Читать книгу The Spiral Staircase - Karen Armstrong - Страница 8

I was late.

That in itself was a novelty. It was a dark, gusty evening in February 1969, only a few weeks after I had left the religious life, where we had practised the most stringent punctuality. At the first sound of the convent bell announcing the next meal or a period of meditation in the chapel, we had to lay down our work immediately, stopping a conversation in the middle of a word or leaving the sentence we were writing half-finished. The Rule which governed our lives down to the smallest detail taught us that the bell should be regarded as the voice of God, calling each one of us to a fresh encounter, no matter how trivial or menial the task in hand. Each moment of our day was therefore a sacrament, because it was ordained by the religious order, which was in turn sanctioned by the Church, the Body of Christ on earth. So for years it had become second nature for me to jump to attention whenever the bell tolled, because it really was tolling for me. If I obeyed the rule of punctuality, I kept telling myself, one day I would develop an interior attitude of waiting permanently on God, perpetually conscious of his loving presence. But that had never happened to me.

When I had received the papers from the Vatican that dispensed me from my vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, I was halfway through my undergraduate degree. I could, therefore, simply move into my college, and carry on with my studies as though nothing had happened. The very next day, I was working on my weekly essay, like any other Oxford student. I was studying English literature, and though I had been at university for nearly eighteen months, to be able to plunge heart and soul into a book was still an unbelievable luxury. Some of my superiors had regarded poetry and novels with suspicion, and saw literature as a form of self-indulgence, but now I could read anything I wanted, and during those first confusing weeks of my return to secular life, study was a source of delight and a real consolation for all that I had lost.

So that evening, when at 7.20 I heard the college bell summoning the students to dinner, I did not lay down my pen, close my books neatly and walk obediently to the dining hall. My essay had to be finished in time for my tutorial the following morning, and I was working on a crucial paragraph. There seemed no point in breaking my train of thought. This bell was not the voice of God, but simply a convenience. It was not inviting me to a meeting with God. Indeed, God was no longer calling me to anything at all – if he ever had. This time last year, even the smallest, most mundane job had sacred significance. Now all that was over. Instead of each duty being a momentous occasion, nothing seemed to matter very much at all.

As I hurried across the college garden to the dining hall, I realized with a certain wry amusement that my little gesture of defiance had occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. That morning, the nuns would have knelt at the altar rail to receive their smudge of ash, as the priest muttered: ‘Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’ This memento mori began a period of religious observance that was even more intense than usual. Right now, in the convent refectory, the nuns would be lining up to perform special public penances in reparation for their faults. The sense of effort and determination to achieve a greater level of perfection than ever before would be almost tangible, and this was the day on which I had deliberately opted to be late for dinner!

As I pushed back the heavy glass door, I was confronted with a very different scene from the one I had just been imagining. The noise alone was an assault, as the unrestrained, babbling roar of four hundred students slapped me in the face. To encourage constant prayer and recollection, our Rule had stipulated that we refrain from speech all day; talking was permitted only for an hour after lunch and after dinner when the community had gathered for sewing and general recreation. We were trained to walk quietly, to open and close doors as silently as possible, to laugh in a restrained trill, and, if speech was unavoidable in the course of our duties, to speak only ‘a few words in a low voice’. Lent was an especially silent time. But there was no Lenten atmosphere in college tonight. Students hailed one another noisily across the room, yelled greetings to friends, and argued vigorously, with wild, exaggerated gestures. Instead of the monochrome convent scene, black and white habits, muffled, apologetic clinking of cutlery, and the calm, expressionless voice of the reader, there was a riot of colour, bursts of exuberant laughter and shouts of protest. But, whether I liked it or not, this was my world now.

I am not quite sure of the reason for what happened next. It may have been that part of my mind was absent, still grappling with my essay, or that I was disoriented by the contrast between the convent scene I had been envisaging and the cheerful profanity of the spectacle in front of me. But instead of bowing briefly to the Principal in mute apology for my lateness, as college etiquette demanded, I found to my horror that I had knelt down and kissed the floor.

This was the scene with which I opened Beginning the World, my first attempt to tell the story of my return to secular life. I realize that it presents me in a ridiculous and undignified light, but it still seems a good place to start, because it was a stark illustration of my plight. Outwardly I probably looked like any other student in the late 1960s, but I continued to behave like a nun. Unless I exerted constant vigilance, my mind, heart and body betrayed me. Without giving it a second’s thought, I had instinctively knelt in the customary attitude of contrition and abasement. We always kissed the floor when we entered a room late and disturbed a community duty. This had seemed strange at first, but after a few weeks it had become second nature. Yet a quick glance at the girls seated at the tables next to the door, who were staring at me incredulously, reminded me that what was normal behaviour in the convent appeared to be little short of deranged out here. As I rose to my feet, cold with embarrassment, I realized that my reactions were entirely different from those of most of my contemporaries in this strange new world. Perhaps they always would be.

There may have been another reason why I kissed the ground that evening. Ever since my dispensation had come through, many of my fellow-students and tutors had made a point of congratulating me. ‘You must be so relieved to be out of all that!’ one of them had said. ‘It never seemed quite right for you.’ ‘How exciting!’ others had exclaimed. ‘You can start all over again! You can do anything, be anything you want to be! Everything is ahead of you!’ It was true, in a sense: now I could fall in love, wear beautiful clothes, travel, make a lot of money – all the things that, most people assumed, I had been yearning to do for the past seven years. But I didn’t feel excited or relieved. I didn’t want to do any of the things that people expected. I had no sense of boundless opportunity. Instead, I felt, quite simply, sad, and was constantly wracked by a very great regret. When I pictured that dedicated Lenten scene in the convent, it seemed unbearably poignant because it was now closed to me for ever. I mourned the loss of an ideal and the absence of dedication from my new life, and I also had a nagging suspicion that if only I had tried just a little bit harder, I would not have had to leave. There had been something missing in me. I had failed to make a gift of myself to God. And so I felt like a penitent and, perhaps, when I kissed the floor that night, I had unconsciously wanted – just once – to appear in my true colours to the rest of the world.

In Beginning the World I described how I had threaded my way through the tables, flinching from the curious gaze of the other students, until I was rescued by a group who had become my friends and who had kept a kindly but tactful eye on me during the past difficult weeks. There was Rosemary, a cheerful extrovert, who was reading modern languages; Fiona, a gentler, more thoughtful girl; her constant companion Pat, who had been a pupil at one of the boarding schools run by my order; and finally Jane, who was also reading English. All were Catholics. All had some experience of nuns. Jane retained a great fondness for the kindly semi-enclosed sisters at her rather exclusive school. Pat had actually known me as a nun, since I had been sent to help out at her school in Harrogate. There were other people at the table for whom Catholicism and convents were alien territory and who clearly intended to keep it that way. In Beginning the World, I made them all tease me good-naturedly about my gaffe, question me about convent life and express shock and horror at such customs as kissing the floor, confessing faults in public and performing elaborate penances in the refectory. Maybe there was some discussion along these lines; certainly people were curious, up to a point. But I doubt that anybody was really very interested.

These young women had been quite wonderful to me. It had been Rosemary, Fiona and Pat who had marched me down to Marks and Spencer a couple of hours after my dispensation had come through and helped me to buy my first secular clothes. Rosemary had cut and styled my hair and all three had escorted me to dinner, my first public appearance as a defrocked nun. But they were probably wary of prying too closely into the reasons for what they could see had been a traumatic decision. I certainly had no desire to discuss the matter with them. In the convent we had been carefully trained never to tell our troubles to one another and it would never have occurred to me to unburden myself to my peers. And these girls had their own concerns. They too had essays to write; they were falling in love, and trying to juggle the demands of concentrated academic work with those of an absorbing social life. They were making their own journeys into adulthood, and now that the drama of my exodus was over, they almost certainly assumed that I was happily revelling in my new freedom, and were content to leave well alone.

