THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE
KAREN ARMSTRONG

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by HarperPress 2005

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Karen Armstrong 2004

Karen Armstrong asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

PS Section copyright © Georgina Laycock 2005

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Estate of

T. S. Eliot and Faber & Faber Ltd, for permission to reprint an excerpt

from the poem ‘Ash-Wednesday’, from Collected Poems, 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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PRAISE

From the reviews of The Spiral Staircase:

‘A book full of riches’

MICHÈLE ROBERTS, Literary Review

‘Unputdownable – absorbing, moving and hopeful’

Daily Mail

‘Her prose is admirably lucid … She writes with great insight and clarity about shifting states of mind and of feeling and about the evolution of thought, and she gives a more exact and vivid account of the pleasures of writing than any I have come across in a literary biography’

LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT, Sunday Times

‘Open, accessible, writing without jargon or denominational loyalty, Armstrong manages to put into words something that most of us cannot express … She tells a good tale at her own expense. She recounts the challenges she faced on her journey with amusement, a good ear for dialogue and an absence of self-pity or piety’

New Statesman

‘This terrifically readable book … is a fine testament to how the effort to escape self-pity and sustain the spirit in adversity is itself richly creative and can reward’

SALLEY VICKERS, Spectator

‘Written with enormous charm and elegance … If you are mystified as to why religion, which you thought was all but dead and buried, has bounced back with such alarming impact on to the human scene, then Karen Armstrong is probably your best guide’

Scotsman

EPIGRAPH

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessèd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

T. S. ELIOT

Ash-Wednesday, I.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Epigraph

Preface

1 Ash Wednesday

2 The Devil of the Stairs

3 I Renounce the Blessèd Face

4 Consequently I Rejoice

5 Desiring This Man’s Gift and That Man’s Scope

6 The Usual Reign

7 Infirm Glory

8 To Turn Again

Keep Reading

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Interview With Karen Armstrong

About the Book

Extract from Through the Narrow Gate

Read On

Have You Read?

If You Loved This You’ll Like …

Find Out More

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

This is the sequel to my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, which told the story of my seven years as a Roman Catholic nun. I entered my convent in 1962, when I was seventeen years old. It was entirely my own decision. My family was not particularly devout and my parents were horrified when I told them that I had a religious vocation. They thought, quite correctly as it turned out, that I was far too young to make such a momentous choice, but they allowed themselves to be persuaded because they wanted me to get it out of my system as soon as possible. I was usually quite a biddable child but I was anxious to test my vocation immediately, instead of waiting until after I had been to university, as my parents would have preferred. My unusual resolution in the face of their opposition impressed them, and they feared that I might spend my college years in a state of mulish obstinacy, failing to make the most of the opportunities of university life, and longing for it all to be over so that I could do what I really wanted. So, on 14 September 1962, I packed my bags and joined twelve other girls at the novitiate.

Why was I so determined to take this step? The motivation behind this type of decision is always complex, and there were a number of interlocking reasons. It is true that at this time I was very shy and worried about the demands of adult social life, but even though the religious life might seem a soft option, it was tough and I would not have lasted more than a few weeks if it had simply been a means of escape. I wanted to find God. I was filled with excitement and enthusiasm on that September day, convinced that I had embarked on a spiritual quest, an epic adventure, in the course of which I would lose the confusions of my adolescent self in the infinite and ultimately satisfying mystery that we call God. And because I was only seventeen, I imagined that this would happen pretty quickly. Very soon I would become a wise and enlightened woman, all passion spent. God would no longer be a remote, shadowy reality but a vibrant presence in my life. I would see him wherever I looked, and I myself would be transfigured, because, as St Paul had said, my puny little ego would disappear and Christ, the Word of God, would live in me. I would be serene, joyful, inspired and inspiring – perhaps even a saint.

This was, to put it mildly, an eccentric career option. I was almost the first student of my convent school to become a nun. Birmingham, my home town, was a materialistic place, where money was king. Most of my immediate family and friends were nonplussed – even slightly irritated – and I, of course, revelled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit different. But I may have been more in tune with my times than I realized, since many of my generation, born in the last years or in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, had the same inchoate yearning for transformation. Post-war Britain was not an easy place in which to grow up. We may have defeated Hitler, but the war had ruined us. Britain was now a second-rate power, and food, clothing and petrol were strictly rationed well into the 1950s. Because thousands of homes had been destroyed during the Blitz, there was a grave housing crisis. Our cities were scarred with desolate bombsites and filled with towering heaps of rubble. The centre of Birmingham was not completely rebuilt until after I left for the convent. After the war, we were in debt to the United States for three billion pounds, our empire was dismantled, and, though we were fed on a surfeit of films celebrating Britain’s endurance and victory, nobody seemed prepared to look facts in the face, and decide what our future role in the world should be. Young Britons, like myself, who came to maturity in this twilight confusion of austerity, repression, nostalgia, frustration and denial, wanted not only a different world but to be changed themselves.

In 1948, 60 per cent of British people under thirty wanted to emigrate; we wanted to be somewhere else. Hence, as the music historian Jon Savage explains in England’s Dreaming: the Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991), the quasi-religious fervour inspired by the Rock’n’Roll records that fell, like manna from heaven, between 1954 and 1959 on a country that had no tradition of Afro-American music. The unabashed rebellion and sexual explosiveness of these records seemed to promise a new world. They were ‘so transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: “A Wop Bop A Loo Bop”, “Be Bop A Lula”.’ People used to say of a record: ‘It sent me!’ as though they had been magically transported, without any effort of their own, to another place. In the world conjured up by Rock’n’Roll, nobody had to do National Service or listen to endless stories about the war. People could reject the self-sacrifice preached by their parents, live intensely, run wild, have sex, consume freely and ‘do as much as they could as soon as they could’.

This might seem a far cry from the convent. But, in my own way, I shared what Savage calls the ‘first time intensity’ of my generation. The raw, disturbing beat of Rock’n’Roll had penetrated my convent school, even though I was neither able nor equipped to answer its summons. I did not like being a teenage girl in the 1950s. I was awkward, plain, bookish and unpopular with boys. I looked absurd in the fashions of the day: the wide swirling skirts, pert ponytails, and backcombed beehives. In 1961, the year before I entered the convent, my parents tried to entice me from my intended course by talking me into joining a young people’s party at the Birmingham Catholic Ball. It was a ghastly affair. Encased in a stiff brocaded dress, with a skirt that stuck out aggressively, my feet squeezed into an agonizing pair of pink satin shoes with long pointed toes, I was hobbled. On the few occasions when I was invited to dance, and grimly quickstepped, waltzed and fox-trotted with a herd of others, I felt like a prisoner going round and round the exercise yard. At one point, my partner and I left the main room, and for ten blissful minutes managed to escape. We weren’t doing anything unlawful; we weren’t smoking, drinking alcohol or kissing – just sitting on the stairs and talking – but a friend of my mother’s pounced on me and frog-marched me back into the ballroom. I felt like a Victorian girl who had been compromised in some way. There had to be more to life than this.

Of course there were alternatives. We were told that, within reason, we could do anything we wanted: we could study, travel and have a career – until we got married. But even though I shrank from the appalling prospect of being an Old Maid, marriage did not look particularly appealing either, since most of the women I knew spent their lives ceaselessly cleaning, baking and washing, chores that I detest to this day. When my father had business problems, my mother took a job, and started an interesting career in the medical school of Birmingham University. I could see how she blossomed in this new environment, but the cooking and washing-up still had to be done. By contrast, the nuns seemed remarkably unencumbered. They had no men to tell them what to do, they ran their own lives, and were, presumably, concerned with higher things. I wanted that radical freedom.

I was looking for the sort of transformation that others were seeking in Rock’n’Roll, an option that was closed to me. As a convent schoolgirl, I was protected from the street culture, and lived in a separate world from most of my fellow-countrymen and women. In the 1950s, most people in Britain still paid lip-service to religion, but Catholicism was beyond the pale. Its extravagant statues with bleeding hearts and crowns of thorns, its Latinate ritual, its Irish priests, and its orientation to Rome made it highly unBritish, and therefore suspect. Catholics lived in self-imposed ‘ghettoes’: we socialized together, went to separate schools, did not attend Protestant services, and were taught to hold aloof from the ‘non-Catholic’ mainstream. As a result of this upbringing, I think that many of us have never felt entirely English, and continue to feel outsiders in British society. My head was filled with the imagery of Catholicism, with the lives and example of its saints, and the soaring theatre of its liturgy. I too wanted to be ‘sent’, to experience an ecstasy that would lift me to a different dimension, to go to another place, and live more authentically than seemed possible in the world I knew. Like my peers, who loitered menacingly in the El Sombrero coffee bar in Birmingham, I too could reject the values of contemporary society. The cloister seemed a radical and daring solution. So while my peers ‘opted out’ in hippie communes, experimented with mind-altering drugs, or tried to change the world politically, I sought intensity and transformation in the life of a nun.

Needless to say, the convent was not what I expected. I entered in 1962 as an ardent, idealistic, untidy, unrealistic and immature teenager, and left seven years later, having suffered a mild breakdown, obscurely broken and damaged. This was nobody’s fault, even though I assumed that the failure was entirely my own doing. I had embarked on the religious life at a particularly difficult moment, since my superiors were involved in a painful period of change, and were trying to decide what exactly it meant to be a nun in modern society. The Catholic Church was also seeking transformation in the post-war world. During my first few months in the convent, the Second Vatican Council convened in Rome. It had been summoned by Pope John XXIII to fling open the windows of the Church, and let the fresh air of modernity sweep through the musty corridors of the Vatican.

One of the areas tackled by the Council Fathers was the religious life, which urgently needed reform. Many of the orders were stuck in a traditional rut. Customs that had made perfect sense in the nineteenth century, when my own community had been founded, now seemed arbitrary and unnatural. Practices that had no intrinsic spiritual value but were cultural relics of the Victorian age had acquired sacred significance, and change was regarded as betrayal. The Council urged the religious orders to go back to the original spirit of their founders, who had been men and women of insight and imagination, innovators and pioneers, not guardians of the status quo. Nuns and monks should also let the bracing spirit of change invade their cloisters; they should throw out the rubble that had accumulated over the years and craft a new lifestyle that was in tune with the times.

This proved to be a monumentally difficult task. Nuns had to decide what was essential in their Rule, and then translate this into present-day idiom. But they themselves had been shaped by the old regime at a profound level and many found that they could not think in any other way. They could modernize their clothes, but they could not change the habits of their minds and hearts, which had been formed by a training that had been carefully designed in a different world and was meant to last a lifetime. For some, this was a time of great anguish. They saw a cherished way of life disappearing while nothing of equal value was emerging to take its place. I left the religious life in 1969, just ahead of a massive exodus of religious who left their convents and monasteries like flocks of migratory birds during the 1970s. The intense discussions surrounding the reforms had led them to call everything into question, even their own vocation. This, I believe, was a healthy development. The title of my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, comes from a text in St Matthew’s gospel, in which Jesus tells his disciples that ‘only a few’ find the narrow gate that leads to life. By the end of my seven years in the convent, I had come to the conclusion that only a very small number of people could live up to the demands of a life that requires the entire subjugation of the ego and a self-abandonment that, I realized sadly, was beyond me. I knew nuns who beautifully enshrined this ideal, but I realized that I was not of that calibre. I suspect that many of those who left during the 1970s had also faced up to this hard truth.

So I arrived at my convent at a difficult juncture, and would be one of the last people to be trained according to the old system. The reforms set in motion by the Vatican Council came just too late for me. And I experienced the traditional regime at its worst. A young nun in those days had to undergo a long period of intensive training. In my order, we spent the first nine months as postulants, wearing a sober black dress with a little white veil, and practising selected portions of the Rule. The Postulantship was a period of probation, designed to test our resolve, and about half of us dropped out. I must emphasize that there was never any pressure to stay. We all knew that we were free to leave at any time, and often a girl would be sent home because it was clear that she was not suited to convent life.

At the end of the nine months, we received the habit and began two years in the novitiate. This was a particularly testing time, and we were often told that if we did not find it almost unbearable, we were not trying hard enough. My superiors should, therefore, have been delighted with me, because I spent a good deal of my novitiate in tears. As if to fend off unwelcome change, they had appointed a particularly conservative nun as Novice Mistress the year before I arrived. In Through the Narrow Gate, I called her Mother Walter. She was unswervingly devoted to the old ways, and revived many disciplines that her two predecessors had discarded as unsuitable for twentieth-century girls. The system she devised, I now believe, was extremely unhealthy, but I threw myself into it because I was convinced that the harder I found it, the sooner it would bring me to God. Much later I was told that several nuns had been concerned about what was happening in the Noviceship during those years. As I shall explain in the early chapters of this book, the system was a form of conditioning. It was meant to change us irrevocably and it did – in my case, for the worse. I suspect that pressure was brought to bear upon Mother Walter, however, because towards the end of my novitiate, she relaxed some of her draconian innovations. A new batch of novices had arrived who were older and more worldly-wise than my own set and they simply would not put up with some of her more outrageous rules. But again, the change came too late for me.

Yet Mother Walter, too, was undergoing a painful transition, watching the religious practices that she had known and loved for so long thrown aside. It must have been a period of great suffering for her. It would never, of course, have occurred to me at the time but I now suspect that she was not very intelligent, and therefore unable to understand the effect of some of her policies. I remember once that, towards the end of my Noviceship, when she was savaging us for what she regarded as a failure in obedience, I suddenly cracked and told her that I no longer knew what obedience really was. ‘We seem to swing, like a pendulum, from one extreme to another,’ I protested, ‘from one disorder to another! One day we will be told off for not obeying absolutely to the letter, however absurd the command may be, and the next day we’ll be in trouble because we did obey blindly instead of using our intelligence and showing initiative! What are we supposed to do? What is obedience?’ I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow-novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite lost for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before.

Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for five years on 25 August 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that things could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life.

And at first, things did go well. After the Noviceship, we left the Mother House in Sussex and went to London for two further years of training, known as the Scholasticate. During the novitiate, we had concentrated on our spiritual lives. We had spent most of the time learning about prayer and the meaning of our Rule. Ironically, considering my aversion to domesticity, we also spent our days doing simple, manual tasks, though in the second year we had been permitted to read a little theology. In the Scholasticate, however, we began our professional training. Since our order was dedicated to the education of Catholic girls, most of us were destined to become teachers in one of the society’s many schools. I had already completed the matriculation requirements for college, and it was decided that I should now prepare for the competitive entrance examinations to Oxford University, where the order had been sending nuns ever since women had been allowed to take degrees. For the next twelve months, I attended classes and tutorials at a ‘crammer’ near Marble Arch. My subject was to be English Literature. That meant that I had to take two three-hour papers in literature, one paper in English language and philology, two translation papers – one in Latin and the other in French – and a paper on topics of general interest. I loved it. I am a natural student and like nothing better than immersing myself in a pile of books. After the years of dreary domestic toil, I was in heaven. I also took a correspondence course in theology, scripture and church history.

