God's Callgirl

by Carla Van Raay

  So Catherine was in a tizz and I was responsible for her misery! I looked down and had trouble not to smile. It seemed ludicrous to me that Catherine’s distress was so important, and I didn’t have it in me to commiserate. ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I have shown her the work and told her all about it. There is nothing much to it.’ Mother did not reply to that, as I had expected, and let me go.

  Eventually Catherine’s face wore its beatific smile once more. How I hated her tragic saintly demeanour! Her face pulled at heartstrings, begging not to be given any task except to play the piano, please. Now she had mastered dusting the parlours and shining the floors—a simple thing. I despised her for being a mollycoddled child who had never had to clean anything at all, and who had been overwhelmed by the challenge I found so easy. In the end, however, it was Catherine who stayed, and I who left. But she hardly ever got her hands dirty again, and is still teaching music.

  When emergencies occurred that cut across the normal routine, we novices had to fill the sudden gaps. Just such a crisis happened one morning: none of the regular nuns was available to hold assembly for the girls in the primary school adjacent to Grange Hill. I was closest to hand at the time and was asked to hold the assembly in the open square until someone came to relieve me. I had no idea how to do this, except that it was necessary to keep everyone under control. I suppose we could have stood at ease in some way, but I found myself staring down at the girls with a grim determination caused by panic in case anybody moved and I would not be able to control them. As it turned out, nobody spoke a word, or did anything more than breathe uneasily. The replacement mistress eventually turned up, smiling away the tension and allowing me to disappear.

  WE NUNS SHOWED extraordinary devotion to priests, especially the local bishop and archbishop. For centuries, religious women had thought of themselves as less than priests, and when canon law was revised in 1917 this attitude was strengthened even more. Apart from being thought of as less intelligent than priests, nuns were also assumed to be timid little creatures. Worst of all, though, they could be thought of as a threat to a priest’s celibacy. So while nuns could venerate priests and fuss over them, they had to be careful to not overstep the mark in any way that could be misinterpreted.

  Archbishop Mannix, who later became a cardinal and was very influential in the preservation of conservative Catholic thought, resided in Kew and was invited to visit Genazzano, the convent in his home suburb, on his ninety-fifth birthday. To the awful delight of the community, the revered old man accepted and naturally a welcome had to be devised. He was Irish, perhaps from County Londonderry, and his first name was Daniel, which wickedly inspired the Irish contingent among us to dare to sing ‘ Danny Boy’ for him.

  The deeply greying archbishop gave nothing away as he sat and listened to the lyrics of this sentimental love song, hackneyed, yet polished up like a new penny by the musical ability and fervour of our well-practised choir. We watched his impassive face. The song was meant to convey loyalty and appreciation; had we presumed too much familiarity? Daniel Mannix held his bishop’s staff in his right hand, and when he used it to rise to thank us, our highly trained eyes detected the concession of a glimmer of a smile around his mouth. The relief that rippled through the ranks was almost audible.

  ALL THIS WHILE, life in my family home continued only a hundred metres or so away. In the cottage behind the cypress hedge, my mother was pregnant for the twelfth time at the age of forty-four. It was an anxious time; Saint Gerard, the patron saint of expectant mothers (for some reason I have forgotten), was promised that the child would bear his name if all went well. It did, and my baby brother Gary, later known as Gazza, became the proverbial spoiled child of the family. When he grew up, he was absolutely resolved never to have children of his own.

  I felt for my little brother when he was hanging on to Dad’s hand one day, dragging tired little legs. Dad had just burned a rat in the incinerator. Gary’s face was red with heat, his mind seemingly preoccupied with what had happened to the rat—a nasty creature to an adult, but to a child simply an animal.

