Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story

“Believe me, Mrs. Armstrong,” Mother Katherine was saying, “if Karen has no vocation she couldn’t stay. It’s a very careful training, you know. She will be trained as a postulant and novice by people who really know how to look into a girl’s heart. There is no way she could bear to stay if it weren’t God’s will. All the other reasons for entering get refined in the noviceship. The only reason for staying is that God wants it.”

“And she can leave at any time during the first three years?” my father asked.

“At any time before first vows.”

“I suppose,” said my mother, voicing for the first time the reason she would use again and again to comfort herself, “that if we stop her now and insist that she go to college, she’ll spend the whole time pining for the convent and never really enter into anything properly.”

“Yes,” said Mother Katherine. “She’d just be marking time.”

“Whereas if she goes next year and then leaves, she’ll have gotten it out of her system sooner,” capped my father.

“Exactly, Mr. Armstrong, but don’t bank on that. I think she has a true vocation—thank God—and I don’t think she will leave. I must tell you that. And believe me, if Karen doesn’t do the will of God, she can never be happy. God makes each of us for a special purpose. If we choose to thwart that purpose, our lives are useless.”

My parents must have thought then of my grandmother. Was that where it had all gone wrong for her? Perhaps she was right. Perhaps she should have been a nun.

“Mr. Armstrong, Mrs. Armstrong, will you give her to God?”

I had been waiting nervously on the stairs for them when I heard the key turn in the lock. It was a moment that was to decide my whole life. As soon as I saw their faces, I knew.

“Well?”

They looked so tired.

“You can go, if you really want to.”

“Oh! Thank you!” How inadequate to say it, to embrace them. And how inadequate as the expression of the joy that suddenly filled me. There was nothing to stop me now. The road stretched clearly ahead to God.

3 • A NEW LIFE 1962 (#ulink_e42b8b57-479d-5bed-965b-5747688a3f87)

The little train jolted to a stop. Anxiously I leaned out of the train to read the sign. Tripton. At last, I had finally arrived. But though it was in one sense the end of a journey I knew it was only the beginning of another.

By the time I’d handed in my ticket and started to walk up to the convent I felt already in another world. The country land that led to the village was banked on either side by thick hedges, lush and tall, enclosing the road in a green silence. Birds sang in the bushes and—yes—there was a faint smell of blackberries.

It was a hot day. Very hot. Already I was regretting that I was wearing my winter coat—navy blue, smartly cut with gold reefer buttons. I was sweating as I labored up the hill. “Don’t you think it’ll be too hot?” I’d asked my mother.

“Oh, I’d take it. This autumn weather is so unpredictable. You might be cold later on.” And I could see what she was thinking: you may leave in the middle of winter and then you’ll need it. Hoping silently. I thought of them now sitting in the theatre, very aware that I wasn’t with them and never would be again. And then they would drive home where my bedroom was empty, the sheets folded on the bed.

They had bought me the black suitcase I was carrying. 'A black, simple suitcase' I had been told to get. And a black umbrella, a good stout one. I was clutching it in my other hand, a heavy man’s umbrella that looked so out of place with my stiletto heels on this brilliantly sunny day. It would have been more sensible to have worn flat shoes, I thought, grimacing as I stumbled on the uneven surface of the country road. Why hadn’t I? And why had I applied a last dab of makeup before leaving the train? Vanity, no doubt, I thought ruefully. I couldn’t bear somehow not to be looking as nice as possible on my last day in the world. Still, after today, there won’t be any more of that. It was a good thought—the future stretched ahead, clearly unencumbered with stupidities of dress.

At the top of the hill I came upon the village. Just one main street. And so pretty, I reflected, looking at the timbered cottages, the quaint little shops, the picturesque pub. A few people were shopping; ladies in expensive tweeds with poodles on leads strolled on the cobbled pavements. A car or two cruised peacefully down High Street. It was like a chocolate-box village.

Two people passed me, and I saw them glancing at my suitcase and umbrella.

“There’s another one!” I heard one of them say.

Of course. All the postulants arrived at Tripton on the same day to begin their religious life. In a little village this size, dominated by the imposing convent, the inhabitants must see girls carrying black umbrellas toiling up the hill at about the same time every September. I wondered how many others they had spotted today.

