When I returned home from Lakes Entrance, my mother took me aside. ‘You know the neon cross I gave you for your birthday, Carla? Well, it got broken.’ It was the cross on the wall of my bedroom which lit up softly at night. She didn’t tell me who had done it, but I knew it was my sister. Even though she had many boyfriends, Liesbet had become jealous of my friendship with Alana, and had found her way of wreaking vengeance. She was jealous of my friendship with Barbara as well, and tried to pry her away from me. She also damaged Alana’s memento. The sister I thought had it all, because she was so popular and somehow didn’t have to do half of the housework I did, thought I was better off than her. Given that we had the same upbringing, where self-esteem was almost a sin, it wasn’t surprising. Our mother deliberately fostered rifts between her daughters; for what reason, I’m not sure. To prevent us ganging up on her? Who knows? We talk of the past sometimes, my sister Liesbet and I. We love each other dearly and she is one of my best friends now, the sister who once refused to let me share a pilfered lipstick. ‘No, you can’t use this; you haven’t even got lips!’
MUSIC AND SINGING were the highlights of the week at college. I had a good voice, true to pitch. Our music mistress was Mother Margaret Mary, a small nun with large glasses, who had to stand on the podium next to the piano to make herself visible to the class. The most remarkable thing about her was her sensitive mouth. Her upper lip was larger than the lower, and sat upon it as if waiting to be kissed. I envied those lips and tried to shape mine like hers.
Mother Margaret Mary gave us an assignment. We were to write our impressions of ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun’, a lyrical piece by Claude Debussy. I was so overcome with emotion at hearing the music that I couldn’t write a thing about it for days. When I finally found words—ever so poetic and delicate they were—it was too late; she would not accept late work. Through her, we were introduced to ‘Where is Sylvia?’, ‘Hark, Hark the Lark’ and all the songs that become young ladies. It was sheer delight.
In those four years of college, I learned to feel connected to my classmates. Even so, I couldn’t share their animated secret conversations about boys. Not only did I dismiss this stuff as something that didn’t concern me because I was going to be a nun, I was genuinely turned off. I didn’t know what the girls were talking about; couldn’t even imagine it. Sex was awful, as far as my subconscious knew, and I prevented myself from finding out about the real facts of life. Yet I frequently dreamed of Bing Crosby, a much older daddy-type film star, whose crooning voice had captivated my soul. I would be swimming across the ocean and appear somehow in his swimming pool, where he would be sitting on the terrace and would graciously help me out of the water. The imagined touch of his hand and the sound of his voice thrilled my dreaming soul.
Apart from Barb, only two girls ever came to my place. They were overwhelmed to discover that I slept with my sister, and were not impressed that there were no cakes or biscuits for tea. My mother was not the kind to make sweets, and those were the days before my three youngest brothers grew up and junk food entered the place.
The one great hit I made with the in-crowd was the day I pretended to put an aspirin in a bottle of Coke I had brought to school. I had overheard them saying that aspirin in Coke could make you lose your normal senses, feel drunk or something like that. You had to shake the bottle and make the aspirin dissolve. None of them was game to try, but I announced that I would do it. They watched as I put the tablet in, then shook the bottle hard. They stared fascinated as I slowly drank the fizz and began to stagger about and slur my speech. I did a superb job of faking it—because the stuff really did nothing to me—and right up until the end of lunch break I managed to stay the hilarious centre of wonderful attention. The bell helped me to regain fairly instant composure.
WORK WAS THE order of the day both after school and at weekends, except on Sundays. There was always so much to do. We didn’t have a washing machine, so we rubbed clothes and sheets on a wash-board with bare hands after they came out of the boiling copper. When the chores were done at home, I would go across the main road to Doctor Billings’ house, to bathe the three children—which became five after twins were born, and six when they adopted a child with a disability.