  After all the glamour of becoming a novice, the ceremony of making our first real commitment with the triple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, two years later, was a simple and humble affair. Once again, the words were pronounced before the local bishop in the chapel, but this time they were said with only my religious sisters as witnesses. My life as a novice had been a time for learning the ways of the order, a two-year assessment to determine whether I really wanted to live as a nun for the rest of my life. I was nearly twenty-one and had grown used to the lifestyle; anything else was simply unimaginable by now. I genuinely loved God and the togetherness of community.

  And so, on a very ordinary wintry day, when the black serge was welcome cover for my skin, I traded my white bonnet and veil for black ones, received a large set of rosary beads to hang from my belt, and a cross of the dying Jesus. The Passion of Jesus wedded to the sacrifice of Carla. Two sufferings, the better to save the world.

  ENGLAND

  MADAME DE BONNAULT D’HOUET was a widow when she founded the Faithful Companions of Jesus, and her followers continued to wear her mode of dress after she died, as a tribute to her spiritual greatness and as a sign of their pledge to follow her example. It also gave them a recognisable identity in the world.

  So in the 1960s we looked exactly the same as our French foundress did at the turn of the nineteenth century, complete with ruffled bonnet and long pointed shawl. For the sake of genuine antiquity we wore a white cotton camisole underneath instead of a bra, covered with a white cotton shawl that crossed our breasts twice, thick enough to hide our nipples. Our foundress had been a truly innovative woman, way ahead of her time. Her followers, on the other hand, had managed to freeze her example and dress into a way of life, as if it were an absolute.

  Although we had professed our formal vows, we would not be considered fully fledged until after another two terms of probation, each lasting three years. Such was the rigour of making sure of a person before she took final vows and could no longer be expelled.

  The powers that be (which never consulted us) decided that some professed novices would go to Latrobe University in Melbourne; and that six of us, a mixed bag of recently professed and older nuns, would be sent to the order’s teacher-training college at Sedgley Park, just north of Manchester in England. Since I hadn’t completed my last year at school, and so wasn’t university material, I was to go to college.

  We were to travel there by ship. Passport photos were needed and the photographer came to the convent. My passport was still Dutch, since I wasn’t with my family when they became naturalised Australians in 1958, the year after I entered the convent.

  As part of the preparations, I was sent to the doctor to have my ears tested. Mother Mary Luke, my erstwhile primary school principal with the wry smile and the bustling manners, and another nun accompanied me. I hadn’t complained about my ears; others had complained about me for apparently not hearing things. I was often too wrapped up in thought, which can be a bad thing when someone sticks their head inside the room to make an impromptu announcement. My tendency to get things not entirely right or to understand instructions a little differently than intended had been observed several times, and had certainly been annoying to some.

  The doctor was not simply to examine my ears—he could have done that during any of his visits to the convent—but was instructed to wash them out. He did so reluctantly because, in his opinion, my ears were not dirty, let alone so caked up that they obstructed sound. It was then that I caught the sly smiles of my two companions, and I understood: this was a charade, a highly embarrassing punishment intended to make me learn to listen up! I sighed with dismay. I was vulnerable to embarrassment, but they had demeaned themselves by stooping this low to strike their message home. Nothing was said on the way back on the trams.

  We were to travel to England on the P&O ship, Oriana. Reverend Mother Winifred—the one with
the Cheshire Cat smile who harboured a particular dislike of me and who was a stickler for the rules—was to be our chaperone. But not even she was going to stand in the way of the excitement the six of us felt about travelling across the wide, wide ocean. And I was to retrace much of the journey I had made as a child migrating to Australia, nine years earlier.

  A jolly march played as the ship moved slowly away from the wharf at midday, and we huddled together to say a prayer for the safety of ourselves and our fellow travellers. This five-week trip was to be a first-class adventure, though we would have little, if anything, to do with the other travellers.

  We had two large cabins to ourselves on D deck; I shared one with three others, sleeping on the top bunk. The floor was thickly carpeted, the porthole beautifully curtained with chenille, and the ship’s soap was a welcome change from the plain yellow Velvet we were used to. The rule of silence was relaxed so we could talk to one another about what we saw, but not to the extent that we could communicate with passengers. We had a map so we could identify all the islands and places we passed.