In the autumn of 1966, I sat the entrance examinations for St Anne’s College, Oxford, passed the first round, was summoned to interview, and to my own and my superiors’ intense delight, succeeded in winning a place. In 1967, the Scholasticate completed, I arrived at Cherwell Edge in South Parks Road, the Oxford convent of my order, to begin my university studies. And my life fell apart.

Intellectually, everything was fine. I lived at the convent, but attended lectures and tutorials with the other students and did very well. I got a distinction in the preliminary examinations, which we sat in the spring of 1968, won a University Prize, and was awarded a college scholarship. So far, so good. But as a religious, I felt torn in two. My elderly superior was bitterly opposed to the new ideas, and I fought her tooth and nail throughout the entire year. I am sure that I was quite insufferable, but I found it well-nigh impossible to think logically and accurately in college, where I was encouraged to question everything, and then turn off the critical faculty I was developing when I returned to Cherwell Edge, and become a docile young nun. The stringent academic training I was receiving at the university was changing me at just as profound a level as the religious formation of the Noviceship, and the two systems seemed to be irreconcilable. I was also increasingly distressed by the emotional frigidity of our lives. This was one of the areas of convent life that most desperately needed reform. Friendship was frowned upon and the atmosphere in the convent was cold and sometimes unkind. Increasingly, it seemed to me to have moved an immeasurably long distance from the spirit of the gospels.

Nevertheless, I struggled grimly on. To say that I did not want to leave would be an understatement. The very idea of returning to secular life filled me with dread. At first, I could not even contemplate this option, which was surrounded with all the force of a taboo. But the strain took its toll and in the summer of 1968 I broke down completely. It was now clear to us all that I could not continue. Everybody was wonderfully kind to me at the end and, in a sense, this made it even more distressing. It would have been so much easier to storm out in a blaze of righteous anger. But my superiors let me take as long as I needed to make my decision. I returned to college, and after a term of heart-searching, I applied for a dispensation from my vows, which arrived from Rome at the end of January 1969.

Writing Through the Narrow Gate some twelve years later was a salutary experience. It made me confront the past and I learned a great deal. Most importantly I realized how precious and formative this period of my life had been, and that, despite my problems, I would not have missed it for the world. Then I attempted a sequel: Beginning the World was published in 1983. It is the worst book I have ever written and I am thankful to say that it has long been out of print.

As its title suggests, this second volume attempted to tell the story of my return to secular life. But it was far too soon to write about those years, which had been extremely painful, even traumatic. I had scarcely begun to recover and was certainly not ready to see this phase of my life in perspective. Yet there was another reason for the failure of Beginning the World. At almost the exact moment when I sent the manuscript off to the publishers, my life changed completely in a most unexpected way. I started on an entirely new course, which took me off in a direction that I could never have anticipated. As a result, the years 1969 to 1982, which I had tried to describe in this memoir, took on a wholly different meaning. In that first, ill-conceived sequel, I had tried to show that I had put the convent completely behind me, had erased the damage, and completed the difficult rite of passage to a wholly secular existence. I had indeed ‘begun the world’.

But I had done no such thing. As I am going to try to show this time around, I have never managed to integrate fully with ‘the world’, although I have certainly tried to do so. Despite my best endeavours, I have in several important ways remained an outsider. I was much closer to the truth at the end of Through the Narrow Gate, when I predicted that I would in some sense be a nun all my life. Of course, it is true that, in superficial ways, my present life is light years away from my convent experience. I have dear friends, a pretty house and money. I travel, have a lot of fun and enjoy the good things of life. Nothing nunnish about any of this. But although I tried a number of different careers, doors continually slammed in my face until I settled down to my present solitary existence, writing, thinking and talking almost all day and every day about God, religion and spirituality. In this book I have tried to show how this came about and what it has meant.

As soon as it was published, I realized that Beginning the World had been a mistake and that I would probably have to rewrite it one day. It was not a truthful account. This was not because the events I recounted did not happen, but because the book did not tell the whole story. The publishers were concerned that I should not come across as an intellectual. So I had to leave out any kind of ‘learned’ reflection. There could be no talk of books or poems, for example, and certainly no theological discussion about the nature of God or the purpose of prayer. I should stick to external events to make the story dramatic and accessible. I was also told to present myself in as positive and lively a light as possible, and, as I was still very unsure of myself as a writer, and assumed that my publishers knew what they were doing, I went along with this. But most importantly, I wanted this cheery self-portrait to be true. It was, therefore, an exercise in wish-fulfilment, and, predictably, the result was quite awful. Today I can hardly bear to look at Beginning the World, which has a hearty, boisterous and relentlessly extrovert tone. It is like reading my life story as told by Ruby Wax.

The reality was very different. During those years, I did in fact live a great deal inside my head, and approached the world largely through the medium of books and ideas. To an extent, I still do. And I was not a lively, positive girl. Much of the time, I was withdrawn, bitter, weary, frightened and ill. And while I was writing Beginning the World, I was particularly scared – with good reason, because, yet again, my latest career had collapsed, and the future looked most uncertain. The book was badly conceived, and could be nothing but a distortion of an important and ultimately valuable period of my life.

And so I have decided to try again. We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter. Reviewing my own story has made me marvel at the way it all turned out. I am now glad that after all I did not simply ‘begin the world’. Something more interesting happened instead – at least, I think so. T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, a sequence of six poems that trace the process of spiritual recovery, has been central to my journey. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent. Catholics have ashes sprinkled on their foreheads to remind them of their mortality, because it is only when we have become fully aware of the frailty that is inherent in our very nature that we can begin our quest. During Lent, Christians embark on six weeks of penitence and reflection that lead to the rebirth of Easter – a life that we could not possibly have imagined at the outset.

In Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and phrases, apparently making little headway, but pushing steadily forwards nevertheless. My own life has progressed in the same way. For years it seemed a hard Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter. I toiled round and round in pointless circles, covering the same ground, repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going. Yet all the time, without realizing it, I was slowly climbing out of the darkness. In mythology, stairs frequently symbolize a breakthrough to a new level of consciousness. For a long time, I assumed that I had finished with religion for ever, yet, in the end, the strange and seemingly arbitrary revolutions of my life led me to the kind of transformation that, I now believe, was what I had been seeking all those years ago when I packed my suitcase, entered my convent and set off to find God.

Note: Some of the characters in this memoir have their own names. Those who prefer anonymity have pseudonyms.

1 ASH WEDNESDAY

I was late.

That in itself was a novelty. It was a dark, gusty evening in February 1969, only a few weeks after I had left the religious life, where we had practised the most stringent punctuality. At the first sound of the convent bell announcing the next meal or a period of meditation in the chapel, we had to lay down our work immediately, stopping a conversation in the middle of a word or leaving the sentence we were writing half-finished. The Rule which governed our lives down to the smallest detail taught us that the bell should be regarded as the voice of God, calling each one of us to a fresh encounter, no matter how trivial or menial the task in hand. Each moment of our day was therefore a sacrament, because it was ordained by the religious order, which was in turn sanctioned by the Church, the Body of Christ on earth. So for years it had become second nature for me to jump to attention whenever the bell tolled, because it really was tolling for me. If I obeyed the rule of punctuality, I kept telling myself, one day I would develop an interior attitude of waiting permanently on God, perpetually conscious of his loving presence. But that had never happened to me.

When I had received the papers from the Vatican that dispensed me from my vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, I was halfway through my undergraduate degree. I could, therefore, simply move into my college, and carry on with my studies as though nothing had happened. The very next day, I was working on my weekly essay, like any other Oxford student. I was studying English literature, and though I had been at university for nearly eighteen months, to be able to plunge heart and soul into a book was still an unbelievable luxury. Some of my superiors had regarded poetry and novels with suspicion, and saw literature as a form of self-indulgence, but now I could read anything I wanted, and during those first confusing weeks of my return to secular life, study was a source of delight and a real consolation for all that I had lost.

So that evening, when at 7.20 I heard the college bell summoning the students to dinner, I did not lay down my pen, close my books neatly and walk obediently to the dining hall. My essay had to be finished in time for my tutorial the following morning, and I was working on a crucial paragraph. There seemed no point in breaking my train of thought. This bell was not the voice of God, but simply a convenience. It was not inviting me to a meeting with God. Indeed, God was no longer calling me to anything at all – if he ever had. This time last year, even the smallest, most mundane job had sacred significance. Now all that was over. Instead of each duty being a momentous occasion, nothing seemed to matter very much at all.

As I hurried across the college garden to the dining hall, I realized with a certain wry amusement that my little gesture of defiance had occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. That morning, the nuns would have knelt at the altar rail to receive their smudge of ash, as the priest muttered: ‘Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’ This memento mori began a period of religious observance that was even more intense than usual. Right now, in the convent refectory, the nuns would be lining up to perform special public penances in reparation for their faults. The sense of effort and determination to achieve a greater level of perfection than ever before would be almost tangible, and this was the day on which I had deliberately opted to be late for dinner!

As I pushed back the heavy glass door, I was confronted with a very different scene from the one I had just been imagining. The noise alone was an assault, as the unrestrained, babbling roar of four hundred students slapped me in the face. To encourage constant prayer and recollection, our Rule had stipulated that we refrain from speech all day; talking was permitted only for an hour after lunch and after dinner when the community had gathered for sewing and general recreation. We were trained to walk quietly, to open and close doors as silently as possible, to laugh in a restrained trill, and, if speech was unavoidable in the course of our duties, to speak only ‘a few words in a low voice’. Lent was an especially silent time. But there was no Lenten atmosphere in college tonight. Students hailed one another noisily across the room, yelled greetings to friends, and argued vigorously, with wild, exaggerated gestures. Instead of the monochrome convent scene, black and white habits, muffled, apologetic clinking of cutlery, and the calm, expressionless voice of the reader, there was a riot of colour, bursts of exuberant laughter and shouts of protest. But, whether I liked it or not, this was my world now.

I am not quite sure of the reason for what happened next. It may have been that part of my mind was absent, still grappling with my essay, or that I was disoriented by the contrast between the convent scene I had been envisaging and the cheerful profanity of the spectacle in front of me. But instead of bowing briefly to the Principal in mute apology for my lateness, as college etiquette demanded, I found to my horror that I had knelt down and kissed the floor.

This was the scene with which I opened Beginning the World, my first attempt to tell the story of my return to secular life. I realize that it presents me in a ridiculous and undignified light, but it still seems a good place to start, because it was a stark illustration of my plight. Outwardly I probably looked like any other student in the late 1960s, but I continued to behave like a nun. Unless I exerted constant vigilance, my mind, heart and body betrayed me. Without giving it a second’s thought, I had instinctively knelt in the customary attitude of contrition and abasement. We always kissed the floor when we entered a room late and disturbed a community duty. This had seemed strange at first, but after a few weeks it had become second nature. Yet a quick glance at the girls seated at the tables next to the door, who were staring at me incredulously, reminded me that what was normal behaviour in the convent appeared to be little short of deranged out here. As I rose to my feet, cold with embarrassment, I realized that my reactions were entirely different from those of most of my contemporaries in this strange new world. Perhaps they always would be.

There may have been another reason why I kissed the ground that evening. Ever since my dispensation had come through, many of my fellow-students and tutors had made a point of congratulating me. ‘You must be so relieved to be out of all that!’ one of them had said. ‘It never seemed quite right for you.’ ‘How exciting!’ others had exclaimed. ‘You can start all over again! You can do anything, be anything you want to be! Everything is ahead of you!’ It was true, in a sense: now I could fall in love, wear beautiful clothes, travel, make a lot of money – all the things that, most people assumed, I had been yearning to do for the past seven years. But I didn’t feel excited or relieved. I didn’t want to do any of the things that people expected. I had no sense of boundless opportunity. Instead, I felt, quite simply, sad, and was constantly wracked by a very great regret. When I pictured that dedicated Lenten scene in the convent, it seemed unbearably poignant because it was now closed to me for ever. I mourned the loss of an ideal and the absence of dedication from my new life, and I also had a nagging suspicion that if only I had tried just a little bit harder, I would not have had to leave. There had been something missing in me. I had failed to make a gift of myself to God. And so I felt like a penitent and, perhaps, when I kissed the floor that night, I had unconsciously wanted – just once – to appear in my true colours to the rest of the world.

In Beginning the World I described how I had threaded my way through the tables, flinching from the curious gaze of the other students, until I was rescued by a group who had become my friends and who had kept a kindly but tactful eye on me during the past difficult weeks. There was Rosemary, a cheerful extrovert, who was reading modern languages; Fiona, a gentler, more thoughtful girl; her constant companion Pat, who had been a pupil at one of the boarding schools run by my order; and finally Jane, who was also reading English. All were Catholics. All had some experience of nuns. Jane retained a great fondness for the kindly semi-enclosed sisters at her rather exclusive school. Pat had actually known me as a nun, since I had been sent to help out at her school in Harrogate. There were other people at the table for whom Catholicism and convents were alien territory and who clearly intended to keep it that way. In Beginning the World, I made them all tease me good-naturedly about my gaffe, question me about convent life and express shock and horror at such customs as kissing the floor, confessing faults in public and performing elaborate penances in the refectory. Maybe there was some discussion along these lines; certainly people were curious, up to a point. But I doubt that anybody was really very interested.

These young women had been quite wonderful to me. It had been Rosemary, Fiona and Pat who had marched me down to Marks and Spencer a couple of hours after my dispensation had come through and helped me to buy my first secular clothes. Rosemary had cut and styled my hair and all three had escorted me to dinner, my first public appearance as a defrocked nun. But they were probably wary of prying too closely into the reasons for what they could see had been a traumatic decision. I certainly had no desire to discuss the matter with them. In the convent we had been carefully trained never to tell our troubles to one another and it would never have occurred to me to unburden myself to my peers. And these girls had their own concerns. They too had essays to write; they were falling in love, and trying to juggle the demands of concentrated academic work with those of an absorbing social life. They were making their own journeys into adulthood, and now that the drama of my exodus was over, they almost certainly assumed that I was happily revelling in my new freedom, and were content to leave well alone.

