Out of India (7 page)

The nuns of her convent in Ireland had been for my mother nightmare shadows in the dark dream of her childhood. Despite this, she knew with certainty that an order of nuns was the only institution fit to undertake the education of little children who were, at least nominally, Catholic. Besides, where else could she find a boarding school willing to take kids as young as four or five?

The Convent of the Sacred Heart, by the river on the outskirts of Oxford, for a suitable fee received little boys into the rigorous circle of its conviction, and released my mother into the world of wartime work.

*

From the first, the sense of space appalled me. The ceilings were too high, the doors too tall, the rooms too big. They petered out in extremities where the gloom bunched in corners as impenetrable as jungles. Ill-lit corridors, hardly touched by daylight, ran out of sight like slow murky rivers. Sounds were dampened, a world with a finger on its lips, reduced to sighs and mutters. Overwhelmed by this scale I was afraid to look up but stumbled on with eyes on the floor, driven into place by gruff orders, digs of the elbow, or a tug on the sleeve.

From morning to night the nuns began to discipline our days. Growth requires some routine, but this weary stamp of regularity marked me beyond my tender years and I wept for my small lost freedoms. I relinquished the dozy hours of former days, when I had fed ducks in the park, kicked a tin can down an alleyway, mooched the street
with a stick ringing against iron railings, or in idle moments before bed had leafed through a picture book in front of the glowing embers of the fire. For this abandoned life, I snivelled under the bedclothes after lights-out in the convent dormitory, or in the raw damp jakes, contemplating my chapped knees in the fraction of the day set aside for a satisfactory bowel movement.

The young child cries for the comfort of a mother, but we wept into the void. There was a remote and fearful figure known as the Mother Superior, but none of our tears stained the black-clad expanse of her forbidding breast.

A clap of hands at an early hour brought us awake in the dimness of the dormitory. Speechless, we dressed, then formed a silent line of midgets in ill-fitting clothes (in those days of rationing, to make clothes last longer, our suits were bought a size too big). At a sharp order we shuffled off, hair still unkempt, kicking the heels of those in front.

‘Eenie, meenie, Mussolini,’ we hissed behind the nun’s back, ‘hurry up you silly ninny.’

‘Silence, children,’ snapped Sister Mary Bede. ‘We do not make a noise as we approach the House of God.’

A ragged line of shrunken figures we clumped downstairs in heavy shoes so insecurely tied that half the laces dragged. Our footfalls on the worn parquet floors made a dull, lowering clatter, leaden with hesitation and regret.

‘Move along now, children. We haven’t got all day. You, slow-coach, get up here with you, or it’ll be the worst for you.’

And Sister Mary Bede, taking a powerful pincer grip on the ear of some poor laggard, would drag him forward wailing into the refectory.

Watery tea poured from large tin pots. Only one teaspoon of sugar per cup was permitted. Sister’s eagle eye was on us.

‘Stir your tea clockwise,’ she warned. ‘The other way is the devil’s way.’

The rules of the table were exacting. Backs straight, no slumping on the benches. No elbows on the table. Chew each mouthful twenty times, mouth closed, hands folded quietly on the lap. A thin spread of marmite on the bread was allowed at breakfast, a scrape of jam at tea. The jam, roughly of a strawberry type, was rumoured to be made of marrow, artificially flavoured, with little pits added for effect. On Sundays, there was a sticky but pleasant stuff called peanut butter. Porridge with horrid lumps was a detested staple. Nothing could be refused, and all food had to be eaten.

‘Remember the starving children of Europe,’ Sister admonished. ‘What wouldn’t they give for such delicious food? Don’t let me see as much as a crumb left on your plate.’

War could not afford the luxury of waste, and to express a preference in these times was a selfish act bordering on the sinful. When one of the parents brought in an iced birthday cake, to be shared among the children as an exceptional treat, Sister descended on those who left the icing and the marzipan to the last and swept the longed-for delicacies from their plates. ‘God,’ she sniffed, ‘does not send His gifts for you to pick and choose.’