I also knew that they could not begin to imagine my convent existence. Occasionally one of them would express astonishment if I inadvertently let something slip. ‘My nuns weren’t a bit like that!’ Jane would insist stoutly. ‘Your lot must have been abnormally strict.’ Pat would look even more bewildered, because she and I had lived with exactly the same community, but her perspective, as a secular, was different. ‘They were so modern and up-to-date, even sophisticated!’ she would protest. ‘They drove cars, were starting to go to the cinema again, and were changing the habit!’ Both girls would look at me reproachfully, because I was spoiling a cherished memory. Nobody likes to be told that things were not as they imagined. But I was quite certain that my own order had not been particularly austere, and agreed with Pat that it had been far more enlightened than many. Most nuns had observed these arcane rituals, had kissed the ground, confessed their external faults to one another, and were forbidden to have what were known as ‘particular friendships’, since all love must be given to God. That was why the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were so necessary.

I also knew that, taken out of context, such practices as kissing the floor or reciting the Lord’s Prayer five times, with your arms in the form of a cross, would seem sensationalist, exaggerated and histrionic. But in reality they became as normal to us as breathing, a routine part of our lives, sometimes even a little tedious. To speak of these things outside the convent would give a false impression. I had not left the convent because we had to do public penance, but because I had failed to find God and had never come within shouting distance of that complete self-surrender which, the great spiritual writers declared, was essential for those who wished to enter into the divine presence.

So I did not speak of my old life to anybody and most people assumed that I had, therefore, simply put the past behind me.

‘Much better out than in,’ Miss Griffiths, my Anglo-Saxon tutor said decisively, as we sat in her elegant college rooms drinking sherry one evening. ‘You look much better out of that habit, my lamb. And, you know, however things turn out in the future, I’m certain you made the correct decision. If you come back to me in fifteen years’ time and say “Look, five children and a divorce!” I shall still say that you were right to leave.’

This, of course, was quite true. There had been no other option. But as I looked around at the richly coloured William Morris curtains, the massive bookcases, and the oriental rug in front of the fire, I felt entirely out of my element. Every item of furniture, down to the tasteful ornaments glinting on the marble mantelpiece and the cunningly arranged lamps, had been designed for comfort and pleasure. In the convent, everything had been pared down to essentials: scrubbed floorboards, uncurtained windows, starkly positioned tables and chairs. Each was a perpetual reminder of how we too were to be stripped inwardly of any lingering attachment to the world, to people and to material objects, if we were to be worthy of God. Nevertheless, it was nice here, I reflected, the sherry blurring the room in a golden glow. Perhaps I could become a don one day, and have a pretty room like this, piled high with books. Perhaps I could dedicate myself to scholarship, as I had once devoted myself to the disciplines of the religious life.

My tutors’ comfortable, peaceful rooms increasingly seemed a haven. As I walked around Oxford, I realized that the world had undergone radical change while I had been inside. I had begun my Postulantship in 1962, just before the sexual, social and political upheavals of the 1960s. In the 50s, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties; and girls were clad in demure twinsets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. The dangers of premarital sex had been burned into my soul. And, indeed, before the contraceptive pill, it was a risky enterprise for girls. But all that had clearly changed. Girls and boys walked with their arms casually slung around one another, in ways that might or might not be sexual. Some embraced languorously in public places. They certainly did not subscribe to the old shibboleths, though I knew that my Catholic friends still agonized about how far they could go without falling into mortal sin. But the demeanour of these young people was even more startling. They had long flowing hair instead of the tidy repressed bobs of my youth. The neat sweaters and ties had been thrown out. Their attire was careless, ragged and often eccentric – flowered or ruffled shirts for the men, evening dress worn with jaunty insouciance in the middle of the day; the girls wore skirts that barely covered their thighs or long, flowing, vaguely eastern robes.

Above all, they were confident. I had just come from an institution in which young people were required to be absolutely obedient and submissive. We were never supposed to call attention to ourselves, never to question or criticize established custom, and, if you were invited to address your elders, you did so with deference and courtesy that bordered on the obsequious. We knelt down when we spoke to our superiors to remind ourselves that they stood in the place of God. These young people, however, seemed openly and unashamedly rebellious. They protested, noisily and vociferously. They even took part in events called ‘demonstrations’, where they publicly aired their grievances, a concept that could not have been more alien to me. What on earth were they trying to demonstrate? What had they got to be so angry about?

This was the spring of 1969, and I now realize that, on the international stage, the weeks that had elapsed since my departure from the convent had been momentous. Richard Nixon had been inaugurated as President of the United States, Yasser Arafat had been elected chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and a military coup had taken place in Pakistan. Palestinian terrorists had attacked an Israeli airliner at Zurich airport; Nixon had authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia, and Soviet and Chinese forces had clashed on the Manchurian border. I knew nothing of this. I had never heard of either Nixon or Arafat, and would have had difficulty in locating either Cambodia or Manchuria on the map. In the convent, we had not kept abreast of current events. In the novitiate, indeed, we did not even see newspapers. We were told of the Cuban missile crisis, which occurred a few weeks after I entered, but our superiors forgot to tell us that the conflict had been resolved, so we spent three whole weeks in terror, hourly expecting the outbreak of World War Three. Mother Walter also told us about the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Catholic president. Later, this strict embargo on the news was mitigated somewhat, but in general political interest was frowned upon. As a result, I entered the secular world completely ignorant of the problems of our time, and because I lacked basic information, could not make head or tail of the newspapers. What I needed was a crash course in the current political scene, but this was not available, and I felt so ashamed of my ignorance that I did not dare to ask questions that would have revealed its abysmal depths.

As it happened, there were students at my college who would have been delighted to take my education in hand, because St Anne’s was probably the most politically-minded of all the five women’s colleges. This was, of course, the great period of student unrest. In January, while I was preparing to leave my convent, the Czech student Jan Palach had publicly burned himself to death to protest Soviet occupation, and in Spain student disturbances had led to the imposition of martial law. In April, left-wing students at Cornell University in New York State staged a three-day ‘sit-in’ to draw attention to their outdated curriculum, while at Harvard, three hundred students occupied the campus administration building, and were forcibly removed by the police. Oxford was also aflame with revolutionary enthusiasm. But the ringleaders looked absolutely terrifying to me – unapproachable in their righteous rage. I would as soon have approached a charging bull, as expose my political naïveté to them

Almost every Saturday afternoon, I watched in bewilderment as crowds of students gathered on the college lawn, carrying placards emblazoned with slogans directed against the government, the university authorities, the syllabus, and something mysteriously called ‘The System’. They seemed furious about everything. I heard astonishing reports of violent meetings in the English Faculty Library, where undergraduates screamed abuse at the dons. They demanded that the formidable linguistic requirements of the course be scrapped, that the syllabus include contemporary literature (it currently stopped at 1900), and that the study of Anglo-Saxon be abolished. To me, who had fallen passionately in love with Old English literature, this rage was incomprehensible. When I heard some of my fellow-students at St Anne’s inveighing against the ‘tyranny’ of the dons, I gazed at them nonplussed. After the draconian atmosphere of the convent, the mildly liberal, laissez-faire atmosphere of St Anne’s seemed like paradise to me. These kids didn’t know what tyranny was! But then I remembered my last painful year in the convent, when I had been the rebel, and had argued relentlessly with my superior about the Rule. I had also been full of rage, constantly frustrated by the convent ‘Establishment’, and passionately eager for change. Perhaps I was not so different from my contemporaries, after all. We had just been fighting in different wars.

Willy-nilly, I found myself drawn into the climate of protest. Somewhat to my astonishment, I had been approached the previous term, while still a nun, and asked if I would let my name go forward as a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the Junior Common Room committee. I had been reluctant – a humiliating defeat seemed inevitable – but my supporters were insistent and it seemed churlish to refuse. For a couple of weeks I slunk past the noticeboard, wincing at the sight of my photograph, complete with veil and crucifix, beside those of my wild-haired rivals. What student in her right mind would vote for me? I looked like a creature from another planet. I scarcely dared to approach the noticeboard on the morning after the election, but, amazed, I saw the same photograph prominently displayed, informing the college that I was now the secretary of the Common Room.