I also knew that they could not begin to imagine my convent existence. Occasionally one of them would express astonishment if I inadvertently let something slip. ‘My nuns weren’t a bit like that!’ Jane would insist stoutly. ‘Your lot must have been abnormally strict.’ Pat would look even more bewildered, because she and I had lived with exactly the same community, but her perspective, as a secular, was different. ‘They were so modern and up-to-date, even sophisticated!’ she would protest. ‘They drove cars, were starting to go to the cinema again, and were changing the habit!’ Both girls would look at me reproachfully, because I was spoiling a cherished memory. Nobody likes to be told that things were not as they imagined. But I was quite certain that my own order had not been particularly austere, and agreed with Pat that it had been far more enlightened than many. Most nuns had observed these arcane rituals, had kissed the ground, confessed their external faults to one another, and were forbidden to have what were known as ‘particular friendships’, since all love must be given to God. That was why the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were so necessary.

I also knew that, taken out of context, such practices as kissing the floor or reciting the Lord’s Prayer five times, with your arms in the form of a cross, would seem sensationalist, exaggerated and histrionic. But in reality they became as normal to us as breathing, a routine part of our lives, sometimes even a little tedious. To speak of these things outside the convent would give a false impression. I had not left the convent because we had to do public penance, but because I had failed to find God and had never come within shouting distance of that complete self-surrender which, the great spiritual writers declared, was essential for those who wished to enter into the divine presence.

So I did not speak of my old life to anybody and most people assumed that I had, therefore, simply put the past behind me.

‘Much better out than in,’ Miss Griffiths, my Anglo-Saxon tutor said decisively, as we sat in her elegant college rooms drinking sherry one evening. ‘You look much better out of that habit, my lamb. And, you know, however things turn out in the future, I’m certain you made the correct decision. If you come back to me in fifteen years’ time and say “Look, five children and a divorce!” I shall still say that you were right to leave.’

This, of course, was quite true. There had been no other option. But as I looked around at the richly coloured William Morris curtains, the massive bookcases, and the oriental rug in front of the fire, I felt entirely out of my element. Every item of furniture, down to the tasteful ornaments glinting on the marble mantelpiece and the cunningly arranged lamps, had been designed for comfort and pleasure. In the convent, everything had been pared down to essentials: scrubbed floorboards, uncurtained windows, starkly positioned tables and chairs. Each was a perpetual reminder of how we too were to be stripped inwardly of any lingering attachment to the world, to people and to material objects, if we were to be worthy of God. Nevertheless, it was nice here, I reflected, the sherry blurring the room in a golden glow. Perhaps I could become a don one day, and have a pretty room like this, piled high with books. Perhaps I could dedicate myself to scholarship, as I had once devoted myself to the disciplines of the religious life.

My tutors’ comfortable, peaceful rooms increasingly seemed a haven. As I walked around Oxford, I realized that the world had undergone radical change while I had been inside. I had begun my Postulantship in 1962, just before the sexual, social and political upheavals of the 1960s. In the 50s, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties; and girls were clad in demure twinsets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. The dangers of premarital sex had been burned into my soul. And, indeed, before the contraceptive pill, it was a risky enterprise for girls. But all that had clearly changed. Girls and boys walked with their arms casually slung around one another, in ways that might or might not be sexual. Some embraced languorously in public places. They certainly did not subscribe to the old shibboleths, though I knew that my Catholic friends still agonized about how far they could go without falling into mortal sin. But the demeanour of these young people was even more startling. They had long flowing hair instead of the tidy repressed bobs of my youth. The neat sweaters and ties had been thrown out. Their attire was careless, ragged and often eccentric – flowered or ruffled shirts for the men, evening dress worn with jaunty insouciance in the middle of the day; the girls wore skirts that barely covered their thighs or long, flowing, vaguely eastern robes.

Above all, they were confident. I had just come from an institution in which young people were required to be absolutely obedient and submissive. We were never supposed to call attention to ourselves, never to question or criticize established custom, and, if you were invited to address your elders, you did so with deference and courtesy that bordered on the obsequious. We knelt down when we spoke to our superiors to remind ourselves that they stood in the place of God. These young people, however, seemed openly and unashamedly rebellious. They protested, noisily and vociferously. They even took part in events called ‘demonstrations’, where they publicly aired their grievances, a concept that could not have been more alien to me. What on earth were they trying to demonstrate? What had they got to be so angry about?

This was the spring of 1969, and I now realize that, on the international stage, the weeks that had elapsed since my departure from the convent had been momentous. Richard Nixon had been inaugurated as President of the United States, Yasser Arafat had been elected chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and a military coup had taken place in Pakistan. Palestinian terrorists had attacked an Israeli airliner at Zurich airport; Nixon had authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia, and Soviet and Chinese forces had clashed on the Manchurian border. I knew nothing of this. I had never heard of either Nixon or Arafat, and would have had difficulty in locating either Cambodia or Manchuria on the map. In the convent, we had not kept abreast of current events. In the novitiate, indeed, we did not even see newspapers. We were told of the Cuban missile crisis, which occurred a few weeks after I entered, but our superiors forgot to tell us that the conflict had been resolved, so we spent three whole weeks in terror, hourly expecting the outbreak of World War Three. Mother Walter also told us about the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Catholic president. Later, this strict embargo on the news was mitigated somewhat, but in general political interest was frowned upon. As a result, I entered the secular world completely ignorant of the problems of our time, and because I lacked basic information, could not make head or tail of the newspapers. What I needed was a crash course in the current political scene, but this was not available, and I felt so ashamed of my ignorance that I did not dare to ask questions that would have revealed its abysmal depths.

As it happened, there were students at my college who would have been delighted to take my education in hand, because St Anne’s was probably the most politically-minded of all the five women’s colleges. This was, of course, the great period of student unrest. In January, while I was preparing to leave my convent, the Czech student Jan Palach had publicly burned himself to death to protest Soviet occupation, and in Spain student disturbances had led to the imposition of martial law. In April, left-wing students at Cornell University in New York State staged a three-day ‘sit-in’ to draw attention to their outdated curriculum, while at Harvard, three hundred students occupied the campus administration building, and were forcibly removed by the police. Oxford was also aflame with revolutionary enthusiasm. But the ringleaders looked absolutely terrifying to me – unapproachable in their righteous rage. I would as soon have approached a charging bull, as expose my political naïveté to them

Almost every Saturday afternoon, I watched in bewilderment as crowds of students gathered on the college lawn, carrying placards emblazoned with slogans directed against the government, the university authorities, the syllabus, and something mysteriously called ‘The System’. They seemed furious about everything. I heard astonishing reports of violent meetings in the English Faculty Library, where undergraduates screamed abuse at the dons. They demanded that the formidable linguistic requirements of the course be scrapped, that the syllabus include contemporary literature (it currently stopped at 1900), and that the study of Anglo-Saxon be abolished. To me, who had fallen passionately in love with Old English literature, this rage was incomprehensible. When I heard some of my fellow-students at St Anne’s inveighing against the ‘tyranny’ of the dons, I gazed at them nonplussed. After the draconian atmosphere of the convent, the mildly liberal, laissez-faire atmosphere of St Anne’s seemed like paradise to me. These kids didn’t know what tyranny was! But then I remembered my last painful year in the convent, when I had been the rebel, and had argued relentlessly with my superior about the Rule. I had also been full of rage, constantly frustrated by the convent ‘Establishment’, and passionately eager for change. Perhaps I was not so different from my contemporaries, after all. We had just been fighting in different wars.

Willy-nilly, I found myself drawn into the climate of protest. Somewhat to my astonishment, I had been approached the previous term, while still a nun, and asked if I would let my name go forward as a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the Junior Common Room committee. I had been reluctant – a humiliating defeat seemed inevitable – but my supporters were insistent and it seemed churlish to refuse. For a couple of weeks I slunk past the noticeboard, wincing at the sight of my photograph, complete with veil and crucifix, beside those of my wild-haired rivals. What student in her right mind would vote for me? I looked like a creature from another planet. I scarcely dared to approach the noticeboard on the morning after the election, but, amazed, I saw the same photograph prominently displayed, informing the college that I was now the secretary of the Common Room.

So now I found that, whether I liked it or not, I was being drawn into student politics. I had to attend protest meetings in the JCR, and take part in intense committee discussions about how to bring St Anne’s into line with the 60s. The most pressing issue was cohabitation in the colleges. Until the early twentieth century, women had not been permitted to attend the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It was assumed that the effort of studying to the same level as men would blow their inferior little brains to smithereens. But some women had refused to accept this exclusion, had set up colleges of their own, and the university had eventually accepted them. The five women’s colleges of Oxford had been a Trojan Horse, smuggling the weaker sex into the male preserve of academia, but now, some believed, their day was over. All the colleges should be open to both sexes. Men should be allowed to come to St Anne’s and women should be admitted to the prestigious male colleges of Magdalen or Balliol.

The present arrangements did not penalize women educationally. All students attended exactly the same lectures and took the same examinations. Men and women competed against one another on equal terms. The college could arrange for us to study with any tutor of our choice. Fellows of St John’s and Merton had taught me, for example, and the St Anne’s Fellows, especially in the English department, which had an exceptional reputation, tutored male students. In fact, the women’s colleges often had a higher rate of academic success: because there were fewer places for women, the standard of those selected at the entrance examinations tended to be higher. During my years at Oxford, St Anne’s regularly came top of the Norrington Scale, the league tables which charted the performance of undergraduates in the final examinations. By the 1960s, therefore, women had proved that they were quite capable of holding their own in the university.

So to many, mixed-sex colleges seemed the next logical step. But that might take time. Women, for example, would require better bathroom facilities than the gruesome arrangements in the men’s colleges. But as a preliminary, students all over the university were demanding that the ‘Gate Hours’ be abolished. We all had to be in college by midnight, and visitors were obliged to write their names in a book at the Porter’s Lodge, and sign out before the gates were closed. Of course, people disregarded these ‘Gate Hours’. There were several places where it was very easy to climb over the college wall; everybody knew this and most turned a blind eye. If somebody were caught, he or she would suffer a mild reprimand and pay a small fine. But in these heady days of revolution, these rules seemed absurd to the more radical and, in my new official capacity, I had to attend heated meetings in which students and dons argued about them. As far as I was concerned, the question was wholly academic. There was no man clamouring to spend the night in my small college room, and the possibility of my climbing over the college wall after a love tryst was about as remote as my scaling the Great Wall of China. Moreover, until a few weeks before, I had been a very visible representative of an institution that condemned all sex outside marriage as gravely sinful.

But those days were over. I still regarded myself as a Catholic, but I was aware that its traditional teachings on sexual matters had become extremely controversial within the Church itself. Some of the nuns had been devastated the previous summer when Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae had outlawed the practice of artificial contraception. In one of our convents, I had heard, one of the more adventurous nuns had caused a minor sensation, on the morning after the papal ruling, by putting a pill (a mere aspirin, of course) on each of the sisters’ breakfast plates. Nuns naturally had no personal stake in the Pope’s decision, but the encyclical had become symbolic of the authoritarian government of the Church: by ignoring the advice of married couples, doctors and psychologists in order to reassert the Church’s traditional position, Paul VI seemed to be withdrawing from the new spirit of the Vatican Council, retreating yet again from the laity, and turning his back on the plight of those married couples who were loyal Catholics but who wanted to limit their families responsibly. The Catholic Church was undergoing its own sexual revolution, but most of those who campaigned against Humanae Vitae would not have condoned the use of the contraceptive pill by unmarried people and many of them would have expected me to take a strong line on the ‘Gate Hours’ issue and speak up for good Catholic values. A few weeks earlier, I would probably have done this without hesitation.

Now, though, I was no longer an official representative of the Catholic Church, and while I listened to the arguments from the Common Room floor, I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I felt no desire to support those students who fought against the abolition of the ‘Gate Hours’ on Christian grounds. My indifference was in part the result of an anxious preoccupation with my own personal drama. I was drained and exhausted by the events of the past few weeks, and had little energy to spare for this battle. But there was more to it than that. When I thought about the issue, I found only a question mark where the old conviction should have been. I had experienced this time and again recently; it seemed as though I had discarded a good deal of my old religious self when I had taken off my habit. Beliefs and principles that I had taken so completely for granted that they seemed part of my very being now appeared strangely abstract and remote. In fact, I reflected uneasily, I did not seem to think or feel anything very strongly any more.

I had now been studying at Oxford for nearly eighteen months, and for two years before that I had been preparing for the rigorous entrance examinations to the university. Academia had its own disciplines that were as exacting in their own way as those of the convent. One of these was already ingrained in my heart and mind: do not pronounce on subjects that you know nothing about. I had now acquired a healthy respect for the limits of my own knowledge and expertise. One of the chief effects of my education so far had been an acute consciousness of everything that I did not know. What did I know about sex? I asked myself during the explosive Common Room debates. What did I know about men, relationships or love? What did I know about the brave new world of the 60s? I knew nothing at all, and was not, therefore, entitled to an opinion. And, remembering my own protests against an outworn system only a few months earlier, I felt that I should listen carefully to those who demanded change. In the meantime, there seemed no need for me to contribute.

I was not allowed to remain on the sidelines, however. The college had appointed a new Dean of Discipline. For years Dorothy Bednarowska, my literature tutor, whose approach had been liberal and relaxed, had filled this post. The new Dean was Emily Franklin, a large, bovine woman who, I learned with some astonishment, was only a few years older than I. Her pupils told me that she was a fine teacher, if a trifle dull. But despite her relative youth, Miss Franklin had no time for student protest, and had decreed that not only would there be no change in the current ‘Gate Hours’, but that the gates would be locked an hour earlier. Furthermore, she had increased the fines for offenders, and, as her pièce de résistance, a barbed-wire hedge had appeared, without warning, underneath the favourite climbing-in spot. The college was in an uproar.

‘Of course, this is quite absurd’, Mrs Bednarowska said, drawing me aside one day in the corridor. ‘The silly woman is out of her mind. The Virgin Vote will be delighted, but it won’t wash.’

‘The Virgin Vote?’ I asked.

‘Oh – the conservative wing on the college governing body,’ Mrs Bednarowska replied. ‘You know who they are! They’re not all virgins, of course, but they might as well be. Anyway, the point is, my dear, what is the Common Room going to do about this?’

‘We’re sending a deputation to the Dean, asking her to reconsider,’ I said, a little dazed by my tutor’s assumption that I would take the liberal line.

