Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  As a result, the more complete one’s submission to that of the Superior … the more perfectly one’s will is united to the Will of God.

  I once consulted the famous Dominican, Father Bede Jarret, about this matter of submission.

  He was a man of deep humour, profound learning and wide experience. I told him about an order which had just been given to me by a Superior and which had struck me as being neither wise nor just.

  ‘I can submit my will sufficiently to do the thing I’ve been told to do,’ I explained to him, ‘but as for forcing my mind …’

  He said: ‘I once took that same problem to my Novice Master. He told me to re-read “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. The idea, you see, is that you do what you’re told, no matter how certain you feel that someone has blundered. To ride fearlessly into the jaws of death without reasoning why adds splendour to your obedience.’

  ‘Even,’ I persisted, ‘if you feel convinced that what you’ve been told to do is sheerest lunacy?’

  He smiled.

  ‘Ah, but don’t you see? – that’s just where the heroism comes in.’

  This is not, of course, a common-sense view: indeed, the whole point of it is that it is the exact opposite of common sense. It’s fair to say that Julia struggled with the idea. Gradually over time, and increasingly, the idea of doing something she knew to be stupid and wrong just because she was told to, and because she was supposed to take a particular lesson in the stupidity and pointlessness of it, began to be something that – to use an expression of hers – ‘stuck in her craw’. It might be something Julia could do now and then, but to ask her to make it a way of life was to ask something against her deepest nature. Of course, from the perspective of the tradition, as it had evolved, the fact that it was against her deepest nature made it all the more important that she should submit.

  The trouble caused by the vow of obedience lay, however, in the future. Julia passed through her two-year novitiate, if not with ease, then at least with her fundamental conviction of her own vocation intact. At the end of the two years, Julia made her three great vows. She lay face down on the floor as her Mother Superior covered her with a funeral pall, and announced that the person she had been was now dead. When the pall was taken off, the light was blinding. It was supposed to feel like a death and rebirth, and it did. Sister Eucharia was now a Presentation Sister, a professed nun. It was the winter of 1946, and she was about to turn twenty-six.

  The Presentation Sisters had a decentralised system, in which separate convents had charge of their own affairs. The convent at Tuam, to which Sister Eucharia belonged, was attached to a school. The first thing Julia did on completing her novitiate was to take the final exams required to award her the Leaving Certificate. After that she was able to teach in the school, and she did, quickly coming to specialise in English. If prayer and the Eucharist were the best thing about the spiritual life of the convent for Julia, the best thing about its practical life was teaching. She loved teaching, being a teacher, and loved the contact with her pupils. She found that she had a gift for making her subjects interesting and making her pupils interested; she had an arena in which her natural liveliness, vividness, and humour could be expressed without getting her into trouble. Perhaps that more than anything was the core of my mother’s love of teaching: it was the first thing she ever did in which she was allowed to express herself.

  It slowly became clear, however, that this was not enough. In the same year that Julia became a professed nun, her sister Peggie had entered the Presentation Sisters. She was at Castle Connell in Tipperary, in a branch of the order that specialised in missionary work. ‘I had done my Leaving Cert and – I’d imagine for much the same reasons that Julia had gone to New Ross originally – we’d got all these things about the heroism of going on missions. This was a missionary branch of the Presentation order, and I had romantic ideas about India, where they had their mission.’ This seems to have made Julia wonder whether she had done the right thing by abandoning her earlier longing to go on the missions. If she stayed with the Presentation Sisters in Tuam, she would in all probability spend the rest of her life there living in the same convent and teaching in the same school. That began to feel as if it was not what she wanted. Not, of course, that what Sister Eucharia wanted was in any way relevant; but perhaps her dissatisfaction might be taken as a sense that she was not, after all, doing the will of God?

