Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story

“I wonder what it’s like,” she muttered. “Golly! Doesn’t she look ghastly!”

We both involuntarily looked down the corridor to the baize door that separated the school from the enclosure where the nuns ate, slept, and prayed. We were never allowed to go through that door.

“She’ll know now what they do all the time,” I said, staring at the photograph, fascinated.

I remained at the bulletin board, studying Miss Jackson’s expression. What had she seen to make her look so surprised? It was an intriguing thought. I looked at her face. She seemed so ordinary. But, really, I thought, she couldn’t have been ordinary at all.

“You seem very interested in that photograph, Karen.” I spun on my heel and found myself looking up at Mother Katherine. I was in awe of her. She swept round the school, remote in her exalted position. But when you had a chance to talk to her on her own, it was easy. She was smiling now, looking down at me questioningly.

“Yes, Mother,” I said feebly. It was that kind of obvious statement that grown-ups often made, expecting you to reply significantly. I could never think how to go on.

“What does it make you think?”

“Well, Mother, why she did it! I just can’t think why anyone would want to be a nun!”

“Why not?”

“Well, it must be terrible!” I said and then blushed. That wasn’t very polite of me. “I’m sorry,” I said hastily, “I don’t mean to be rude, but …”

“What seems to you to be the hardest thing about it?”

I thought. There were so many horrors. But then I thought of the happiest moments of my life—the holidays. The first day of the holidays filled me with a pleasure that almost hurt.

“Well, never being able to do what you want to do. I’d hate not to have some time to myself when I’m free to do whatever I want. You know, sleep late, read—and be able to go on reading all day if I want to!”

“You mean freedom?” Mother Katherine said. She smiled. “But no one is really free much of the time, Karen. Think of your mother, any mother of a family. She’s not really free to do what she wants either.”

I was silenced. It was absolutely true. I thought of my mother endlessly running from chore to chore—shopping, cleaning, cooking, mending, washing, ironing.

“But my mother has fun sometimes,” I said. “A nun can’t really enjoy herself, can she? It must be like Lent all the year round.”

Mother Katherine laughed. “Well,” she said, “a nun doesn’t enjoy herself in quite the same way as people in the world do. Of course not. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t happy.”

“Happy?” I wrinkled my nose.

“Have you ever seen an unhappy nun?”

Again I was silent. No. I thought of the nuns’ smiling faces, unlined and peaceful. I looked up at Mother Katherine. Her eyes were smiling at me and behind the smile there was a peace and a stability. When she was talking to me, she wasn’t like other grown-ups I knew. Their minds weren’t ever with me one hundred per cent. The anxious lines around their mouths, the flickering moments of worry in their eyes showed that their minds were teeming with a dozen preoccupations. But Mother Katherine’s mind was uncluttered.

“No, you all seem happy enough,” I said grudgingly.

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Well, Mother, I can’t really imagine how God can make you happy. Really happy, that is. I know He ought to, but it’s very difficult to believe.”

“Why?” Mother Katherine spoke quietly as though she were thinking over something precious and secret. Nuns often did that, I noticed. They smiled with amusement when you talked to them about God as though they knew something nice that you didn’t.

“Well, it’s hard sometimes to believe that God is a real person.”

“Of course He is,” she laughed.

“But what about other people!” I said, rather dismayed. “Don’t you ever get lonely? Or fed up with having a hard life? You know, not going to the theatre or watching television.”

She gave me a long look. “When you’re in love the things you do with the person you love are always exciting and wonderful—even when they’re difficult.”

“And are you in love with God?” I said, amazed. “Love” was a fairly abstract idea for me, but I knew what being “in love” was. It made the heroines in films and plays rush about, sing, do incredibly difficult dances, surmount all kinds of difficulties. “Are you in love?” I asked again.

Mother Katherine nodded. “Yes,” she said very quietly. “There’s the bell! You’d better hurry along to class.” She turned on her heel and started off down the corridor. She never really walked anywhere, I realized; she seemed to swoop and float—not so difficult from those film stars after all, perhaps. As she reached the foot of the stairs leading to her room she turned round.

“Come and talk to me about this again, won’t you, Karen?”

I was reminded sharply of Miss Jackson a few weeks later on my grandfather’s birthday. It was 20 October 1956, a cold autumn day, and the family, gathered together for a celebration, were sitting together round the fire, which as usual was banked up far too high and roared dangerously up the chimney.

“Good God, Madge,” said my father irritably, “that fire’s positively lethal!” Whenever we got together like this with my grandparents there was tension, I thought. Why? I followed my father’s eyes and looked at Granny, standing by the window pouring sherry into a glass. Her hand, I noticed, trembled slightly, and the drink splashed onto the crocheted white cloth. I felt protective of her. Tiny, skinny, her spectacles perched perilously on the end of her nose, she looked so frail. In a family of giants the two of us were the odd ones out, united by our small stature and the growing complicity of our minds.

My mother was sitting near me by the fire. She was smiling.

“What are you drinking?” she asked pleasantly, but with a heavy edge of significance. “Gin?”

“Gin!” Granny was horrified. “Gin! I hate gin, hate it,” she repeated emphatically. “No, I’m having a little sherry.” She held up her tiny glass, in which a thimbleful of amber liquid glowed in the angry firelight. “I never drink gin.”

I felt my parents’ eyes meeting over my head. Granny had taken her glasses off and her eyes flickered round the room. They looked frightened and alone.

“I’d better go and look at the dinner,” she said.

“Karen! Go and help Granny,” said my mother, prodding me urgently in the back.

I got up and followed her out into the kitchen, which was filled with a savory smell from the oven. Vegetables bubbled busily on the hobs of the old gas stove. It was a steamy, comfortable place. I perched myself on the formica-topped table and sat there, legs swinging, while she jabbed the potatoes with a fork.

“Nearly done,” said Granny. “It’ll be another quarter of an hour, I think. When I was at school,” and her voice was softened with memory, “I’d have been expelled for knowing what a potato looked like before it was cooked! A lady didn’t do this kind of thing then!”

We laughed comfortably, at ease together. This was familiar ground. Granny had been at a convent school in Liverpool run by the same order of nuns that taught at my own school. That had been an important factor in my parents’ choice of a school for me.

“You liked school, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she was smiling quietly to herself. Then suddenly she coughed loudly. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I’ve got a bit of a tickle in my throat.” She turned her back to me, and, with a nervous glance in the direction of the living room, she went to the tray beside the stove, which contained a large array of cooking bottles: vinegar, oil, brown sauce, and one squat green bottle. She filled a generous glassful of a clear liquid like water and, coughing markedly at me, knocked back the draught in one swift action.

“Hmm,” she cleared her throat. “That’s better. It’s a nuisance, this cough.”

I turned my eyes resolutely away from the green bottle and deliberately closed a shutter in my mind. This, I knew instinctively, was something that I mustn’t know about.

“Can I do anything to help, Mummy?” my mother called suddenly.

We both froze and looked guiltily at one another.

“No, thank you, dear!” Granny called back, “Karen’s doing a great job out here. We’ll be back presently. Help yourself to another drink!”

“All right!” My mother’s voice was deliberately casual.