Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story

I was born in Worcestershire, some fifteen miles outside Birmingham in a little place called Wildmoor. Now it has been swallowed up in housing projects. Then it consisted only of a row of small artisans’ cottages half a mile from a little shop that sold everything from fuel oil and candles to groceries and sweets. On the third point of the triangle, two suburban semidetached houses stuck out incongruously. We lived in one of these. It was tiny, but it had a large garden that backed onto a ploughed field. This was also the local cess pit, for on Mondays huge pipes conveying the local sewage flowed through our garden, filling the house with a subdued but acrid stench. It was quite primitive. There was no running water downstairs and kitchen water had to be jacked out of a little pump in the garden. Every day my father would drive off to Birmingham to work and leave my mother alone in the house.

My mother so wanted to create a happy home for me, shielded from the disturbance that had been too much a part of her own childhood. She was the second daughter of a pharmacist and had grown up in Essex. Her elder sister, Mary, was my grandmother’s favorite—not my grandfather’s. I rarely remember him as preferring anybody or anything much to anyone else. He was a quiet, scholarly man. He should have gone to college, but there was no money, and he contented himself with reading—especially history. As the years went on his reading became a retreat. He had plenty to retreat from, poor man. My grandmother, a small, vital woman, was notoriously unfaithful to him and from my mother’s earliest years had a string of lovers, one being the father of her best friend at school. When Eileen, my mother, was twelve, Granny got tuberculosis—all her family died of it—and went to live in a sanatorium in Switzerland for two years. My mother went with her, thus wrecking her education. She learned skiing and Swiss-German but little else. There’s a cartoon at home done by one of the other patients there at that time. It shows my grandmother clasped passionately in the arms of a faceless man and my mother standing looking at them, a plain little girl with a skirt far too short for her, knickers showing. The caption reads: “I think I had better go to bed now, Mummy.”

On their return to England the procession of men resumed but, an added horror, my grandmother started to drink. By the time the war broke out she was an alcoholic, secretly drinking neat gin in the bathroom. From the time she was fifteen my mother felt she was in charge of the whole mess. But she escaped. My great-uncle, with whom she stayed sometimes, used to frequent the local pub, and, after closing time, he would gather up all his drinking companions and take them back to his house. There the drinking continued and my mother played the piano for them when she was on leave. On one of these evenings she met my father, who fell in love with her while she was playing the piano and singing a song called “Little Brown Bird”. Almost a Victorian set-piece.

My father, however, was no callow romantic. At this time he was in his forties, twenty years older than my mother, and a bit of a rake. At the age of four he had come over to England from Ireland, where his father had run a village post office and was a respected member of the little community. He never made it in England, however. My father grew up in a Birmingham slum, left school at fourteen, and, after various fits and starts, eventually began a quite successful business as a scrap metal merchant.

When my mother met him there had been many women in his life, but she nailed him. He was a handsome man. Very tall—well over six feet—he stood broad-shouldered and solid, with a firm face and a lot of black, wavy hair. He loved clothes and decked himself out with flamboyance.

The match came in for heavy opposition. My grandmother refused to have anything to do with it, and her family told my mother firmly that she was neglecting her responsibilities and was mad to marry a man so much older than herself who would never, it was clear, be much of a success. She stood firm, though. My father paid for the wedding, which was poorly attended on my mother’s side. And a very successful marriage began.

My father loved life and the things of this world. He adored good food and drink. He used to draw and paint and developed an interest in antiques, which he sought out with the zeal of a lover, filling the house with beautiful things. He loved travel and would frequently whisk my mother off to the French Riviera. He made quite a lot of money from scrap metal but never saved a penny of it. What he had he spent recklessly and generously. When their friends asked him how on earth he could afford to take us all to the south of France every summer, he smiled charmingly and replied, “I can’t.” He rescued my mother from the grimness of her youth and taught her to enjoy herself. Neither of them ever looked at anyone else.

Under his influence my mother opened out like a flower. From a pudgy adolescent, she became a slim, glamourous woman. She had dark hair, bright alert eyes, and a full mouth. With my father she ate and drank like a princess, entertained his enormous circle of friends, and went with them on perilous midnight tobogganing expeditions where, clinging to my father, she hurtled dangerously through the darkness. My earliest memories are of lying upstairs on my cot, listening to the hum of voices downstairs, the laughter of the assembled company, and the clinking of glasses.