So now I found that, whether I liked it or not, I was being drawn into student politics. I had to attend protest meetings in the JCR, and take part in intense committee discussions about how to bring St Anne’s into line with the 60s. The most pressing issue was cohabitation in the colleges. Until the early twentieth century, women had not been permitted to attend the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It was assumed that the effort of studying to the same level as men would blow their inferior little brains to smithereens. But some women had refused to accept this exclusion, had set up colleges of their own, and the university had eventually accepted them. The five women’s colleges of Oxford had been a Trojan Horse, smuggling the weaker sex into the male preserve of academia, but now, some believed, their day was over. All the colleges should be open to both sexes. Men should be allowed to come to St Anne’s and women should be admitted to the prestigious male colleges of Magdalen or Balliol.

The present arrangements did not penalize women educationally. All students attended exactly the same lectures and took the same examinations. Men and women competed against one another on equal terms. The college could arrange for us to study with any tutor of our choice. Fellows of St John’s and Merton had taught me, for example, and the St Anne’s Fellows, especially in the English department, which had an exceptional reputation, tutored male students. In fact, the women’s colleges often had a higher rate of academic success: because there were fewer places for women, the standard of those selected at the entrance examinations tended to be higher. During my years at Oxford, St Anne’s regularly came top of the Norrington Scale, the league tables which charted the performance of undergraduates in the final examinations. By the 1960s, therefore, women had proved that they were quite capable of holding their own in the university.

So to many, mixed-sex colleges seemed the next logical step. But that might take time. Women, for example, would require better bathroom facilities than the gruesome arrangements in the men’s colleges. But as a preliminary, students all over the university were demanding that the ‘Gate Hours’ be abolished. We all had to be in college by midnight, and visitors were obliged to write their names in a book at the Porter’s Lodge, and sign out before the gates were closed. Of course, people disregarded these ‘Gate Hours’. There were several places where it was very easy to climb over the college wall; everybody knew this and most turned a blind eye. If somebody were caught, he or she would suffer a mild reprimand and pay a small fine. But in these heady days of revolution, these rules seemed absurd to the more radical and, in my new official capacity, I had to attend heated meetings in which students and dons argued about them. As far as I was concerned, the question was wholly academic. There was no man clamouring to spend the night in my small college room, and the possibility of my climbing over the college wall after a love tryst was about as remote as my scaling the Great Wall of China. Moreover, until a few weeks before, I had been a very visible representative of an institution that condemned all sex outside marriage as gravely sinful.

But those days were over. I still regarded myself as a Catholic, but I was aware that its traditional teachings on sexual matters had become extremely controversial within the Church itself. Some of the nuns had been devastated the previous summer when Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae had outlawed the practice of artificial contraception. In one of our convents, I had heard, one of the more adventurous nuns had caused a minor sensation, on the morning after the papal ruling, by putting a pill (a mere aspirin, of course) on each of the sisters’ breakfast plates. Nuns naturally had no personal stake in the Pope’s decision, but the encyclical had become symbolic of the authoritarian government of the Church: by ignoring the advice of married couples, doctors and psychologists in order to reassert the Church’s traditional position, Paul VI seemed to be withdrawing from the new spirit of the Vatican Council, retreating yet again from the laity, and turning his back on the plight of those married couples who were loyal Catholics but who wanted to limit their families responsibly. The Catholic Church was undergoing its own sexual revolution, but most of those who campaigned against Humanae Vitae would not have condoned the use of the contraceptive pill by unmarried people and many of them would have expected me to take a strong line on the ‘Gate Hours’ issue and speak up for good Catholic values. A few weeks earlier, I would probably have done this without hesitation.

Now, though, I was no longer an official representative of the Catholic Church, and while I listened to the arguments from the Common Room floor, I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I felt no desire to support those students who fought against the abolition of the ‘Gate Hours’ on Christian grounds. My indifference was in part the result of an anxious preoccupation with my own personal drama. I was drained and exhausted by the events of the past few weeks, and had little energy to spare for this battle. But there was more to it than that. When I thought about the issue, I found only a question mark where the old conviction should have been. I had experienced this time and again recently; it seemed as though I had discarded a good deal of my old religious self when I had taken off my habit. Beliefs and principles that I had taken so completely for granted that they seemed part of my very being now appeared strangely abstract and remote. In fact, I reflected uneasily, I did not seem to think or feel anything very strongly any more.

I had now been studying at Oxford for nearly eighteen months, and for two years before that I had been preparing for the rigorous entrance examinations to the university. Academia had its own disciplines that were as exacting in their own way as those of the convent. One of these was already ingrained in my heart and mind: do not pronounce on subjects that you know nothing about. I had now acquired a healthy respect for the limits of my own knowledge and expertise. One of the chief effects of my education so far had been an acute consciousness of everything that I did not know. What did I know about sex? I asked myself during the explosive Common Room debates. What did I know about men, relationships or love? What did I know about the brave new world of the 60s? I knew nothing at all, and was not, therefore, entitled to an opinion. And, remembering my own protests against an outworn system only a few months earlier, I felt that I should listen carefully to those who demanded change. In the meantime, there seemed no need for me to contribute.

I was not allowed to remain on the sidelines, however. The college had appointed a new Dean of Discipline. For years Dorothy Bednarowska, my literature tutor, whose approach had been liberal and relaxed, had filled this post. The new Dean was Emily Franklin, a large, bovine woman who, I learned with some astonishment, was only a few years older than I. Her pupils told me that she was a fine teacher, if a trifle dull. But despite her relative youth, Miss Franklin had no time for student protest, and had decreed that not only would there be no change in the current ‘Gate Hours’, but that the gates would be locked an hour earlier. Furthermore, she had increased the fines for offenders, and, as her pièce de résistance, a barbed-wire hedge had appeared, without warning, underneath the favourite climbing-in spot. The college was in an uproar.

‘Of course, this is quite absurd’, Mrs Bednarowska said, drawing me aside one day in the corridor. ‘The silly woman is out of her mind. The Virgin Vote will be delighted, but it won’t wash.’

‘The Virgin Vote?’ I asked.

‘Oh – the conservative wing on the college governing body,’ Mrs Bednarowska replied. ‘You know who they are! They’re not all virgins, of course, but they might as well be. Anyway, the point is, my dear, what is the Common Room going to do about this?’

‘We’re sending a deputation to the Dean, asking her to reconsider,’ I said, a little dazed by my tutor’s assumption that I would take the liberal line.

Mrs Bednarowska gave her characteristic yelp of laughter. ‘That won’t work – though it’s very correct, of course,’ she opined, as she strode off with her curiously splay-footed gait to her rooms.

What I had not realized was that, as Secretary, I was expected to go with the president of the JCR to put our views to Miss Franklin. Maureen Mackintosh, a clever girl with masses of long red hair, was one of the most politically radical students in college, and I found her distinctly alarming. I always expected her to treat me with disdain, and dreaded lest she strike up a conversation about Vietnam and Cambodia in which I would certainly not be able to hold my own. And what on earth was an ex-nun doing campaigning for students to spend illicit nights together? To my relief, however, Maureen seemed untroubled by my presence as we set off for Miss Franklin’s apartment. We sat together, side by side, on a sofa in the Dean’s room, drinking tiny glasses of sherry in an atmosphere that was distinctly chilly, while the champion of the Virgin Vote sat with her back to the window, her cat Smokey purring noisily on her knee.

‘No more concessions!’ she replied, when we formally requested that the new measures be withdrawn and the wire fence removed. She repeated the phrase like a mantra at intervals during the ensuing discussion, almost chanting it in a strangely expressionless falsetto. ‘No more concessions!’

This irritated me. ‘You can’t call these “concessions”,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ve taken away rights that have already been given to us. We’re simply asking for a return to the status quo. Not for concessions.’

I might as well have kept my mouth shut. ‘No more concessions,’ Miss Franklin repeated.