  Sister Eucharia on the MV Caledonia

  ‘Julia was in Tuam and we wrote to each other,’ says Peggie. ‘Remember, your letters were censored. Your letters were all opened and read. In both directions. Julia was beginning to get discontented and sorry that she hadn’t joined a missionary order.’ So she thought about it, and prayed about it, and became convinced that her vocation was after all in missionary work. By now, after an annual renewal of her vows, at the end of her third year she had taken her final vows, as the Presentation Sisters’ rule dictated. Her status as a nun was irrevocable. But her exact vocation was not. ‘So in 1948,’ Peggie remembers, ‘Julia got permission from the bishop and the Superior General to transfer to Castle Connell because she wanted to go to India. And very shortly after she went to India.’ This was no small feat of will and effort. Nuns hardly ever changed from one branch of the order to another; but once Julia decided to do something, she was not easy to stop. It was late 1948 when she transferred to Castle Connell, and early 1949 when she boarded the MV Caledonia and travelled out to her new post at Church Park, a school run by the Presentation Sisters in Madras.

  2

  I sometimes think that my mother’s years in Madras were the great adventure of her life. As was rarely the case with her childhood, she did talk about the time she spent at Church Park. It was never a connected narrative: she dealt in specific memories and specific stories. She didn’t give me any sort of rundown or overview of what she did in India. But at least some of what I know about her years in India, I know directly from her.

  Madras is one of those cities that get a bad press from guide books and casual visitors. (Since 1997, for post-colonial and pro-Tamil reasons, the city has been officially known as Chennai, though I will use the old name here, to keep things simple.) Kipling, for instance, didn’t miss a chance to say how dull he found it. A guide book says that ‘most travellers stay just long enough to book a ticket for somewhere else’. This is partly because the city has no obvious central magnet for the casual visitor. The location on the Indian Ocean is mercantile and convenient rather than spectacular. The marina, a seafront promenade, is a pleasant place for a stroll and some people-watching, but nothing extraordinary. The old fort, built when the city was founded by the British in 1639, is worth a look, but one old colonial fort is very much like another old colonial fort. The city teems, but not as unforgettably as Calcutta teems, and thrives, but not as post-modernly as Bangalore of the laptops, and is the centre of a film industry, but not as amusingly (for foreigners) as Bombay. The old church is where Clive of India married and so did Elihu Yale, he who founded the eponymous American university – which is interesting, but not that interesting. Some of the world’s greatest temple architecture is just down the road at Mammalapuram, so why would anyone linger in Madras?

  But Madras is one of those places that gets its hooks into people, and you are more likely to hear praise of it from residents who have lived there for a decade than from travellers who stayed for a weekend. Julia loved Madras. She had never been out of Ireland, and the most exotic place she had ever been to was O’Connell Street in Dublin. She had never seen a black person. In Madras, people weren’t just black, their skins were luminous Tamil mahogany black. Madras was different. That was what Julia loved about it, the idea and experience of difference. Post-colonial Ireland was a state that emphasised its sameness, its monocultural agrarian Gaelic Catholicism, in the embrace of De Valera’s fantasy about its being an ‘island of saints and scholars’. You could have any colour you liked as long as it was green. India was every co
lour. For one thing, the Dravidian Tamils of Madras are a minority ethnically distinct from the majority population of northern India. The city had a significant Muslim population, as well as a scattering of Buddhists, a few Parsis, the odd Jain, some vociferous Marxists, angry Hindu supremacists, pacifistic Gandhian advocates of non-violence, noble members of Congress – the new governing party – and corrupt ones, as well as voices already arguing for Tamil separatism. And there was also the fact that Ireland, in the aftermath of its break-away from Britain, was keen not to talk about class and difference, whereas the caste system in India was a daily, all-consuming, self-evidently central fact of life. To Julia, for all the troubles caused by caste, it at least did not seem hypocritical. Like almost everything else about Madras, it was energising.

