by John Gardner
‘There has been a recent arrival,’ Sister Eve told them. ‘Three or four postulants came up from our little house in Farnborough. Postulants stay there for six months, or a year, before they go out into the world, or come here to serve the three year novitiate.’ Her eyes flicked away as though she was reluctant to meet anyone else’s eyes. Sliding away shyly, Suzie reckoned.
‘Three and a half years before they enter the Order?’ Tommy asked.
‘Sometimes that doesn’t prove to be enough time, Mr Livermore. Those who arrived today were to be Professed shortly: take their final vows. It’s not all beer and skittles being a nun, you know.’
The remark took them by surprise. Tommy and Suzie spluttered, Emma coughed and Mother Ursula gave a low, growling laugh. ‘Certainly it’s not all beer and skittles,’ she said. ‘It’s not living in a rose garden either. People find it difficult to understand how regulated our lives can be, especially when for part of the time we live in and out of the world: out there teaching, and keeping to our somewhat rigid lives of restraint.’ She seemed to have thrown off her more uncertain, age-ridden persona. ‘And people find it difficult to understand that we can have a sense of humour about the world and our faith.’ Again a small laugh. ‘Beer and skittles.’
Once more a pause, during which Tommy seemed lost for words; Suzie didn’t want to jump the gun, and Emma remained silent because she was merely observing, holding a kind of watching brief – a change for her.
At last Tommy said, ‘You say they’ll return soon, Sister Rachel – Mother Rachel – and Sister Eunice?’
‘Actually they’re usually back by now.’
‘Talking about laughter and faith,’ Mother Ursula was off on her own again, ‘I remember when some people were shocked at Father Brooking’s changes at St James’s: the use of vestments, incense, the ritual and practice of the services and sacraments. When I was in my teens I was a regular member of St James’s congregation with my parents and brother and sisters. I went in one afternoon in summer, I recall. Just popped in to say a prayer, bit of peace and quiet. It was a still afternoon, and the coolness of the building struck me on entering. I remember that most vividly, going from the hot street into the cool calm of St James’s. In those days there was an unpleasant little verger, name of Chickit. I shouldn’t speak ill of him I know, but, well … he came up behind me and whispered, “You want to see something?” and pointed up towards the nave, under the tower. Father Brooking was seated by one of the big pillars on the south side of the transept, and a figure, I don’t know if it was a man or woman, knelt beside him. The awful Chickit whispered, “You see that? That’s Confession.”’ She gave another of her growling laughs. ‘He was shocked and I think wanted to frighten me, because he said – and this is the amusing part – “It’s getting more like the Roaming Catholics every day.” The Roaming Catholics.’ She repeated the line, diminishing the humour. They laughed politely and Tommy started to tell an off-colour ecclesiastical story concerning a canon and an actress. Suzie prepared to faint or do something equally extreme to cut off the punchline of the story, which had something to do with cannonballs, when the door swung open and a tall imposing nun carrying all before her strode in.
‘Mother Rachel,’ she announced. ‘You are the police?’ Her face round and florid, the voice crisp with drawling vowels, hand outstretched towards Tommy who said later that he felt as though he was being asked if he were the entire Metropolitan Police Force.
Mother Rachel’s grip was so strong that Emma later declared she’d almost started to do the moves for an arm lock, and Suzie felt unsteady for a good thirty seconds, some of it due to the almost hypnotic quality of the nun’s piercing brown eyes. Mother Rachel, they agreed, was a character with a capital K: every word and move larger than life, her voice a bellow, and her actions wide and overstated.
Behind her trailed a thin, sharp-featured and unsmiling Sister Eunice, the Novice Mistress. For no particular reason she reminded Suzie of a hornet, and later Tommy consistently spoke of her as Sister Eunuch.
Both ladies were angry. Suzie, who had met angry nuns before, during her schooldays, reflected that she’d never seen nuns quite as angry as this pair. She physically flinched at their arrival.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mother Rachel made a sweeping gesture, indicating the police officers should follow her, sharply telling Mother Ursula and Sister Eve that she would see them later. That there was threat in the words and the promise of dire punishment was in no doubt. Sister Eunice strode after the police trio like a sheep dog herding lambs into a pen. Suzie felt distinctly uncomfortable.
