, since everything was changing almost from hour to hour? Another cause for headache was that everyone of whom I asked advice immediately urged me to do the opposite of what had just been pointed out to me as essential by somebody else. And this—since I felt that I ought to distrust my own judgment even more than that of other people—led to a mental state of dithering and uncertainty which nearly drove me wild.
My outlook was still that of a twelve-year-old schoolgirl. And the inferiority fixation which resulted automatically from intercourse with my own relations wasn’t going to help things one bit.
Two more visits to relatives in Hereford and Sussex convinced me that unless I stopped wobbling to and fro at the suggestion of other people, I should get nowhere. The only way out of the impasse was to act for myself. I must be bloody, bold, and resolute; I must hold up my mind by the scruff of its neck and refuse to release it until it had made itself up.
But it needed courage. To fly in the face of all the advice showered on me would mean being condemned as (a) Ungrateful, (b) Pigheaded and—probably—(c) Rude.
In the end, I set my teeth and—did it. And—as usual—the moment I had shaken myself free, the fog began to li
ft. What was more, I actually perceived, in the depths of my almost atrophied subconscious, the beginnings of another Inward Urge.
In case you may have any difficulty in guessing the direction in which it pushed me, I will tell you.
It was Cornwall again.
(3)
At Porlock Weir I had been told so much about the loveliness of Goran Haven that I decided to go and investigate it for myself.
So, after a preliminary—and rather entertaining—correspondence with a certain Cornish Vicar and his wife, a kind of au pair arrangement was agreed upon. In the mornings, I was to dash round with broom and duster and lend aid where it was required: in the afternoons, they would drive me around with them on their various errands in their car. In this way I hoped to see something of the county, and, just possibly find the longed-for cottage which was to shelter me till the summons from Trevelioc arrived.
Now, when people are terribly, terribly kind to me (and it happens oftener than you might imagine) I always want to go up and proclaim it from the house-top. I have a theory that it makes us all feel better (though quite possibly a little envious) to know just how kind and delightful other folk can be.
So I can’t help regretting that (owing to pressure which has been brought to bear upon me by the very persons whom I desire to eulogize) My Lips—alas!—are Sealed.
There really can’t be any harm, however, in mentioning that when I at last arrived at Goran, I was in what I can only describe as a thoroughly chewed-up condition. Maybe that was why the impression of really heavenly kindness being showered upon me was so deep. All soreness of heart and mind melted away like snow in sunshine. An inner glow slowly diffused itself throughout my being till I felt like a well-stroked, cream-fed cat, basking comfortably on a cushion in the sun.
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