‘The Common Room won’t accept this, Miss Franklin,’ Maureen replied sternly. ‘If you don’t at least restore the old “Gate Hours”, we shall have to take action. And that barbed wire is extremely dangerous. You didn’t warn us. Somebody could have been seriously injured.’

‘Then she – or he – would only have themselves to blame,’ Miss Franklin retorted smoothly. ‘You are here to be educated, not to indulge in unlicensed sex at all hours. Nor to organize childish demonstrations, at the expense of your studies.’

Maureen sighed, and again I felt indignant. The remark was entirely uncalled for. Maureen’s political activities certainly did not interfere with her work. She had recently won one of the highly coveted and prestigious Kennedy Scholarships for postgraduate study in the United States, and was going to Berkeley, which, I gathered, was the new Mecca for 60s revolutionaries. ‘I can only repeat,’ she persisted, with admirable self-control, ‘that the Common Room will have to take action.’

‘No more concessions!’ Miss Franklin sang implacably, turning away from us to give her attention to Smokey, and crooning endearments in his ear as he tried to climb over her ample bosom to the windowsill. I studied her with perplexity. All my life I had accepted the fact that some opinions were right and others wrong. And yet how deeply unattractive such a stance could be. Nothing we could say would cause Miss Franklin a moment’s doubt. Her mind was closed to any other possibility. She reminded me of those virginal saints in the Catholic legends who were utterly impermeable: wild beasts fell back from them in terror; swords could not pierce their invulnerable flesh; even when they were thrust into brothels, they proved impenetrable. They seemed to be surrounded by an invisible shield, a barricade that preserved them in a world of their own. In the convent we had sung hymns to the Virgin Mary, which compared her to a ‘garden enclosed’ or ‘a well sealed up’. I had been proud to take my vow of chastity, but I knew that right now I was no longer on the same side as the Virgin Vote.

I turned to Maureen inquiringly. She nodded and rose to her feet. ‘I don’t think we have anything more to say to one another,’ she said.

That night, under cover of darkness, I accompanied Maureen and a group of other students to the college wall. Each of us carried a pair of wire-clippers. Grimly and methodically we demolished the barbed-wire fence, and deposited it in a heap of ten-inch fragments on the lawn outside Miss Franklin’s window. I seemed to have thrown in my lot with the sexual revolution.

But a few days later, when I went to my first party, I was not quite so sure. Yet again, when I walked into the murky, smoke-filled room, the noise almost knocked me sideways. The parties I had attended before the convent had been sedate, elderly affairs. Under the benign but hawk-like gaze of our elders, we had lurched around the room in pairs, trying to match our faltering steps to the polite strains of waltzes and quicksteps. Bored, I had to admit, almost to stupefaction. But nobody seemed bored here, I noted, as I groped my way uncertainly to a corner where I had spotted Jane with her boyfriend Mark and accepted a glass of wine. I sipped it gratefully, hoping it might have some anaesthetic effect, as I stared, dazed, at the scene before me. The room was as dark as an underground cavern, the gloom relieved periodically by flickering lights that transformed us all into granite-hued hags. Jane’s skin looked blanched, her lips black. On the other side of the room, I could see Pat and Fiona, their pretty, fresh faces also drained of colour, their animated expressions curiously at variance with their corpse-like pallor.

‘You look stunned.’ Mark, a tall, solemn young man with the regular good looks of a male model, bent towards me solicitously. He had to shout above the din of a jangled crashing that I was trying to identify as music. Amplified male voices screamed, guitars thrummed, cymbals clashed and, beneath it all, a drum beat a primitive, disturbing pulse.

‘No. No, not at all,’ I yelled back, politely. It would have been so much easier, I now realize, if I had admitted how strange this new world appeared to me, had shared my confusion and dismay and let people in. But I seemed quite unable to do this. In my own way, I was quite as impenetrable as Miss Franklin or any Virgin Martyr. I wanted people to believe that I was taking it all in my stride and that leaving a convent was as easy as falling off a log. I didn’t want to be the object of pity or curiosity, and the convent habit of reticence was now almost reflexive. I tried to take an intelligent interest. ‘Who are the singers?’

With a unanimity that was almost comical, Jane and Mark both did a double-take. ‘The Beatles, of course!’ Jane exclaimed. And then, as I continued to look blank, she added, a little more tentatively: ‘You have heard of the Beatles, haven’t you?’

I had. Just. My sister had mentioned the group to me on one of her visits, and the name had cropped up occasionally in the conversation of my fellow-students. But even though it was now 1969, I had no idea who the Beatles really were, no notion of their extraordinary impact on British society during the 60s, had never encountered Beatlemania, and had certainly never knowingly heard a note of their music. Jane and Mark tried to explain to me what the Beatles meant for their generation, but I took little in. I could see that they were slightly alarmed by my ignorance. Jane was looking at me thoughtfully, though I made her laugh when I asked, in some perplexity, why the band was named after those rather unpleasant black insects. On my other side, Mark was reciting the lyrics, which shocked me by their unabashed expression of naked need: ‘Love, Love Me Do!’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand!’, ‘Please, Please Me!’ I could not even have admitted to myself that I had such needs, let alone shouted my yearnings aloud in such wild abandonment. Yet the words touched some raw place within me, making me aware of my loneliness in this crowded room. All around me I noticed feet tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words of the songs, glances exchanged as though a phrase had a special private significance. The Beatles were a current that united everybody at the party; a thread that bound the room together. They were the spokesmen of their generation, but even though they must have been about my own age, they could not speak for me. I was present at the party, but only as an outsider. The ease and confidence with which the Beatles simply said what they wanted appalled me, and yet I longed to be able to do the same. Even today, more than thirty years later, when I have come to appreciate their real genius, I find their songs almost unbearably poignant. Those desires had been schooled out of me, and yet the painfully direct appeal of the lyrics made me realize that I wished that I had them. I felt my throat swell with unshed tears: ‘All You Need Is Love’.

But love in this context? I stared bemused at the dancers. These new acquaintances of mine had obviously never heard of the quickstep. Instead, they were leaping, twisting, gyrating together in pairs. Some even danced singly, and no one followed any predetermined pattern. They shot into the air, waved their arms, swung out legs at odd angles. Doing what came naturally. But it was not natural for me. For a second I felt a pang of pure envy. I would love to be able to do that, I thought, and to be so wild, uninhibited and free. These students were living fully and intensely, in a way that I could not. When Mark, kindly, asked me if I would like to dance, I shook my head. I could no more fling myself around like that than fly.

For years, I had been trained in absolute physical restraint. Nuns had to walk smoothly, at a moderate pace. Unless there was some dire emergency, they must never run. At first all this had been difficult. Most of us were young and it was hard to quench the impulse to run upstairs, two steps at a time, or to hurry to a class when late. But gradually I had learned to keep myself in check. I had, however, never fully mastered these rules of ‘religious modesty’ which were supposed to regulate a nun’s demeanour. I was, and am, clumsy and badly coordinated. I never quite achieved the noiseless, gliding carriage of some of my fellow-novices, and I was always hopeless at ‘custody of the eyes’, the quaintly named monastic habit of keeping one’s gaze fixed on the ground. I like to know what is happening, and if I heard an unusual noise or somebody entering the room, I found it almost impossible not to check it out. I was often reprimanded for staring boldly at my superiors, instead of casting my eyes down humbly. I did not mean to be disrespectful, but I had been brought up to look people directly in the eye when I spoke to them. Yet for all these failings, some of this convent discipline had rubbed off on me, and to this day I have never been able to dance. I have often fantasized about being a disco-girl, imagining an alternative Karen, able to leap about, let go, and disappear into the music. It must be a marvellous feeling. But it has never been possible. At a very impressionable age, my body was schooled in quite other rhythms and it has, for better or worse, taken the print.

As I watched the dancers, I felt completely out of my element. I could see that this kind of dancing was unabashedly sexual. It reminded me of the ceremonial dances performed by Africans that I had seen occasionally on documentaries or newsreels. It was interesting, but had nothing to do with me. I tried to look nonchalant and at ease, but felt miserably that I must look as out of place as the Queen, in her suburban, matronly clothes, carrying her ubiquitous handbag like a shield, staring with a glazed smile at the ritual dances performed in her honour during a tour of the Commonwealth. I had found, to my considerable sorrow, that even though I no longer belonged in the convent, I didn’t belong out here either.

