God's Callgirl

by Carla Van Raay

  I was compelled to do the best I could, and I would do anything rather than give up hope that the key would be found. And yet it was the perfect thing to do. The Divine somehow had it all sewn up, even as I seemed to exercise my shaky free will in such a paradoxical manner. To go in was to be my way out.

  A month or so before I was due to enter the convent, my mother rushed into my bedroom. She had heard a loud sobbing and was horrified to discover me in a frenzy, tearing at my clothes and crying hysterically. I told her between sobs how terrible it was for me to go in. She listened to my despairing confusion: ‘I don’t want to go in, but I do want to!’ She felt sorry for me and comforted me, but what else could she do? Besides having a vested interest in the honour that my entering would bestow on her family, she too was a firm believer in ‘doing the will of God’.

  With her expert skills, she quietly helped me to get ready. She made me the simple black dress, apron and short cape that was part of the postulant’s uniform. I needed a net cap to stop my hair from blowing in the breeze or falling about, lisle stockings and the detested old black lace-up shoes I’d worn to school, with new soles glued on by Dad. Underwear as usual. Nightdresses were to be plain white. My mother and I made some from white flannelette and some from cotton sheets.

  I did allow myself one statement before going in: I sewed large bright red buttons on every one of my white nighties.

  PART TWO

  ASKING FOR TROUBLE

  FEBRUARY 1957, A hot day in Melbourne. A version of me I had never known before, accompanied by my proud and smiling parents, walked with straight shoulders past the cypress hedge that stretched all the way from my home to the convent. I arrived at the nunnery’s back door to be received by a proudly smiling Reverend Mother. It was Cheshire Cat day; there were smiles such as I had never seen, the biggest from Reverend Mother Winifred, the Cheshire Cat herself, as I (strictly privately) called her.

  I had become a postulant—literally ‘one who asks’; in this case, one who asks to be admitted to become a nun. There were five other ‘possies’ with me, all girls straight out of school, like myself. I hadn’t even done my matriculation year; neither had some of the others. In a few years my eager younger sister, Berta, would be accepted at the age of barely sixteen, ecstatic to get away from home and still have a roof over her head.

  ‘For fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ wrote Alexander Pope. If anyone had called me a fool in those days, I would have replied:‘Oh yes, I am; I’m a fool for Christ.’ I was single-minded; a euphemism for blind.

  I couldn’t afford to examine my motives. Motives didn’t seem to bother the nuns’ consciences either. They couldn’t afford to look too closely at their much-needed recruits, even if they’d had the psychological know-how to detect ulterior motives. It has taken thirty years of my own life, after all, to fully understand why I thought I had no choice but to go into a nunnery.

  ‘God beholds thee individually whoever thou art. He calls thee by name. He sees and understands thee as He has made thee…’ These words had somehow wafted their way to me, on a piece of paper I found floating in the street one day on my way home from school. They had touched me deeply, and I clung to the original scrap of paper as if it were a treasure map. I sure needed someone who knew me, as I didn’t know myself, and nobody else seemed to either. I needed the promise of being ‘beheld’ by my God, who, it said, ‘knew me by name’. I could not afford to turn my back on this. ‘ Thou canst not love thyself as He loves thee…He compasses thee round and bears thee in His arms.’ Such comforting words to one who doubted love.

  I said goodbye to my parents, knowing that I would most likely see my father in the convent grounds every day, and, if not, he would make it his business to see me somehow. And my mother was only a minute’s walk away. They had tears in their eyes. Had they known what was in store for me, they might have bawled or taken me away by force. But nothing like that happened. There was an unreal atmosphere of holy sacrifice and blind trust that day.

  I was led into the inner sanctum, into which I had so often seen the nuns disappear; the domain where I imagined them to fade into vaporous non-human beings. I had been shocked at school when Mother Anthony took a handkerchief from the bottomless pocket of her skirts and vigorously blew her nose in front of her class. The shock came from the realisation of her humanness, and an aesthetically offensive one at that. It was an exotically strange feeling now, to be finally admitted behind the scenes. Understandably, I entered with the FCJs, the order which had taught me.

