cream, to be applied at night.
I still have one of the powder boxes we failed to sell: pale glazed wood, with stylized flowers painted elegantly upon its lid. My mother’s training at the Slade School of Art was paying off, though not perhaps in the way her tutors had envisaged. I love it and hate it, and as for using it, that’s out of the question. Powder flies all over the room. I keep buttons in it, on the theory that one day or another I shall take up a needle and sew.
Letters came from my father. He made a book for us out of firm paper, and glued photographs and drawings to it, and scraps of poetry, and tales of things he had done and seen, and people he had met. He had taken a lot of time over it: I thought perhaps he missed us. I assumed he would be back soon and we would all live together again. (No one had mentioned the divorce.) He seemed to be quite rich: he sent a photograph of himself leaning against a KLM aircraft, in Amsterdam. He sent a book, Ferdinand the Bull. Ferdinand was stung by a bee and picked for the bullring because of it. When it came to the point he just sat down and smelled the flowers in the ladies’ hats and lived happily ever after. A good pacifist book: even my mother admired it. My father was going back to school in London to get some more medical letters after his name. Yes, said my mother, your father always has money to do what he wants. But he’s a very good doctor, never forget that.
I looked for Holland on the map. I could accept by now that the world was round. Europe took precedence in the scheme of things. They were on top, we were underneath. If anyone were to fall off it would be us.
I learned anxiety and fear. I was out playing sevens in Cranmer Square – you threw a tennis ball against a wall and caught it in a progressively difficult way – so many bounces, overarm, underarm, a group of seven to be completed before you could move on to the next stage; as solitary and obsessive an occupation as any computer game today – when I was interrupted by a boy. I didn’t know him. My concentration went: I dropped the ball and complained. He told me he had been in an earthquake, and how the earth yawned in front of you and if you weren’t careful you fell down into the cracks, and even as you scrabbled to climb out the earth would close again, and squash you. It had happened to a friend of his. He told me about how erupting volcanoes could suddenly rise up out the ground, and how the boiling lava would frizzle you alive, and he hoped it would happen to me. If you felt the earth shake beneath your feet it meant earthquake or volcano was about to happen. Then he walked off. I was petrified. Every now and then I did feel the earth shake but I was never sure if it was in my head or outside. How would one know? You could look to see if the ceiling light was swaying, and sometimes it was, but your eyes must be deceiving you, because everyone said there were no earthquakes in the South Island, only in the North, and all the volcanoes were extinct.
I don’t know whether Jane shared my fear: I assumed she did, but I may have been wrong. We were separate enough for her to love St Mary’s Convent and me to hate it. The nuns liked her and were suspicious of me. Jane was good and quiet and looked holy: I was noisy and giggly and looked frivolous.
The Convent was a tall building with gothic towers. Behind barred windows lived scores of women who wore black robes and white wimples. When they were angry, which they often were, they were like the magpie; they’d come screeching at you in a flurry of black and white, though rapping your knuckles or pinching you instead of pecking your ankles, and much more painfully. Fortunately most of them stayed in their cells in the towers: just a handful came out to teach in the school wing. Mother Teresa was nice and motherly, and would hug you and give you sticky sweets: all the others, from Sister Katherine to Sister Dorothy, ruled by sarcasm and violence. I liked their names, but that was about all.
The children, all Catholic except for a handful of heathen, which group included Jane and I, were on the whole cowed and snivelly. Their noses tended to run. I was a worse case of pious dereliction than Jane, who had at least been christened, albeit as a Protestant not a Catholic, but I had not even been that. My parents were freethinkers, rationalists, humanists – which was why I was spared Arthur Machen’s blessing. Jane was allowed to stay in the classroom while the rest of the class said their prayers and told their rosaries – some six times a day – but I had to leave the room, and stand outside the door with my spelling book, and learn the hard words. I became very good at spelling. I did not mind the exclusion much: prayers were boring and rosaries were peculiar, but I could see it was more comfortable to belong. But belonging was already beginning to seem unlikely. I was a homie, I spoke with a fancy accent, lived in a boarding-house and not a bungalow, didn’t get pocket money, and my mother put on airs. I was the youngest in my class by more than a year. I struggled to keep up.
The nuns decided that I had to be baptized. Otherwise, being unchristened, my fate was to go to limbo when I died. Limbo was the place, in their rather primitive theology, where all those born after Jesus’s time but who weren’t Catholics were doomed to go. It was a flat, featureless, grey landscape where nothing ever happened. The face of the Lord had been turned away. In retrospect it seems a fair description of a depression, and perhaps that’s all depression is, limbo leaked over in life: but the prospect certainly terrified me. There was no getting out of it: limbo was everlasting, and my certain fate, so I had better start learning my catechism and sign up for baptism now.
I asked my mother if I could be christened as a Catholic but she said certainly not. She did not seem to realize the full implications of what she had said or what she was letting me in for. I could see that the only way I would ever be able to save myself was if she were dead – but that would be bad for her because she would be going to purgatory, and I was ashamed of myself for wishing it. Purgatory was where she and Jane were going: they had been christened but didn’t go to Mass, so they would be put into this kind of holding pen for heaven and tortured there until they were purified. If people prayed for you after you were dead you could sometimes get out early. Then the gates of heaven would open and you would spend your time praising God.
I told them at school I wasn’t allowed to be a Catholic and they were shocked at a mother who would condemn her own daughter to limbo. It was probably a mortal sin. If you committed a mortal sin you went to hell. I could see the only thing to do was to stay alive, and when my mother died of old age, I would be free to be a Catholic.
I sat next to an etching of St Anthony being tortured in hell by demons, and tried to concentrate on mental arithmetic, and pronouns. I could not get the knack of the latter, so in a test I copied the answers of the girl in front of me, taking care to change one so as not to be charged with the sin. That was the only one I got right. I realized the imprudence of copying. Better to rely on yourself than others. I had my knuckles rapped for doing so badly in the test. A nun seized your hand, turned it over and banged your knuckles sharply against the desk. For some reason the girl I had copied from did not get her knuckles rapped, but then she was a devout girl who even at the age of seven wanted to be a nun. Knucklerapping hurt: anything to get out of it, but I did not want to join the magpies in their high tower, or even promise to. How they lied and swore and cheated, all the little convent girls, to get out of trouble or make money. I had never known anything like it.
My friend Colleen borrowed twopence from the newsagent telling him her father had just died. Then she went into the butcher and borrowed threepence saying she had to take it back to her
