God's Callgirl (25 page)

I was the server, and all was fine, except I wasn’t prepared for the possibility that the priest might talk to me. The priest that week was a human sort of guy who must have been curious to get to know the new sister. He threw out the occasional small talk, which was naughty of him as he must have been aware of the tertiary novices’ rule of silence. I answered politely and briefly and so survived a week. The sick nun I was replacing either never asked for her job back or never got better, so I continued into a second week. I was really getting into the swing of things. The priests weren’t always the same, but they were normally reserved, polite and unengaging.

I was to become undone, however. One Irish priest started asking me questions about what I was going to do that day, and why was I in England. It was all very disconcerting—somehow too human, too friendly—but I didn’t think of asking for guidance from my superiors. Then one morning I couldn’t resist telling him the old joke about the Rolls Can’ ardly. He had told me a little joke and I thought it was appropriate for me to tell him one in return.

‘My father owns a Rolls Can’ardly,’ I said, with wicked pleasure in the humour I was encouraging. ‘It rolls easily down the hill but can ’ardly get up!’

The laughter which followed must have reached through the walls. The General had been having her breakfast in another parlour not far away and, inevitably, Mother Mary John called me to her side that very morning. I knelt down as was the custom and listened to her reprimand. Cracking jokes was not part of my job, I was told, and was a serious breach of silence. I was to be relieved of my parlour job at once.

Well, I wasn’t too upset—that morning of laughter would be a hard act to follow, anyway. The trouble was that the job was now the sole responsibility of my partner, and she was having great difficulty doing it all smoothly and properly by herself. I would see her rushing through the refectory with the tray of cutlery and crockery, then the tray of food, and not getting to her own breakfast till everything was cold.

This went on for days, until Mother Mary John took me aside and hinted that I should apologise and ask to get the job back. What? The notion was so preposterous that I flatly rejected it. ‘No, thank you, I will never go back to that job again.’ If I wasn’t good enough then, I wasn’t good enough now, and the fact that the other sister was struggling had nothing to do with me. If this was some strange test, I was willing to fail it wholeheartedly!

AUTUMN TURNED TO
winter, the time of great winds and storms. They swept the foreland mercilessly. We had to walk from the vicarage to the main residences and back every morning and evening; the objective was to arrive without losing anyone over the cliff. Umbrellas being useless in the gale, we left them behind and held each other’s gloved hands in a row of six or so, proving that there was strength in numbers! Together we would pull each other through the wind, cloaks plastered against our bodies, plodding along in gumboots. How we enjoyed those wild and windy days! Yes, we got wet, but our cloaks were made of good serge and the plastic bonnets over our heads saved us from the worst of the rain. There’s nothing like a refreshing physical challenge to rehumanise spiritual people. Among the genteel, mollycoddled older members of the community, the Australians acquired something of a
heroic status for the way they tackled nature. Well, it was something. Crossing the grounds at least four times each day between the main house and the vicarage had a cooling and refreshing effect on us; it probably contributed greatly to our relative sanity. The eyes-down rule kept me in contact with the things that grew in the ground and around our feet as we walked. Nature was my ally, as it had always been.

Christmas drew close, and so did the snow-laden skies and the cosiness of a heated recreation room. During the six weeks of Advent we chose to do extra penance, easily achieved if you suffered from the cold. However, we all did compulsory penance when the breakfast tea was served not hot, not warm, but cold. Here was a
ready-made
penance, we were told. Worse was to come: the General decided at lunch that
no tea at all
might be an even more suitable penance for the duration of Advent.

I could sense a few hackles rising around me, especially from the resident lay sister in charge of the laundry, who year after year had been thwarted in her bid to get warm water to rinse the washing. She had been at Stella Maris for some years and the mystique of the place had apparently rubbed off a bit. She had a loud voice too. ‘We’ll all get sick!’ she shouted.

And she was right—people started to display all kinds of withdrawal symptoms. Hot tea was reinstated after a week, much to everyone’s relief. We were all thoroughly addicted to it. How ordinary we were, in spite of our grandiose ideas of leading lives of detachment.