  Out in the sunshine the next day, dressed in our black cotton frocks, aprons, short capes and white hairnets, each aspirant had her photograph taken—an innovative memento for the parents that year.

  It would take stern self-discipline to stop me taking the opportunity to call in on my mother, as she was so near. Sometimes I dreamt about it. One morning, I glided around the inside of the cypress hedge, past the nuns’ washing lines and Sister Kevin’s chookyard, and spied her hanging out the clothes in the backyard. I called out to her. She was surprised and looked so guilty that I had the distinct feeling that my furtiveness wasn’t completely appreciated. Nevertheless, I discovered years later that my mother was frequently spotted slinking along the same cypress hedge by my brothers and sisters, to sneak a look when she thought the nuns wouldn’t catch her.

  My first letter home described the circumstances of my new life. ‘I get up as if my bed is on fire,’ I wrote, ‘then we wash away all our laziness with cold water.’

  For the first few months we rose at 6.15 am, in time for twenty minutes’ meditation before seven o’clock Mass. A novice would run through the dorm, breaking the early-morning stillness by shouting ‘Praise be to Jesus!’ with as much piety and urgency as she could muster. She would not leave until she heard an ‘Amen!’ from behind every curtain. Getting up was the first joyful act of obedience. I literally bounded out of bed.

  The dormitory for postulants and novices was originally designed to be a chapel, but it was never used for that, being situated high up on the third floor. The dorm, gowned with white curtains to made cubicles for twelve beds, felt more like a dreaming room for angels or fairies. Its large arched double oak doors looked like wings, and there were tall sash windows at the far end, set in a five-sided wall, giving the room a rounded look. The floors, as throughout the entire building, were polished wood. The metal wire-slung beds had very down-to-earth horsehair mattresses. At home, I had been used to kapok, dusty and lumpy but supremely comfortable compared with unyielding horsehair. It was something to get used to, and nobody complained.

  In the morning, summer and winter, we washed in cold water. The water was collected in a pitcher the evening before, to be poured into a metal basin standing on a wooden locker in the morning. We would strip the bed and put the bedclothes on the single chair that fitted neatly in the small remaining space next to the bed, then sweep back the curtains as we left. The two people at the end of the dorm had more room than the others because of the rounded wall. I was one of the fortunates to be given an end cubicle, and slept beside an open window through which I could see the stars and the moon. ‘The view from the window even beats the view from the top of the tree in our yard,’ I wrote, to let my family know how wonderful it all was. ‘FCJ stands for First Class Jailbirds,’ wrote back my brother Willem.

  Postulancy was, on the whole, a rather gentle introduction to the ways of the nuns. We shared the living quarters of the novices, who had been there for a whole year and wore the complete habit, but with a white bonnet and veil instead of the fully-fledged nuns’ black. Except for the times we met in chapel, and for some readings, we postulants and novices were segregated from the nuns. It meant that, for the moment, we were shielded from the day-to-day routine of those who had taken permanent vows—or perhaps they were shielded from us! In spite of being an optimistic postulant, I was still in fear of the total blackness of the nuns’ habit.

  The only visible white on a nun was
on the forehead: a half-moon-shaped strip of starched cotton which fitted between the brow and the hairline, known as a bandeau, inside a white, stiffly starched band around the face. In spite of the urgent advice of Pope Pius XII at the 1950 Congress for Religious in Rome that nuns should modify their clothing to suit modern life, no changes had been made. Ten years after entering the convent, I would have nightmares about this little bit of white on the forehead, the only part of me that had been symbolically left intact.