Looking back, I can see that, during those first few months, I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine or Zimbabwe, and migrate to a Western country. The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of ‘home’ is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away, and becoming insubstantial. Their ‘world’ – inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos – has literally come to an end.

Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my ‘home’ in the convent of my own free will, and was not languishing in a camp, but I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the 60s’ world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction, not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St Anne’s, where we bought newspapers and sweets.

I saw it again in the eyes of Sister Mary Sylvia, a nun in my college. She had recently come from India to take a degree in English literature, and was living in my old convent at Cherwell Edge. In India, apparently, she had earned a first-class degree, had run schools, and held high office in her order. But the move from India seemed to have unhinged her completely. She was quite unable to write a coherent essay, complete the simple procedures that enabled her to take books out of the college library, or remember the times of lectures and seminars. I knew about this all too well, because – as one familiar with the arcane ways of nuns – I was constantly called to the rescue. When I tried to help Sister Mary Sylvia with her essays, I noticed that she simply could not take in what I was trying to tell her. One day when she failed to turn up to the philology class that, as usual, was being held in the small seminar room, I found her sitting all alone in the dining hall with her notebook, smiling benignly, while puzzled college servants tried to work around her, waxing the floor and laying the tables for dinner. She was clearly in shock, could make no sense of her surroundings, and had entirely lost her bearings. I was in better shape, but I sensed something of what she was going through. Deprived of the familiar, I too seemed to have lost my way in a world that meant nothing to me. When later that year, I watched my namesake Neil Armstrong make his ‘giant leap for mankind’, and jump on to the pitted surface of the moon, the utterly bleak, dark and eerily empty lunar landscape epitomized exactly what Planet Earth had become for me.

It was little better when I returned home during the vacation. My family gave me a wonderful welcome, but they were expecting the daughter and sister who had left home seven years earlier. My parents were tremulously eager to resume normal family life, but they seemed almost strangers to me. They had been allowed to visit at six-monthly intervals and I had been permitted to write to them only once every four weeks. These communications had, to put it mildly, been unsatisfactory. Visits to the convent parlour were starchy and artificial. Nuns were not allowed to eat with ‘seculars’, so my parents had some appalling meals surrounded by a bevy of nuns pouring out tea and making polite conversation, while I went off to eat with the community in the convent refectory. My sister Lindsey, who was three years younger than I, had hated these visits. As she watched us process into the chapel, genuflecting before the altar with near military precision, and kneeling motionless in the pews, the underlying tension, the humourless rigidity, and the fear that somebody might ruin this perfection by making a mistake so petrified her that, to the amusement of some members of the community, she often passed out, and had to be carried outside, even though she never fainted anywhere else. My letters were little better. We were never allowed to speak of what happened inside the convent, and since for years I scarcely left the enclosure, I had to confine my remarks to anodyne descriptions of the countryside or reverential accounts of church services.

My parents, therefore, had no idea what my life had been like for the last seven years. At a deeper and more worrying level, I found that I simply could not respond to their affection. I shied away from any intimacy, could not bear to be touched or embraced, and could speak to my family only in the rather formal, distant way of nuns. Naturally my parents were hurt, I felt bad about hurting them, and there was an impasse. The training seemed to have worked, after all. My capacity for affection had either atrophied or been so badly damaged that it could not function normally. I felt frozen and could see what people meant when they said that their heart had turned to stone. I could almost feel this new hardness within, like a cold, heavy weight. I had become a person who could not love and who seemed incapable of reaching out to others. Whether I liked it or not, I was now a garden enclosed, a well sealed up.

Leaving the religious life in those days was not like changing your job or moving house. Our novitiate had not simply provided us with new professional skills, and left our deepest selves untouched. It was a conditioning. For about three years, we were wholly isolated from the outside world, and also from the rest of the community. The door of the Noviceship was kept permanently locked, and we spoke to the other nuns only on very special feast-days. This meant that the novitiate became our whole world; no other existed for us, and the whims and moods of our Mistress acquired monumental importance. When we were punished, it seemed a cosmic event; when we were lonely or miserable, there was no possibility of comfort. The atmosphere was frigid, and sometimes even frightening. At night in our long dormitory, we often heard one another weeping, but knew that we must never ask what was wrong. We lived together in community, cheek by jowl, but were so lonely that we might as well have been living in solitary confinement. We became entirely dependent upon our Superior’s every move, and accepted her worldview and her opinion of ourselves as gospel truth. I was so young that I could draw upon no experience to counter this regime. So the world receded, and the tiny dramas and cold values of Noviceship life filled my entire horizon.

This type of isolation is central to the rituals of initiation, practised in the ancient world and in many indigenous societies today. On reaching puberty, boys are taken away from their mothers, separated from their tribe and subjected to a series of frightening ordeals that change them irrevocably. It is a process of death and resurrection: initiates die to their childhood and rise again to an entirely different life as mature human beings. They are often told that they are about to suffer a horrible death; they are forced to lie alone in a cave or a tomb; they are buried alive, experience intense physical pain (the boys are often circumcised or tattooed), and undergo terrifying rituals. The idea is that in these extreme circumstances, the young discover inner resources that will enable them to serve their people as fully functioning adults. The purpose of these rites of passage is thus to transform dependent children into responsible, self-reliant adults, who are ready to risk their lives as hunters and warriors, and, if necessary, to die in order to protect their people

Our training had been an initiation. We too had been segregated from the world, deprived of normal affection, and subjected to trials that were designed to test our resolve. We too were to be warriors of sorts – soldiers of God, who practised the military obedience devised by St Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, whose Rule we followed. The training was designed to make us wholly self-reliant, so that we no longer needed human love or approval. We too were told that we were to die to our old selves, and to our worldly, secular way of looking at things. Of course, we were not buried alive in a tomb or anything of that sort, but we were constantly undermined, belittled, publicly castigated, or ordered to do things that were patently absurd. As Ignatius’s Rule put it, we were to become utterly pliable to the will of God, as expressed through our superiors, in the same way as ‘a dead body allows itself to be treated in any manner whatever, or as an old man’s stick serves him who holds it in every place and for every use alike’. Dead to ourselves, we would live a fuller, enhanced existence, as Jesus had promised in a text that we liked to quote: ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will remain nothing but a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit.’ On our profession day, while the choir sang the Litany of the Saints, we lay under a funeral pall, symbolically dead to the world, and to our greedy, needy, selves that clung, infant-like, to ordinary, worthless consolations.

Now, it seemed to me that I had indeed died, but I was certainly not bringing forth much fruit. I felt as though I had entered a twilight zone between life and death, and that instead of being transfigured, as I had hoped, I had got the worst of both worlds. Instead of being full of courage, fearless, active and protective of others, like the initiate of a tribal rite of passage, I was scared stiff. Unable to love or to accept love, I had become less than human. I had wanted to be transformed and enriched; instead I was diminished. Instead of becoming strong, I was simply hard. The coldness and frequent unkindness, designed to ‘toughen us up’, had left me feeling merely impaired, like a piece of tough steak. The training was designed to make us transcend ourselves, and go beyond the egotism and selfishness that hold us back from God. But now I seemed stuck inside myself, unable either to escape, or to reach out to others. An initiation prepares you for life in the community; I had left the community that I was supposed to serve, and was inhabiting a world that I had been trained, at a profound level, to reject.