Mrs Bednarowska gave her characteristic yelp of laughter. ‘That won’t work – though it’s very correct, of course,’ she opined, as she strode off with her curiously splay-footed gait to her rooms.

What I had not realized was that, as Secretary, I was expected to go with the president of the JCR to put our views to Miss Franklin. Maureen Mackintosh, a clever girl with masses of long red hair, was one of the most politically radical students in college, and I found her distinctly alarming. I always expected her to treat me with disdain, and dreaded lest she strike up a conversation about Vietnam and Cambodia in which I would certainly not be able to hold my own. And what on earth was an ex-nun doing campaigning for students to spend illicit nights together? To my relief, however, Maureen seemed untroubled by my presence as we set off for Miss Franklin’s apartment. We sat together, side by side, on a sofa in the Dean’s room, drinking tiny glasses of sherry in an atmosphere that was distinctly chilly, while the champion of the Virgin Vote sat with her back to the window, her cat Smokey purring noisily on her knee.

‘No more concessions!’ she replied, when we formally requested that the new measures be withdrawn and the wire fence removed. She repeated the phrase like a mantra at intervals during the ensuing discussion, almost chanting it in a strangely expressionless falsetto. ‘No more concessions!’

This irritated me. ‘You can’t call these “concessions”,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ve taken away rights that have already been given to us. We’re simply asking for a return to the status quo. Not for concessions.’

I might as well have kept my mouth shut. ‘No more concessions,’ Miss Franklin repeated.

‘The Common Room won’t accept this, Miss Franklin,’ Maureen replied sternly. ‘If you don’t at least restore the old “Gate Hours”, we shall have to take action. And that barbed wire is extremely dangerous. You didn’t warn us. Somebody could have been seriously injured.’

‘Then she – or he – would only have themselves to blame,’ Miss Franklin retorted smoothly. ‘You are here to be educated, not to indulge in unlicensed sex at all hours. Nor to organize childish demonstrations, at the expense of your studies.’

Maureen sighed, and again I felt indignant. The remark was entirely uncalled for. Maureen’s political activities certainly did not interfere with her work. She had recently won one of the highly coveted and prestigious Kennedy Scholarships for postgraduate study in the United States, and was going to Berkeley, which, I gathered, was the new Mecca for 60s revolutionaries. ‘I can only repeat,’ she persisted, with admirable self-control, ‘that the Common Room will have to take action.’

‘No more concessions!’ Miss Franklin sang implacably, turning away from us to give her attention to Smokey, and crooning endearments in his ear as he tried to climb over her ample bosom to the windowsill. I studied her with perplexity. All my life I had accepted the fact that some opinions were right and others wrong. And yet how deeply unattractive such a stance could be. Nothing we could say would cause Miss Franklin a moment’s doubt. Her mind was closed to any other possibility. She reminded me of those virginal saints in the Catholic legends who were utterly impermeable: wild beasts fell back from them in terror; swords could not pierce their invulnerable flesh; even when they were thrust into brothels, they proved impenetrable. They seemed to be surrounded by an invisible shield, a barricade that preserved them in a world of their own. In the convent we had sung hymns to the Virgin Mary, which compared her to a ‘garden enclosed’ or ‘a well sealed up’. I had been proud to take my vow of chastity, but I knew that right now I was no longer on the same side as the Virgin Vote.

I turned to Maureen inquiringly. She nodded and rose to her feet. ‘I don’t think we have anything more to say to one another,’ she said.

That night, under cover of darkness, I accompanied Maureen and a group of other students to the college wall. Each of us carried a pair of wire-clippers. Grimly and methodically we demolished the barbed-wire fence, and deposited it in a heap of ten-inch fragments on the lawn outside Miss Franklin’s window. I seemed to have thrown in my lot with the sexual revolution.

But a few days later, when I went to my first party, I was not quite so sure. Yet again, when I walked into the murky, smoke-filled room, the noise almost knocked me sideways. The parties I had attended before the convent had been sedate, elderly affairs. Under the benign but hawk-like gaze of our elders, we had lurched around the room in pairs, trying to match our faltering steps to the polite strains of waltzes and quicksteps. Bored, I had to admit, almost to stupefaction. But nobody seemed bored here, I noted, as I groped my way uncertainly to a corner where I had spotted Jane with her boyfriend Mark and accepted a glass of wine. I sipped it gratefully, hoping it might have some anaesthetic effect, as I stared, dazed, at the scene before me. The room was as dark as an underground cavern, the gloom relieved periodically by flickering lights that transformed us all into granite-hued hags. Jane’s skin looked blanched, her lips black. On the other side of the room, I could see Pat and Fiona, their pretty, fresh faces also drained of colour, their animated expressions curiously at variance with their corpse-like pallor.

‘You look stunned.’ Mark, a tall, solemn young man with the regular good looks of a male model, bent towards me solicitously. He had to shout above the din of a jangled crashing that I was trying to identify as music. Amplified male voices screamed, guitars thrummed, cymbals clashed and, beneath it all, a drum beat a primitive, disturbing pulse.

‘No. No, not at all,’ I yelled back, politely. It would have been so much easier, I now realize, if I had admitted how strange this new world appeared to me, had shared my confusion and dismay and let people in. But I seemed quite unable to do this. In my own way, I was quite as impenetrable as Miss Franklin or any Virgin Martyr. I wanted people to believe that I was taking it all in my stride and that leaving a convent was as easy as falling off a log. I didn’t want to be the object of pity or curiosity, and the convent habit of reticence was now almost reflexive. I tried to take an intelligent interest. ‘Who are the singers?’

With a unanimity that was almost comical, Jane and Mark both did a double-take. ‘The Beatles, of course!’ Jane exclaimed. And then, as I continued to look blank, she added, a little more tentatively: ‘You have heard of the Beatles, haven’t you?’

I had. Just. My sister had mentioned the group to me on one of her visits, and the name had cropped up occasionally in the conversation of my fellow-students. But even though it was now 1969, I had no idea who the Beatles really were, no notion of their extraordinary impact on British society during the 60s, had never encountered Beatlemania, and had certainly never knowingly heard a note of their music. Jane and Mark tried to explain to me what the Beatles meant for their generation, but I took little in. I could see that they were slightly alarmed by my ignorance. Jane was looking at me thoughtfully, though I made her laugh when I asked, in some perplexity, why the band was named after those rather unpleasant black insects. On my other side, Mark was reciting the lyrics, which shocked me by their unabashed expression of naked need: ‘Love, Love Me Do!’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand!’, ‘Please, Please Me!’ I could not even have admitted to myself that I had such needs, let alone shouted my yearnings aloud in such wild abandonment. Yet the words touched some raw place within me, making me aware of my loneliness in this crowded room. All around me I noticed feet tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words of the songs, glances exchanged as though a phrase had a special private significance. The Beatles were a current that united everybody at the party; a thread that bound the room together. They were the spokesmen of their generation, but even though they must have been about my own age, they could not speak for me. I was present at the party, but only as an outsider. The ease and confidence with which the Beatles simply said what they wanted appalled me, and yet I longed to be able to do the same. Even today, more than thirty years later, when I have come to appreciate their real genius, I find their songs almost unbearably poignant. Those desires had been schooled out of me, and yet the painfully direct appeal of the lyrics made me realize that I wished that I had them. I felt my throat swell with unshed tears: ‘All You Need Is Love’.

But love in this context? I stared bemused at the dancers. These new acquaintances of mine had obviously never heard of the quickstep. Instead, they were leaping, twisting, gyrating together in pairs. Some even danced singly, and no one followed any predetermined pattern. They shot into the air, waved their arms, swung out legs at odd angles. Doing what came naturally. But it was not natural for me. For a second I felt a pang of pure envy. I would love to be able to do that, I thought, and to be so wild, uninhibited and free. These students were living fully and intensely, in a way that I could not. When Mark, kindly, asked me if I would like to dance, I shook my head. I could no more fling myself around like that than fly.

For years, I had been trained in absolute physical restraint. Nuns had to walk smoothly, at a moderate pace. Unless there was some dire emergency, they must never run. At first all this had been difficult. Most of us were young and it was hard to quench the impulse to run upstairs, two steps at a time, or to hurry to a class when late. But gradually I had learned to keep myself in check. I had, however, never fully mastered these rules of ‘religious modesty’ which were supposed to regulate a nun’s demeanour. I was, and am, clumsy and badly coordinated. I never quite achieved the noiseless, gliding carriage of some of my fellow-novices, and I was always hopeless at ‘custody of the eyes’, the quaintly named monastic habit of keeping one’s gaze fixed on the ground. I like to know what is happening, and if I heard an unusual noise or somebody entering the room, I found it almost impossible not to check it out. I was often reprimanded for staring boldly at my superiors, instead of casting my eyes down humbly. I did not mean to be disrespectful, but I had been brought up to look people directly in the eye when I spoke to them. Yet for all these failings, some of this convent discipline had rubbed off on me, and to this day I have never been able to dance. I have often fantasized about being a disco-girl, imagining an alternative Karen, able to leap about, let go, and disappear into the music. It must be a marvellous feeling. But it has never been possible. At a very impressionable age, my body was schooled in quite other rhythms and it has, for better or worse, taken the print.

As I watched the dancers, I felt completely out of my element. I could see that this kind of dancing was unabashedly sexual. It reminded me of the ceremonial dances performed by Africans that I had seen occasionally on documentaries or newsreels. It was interesting, but had nothing to do with me. I tried to look nonchalant and at ease, but felt miserably that I must look as out of place as the Queen, in her suburban, matronly clothes, carrying her ubiquitous handbag like a shield, staring with a glazed smile at the ritual dances performed in her honour during a tour of the Commonwealth. I had found, to my considerable sorrow, that even though I no longer belonged in the convent, I didn’t belong out here either.

Looking back, I can see that, during those first few months, I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine or Zimbabwe, and migrate to a Western country. The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of ‘home’ is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away, and becoming insubstantial. Their ‘world’ – inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos – has literally come to an end.

Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my ‘home’ in the convent of my own free will, and was not languishing in a camp, but I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the 60s’ world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction, not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St Anne’s, where we bought newspapers and sweets.

I saw it again in the eyes of Sister Mary Sylvia, a nun in my college. She had recently come from India to take a degree in English literature, and was living in my old convent at Cherwell Edge. In India, apparently, she had earned a first-class degree, had run schools, and held high office in her order. But the move from India seemed to have unhinged her completely. She was quite unable to write a coherent essay, complete the simple procedures that enabled her to take books out of the college library, or remember the times of lectures and seminars. I knew about this all too well, because – as one familiar with the arcane ways of nuns – I was constantly called to the rescue. When I tried to help Sister Mary Sylvia with her essays, I noticed that she simply could not take in what I was trying to tell her. One day when she failed to turn up to the philology class that, as usual, was being held in the small seminar room, I found her sitting all alone in the dining hall with her notebook, smiling benignly, while puzzled college servants tried to work around her, waxing the floor and laying the tables for dinner. She was clearly in shock, could make no sense of her surroundings, and had entirely lost her bearings. I was in better shape, but I sensed something of what she was going through. Deprived of the familiar, I too seemed to have lost my way in a world that meant nothing to me. When later that year, I watched my namesake Neil Armstrong make his ‘giant leap for mankind’, and jump on to the pitted surface of the moon, the utterly bleak, dark and eerily empty lunar landscape epitomized exactly what Planet Earth had become for me.

It was little better when I returned home during the vacation. My family gave me a wonderful welcome, but they were expecting the daughter and sister who had left home seven years earlier. My parents were tremulously eager to resume normal family life, but they seemed almost strangers to me. They had been allowed to visit at six-monthly intervals and I had been permitted to write to them only once every four weeks. These communications had, to put it mildly, been unsatisfactory. Visits to the convent parlour were starchy and artificial. Nuns were not allowed to eat with ‘seculars’, so my parents had some appalling meals surrounded by a bevy of nuns pouring out tea and making polite conversation, while I went off to eat with the community in the convent refectory. My sister Lindsey, who was three years younger than I, had hated these visits. As she watched us process into the chapel, genuflecting before the altar with near military precision, and kneeling motionless in the pews, the underlying tension, the humourless rigidity, and the fear that somebody might ruin this perfection by making a mistake so petrified her that, to the amusement of some members of the community, she often passed out, and had to be carried outside, even though she never fainted anywhere else. My letters were little better. We were never allowed to speak of what happened inside the convent, and since for years I scarcely left the enclosure, I had to confine my remarks to anodyne descriptions of the countryside or reverential accounts of church services.

My parents, therefore, had no idea what my life had been like for the last seven years. At a deeper and more worrying level, I found that I simply could not respond to their affection. I shied away from any intimacy, could not bear to be touched or embraced, and could speak to my family only in the rather formal, distant way of nuns. Naturally my parents were hurt, I felt bad about hurting them, and there was an impasse. The training seemed to have worked, after all. My capacity for affection had either atrophied or been so badly damaged that it could not function normally. I felt frozen and could see what people meant when they said that their heart had turned to stone. I could almost feel this new hardness within, like a cold, heavy weight. I had become a person who could not love and who seemed incapable of reaching out to others. Whether I liked it or not, I was now a garden enclosed, a well sealed up.

Leaving the religious life in those days was not like changing your job or moving house. Our novitiate had not simply provided us with new professional skills, and left our deepest selves untouched. It was a conditioning. For about three years, we were wholly isolated from the outside world, and also from the rest of the community. The door of the Noviceship was kept permanently locked, and we spoke to the other nuns only on very special feast-days. This meant that the novitiate became our whole world; no other existed for us, and the whims and moods of our Mistress acquired monumental importance. When we were punished, it seemed a cosmic event; when we were lonely or miserable, there was no possibility of comfort. The atmosphere was frigid, and sometimes even frightening. At night in our long dormitory, we often heard one another weeping, but knew that we must never ask what was wrong. We lived together in community, cheek by jowl, but were so lonely that we might as well have been living in solitary confinement. We became entirely dependent upon our Superior’s every move, and accepted her worldview and her opinion of ourselves as gospel truth. I was so young that I could draw upon no experience to counter this regime. So the world receded, and the tiny dramas and cold values of Noviceship life filled my entire horizon.