Every act was measured against the iron rod of religion. At the centre of our lives stood the mystery of faith. In the convent, the chapel dominated the buildings and regulated all the activities of the day. Everything we did circled round it or pointed to it. For me, it became a place of dread. When the great oak door opened, with a stealthy quiet that belied its bulk, the unwholesome perfume of stale incense pinched my nostrils. The wink of the sanctuary lamp – a wizard’s eye – made the heart skip with apprehension. In the cave of the church sombre light drifted onto heavy fittings, lying like dark dross between
the pews. Pushed into those pews in rows we clutched at one another for support, forgetting our usual bickering and glad for once of human contact. From the hard bench I watched the strange man in the vestments mouth at the altar the magic Latin words that we did not understand. His gestures were languid and mournful, while the servers in lace-fringed white surplices soft-footed around him in a slow but difficult dance.

In the small morning hours, or in the tired dusk of evening, it was hard to take it all in. Solemnity is a drug of a kind, a hypnotic. Even so, our attention often wandered. A tired child would fall into a doze, head lolling on a neighbour’s shoulder. Others gaped into the great spaces of the roof, or stared at plaster saints with haloes of tarnished gilt. Candles in clusters, gummed with molten wax, waited to be lit by the matches of suppliants.

Then, with the climax of the Mass approaching, the nuns drove us to our knees with fierce whispered reminders or with a knuckle poked in the back of the neck. The priest raised the Host in the air to the tinkle of a tiny bell. I did not know what this gesture meant. It looked like some petition or pleading. But I recognized in the weight of the uplifted arms a sadness beyond tears but also beyond my understanding.

The big oak door opened again and let us out, from interior dark to the grey light of ordinary day. Going back and forth between these two worlds I learnt that there were two Gods (the third one of the Trinity was a conundrum beyond even our powers of belief). The first, the grim emaciate on the Cross above the altar, all wounds and bones, was the Inflexible Judge, the Prince of Rigour, the Frightener of Souls, served by hard-minded monitors with rods in the hand. The second, the one whom Sister Catherine called Gentle Jesus, was the obverse of the divine coin, the Redeeming Comforter, the Balm for the Hurt. It was for the sake of this Gentle Jesus that Sister Catherine
urged us to give our few pennies of pocket money towards the upkeep of the African missions.

‘Who’ll give thruppence to save a black piccaninny?’ said Sister Catherine to our class with cheerful red-faced enthusiasm, waving a kindly arm across the broad expanse of the African map.

I loved to see how Sister Catherine’s ample flesh jounced when she was jolly and excited so I gave all my thruppenny bits for Africa. I was convinced (since money had no relevance in our lives beyond paying for a sweet or a glass marble) that I had
purchased
a number of black babies – a little family flock that was mine – and this thought gave me warm feelings of friendly possession and belonging that I longed for but lacked in the convent. Gentle Jesus had sent me my own imaginary companionship – a squall of tiny jungle tots – to compensate for the cold harsh discipline imposed under the agonized stare of the Judge on the Cross.

Our only hope for relief from this severity was to hide beneath the cloak of Gentle Jesus. But the way to forgiveness was not easy to find; it was hedged and blocked by the thorns of observation. The black monitors were ever-vigilant and He on the Cross was not deceived. The nuns were very free in their interpretation of His displeasure:

‘God does not love naughty children.’

‘Nose-picking in church is an insult to heaven.’

‘Only a sinful boy scribbles on his picture book.’

‘Neglect your prayers and you’ll get no blessings.’

‘Every act of disobedience is another wound in His side.’

‘The fires of hell await little liars.’

‘God punishes bed-wetters.’

And if admonition and threats had no effect, then came the clinching argument against which there was no appeal. ‘What Sister says, child, is God’s law.’

Though heaven demanded so much, the rules of conduct here on earth, even if certain, were obscure. Both punishments and rewards flowed from the Church, imposed, granted or withdrawn by inscrutable religious authority. My brother, leaving his pew to follow a small trail of fellow pupils to the altar rail for their First Communion, was stopped in horror, hauled away by the shoulder with much finger-wagging, and returned at once to the ranks of the sinners, because he had not yet made his First Confession. As a punishment, his advance to the altar rail was put off to some unspecified time. He remained among a graceless herd while smarter boys put an early foot on the road to heaven. In another case, when in a playground fight I split my brother’s forehead with a brick, I was removed from the group of boys learning to be Mass-servers. I was denied the holy foppery of lace and candlelight, incense and bells. In this way I was prevented from giving my fullest service to the Lord. This was a dire punishment for any faithful son of the Church. It was true. I was not much of a servant for the Lord. I was sad and bemused and given to fits of violence. The nuns, with their threats of divine displeasure, somehow failed to cure my outbursts of temper. I wanted my mother.