Both parents were doctors, Catholic, and devoted to each other. It was an excruciating sight for me to see them embrace one another when they came home from work; my parents never did such a thing. It tied my belly in terrible knots to witness their affection. Shyness and tears would well up at the same time. I was paid ten shillings at the end of each week, and handed the lot over to my mother. It was up to her to graciously give me two shillings back, so I could go to a dance or the movies.
Dances were the thing that saved us during those teenage years. Liesbet and I went dancing every Saturday and most Wednesday evenings. We had to travel quite a distance to get to the Box Hill town hall two suburbs away. There was a tram to catch and a bus, but we often chose to walk to save our pocket money.
There were two bands at the town hall: ballroom dancing upstairs and rock’n’roll downstairs: two completely different worlds. All the folks who couldn’t dance went downstairs, I told myself. I went there occasionally, out of curiosity, and was driven away by the raucousness of the music and the chaos on the dance floor.
Upstairs was much more graceful and predictable. My Italian friends preferred foxtrots and waltzes, and they had good rhythm. I was too tall for many of the shy Australian boys to ask me to dance, but the Italians were different and never minded the papare e papaveri—the tall poppy and the small one—dancing together, and neither did I. I danced with them every week and they became my friends.
I learned their songs, they gave us espresso coffee that made our spines run, and they saw us off on the last bus out. No one made advances, not even Luciano, the taxi driver. He became my mother’s friend, and she would ring for him whenever she needed a taxi, for she never learned to drive herself. Luciano, so handsome with his blond wavy hair and perfect teeth, was particularly polite to young girls. He realised that teenage girls needed to be romanced, and then left alone. God bless Luciano—at first much maligned by my mother, as all Italians were, until he proved himself to her.
On Wednesdays we went to Manresa Hall, which was near the Jesuit college for boys. Mostly Catholic people went there, and a different set of Italians.
With my Italian friends I could be at ease, extroverted and saucy. I was friends with all of them but had no boyfriend, something that made them suspicious towards the end, before I was due to leave for good.
Mariano, a rather lonely Italian guy, started giving me chocolates and flowers, which I accepted, but I never took up his invitation to go out with him. They huddled in a circle one evening, speaking heated Italian, before facing me with their question: ‘Do you live in Lygon Street?’ I said no, I lived in Kew, but they wouldn’t believe me. One of them was sure I was a whore he’d seen in Lygon Street, and they turned their backs on me. Mariano looked at me sadly, but there was nothing I could do. To him, it explained everything. I wanted to tell him and his friends that I was going into a convent and that was why I didn’t encourage any boyfriends. As I was leaving I mentioned this to one Italian who stood away from the group. They never saw me again, as the time for going in was now so close, and whether my name was eventually redeemed or not I don’t know. Italians! If only they weren’t all suspicious Catholics!
I TURNED EIGHTEEN and started having nightmares about school, dreaming that I’d never be able to leave. At the end of Year 11, I still wore those dreadfully heavy lace-ups that made my big feet look even bigger. That year was to be my last, but before leaving I was to play the lead role in the annual school play.
Les Cloches de Corneville was a hackneyed production which wasn’t expected to tax the imagination of the producer, the seemingly ubiquitous Mother Eleanor, to an inordinate degree. I was both appalled and flattered to be chosen for the role of the count, dressed in satin hose and frilly jacket
. The female lead was Ann Hathaway, a small dainty girl with a voice that made her a professional later in life. This was before the time of PA systems on stage and our lines had to project to the end of the hall. My Dutch vocal cords drove Mother Eleanor almost to despair; they blunted and blurred what was trying to come out of my mouth.
We had to dance a minuet, Ann Hathaway and I, a tricky manoeuvring which I never fully mastered. The concert, eventually judged a success, was a feat of endurance for the despairing nuns. ‘How wonderfully boorish of you. Why not wear clogs and stomp about like a horse?’ This sarcasm from one of the nuns cut so deep that she was shocked and changed her strategy to handing out compliments. I was only human, and it worked much better.
