God's Callgirl (57 page)

It surely is the ultimate gift of grace to return to original innocence and know yourself to be nothing but good, uncontaminated in your heart, no matter what your mental and emotional patterns might be. Now I had some brilliant tools for finding the truth in moments of self-criticism, as well as criticism of others.

What I had thought of as my real self when I was a child, a nun and a prostitute was the bad, guilty part of me. Because I had given my ‘bad self’ so much credence, it grew out of all proportions, and even came to have a life of its own—a sub-personality, a sort of devil. Every self-condemning thought gave this bad-self devil in me the energy it needed to stay alive. How extraordinary to discover myself to be radically innocent, a still and timeless being of grace.

MY KIND FRIEND
Julia and I went cycling together in the glorious countryside, fragrant with herbs and wildflowers.
She showed me the rough sandy beaches, and we sat by canals, rivers, dykes and lakes, and visited quaint villages and farms. In childhood, my circumference had been so limited; I had never even seen the sea. I felt privileged to be so royally treated by Julia. She took me to one of the few spots in Holland where you couldn’t hear the traffic: the undulating expanse of natural grasslands called the Veluwe. Quietly we lay in the grass, so thankful for the beauty around us.

Then came the time for me to go exploring on my own. I boarded a train and went to Tilburg. I didn’t expect to recognise much of the place after forty-nine years, but I was in for a surprise.

Along the route from the railway station—those familiar streets I had so often walked with my brothers and sisters—I crossed the large square where our annual
Kermis
or fair used to be held, and entered the cathedral where my parents were married. Suddenly the church bells rang out, the same bells my parents had heard as they walked down that aisle. I was deeply moved as I remembered their difficult lives together started here, in this very church, with so much love and courage.

I walked on to the house that had been my home. It had a new facade, not an improvement on the old one. I knocked on the door and the owner answered. I explained as best I could that this was my old home from long ago, that I had come all the way from Australia, and he let me sit in his lounge room while he busied himself in the kitchen. My seat was next to the window where I had lain as a child, sick with scarlet fever. I looked out over the little backyard: it seemed impossibly tiny, yet it was the same brick-walled space that had held our swing and monkeybar. There were the three doors: to the kitchen, the coal shed and the toilet.

I asked if I could walk around, and the owner said yes, leaving me to wander in silence.

The coal shed had been incorporated into the house as a neat laundry and toilet. The original thunderbox was a doorless and floorless space; no one had bothered to beautify it in any way. Where there was once a laneway at the back and a vegetable garden with a lilac tree and summerhouse, the owner had opted for a covered garage and a large games room. It is a great luxury to have undercover parking and any extra space in Holland.

I went back inside. In the nicely painted kitchen, I noticed the original wooden slats on the walls. The door leading to the cellar was now just a cupboard under the stairs. People no longer needed damp cellars since the invention of the refrigerator. Just opposite the front door was the narrow carpeted staircase leading to the bedrooms. I did not ask to go upstairs.

Memories crowded in, but I felt nothing but joy—joy for having been born, for having lived here, for all my experiences. The past no longer had a bitter hold on me. Instead I had only memories, thoughts in the moment, stories—and this was the miracle of The Work I had done with Byron Katie a week before.

WHERE NEXT BUT
across the channel to England? In England was Alice, my ancient love, whose image had never left me. We had maintained sporadic contact over the years; now I was to take up her offer of staying with her ‘should you ever come to the UK’. Well, I was coming, ready or not!

In my nervousness to catch the right train I missed it and had to wait for several hours to catch the next one. I phoned Alice: it was all right, she’d be there to meet me at the train
station. ‘Don’t worry about going to Trafalgar Square as we’d arranged,’ she said. ‘That’ll make it too late.’ I breathed a sigh of relief. Having missed a train, I could do without the possibility of missing a bus as well.

The train rumbled straight across England’s broad girth from London to Manchester. I alighted. No Alice. I walked towards the exit, then I saw her: a matronly figure running up the ramp to meet me.