  There were four travelling priests on board, who said Mass together every morning and attracted a dozen or so passengers. We nuns prepared the altar and ironed the vestments for the priests provided by the ship. They had to be pinned onto the senior priest, who took central stage on the altar, as everything was size XL, which he was definitely not.

  We had a dining room to ourselves, complete with our own waiter, a short young chap whose eyes boggled at the inane conversation of nuns. I think it blew his reverent Catholic ideas about religious women and their supposed composure and intelligence. He couldn’t believe our blithe ability to order things without knowing what they were. We hardly ever consulted him about the meaning of words on the extensive menu, which presented us with unaccustomed choice.

  ‘Gorgonzola; that’s an interesting name. Shall we ask for some? Everyone agreed?’

  Our waiter boy lifted his eyes to heaven and shifted from one foot to the other in a hopeless attempt to let us know that this was an unwise choice for the uninitiated, but he must have had instructions not to speak to us, let alone contradict us.

  The gorgonzola arrived, and we examined the strange-looking cheese. ‘Why does it have blue veins in it?’ someone had the good sense to ask. Our young attendant’s tongue was untied at last. ‘The mould creatures,’ he began enthusiastically, ‘gradually creep through the cheese as they eat away at it. They multiply their numbers as they go and…and…’ He hesitated, as if weighing up whether to inform us or not, and then seemed to decide it was his duty to tell us the truth in the politest language. ‘They defecate as they go along as well. It gives the cheese its unique flavour,’ he hastened to add. It was a good enough description to have the cheese sent back.

  The voyage took us through a variety of weathers, conjuring up many memories for me. Colombo’s steamy weather was followed by an almighty thunderstorm as we pushed out to sea. Great flashes of lightning lit up the dark clouds covering the whole sky, followed immediately by crashing claps of thunder. We watched as one particular flash turned into a fireball, which immediately came flying towards us. It fell in the water at close range, hissing and steaming as if angry for failing to hit the ship. ‘A narrow miss!’ said the awed passengers.

  Night-time brought another electric storm that knocked out the ship’s aerial. The explosive sound, followed by a strange sweeping wind, made us believe that the ship had caught fire. We just about wept for joy to find out it hadn’t at all, and then slept so soundly that we almost missed breakfast.

  Once again I came to the place where the young Egyptian of my teenage dreams had refuelled the migrant ship nine years ago. This time, as we briefly left our ocean liner to wander along the quayside, I noticed the poverty of the people. It struck me, however, that they were happy and quick to respond to kindness. Back on board we were surprised by a dark face peering into our cabin, and decided to close the porthole curtains.

  We glided majestically through the Suez Canal. It was such a delight to see through adult eyes the utterly strange and amazing world that had unfolded before me when I was a child. Our convoy of eight ships rounded a bend, and looking back we could see all the others following the Oriana, stately and precisely placed as if they belonged to Nelson’s fleet.

  Then, out to sea, we hit the doldrums. The only doldrums I knew were those feelings of dull listlessness and indecisiveness, a kind of depression, but when there was talk of ‘hitting the doldrums’, I knew it must be a nautical term as well. After lunch I displayed a typical example of that naive ignorance that my superior so hated in me. We were all staring at the water, looking, I presumed, for the doldrums. After a while I confessed that I couldn’t see them. ‘Please, would somebody show them to me?’

  Mother Winifred was affronted, probably thinking I was taking the mickey out of her. She couldn’t imagine that I was sincerely ignorant. ‘The doldrums is a belt of becalmed waters, where sailors of old were often stranded with no wind to push their sails,’ one of the others explained. I shall always remember that piece of information!

  Every day we went for a one-mile walk—seven times around the deck. Not once did I feel seasick.