  Almost everything. There were two problems with the work of the Church in Madras, apart from the usual difficulties of convent life. One was that 1949 was not a good time for a Christian missionary to arrive in India. The country had gained its independence, and been partitioned from Pakistan, on 14 August 1947. The missionary movements – of which there were a huge variety all over the subcontinent – were out of kilter with the post-colonialist development of the country. India was undergoing a strong Hindu revival and an upsurge in national pride; charitable works were welcome, but missionary intervention in the religious life of the nation was not. ‘The way things are going,’ Julia wrote in a letter home, ‘none of us are likely to be very long in India, as the country has less and less use for missionaries and the Christian message.’ Today, new foreign missionaries are not allowed into India, and all the nuns working at the Presentation Convent in Madras are Indian-born.

  This does not mean that Christianity in itself was an alien presence in Madras. Christianity has been present in southern India for a long time. There is a long tradition, and even some evidence, that the apostle St Thomas travelled to India in AD 52, less than two decades after Christ’s death, and was martyred in Madras in AD 72. ‘They’re very snooty about it in Madras,’ my mother told me. ‘They like to say to people like the Goans, we’re St Thomas’s Christians. You’re St Francis Xavier’s Christians. We’re much older Christians than you.’ There are still some Thomas Christian churches in Madras, following the Syrian rite that the saint is said to have brought to India. So Christianity was already established by the time Portuguese Jesuits arrived in Kerala in the sixteenth century, and Catholicism was in turn established by the time the British arrived and built Fort St George, the outpost that was eventually to turn into the city of Madras. The British brought Protestantism, and St Mary’s Church, consecrated in 1680, is the oldest Anglican church in Asia. So although foreign missionaries were about to have some difficult years in India, Christianity had traditions and roots around Madras: the local population was, and is, roughly 5 per cent Christian. The Presentation Convent was not working in a vacuum.

  Sister Eucharia on the banks of the Ganges

  The political context was one major difficulty about Madras when Julia arrived there. The other was more straightforward: the climate. Madras has a truly horrible climate. The humidity is high all year round. Throughout the summer months the temperature climbs into the hundreds. From my own childhood in the Far East I remember the summer as a time when you looked not at the temperature forecast – which was always in the nineties – but at the predicted humidity. The hardest days to get through were the ones when the temperature and humidity were both in the nineties. You would feel utterly drained and exhausted by the heat. Madras is hotter than that, and more humid, and the hot months go on for longer, building up unbearably until they are interrupted by the monsoon. ‘A beautifully enervating atmosphere like a warm bath’ was the description from one contemporary account. All this contributed to Madras’s reputation for being sleepy, boring, something of a backwater – which was how it had been regarded in colonial times.

  Everyone found it hot. But not everyone had to wear a full nun’s habit, with its ‘underwear designed by ascetics in the fourteenth century’ (Monica Baldwin’s vivid phrase), tunic of black serge, wimple and bandeau of white linen, cincture of black leather, and wear it all day every day. This, physically, was the hardest thing about Madras for Julia. She described it in an autobiographical short story, ‘My Hair and Me’, that was broadcast on the BBC in 1961:

  I wore on my head, in addition to my now cropped hair, a cap, a bandeau – which is a box-like arrangement of a stiffened rubber material known as plyalin – a pair of starched bands which secured the guimpe that covered one’s chest, a smallish inner veil, or domino as it was called, and a full length outer veil – five pieces of clothing in all.

  Now, even if convent custom allowed one to have long hair, the heat of India made it impossible for me at least. Different people perspire in different ways and in varied amounts, I believe. I seemed to produce most of my perspiration under my veil. The sweat trickled down my face under the bandeau, it ran down my shoulders and back under the veils, it collected behind my ears and on my neck. So very soon after I arrived in India, I got the scissors and cut my already cropped hair as close to the scalp as I could get. Even then I perspired. There were nights in the hot season when my pillow was soaked through before midnight and the discomfort was so great that time after time I got up, put my head under the tap and washed it, then climbed back into bed – wet but fairly cool – and so got to sleep at last. I became accustomed to the heat in time but my head went on perspiring and so my hair was never allowed to grow more than a quarter of an inch or so on my scalp.