At the outset of her married life, my mother was an indifferent housekeeper. Unlike her neighbors, she sat quite happily amid the breakfast debris, reading the paper until well into the morning. She scandalized Mrs. Jefferson next door by not getting her washing out to dry until Saturday. What cleaning there was was done by Mrs. Meacham, a fat, gingery woman with a loud cheery voice who came in daily from the cottages. “Meachey” was not much of a one for cleaning either. When she had had enough she called to my mother, who was reading in the back room: “I’m just going to take Karen to see the pigs!” and my mother would agree happily, settling back to enjoy a peaceful half-hour, knowing that I would be well looked after. Meachey would put me on the handlebars of her bicycle and wheel me to her cottage. I loved her, purely and simply. We went through the front door straight into the downstairs room where I was given a glass of orange juice. Then, as a part of the ritual, I visited the outside privy, which I considered a great treat. Finally we went down the narrow strip of garden to a corrugated fence and Meachey lifted me up. There, inside the little enclosure, were the pigs: one pink and one black and white, snorting and messy. I used to look at them solemnly, thinking what a nice, sensible life they led, wallowing in the mud and straw. Sometimes I helped to feed them and relished the decaying smell of the sloppy food. It was even more special when there were squealing little piglets, too, shrieking and sleek, fighting to be first at the trough, hankering for life. Next time I went they had disappeared, and some instinct of self-preservation told me not to ask where they had gone. The sty seemed very empty.

Apart from my parents, Meachey, and the pigs, I had no other companions. There were no children of my age in Wildmoor and I lived in a little cocoon of family. I was never lonely. As soon as I could walk and talk I lived an intensely imaginative life. On Sunday afternoons my father would take me for a walk. This was a special event. We went right down to the little brook and played “pooh sticks”, and on my way home I visited all my “friends”. Certain bushes and trees along the country lanes housed fairies, and we used to knock at a bush, enter, and have tea and a chat. I always felt very proud to show my handsome father to these friends of mine, and he patiently sat there, crouched on a tree stump, pretending to drink tea, entering gamely into the spirit of the thing. He had not been keen to have children initially; he felt he was too old to adapt to their demands, but once we arrived he loved being a father. He never wanted sons.

When I was three and a half my mother presented me with a sister, Lindsey Madeleine. She was too young to play with for a long time. She was a noisy, vivacious baby and extremely restless. As soon as she could sit up, she ruined the pram by forcing her head through the canvas hood. We must have looked an odd trio on our afternoon walks, my mother pushing a battered and muddy pram with Lindsey’s head thrust through the hole in the hood, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, waiting patiently while I stood chattering into a thornbush.

When he got home in the evening, my father always read to me before I went to bed. My mother also read to me during the day, and together we listened to the story on “Listen with Mother,” and later I joined her for the story on “Woman’s Hour.” No matter that I could not understand it; I loved the words. My father bought me a lot of books and I quickly knew them by heart, we read them so frequently. If my mother tried to skip a page, I knew instantly and made her go back and read the thing through in full. Reading was not just a matter of finding out what happened in a story; it was a ritual. It was the words that mattered. The characters of the books became realities to me when I played alone. I had endless conversations with Little Grey Rabbit and her ménage. There was one book that was a special favorite. It concerned a hedgehog called Harry and featured human beings as creatures called “mortals”. I can’t remember much about the story, but the word mortal, once I knew what it meant, colored the rather somber story with melancholy. Whenever my mother or Meachey offered to read to me, I produced Harry the Hedgehog till they both got heartily sick of it. But it was no use offering me anything else. My mother thought the book was morbid and quietly disposed of it. I noticed its absence and guessed what had happened. It was no use complaining. Adults were omnipotent and I mourned the lost book, trying to recapture the beautiful sadness as best I could. I bided my time.

One day when my grandmother was staying with us, she took me on the village bus into a nearby market town for tea. We did some shopping and she offered to buy me a book, which was the best present I could have. In the children’s department I scoured the shelves with eagle eye. I knew exactly what I was looking for. Granny offered me one or two books, but I shook my head. At last I saw it. I couldn’t read but I recognized Harry himself on the cover.

“That one!” I cried.

Granny looked at it.

“Harry the Hedgehog?” she read. I nodded firmly.