‘I’ve been so afraid I’d made you wait!’ Alice was in a bustling mood. I looked at her, expecting a return gaze that would tell me she recognised me as the person who once was extremely fond of her, who had now come to her senses, but still had a very special regard for her. Alice extended her hand, then embraced me without our faces ever touching. My face reached out for hers, to plant a kiss on her cheek, but her firm grip and her quick talking prevented me.

Alice was full of questions about my trip. She smiled widely and I noticed a flush in her cheeks. Alice was nervous! I answered as well as I could, taking in her presence, as she was doing mine.

Her mouth was still red, all without lipstick, and her smile still wide and perfect. Her green eyes were still oh, so steady as they took you in. She had grown older and wiser, meaning cynical of life in general, of politicians and young women in particular. Alice was very pleased to be living in England rather than in any part of Ireland, thank you very much. Her wild side longed for the west coast of Ireland, but her practical side enjoyed what her lifestyle in England had to offer.

Her pleasant little home had an upstairs, and Alice showed me to her tiny sewing room where a narrow iron camp bed awaited me. ‘The visitor’s room,’ she explained, ‘is at present taken up by Sister Bridget.’

‘What, Sister Bridget, the Irish historian I used to know at Stella Maris?’

It was one and the same. Now in her eighties, she often came to visit Alice, even though Alice had left the order. Sister Bridget was still loyal to the FCJs and I would not hear one word of complaint from her, nor any news that might be taken for gossip.

How was it that a person as colourfully critical of just about anything in the world as Alice was could continue to go to church every day? The Alice I saw was essentially still a nun, cardigan and all. She cared nothing about her looks and looked positively frumpy.

Alice resisted reading any part of my book, including the chapter about herself. Maybe she will never read it. I realised that not much of the past would be discussed between us. Nor would we ask each other personal questions. The only thing of importance to her, it seemed, was to treat me well as her guest. She shared her knowledge of the history of the area and drove me around until I felt confident enough to take the buses. It was only when she learned that the nuns at Broadstairs would not allow me to visit them that her rebelliousness came to the fore. Alice took me to meet an old FCJ friend who was living in stately retirement in a four-storeyed mansion not far away.

Alice knew how to reach Sister Mary’s room on the top floor without anyone seeing us. I was introduced to Sister Mary—whose name I have changed here because she wished to remain anonymous—an old, wispy nun whose hair was nevertheless still a natural brown and whose pleasure it was to read books endlessly, judging from all the volumes lying around. She was unsteady on her feet so remained seated during our visit.

In spite of her age, Sister Mary had all of her wits about her. She sized me up suspiciously and I sensed an inner battle going on while she decided whether she could trust me. Finally, she decided to open up and tell me her story. She was hesitant at first, not knowing exactly how this information would be used, but in that precious half an hour Sister Mary gave me a bigger picture of the Mother General who had had such a large influence on my life, and the lives of many others.

Sister Mary had known her for a great many years. ‘She was quite a character long before she was made a General,’ she said with feeling. ‘Margaret Winchester was the superior of a Canadian convent before she came to Broadstairs, and she was known for the bizarre treatment of her nuns. For instance, she made them all sleep on the floor instead of in beds.’

That sounded exactly like the person I had known. I tried to imagine the heroism of the nuns under her command; not so much for sleeping on the floor, as for being able to endure the continual stream of surprises she would have cooked up for them to test their obedience and humility. I said, ‘Margaret Winchester seemed not quite sane to me.’

Sister Mary did not like this critical assessment of the General and proceeded to explain the underlying cause for the outrageous behaviour for which Margaret Winchester was remembered. ‘During the war,’ explained Sister Mary, ‘as a superior residing at Broadstairs she was extremely concerned about the welfare of all the people in the various buildings there. She became hysterically nervous at every air attack, and when an incendiary bomb fell on the village at Broadstairs she thought it had fallen on the novitiate. The shock affected her mentally.’

Aha, I thought, by the time I met her, the General had been ‘mentally affected’ for at least sixteen years! Why hadn’t this stopped her from being elected as a Superior General three years after the war, in 1948?