I looked at my watch again. Four thirty-five. I was on time. I had been so afraid of missing the train, of being late. What a terrible start that would have been! The empty place in the line of postulants, the raised eyebrows. They might think I had changed my mind or was having a last minute panic, or even a last fling. There must be girls who wanted a last cigarette or who were bidding their boyfriends a passionate and tearful good-bye. Lots of the saints, I reflected, had fought against their vocation right up to the last second. And of course I could change my mind right now. All I had to do was turn back, catch the next train to London, and arrive home. How delighted everybody would be! But I didn’t want to do that. I was excited. Already I was impatient to begin, to tear off these worldly clothes, to start the new life at once. The mental numbness was wearing off and I was feeling slightly sick with anticipation, a bit nervous, and very shy. But glad.

Suddenly on my left I saw the tall convent wall stretching austerely far down the street. And there was the huge gatehouse arching medievally over the heavy iron gate. You couldn’t see the convent from the road. Only a mass of trees down a long drive. The gates were flung back invitingly. The road from one world to another. I suppose I ought to take my last look at the world, I thought,but it seemed theatrical and unreal. What had I to do with that sleepy village?

I walked through quickly without a backward glance.

Turning the corner, I saw the convent. Tranquil and silent, it lay before me. Even the little village street seemed noisy by comparison. There on the left stood the old buildings. I remembered what I knew about Tripton. Before the Reformation it had been the palace of an eminent ecclesiastic. A hundred years ago, in 1863, the Foundress of the Order had brought the little girls in their nearby boarding school here on a picnic. They had their lunch in the palace ruins, just a mass of broken grey stone, save for three huge arches that had once towered over the banquet hall. Now the arches reared triumphantly over the Bedfordshire meadow, the second largest of their kind in Europe. The Foundress had determined then and there to restore the palace to its former beauty and win it back for the church. She had sent her nuns in pairs all over Europe to beg from the Catholic aristocracies who were eagerly watching the Catholic revival in England. And they had raised the money, and the building stood again, noble and majestic. There was the old banquet hall, which was now the convent church, with its tall, sloping roof, its flying buttresses, and its high, arched windows. And just to the left of that was the squat fourteenth-century tower with a rose window and crenellated battlements. A flag floated gracefully on its summit, the white and gold Papal arms in honor of the feast day. That tower, I knew, was now part of the Noviceship, and if I moved to the extreme right of the drive I would see—yes, there it was—the low modern building that was the Postulantship, skillfully hidden so as not to disturb the view. A little to the left of the main building was an old wellhouse. The grey buildings spoke of another world. To the right, hidden slightly now by the arms of an old cedar, but growing clearer all the time as I walked up the long drive, Victorian buildings cavorted crazily, a medieval fantasy in red brick of towers, turrets, mighty windows, and domes, stretching on and on, which housed the boarding school.

From somewhere a clock broke the silence, a sonorous but restrained chiming. Quarter to five.

I pulled at the bell rope hanging over the front door and heard it clanging and then fading back into echoing silence.

Strictly speaking, the nuns of the Order I joined are not really nuns at all. The term “nun” originally applied to enclosed orders of women who remained in their convents through their lives, never venturing out, devoting their lives to prayer and contemplation. It was St. Vincent de Paul who in the last century founded a quite different kind of female religious: the Sister of Charity who went out of her convent to work in the world among the poor. The Catholic church—always hot on red tape—objected. Female religious—nuns—had to be enclosed. Vincent’s reply was that the Sisters of Charity were not nuns at all but “religious sisters”, and the distinction, I believe, is still adhered to by canon law. Following the Sisters of Charity a spate of similar religious orders sprang up in the nineteenth century. The sisters were, of course, referred to as nuns for convenience’ sake, and they took simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and devoted themselves to prayer and good works.

My Order was one of these. It had been founded in the 1840s to meet a specific need. The Catholic revival in England was under way. The great Catholic boys’ schools at Stonyhurst and Downside were reestablished and the Catholic gentry dispatched their sons there. It was felt that their daughters needed a similar type of boarding school, and it was for this purpose that the Foundress was invited to open her first convent at Derby. The number of nuns and schools increased rapidly and by 1962 the Order boasted some seventeen convent schools in England, a substantial number of convents in the American province, missions in West Africa, and odd convents in Ireland, France, and Rome, which held the Mother House. Like many of the orders founded at the time, it had adopted very largely the Jesuit rule, and the prayer life of the nuns was founded on St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises.

When the Order had been founded the nuns had worn a simple black dress, in the style of Victorian women, a cape and a veil. The idea was that they should look unobtrusive. In the outside world fashions changed drastically but the habit of the Order did not. Similarly many of the rules and customs were based on the conduct considered appropriate for Victorian women. The religious life in the Order was originally intended to be an extension of their normal lives, not a complete divorce from everything they had known before. Many other religious orders of nuns were in a similar state: the anachronism of their lives, which had developed by a type of historical accident, had become endowed over the years with a weighty religious significance.

