My blue madonna dress also gave me my first experience of being the object of a male sexual fantasy. On a sunny winter’s day, during my very first shopping trip without the veil in nearby Camberwell, my psychic sex sense picked up a mumbled conversation between two sixteen year olds lounging against a shop wall on the opposite street corner. ‘Look at that one!’ I saw the lanky guy saying to the shorter fellow, keeping his hands in his pockets and nodding in my direction. ‘Now that’d be an easy one to get into,’ meaning my dress. ‘No buttons at the back. Just a big zipper all the way down the front!’ And he made a tell-tale unzipping gesture.
I smiled, tingling with pleasure at this first experience of being eyed up! It was a warm, human sensation, which helped me feel more at home on the planet.
During those early weeks, I still entertained the delusion that I might want to return to the convent after six months, so I kept up the morning and evening prayers. As I was no longer hampered by the droning group of somnambulant nuns in the convent, I found myself fairly racing through the words.
It took less than a week for me to realise the utter idiocy of the practice. It had become the most literal form of lip service. Somehow, these prayers worked through the devotion of the whole group; one individual wasn’t enough—and certainly not this individual. Maybe I had never been pious enough, or maybe everyone left it up to her companions to fill those dry, repetitious prayers with energy and meaning. Maybe lots of small weak lights, of which I had been one, added up to a single bright light. Anyway, my tiny little bulb began to falter when I opened the book of prayers, then died, never to spark into life again.
I still went to Mass quite often. This freedom of choice was like a delicious, cool current running through my spine: I no longer had to go! I had barely missed a single Mass since I was old enough to go to church. Now nobody would say a word if I didn’t go! In lucid moments, I realised with shock how conditioned I had become, and how childish was my pleasure in choosing.
In my parents’ house, I slept once more in the double bed that I had shared with my sister more than twelve years ago. I was reminded that my parents’ bedroom was next door when I heard my mother squeal ‘No!’ during the night. But my father still refused to take no for an answer. Soft objects hit the wallpapered wooden wall, slippers and pillows, then heavier things, like an ashtray. My mother’s suppressed squeals turned into suppressed screams.
I was bold one night and called out, ‘Stop it, you two! I can’t sleep for all the noise!’, thinking that I was protecting my mother. But my father was not about to ‘cop flack’ from his daughter—not even if she had been a nun and thought she had some sort of moral authority. He appeared suddenly in the doorway of my room, dressed in an assortment of nightclothes and gaping dressing-gown, looking like something out of Dickens. He was uncompromising: if I didn’t keep quiet, he would let me have it. That was my cue to leave.
A FORTNIGHT AFTER I left the convent, I also left my parents’ house. I rented a room in a large manor house converted into flats with money borrowed from my sister. No one guessed how completely unnerving it was for me to take this step into the anonymous secular world, but nothing could stop me from plunging headlong into it. I started teaching French at Templestowe High, one of Melbourne’s most notorious and overcrowded high schools, the day after I moved into the flat.
My life as a ‘normal’ person had begun, whatever that means. I still don’t feel normal, in the regular sense of the word, but at that tender stage of my life, at the age of thirty-one, I didn’t even know exactly what a post office was for.
The principal of the school asked me into his office. ‘If you need to know anything, or need help, all you have to do is ask, Carla.’ He was a genuinely kind man. I did need help. My head was often spinning, making me tighten my neck muscles. I experienced frequent momentary blank-outs from the pressure of having to adjust to so many things at once.
I didn’t know how modern adults behaved socially. I watched the people around me to give me some ideas and listened to their banter. Even ordinary language had changed. ‘Nerds’ now existed; at first I thought a nerd was a dimwit! It would have been good if I could have trusted my principal, but I was humiliated by the fact that he knew about my immediate past. Shades of my supposed new start at Benalla! I sorely needed a mentor, but instead I swallowed Valium before going to school.
For six weeks I lived in a semi-conscious state, until I threw the Valium in a bin and adapted with incredible tenacity to the ways of a secular high school. It was my impeccable French and my love of the subject that earned me the respect of the students and enabled me to struggle on.
They called me The Frog that first winter, because of the snugly fitting green knitted suit I bought with my first pay. It was an appropriate compliment for a French teacher. Within a month, I was given a new name: The Flying Nun. Somehow all the children knew by then that I had been a nun. Maybe it was the way I moved—fast, and seeming to glide rather than touch the ground. Sally Field flew across the TV screen as ‘The Flying Nun’ and I flew across the schoolyard and through the corridors like her real-life counterpart, without the wimple.
Some members of staff queried my position in a high school because I hadn’t graduated. Well, I hadn’t even matriculated! They talked about it among themselves loud enough so I could hear, but never said anything to my face. I gathered that they thought Sedgley College’s affiliation with Manchester University was just a smart trick. I reacted by sitting for the very next Matriculation exam, and then becoming a member of the teachers’ union. This was an accreditation in itself. My salary could have been affected if they had refused me. I found that my principal was on my side, and I had the explicit support of one of the staff, Ron.
