God's Callgirl (15 page)

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 ice. 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
.’

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.