*

‘What would you like to do today?’ said my mother in a hopeless voice we had come to know so well.

We never had an answer to this, but it did not matter to us that we were drifting without much purpose. The important thing was that we were away from the convent for the afternoon. If the day was fine we would wander. Nowhere in particular. Magdalen Bridge to Carfax. Peeping in the austere wartime shops of the High, past crouching pubs with low, battered doorways and windows of bottle-glass. Amusements for children at this time were in short supply. We took in the modest stock of sights – Radcliffe Camera, Sheldonian, Bodleian, Ashmolean –
those pompous names for quite innocent institutions. Then we made our way towards open spaces, under a sky that seemed always more welcoming than the wan pall of grey or watery blue that hung over the convent playground. We skirted the Botanic Gardens into Christ Church Meadow, or aimed for the Parks in a green, almost drowned landscape, strange territory where rivers seemed to change their names at will and a place called Mesopotamia lay, as it were, offshore. But best of all for us were the gardens of Worcester College, which revealed, though I did not know it then, a view of the subtle artifice of the European imagination.

If it rained there was nothing for it but to eke out time in a café, reading and re-reading the timid offerings of the wartime menu, and settling almost inevitably on Heinz tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce, a dish known to us as ‘worms on toast’. My mother wrinkled her nose in disgust. She hated vulgarity.

I look now at a photo of her from that time. Heavy coils of fair hair gathered at the back of the neck, pale widely spaced eyes, a long upper lip trembling on the edge of a smile. There is an air of diffidence but a hint also of some new woman emerging beneath.

In Oxford she began, as she said, ‘to come out of herself’. With colleagues from her office she went to a concert or two, though she preferred operetta. ‘Such fun,’ she would say, ‘such gaiety.’ She was not musical though she would hum along strenuously to well-known classical pieces – Beethoven’s Fifth or the Tchaikovsky fiddle concerto – getting the turns of the melody wrong and beating time on the arm of her chair. She did have a remarkable memory for the voices of famous singers and gained herself some artistic credit by recognizing at once Galli-Curci or Conchita Supervia or Lily Pons. She would cock her head aside like an attentive bird. ‘Ah, dear Richard Tauber,’ she would murmur dreamily. Was
it the voice or the fame of the singer that met her approval?

On the whole, the theatre pleased her more. She had an eye for fame here also, and later she used to speak of seeing ‘that young Coral Browne’ at the Playhouse. She attended most weeks for a diet of Pinero, Coward, Rattigan. She was suspicious of Shaw. Too Irish, too wordy, too argumentative, he invited cynicism and disbelief. ‘So clever-clever,’ she said disparagingly. Wilde was Irish too, and witty perhaps, but he laid souls bare in a most uncomfortable way. My mother liked to live in a nice world, with indecencies hidden. The motives of the propertied classes – those founts of authority – should not be exposed. ‘Heartless,’ she called Wilde – a grave criticism, for she attached great store to the heart. Shakespeare, apart from the whimsical comedies, she did not care for. The barbarism of murder, rape, treachery, madness, eye-gouging seemed to her grotesquely medieval. The power of ungovernable emotion was a distressing affliction. She wanted to turn her eyes from the spectacle, not investigate it. ‘We’ve come a long way from those days,’ she would say after the war, abandoning in some byway of memory Auschwitz and Stalingrad and the Dresden fire-storm and the nuclear night of Hiroshima, and even the bombs of the Blitz that fortunately did not fall on Oxford.

She never wanted to delve below the surface. Life down there was unbearably raw. ‘Why can’t people be pleasant?’ she used to lament. ‘It’s so easy.’ Her simple job at the Foreign Office gave some shape to her day, some stability. After that, she innocently craved what she called ‘fun’. She wanted to hold her head up, floating, in a world of knights and maidens. But she looked down and saw her feet churning the muck and refuse of a brutal civilization.

Most of all, when the evening freed her from the office, she loved to dance. She was poised and stylish on the
dance-floor, keen to try the latest steps, and she reaped many compliments. When the American officers began to arrive in Oxford towards the middle of the war, my mother met these energetic young men, with their curious courtesy and unquenchable enthusiasm, in the bar of the Randolph Hotel. Her children were in boarding school. What could be wrong in going to a dance now and again? These young Americans seemed so eager and desperate to please. Surely they were officers and gentlemen?