Doris Lessing - Under My Skin

The nun whose talent was for hellfire and the undying worm used a ruler on our palms when we were naughty. There were a thousand petty rules, and I have forgotten them, but remember the secret scorn they endangered: we protected ourselves by despising these dormitory nuns, making fun of their accents, telling each other if they weren’t stupid they would be teaching nuns. Most of the rules were to do with washing. Not that we should wash, but that we should not. Cleanliness for these women was an invitation to the devil. We were told to wash our hands only to the wrists, keeping sleeves rolled down. Only our faces, with a washcloth soaped thick: if our eyes stung, we must offer the pain to God. We might bathe only once a week. The nuns told us that good children would agree to wear the wooden board that stood always against the bathroom wall, when we bathed. The board had a hole in it for the head, and was designed to rest on the sides of the bath, making it impossible to see our bodies. But no one would. We were allowed to change our underclothes once a week. We smelled. All our letters were read by the nuns and when I told my mother about the bath rules, the nun said I was disloyal and wicked and made me write the letter again. But at half term I ‘told’ on the nuns, and my mother was furious, protested – and thereafter we were all allowed to bathe twice a week and change our underclothes twice. We continued to smell. We had to put on smelly knickers and dirty socks. ‘Vanity’ said Sister Amelia, or Brünnhilde or whoever. ‘All is vanity. You should not think about your body.’

There went on the usual school mythology about the slaps administered to our palms with rulers. We giggled, as is prescribed, advised each other how to soap our palms, recounted tales about a former pupil who was beaten till her hand fell off, and now she had an artificial hand. All this was as it always is, at this type of school. But if the rulers left hot red marks on palms, that was all, the nuns were not allowed to hit us anywhere else. It could all have been much worse. And I don’t remember bullying, on the contrary, the older children were tender with the little ones, remembering their own misery.

The atmosphere in the Convent, in short, can only be described as unwholesome, a favourite word of mother’s. How much did she know about all this? If it was within the code to ‘tell’ about the lack of baths, why not about the viciously slashing rulers, why not about those hellfire sermons? When ‘Tigger’ reported on them, she made a joke about it all. And certainly my mother knew about the sadistic pictures in the room we slept in, for she inspected the Convent thoroughly. But after all, she herself had had a strict, punishing upbringing.

The nuns never made any attempt to ‘get’ the Protestant girls. They did not need to. The atmosphere of magic and mystery was enough. Antonia White’s Frost in May describes the allurements of the forbidden, though her convent was on a somewhat higher social level. Most of us at some time wanted to be Catholics, simply to be like the Catholic girls, who dipped their fingers into the holy water stoups beside every door, who crossed themselves and curtsied as they passed statues of Christ or the Virgin, who carried holy pictures in their pockets and rosaries wound around their wrists. They were always going off to special events in the cathedral. Bells rang from the cathedral a block away, several times a day, for Angelus, and for Mass. Bells tinkled from the nuns’ chapel. The Virgin, a pleasant and beneficent figure, was often carried about the grounds on litters draped with coloured paper. Above all, there was the mystery of the part of the convent we were not allowed into. We believed there were hundreds of nuns, but perhaps there were not more than fifty. Most of them we never met. They worked in the kitchens, cooked our food and theirs, kept the convent and its grounds clean – there were no black servants. Some were taken out every day in lorries to the vegetable gardens. They all got up very early in the morning, four o’clock, some earlier. If you woke at night you could hear the sweet high chanting voices from the chapel. There were often funerals. If we begged hard enough the Protestant girls were allowed to go in the lorries to the cemetery with the Catholics, where we stared in a romantic trance at the coffin, violin shaped, bright white and pink, like a cake, with messages in gold script, Sister Harmonia, Bride of Christ, RIP. She was very young to die, said the other sisters. Knowing that eighteen, twenty, was thought young shocked us with our small sum of years, for it was hard to believe we would ever be as old as this dead woman.