One of the most difficult things about returning to the family home was that at every turn I kept meeting my former self – the undamaged, seventeen-year-old Karen, who had been vital and full of hope. In my bedroom, I remembered how I had sat in this very chair, and lain on that very bed, full of excitement about the great adventure I was about to begin. When I took down a book from my shelves, I remembered my wonder and delight when I had first read this novel, or come across that poem. There were boxes of letters and postcards to friends, full of affection and an easy intimacy that I could no longer imagine. That person had gone; she had indeed died under the funeral pall. I felt bereaved – full of grief as though for a dead friend. This, I knew, was entirely my own fault. My superiors had not intended this to happen to me; they had not meant to push me into this limbo. I had not responded properly to the training. I had been too feeble to go all the way, to let myself truly die. I had kept on hankering for love and affection, and wept because I was too weak to endure these robust austerities. I had attempted something that was beyond my capacities, and been injured by my presumption – like a little girl who, in her impatience to become a ballerina, insists on going en pointe too early, before her feet are properly mature, and hobbles herself for ever.

Love was beyond me; even friendship was difficult. But at least I had my work. I knew that I was good at academic study. Despite the upheaval of leaving the religious life, I had done very well at Oxford so far and was expected to get a first-class degree. With that under my belt, I could become an academic, engaged in full-time study and teaching the subject I loved. So I returned to Oxford for the summer, full of renewed determination to do even better and make this prospect a reality. If I had lost one cloister, I could immure myself in my studies and find another.

To my dismay, I found a new obstacle. This term I was sent out to study with a young tutor at one of the men’s colleges. My tutorial partner was Charlotte, an immensely gifted girl who had her own troubles. Her mother had died during our first year and Charlotte had become anorexic. Even though she seemed over the worst, she was still thin and wary of food. We had often eyed each other knowingly, wryly acknowledging that we were both struggling, so it was good to be spending more time together. Charlotte wanted to be a novelist. ‘She can really write,’ Dorothy Bednarowska had told me, and she had already introduced Charlotte to a literary agent. But Charlotte found the academic study of literature difficult. Her work was brilliant and original but, ‘Studying literature so critically and technically is bad for my writing,’ she told me. Fearing that it would cramp her own style, she refused to study the novel at all. As was customary at Oxford, we had to read our essays aloud to our tutor during the weekly tutorial, and Charlotte was obviously perplexed, even repelled by mine. ‘Idon’t know how you churn out all this stuff,’ she had said to me once. ‘It’s beautiful in a way. Your essays are like Gothic cathedrals, with all the right scholars and theories slotted together and built into a massive structure of conformity.’ I wasn’t sure that I liked the sound of that. I enjoyed reading the literary criticism that Charlotte hated. I found it fun to weigh one scholar against another and make a pattern of my own out of other people’s thoughts. But I was uneasily aware that not much of myself was going into my work, and that what I was presenting, week after week, was other people’s ideas rather than my own.

That would not be allowed this term, however. Our new tutor was a rather affected but reputedly very clever young don at one of the more modern colleges. We sat in his bright, book-lined room overlooking the forecourt, watching some students teasing the goldfish in the moat. Dr Brentwood Smyth sprawled elegantly in a large leather armchair, leaping up occasionally to consult a text. ‘You got a Violet Vaughan Morgan prize, didn’t you?’ he asked me. ‘Impressive. You must be very good at exams.’ I could tell that he did not think much of this accomplishment. He seemed more interested in Charlotte, whose original, thoughtful response to his questions clearly intrigued him.

‘Oh, don’t let’s have a fixed time!’ he cried impatiently when I asked him when we should come for tutorials. ‘That’s the trouble with the women’s colleges! They’re organized like high schools. Just ring me up when your essay is done.’

‘What should we write about?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, anything you like! I’m not going to set you one of those dreary exam questions. I’m sure you get quite enough of those at St Anne’s. No. Just write me something on one poem. Take “Frost at Midnight”. Coleridge. Don’t read any literary criticism. Just live with the poem for a week and then tell me what it means to you. Not to anybody else. When you’re ready, give me a call.’

This was music to Charlotte’s ears, but worrying for me. I could see that it was a good idea and, indeed in later years when I came to teach literature myself, I would often set my students a similar task. But the problem back then was that I just couldn’t do it. I needed to escape into other people’s books and minds because, when left entirely to my own devices, I found that I had nothing to say. It wasn’t exactly that the poem did not speak to me. It was clearly an extraordinary work. I could have made it the basis for a fascinating essay on the English Romantic movement. But what did the poem say to me? That was what Dr Brentwood Smyth wanted to know and I didn’t know what I was going to tell him. I found myself thinking of some other lines by Coleridge, written in a period of deep depression, when he looked out at the evening sky ‘with its peculiar tint of yellow-green’, at the thin clouds, the moon and the stars:

I see them all so excellently fair,

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

I should have been pierced by the poem, and then have leapt out to meet it. I used to be like that. I remembered how deeply poetry had touched me while I was at school. But yet again, as with my relations with people, there was only deadness, nothingness. I was now impervious even to the literature that I thought I had loved.

An initiation is supposed to make you self-reliant, but mine had made me dependent. As I struggled to fill the requisite number of pages for my essay, I had to face the grim fact that I no longer had ideas of my own. Indeed, I had been carefully trained not to have them. There had been a moment early in the Postulantship, when I had heard a warning bell. We were doing a little course in Apologetics, which explained the rational grounds for faith. I was set an essay: ‘Assess the historical evidence for the Resurrection.’ I had read the requisite textbooks, could see what was required, and duly produced a discussion of the events of the first Easter Sunday that made Jesus’ rising from the tomb as uncontroversial and unproblematic historically as the Battle of Waterloo. This was nonsense, of course, but that did not seem to matter in Apologetics.

‘Yes, Sister, very nice.’ Mother Greta, the pale, delicate nun who was supervising our studies, smiled at me as she handed back my essay. ‘This is a very good piece of work.’

‘But, Mother,’ I suddenly found myself saying. ‘It isn’t true, is it?’

Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly-fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. ‘No, Sister,’ she said wearily. ‘It isn’t true. But please don’t tell the others.’

This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict each other, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in Apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it.

It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the Postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day. Years later, while I was having my breakdown, I learned that Mother Greta had been very anxious indeed about the way we were being trained, had voiced her disapproval, and had been overruled. What had our superiors been about, and why did I not tear up that dishonest piece of work, or at least argue with Mother Greta? I had simply gone along with the whole unholy muddle.

But I was only eighteen years old and this had not been an isolated incident. On the very first day of our Postulantship, Mother Albert, our Mistress, explained that during the first years of our religious lives we would constantly be told things that seemed incredible or irrational. But they only seemed this way because we were lacking in spiritual maturity. We were learning to inhabit a different element from the rest of the world, to breathe another atmosphere. We were still fresh from ‘the world’ and its taints; we still thought and responded like secular people, but now we had to enter into God’s perspective. Had God not told Isaiah:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

My ways are not your ways,

For as high as the heavens are above the earth

So are my thoughts above your thoughts, my ways above your ways.

So when we were tempted to question the ideas, principles and customs of the order, we must remember that as yet we were simply not in a position to understand. We were like babies, learning an entirely new language. One day, in the not too distant future, when we had developed spiritually, we would see all these matters quite differently. Until then, we just had to wait patiently, in what the mystics had called the cloud of unknowing, and all would be revealed. So my lying little essay on the Resurrection was part of this larger programme.

So was the fact that I had once, during my Postulantship, spent hours treadling a sewing machine that had no needle. To be fair, this was the result of a misunderstanding, but the underlying principle still applied. I was finding all needlework very difficult indeed, and had just put the good sewing machine in our community room out of action. Furious, Mother Albert told me to practise on an older machine in the adjoining room for half an hour a day. But it had no needle. My mistake was to point this out. Mother Albert had been meaning to replace that needle for some time, but it had completely slipped her mind. She was already angry with me, however, and I was not supposed to answer back in this way. ‘How dare you!’ she said, her voice cold with rage. ‘Don’t you know that a nun must never correct her superior in such a pert manner. “There’s no needle in that machine!”’ she cried, tossing her head in supposed imitation of my defensive manner. ‘You will go to that machine next door, Sister, and work on it every day, needle or no needle, until I give you permission to stop.’