As I walked up the path that day in 1962 I had no idea that I would be one of the very last postulants to be trained along the old lines of severe Victorian discipline. Pope John XXIII had already summoned the Second Vatican Council, and a few weeks later bishops from all over the world were to congregate in Rome to begin Pope John’s work of aggiornamento, of renewal. The Council, as it was originally conceived, did not mean to initiate new measures but to restore primitive simplicity and fervor to the Church in the modern world. One of its tasks was to renew the religious orders in the light of John’s vision, which, sadly for the church, he did not live to see through. A year or two after the opening of the Council the bishops published a document in which, among other things, they urged religious orders of women to go back to the original spirit of their founders and discard the weight of unessential customs and practices to bring themselves more in tune with the world around them. Already Cardinal Suenens in Belgium was preparing his book The Nun in the Modern World, in which he was to urge nuns to discard their traditional habits and return to a simpler style of dress. The modern girl, he said, was too often stifled in the religious life by unessential practices that had developed many years ago. You could not train girls of the 1960s to be Victorian women.

But that afternoon no one had any idea that all this would happen. And I had no idea of what I would have to face before the convent, confident in its long-established rituals and secluded from the modern world, did at long last move out of the Victorian era.

“And here’s Karen!” A tall, angular nun bore down upon me. I caught a glimpse of a long, beaky nose, thick spectacles, and a wide, thinlipped mouth. Then I was enveloped in black serge as she pulled me to her in the ceremonial embrace of the Order. Her fingers jabbed into my shoulders, gripping them tightly, and her hard, smooth cheeks pressed themselves abruptly and fiercely against mine. One press per side. Then I was pushed away and held at arm’s length.

“Splendid!” she said, her voice deep and rich. “Did you have a good journey?” and then, not pausing for an answer, she rushed on. “She’s arrived exactly on time! What a splendid start! A model of religious punctuality already!”

A little gust of laughter rose around her. Nuns’ laughter. I recognized it. A quiet, controlled trill that fell on a descending scale and then died away. I glanced at the black-robed presences surrounding her and then looked back up at the sharp face that beamed down at me. It was the Provincial. She ruled the twenty or so convents of the English Province of the Order and had been responsible for admitting me to its ranks.

“Did you leave your parents well?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you, Reverend Mother,” I smiled back at her. Well, yes, but happy …?

“Splendid!” she said again. “And now you must meet Mother Albert, the Postulant Mistress.”

A shorter, round-faced nun with glasses bobbed up to me. She seemed to be bubbling inside, laughing at some private joke. Once more my cheeks were struck with hers in a gesture of welcome and affection.

Then other names were called and I gave up registering them. The members of the Provincial Council, the superior of the convent, and other dignitaries of the Order embraced me. Dazed and drowning in their musty blackness I submitted to their arms, turning my cheeks obediently to meet theirs, my hands hanging awkwardly at my sides. Often their cheeks never actually met mine and I felt myself poked in the eye, in the mouth by the starched borders of their wimples. Their lips, carefully avoiding all contact, moved in embarrassed little messages of greeting: “So glad, dear!” “Welcome to Tripton!”

“Ah! I remember Karen!” one of them said jauntily, as she held me away from her. “Do you remember me?”

I looked blankly at her crumpled white face, the mouth that seemed to move independently of the rest of her, the shrewd, rueful black eyes. A kind face. I thought frantically. I can’t start off with a lie, even a white one, I told myself in the silence.

“Of course she remembers Mother Greta!” Reverend Mother Provincial came to my rescue. And just then, I did remember her. She had come to Birmingham years ago for a term. She had taught me Latin. I remembered that her hands had been shaking while she tried to write the principal parts of diligo on the board. A gentle, birdlike nun with a sharp mind. I smiled at her in relief. “Mother Greta will teach you theology,” Mother Provincial explained. “But not yet. Not until the second year of your noviceship.”

“Oh no!” someone said, laughing. “There’s a lot to go through before she gets to theology!”

Again that gust of laughter, teasing now, withholding something from me. What? I wondered shiveringly, feeling outside the little circle.

“Now, Mother,” Reverend Mother Provincial’s voice was firm and commanding as she turned to Mother Albert. “I think the others are all ready and we can go in to tea. Come along, Karen; you must come and meet your brothers.”

“Brothers?” I muttered, bewildered, as the nuns swept out of the hall, following their superior in a cloud of billowing veils. I turned to Mother Albert, who was walking beside me.