‘She was an impressive figure,’ said Sister Mary, as if guessing my thoughts. I agreed. But kept it to myself that Hitler, too, had been called ‘impressive’.

Sister Mary moved on to what had inspired her, as a much younger nun, to take action against her own Mother General. ‘During Madame Winchester’s rule, she encouraged the already existing custom of nuns reporting on each other, until it grew like a killer vine in the order. Even nuns merely suspected of breaking a rule were reported. The General seemed to have an obsession with strict discipline and knowing exactly who was behaving in a way not entirely approved of. The nasty custom grew to political proportions: those who toed the line were rewarded with positions of power; those who did not were humiliated and demoted.’

I noted all this down as fast as I could—something Sister Mary did not like, I noticed, but the details were too important to trust to memory. Sister Mary wanted me to understand that she only acted after the General had really gone too far.

‘She abruptly ordered Sister Helen, who was the principal of a large secondary school in England, to close down her school. The order came after all the staff had been hired and all the students enrolled for the coming school year. Sister Helen was a loyal nun, but also blessed with a good dose of common sense. She decided that enough was enough, and it was time to take this matter to a higher authority, namely the Bishop of London. This sort of thing had never been done before, and it was a political manoeuvre definitely not
envisaged by the General, who then had no option but to let her keep her school.’

Sister Mary looked at Alice, who was sitting to one side with hands folded in her lap. Alice nodded: yes, this was how she remembered it also, and yes, Sister Mary, do go on.

‘However,’ Sister Mary continued, ‘by taking the extraordinary step of going over her superior’s head, Sister Helen had sparked off a war of intrigue inside the order. There were those who became more vocal about having Madame Winchester removed, most of them from her previous communities in Canada. [And, of course, Sister Mary, who managed to put aside her shyness and scruples to speak up.] Margaret Winchester played her cards by removing her nearest rivals to distant outposts, but it was no good. Nothing but her resignation would save the order from further misuse of power, and this is exactly what happened, in 1967.’

I scribbled away, my mind reeling at this riveting stuff that we in Australia had been blissfully unaware of. It seemed I had not been singled out for abominable treatment by the General, and I had been far from alone in my judgments about convent life in the early 1960s. To Sister Mary, however, the 1960s were the years of the great decline of the order and its demise as a significant force in Catholic society. The changes sparked a veritable exodus, but Sister Mary was anxious to impress upon me that this had not been her wish, that nothing she did had been intended to undermine the order. Most religious orders had to cope with similar defections.

What Sister Mary told me next made me smile wryly. Now that it was 1999, three decades on from the events she was describing, the evidence of all this turmoil—letters, diaries and documents which had been stored in archives at
the archbishop’s palace—should be available for public perusal. But they weren’t. The FCJ nuns, afraid for the order’s reputation and the people implicated, had persuaded the archbishop to keep them secret for another twenty years, by which time the key players would surely be dead.

Well, I thought, this action speaks for itself. I had no need, or desire, to look at any of those documents. I expect that the order will be finished before the twenty years are up. Once there were thousands of FCJs. Now there are less than two hundred, and most of them are elderly.

I thanked Sister Mary for confiding in me, but I could see that she wasn’t quite sure that she had been wise.

I TOOK A
bus to Sedgley Park. When I told Alice I was going, she reacted as though I was merely visiting a museum. ‘I think Sedgley Park is a police academy now,’ she said. It was, in the care of a person who appreciates the history of the place and is taking great care to preserve most of the buildings and the grounds as they originally appeared.

I rang ahead and an officer was assigned to show me around. He could not have guessed what I felt as I walked those corridors once more and was shown into the old music and history rooms, various lecture rooms, common rooms, the gymnasium and the chapel. We even went up the old oak staircase, still winding gracefully to the second floor, where the rooms had been converted into offices. I glimpsed the narrow wooden staircase that used to lead to our attic dormitories; now the attic was a storage area out of bounds. Our old refectory had been transformed into a private area for the officers.