Mother Rachel led them along the corridor, walking not with the gliding manner of a nun on wheels but with firm long strides, her heavy sandals clicking against the russet, polished tiles with a noise almost identical to those of the jackboots of Nazi officers you heard on the BBC, or as depicted in British Lion films.
At last she opened a door to her left leading into a large, comfortable room, dominated by a pinewood desk littered with documents, and positioned in front of two long, mullioned windows looking out onto a stretch of neatly mowed lawn. Cypresses flanked a path below them, leading to the ornate-looking chapel, gargoyles above the single door and a small spire – the one they had glimpsed from the other side of the wall, where the V-1 had landed.
The windows inside the Mother Superior’s office were diamond leaded lights and they could see that the windows of the chapel, below, were intricate stained glass, high, reaching from almost the ground to the sloping roof. After the close blast of the V-1 explosion it was a wonder that the windows had remained intact.
Mother Rachel stood behind her desk, leaning forward, hands flat supporting her heaving body as she muttered and fought to control her breathing. Behind them Sister Eunice clucked, growled and also worked on her breath.
‘Are you all right, Reverend Mother?’ Suzie asked.
‘No … No!’ She said, taking gulps of air between the words. ‘No! No! No! No I am not all right!’
Sister Eunice took a step towards the desk.
‘I am sorry,’ Mother Rachel was gradually gaining control. ‘I do apologise. Anger is my besetting sin, and I fear good Sister Eunice feeds her anger on mine. I shall pay for this, it is sure, but I really can’t understand the workings of my sisters’ minds. Mother Ursula is an old lady now and Sister Eve is not the sharpest of young knives – in fact there are times when I think she is a total moron. But there are forty-five other sisters here in the convent at the moment. Nobody had the wit to telephone our house in Farnborough, our house of the Holy Family, to inform us of this tragedy. Saints alive, where are their heads?’ she shouted. ‘Where is their common sense? Sister Faith who, like Rhoda at the house of Mary the mother of John, is our gatekeeper, has even less intelligence. I could give up. They should all be scourged.’ She brought the flat of her hand down upon the desktop making even Tommy wince.
‘Calm yourself, Rachel,’ Sister Eunice said in a voice as sharp as her nose and with a slight Northumberland inflection. Suzie heard, in her head, the good sister saying, ‘why aye’, the Geordie catchphrase, or ‘calm yourself, hinnie’.
‘You’ll have one of your turns unless you calm down. Recite the rabbit song.’ She didn’t actually say ‘pet’ but it was implied. Mother Rachel began quietly and rhythmically to chant:
‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.
Don’t give the farmer his fun, fun, fun.
He’ll get by, without his rabbit pie,
So run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.’
As she spoke, so she started to relax, the flush left her face, her breathing became normal and she gently subsided into her chair.
When she next looked up at them, Mother Rachel was smiling broadly.
‘Never fails,’ she beamed. ‘The old rabbit song does it every time. Thank you, Sister,’ to Eunice who now sat in another chair as Rachel bade the police officers sit.
‘We spent a good day toda
y with the novices in Farnborough,’ she began, ‘and we came back here singing, merry as grigs on a mountain. We sang, “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise”, then “Underneath the Arches” – another Flanagan and Allen song like the rabbit song – and the umbrella song. We’re partial to Flanagan and Allen, Eunice and I. At the little party we have on Christmas afternoon we do a turn which includes Flanagan and Allen…’
‘Yes,’ Sister Eunice piped up, ‘and we do a little skit as well: two Germans in a shelter in Berlin.’ She coughed. ‘Vot vos dot?’
‘Dot vos a bomp,’ Mother Rachel replied, and they both laughed.
‘I shouldn’t say it but we’re the best on Christmas afternoons. Sister Agnes does her impression of an aged canon reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade”’ – she spoke in a sonorous, studied voice:
‘Cannon to the right of them,
Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thunderéd.’