This type of isolation is central to the rituals of initiation, practised in the ancient world and in many indigenous societies today. On reaching puberty, boys are taken away from their mothers, separated from their tribe and subjected to a series of frightening ordeals that change them irrevocably. It is a process of death and resurrection: initiates die to their childhood and rise again to an entirely different life as mature human beings. They are often told that they are about to suffer a horrible death; they are forced to lie alone in a cave or a tomb; they are buried alive, experience intense physical pain (the boys are often circumcised or tattooed), and undergo terrifying rituals. The idea is that in these extreme circumstances, the young discover inner resources that will enable them to serve their people as fully functioning adults. The purpose of these rites of passage is thus to transform dependent children into responsible, self-reliant adults, who are ready to risk their lives as hunters and warriors, and, if necessary, to die in order to protect their people

Our training had been an initiation. We too had been segregated from the world, deprived of normal affection, and subjected to trials that were designed to test our resolve. We too were to be warriors of sorts – soldiers of God, who practised the military obedience devised by St Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, whose Rule we followed. The training was designed to make us wholly self-reliant, so that we no longer needed human love or approval. We too were told that we were to die to our old selves, and to our worldly, secular way of looking at things. Of course, we were not buried alive in a tomb or anything of that sort, but we were constantly undermined, belittled, publicly castigated, or ordered to do things that were patently absurd. As Ignatius’s Rule put it, we were to become utterly pliable to the will of God, as expressed through our superiors, in the same way as ‘a dead body allows itself to be treated in any manner whatever, or as an old man’s stick serves him who holds it in every place and for every use alike’. Dead to ourselves, we would live a fuller, enhanced existence, as Jesus had promised in a text that we liked to quote: ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will remain nothing but a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit.’ On our profession day, while the choir sang the Litany of the Saints, we lay under a funeral pall, symbolically dead to the world, and to our greedy, needy, selves that clung, infant-like, to ordinary, worthless consolations.

Now, it seemed to me that I had indeed died, but I was certainly not bringing forth much fruit. I felt as though I had entered a twilight zone between life and death, and that instead of being transfigured, as I had hoped, I had got the worst of both worlds. Instead of being full of courage, fearless, active and protective of others, like the initiate of a tribal rite of passage, I was scared stiff. Unable to love or to accept love, I had become less than human. I had wanted to be transformed and enriched; instead I was diminished. Instead of becoming strong, I was simply hard. The coldness and frequent unkindness, designed to ‘toughen us up’, had left me feeling merely impaired, like a piece of tough steak. The training was designed to make us transcend ourselves, and go beyond the egotism and selfishness that hold us back from God. But now I seemed stuck inside myself, unable either to escape, or to reach out to others. An initiation prepares you for life in the community; I had left the community that I was supposed to serve, and was inhabiting a world that I had been trained, at a profound level, to reject.

One of the most difficult things about returning to the family home was that at every turn I kept meeting my former self – the undamaged, seventeen-year-old Karen, who had been vital and full of hope. In my bedroom, I remembered how I had sat in this very chair, and lain on that very bed, full of excitement about the great adventure I was about to begin. When I took down a book from my shelves, I remembered my wonder and delight when I had first read this novel, or come across that poem. There were boxes of letters and postcards to friends, full of affection and an easy intimacy that I could no longer imagine. That person had gone; she had indeed died under the funeral pall. I felt bereaved – full of grief as though for a dead friend. This, I knew, was entirely my own fault. My superiors had not intended this to happen to me; they had not meant to push me into this limbo. I had not responded properly to the training. I had been too feeble to go all the way, to let myself truly die. I had kept on hankering for love and affection, and wept because I was too weak to endure these robust austerities. I had attempted something that was beyond my capacities, and been injured by my presumption – like a little girl who, in her impatience to become a ballerina, insists on going en pointe too early, before her feet are properly mature, and hobbles herself for ever.

Love was beyond me; even friendship was difficult. But at least I had my work. I knew that I was good at academic study. Despite the upheaval of leaving the religious life, I had done very well at Oxford so far and was expected to get a first-class degree. With that under my belt, I could become an academic, engaged in full-time study and teaching the subject I loved. So I returned to Oxford for the summer, full of renewed determination to do even better and make this prospect a reality. If I had lost one cloister, I could immure myself in my studies and find another.

To my dismay, I found a new obstacle. This term I was sent out to study with a young tutor at one of the men’s colleges. My tutorial partner was Charlotte, an immensely gifted girl who had her own troubles. Her mother had died during our first year and Charlotte had become anorexic. Even though she seemed over the worst, she was still thin and wary of food. We had often eyed each other knowingly, wryly acknowledging that we were both struggling, so it was good to be spending more time together. Charlotte wanted to be a novelist. ‘She can really write,’ Dorothy Bednarowska had told me, and she had already introduced Charlotte to a literary agent. But Charlotte found the academic study of literature difficult. Her work was brilliant and original but, ‘Studying literature so critically and technically is bad for my writing,’ she told me. Fearing that it would cramp her own style, she refused to study the novel at all. As was customary at Oxford, we had to read our essays aloud to our tutor during the weekly tutorial, and Charlotte was obviously perplexed, even repelled by mine. ‘Idon’t know how you churn out all this stuff,’ she had said to me once. ‘It’s beautiful in a way. Your essays are like Gothic cathedrals, with all the right scholars and theories slotted together and built into a massive structure of conformity.’ I wasn’t sure that I liked the sound of that. I enjoyed reading the literary criticism that Charlotte hated. I found it fun to weigh one scholar against another and make a pattern of my own out of other people’s thoughts. But I was uneasily aware that not much of myself was going into my work, and that what I was presenting, week after week, was other people’s ideas rather than my own.

That would not be allowed this term, however. Our new tutor was a rather affected but reputedly very clever young don at one of the more modern colleges. We sat in his bright, book-lined room overlooking the forecourt, watching some students teasing the goldfish in the moat. Dr Brentwood Smyth sprawled elegantly in a large leather armchair, leaping up occasionally to consult a text. ‘You got a Violet Vaughan Morgan prize, didn’t you?’ he asked me. ‘Impressive. You must be very good at exams.’ I could tell that he did not think much of this accomplishment. He seemed more interested in Charlotte, whose original, thoughtful response to his questions clearly intrigued him.

‘Oh, don’t let’s have a fixed time!’ he cried impatiently when I asked him when we should come for tutorials. ‘That’s the trouble with the women’s colleges! They’re organized like high schools. Just ring me up when your essay is done.’

‘What should we write about?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, anything you like! I’m not going to set you one of those dreary exam questions. I’m sure you get quite enough of those at St Anne’s. No. Just write me something on one poem. Take “Frost at Midnight”. Coleridge. Don’t read any literary criticism. Just live with the poem for a week and then tell me what it means to you. Not to anybody else. When you’re ready, give me a call.’

This was music to Charlotte’s ears, but worrying for me. I could see that it was a good idea and, indeed in later years when I came to teach literature myself, I would often set my students a similar task. But the problem back then was that I just couldn’t do it. I needed to escape into other people’s books and minds because, when left entirely to my own devices, I found that I had nothing to say. It wasn’t exactly that the poem did not speak to me. It was clearly an extraordinary work. I could have made it the basis for a fascinating essay on the English Romantic movement. But what did the poem say to me? That was what Dr Brentwood Smyth wanted to know and I didn’t know what I was going to tell him. I found myself thinking of some other lines by Coleridge, written in a period of deep depression, when he looked out at the evening sky ‘with its peculiar tint of yellow-green’, at the thin clouds, the moon and the stars:

I see them all so excellently fair,

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

I should have been pierced by the poem, and then have leapt out to meet it. I used to be like that. I remembered how deeply poetry had touched me while I was at school. But yet again, as with my relations with people, there was only deadness, nothingness. I was now impervious even to the literature that I thought I had loved.

An initiation is supposed to make you self-reliant, but mine had made me dependent. As I struggled to fill the requisite number of pages for my essay, I had to face the grim fact that I no longer had ideas of my own. Indeed, I had been carefully trained not to have them. There had been a moment early in the Postulantship, when I had heard a warning bell. We were doing a little course in Apologetics, which explained the rational grounds for faith. I was set an essay: ‘Assess the historical evidence for the Resurrection.’ I had read the requisite textbooks, could see what was required, and duly produced a discussion of the events of the first Easter Sunday that made Jesus’ rising from the tomb as uncontroversial and unproblematic historically as the Battle of Waterloo. This was nonsense, of course, but that did not seem to matter in Apologetics.

‘Yes, Sister, very nice.’ Mother Greta, the pale, delicate nun who was supervising our studies, smiled at me as she handed back my essay. ‘This is a very good piece of work.’

‘But, Mother,’ I suddenly found myself saying. ‘It isn’t true, is it?’

Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly-fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. ‘No, Sister,’ she said wearily. ‘It isn’t true. But please don’t tell the others.’

This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict each other, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in Apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it.

It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the Postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day. Years later, while I was having my breakdown, I learned that Mother Greta had been very anxious indeed about the way we were being trained, had voiced her disapproval, and had been overruled. What had our superiors been about, and why did I not tear up that dishonest piece of work, or at least argue with Mother Greta? I had simply gone along with the whole unholy muddle.

But I was only eighteen years old and this had not been an isolated incident. On the very first day of our Postulantship, Mother Albert, our Mistress, explained that during the first years of our religious lives we would constantly be told things that seemed incredible or irrational. But they only seemed this way because we were lacking in spiritual maturity. We were learning to inhabit a different element from the rest of the world, to breathe another atmosphere. We were still fresh from ‘the world’ and its taints; we still thought and responded like secular people, but now we had to enter into God’s perspective. Had God not told Isaiah:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

My ways are not your ways,

For as high as the heavens are above the earth

So are my thoughts above your thoughts, my ways above your ways.

So when we were tempted to question the ideas, principles and customs of the order, we must remember that as yet we were simply not in a position to understand. We were like babies, learning an entirely new language. One day, in the not too distant future, when we had developed spiritually, we would see all these matters quite differently. Until then, we just had to wait patiently, in what the mystics had called the cloud of unknowing, and all would be revealed. So my lying little essay on the Resurrection was part of this larger programme.

So was the fact that I had once, during my Postulantship, spent hours treadling a sewing machine that had no needle. To be fair, this was the result of a misunderstanding, but the underlying principle still applied. I was finding all needlework very difficult indeed, and had just put the good sewing machine in our community room out of action. Furious, Mother Albert told me to practise on an older machine in the adjoining room for half an hour a day. But it had no needle. My mistake was to point this out. Mother Albert had been meaning to replace that needle for some time, but it had completely slipped her mind. She was already angry with me, however, and I was not supposed to answer back in this way. ‘How dare you!’ she said, her voice cold with rage. ‘Don’t you know that a nun must never correct her superior in such a pert manner. “There’s no needle in that machine!”’ she cried, tossing her head in supposed imitation of my defensive manner. ‘You will go to that machine next door, Sister, and work on it every day, needle or no needle, until I give you permission to stop.’

So I did, treadling away at the empty machine, telling myself that because I was acting under obedience, however pointless this exercise might seem to a profane eye, this was the best possible way of spending my time. It was God’s way. I had almost succeeded in quelling the objections that stubbornly erupted in my mind from time to time, when Mother Albert walked into the room two weeks later and stared at me as though I had lost my wits. But this time, when she cried in outraged astonishment, ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’ I was ready for her.

‘Practising machining, Mother,’ I replied demurely.

‘But there’s no needle in that …’

Even as she spoke, I saw light dawning and realized that she had completely forgotten about the whole thing. She clapped her hand to the back of her head, and turned away abruptly, lips twitching with suppressed mirth. After recovering herself, she gave me a searing lecture on my pride and disobedience. No nun should ever correct her superior, as I had done that day, even if convinced that she was wrong. As far as I was concerned, my superior was right, because she stood in the place of God. It was my wretched intellectual pride that blocked my spiritual advancement, and I would make no progress as long as I refused to regard things from a supernatural point of view.

Yet could you behave like that indefinitely, without inflicting real and lasting damage on your mind? I remembered the moment, a year or so later, when I had realized that my mind no longer worked freely. It was the recreation hour in the Noviceship. We all sat around the long table in the community room with our needlework, Mother Walter, our Novice Mistress, presiding. That night we were talking about the liturgical changes that were being introduced by the Second Vatican Council: the mass was being said in English instead of Latin, for example, and that morning the children in the adjacent boarding school had played guitars to accompany a song they had composed themselves. Mother Walter had not enjoyed that song. She was devoted to the Gregorian chant and had taught us to love it too. Even though she once told me that I had a voice like a broken knife-grinder, I had to sing in the choir and, though I could never hit the higher notes and was ruefully aware of the tunelessness of my efforts, I was beginning to appreciate the spiritual quality of plainsong – the way the music circled meditatively around the words and drew attention to a phrase or obscure preposition that could easily have passed unnoticed, but which proved to have rich meaning. Now it looked as if the days of the chant were numbered and though Mother Walter would have cut out her tongue rather than criticize the Vatican, she was convinced that this would be an irreparable loss. ‘Of course the Council is inspired by the Holy Spirit,’ she was saying, ‘but it is hard to see how we can replace a musical tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Just think: St Bernard would have sung the same chant as we do. So would Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. And now we have to listen to those silly children playing guitars.’ For a moment, the measured calm of her voice faltered and her face darkened in a way we had learned to dread.

‘But, Mother,’ Sister Mary Jonathan, a novice who was a year ahead of me and who had been my ‘guardian angel’ when I had begun my novitiate, spoke up eagerly. ‘Surely the changes needn’t necessarily be a disaster? After all, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing a guitar at mass, is there?’

Mother frowned. ‘I should have thought,’ she replied coldly, ‘that this is a matter we need not discuss.’ We all bent our heads obediently over our needlework, distancing ourselves. The topic had been closed. No one would dream of taking it any further, against the expressed wish of our superior.

‘But some people,’ Sister Mary Jonathan continued, to my astonishment, ‘might go to church initially to enjoy the guitar because they like that kind of music. We’ve learned to love the chant, but lots of people can’t understand the Latin, and the music is so different from anything they are used to that they can’t make anything of it.’

Mother Walter laughed shortly. It came out as an angry bark. ‘Anyone who needs a guitar to get them to mass must have a pretty feeble faith!’ Her eyes had hardened and her lower lip protruded in a scowl. The tension in the room was almost palpable. Nobody ever answered back like that and the rest of us were sewing as though our lives depended upon it. But I found myself looking hopefully at Sister Mary Jonathan, willing her to go on. I used to be able to do that, I thought wonderingly. I used to like exploring different points of view, building up an argument step by step, sharpening an idea against somebody else’s mind. But I could no more do that now than run naked down the cloister. Not only would I never have dared to cross Mother Walter – and, indeed, I hastily reminded myself, Sister Mary Jonathan was breaking several rules at once – but I wouldn’t be able to think like that any more. I no longer had it in me. But Sister Mary Jonathan did.

