by Anne Boileau
At last, after what seemed like a week of being cooped up in the coach with strangers – who kept changing, with some getting off and others getting on – we clattered into Grimma. This was the last stop for the coach. The sun was setting like a red orange and a mist was rising. My escort helped me down from the coach and gave a coin to the postilion who brought down our bags from the roof.
“Now, my child, someone is meeting you here, I assume?”
“Yes, I think so.”
And sure enough, there was a nun in a white habit and black veil sitting in a little donkey cart in the town square. She stepped down and walked towards us.
“Fräulein von Bora?”
“Yes”
No-one had ever called me Fräulein before, so I felt flattered. But my head was aching terribly. The nun took my bag and stowed it in the cart.
“There. Shall we go then?”
She shook hands with the lady, thanking her for minding me. I said thank you too and she patted me on the head and said,
“Well, good luck, dear girl, and may God go with you.”
The journey had been exhausting. I crept into my little bed, one of twelve in two rows in a dormitory, and lay quite still, curled up tight. I thought about home and tears slid silently down my cheeks, wetting the pillow, salting my lips. Every time I nearly fell asleep I woke with a jolt, still feeling the bump and lurch of the carriage, hearing the clattering of horses’ hooves, the cracking whips, the coachman cursing and encouraging the horses. I had never made such a long journey before; my head ached, and I thought it was just because I was tired and scared, but when I woke from a fitful sleep with the morning bell I felt both cold and hot and very ill.
“The child has a fever. She’ll have to go to the Lazarette.” I was told, not unkindly, to get up and a nun led me along a creaky passage, up some more stairs and into another dormitory which was set aside for sick girls. I crept into the new bed, and shivered and sweated and felt miserable. The next day I was covered in spots. I had caught the measles.
I was only the first of many. One of the girls died, but I never knew her. I don’t know how long I was ill, but I remember being aware of this lovely person in a white habit and black headdress, sitting by my bed. I have a recollection of her cooling my hot head with a damp cloth, helping me to sit up and holding a mug of herbal tea to my lips. Of her kind hands giving me a bed-bath, her soft voice reassuring me. And gradually, as I emerged from fever, I watched her more closely, tall and graceful, gliding softly from bed to bed, nursing us. She looked like my father, spoke like my father, moved like my father. I realised then that she must be my aunt. And I loved her.
Perhaps it was because I was feeling weak and acquiescent after the measles that the imposition of a strict routine, with rules and regulations, did not seem too objectionable to me. I didn’t mind the rigid timetables, the repetitive prayers, the list of petty rules. No whistling, no running in the corridors, no whispering, no jumping on the beds. Speak to grownups only when spoken to; never interrupt; at meals, begin to eat only when the nun at the head of the table has begun to eat. Say your prayers every morning, noon and evening. And so on.
We new girls adapted quickly to the daily routine: up at dawn with prayers. Breakfast, then labour (usually laundry or some other work for the convent) then lessons. Lunch. A rest on the floor in the refectory, while a nun reads to us. Exercise outside. More labour, in the kitchen or garden. Homework. Prayers. Bed.
I enjoyed the lessons. I could read already but learning to write was fascinating, comparing the shapes of the letters on our slates with the letters in the books we were allowed to look at. Our teacher Sister Plenitude told us we must master the art of fine calligraphy and painting so that when we became nuns we could copy books to a high standard and illustrate them with illuminations. To that end we learnt drawing as well, on a very small scale.
“If it were not for the great religious houses, many books would have been lost forever. Monks and nuns have kept the torch of learning, of history and the word of God alive by copying them, and teaching boys and girls how to read and write. This is why you girls must learn to write very neatly and paint very precisely, so that you can copy manuscripts and books for future generations.”
We could not know then that in a few years this great industry of copying by hand would be obsolete and the monks and nuns made redundant. Printing would sweep all that away.
