climbed up onto the bed, and nestled down near her. The closer I got, the safer she’d be. “Sing it! Sing it!” I demanded, thrusting the book firmly into her hand. Sensing my need of her, my mother read on bravely, hour after hour. Sitting close together, we made a cocoon of security. It was an incantation holding away the sadness of life.
To all intents and purposes life continued smoothly in the same peaceful, uneventful way. Yet fear, dating perhaps from Caroline’s death, was always there and emerged in my dreams. Dragons pursued me endlessly over terrifying, undulating hills night after night. I remember dreaming once that my father was dead, and a desolation filled me as I knelt beside his strangely changed body, weeping, “Come back, Daddy! Come back!”
It must have been about this time that I hit upon a magical way of leaving this frightening world behind and entering into my own world of beauty and order. Sometimes on weekends or on summer evenings when my father got home we went for a picnic in the nearby Farley woods. Once we hit upon a perfect place, but we never went there again. It was a beech wood and it was bluebell time. The little glade was completely enclosed by walls of pale green leaves broken only by sharp shafts of sunlight. The ground was a blurred mass of blue. It was the most perfect place I had ever seen. It was not just the beauty, it was the peace. The fears and that horrible shadowy reality that now lurked at the corners of my life were shut out and I was safe with my parents. They were talking together and I was left to listen or to think as I chose, knowing that they were there. I gave the experience of that hour a private name. I called it “putsh”. Peace, safety, beauty, and privacy.
“Putsh” became an important concept for me. Whenever I thought we were near the woods, I called out “Putsh!” from the back of the car, to my parents’ bewilderment. Whenever life became troublesome, I repeated the word over and over again as a talisman, trying to bring that beauty and order back into my life. Nobody could understand what I wanted, but I didn’t want them to. It was like a magic secret. If I told anyone, the magic would go away.
Though I longed to go back to the little glade, there was one special means I discovered for arriving at “putsh” inside my own head. We had an old wind-up Gramophone, and I learned to work this myself. I found the exact spot on the carpet, and then, crouched in a fetal position, I rocked backward and forward to the music. Swaying to and fro like that, I found I could empty my mind of everything but a heightened sense of things. Death and sadness no longer existed and I moved in an atmosphere of limitless perfection. This lasted for years and left in me a hunger for infinite horizons that later I learned to transfer to religion. After all, God is the ultimate perfection, and as the world grew more and more distressing when I grew older, I found myself searching for Him to find that peace permanently.
The seclusion of my childhood ended abruptly on the day I first went to school. I’d looked forward to it for weeks. My mother had told me enthusiastically what fun I would have. I felt important trying on my school uniform—bottle-green gym slip, bulky tie, fawn sweater, all several sizes too big for me to allow for growth. But now, as I sat next to my father in the front seat of the car, the thick Harris tweed coat felt like a suit of armour. It was a wet, dark morning, and the long journey into Birmingham seemed a trek from one world into another. I peered with difficulty from under the huge brim of my green velour hat and saw the trees straining despairingly in the wind, which blew shrilly and threateningly.
The windshield wipers shrieked as they made their jerky journey backward and forward, sloshing the rain into deep pools and rivulets.
“How does the uniform feel?” Daddy asked. I could hear the strained heartiness in his voice and tried to reassure him.
“Very nice, thank you, Daddy.” My voice seemed squeaky and came out in a rush as though it didn’t belong to me. I swallowed and felt a great lump in my throat, and when I tried to breathe my chest was constricted with fear.
My father looked at me. Pigtails stuck out awkwardly beneath the hat. My face, never very rosy, was now almost the same greenish hue as my uniform, and the sprinkling of freckles across my nose stood out in stark relief. They seemed an incongruous memento of a carefree summer.
“You do look smart!” he said. “The nuns will think you look nice! Just like a proper schoolgirl.”
I did my best to smile. The nuns. What a strange word that was! I had heard a lot about them recently. I must call them “Sister” or “Mother”, and they loved Jesus and would teach me to read. They were very kind people and I would love them dearly.
Clutching my father’s hand I made my way down the school drive. Everywhere there were little girls. But they didn’t seem little to me. Most of them towered above me. Still trying fiercely to smile, I let go of my father’s hand. I wanted him to go quickly so that he would not witness my possible failure in this frightening new world. But I also longed for him to stay, to take me home.
“Hello, Mr. Armstrong.” I looked up quickly and thankfully; that somebody knew his name was reassuring.
I recoiled. There peering up at my father was the strangest creature I had ever seen. It was covered from head to foot in black robes that formed a solid wall of musty-smelling darkness, like winter coats hanging up to dry. Glancing at the ground I saw two feet shod in gleaming black leather. Then the wall rose in perpendicular folds. No legs. Cautiously, the little girls quite forgotten as I stared in fascination, I reached out for the skirt and touched it gingerly, lifting it slightly to see whether I could discover the missing limbs. Yes, ankles. I lifted it further to see for a brief second two sturdy black calves. Then a hand reached out and deftly seized my hands, ending any further exploration, and I was pulled gently up against her. Somehow I knew that this creature was friendly. My eyes traveled up. Some way above me a black and silver object gleamed. I recognized it from my few visits to church but had never seen such a big one on a person before: Jesus on the cross, I told myself wonderingly. Then I looked up, puzzled, to the face, small and putty-colored. I searched in vain for hair. The voice was deep. Did it belong to a man or a woman? It was explaining things to my father.
“Yes, four o’clock.”
“Right, Mother, I’ll be there,” he said. Mother? A woman, then. I gaped incredulously. I looked up again at the face. There was so little of it that I could see. There was a wart, I noticed, on the top lip. Did all nuns have one?
“Come along, Karen,” and I was led away from the alarming din; this friendly “Mother” would interpret the world for me. I was safe with her.
Gradually I learned to adapt to the aggressive and turbulent life of the classroom and the playground. I learned to read very quickly and discovered the joy of losing myself entirely in books without my parents’ help. Otherwise work bored me somewhat. As I grew older and was set small tasks for homework, I skipped through them as best I could, relying on my wits to get me through. But during my time in the Junior School two incidents impressed themselves forcibly on me, setting a pattern that would profoundly influence me in the future—my love for a challenge.
The first occurred when I was eight. We had by then moved into Birmingham, and my parents decided that I should learn to swim. Three times a week we went to the strange echo-filled swimming baths where a fearsome lady called Mrs. Brewster gave free instruction. The first stages of swimming were pleasant enough, but at length it was time to learn to dive. I was terrified. The idea of falling head foremost through the air, seeing the glittering water rush to meet me, was appalling. I refused to do it, hating myself for my cowardice. At length Mrs. Brewster had had enough of my evasion. She picked me up in her brawny arms, taking no heed of my frantic kicking and screams for help, and strode to the brink of the pool. “One, two, three!” she called and hurled me head first into the water. I flew dizzily; the sinister blue water dazzled terrifyingly for a moment, and then there was nothing but a confusion of water and sound.
I