Ron was a guy with a moustache and a naughty smile who loved to make me blush, which was very easy. He shared a broom cupboard converted into a staffroom with me and four others. He never forgot to ask how I was every morning. He was my main lifeline: married, and therefore no threat as a possible boyfriend, with a nice sense of humour. Ron came into the little staffroom one day with a ditty he’d found for me. My recent history had never been mentioned to my face, not by him or by anyone else. But any doubt of whether he was aware of it was dispersed with Ron’s verse, which went like this:
There once was a monk in Siberia,
Who found life getting dreary and drearier.
He met a young nun,
They had lots of fun,
And he made her a mother superior!
To his satisfaction, I blushed deeply.
The teachers in my broom-closet staffroom had warned me to watch out for the ‘sleazebags’—doctors employed by the education department to examine new teachers and give them their medical clearance.
The surgery was large, old-fashioned and well-equipped, and the doctor was a fit-looking man of about forty, frocked in white. The new priesthood, I thought, in white instead of black. Having been forewarned I was cool in my demeanour, an attitude I’d had excellent training in. All the same, I was naive and new to the procedures of a normal medical practitioner. It was highly probable that this doctor knew about my background.
‘Please take off your clothes and lie down on the examination table. There is a chair for your clothes over there,’ he said with the greatest nonchalance. This is what I ask all my patients to do, was the inference. I hesitated. All of my clothes? Should I ask more exactly what he meant? He saw my hesitation and repeated his request in a more commanding tone so I could be sure. ‘Please take off your clothes and lie down on the examination table, Miss van Raay.’
There was no screen, but he turned his back while I placed my clothes on a large, comfy chair, then walked over to the white table near the wall, stark naked, to lie down on my back. He didn’t bother to cover me up and started the routine of placing his stethoscope here, thumping his fingers there, and so on. I sat up for him to examine my knee reflexes, and was asked to lie down again, this time on my tummy, while
he stroked the entire length of my back and buttocks with a feather, explaining that this was also to test my reflexes.
The feather trailed along my very white, virginal skin. I felt I couldn’t object; my brain went into a scramble and refused to reason clearly. For one thing, I was unfamiliar with medical practice, as well as overawed by his authority. He made a fine mother superior substitute. However, I was careful not to be seen to react; I didn’t want to satisfy this man’s curiosity.
Finally he sighed and told me I could get dressed again. He did not take his eyes off me as I walked over to my clothes and started to put on my bloomers. Before I had quite got them on, he lunged over and put his right hand on the crease of my groin. ‘To test the lymph glands,’ he said. I stopped mid-movement to allow him to carry out his last-minute mission, coughing obediently when asked and remaining completely cool even while feeling that this was distinctly off.
It didn’t occur to me that I could have slapped his face, or reported him. Sexual harassment was not an indictable offence in the early seventies. I wonder if he would have given me the required certificate if I had not cooperated. As it was, I could sense his excitement—and his frustration. A naked ex-nun in his rooms who didn’t smile at him. She hadn’t even become hysterical, which would at least have been interesting. I dressed as he watched, feeling his rude curiosity. But I gave him nothing. That was my only revenge.
I taught French to several streams of classes, to children with various levels of interest in the subject. When the inspector came around, I was pleased to hear him tell the children they were lucky to have a French teacher with such an excellent accent. It was then that I appreciated my six-month experience in a French-speaking convent in Brussels! I also played the mouth organ—something my father had taught me—as an aid to teaching French songs.
I only had minor problems at Templestowe High. ‘I am sorry I corsed you so much trubble,’ wrote Melinda—one of several students who had a limited ability in English, never mind French, but had been forced to try to learn a foreign language in her second year of high school. She gave me a little bouquet of flowers.
I BEGAN TO have money in the bank. After I’d had my front teeth capped to hide the blackened legacy of my father breaking them when I was ten, my thoughts turned to buying a car. I was being driven to work every day by a kind woman who went out of her way to help me. To own a car, I would need to get a licence, and to get a licence I had to get out into the Melbourne traffic. It was then that I wished I’d kept the Valium to cope with fear bordering on terror. It might not have been such a big deal if my father hadn’t bet with me that I would fail. It wasn’t just spite; he reminded me that none of our family had so far succeeded on their first attempt, so the likelihood of me doing so was tiny.
When the big day came I was more nervous than when I’d had to win the races around the block as a child. My examiner noticed and tried to put me at ease. He sat in the front seat and my instructor relaxed in the back, as we launched into peak-hour traffic on a Friday afternoon in St Kilda. I had to manoeuvre us through a five-point intersection. I had been taught well, but forgot to turn off an indicator light, causing some confusion among my fellow travellers on the road. I thought that was it, that I’d blown my chances, so it was a huge surprise and relief to learn that I’d passed. I was so delighted that I drove all around on my way back, trying to get lost.
When I went to collect on my bet, my father was unable to be gracious; he hated parting with his money. He looked incredulous, then envious; that sinister desire to dominate his children, even if it meant their failure, was still there. He didn’t want me to achieve what he himself had been unable to.