Now I think these girls died of broken hearts. Nearly all were poor peasant girls from Germany. The Convent in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, was an extension of the economic conditions in Europe. Germany had not recovered from the First World War and reparations. As had always happened in the poor families of Europe, one or two girls in a family became nuns, to save their families the burden of feeding them. They found themselves thousands of miles from home, in this exotic country, doing hard physical work, as they had all their lives, but in the heat, and with no prospect of seeing their families again. Their only consolation can have been that their loneliness and exile made things easier at home. Once, when I was in the sickroom, a nun came to sit on my bed (against the rules) while the Angelus rang its call to prayer and the sky flamed red, and she wept, and crossed herself, crossed herself and wept, saying she longed for her mother. Then up she jumped, asked the Holy Virgin to forgive her, told me to forget what she had said, and ran out. She was eighteen.

Our speculations about the nuns’ secret lives were innocent. Now children of five or six would probably talk knowledgeably about lesbianism. Their bathing arrangements part consoled us for ours. They took baths once a week, wearing a white shroud, and kept the board around their necks. They never saw themselves in a mirror. Their heads were shaved. They seldom changed their undergarments. We knew what they wore, for we could see acres of white garments on the washing lines. There were layers of vests and knickers and petticoats under the heavy white serge robes we could see, that had over them the black robe, the crimped wimple, and the two veils, white and black. The nuns smelled horrible.

The nuns who taught us were educated women. One at least was a Nazi – so says Muriel Spark who writes about the same convent in her autobiography. Sister Margaret taught music, was kind to the little girl whose mother kept insisting she was a musical prodigy. She knew my mother could have had a career in music, listened gently to her tales about thwarted ambition, and for four years taught me scales and apprentice pieces, told me about great musicians and the obstacles they overcame. She never even hinted I had no particular talent. There was a Sister Patrick who, the nuns said, was a real lady, from Ireland, but she had given all that up for the love of God. She was a tall thin woman, with a fine elegant face, and she was dry and witty and sometimes unkind. She might quote from French or Latin and then say, ‘But you will not have heard of him I suppose,’ and sigh.

I was clever, that was my attribute, clever little Tigger Tayler. School lessons were never difficult, exams pleasurable. But being clever was not something I was prepared to go along with, for from the start I was quietly sliding out, not knowing what I did. My cleverness was a continuation of my mother’s, like my musical talents, insisted on, held up to other people for admiration, boasted about to the farmers’ wives, used as a means to get bursaries and special privileges.

What was my own, where I belonged, was the world of books, but I had to fight for it as soon as I arrived at the Convent. The school library was several rooms full to the ceiling with books neatly covered in brown paper, the titles and authors written on their spines in ink. I felt as if I had walked into a treasure cave, but the library nuns did not believe a child of eight had read Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. They insisted I must have the permission of my parents to read such unsuitable books. My weekly letter home read, ‘I am very well. I hope you are very well. How are Lion and Tiger? Sister Perpetua says I must have your permission to read books. It is only four weeks and three days and seven hours to the holidays. Love to Harry.’ While waiting for permission, the library nuns urged on me improving literature, which filled two long shelves. The word ‘unwholesome’ is hardly adequate to describe the moral climate these novels came from. The plots were all the same. A pure young man or girl met, apparently by chance, a worldly person, usually a woman, well dressed, older, but whose every smile or glance promised enticing initiations. The neophyte was invited to a country house, full of cosmopolitan older people, who all had the same air of mystery. The bemused one found herself, himself, attending seances, table-turnings, and ambiguous services in ruined chapels and sylvan glades. And then – the choice! The left-hand path into Satanism, the right-hand path into tedious virtue, which was fit only for the stupid or the timid. I did not find anything like this mix of eroticism and black magic until the TV series Twin Peaks from the States a couple of years ago, but the convent novels had nothing in them of that grotesque wit.