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