So I did, treadling away at the empty machine, telling myself that because I was acting under obedience, however pointless this exercise might seem to a profane eye, this was the best possible way of spending my time. It was God’s way. I had almost succeeded in quelling the objections that stubbornly erupted in my mind from time to time, when Mother Albert walked into the room two weeks later and stared at me as though I had lost my wits. But this time, when she cried in outraged astonishment, ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’ I was ready for her.

‘Practising machining, Mother,’ I replied demurely.

‘But there’s no needle in that …’

Even as she spoke, I saw light dawning and realized that she had completely forgotten about the whole thing. She clapped her hand to the back of her head, and turned away abruptly, lips twitching with suppressed mirth. After recovering herself, she gave me a searing lecture on my pride and disobedience. No nun should ever correct her superior, as I had done that day, even if convinced that she was wrong. As far as I was concerned, my superior was right, because she stood in the place of God. It was my wretched intellectual pride that blocked my spiritual advancement, and I would make no progress as long as I refused to regard things from a supernatural point of view.

Yet could you behave like that indefinitely, without inflicting real and lasting damage on your mind? I remembered the moment, a year or so later, when I had realized that my mind no longer worked freely. It was the recreation hour in the Noviceship. We all sat around the long table in the community room with our needlework, Mother Walter, our Novice Mistress, presiding. That night we were talking about the liturgical changes that were being introduced by the Second Vatican Council: the mass was being said in English instead of Latin, for example, and that morning the children in the adjacent boarding school had played guitars to accompany a song they had composed themselves. Mother Walter had not enjoyed that song. She was devoted to the Gregorian chant and had taught us to love it too. Even though she once told me that I had a voice like a broken knife-grinder, I had to sing in the choir and, though I could never hit the higher notes and was ruefully aware of the tunelessness of my efforts, I was beginning to appreciate the spiritual quality of plainsong – the way the music circled meditatively around the words and drew attention to a phrase or obscure preposition that could easily have passed unnoticed, but which proved to have rich meaning. Now it looked as if the days of the chant were numbered and though Mother Walter would have cut out her tongue rather than criticize the Vatican, she was convinced that this would be an irreparable loss. ‘Of course the Council is inspired by the Holy Spirit,’ she was saying, ‘but it is hard to see how we can replace a musical tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Just think: St Bernard would have sung the same chant as we do. So would Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. And now we have to listen to those silly children playing guitars.’ For a moment, the measured calm of her voice faltered and her face darkened in a way we had learned to dread.

‘But, Mother,’ Sister Mary Jonathan, a novice who was a year ahead of me and who had been my ‘guardian angel’ when I had begun my novitiate, spoke up eagerly. ‘Surely the changes needn’t necessarily be a disaster? After all, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing a guitar at mass, is there?’

Mother frowned. ‘I should have thought,’ she replied coldly, ‘that this is a matter we need not discuss.’ We all bent our heads obediently over our needlework, distancing ourselves. The topic had been closed. No one would dream of taking it any further, against the expressed wish of our superior.

‘But some people,’ Sister Mary Jonathan continued, to my astonishment, ‘might go to church initially to enjoy the guitar because they like that kind of music. We’ve learned to love the chant, but lots of people can’t understand the Latin, and the music is so different from anything they are used to that they can’t make anything of it.’

Mother Walter laughed shortly. It came out as an angry bark. ‘Anyone who needs a guitar to get them to mass must have a pretty feeble faith!’ Her eyes had hardened and her lower lip protruded in a scowl. The tension in the room was almost palpable. Nobody ever answered back like that and the rest of us were sewing as though our lives depended upon it. But I found myself looking hopefully at Sister Mary Jonathan, willing her to go on. I used to be able to do that, I thought wonderingly. I used to like exploring different points of view, building up an argument step by step, sharpening an idea against somebody else’s mind. But I could no more do that now than run naked down the cloister. Not only would I never have dared to cross Mother Walter – and, indeed, I hastily reminded myself, Sister Mary Jonathan was breaking several rules at once – but I wouldn’t be able to think like that any more. I no longer had it in me. But Sister Mary Jonathan did.

‘The guitar might give God a chance,’ she countered brightly. ‘People might come to listen and then find something more …’

‘Really, Sister!’ Mother’s voice was thunderous. ‘I would have thought that you of all people would understand.’ Sister Mary Jonathan was very musical. ‘Do you think God needs a guitar,’ she uttered the word as though it were an obscenity, ‘to give him a chance?’

Sister was undeterred. ‘But surely Jesus would have used a guitar, if he’d been alive today?’

‘Nonsense, Sister! I’ve never heard such rubbish! He would have done no such thing!’

I had to bend my head quickly over the stocking that I was darning to hide an involuntary smile. I had a sudden mental picture of Jesus standing on a hill in Galilee, surrounded by his Jewish audience, singing plainsong. He looked pretty silly.

Mother Walter had spotted me. ‘I am glad that you find this amusing, Sister,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘I find it extremely sad. Sister Mary Jonathan has committed a serious fault against obedience and against charity, by spoiling recreation for everybody!’

That had been the end of the matter; though, when Mother wasn’t looking, Sister Mary Jonathan had winked at me and pulled a face. With hindsight, that complicity had been prophetic. She had left the order shortly before I had. She had fallen in love with a young Jesuit, with whom she was studying at London University. Somehow she had held on to herself better than I had. I was quite sure that she would not find it difficult to tell anybody what she thought. My problem, as I wrestled with my highly unsatisfactory essay for Dr Brentwood Smyth, was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come any more. True, at the very end of my religious life I had argued with Mother Praeterita, my Oxford superior, but the ideas I used against her had not been mine. I was simply parroting books and articles that I had read. It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent. You can probably abuse your mind and do it irrevocable harm, just as you can damage your body by feeding it the wrong kind of food, depriving it of exercise or forcing your limbs into a constricting straitjacket. My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman; I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. The restraints had been removed too late, and she would never walk normally again.

I knew that a good nun must be ready to give up everything and count the world well lost for God. But what had happened to God? My life had been turned upside down, but God should still be the same. It seemed that, without realizing it, I had indeed become like St Ignatius’s dead body or the old man’s stick. My heart and my mind both seemed numb and etiolated, but God seemed to have gone too. In the place that he had occupied in my mind, there was now a curious blank.

Or perhaps it was only now that I could admit to this God-shaped gap in my consciousness. One of the most painful failures of my convent life had been my inability to pray. Our whole existence had God as its pivot. The silence of our days had been designed to enable us to listen to him. But he had never spoken to me.

Every morning at six o’clock, we had knelt in the convent church for an hour of meditation, according to the method that St Ignatius had designed for his Jesuits in the Spiritual Exercises. This had been a highly structured discipline. As a preliminary step, we prepared the topic the night before. Each of us spent fifteen minutes selecting a passage from scripture or a devotional book, and making a note of the topics that we intended to consider in the morning. Ignatius’s meditation was based on a three-part programme: See, Judge and Act. First we all stood in silence for a few minutes, reciting to ourselves a prayer that reminded us that we were in the presence of God, and then we knelt down, took out our books and notes, and began with ‘See’. This meant that we had to use our imaginations to picture the gospel scene we had chosen, and even if the subject of our meditation was more abstract, we had to give it a local habitation and ‘place’ it in some concrete way. Ignatius had thought it very important that all the faculties be engaged, so that the whole man (Ignatius had a poor opinion of women) was brought into the divine ambience. This ‘composition of place’, as it was called, was also meant to ward off distraction. If you were busily picturing the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, evoking a sense of the Middle Eastern heat, looking at the sand dunes, listening to the braying donkeys and so forth, your imagination was less likely to stray to profane topics. At least, that was the theory.

Next came ‘Judge’, when the intellect was brought into play. This was the point when you were supposed to reflect on the topics you had listed the night before. Finally you proceeded to ‘Act’ which, for Ignatius, was the real moment of prayer. As a result of your deliberations, you made an act of will, applying the lessons you had learned to the day that lay ahead. There had to be a specific resolution. It was no good vaguely vowing to live a better life from that day forward. You had to settle for something concrete: to try harder with your sewing, for example, or to make a special effort not to think uncharitable thoughts about a sister who irritated you beyond endurance. Prayer, Ignatius taught, was an act of will. It had nothing to do with pious thoughts or feelings; these were simply a preparation for the moment of decision. Ignatian spirituality was never an end in itself but was directed towards action and efficiency. He wanted his Jesuits to be effective in the world and their daily meditation ensured that their activities would proceed from God.