‘The guitar might give God a chance,’ she countered brightly. ‘People might come to listen and then find something more …’

‘Really, Sister!’ Mother’s voice was thunderous. ‘I would have thought that you of all people would understand.’ Sister Mary Jonathan was very musical. ‘Do you think God needs a guitar,’ she uttered the word as though it were an obscenity, ‘to give him a chance?’

Sister was undeterred. ‘But surely Jesus would have used a guitar, if he’d been alive today?’

‘Nonsense, Sister! I’ve never heard such rubbish! He would have done no such thing!’

I had to bend my head quickly over the stocking that I was darning to hide an involuntary smile. I had a sudden mental picture of Jesus standing on a hill in Galilee, surrounded by his Jewish audience, singing plainsong. He looked pretty silly.

Mother Walter had spotted me. ‘I am glad that you find this amusing, Sister,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘I find it extremely sad. Sister Mary Jonathan has committed a serious fault against obedience and against charity, by spoiling recreation for everybody!’

That had been the end of the matter; though, when Mother wasn’t looking, Sister Mary Jonathan had winked at me and pulled a face. With hindsight, that complicity had been prophetic. She had left the order shortly before I had. She had fallen in love with a young Jesuit, with whom she was studying at London University. Somehow she had held on to herself better than I had. I was quite sure that she would not find it difficult to tell anybody what she thought. My problem, as I wrestled with my highly unsatisfactory essay for Dr Brentwood Smyth, was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come any more. True, at the very end of my religious life I had argued with Mother Praeterita, my Oxford superior, but the ideas I used against her had not been mine. I was simply parroting books and articles that I had read. It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent. You can probably abuse your mind and do it irrevocable harm, just as you can damage your body by feeding it the wrong kind of food, depriving it of exercise or forcing your limbs into a constricting straitjacket. My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman; I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. The restraints had been removed too late, and she would never walk normally again.

I knew that a good nun must be ready to give up everything and count the world well lost for God. But what had happened to God? My life had been turned upside down, but God should still be the same. It seemed that, without realizing it, I had indeed become like St Ignatius’s dead body or the old man’s stick. My heart and my mind both seemed numb and etiolated, but God seemed to have gone too. In the place that he had occupied in my mind, there was now a curious blank.

Or perhaps it was only now that I could admit to this God-shaped gap in my consciousness. One of the most painful failures of my convent life had been my inability to pray. Our whole existence had God as its pivot. The silence of our days had been designed to enable us to listen to him. But he had never spoken to me.

Every morning at six o’clock, we had knelt in the convent church for an hour of meditation, according to the method that St Ignatius had designed for his Jesuits in the Spiritual Exercises. This had been a highly structured discipline. As a preliminary step, we prepared the topic the night before. Each of us spent fifteen minutes selecting a passage from scripture or a devotional book, and making a note of the topics that we intended to consider in the morning. Ignatius’s meditation was based on a three-part programme: See, Judge and Act. First we all stood in silence for a few minutes, reciting to ourselves a prayer that reminded us that we were in the presence of God, and then we knelt down, took out our books and notes, and began with ‘See’. This meant that we had to use our imaginations to picture the gospel scene we had chosen, and even if the subject of our meditation was more abstract, we had to give it a local habitation and ‘place’ it in some concrete way. Ignatius had thought it very important that all the faculties be engaged, so that the whole man (Ignatius had a poor opinion of women) was brought into the divine ambience. This ‘composition of place’, as it was called, was also meant to ward off distraction. If you were busily picturing the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, evoking a sense of the Middle Eastern heat, looking at the sand dunes, listening to the braying donkeys and so forth, your imagination was less likely to stray to profane topics. At least, that was the theory.

Next came ‘Judge’, when the intellect was brought into play. This was the point when you were supposed to reflect on the topics you had listed the night before. Finally you proceeded to ‘Act’ which, for Ignatius, was the real moment of prayer. As a result of your deliberations, you made an act of will, applying the lessons you had learned to the day that lay ahead. There had to be a specific resolution. It was no good vaguely vowing to live a better life from that day forward. You had to settle for something concrete: to try harder with your sewing, for example, or to make a special effort not to think uncharitable thoughts about a sister who irritated you beyond endurance. Prayer, Ignatius taught, was an act of will. It had nothing to do with pious thoughts or feelings; these were simply a preparation for the moment of decision. Ignatian spirituality was never an end in itself but was directed towards action and efficiency. He wanted his Jesuits to be effective in the world and their daily meditation ensured that their activities would proceed from God.

But this did not work for me. Every morning I resolved that this time I would crack it. This time there would be no distractions. I would kneel as intent upon God as my sisters, none of whom seemed to have my difficulties. I had never before had any problems of concentration. I had always been able to immerse myself in my studies for hours at a time. But to my intense distress, I found that I could not keep my mind on God for two minutes. The whole point of the careful preparation was to prevent this. It was acknowledged that at 6.00 a.m. we were likely to be less than fully alert and would need help in focusing our thoughts. But as soon as I sank to my knees, my mind either went off at a tangent or scuttled through a maze of pointless worries, fears or fantasies, or else I was engulfed by the torpor of physical malaise. Like most adolescents, I craved sleep and experienced the 5.30 a.m. call as a violent assault. I often felt queasy with hunger and fatigue, and clung dizzily to the pew in front of me. At 6.30, the clock in the cloister chimed and we could sit down. But this sweet relief gave way to another trial, as I battled against sleep, and was comforted to see that even some of the older nuns listed and slumped in such a way that it was clear that they had succumbed. The minutes crawled by until the sacristan appeared to light the candles on the altar as a welcome signal that mass was about to begin.

At breakfast, an hour later, we were supposed to examine our meditation, going through a ten-point questionnaire. Had I made myself fully conscious of the Presence of God? No. Had I made sufficient effort in the ‘composition of place’? No. Had all my senses been fully engaged? No. And so on. I didn’t need the fifteen minutes we were supposed to devote to this self-appraisal. I didn’t have to spend any time grading my performance on a scale of one to ten. I was just a Big Zero.

Meditation was only the first spiritual exercise of the day. Four times daily we chanted our version of the divine office in choir. Twice a day, for fifteen minutes, we examined our consciences, according to Ignatius’s five-point plan: this involved marking off one’s faults and achievements in a little book, and counting the number of times we had failed to perform the special task for this week (in Ignatian terminology this was called the ‘particular examen’): there was half an hour’s spiritual reading, a community exercise during which one of us read aloud and the rest continued our everlasting needlework; half an hour’s silent ‘adoration’ in the chapel in the early evening; and the private recitation of the rosary. Yet again, I flunked. Throughout my seven years, I hugged to myself the shameful secret that, unlike the other sisters, I could not pray. And, we were told, without prayer our religious lives were a complete sham. For several hours a day on every single day of the year, I had to confront and experience my abject failure. In other ways, my mind was capable and even gifted, but it seemed allergic to God. This disgrace festered corrosively at the very heart of my life and spilled over into everything, poisoning each activity. How could I possibly be a nun if, when it came right down to it, I seemed completely uninterested in God and God appeared quite indifferent to me?

I don’t know quite what I thought should be happening. Certainly I didn’t expect visions and voices. These, we were told, were only for the greatest saints and could be delusions, sent by the devil to make us proud. But all the books that I read about prayer spoke of moments of ‘consolation’ that punctuated the inevitable periods of dryness. Periodically God would comfort the soul, make it feel that he was near and enable it to experience the warmth of his presence and love. God would, as it were, woo the soul, offering this periodic breakthrough as a carrot, until the soul outgrew this need and could progress to the next stage of its journey. Gradually the soul would be drawn into the higher states of prayer, into further reaches of silence, and into a mysterious state that lay beyond the reach of thoughts and feeling.

That was the theory. But far from progressing to these more advanced states, I never left base-camp. Of course there were moments when I felt moved by the beauty of the music or uplifted by a rousing sermon, but in my view this did not count. It was simply an aesthetic response, something that even an atheist could experience at a concert or when she was exposed to skilful rhetoric. I never had what seemed to be an encounter with anything supernatural, with a being that existed outside myself. I never felt caught up in something greater, never felt personally transfigured by a presence that I encountered in the depths of my being. I never experienced Somebody Else. And how could I possibly hope to have such an encounter when my mind was unable to wait upon God? Prayer, we were always told, was simply a way of quieting the soul, enabling it to apprehend the divine. You had to gather up your dissipated faculties, bring them together and present yourself, whole and entire, to God, so that every single part of your mind and heart could honestly say with the prophet Samuel: ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ But my mind, heart and faculties remained scattered. Try as I would, I could not re-collect them, so there was no way that God could get through to me.

I tried to discuss this with my superiors, of course. On several occasions, I explained that I never had any ‘consolation’ and could not keep my mind on my meditation. But they seemed frankly incredulous. ‘You’re always so extreme, Sister!’ Mother Frances, the Mistress of Scholastics, had said with irritation. ‘You’re always exaggerating. Everybody has consolation at some time or another. Are you seriously telling me that in all the six years of your religious life you have never once experienced consolation?’ I had nodded. She had looked baffled. ‘Well, I really don’t know what to say to you,’ she had said, clearly at a loss. ‘That’s most unusual. I don’t know how anybody could go on without some consolation. But I’m sure that things aren’t really as bad as you say,’ she had gone on briskly. ‘You probably just feel a bit down at the moment, that’s all, and being you, you have to make a major drama out of the whole business.’ This was not reassuring. I must be a particularly hard case, I thought miserably. As for my confession that I could never keep my mind on my prayers, this was also airily waved to one side. ‘Everybody has their off-days, Sister!’ Nobody would believe that I would love to have had some off-days, because it would have meant that some of my days were ‘on’.

So even in the convent, God had been conspicuous by his absence from my life. And that, I became convinced, must be my fault. My case seemed to be so peculiar that it could not be a mere failure of the system. If only I had tried a little harder, concentrated just that little bit more, or found more interesting topics for meditation. The quality of a nun’s commitment was reflected in the quality of her prayer. And how could I hope to sense God’s presence when I continually broke the silence, frequently had uncharitable thoughts, and, above all, constantly yearned for human affection, and wept when reprimanded? It was, of course, a vicious circle. The more empty my prayers, the more I sought consolation in mundane things and in people. Round and round. Then there were my secret doubts. Even though I tried to tiptoe gingerly around difficult articles of faith, I could not stop wondering whether the Virgin Mary really had been conceived without Original Sin and been taken up body and soul into heaven after her death. How did anybody know that Jesus was God? And was there even a God out there at all? Was that why I never encountered him in prayer? As I knelt in the chapel, watching my sisters kneeling quietly with their heads bowed contemplatively in their hands, I would sometimes wonder whether it wasn’t a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Nobody ever experienced God but nobody dared to admit it. And then I would mentally shake myself. How could God reveal himself to a nun who harboured these shocking doubts?

And so came the morning when, just a few days after I had been dispensed from my vows, my alarm rang at six o’clock and instead of getting up and walking down the road to St Aloysius’s Church for early mass, I simply switched it off and went back to sleep. For seven years, each day had begun with prayer and Eucharist, but now there seemed no point in any of that. I would still go to mass on Sundays, of course, because this was obligatory, binding upon all Catholics. Leaving the Church as well as the convent was at present a step too far. But the very idea of kneeling silently in a darkened church – yet again – filled me with immense fatigue. I cannot do that any more, I told myself wearily that morning; I simply cannot do it. The accumulated failure had left me feeling not merely exhausted but also slightly sick.

I had tried, I told myself, as I turned over and faced the whitewashed brick wall of my cheerful college room. I had not been the best nun in the world, but I had honestly done my best, and my superiors had all tried to help me. But it was just no good. If God did exist, he clearly wanted nothing to do with me, and, right now, I couldn’t blame him. There was something in me that was proof against religion, closed to the divine. Let it go, I told myself sleepily. Don’t beat yourself up any longer. Just live simply as a secular, and give up these inappropriate spiritual ambitions. You’re in the world now. Make friends with it. One day at a time.

But soon even that would become impossible.

2 THE DEVIL OF THE STAIRS

It began with the smell. It was a sweet but sulphury aroma, reminiscent of bad eggs and giving off an aura of imminent menace. Like any odour, it was also intensely evocative. I recognized it immediately. This was how it always started. In the convent, I had several times been assailed by this strange smell, had looked around for a cause and found the world splintering around me. The sunlight, the flickering candles of the altar and the electric light seemed to oscillate crazily; there would be a moment of pure nausea, and then nothing: a long, long fall into emptiness.

These fainting attacks had occurred four or five times, to the intense irritation of my superiors. Once it had happened on the day before Easter, and although afterwards I felt reasonably well, Mother Frances had sent me to bed in disgrace and I was forbidden to attend the midnight Vigil. The next day I had to go to mass at Our Lady of Victories in Kensington High Street, escorted as if under penal guard, and was subjected to a merciless scolding on my return. ‘Emotional indulgence. Exhibitionism … weakness of will’ – I knew the list almost by heart. Nuns were not supposed to faint like wilting Victorian ladies; we were meant to be strong women, in control of our lives, exercising an iron constraint over our emotions and bodily functions. Ignatius had wanted his Jesuits to be soldiers of Christ, and we were to cultivate the same virile spirit. Whoever heard of a soldier fainting on the parade ground, crumpling helplessly into a heap as he stood to attention before his commanding officer? And so these blackouts of mine had been greeted with cold disapproval. ‘You must pull yourself together, Sister,’ Mother Frances had concluded, tight-lipped.

But how was I supposed to do this? Whatever my superiors thought, I did not plan these bouts of unconsciousness. They terrified me. When I felt one coming on, I fought it to the last. And there seemed to be no reason for them. My superiors assumed that they were caused by my unruly emotions, but they rarely happened when I was upset. On that Holy Saturday night, for example, I had been feeling positively light-hearted. We were coming to the end of the penitential season of Lent and were all looking forward to the magical liturgy that evening: the lighting of the new fire, the strange unearthly chant of the Exsultet (the great theological hymn of the Easter mystery), the blessing of the baptismal waters, and the triumphant mass at midnight. The ritual re-enacted the passage from darkness to light, from death to life. There were also the simple earthly joys of Easter Sunday to look forward to: we had boiled eggs for breakfast, could talk all day long, and read our Easter mail. When the attack happened, I was feeling nothing but pleasurable anticipation. Where had it all come from: the smell, the fractured light, the sickness and the slide into unconsciousness?