On Christmas Day we waited expectantly for festivities to begin. The long ceremonies in the chapel were over and we were all congenially crammed into the recreation room, eyeing the many little bowls of sweets on the table, waiting
for the General to appear so we could wish her a Happy Christmas and get stuck into the chocolates, humbugs and boiled lollies.

The General had a real fear that we took too many things for granted. Mother Clare swept into the room like a broom on fire and swiped all the bowls off the table. The sweets gone, the General came in and planted her large frame squarely in a chair at the head of the table, one hand on her knee, a forearm draped over the table, like the King of the Castle.

‘Jesus,’ she said (pause), ‘was born in a cold stable (pause) and we (pause) are His Companions. Indulgence in sweets is not a proper way to celebrate Christmas!’ Her manner was impeccably choreographed and impressive. Eyeing all of us around the room, she added, ‘There are many starving people in the world. Let us think of them today.’

It was this sort of superior-sounding wisdom, this bold way of stating her truth, that for many years had earned her a special respect. It takes nerve to come out with persuasions like hers, and a certain flair to impose them on others. She spoke softly and intently, with many pauses, conspiratorial half-smiles and knowing eyes. She made you believe that if you did not understand what she was saying, you were stupid. Small, intimate groups like ours were her little playground.

WINTER WAS ALSO
a time for colds and flu. For a while I helped out when others fell victim to influenza, then succumbed to something mysterious myself. I developed such a raging fever that someone was assigned to watch over me and administer medicine at certain times. She was a young nun, who was rather obviously anxious about
something other than her present job. I had my eyes closed, but I could sense her restlessness. Finally, she spoke up.

‘Listen,’ she said earnestly, ‘can you take those tablets yourself?’and mentioned a time. In my delirium, it seemed perfectly fine for me to believe that I was capable of taking the tablets as instructed, and I said yes. After a while, alas, I had no idea what I had and hadn’t taken. Had I swallowed the tablets or only imagined it? What time did she say they were to be taken? I decided to take the tablets I could see on the saucer close to me. My guardian came back, seemingly only moments later, and was aghast. Why hadn’t I looked at the clock properly, she wanted to know. She ran away again, very agitated, but I promptly fell asleep.

I woke during what I thought was the middle of the night, needing to go to the toilet. It was pitch dark. I couldn’t make out a thing, but knew where the toilets were, so groped my way out of the dormitory into the passageway and into a toilet. I switched on the light, I thought, but there was no light. I went into the next toilet and tried the light there, again with no luck. There was a power failure, I presumed, or else all the globes had blown. I managed to use a toilet, made it back to bed and fell asleep again. When I woke up and opened my eyes, I still couldn’t see. My world was pitch black but I knew it was daytime from the noise of people around the place. Whatever those tablets were, they had sent me blind.

Someone came to question me about the taking of the tablets, reprimanded me for being stupid, and left me alone. I had no idea if I would stay blind or not, and was curiously resigned to whatever might happen. For days I woke up in darkness, checking for sounds to see if it was day or night.

Then, one morning at dawn, my eyes saw the world again, softly. I was on the mend. I asked for little jobs I could
do in bed as I improved, like peeling potatoes or apples, or shelling peas. The amazing hothouses in the garden produced vegetables all year round.

The sister who had made the mistake came to apologise, as was her duty, and that was that. All in all I enjoyed my illness as a respite from the daily round of tensions.

I BECAME BADLY
constipated again, like I had been back in Australia when I was a novice. Laxatives didn’t work this time, so I was given a big cup of the sweetest tea ever and was made to lie down on the infirmary table, on my side, buttocks exposed.

The infirmarian looked at me as if she wondered if I knew where all this was going to end, but her rule of silence apparently prevented her from explaining anything to me. She put on some gloves, swirled a hand in a pot of Vaseline, and approached the end of my intestines as if she was holding a gun. I watched her face during all this: she kept it turned away from the work at hand, watching me in her turn, but her expression gave nothing away.