  In this nightmare I dreamed that the nuns, who all lived precariously in a treetop house with dangerous holes in the floors, had asked me to skin a cat. The cat was black, but had a small white diamond patch on its forehead. I was handed the cat and a scalpel. The cat was limp, as if it had been knocked out, but was warm to the touch. Going totally against every instinct, and with complete horror, I proceeded to obey a command I did not allow myself to question. I proceeded to do ‘the will of God’. Scalpels usually make me want to faint, but in my nightmare I managed to use one to skin the warm, sleeping cat. I skinned off all of its black fur, but hesitated when it came to removing the white diamond-like piece on its forehead. I couldn’t do that! I didn’t do it, and left the white piece intact.

  I would wake up with pounding heart, but there was also a tiny flicker of triumph. The cat had fared badly (by my own hands), but it hadn’t been entirely skinned.

  THE BEGINNING OF postulancy was sweet: it was summertime; at first there weren’t even schoolchildren around; and there were no harsh demands. We were given a lot of leeway to help us gradually get used to the rules of silence, and I had the comfort of the company of other souls who were just as new as I was.

  The novitiate was a large square sunny room with a creaky floor, lined with large wooden desks. Each of us had her own desk in this friendly room, where we studied the rules of the convent, the scriptures, the life of our foundress, Madame de Bonnault d’Hoüet, and the lives of the saints. It was where we wrote our letters, and kept our missals and rule books.

  A statue of the patron saint of novices stood on a pedestal decorated with fresh flowers. There was another Saint Stanislaus in our dorm sharing the honour with Saint Anthony, patron saint of all things lost, and therefore a favourite saint. Why did we feel that we were always losing things?

  Every day we came together at recreation time, for a full hour after lunch and half an hour in the evening before prayers. Two large tables were placed together in the middle of the novitiate so we could all sit around them, postulants and novices together. Whenever the weather permitted we would go outside, walking leisurely to the friendly shade of a large tree, or watering two little oak trees we had planted in the horse paddock a short distance away. We adopted three pumpkin plants in the compost heap, but discovered one day that two had been pulled out by my father, the gardener. I complained about it in a letter to him, and received a reply explaining that only one could use the space. My father wasn’t a sentimental man.

  Our sense of fun was sharp in those days. Humour prevented the strange and unusual becoming macabre. All the same, the first time we joined the nuns in the common room for the daily reading session, and a nun knelt on the floor, accusing herself in a loud voice of some misdemeanour and asking her superior and us to forgive her and pray for her, I turned scarlet. I felt I was doing something indecent, just in witnessing this exposure. I stumbled into the chapel afterwards. Once there, I was in for another shock: nuns were kissing the chapel floor upon entering and leaving! Later, I saw nuns kissing the refectory floor—I never understood why—and, on especially penitential occasions, kissing venerable old nuns’ shoes—most often those of the Reverend Mother Vicar, grabbed by grovelling hands from beneath her skirts.

  A distinct feeling of having gone back to the Middle Ages overcame me. I was shocked to see a novice take her meals while kneeling on the floor, making her chair into a table. She was a little removed from the others and therefore from the possibility of serving herself. I came to understand that this happened quite frequently and was a sign of voluntary removal from the community for having broken a rule. To be fed by a compassionate volunteer meant that this humble apology had been accepted. Sometime during the meal, the superior would allow the sister to rejoin the community and take up her place at the table again. You could always count on being fed and forgiven, so the exercise was really a tame ritual.

  Our first novice mistress had an act of cultured grandeur about her because of her very straight back, her age, her gaunt looks, her powers of observation, sense of humour, intelligence and fortitude. Mother Philomena was slowly dying of cancer, which gave her a chance to sort things out in her very astute mind. Once she had been feared as a strict disciplinarian in the school, but she showed us a rare compassion. She took us for slow walks around the convent grounds, made magnificent by the huge conifers, oaks and elms, and the dedicated work of my energetic and resourceful father. She knew the names of all the trees and taught them to us. Mother Philomena was full of stories of life in other convents in other countries and the women who had lived in them.

  She loved our exuberance, although she made us keep the rules. Only one person was allowed to speak at a time. In her magnificently mild-mannered way she saw to it that everybody got a fair chance to contribute to our lively conversations.

