Karen Armstrong - Through the Narrow Gate - A Nun’s Story

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.