Then she went to the newsagent and spent the lot on colour balls which she shared with me. I thought I ought to refuse but the sweets changed colour as you rolled them round in your mouth and I couldn’t resist. You had to keep taking them out of your mouth to see whether the pink had turned to violet, the magenta to mauve. It was a sticky process and the dye stayed round your mouth for days.
I was hungry most of the time. The boarding-house breakfast was meagre and my mother gave Jane and me sixpence between us to buy lunch every day. You could have a small hot meat pie or a cold apple pie or half a pound of broken biscuits from the biscuit factory down the road. The meat pie was nicest but it was also smallest. The biscuits were dry and dusty and hard to swallow. Drink came from the water tap.
There was a girl in my class called Beverley whom everyone hated. She had cross-eyes and spots, and was smelly. She crouched in a corner and whimpered, and the more they bullied the more bulliable she became. I thought it was outrageous. I played with her on principle: if I played with her the others would. I made her wash out her knickers. If her mother didn’t she’d have to do it herself. She cheered up a bit. Presently the other children asked to join in: Colleen, Mary, Teresa, Marjorie, all the big wild popular girls.
The nuns were firm creationists: I was taught that the world began with the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. I was annoyed to discover that Eve was created out of Adam’s rib as an afterthought, because God thought Adam needed company, and puzzled as to how Cain and Abel managed to have children without marrying their own sisters, which I knew was forbidden. My mother said that Genesis was not necessarily the only truth, but I knew her witness was not sound.
I took to reading the psalms in bed at night under the bedclothes. The nuns did not encourage us to read the Bible: on the contrary, they thought it should be mediated through a priest. It has always been my impulse to read what I am not meant to read and not to read what I am encouraged to. I fell in love with language, in what I can now see was in itself a kind of sub-erotic experience. I wrestled with the notion of the hills lifting themselves up and the valleys being exalted, and like Daniel wrestling with the lion, I won. If I could not understand, I osmosed. I do not think the Good News Bible could ever have done as well as this little, leather-bound, thin-papered Authorised Version we happened to have in the house. I wrestled with Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job, and came to the conclusion that the nuns were only telling half the story.
What the nuns gave us to read was Little Lives of All the Saints, a Victorian tract describing the tortures that young women of long ago endured preserving their virtue in the name of Jesus. Their breasts were chopped off, bits of them sliced up and fried, but they would not give up their virginity. They were beautiful and they were good, and pain was their reward. I was fascinated and horrified: I knew there was something wrong in my response but not quite what. Tremors, halfway between pain and pleasure, affected me as I read. Sex was a mystery to me, let alone the finer pleasures of masochism. I had no idea what virginity was, or what men did, or how babies were conceived. No one talked about these things at the convent for fear of knuckle-rapping or ear-tweaking: nuns slid about the corridors overhearing what was said, invisible until suddenly you saw them. All you knew about sex was that it was exciting and forbidden, and very secret.
On the way home from school one day a little boy with no clothes on ran out of his house. When I got home I asked my mother if there was something wrong with him, since he had this little bit hanging out in front. She said no but was too embarrassed to elaborate. I thought he was probably malformed.
The main problem with the convent was that you never knew what would get you into trouble. It seemed to have so little to do with common sense. It shrieked at you out of a clear sky. If your mother made you meat sandwiches on a Friday there was terrible trouble, though it was not your fault. You would be lining up at playtime to go back into the classroom, jostling as ever, called into silence. ‘You are touching one another. Never, never touch another person if you can possibly help it!’ I stretched out my hand and touched the person in front of me, in defiance. I was seen. Deliberate disobedience! My punishment was the worst they could think of: I was not to be allowed to stand and clap and wave flags when the cardinal from Rome came to bless us, dressed in his scarlet robes with gold binding. I was to stay in and learn more spelling. I learned to spell ‘theatre’, I remember, though my mother had to explain to me what it was. I didn’t mind at all not seeing the cardinal, which merely proved to the nuns how hardened in sin I was. But things were getting worse: I could not explain it: limbo was creeping round the outskirts, with occasional glimpses of hell showing through.
The nuns liked Jane and she liked them. She was quiet and clever and good at art and never got her ears tweaked. She embroidered exquisite flowers and made a little cloth book to contain them: it had a white vellum cover, on which she painted bluebells: it seemed something out of the past, from long ago. If I tried to do anything like that it got covered with ink and was tatty within minutes. Jane also painted an entire set of the Tarot pack: small, fine, perfect replicas of those sinister cards. I don’t suppose she did this in the school art class, and where she got the originals or whose idea it was I do not know. My mother half admired them and half hated them. I thought they were very spooky, especially the one she did of the Tower, the edifice splitting apart beneath the black hammer blow of a bolt of lightning.
A nun slammed open a window in the gothic tower of the convent as I ran up and down shrieking and splashing in the mud and called out to the world that I was a wicked girl and a heathen and the ringleader, and she would let my form teacher know in the morning. I spent a night of terror so abject nothing has been as bad since, not even the night in the haunted house in Saffron Walden years later. Nameless horrors, scrabbling to get in, the worse for being un-named. In the morning nothing happened. There was no hammer blow. I did not tell my mother because her life was hard enough.
I got a bad sore throat and lay with my pecked ankles in bed and couldn’t go to school and was tremendously happy. The doctor came and said I might have scarlet fever and if so I would have to go to an isolation hospital. I prayed to God that I could go, and to the Cardinal in his wonderful sweeping scarlet gown, all the way from Rome, the Holy City, to intercede for me with God. My prayers were answered, which was gratifying. I had begun to doubt the deity. I thought it said in the Bible that if you threw your bread upon the water it would be returned threefold: I’d throw some of the stale biscuits into the Avon but nothing ever came back, though rather more ducks than usual would come by. The ducks seemed so happy and free, though sometimes they too would turn on one of their number, a Beverley duck, as it were, and peck it to bits.
I loved the fever hospital. The nurses were kind and the other children were friendly. My ankles healed and fears of limbo receded. My confidence in the deity was restored. Invalid food, the like of which is not known in today’s hospitals or sick-rooms, food to tempt the reluctant appetite, was cooked and served. A little pale and white, it’s true – clear beef broth, steamed fish and mashed potatoes, and vanilla blancmange – followed by hot sweet milk and white-iced biscuits – but every spoonful you got down you was applauded.
Anything parents brought in had to be sterilized in great steam cupboards, and if they visited us, which they were only allowed to do once a week, they had to sit the other side of a thick glass partition. I had a fit of neurosis which I remember