BACK IN THE parish of my childhood—Our Lady of Good Counsel—Sister Bartholomew continued the drama she had started in 1950, when the van Raay family first went to school there. Now it was 1970 and she had my sister Liesbet’s children in her class.
Beatrice, the oldest girl, came home with welts on her hands, arms and legs from the big iron-edged ruler. Beatrice was a spirited girl but with good manners, so Liesbet went to school to investigate.
‘Beatrice is insolent,’ Sister Bartholomew explained in her defence. ‘She doesn’t say anything, but I can see it in her eyes: they’re just like Carla’s!’
Liesbet was not about to accept this line of reasoning. ‘Frustrated old bitch!’ she yelled.‘You’re just jealous because Carla’s out, leading a normal life!’ She locked the office door and, with the instinct of a furious mother, punched Sister Bartholomew on the shoulder. Sister Bartholomew was made of good country stock and a regular tennis player, and her muscles leapt instantly into gear, trying to return the punch. She was at a disadvantage with her veil swirling around the tiny room, and she lost it to the firm grip of my sister, who gave it one decisive yank. It was enough for Liesbet to see Sister Bartholomew’s utter consternation and to hear her yell: ‘Get off me! I’m a nun!’The incongruous remark changed my sister’s anger into mirth and great satisfaction.
Sister Bartholomew desisted from using her ruler on the girl who reminded her of Carla, the van Raay who had disgraced the order by leaving it and caused so many headaches in the process. She still had the temerity to warn my sister that she would stop her children from going to school at Genazzano, but the threat was an empty one.
‘Whatever made you think your girls would not be welcome here?’ said the superior when Liesbet enquired, and both Beatrice and her sister were duly enrolled at Genazzano, Melbourne’s most prestigious convent.
WHEN I FOUND out about my family’s financial subsidisation of my previous lifestyle I decided to confront my mother about it.
I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard the facts from my mother, who broke the silence at last. She had been the main contributor—(How did she manage to do it? She refused to say.)—and my brothers Adrian, Markus and Willem, as well as my sister Liesbet, had all chipped in. I was livid.
My poor mother, she hadn’t wanted any trouble with the nuns. The family was dependent on the sisters for their livelihood, for the very house they lived in. For nearly twenty years, harmony with the nuns had been essential: my father was their gardener and caretaker, and my mother worked for them as a casual seamstress.
For a while, I considered suing the order. My leaving had inspired a string of others to leave as well—six more by the end of 1969—and I thought of joining forces with all the other women whose parents had been treated like mine. We could create some publicity and get compensation for ourselves. We should never have been put out on the street with nothing after so many years of hard work, which had been supplemented for years by funds from our own families! Yes, we had been trained as teachers, thank goodness. But I had taught at Brussels and for four years at Benalla without wages; I should at least have been given enough to make a new start in the world of houses, furniture, cars and clothes. But I did not pursue it because of my parents’ precarious position. Besides, what did I really know of my legal rights? All in all, it seemed best to let sleeping dogs—or cats—lie.
The ‘cats’ are very grey now, if not exactly lean and hungry, and both my father and mother have died. Their home has been returned to the nuns. The time for litigation has long gone.
LIFE IN MY flat threatened to become lonely. I was only just coping with reality. But then I met Cheryl, a stylish, extroverted girl with a good heart, and we decided to share. She loved dancing and once again I found myself on the dance floors of the Melbourne suburbs. Had they always been full of people who couldn’t look their partner in the face as they executed the barn dance? The guys would pass me on as if they were dancing with a bag of wheat with legs. Never mind; the music and the exercise did me a great deal of good.
The question of my getting married was now on everyone’s mind, including mine. ‘I think I know of a good match for you,’ my mother said, trying to sound casual. ‘He’s Dutch and his name is Bart. His mother will ask him to take you out on a picnic in the country.’ His mothe
r did ask, he agreed, she packed a basket and off we went in his car.
Bart was a tall fellow in his forties who had never left home and had never been kissed. He worked hard as a window cleaner from dawn to dusk and was probably too tired for a social life. He had amassed quite a fortune from having nothing much to spend his income on. My mother made a big point of this fact.
He had just been to see the doctor, he confided to me as we sat on a grassy slope in a park somewhere. The doctor had recommended a book, The ABC of Sex, which he had bought and read. There was nothing more he needed to say to me: I didn’t need a holy innocent like myself; I needed an understanding man, or at least someone who knew what he was doing. I wasn’t tempted in the least by his wealth and I found his awkwardness terribly boring; in short, I had no compassion or understanding for this timid little boy in a grown man’s body.
The expectant faces of our mothers fell immediately upon our return. They sighed: my mother for me, his mother for her dejected son. What were they to do?
But did my mother really want me to get hitched? Months later, when I was staying with my family again for a short while, and invited a dancing partner home for a chat—and nothing more than a chat—my mother was stupefied by moral indignation when she found us tiptoeing through the kitchen on our way out.
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