  The nuns had a special dispensation from the fixed regime of the order and were allowed a daily tepid bath. Tepid water, as my mother insisted and as all old tropical hands know, is much more cooling than either hot or cold. During the gradual build-up of heat all she could think about was the two months of high summer when the nuns went to work at the boarding school they ran at Kodaikanal in the Palani hills, about three hundred miles away. The altitude there was seven thousand feet, and the relief at getting out of Madras was exquisite. As her letters make clear, Julia deeply looked forward to Kodai. ‘I am longing for a lungful of cold air, a mouthful of real cold water, and the feel of a blanket over me at night.’

  The emphasis of the Presentation Sisters was on education. In Madras they had founded what was in effect a campus, called Church Park, with a convent where the nuns lived and several different schools, one of them also an orphanage aimed at Anglo-Indians, another a teacher training college. This was an important educational institution for Madras. (It still is: in addition to the teacher training college, Church Park now has three schools, two of which operate in English and one in Tamil.)

  The Presentation Sisters’ mission had been established to address the needs of Anglo-Indians, a term that should be glossed. Anglo-Indians are the offspring of mixed marriages, or at any rate sexual liaisons, between Europeans and the local population. Church Park was founded, to quote my mother, to look after the ‘illegitimate children of British Tommies and Tamil coolie women’. Just to complicate things, the Anglo-Indian community of Madras was to a considerable extent of Portuguese origin, since many of the first European-Indian children in Madras were born to the first waves of early Portuguese colonists; and it was their children who in turn often were the women with whom British colonists had children. Portuguese surnames were common in the Anglo-Indian community of Madras.

  The status of Anglo-Indians in India is a delicate subject. In some respects they were at this point in India’s history recipients of a double dose of prejudice. For the Raj, half-Indian children were, to use the terrible phrase of the time, ‘fourteen annas to the rupee’ – in other words, given that a rupee was supposed to be sixteen annas, they were not quite genuine, not quite the real thing. Their very presence was a reminder of a scandalous and unspeakable issue: the sexual exploitation of the ruled by the rulers. At the same time, for many Hindus the Anglo-Indians carried the taint and corruption of the West – the sense of cas
te contamination brought by the outsider – without the protection of belonging to the colonial overclass. Some of the distaste for the British was transferred to the Anglo-Indians, about whom it could be more safely expressed. A recent study of Anglo-Indian identity lists some stereotypes: ‘vulgar, conceited, ill-bred, lacking intelligence, promiscuous (if women) and work-shy (if men), more British than the British themselves, relics of and nostalgic for the Raj’. The Anglo-Indian community was by definition hybridised, and Julia took a particular interest in that. The very idea of a mixed or hybridised identity – of coming from more than one place, of having something complicated about who you were and where you were from – appealed to her. She was also stirred by the idea that the Anglo-Indian community had about it a sense of shame or embarrassment. Julia knew about that. She felt a deep connection with the stigmatised.

  Church Park

  By the time she went to work there, however, Church Park had drifted away from its origins as a school for the poor and had become an institution increasingly attended by the Indian élite. The school’s high standards were one reason for this; education in English was another. The school for the children of Tommies and coolie women was rapidly becoming an institution for the aspiring, achieving, new Indian middle class. From a charitable point of view, this might have represented something of a shift of emphasis, but the students attending Church Park were a teacher’s dream, and Julia quickly found herself happier in her work than she ever had been. Her main subject was English, with a little history on the side (and very occasionally, when illness or personnel difficulties required, her least favourite subject, maths). Her talent and abilities were soon evident. The single possession she kept from her time in India was the Abinaschandra Meda medal that she was awarded by the University of Calcutta in 1951. I have no idea what it is or what it was awarded for, or why the University of Calcutta was rewarding my mother’s contribution to education, but it must have meant a lot to her, because in the huge mass of papers and things she left behind after her death, it is the single thing – the only thing – that bears her real name, Julia I. Gunnigan.