I sacrificed many precious weekend hours learning my part, and for weeks I walked around close to complete exhaustion. The nuns finally noticed and I was sent home early on occasion to get some rest. What exhausted me, and everyone else, was my shyness. Stage fright is a well-known sensation, but this ran deep, very deep, into a bottomless fear of exposing what I felt I was at the core: a rotten apple. I felt helplessly transparent. Phenomenal energy was needed to convince me that I could act well enough to get away with it. Poor nuns: how could they have guessed the white fear they were working with? ‘All for Jesus through Mary’ and ‘Courage and Confidence’ were the mottos they drew on to help them along with the extraordinary sacrifice of time and energy the production demanded.
The audience was appreciative throughout the performance, and thought it was funny to see my feet lose the plot in the middle of the intricate minuet. I gratefully warmed to their kindly attention, and managed to enjoy the performance. After the concert, as custom demanded, the whole choir of senior girls gathered to stand on tiered cloth-covered boxes, stools and steps to sing the school song and that glorious hymn to Mary, Gounod’s ‘Magnificat’. We sang like angels, our spirits soaring after our successful performance and with the beauty of the harmonies.
Afterwards a large young man with black hair in tight curls surrounding his chubby but serious face, and brown eyes, came up to me. ‘Carla, this is Keith,’ his sister introduced him to me. He had been in the audience. Touched by what he saw and heard, he had wanted to meet me, the star performer.
When he had me to himself, Keith’s manner was shy but steadily determined. ‘Can I call on you, Carla? We can go for a drive or something.’ He didn’t even blink when I told him straight off, ‘Keith, it’s no use us starting a relationship, because I’m going into a convent in three months’ time.’
Completely undeterred, he arrived at our gate the very next weekend to take me for a ride on the back of his motorbike. What fantastic fun! He soon acquired a Holden with a bench seat in front, and we went for long drives, mostly saying nothing but our bodies burning with desire. I looked at him furtively and felt him aware of it, and wondered how long we were going to maintain this self-denial.
‘Saint Maria Goretti, come to my aid!’ I whispered to myself. Maria Goretti, a young Italian girl, had recently been proclaimed a saint after she was murdered for refusing to have sex. A huge picture of her filled a large section of the wall in front of the assembly hall, her eyes lifted dolefully to heaven for help and a bunch of lilies clutched to her chest. She had been proclaimed ‘a saint for our times’, a role model for all girls who were sinfully tempted—which occurred more in our times than ever before, it seemed.
Keith suffered from flat feet so we didn’t go for walks much, and besides he had a tendency to be overweight and didn’t like exercise. His affection for me grew and I loved him for his generosity in freely giving me his friendship and admiration. He asked me why I wanted to go into the convent. I forget what answer I gave him—it was the will of God, or something—but he never tried to dissuade me. For eight years he waited for me, only giving up when he was told that I had made my final vows.
IT WAS ASSUMED without question by all the nuns and the girls in my class that I would enter the convent, together with five others. That last year at school I was awarded the highest recognition for a school prefect: the Louise Grieve Prize, a statue of Our Lady.
Louise Grieve, we were told, had been an outstanding pupil of the school many years ago, and had instituted an annual prize for the girl with the best school spirit. I knew that wasn’t me; I was cynical, both about school spirit and the prize for it, which smacked of bribery. I was the girl who took off my gloves on the way home from school, had once gone into the Greek Orthodox church, and regularly went to visit her Italian friends while in uniform. Apart from that, I was often late for school, did nothing at fundraising times and was never very flattering in my opinions of the nuns. However, the prize was as much a device for instilling the much-vaunted school spirit as a reward for it. My mother kept the statue. It fell once and broke, and she had it expertly mended at great expense only to discover later on that I didn’t want it back. My sister, Mary, appreciated it as a symbol of the feminine and put it in her garden.
