did not care for doctrine or theology and devised her own rules of daily practice. She thought that a public acknowledgement of her Catholicism and a strong suspicion of all other sects and faiths would be enough for heaven. Here on earth she would do much as she pleased, relying on the simple morality of a peasant heart. Years later, she told me that the only time she had been to church during the long years of her marriage had been for the wedding Mass itself. Yet she had insisted, as a condition of marriage, that my father take instruction and be received into the Catholic Church. Seeing that her religion was a matter of culture and prejudice, not understanding, my father had simply given way. With some amusement and more impatience he had gone through thechildish rote of the catechism while sharing a few whiskys with a benevolent Irish priest, sitting on the verandah of the parish house as the Indian sunset burned into the distant plain. Then he forgot the whole business. He remained what he had always been, the sturdy agnostic who at a young age had chosen to pump the organ-bellows of the Methodist chapel from outside rather than listen to the preaching from within.
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 streetwith 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
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 streetwith 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
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