Then a little laugh, ‘And Sister Cleo does her conjuring tricks. Sometimes the good fathers from St James’s drop in and give us a few choruses of “Widdecombe Fair”, and Sister Anne does a monologue after the style of that nice Joyce Grenfell, not as polished of course but she shows spirit, does a Sunday School teacher trying to explain the miracle of the loaves and fishes.’ She chuckled, ‘No, William it wasn’t whale meat. There was no whale meat in those days. Yes, yes, Harriet, I know about Jonah in the whale. What I said was there was no whale meat.’ And Eunice joined in the laughter.
Tommy tried to whip things back into order, ‘Reverend Mother, you got back here, and…?’
‘Yes.’ The Reverend Mother composed herself. ‘We arrived back here to discover there had been a tragedy, with novices killed and in hospital. Sister Faith was in a terrible state. She hardly made sense. Pray, please tell us the facts, Inspector. I must now have the facts.’
‘Detective Chief Superintendent,’ Tommy corrected, jealous of his rank, and Mother Rachel spread her hands in apology. Then Tommy broke the news that two of her novices were dead, killed by a flying bomb, one was in hospital, and there was another body. ‘A male, dressed as a novice, with his throat cut.’
‘A man? Dressed as a…? As a novice? A man? And his throat cut? That’s very unusual in a religious house.’
‘I’m afraid so, Mother, yes.’
‘Right,’ thought Suzie, ‘dead unusual in a religious house.’
‘Someone dressed in drag, eh?’ Mother Rachel said in her loudest voice, again taking them by surprise. ‘Oh my dear Superintendent, we know all the words, and that’s what they are, only words – though perish the thought if people ever become so degraded to use the worst of them in ordinary speech.’
‘Amen to that,’ Sister Eunice said solemnly, making the sign of the cross.
‘What do you wish us to do?’ Mother Rachel, serious now.
‘We would like you to formally identify the bodies,’ Tommy dropped his voice. ‘Also I’d like you to look at the male corpse and tell us if you recognise him. Are any men allowed into the convent?’
‘Oh, yes. Father Sheldon, the vicar of St James’s, and his three curates, Fathers Carefull, Judge and Evans. Good priests all of them. In the constitution the good Canon Brooking laid down for us all those years ago, he made it the specific job of the priests of St James’s, to minister to us. This saves much trouble.’
‘Anybody else, apart from the clergy?’
‘We have a gardener, Mr Cobbs, and he usually has two young men to assist him. They don’t stay long these days as they are quickly called up to serve in the Forces, so we have had a member of the Land Army – a nice cheery girl called Topsy – posted to us … a land girl. I am told she spends a lot of her spare time at the palais de danse and in the Grove public house, but what is one to do? Mr Cobbs made a remark about her giving a new meaning to back to the land.’ She paused, sighing. ‘I expect all our lay staff to come to the sung mass on Sunday and they mostly do.’
‘We grow all our own vegetables, and keep chickens also,’ Sister Eunice told them, apparently harking back to Mr Cobb and his team.
‘We also have a general odd-job man, Mr Taylor, who gets in specialists if we need help.’
‘Like in that terrible winter of 1939/40,’ Eunice added. ‘We had an awful time with the water pipes and cisterns being frozen. Dear Mr Taylor, he worked positive miracles.’
‘Of course you’d recognise any of these gentlemen?’
‘But of course. We know them well.’
‘Then I think we should take both of you down to the hospital, and the mortuary, so you can view the bodies. Then, perhaps, we could come back here and you may be able to give us some details. Parents, addresses, that kind of thing.’
‘Yes.’ A cloud seemed to cross Mother Rachel’s face. ‘We shall, of course, have to inform the unfortunate victims’ families. I do so hate that kind of thing.’
‘I think you can probably leave that to us,’ Tommy told her, and the Mother Superior nodded, looking relieved.
As she stood up Tommy asked, ‘And they are the only men who come into the convent: Mr Cobb, Mr Taylor, and the clergy?’