We learnt Latin too. Of course we knew the sounds already from church and occasionally I had heard Father talking in Latin to other learned men. But I had only learnt the rudiments. Now I loved learning the words, the declension like dominus, domine dominum, domini domino domino. The conjugation of verbs. Amo amas amat, amamus amatis amant. When we went out for play we ran about chanting Latin at each other and laughing at ourselves. The ancient language made us feel grown up, the words had an unfamiliar shape in our mouths; it was the language of knowledge and power. We had thought of it as the language of men and boys, not women and girls, so we felt proud to be learning it. Quite soon Sister Plenitude was writing up whole sentences for us to translate. To help us, she would draw little pictures of the words we couldn’t guess. Life in the school was regimented and confined, but it was not boring.
From time to time we felt homesick, but gradually my old life became a distant memory. Then I lost Moly. It had been my most treasured possession when I first arrived and I was never parted from it. At night I kept him under my pillow, and by day he hung round my neck, under my tunic. Even when I was sick with measles, he stayed under my pillow. But one dreadful day, Sister Charity, a cold fish and a bully, was doing dormitory patrol before lights out. I was brushing my hair and Moly lay beside me on the bed.
“What’s that?”
“It’s my mole” I said, whipping him away out of sight, under my blanket.
“Give it to me, child.”
“No.”
“Do as I say, give it to me now. Or I shall have to call the Mother Superior.”
“What will you do with him, Sister Charity?”
“That is not for you to ask. You know quite well, we should not gather possessions about us, they lead to unnatural attachments and distract us from God’s love. You must relinquish all such vanities, and love only our Lord and his blessed Mother.”
She spoke all this in a sing-song intonation as if it came straight out of a book of rules. I had no choice but to give him up. She held him gingerly between finger and thumb as if he were a dead rat, and glided away out of the dormitory and down the stairs. Ave tiptoed over and hugged me, trying to comfort me, but even so I cried myself to sleep that night. When I woke in the morning I thought it must have been a bad dream and felt for Moly under my pillow. But he was gone, it was true and a wave of misery washed over me. My mole had been my only connection to home; all the love that I had for my father, my sister and baby brother, for Sebastian and Magdalena, for my owl and the horses and dogs and house, all my love for them had been bottled up and held in this tiny little scrap of moleskin and sawdust. He had lost most of his fur; even the little hands and feet had fallen off, so it was scarcely recognisable as having once been a mole.
I hated doing laundry and my hands got very sore from the hot water and the soap. I showed Sister Charity my hands and asked her if I could be put on some other duty, but she was unsympathetic and said not to make such a fuss, my hands needed to get tougher and so did my spirit. But when the skin broke and the wounds became infected, Sister Plenitude overruled Charity and said I should do dry work until they healed.
The days and weeks and months went by. Prayers, lessons, labour, play, reading, prayers, bed. Festivals brought a break to the routine: Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension Day, Walpurgis night, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, Midsummer’s Day, Harvest Thanksgiving, Michaelmas, All Saints and All Souls, Martinmas, Advent and back to Christmas. On some of these occasions we would meet up not only with the nuns in the convent, the ones who were not teachers, but also
the village folk, some of whom used to come and do work in the school and convent. The butcher, the blacksmith, the builder, the extra farm hands, even the man who cleaned the latrines.
The nuns worked us hard but were mostly kind and fair. My childhood at Lippendorf, my time of running free, of hiding in the stables and exploring attics, riding the cob, of calling into the dusk for my pet owl, were gone. I was learning what I must learn in order to be considered for admission as a nun in the convent Marienthron.
Every year we grew taller and attained higher status, until eventually Ave and Brigitte and Elisabeth and Renate and I were the oldest and tallest; we had responsibilities; the nuns treated us with more respect; and we were beginning to look and feel like women.
Chapter 4
Life as a Novice
Grösste Knechtschaft und grösste Freiheit – beides sind grösste Ubel
Complete slavery and complete freedom – both are complete evil.