  We had many sunny days to spend outside at recreation time, and I was happy. To me, recreation felt so civilised; it was unaccustomed civilisation, the nearest thing to the genteel ways I had read about in E M Forster’s A Room With a View, wistfully reminding me of my mother’s lost heritage. Often, we’d take chairs with us and sit under a shady tree to do our embroidery or our mending. Poverty meant we had to mend our clothes. Doing it for the glory of God meant mending them to perfection; our darned stockings were worthy of a needlewoman’s craft. Our embroideries too were works of devotion. They were sold to God knows where or given to God knows whom, and we learned the virtue of detachment by handing over the work of our hands and hearts without question. Later, much much later, I was astonished and angry to find out that my family had been paying their hard-earned money for the things I was embroidering.

  Recreation was also a time for sharing tall stories, asking sly questions about the nuns, and much laughter. We laughed a lot—we were young, full of repressed mischief, and needed relief from the anxious business of adjusting to a new life. Laughter was the great tension-defuser, the thing that kept us sane and restored healthy blooms to our cheeks. My natural sense of humour found scope in those daily sessions when everybody listened to you when it was your turn. It was only in the third year of my novitiate, after my new novice mistress told me to be sure to cultivate my sense of humour or I might lose it, that I started to forget to laugh. She had triggered some warning about pride—it was like winning too many marbles.

  Before this unfortunate reminder, I learned to tell jokes with flair, and wrote down the new ones to send home for the family to have a laugh.‘God looked over the walls of heaven at the souls in hell, who were writhing in terrible agony while the demons poured pitch over them and goaded them with red-hot pokers,’ began a joke of Scottish origin (perhaps it was one of Bertrand Russell’s, who must have told it better than I did). ‘His eyes searched out the souls among the flames and smoke. “Oh, God,” the souls agonised, “we didn’t a-ken it would be this bad.” God looked them over and said: “Well, ye ken it noo, doon’t ye?” ’

  I always thought this was a very risque joke; in it there was such a firm belief in hell and the eternal wrath of God. We must have felt pretty smug and secure to laugh at these sorts of in-house jokes. Somewhere inside me a key turned, but I hardly noticed it. Laughter has a way of banishing the devil, if only temporarily.

  Throughout my twelve and a half years of convent life, it was always the laughter and the togetherness that made any part of the experience seem worthwhile. The shared laughter created a camaraderie, a solidarity; the one thing that truly gave us a common identity. We even created a comm
on noticeboard for jokes to be posted, anecdotes that everyone could read, not just the possies and novices. It was a friendly communication device between the two camps of the fledglings and the fully fledged. ‘A housewife found a little live rabbit in her Westinghouse fridge one day. When she asked him what he was doing there, he said “Just westing.”“Just resting?” she queried. “Yes, isn’t this a westing-house?”’

  Sometimes I would catch sight of one of my little brothers. Once, my two-year-old brother Peter came wandering along with a teddy bear in his arms, looking for his daddy. I sent him on his way, not sure myself where Dad was, and he grinned and blew me kisses as he went. A few weeks later, during one of our outdoor recreation times, he sat nearby on the cement kerb, content just to be there. Every minute or so he’d say, ‘Allo, Ca-la!’ and smile. I was allowed to kiss him and send him home, pulling up his trousers because his belly was exposed. ‘I can’t find Mummy anywhere, Ca-la,’ he said. Poor little boy.

  The end of recreation time usually filled me with a feeling of great loss, even doom. Why couldn’t we continue to dream, to recreate the world, for a few more hours? Why this forlorn obedience to a clock? But 2 pm spelt sudden silence, like sudden death. The time was up; eyes down, hurry off to work duties.

  There was plenty of work to do. We postulants and novices must have saved the convent from massive cleaning bills. We worked hard in the laundry, in the kitchen, in the chapel, in the linen room—sorting clothes, making new ones, doing large mending jobs with sewing machines, in the dormitories; in fact, everywhere in that enormous place.