Mother Rachel sat down again. ‘No, there are odd priests of course. Some of them very odd. We have people who come to take retreats – times of devotion and meditation. And once a month we have a different preacher of a Sunday. Some good … some … well, last month we had an RAF padre. He was not a success; announced that his sermon was “Shooting a line for God”. Not the best of starts.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Alas, he continued to talk about a Christian death being a wizard prang for God. I really cannot stand slangy people. The way that one talked we’d be using slang in the responses – “The Lord be with you.” – “Wizard,”’ she intoned.
It quickly became clear that Tommy was in no hurry to move the good sisters down to the hospital to identify the bodies. Here he was, relaxed, leaning back in his chair, one hand hanging loosely to the side as though dangling in river water from a punt: his head lazy against the chair back, eyes fixed benignly on Mother Rachel almost willing her to go on talking.
Suzie knew that look: it was Tommy’s listening and watching pose in which he dragged information from interviewees by force of charm and a ready ear. She remained still and quiet, noting that Emma Penticost had stationed herself by the door, standing like a statue apart from her eyes which flicked constantly from the two nuns to the window and beyond.
Mother Rachel talked about the Community of St Catherine of Siena, in particular the daily routine of those nuns who remained in the Mother House here in Silverhurst Road: the rising bell at five-thirty each morning; mass at six then the day studded with those little services known as the divine office – matins, terce, sext, nones, lauds and compline – serving as a discipline of prayer, sung at their appointed hours in the chapel or, for the nuns ‘in the field’ as Mother Rachel put it, recited in a convenient church or quiet place. ‘We think of it as a great wheel of prayer,’ she said. ‘And to us nothing is more important than worshipping God in a strict and regular manner. It is our duty as a religious order. Difficult for men and women out in the world to understand. So often people regard prayer as a parroting of words learnt in childhood.’
To Suzie’s surprise Tommy asked if Shakespeare hadn’t had something to say about that in Hamlet. And Mother Rachel told him, yes, Claudius at prayer when Hamlet wanted to kill him. She even quoted it:
‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’
‘You know your Shakespeare, Reverend Mother.’
‘I know why Hamlet didn’t kill Claudius when he was at his prayers.’
‘Why?’
She laughed, gruff and throaty. ‘Because Shakespeare was a good playwright and killing Claudius would’ve cost him the rest of the play. Ended it all too soon.’
Tommy asked Mother Rachel if it was usual for the novices to be in their cells at that t
ime of day. ‘Noon, couple of minutes either way when the V-1 struck?’
Suzie remembered looking at her watch. Three minutes past twelve noon exactly. This must have been the one they heard in Upper St Martin’s Lane.
‘Absolutely normal. All the sisters return to their cells at noon when they’re here in the convent. They say the Angelus and then spend half an hour in quiet prayer and contemplation, before going to the refectory for what you would call lunch at half past twelve. We have a strict routine of work and prayer: the singing of the daily office, which I’ve told you is a set of punctuation marks in our days. In the morning sisters usually work on their special subjects. Those who teach must also learn. It is part of our duty. In the afternoon we carry out set tasks, helping Mr Cobbs and his team in the gardens, cleaning individual cells, keeping the passages and corridors clean, tidy and polished. Four sisters are detailed each week as sacristans, and of course there is much to do in the way of mending, keeping the vestments in good order. And naturally there is cooking. We have many good cooks here. It is sometimes difficult to avoid the sin of gluttony. Even now, with the rationing.’ She laughed. ‘You and your people must eat with us sometime, some evening perhaps,’ she said, and Tommy Livermore blanched at the thought of the Reserve Squad sitting down to eat with platoons of nuns.
After about an hour’s conversation a bell began to toll deep within the building.
‘A call to prayer?’ Tommy asked.
‘Rather a call to the inner woman,’ Mother Rachel smiled. ‘That is the call to the refectory. We have our evening meal at seven.’
‘Then you must go, Reverend Mother, and we’ll wait until you’ve eaten, then go with you to identify the bodies.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Suzie thought, ‘I’m bloody famished,’ and was immediately aware of a twinge of guilt at having thought a swear word, so ingrained was her school training. In the presence of nuns, Suzie was returned to near child-like innocence and discipline.