Nobody ever thought that I should see a doctor. Fainting meant only one thing: hysteria. It had been the same at my school. When girls had fainted, they were subjected to a hostile inquisition and told in no uncertain terms to stop showing off. I had once watched my headmistress, Mother Katherine, grab a girl who had fainted during a seemingly interminable church service, seize her under the armpits, haul the inert body down the polished aisle, and dump it outside the chapel door, returning immediately, stony-faced. Over the years, I had imbibed this ethos, and though I could not account for these attacks, I assumed that even though I might not be feeling especially upset, I was displaying some subconscious need for notice, love or intimacy. The blackouts, I concluded, must be a bid for attention. And yet, I reflected wryly, my unconscious mind must be very slow on the uptake. You would think that by now it would have learned that, far from eliciting the tender concern I craved, the fainting simply inspired anger and disdain.

So my fainting, we all agreed, was emotional self-indulgence. And in my last year in the order, my body did indeed seem to be staging a rebellion all of its own. I wept uncontrollably, convulsed more by anger than grief; I found it impossible to keep my food down; suffered such severe nose bleeds that I had to have a vein cauterized, and … I fainted. It was as though my whole physical self had risen in protest and demanded that I take notice, telling me that, however much I might want to stay in the convent, something was badly wrong. Finally in the refectory of our convent in Harrogate, where I had been sent for the Long Vacation, I had given up the battle and succumbed to a breakdown. It was only logical to assume that there had been unconscious tension all along, which had finally and irrevocably surfaced and taken me out of the religious life. And now I was out in the world. I was no longer struggling to conform to a way of life to which I was not suited. I was free, fortunate, privileged to be attending one of the finest universities in the world, and even though I was having some trouble adjusting, I was now on the mend. Wasn’t I?

So why were the symptoms recurring, as though my body had not been informed that the battle was over? Why was it behaving in the same old way? I was not kneeling in a convent chapel this time, but sitting in a pleasant library in Merton College. The room was full but not unduly crowded; it was not stuffy, even on this warm summer day. The tall leaded windows were open and a light, fragrant breeze wafted into the room, gently lifting the threadbare curtains. I was listening to John Jones’s lectures on nineteenth-century England, enjoying the slightly eccentric cast of his mind and his delightful command of the language, when the familiar stench choked me, the voice of the lecturer became a confused babble of meaningless sound, the light in the room looked suddenly uncanny, there was a moment of pure terror, and then I felt myself falling down that familiar narrow shaft.

When I opened my eyes, I was conscious of a hard band of pain across my forehead. The brown blur in front of me composed itself into the grain of a polished wood floor, and I groaned and rolled over on to my stomach to try to blot out the world for a few more minutes.

‘I think she’s coming round now.’ The voice was male and familiar. Slowly, as from a deep well, the memories came back to me. The lecture … John Jones … ‘Keep back and let her get some air.’ To my right I could see a large scuffed brogue and an expanse of worn corduroy trouser. I knew that in a few moments I would feel embarrassed, but right now the world had shattered into separate, meaningless shapes, none of which seemed related to anything else.

‘Look, I think we’d better call it a day,’ Mr Jones was saying. I tried to raise my head, but it was pushed firmly down again. ‘I don’t think any of us feels like carrying on with the lecture. Does anybody know who this poor lady is?’

‘Yes, I do – she’s at my college. I can take her home. Karen, it’s Jane.’ I peered up at her and tried to smile. She looked strange from this unfamiliar angle and I realized that she was alarmed. Gradually I began to be aware of the disruption I had caused.

‘I am … so sorry,’ I muttered, as I always did after one of these attacks. ‘So sorry.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Mr Jones sounded genuinely astonished, and when I looked round at him, his large kind face was creased with concern. ‘You didn’t do it on purpose. We’re just sad for you.’ That was a bit of a change. I blinked uncertainly. ‘You still don’t look too good to me. How are you feeling? That was quite a long faint. Better get her to a doctor?’ That last, clearly, was addressed to Jane.

‘Definitely.’ Jane sounded uncharacteristically subdued. ‘Do you think we could phone for a taxi?’ I closed my eyes, mentally shaking my head. Sympathy, doctors, taxis – I could not take it all in. I must have tried to protest feebly, but nobody took any notice and I lay there gratefully, thankful that it was over, but feeling hugely tired.

As we drove up the Banbury Road towards St Anne’s and climbed the short flight of stairs to my room in the Gatehouse, Jane kept up a determined flow of chatter. The fright that I had seen in her eyes had gone and she was now recasting the whole event in her usual ebullient manner.

‘I always longed to faint at school,’ she said cheerfully, as she opened the large window overlooking the college lawn. We could see students hurrying past in ones and twos, going about the business of a normal Tuesday morning. ‘I always thought it would be a sign of such sensitivity and refinement. I tried everything. Put blotting paper in my shoes, held my breath. Nothing happened. Not a hope. I’m just too horribly healthy.’

I smiled as Jane glared at herself in the mirror and threw back her long blonde hair. It was indeed difficult to imagine her wilting feebly; she was built on too large a scale, was too confident for that. ‘Have you ever fainted before?’ she asked, suddenly serious.

I nodded. ‘It used to happen quite a lot in the convent. It’s all emotional – all in the mind. At least, that’s what the nuns said.’

‘Don’t tell me! I was at a convent school, remember? And I suppose you have been under a strain, giving up that lovely peaceful life.’ I grimaced slightly, amazed as I always was that even people who knew nuns at first hand had such an unrealistically idyllic image of convent life. ‘Tell me,’ Jane said abruptly, ‘do you feel guilty?’

I thought hard for a moment. People often asked me this, because they seemed to associate Catholicism with guilt. ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t feel at all guilty. Guilt is not the word.’ One of the good things that I had learned from my superiors was that guilt could be pure self-indulgence, a wallowing in the ego. Guilt, I was told, usually sprang from misplaced pride; it might simply be chagrin that you were not as wonderful as you hoped. ‘I feel sad,’ I went on, ‘a failure, in some ways. But not guilty exactly.’

‘God, you are lucky!’ Jane flung herself down in my armchair. ‘I feel endlessly, endlessly guilty about sleeping with Mark. It means that I can’t go to mass, communion or confession, because I don’t have a “firm purpose of amendment”, as they say. I’m not going to stop doing it, so I haven’t truly repented. So now I’m that dreadful thing called a lapsed Catholic.’

‘Do you miss it?’ I asked, and then surprised myself by adding, ‘Do you care?’ I noticed how far I had moved in the last few months. This time last year, I could not have imagined living outside the Catholic Church, but now I wasn’t so sure. Did God really care so much about Jane’s sexual life? Was sleeping with her fiancé as bad as telling lies or being unkind, sins which didn’t debar anybody from the sacraments?

Jane sat quite still for a moment and then shrugged. ‘In some ways, no – of course, I don’t care. I can’t believe that God – if there is a God, I must say I do wonder sometimes – is really a narrow-minded prude. And I know that lots of people right here in college just carry on going to communion, no matter what they do. But I can’t manage that. It seems dishonest …’ she tailed off.

‘But do you miss it?’ I probed. Jane seemed so much at ease with the world and so bracingly positive, that it was hard to imagine her style cramped by a disapproving Church.

‘Oh, heavens, yes!’ she breathed. ‘I used to love the liturgy at school. Last Christmas, Mark and I were in Paris and went to Midnight Mass in Notre Dame. You can imagine … Mark couldn’t believe that I had been able to give all that up. “You’re a heroine,” he said. Though I can’t say I believe in much of it any more, frankly.’

I wondered how much of a Catholic I really was. No one would ever have admitted to doubts in the convent, and it was somehow liberating to have Jane do it for me. ‘But that’s enough about me!’ Jane got up and reached for her books. ‘I’m going to get the college nurse to have a look at you … I know, I know, she really is perfectly awful, but I promised Mr Jones. And it is sensible, you must admit, even if it is all due to stress. Mr Jones was right. That really was a very long faint.’

Before she left, Jane looked around the room. A typically modern box: shiny cork flooring, matching orange curtains and bedspread, desk and dressing-table combined. ‘You ought to try to put your own stamp on this,’ she said appraisingly. ‘It looks anonymous. Have some of your own things around. Whoops!’ she laughed. ‘You probably haven’t got any things. Well, you’d better acquire some. You’re not a nun now. No more holy poverty for you. What about a record player? You like music and you won the Violet Vaughan Morgan last year. You must have some of that prize money stashed away in the bank. Go on, treat yourself.’

‘Yes,’ I replied thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps I will.’

The college nurse was brisk and matter-of-fact. Yes, the fainting was almost certainly due to stress. I had had a confusing time and it was bound to take its toll. But worse things happened at sea. Mustn’t give in or feel sorry for yourself. Get back into the swing of things. Put your best foot forward. I listened to this string of clichés with mounting irritation. It was easy to be brisk and bracing about other people’s difficulties. I was quite aware that leaving a convent must rank very low on the scale of human suffering. Certainly, a bad divorce or bereavement must be even more painful, but, after all, it was not a competition. ‘Do make an appointment with your GP, however,’ the nurse concluded. ‘Always wise to get these things checked out, especially if it’s happened before.’

I promised that I would. It did seem a sensible precaution, and I was grateful for the concern that was so different from the icy response of my superiors. News of the faint travelled fast. People I scarcely knew stopped me in the corridor and asked how I was feeling. Pat and Fiona gave me a bunch of flowers and Rosemary had thoughtfully provided a little vase, realizing that I probably didn’t have one. Charlotte asked me quite a lot about the incident and we again silently sized each other up as fellow-neurotics.

Charlotte and I were no longer tutorial partners. Dr Brentwood Smyth had got rid of me fairly rapidly and passed me on to one of his graduate students. The college had responded indignantly. I was being groomed for a first-class degree and should not have been relegated to what they regarded as the scrap heap in this way. Now I was back with Mrs Bednarowska, who was quite happy with my intricate gothic essays and everybody seemed pleased with me. But I had not forgotten the emptiness I had encountered when I had had to rely on my own thoughts, and felt that Dr Brentwood Smyth had seen through my polished intellectual exterior to the vacuum at the core, as had Charlotte, though she knew too much about the numbing effects of shock to dismiss me as contemptuously as our tutor.

So some good had come out of that faint. I had become closer to Jane, let down my guard a little and allowed people to see that all was not well. And I decided to take Jane’s advice and buy myself a record player. As the new spirit of Vatican II slowly percolated through the convent, we had been encouraged to listen to music. A record player had appeared in the community room of the Scholasticate, and we were allowed to use it during the afternoon recreation hour. I discovered a new world. I remember walking into the room one day after doing the washing-up and being almost shocked by the beauty of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Now thanks to my simple little player, for which I paid the princely sum of twenty-five pounds, I could have this sublime treat any time I wanted. Jane introduced me to the late quartets of Beethoven and I would play these almost nightly. This, I was aware, was probably the kind of experience I had sought in religion. While I listened, I felt my spirit knitting together. Things began to make sense.

But one night, the world broke apart again. It was early evening and I was tired, having stayed up most of the previous night to write my essay. This weekly ‘essay crisis’, as we called it, was a feature of Oxford life. Throughout the college, lights burned all night as students scribbled earnestly, trying to get their piece finished in time. Since leaving the convent, I had fallen into this weekly ritual and in a perverse way quite enjoyed it. There was something rather magical about sitting alone in the lamplight, surrounded by darkness and absolute stillness. Occasionally there would be a gentle scratching on the door, and Rosemary or Charlotte, whose essay night coincided with my own, would peer cautiously round the door and we would have a midnight coffee-break before returning to our books. The next day I felt hollow and depleted, but triumphant, and I used to revel in the post-tutorial euphoria: essay done, duly praised, and a lovely fresh assignment beckoning me invitingly into the next week.

But on this particular occasion, my eyes prickled with fatigue. Suddenly I found myself invaded by the familiar stench, but this time it was different. My brain felt as though a cosmic potato masher was pounding it, reducing it to long worms of sensation like spaghetti, but spaghetti that was alive. I could hear a bell ringing mournfully in the distance and I was convinced that somebody was standing beside me. I could almost glimpse his face out of the corner of my eye. An aged, senile mask, with empty eyes. Some part of me knew that there was nobody there, and that if I reached out to touch him my hand would encounter empty air. And yet I could not connect this knowledge with the spectre because it had its own reality, its own absolutely commanding presence. I had no leisure to think about this, because I was gripped suddenly by a quite overwhelming fear. When I looked around me, the room was wholly unfamiliar, as though I had never seen any of these objects before. The world had become uncanny and horrifying. I did not know who, what or where I was, but was aware only of my extreme terror, a cold sickening dread that made everything around me seem brown, rotten and repulsive, because it had no meaning.

And yet, of course, it wasn’t like that at all. I am trying to describe an experience that has nothing whatever to do with words or ideas and is not amenable to the logic of grammar and neat sentences that put things into an order that makes sense. Maybe I could explain it better if I were a poet. But I am sure that this is the kind of horror that Hieronymus Bosch tried to convey in his paintings. It is as though a comforting veil of illusion has been ripped away and you see the world without form, without significance, purposeless, blind, trivial, spiteful and ugly to the core. T. S. Eliot describes something similar in the third poem of Ash-Wednesday. He is climbing a spiral staircase, a mythical image of the ‘ascent’ of the mind and heart to spiritual enlightenment. But ‘At the first turning of the second stair’ he sees a shape twisted into the banister, surrounded by vaporous, foetid air, and he is forced to struggle with ‘the devil of the stairs’. He leaves these convoluted forms behind, and at the next turning finds only darkness: ‘Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair, Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark’, the underbelly of consciousness that lurks in the basement of all our minds.

When the horror recedes, and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is ‘really’ there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again. The revelation remains embedded in your soul and affects everything you feel and everything you see. But when you try to express this vision in words, you inevitably distort it, and find yourself writing purple, melodramatic prose. Better to be as simple as Coleridge, when he describes the recurrent terror of the ancient mariner after his ordeal, which makes him feel:

Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows, a frightful fiend,

Doth close behind him tread.

The words are flat, and the image of the ‘frightful fiend’ deliberately banal, but the simple description of a fear that is constantly beside you but just out of reach captures the sensation exactly.