  It was Easter when we reached France, and very cold. The crane operators were in no festive mood, their faces frozen against our attempts to cheer them up with smiling sympathetic faces.

  We reached Southampton at five-thirty on the morning of 27 March 1960, on a typically rainy day that blotted out all colours. The way through the harbour was littered with grey industrial buildings and dismal machinery. We were met at the quayside by a streetwise sister whose job it was to chaperone the ‘provincials’ through the bustle of city life to safety inside the convent walls in London. After our gear had gone through customs it was loaded onto a train. Our chaperone did the lugging that the porter refused to do—she had the physique of two porters, and there was a lot of heavy luggage. There was also more than a fifty per cent chance that some of it might get mislaid.

  ‘Say a little prayer that our luggage is safe,’ said our Reverend Mother, in a moment of inspired intuition. Only a moment later, our ears caught the name ‘Sister Raay’ coming from the luggage department. We were about to investigate, when an observant and sympathetic porter stuck his head through a nearby window and announced: ‘Sister Raay, your luggage was found on the floor of the ship’s cabin, but has now been put on the train.’ Had I really left a case in the cabin? Thank God it had been found by this kindly porter, and was now safe. It must have been an answer to our timely prayers. The porter did not expect a tip, and quickly retracted his head.

  The train was fairly packed. A woman kept up a very noisy stream of chatter just behind our backs. I tried the prayer trick again—I was on a little roll—and miraculously she said, ‘I think I’ll keep quiet now.’ Mercifully she did.

  Our intrepid Cockney sister hailed a taxi for the last part of our journey, and we passed some of the famous landmarks we’d heard about: Pall Mall, Westminster Cathedral, bridges over the Thames, the infamous Tower, the Guards changing at the Palace. We caught many glimpses, in spite of the eyes-down rule. Surely not to look would be more of a distraction to the spirit than to catch glimpses from a taxi? Tulips were ablaze everywhere, as if this were Holland.

  We arrived. The very first thing everyone needed was to find a toilet. This London convent doubled as a large school for senior girls. With any luck, we could use the nearest toilets before the girls descended on them at break time. But we weren’t lucky; four of us were caught in the loos.

  This was a dilemma! We didn’t know what to do at all. None of us spoke or made a sound; we all wanted to disappear into thin air. When that didn’t happen after half a minute or so, we used our combined weight against the door of the toilet block to keep it closed. The girls on the other side pushed and shoved, and we pushed and shoved against them! They thought it was some kind of joke, not realising who was in there.

  Eve
ntually there was nothing for it: we’d have to face the music, come out, and not only confess to being human and needing to relieve our bladders, but to being ashamed of showing it. We emerged with eyes down, without saying a word. The girls gasped, ‘Sorry, Sisters!’ They had the enormous good grace to apologise instead of bursting into laughter. The apologies should have been ours! I often wonder what those girls surmised from our strange behaviour: perhaps that being human was shameful? That nuns shouldn’t have to urinate and defecate?

  After lunch, we travelled by bus to the Mother Convent at Broadstairs in Kent—Stella Maris, the home of our venerated Reverend Mother General. She was away at the time, but the place could not have been more impressive with its spring beauty and the sprawl of its several gardens and buildings. Tulips seemed to grow like weeds. Fruit trees stood in blossom, poplars showed their first green, and hundreds of daffodils lined the narrow paths through the gardens. One of the buildings was an old novitiate. We would have afternoon tea there, and sleep in a little round bedroom in The Knoll.

  The Knoll’s distinctive red-brick walls went four storeys high, narrowing to the top room, which had become a dorm for three. We were allowed to sleep in the next morning, and I awoke to the unusual pleasure of breakfast in bed, at eight-thirty! The kindness was overwhelming. I was even presented with a new block of soap by a sister who had spotted my tiny remnant from the sea voyage, but when I showed her my collection of similar remnants, squeezed into one bigger piece, she promptly withdrew her offer!