But this did not work for me. Every morning I resolved that this time I would crack it. This time there would be no distractions. I would kneel as intent upon God as my sisters, none of whom seemed to have my difficulties. I had never before had any problems of concentration. I had always been able to immerse myself in my studies for hours at a time. But to my intense distress, I found that I could not keep my mind on God for two minutes. The whole point of the careful preparation was to prevent this. It was acknowledged that at 6.00 a.m. we were likely to be less than fully alert and would need help in focusing our thoughts. But as soon as I sank to my knees, my mind either went off at a tangent or scuttled through a maze of pointless worries, fears or fantasies, or else I was engulfed by the torpor of physical malaise. Like most adolescents, I craved sleep and experienced the 5.30 a.m. call as a violent assault. I often felt queasy with hunger and fatigue, and clung dizzily to the pew in front of me. At 6.30, the clock in the cloister chimed and we could sit down. But this sweet relief gave way to another trial, as I battled against sleep, and was comforted to see that even some of the older nuns listed and slumped in such a way that it was clear that they had succumbed. The minutes crawled by until the sacristan appeared to light the candles on the altar as a welcome signal that mass was about to begin.

At breakfast, an hour later, we were supposed to examine our meditation, going through a ten-point questionnaire. Had I made myself fully conscious of the Presence of God? No. Had I made sufficient effort in the ‘composition of place’? No. Had all my senses been fully engaged? No. And so on. I didn’t need the fifteen minutes we were supposed to devote to this self-appraisal. I didn’t have to spend any time grading my performance on a scale of one to ten. I was just a Big Zero.

Meditation was only the first spiritual exercise of the day. Four times daily we chanted our version of the divine office in choir. Twice a day, for fifteen minutes, we examined our consciences, according to Ignatius’s five-point plan: this involved marking off one’s faults and achievements in a little book, and counting the number of times we had failed to perform the special task for this week (in Ignatian terminology this was called the ‘particular examen’): there was half an hour’s spiritual reading, a community exercise during which one of us read aloud and the rest continued our everlasting needlework; half an hour’s silent ‘adoration’ in the chapel in the early evening; and the private recitation of the rosary. Yet again, I flunked. Throughout my seven years, I hugged to myself the shameful secret that, unlike the other sisters, I could not pray. And, we were told, without prayer our religious lives were a complete sham. For several hours a day on every single day of the year, I had to confront and experience my abject failure. In other ways, my mind was capable and even gifted, but it seemed allergic to God. This disgrace festered corrosively at the very heart of my life and spilled over into everything, poisoning each activity. How could I possibly be a nun if, when it came right down to it, I seemed completely uninterested in God and God appeared quite indifferent to me?

I don’t know quite what I thought should be happening. Certainly I didn’t expect visions and voices. These, we were told, were only for the greatest saints and could be delusions, sent by the devil to make us proud. But all the books that I read about prayer spoke of moments of ‘consolation’ that punctuated the inevitable periods of dryness. Periodically God would comfort the soul, make it feel that he was near and enable it to experience the warmth of his presence and love. God would, as it were, woo the soul, offering this periodic breakthrough as a carrot, until the soul outgrew this need and could progress to the next stage of its journey. Gradually the soul would be drawn into the higher states of prayer, into further reaches of silence, and into a mysterious state that lay beyond the reach of thoughts and feeling.

That was the theory. But far from progressing to these more advanced states, I never left base-camp. Of course there were moments when I felt moved by the beauty of the music or uplifted by a rousing sermon, but in my view this did not count. It was simply an aesthetic response, something that even an atheist could experience at a concert or when she was exposed to skilful rhetoric. I never had what seemed to be an encounter with anything supernatural, with a being that existed outside myself. I never felt caught up in something greater, never felt personally transfigured by a presence that I encountered in the depths of my being. I never experienced Somebody Else. And how could I possibly hope to have such an encounter when my mind was unable to wait upon God? Prayer, we were always told, was simply a way of quieting the soul, enabling it to apprehend the divine. You had to gather up your dissipated faculties, bring them together and present yourself, whole and entire, to God, so that every single part of your mind and heart could honestly say with the prophet Samuel: ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ But my mind, heart and faculties remained scattered. Try as I would, I could not re-collect them, so there was no way that God could get through to me.

I tried to discuss this with my superiors, of course. On several occasions, I explained that I never had any ‘consolation’ and could not keep my mind on my meditation. But they seemed frankly incredulous. ‘You’re always so extreme, Sister!’ Mother Frances, the Mistress of Scholastics, had said with irritation. ‘You’re always exaggerating. Everybody has consolation at some time or another. Are you seriously telling me that in all the six years of your religious life you have never once experienced consolation?’ I had nodded. She had looked baffled. ‘Well, I really don’t know what to say to you,’ she had said, clearly at a loss. ‘That’s most unusual. I don’t know how anybody could go on without some consolation. But I’m sure that things aren’t really as bad as you say,’ she had gone on briskly. ‘You probably just feel a bit down at the moment, that’s all, and being you, you have to make a major drama out of the whole business.’ This was not reassuring. I must be a particularly hard case, I thought miserably. As for my confession that I could never keep my mind on my prayers, this was also airily waved to one side. ‘Everybody has their off-days, Sister!’ Nobody would believe that I would love to have had some off-days, because it would have meant that some of my days were ‘on’.

So even in the convent, God had been conspicuous by his absence from my life. And that, I became convinced, must be my fault. My case seemed to be so peculiar that it could not be a mere failure of the system. If only I had tried a little harder, concentrated just that little bit more, or found more interesting topics for meditation. The quality of a nun’s commitment was reflected in the quality of her prayer. And how could I hope to sense God’s presence when I continually broke the silence, frequently had uncharitable thoughts, and, above all, constantly yearned for human affection, and wept when reprimanded? It was, of course, a vicious circle. The more empty my prayers, the more I sought consolation in mundane things and in people. Round and round. Then there were my secret doubts. Even though I tried to tiptoe gingerly around difficult articles of faith, I could not stop wondering whether the Virgin Mary really had been conceived without Original Sin and been taken up body and soul into heaven after her death. How did anybody know that Jesus was God? And was there even a God out there at all? Was that why I never encountered him in prayer? As I knelt in the chapel, watching my sisters kneeling quietly with their heads bowed contemplatively in their hands, I would sometimes wonder whether it wasn’t a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Nobody ever experienced God but nobody dared to admit it. And then I would mentally shake myself. How could God reveal himself to a nun who harboured these shocking doubts?

And so came the morning when, just a few days after I had been dispensed from my vows, my alarm rang at six o’clock and instead of getting up and walking down the road to St Aloysius’s Church for early mass, I simply switched it off and went back to sleep. For seven years, each day had begun with prayer and Eucharist, but now there seemed no point in any of that. I would still go to mass on Sundays, of course, because this was obligatory, binding upon all Catholics. Leaving the Church as well as the convent was at present a step too far. But the very idea of kneeling silently in a darkened church – yet again – filled me with immense fatigue. I cannot do that any more, I told myself wearily that morning; I simply cannot do it. The accumulated failure had left me feeling not merely exhausted but also slightly sick.

I had tried, I told myself, as I turned over and faced the whitewashed brick wall of my cheerful college room. I had not been the best nun in the world, but I had honestly done my best, and my superiors had all tried to help me. But it was just no good. If God did exist, he clearly wanted nothing to do with me, and, right now, I couldn’t blame him. There was something in me that was proof against religion, closed to the divine. Let it go, I told myself sleepily. Don’t beat yourself up any longer. Just live simply as a secular, and give up these inappropriate spiritual ambitions. You’re in the world now. Make friends with it. One day at a time.

But soon even that would become impossible.