This was not an isolated experience. Some weeks later, while I was shopping in Cornmarket, the world seemed to have lost all connection with the fundamental laws that give it meaning and coherence. It took on the grotesque aspect of a cartoon. The women ahead of me in the queue at Marks and Spencer looked as though they belonged in a primitive painting by Beryl Cook; their features became coarse and alien. Again there was that paralysing fear. I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. When I reached the till, the woman sitting behind it seemed to be shouting at me, pointing to my purse. I stared back at her blankly, unable to understand what she was saying or what she wanted me to do. Somebody took my purse from me, and opened it, but I could make nothing of the round metal discs inside. Dazed, I put down my wire basket and wandered out into the street. I don’t know how long it was before I found myself sitting outside Brasenose College in Radcliffe Square, contemplating the perfect dome of the Camera, an image of wholeness and harmony. It was one of my favourite haunts, a place where I loved to come and study. It had been raining. I was wet and chilled, but back in my skin on a planet that had returned to normal.

I never imagined for one moment that these were supernatural visitations. I knew at once that I must be ill and assumed that, like my fainting attacks, these ‘visions’ were symptoms of strain. This seemed oddly appropriate. The world that I had rejected had turned on me and exacted a revenge, in which my surroundings periodically took on a nightmarish unfamiliarity. But as these strange interludes became more frequent, I became frightened, and took myself off to the doctor. How was I going to live with a horror that descended upon me without warning and made it impossible for me to function? It seemed as though the world and I had become chronically incompatible; that I would never be able to live in it. And what if one day I remained trapped on the other side of the looking glass?

The doctor dismissed these worries as excessive but agreed that I was not very well. He talked sagely about ‘anxiety attacks’, told me that these things happened, were fairly common and could easily be dealt with. After all, I had been under a strain; I was probably working too hard. In my final year now, was I? Exams next summer? Yes, people often got het up about these things. But in view of my … er … history, it might be a good idea to go and see a specialist. He knew a very good chap at the Littlemore Hospital. Somebody would write to me in due course to set up an appointment. Good idea to talk things over, perhaps take some medication – only temporarily, of course – to get rid of these bouts of panic, and then I’d soon be on my feet.

The Littlemore. One of Oxford’s two psychiatric hospitals. My heart sank. I had seen it coming, but now that the process had been set in motion, it felt like a real defeat. Psychiatry had certainly not been part of the convent ethos. The very idea of ‘talking things over’ with anyone was anathema. But I could see no alternative. The way both the doctor and the college nurse had taken refuge immediately in cliché when confronted with my predicament indicated that they felt out of their depth. I needed expert help, but I still shrank from exposing the mess of my life to a stranger, who would examine it clinically and make his own appraisal, and I hated the prospect of being known to be mentally ill.

It was partly to prevent this, I suppose, that I started to become more reclusive and reserved. I was afraid of experiencing one of these uncanny episodes when I was with other people. I had lost confidence. Where previously I had felt only shy and socially inhibited, I could now place no trust in either my body or my mind. I no longer took it for granted that I could get through a party or a quiet evening with friends without succumbing to this malady, and, indeed, I had noticed that the flickering lighting to which people seemed so strangely addicted these days made me feel very odd indeed. And so, just as I had started to put out feelers to the world, I began to withdraw again.

There was another, deeper reason for this. These frightening incidents were changing me. I now knew that at any second, the pleasant, innocent-seeming surface of normality could split apart, and this knowledge infected everything. I knew that other people had been to this dark place. I could see it in Van Gogh’s tormented, writhing olive trees and swirling starry skies. It was in the infernal visions of Bosch; it was the heart of darkness evoked by Joseph Conrad. It didn’t matter how often I told myself that these experiences had no substantive reality. However you accounted for them, this was a region of the human mind. And because I had visited it, I felt set apart. I was surrounded by girls whose existence was beginning to blossom. Most of them were hopeful, cheerful and excited by their unfolding lives, but I could no longer share this instinctive optimism. I was now doubly out of place among my fellow-students, as though I were the wicked fairy in the story, brooding balefully over the party.

Increasingly I felt as though I were witnessing everything at one remove. As time went on, solid physical objects appeared ephemeral, and people seemed like ghosts, with no clearly defined identity. When your surroundings can so suddenly take on a frightening aspect, you start to experience them as fluid, unreliable and without inherent integrity. Things seemed to flow into one another; a kind face could rapidly become menacing, a pleasant landscape take on a malign aspect. Sometimes I felt as though I were looking at reality through a sheet of glass. If I put my hand out to touch an object. I often expected to feel this barrier; sounds seemed faint and dim. This happened so gradually and became so habitual that, after a time, I ceased to remark upon it. It became the norm, the element in which I lived. I was rather like the little fish in the Sufi parable, who asks his mother about this stuff called water that he hears everybody discussing but which he has never seen. It is not until the condition lifts that you realize that it was abnormal. At the time, it simply seemed that the world from which I had retreated had now begun to recede from me.

This made it even more difficult to relate to other people. When you feel that you are talking to somebody through a plate-glass window, it is hard to make real contact. I also found it impossible to feel strongly about current events, which seemed somehow vague and remote. During the spring of 1970, when I read about the fighting between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights, looked at a newspaper photograph of a despairing child in Biafra, or watched television footage of the Viet Cong offensive in Laos, I could not feel anything at all. In May, the anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington DC, which delighted so many of my fellow-students at St Anne’s, seemed like something you might see in a surrealist dream, weird and insubstantial. I viewed these distant crises as through the wrong end of a telescope. They might as well be taking place on another planet that I would never visit.

Yet again, work became my refuge, because it made me feel relatively normal. If I could write good, competent essays about Chaucer or Shakespeare, my mind might not be irretrievably damaged. I could still think logically and coherently, if not originally. The more I read and studied, the more competent work I produced, the easier it was to believe that I was not completely mad and that one day I might be able to make my way in the world as an ordinary person. If I could stay for ever in the nice secure realm of scholarship, doing a little teaching, or writing the occasional article on Emily Brontë or Wordsworth, I might be able to keep my demons at bay.

Besides turning me into a solitary, these attacks of fear dealt yet another blow to my already wavering faith. No, I did not imagine that I had seen Satan during these visitations and knew very well that the evil I sensed had no metaphysical existence but was simply the product of my own mind. But these ‘visions’ got me thinking. In an age that was less scientific than our own, it would surely have been natural to conclude that the ghostly, senile presence that I sensed with hallucinatory intensity was a real diabolic personality. Poets and mystics had often spoken of the foul stench of hell. Almost certainly, hell was simply the creation of infirm minds like my own. There was no objective evidence to support such a belief. That was a wonderful and liberating thought, but what if God was also a mental aberration? The ecstatic, celestial visions of the saints could be just as fantastic as my own infernal sensations. What we called God could also be a disease, the invention of a mind that had momentarily lost its bearings. I was slightly dismayed to find that this idea did not trouble me overmuch. If there were no God, then much of my life had been nonsense, and I should, surely, have felt more upset. But then, God had never been a real presence to me. He had been so consistently absent that he might just as well not exist. Perhaps I should just leave the Church and have done with it.

Father Geoffrey Preston, a benign Dominican at Blackfriars in St Giles urged me not to make too hasty a decision. I had started to attend mass at Blackfriars at the suggestion of one of my tutors, who was also recovering from an unhappy Catholic past, and sometimes looked as though she had barely survived the struggle. She had recommended the family mass on Sunday mornings, and I found that it was indeed a cheerful, imaginative liturgy, geared to the needs of children who could crawl or run around the church freely and, within reason, make as much noise as they liked. My tutor also advised me to talk to Geoffrey.

He was clearly a kind man, but seemed faintly ill at ease, and I suspected that, like many priests, he had ambivalent feelings about nuns. ‘I hope you’re not feeling guilty about all this.’ He shifted his massive girth uncomfortably around on the formal parlour chair. ‘I know nuns tend to trade on guilt. I expect you had to count up your faults on a special string of beads and write them down in a little book,’ he chuckled, inviting me to share what he clearly assumed was a joke.

‘Yes, we did, actually,’ I said.

Geoffrey’s head snapped to attention, his eyes startled. ‘You’re not serious, are you?’ I nodded. ‘Good God.’ He gazed, lost for words for a moment, at the ceiling. ‘We always thought that was a silly fantasy – one of the absurd stories that people tell about nuns. I had no idea that they actually did it.’

‘You’ve had a sheltered life, Geoffrey.’ I stood up and started putting on my coat. ‘If you’re not careful, I’ll tell you the whole story one day.’

‘I’m not sure that I could take it.’ Geoffrey was smiling but I could sense his real distaste. ‘I suppose that’s women for you,’ he said reflectively as we walked down the cloister. ‘We always said in the army that they were no good at community life. They seem to get bogged down in petty rules and regulations – can’t see the wood for the trees.’

Perhaps, I thought, as I headed back to college. But I also knew enough about the Church to know that it was men who had made the rules in the first place.

I had mixed feelings as the train thrust its way through the lush Sussex countryside. In one sense, I was going home, going back to the convent where I had spent the first three years of my religious life. I had received a letter from Sister Rebecca, asking me if I could come to see her. This in itself was surprising. Visitors were generally discouraged and I could scarcely be considered a suitable companion for Rebecca. Things had obviously changed during the fourteen months that I had been away. But I had some misgivings about my own reactions. I had no idea how it would feel to be in a convent atmosphere once more.

Sister Rebecca had been two years ahead of me. When I had been a postulant, she had been a second-year novice, and we had all seen her as the perfect young nun. She had the serene face of a Botticelli Madonna, her habit was never creased, her eyes were modestly cast down, and she spoke always in a quiet, dispassionate tone, just above a whisper. Most of us forgot how to be nuns from time to time. We would run upstairs, burst into loud laughter or answer back when reprimanded, but not Sister Rebecca. She was always controlled, composed and peaceful. When I had arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1967, she was in her final year at St Anne’s, reading French and Italian, and because we were the only two student nuns in the community, we were thrown much together. We went to the convent chapel together after lunch every afternoon to perform all our spiritual duties, one after the other, in a soulless marathon of examination of conscience, rosary, spiritual reading and thirty minutes of mental prayer. The idea was that we should get these ‘out of the way’, so that we could spend the evening studying. When we had finished praying, we took a forty-five minute walk. And we talked.

Although we were not supposed to form friendships, Rebecca and I were so isolated from the other students and from the rest of the community that inevitably a relationship developed. We both loved our work but had nobody else to discuss it with. I would tell her all about Milton, and she would impart to me her latest discoveries about Dante or Proust. But the conversation did not always remain on such an exalted level. I was beginning to rebel. The Oxford community was not an easy one. Most of the nuns there were adamantly opposed to the reforms, about which both Rebecca and I were excited. The evening recreation would often consist of long communal lamentations about the abolition of the old ways, and Rebecca and I would exchange sardonic looks. I discovered that beneath her apparently perfect exterior, Rebecca had quite a sharp tongue and a salty turn of phrase, though she was unfailingly sweet to the older nuns and never showed her irritation, as I so frequently did.

During our walks, Rebecca had listened to my growing saga of frustration with the religious life. She had been a lifeline in that last difficult year, but she had not shared my disenchantment. Why had she summoned me? I wondered, as we pulled into the station. Was she in trouble? We had arranged that she would meet my train with the convent car, but I did not see her on the platform; nor was she in the entrance hall after I had handed in my ticket. Then, suddenly, I caught sight of a nun standing beneath the old-fashioned wall-clock, wearing one of those modern habits that gave her the appearance of an Edwardian nurse. There was something familiar about her but she was far, far too thin. That could not be Rebecca. I looked around again, but found my gaze drawn back to that modest figure, whose eyes were meekly cast down on the tiled floor. The nun looked up, and her face brightened with delighted recognition, as she gave me a small, discreet wave. And for a moment, my heart stopped.

Gone was the serene Madonna. This nun looked as though she had just been released from a concentration camp or was in the final stages of cancer. Her face had shrunk, so that she looked all eyes, which now seemed huge and protuberant. There were cavernous hollows beneath her sharply-etched cheekbones. As she crossed the hall towards me, I was appalled to see how skeletal her legs were. She was about five foot ten inches, and could not have weighed more than eighty pounds. But when she spoke, her voice was the same and I had to face it. This was indeed Rebecca, but dreadfully, frighteningly altered. Quickly, I pulled my own face into what I hoped was an answering smile. ‘I didn’t recognize you for a moment in your new habit,’ I murmured, as we exchanged the nun-like kiss, pressing each other’s cheeks smartly, one after the other. I kept smiling. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’

‘And so good of you to come.’ Together we crossed the station forecourt and got into the car.

‘This is a first,’ I said, in what I hoped was a cheery tone of voice. ‘How long have you been allowed to drive? We could have done with this car in Oxford. Think of the lovely trips we could have taken!’

‘To the Cotswolds … Blenheim … how is it all? I do miss it.’ Rebecca inched through the traffic and we started the forty-minute drive to the convent.

‘Oh, it’s all much the same,’ I replied. ‘Though, of course, it isn’t the same being “outside”.’

‘You sound as though you’ve just got out of prison!’ We laughed uneasily, our eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead. ‘But it’s all so different “inside” these days,’ she continued. ‘The car, the habit – those are the most obvious changes, and we have more baths, more talking. We can make our cells into bed-sitting-rooms and give each other cups of Nescafe. It’s probably a bit like St Anne’s – lots of girlish laughter; intense discussions and pop psychology. We all sit around talking about how damaged we are.’

There we were; we had arrived at the heart of what was uppermost in both our minds. There was silence, and then Rebecca said quietly: ‘Karen, thank you for not saying anything.’

‘About your weight.’ It was not a question. I forced myself to turn and look directly at her. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Very quickly.’ Rebecca sighed. ‘In London, while I was doing the Certificate of Education. I hated it, hated teaching – and I just got thinner and thinner.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Anorexia nervosa, the eating disease.’ I nodded. Besides Charlotte, a number of other girls in college had it. ‘At first the doctors thought that I might just have an over-active thyroid. Everybody was very keen on that – anything so long as I wasn’t suffering from a mental illness, an emotional disorder. Some of the community still refuse to accept it.’ Again I nodded wordlessly. I could imagine that all too well.

‘But what are they going to do about it?’ I demanded. An eating disorder required hospitalization, special programmes and expert help. It could, in extreme cases, even be fatal.

‘Nothing,’ Rebecca said flatly.

‘But you need a doctor!’ I persisted. ‘You can’t teach looking like that.’

‘Oh yes, I can,’ Rebecca spoke grimly, and I was beginning to sense that underneath the studied calm she was very, very angry. ‘I’m teaching French in the school here, and Reverend Mother Provincial says that she cannot find a replacement at the moment. And then,’ her voice took on a real edge, ‘in a few years, I am to be the next headmistress.’

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