“Are you sure that’s the one you want, dear?” She was puzzled by my insistence but finally agreed.

My mother and Meachey were having a cup of tea when we returned. I tried not to look too triumphant. I wanted to be generous in my victory.

“Granny’s bought me a new book!” I said, cuddling up to my mother with a winning smile.

“Aren’t you a lucky girl! Say thank you to Granny!”

“I already have,” I answered truthfully and produced my parcel. “Look, Meachey!” I said innocently.

She looked. “Oh, no!” she wailed. “Oh, my God! Not Harry the Hedgehog! Oh, Mrs. Armstrong! I can’t stand it!”

“It was a pity we lost the old one,” I said sweetly. “Isn’t it kind of Granny? Let’s have it tonight.”

But mortality had already entered our safe little home. I had been told that my mother would be bringing home a new baby. She prepared me for the event very carefully and bought me a doll, a crib, and a pram, so that I could be occupied with my baby and not feel jealous. The baby, alas, was a breech birth, and the little blonde girl, christened Caroline, died of a lung infection. I remember nothing of my own expectations about the baby, nor my disappointment when my mother came home alone. But I do remember the sadness and the sense of loss that pervaded the house, bravely hidden but strongly felt. I once came upon Meachey and an aunt in close conversation in the kitchen.

“It’s a shame,” Meachey was saying, “a crying shame!”

There was nothing unusual in this. Meachey’s conversation tended to be rather lugubrious at the best of times. What was different was the way they both stopped talking as soon as they saw me, bustled me out of the room, and talked with affected cheerfulness of something else. Something was being kept from me, something sad, and I felt frightened and excluded. I took to carrying around the house the doll my mother had bought me. Her name was Trudi and she went everywhere with me. I felt obscurely that it was vital to keep Trudi safe, and that if I kept a stern eye on her it would ward off this terrible thing that had entered the house. I found great comfort in the fact that Trudi was rubber.

“She won’t ever break, will she?” I pestered my father. “She’ll be with me always, even when I’m old?”

“No, she won’t break,” he answered.

“Will she break if I drop her?”

“No. Try it and see.”

I closed my eyes tightly and flung Trudi on the ground and then dared not look. “It’s all right,” my father promised. It was. Trudi lay there on the ground, undignified and outraged but still miraculously whole.

“It’s all right,” I promised her that night. “I’ll always look after you. Nothing will ever happen to you.”

My mother was in bed for a long time after she came home from the hospital, and I felt that I must be near her to keep this thing, whatever it was, at bay, to assure myself that everything was really just the same as ever. (Of course, once death entered my life, nothing would ever be quite the same again.) Book in hand, I waddled sternly into her bedroom, 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 found myself standing in the pool, dazed, yes, exhausted, but also exhilarated. I had survived. And I had done it. I had done it. From that moment swimming became heaven for me. A chunky child, I was altogether without physical grace, but now the water became my element. And I’d learned that to find freedom from my limitations I had to push myself beyond what I thought I could do.

The second incident centered that same year on an encyclopedia called A Path to Knowledge. It was a four-volume work that my father had seen advertised and he urged me to read a little of it every day.

“While your mind is young, you’ll learn lots of things that will stay with you all through your life. Knowledge is one of the most important things in the world. It gives you freedom.”

The volumes looked important in their dark green binding with gold lettering. Glancing through them I discovered that the best part was definitely Volume IV, where there was a lot about writers and poetry and some history, too, the things that I liked best at school. But I closed that volume firmly. Knowledge was a serious business. I had to start at the beginning and work through to the end. Dipping in here and there was a frivolity. I knew the rules of life: before you were allowed cake for tea you had to eat your bread and butter. Also the title of the work enthralled me. A path lay ahead, down which I would heroically overcome all obstacles, grappling with huge intellectual difficulties until at the end knowledge loomed gloriously. And I would do it alone.

So chapter by chapter, page by page, I dragged myself on through all four volumes. My eyes glazed with boredom, I ploughed my way through the dusty paths of mathematics, science, industry, and commerce. One evening, as I was engaged with a study of the iron and steel trade, my father came into the room.

“Oh, you’re reading the encyclopedia, are you?”

I glowed with satisfaction at his pleasure.

“What are you reading now?” he asked, looking over my shoulder, and, ablaze with virtue, I announced:

“Trades.”

“Trades?” said my father, surprised. “Do you like that?”