When the strategy started to work, I finally caught signs of relief and disgust before I was told to slide down onto a commode. I decided then that it might be a good idea to leave penitential salt out of my tea in future, and take a lot of sugar instead.

Later in the year, my periods stopped. I was unconcerned, having experienced a similar hiatus as a postulant in the convent at Genazzano. Kneeling alongside Reverend Mother Winifred’s armchair, looking up into her large face, I had shyly come out with an issue that was bothering me. ‘Reverend Mother,’ I began shyly, ‘I haven’t had my period for four months.’ Her body had rocked in
her chair, then she had replied with all the surety of bluff, ‘It means absolutely nothing, Sister Carla.’ But for the nuns at Stella Maris, it was another matter entirely!

Mother Mary John responded to the report from the linen mistress that I hadn’t ordered sanitary pads for five months by calling me to her office. There, she and the linen mistress quizzed me about my activities. ‘Where have you been, Sister?’

Been? I had been nowhere special
. My interrogators watched me closely. The tension was electric.

Mother Mary John finally became more specific. ‘Did you go to the village at all, Sister?’

‘No, I haven’t gone to the village. Not at all. Why?’

She seemed relieved and handed me over to the infirmarian, who judged that I was suffering from a shortage of iron and gave me some tablets. In a short time, my periods returned and ‘all was well’. It was years and years before I understood the reason for their anxiety:
they were wondering if I was pregnant!
This was a preposterous idea, but I smiled at the implication—I guessed that if it had been suspected of me, it must have happened before.

SPRING CAME. I
wanted to shout my delight at seeing the snowdrops come up; then the jonquils and daffodils that waved to me
en masse
as I passed, and the hyacinths, tulips and bluebells. The crisp air made their perfumes sharp and delicious. I longed to talk to someone about the beauty I saw, as if it would otherwise be lost. It couldn’t be done, of course, except at recreation time. I felt very foolish then, speaking hours afterwards of feelings that were so private and poetic. I wasn’t ashamed to cry as I walked among the flowers. For once, I desperately wished for a special friend
to share life with, someone with whom I could share my deepest soul. Jesus was too far away; I wanted someone real that I could talk to. My truest relationship was with something I could feel at my core, but as for Jesus—I couldn’t put a face to him. A physical description of him was nowhere to be found, and the sentimental holy pictures showed an effeminate, meek man, not the kind of Jesus I could believe in. The Gospels never once describe Jesus as laughing, smiling or hugging those close to him.

I had been at Stella Maris for about nine months when a flu epidemic, accompanied by severe diarrhoea, swept the Foreland. Quite a few sisters fell foul of the germs, but I hung out for a bit longer. The usual procedure for communicating with the infirmarian was through a written message, deposited in a box. It worked well if the infirmarian bothered to empty the box regularly, or if there were no emergencies.

When the stomach cramps finally hit me, I stuck a note describing my symptoms in the box. Then I waited for the response. I knew this was silly, and even perverse—the sooner I got attended to the better—but I wanted to show up this system and the rule of silence that prevented me being able to say anything directly and out loud. Finally, I was becoming angry.

I spent most of the day near or in the toilets. It was Easter, and the place was crowded with visitors; there was an awful lot of to-ing and fro-ing for the Easter ceremonies in the chapel. I didn’t attend prayers and didn’t turn up for lunch, but wasn’t missed.

The toilets at Stella Maris held a particular fascination for me, because of the pictures I saw in the pine-clad doors and walls—the kind you can also see in clouds. There was a snarling wolf, a dragon, a nymph, faces, trees, a whole
landscape in the whorls of knotted wood. I whiled away the time by admiring the animals and the fairies in the pine slats, then decided to draw what I saw, so took my sketchbook with me to the toilets. An amazing thing happened then: the animals and fairies disappeared! It was the strangest experience to see them one moment, then have them disappear the very instant I wanted to draw them, even though I only took my eyes off them momentarily. It was as if they were playing hide and seek. I felt stupid and baffled; I may have been delirious by that stage.