All the senior girls were expected to be members of the Sodality of the Children of Mary. We wore a shining silver medallion of Mary on a shining blue ribbon and fine white tulle enveloped our faces, giving us the illusion of being angels. The Sodality girls met in the chapel after school and were taught about modesty and all the virtues that the Virgin Mary stood for. We visited her blue-and-white statue in the grotto in the garden. Her hands were joined, her eyes looked up to heaven, and her feet were not quite on the ground.
On 8 December, the date for the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, the Children of Mary busied themselves for hours, decorating her altar in the concert hall. I brought a bunch of late forget-me-nots, a little nothing in that sea of lilies, larkspur, delphiniums, gypsophila and roses, their exotic perfume even more heady in the humidity of the confined space. We cleaned the floor of the hall and were soaked in sweat by midday. At 2 pm the long procession began.‘Our Lady conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee’, was the special prayer that day for our souls that had been conceived in sin.
The long journey home on the trams was more crowded on feast days, because it was later in the day and working people were going home. At those times, it was impossible to read or even sit down; we had to make do with hanging on to a strap to try to keep our balance. On wet days, there were the steaming smells of offices, sawdust and oil, perfumes, talcs, warm clothes and wet mackintoshes. Hardly anybody said a word as we were tossed against each other with the tram’s every stop and start. Some people managed to read a newspaper in those conditions, holding the paper close to their nose, tightly folded so as not to poke it in the eye of the next person, unwillingly pressed up against them.
It was on one of those crowded days that a boy managed to get his hands into my pants. I could feel his fingers but pretended I was dreaming, that he was not really there. Everyone else around me was also pretending—pretending that the others in the tram did not exist. I just went a notch further, going into a freeze. I was totally unable to stop him. My brain went into the automatic response of denial, just like long ago, when my father came to me in the night. I couldn’t risk knowing fully, couldn’t pull away; the best way to get by was to be as unconscious as possible.
I never looked at the boy who had jammed himself next to me, but I saw him as he left the tram, exuberant at the success of his subterfuge. Then the shame and the remorse hit me and made me turn scarlet. Walking the short distance home after alighting, I tried to erase it from my mind.
No medal of Our Lady on a blue ribbon was going to protect me from my inability to face my sexuality; neither would the brown cloth picture of Our Lady of Mount Carmel that we were obliged to wear under our clothes. I entered the convent for a multiplicity of reasons—one of them was the fact that I was totally unable to face life as an adult.
EVER SINCE I had come into contact with nuns, I had heard them talk about vocations, and dreaded the possibility that I might ever be cursed with one. Nuns seemed as cold as ic
e. In Holland they were cruel and self-centred; in Australia many seemed conceited and self-righteous. Most of them weren’t real people, not natural, and the last thing I wanted was to become one of them. Even at the age of six, it used to give me awful shivers just to go near the convent walls. Those shivers had to do with a premonition, because I knew that in spite of all my dread I would be a nun one day, that it was an unavoidable fate.
At the age of seventeen, just in case my motivation to enter the convent had weakened after my friendship with Keith, the nuns provided powerful inelegant prods to engender fear. All the young women who were about to leave school were fed stories of girls who hadn’t followed their religious vocation. Their lives, we were told, were full of misery because they had deprived themselves of the grace of God. It was like leaving a path that had been mapped out, the only route filled with God’s grace. The results of refusal were unhappy marriages, stillborn babies, terrible illnesses and bad luck. Nevertheless, my stomach would turn into knots whenever I saw a mother with a baby. Babies were not to be for me, and I cried inside.
The tension in me was immense, because, in spite of the repulsion I felt, I knew there was no escape: I would have to go in. It was the will of God, I told myself. God would love me for my sacrifice. God would also bless my family, as the nuns had promised. I wasn’t just searching for the Truth; I was searching to be loved, really loved. I was like the young man in the story, looking for a lost key. He was searching under a lamp-post late at night, when a stranger came by and asked him where he had lost the key. The young man pointed out into the darkness. ‘Why are you looking for it here then, if you lost it there in the dark?’ the stranger asked. ‘Because,’ the young man asserted, ‘the light is here.’
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