When I was fifteen I became a novice in Marienthron Convent. It was the natural progression and it never occurred to me that I might leave the school and return home for marriage; of course I knew that my sister Irmingard was to be married shortly, but I didn’t envy her in the slightest.
My friend Ave von Schönfeld was a novice too; she and I had been friends since we were nine years old. We had shared our secrets, exchanged friendship bands, confided our doubts and fears: homesickness, dislike of Sister Charity; fear of the Abbess or the visiting priest when we were in trouble. Ave has four older brothers and she is rather boyish in her movements and sense of humour. She’s tall and thin, with angular features; a prominent nose and pale blue eyes; outwardly she seems grave, but in fact she has a rebellious streak and a keen sense of the ridiculous; she and I got into trouble more times than I could count for playing practical jokes. We come from similar backgrounds; her family, like mine, is well-connected but fallen on hard times. We both love music too, and played lute together and enjoyed singing, both for fun, folk songs, and choral singing in church.
As we grew up, not only physically, but spiritually, we whispered at night about our favourite saints; about how our hearts ached when saying our prayers and coming close to Mary and Jesus: that burning sensation, the ardour we both experienced at certain times when we were praying very hard and Our Lord was listening.
So five of us, including a widow from outside who wanted to join the order, were admitted into the inner confines of the convent to begin a year on probation, learning how to be a good nun. It was a simple little ceremony, where we said good-bye to the younger schoolgirls and changed our school pinafores for a plain grey fustian tunic; we would wear this all year, so we could be distinguished from the professed nuns who wore white woollen habits and black veils. We were put under the wing of an older nun called Sister Clara, our novice mistress. On the wall of the refectory was a picture of Our Lady with the baby Jesus, holding her cloak out like a mother hen, with six little Cistercian nuns on her left and six little monks on her right; in a funny way I felt I was one of Sister Clara’s little chicks. She was firm but forgiving, and smiled with her eyes if not always with her lips. If we made mistakes she looked disappointed rather than angry and when we did well she praised us and was pleased; this made us want all the more to do the right thing.
I was prone to losing my temper; it was always the same women who annoyed me. One afternoon after rest I got into a fight with another novice called Monika, she was a little older than me. She had been taunting me in silent language, implying I was snobbish. I assumed it was because her father from Erfurt had paid a handsome dowry for her, because her piggy little eyes made her unmarriageable. Apart from her pasty complexion, she had always lived in the town and had not the first idea how to milk a goat or kill and pluck a hen or catch a runaway piglet. She even refused to skin and draw a rabbit for Cook, saying it was disgusting. Our quarrel was sparked off by silent looks and little wordless insults – the very silence of it made it even more maddening – and I suddenly grew dizzy with fury; I lashed out at her and started pulling her hair and swearing at the top of my voice. I heard my own shrill cries echoing around the cloisters, and it was as if I had been possessed by a demon.
Of course the cloisters are supposed to be kept tranquil for walking up and down in prayer and meditation, and by now we were both screaming and swearing in language we scarcely knew we had. Sister Fenella came gliding out of the shadows and pulled us apart by our hair; she marched us, gripping our collars like two dogs in disgrace, across the courtyard and up the stairs to the Abbess’s apartment.
On entering her study, we prostrated ourselves on the floor, as we must do when we have transgressed. Her black cat came and sat very close to my face and stared at me with his cold yellow eyes.
“You may stand up now, girls. So, Sister Fenella, tell me what has been going on.”.
“Reverend Mother, I caught these two fighting like cats in the cloisters. You probably heard them. I broke it up, good Mother, but have brought them here for your correction.” She stood there smugly, turning her hands around in front of her and pursing her lips primly.
The Abbess was a wise and fair woman. Although she was my mother’s cousin, she never gave me preferential treatment. But I think she might have noticed the family likeness, and had a soft spot for me within her heart. Also, I am sure she understood the strain we sometimes came under, living so closely together in an all-female community, under a strict regime and with no privacy. But rules were rules, so she obliged us to wear the hated oblong hank of red felt fixed below the chin, hanging down over our chests, for a whole week; this symbolised a big ugly tongue, and was meant to shame us by exposing our use of foul language. Monika and I developed an uneasy truce after this shared humiliation. But our superior Sister Clara was sympathetic; three days into that week she and I were sitting on a seat in the sunken garden after Vespers; she knew I was miserable about the horrible tongue and she took my hand and stroked it, saying “Only three more days; look on it as a valuable lesson in self-restraint. When you feel angry – and we all do, believe me, more often than you might think – try breathing deeply and offer your anger to Our Lord. Turn your mind to something good; a brood of newly hatched chicks, for instance, or the chestnut foal which Nellie brought into the world last week; and let your anger melt away.”
Dear Sister Clara. She knew how I loved horses and chickens, and I’ve always remembered her advice. How can you stay angry if you can watch, or even just call to mind, a hen with new chicks or a mare with a new foal? Which doesn’t mean I became well-behaved and restrained overnight; but at least I became aware when anger was about to erupt within me, and learnt how to manage it. I also tried to avoid areas of confrontation. I love a good argument, but hate to get into a brawl.
I made many mistakes, though, some worse than getting into fights. I disliked being treated as an inferior and would glare, or turn my back in defiance; then we had to confess our misdemeanours in front of all the other nuns, and ask for forgiveness; “I am guilty of picking and eating eight hazelnuts on Tuesday when I knew they were not ripe. I am guilty of falling asleep in Lauds on Wednesday; I am guilty of sinful thoughts while milking; I am guilty of envy of Sister Angelica because she always gets more honey on her porridge; I beg for forgiveness of my sins.” And so on.
I underwent the gamut of punishments: hair shirt for a day; sitting alone in the corner at mealtimes with only water; having to prostrate myself length by length right up the aisle of the chapel; saying Ave Marias non-stop for two hours on my knees instead of recreation. Another frequent but communal sin was getting the giggles in chapel – the giggles would travel like a rash along the pew, sometimes we didn’t even know what we were laughing at, but it was like a volcano erupting, and the more you felt the stony glares of your superiors on you, the more you tried to stifle the laugh and the more it pushed to get out, bursting into snorts which we tried to transmute into feigned coughs or sneezes. And following on from that, the sin of
accidie: not taking the offices seriously, or feeling apathy towards God or His beloved Son or Our Lady. I tried not confessing to such sins but clamming up and keeping them secret seemed to make it worse, to exacerbate my guilt about them.
Once a month we were able to make private confession to the priest, which I found much easier than telling the whole community. But despite all these transgressions Ave and I seem to have survived our probationary year; our names were put forward for election by the whole community, to be admitted as professed nuns, and three of us, including me and Ave, were voted in.
Our admission ceremony was a wonderful day. Sometimes, when I feel my faith becoming sloppy, or doubt creeping in, I try to recall, to experience again, the ardour that burnt in my heart at that time. We were given plenty of time to prepare ourselves both mentally and spiritually for what was in effect our wedding day, the day when we became a Bride of Christ. We immersed ourselves in prayer and contemplation throughout the preceding day and most of the night. When the great day dawned, 8th October 1515, we felt so special, and so sure that what we were doing was right. My father and brother and sister came to the ceremony, they stayed two nights in the guest wing. We took our vows and were robed in our new white woollen habits and black veils, and a plain gold ring was slipped onto my finger by the Bishop. Then we were made a fuss of and a special meal was prepared in our honour, for us new nuns, their families, and of course the Bishop. It was a memorable occasion, a day I remember now with unusual clarity, like a wedding day. But imagine how unbelievable it would have been, had someone predicted on that day that I would, in ten years’ time, have another Wedding Day, that time to a man. And what’s more, to a man renowned (or notorious!) throughout the civilised world!
