Karen Armstrong, Eleanor Stewart, Margaret MacConnell, Catherine Coldstream and others wrote about their convent experiences, which I will get around to in parts 2 or 3 of this particular topic over the next few months, but it was Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over The Wall (1949),which set the ball rolling and I’m writing about her today.
The book chronicles the first few years of her life after she was formally dispensed from her vows in a strict, contemplative religious order in England in 1941. (She doesn’t tell us which order it was, but her dislike of Teresa of Avila makes one suspect that it was not Carmelite.) She had entered the convent in 1914. The book is not in any sense a ‘take-down’ of the religious life, which is probably why it was often to be found in the tall, glass-fronted bookshelves of presbyteries, convents and monasteries. (My copy, which I found in a second-hand shop, bears the stamp of St Joseph’s Industrial School, Salthill. I’m sure there were many boys who longed to leap over that particular wall, but that’s another story for another day.) There was nothing wrong with the convent, Baldwin insists; it just wasn’t for her. She realized after 10 years that she was not suited to the life, and spent another 18 years trying to convince herself that she was – as people often do when they’ve invested a lot of themselves in marriages or jobs or other life situations. When she left, she was 48, her parents were dead and she had no ‘home’ to go back to.
The title of the book is taken from a family motto ‘By the grace of God I leap over the wall’ that dates back to a noble ancestor who supported Mary Queen of Scots. Baldwin was very well-connected – former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was her uncle, and she counted Kiplings and Burne-Joneses among her cousins. (There was a Catholic/Protestant mix in her extended family). Plenty of relatives and friends were glad to offer her accommodation, but she did not want to outstay her welcome with anybody. At a time when any British woman who could read and write well was able to walk into an office job in the greatly- expanded war-time administration, she had hardly any success at all (even with her connections); one can only conclude that she ‘interviewed’ poorly. She had a small private income from the convent dowry which had been returned to her, but she refused to be idle at a time of national crisis. So she became a land ‘girl’, then she worked as a relief matron in a girls’ work camp, but most difficult of all was a job as canteen assistant in another camp, where she slept on a flea-ridden bed in a room with six others, all working-class girls in their late teens. Her convent experience made her physically tough and able for hard work, but convent hardships were regularly relieved with periods of silence and prayer and privacy, and life in any of the services in wartime Britain was, to put it mildly, not like that at all. You have to hand it to her; she was game for everything but she overdid it, as her sweet young canteen colleagues realised when they fried her a good breakfast before helping her to leave without official permission.
A fictional equivalent of Baldwin’s experience would be Barbara Euphan Todd’s Miss Ranskill Comes Home (1946), about a woman lost on a desert island for some years who comes back to a wartime Britain in 1940 or 41, and is baffled and horrified by its minute and detailed regulations and privations. Because of her convent life, Baldwin was used to regulations and privations – rationing was no hardship – what she found hardest of all was ‘the noise…. and the people!’, as someone once famously said about the Great War. Her alarm at a greatly-changed, mechanized and motorized world where women wore short skirts is easy to understand. Her snobberies and prejudices are harder to swallow, though they are very much of their time. She refers to Jews in the casually-disparaging way that George Orwell heard all around him in London in the closing years of the war, even when the Nazi atrocities were well-known. She cannot refrain from shocked disapproval of young working-class women all dressed up and made-up, cocky and confident, but in this she is no different from most women writers of her era, regardless of religion, nationality or political tendency. And she is even more critical of women of her own social class who complain about the servant shortage and all the nice things they cannot get hold of any more. (This probably made her a difficult house guest.)
What is hardest of all for Baldwin, in these early years, is having to explain the religious life to the kind of men who are outraged at females making themselves unavailable for male/domestic use. These discussions, of course, are partly a literary device for her to explain the religious life to the reader, and she explains it very well. But is the contemplative pre-Vatican II religious life as she describes (and defends) it, a good one? I can accept the need for physical hardship and going without comforts so as to discipline the body, cleanse the mind and make room for things of the spirit. I can understand the need for humility so as to suppress the ego, which makes for a happier life in the long run, without grudges and grievances. The timetable of prayer and the concentration on higher things all make sense within the context of a life dedicated to God; some of the devotions and practices Baldwin describes open a window into a realm of the spirit that is breath-takingly beautiful. And every fit person should take their turn at physically hard domestic work like scrubbing, washing clothes and other necessary tasks, which Baldwin and her fellow-nuns did routinely. Eating disgusting food to mortify the appetites is where I personally would draw the line, but I’ve always been faddy about food anyway. What I don’t understand at all about the religious life as she describes it, is what she sums up as ‘custody of the eyes’. The perfect nun has to keep looking ‘down’ (metaphorically) at all times so as not to notice things that will distract her from her spiritual journey – and these distractions include her physical and human surroundings – things and people around her. This ‘not noticing’ seems to me to be completely at variance with the true Christian life and especially, the life of a religious community. Surely it must be a holy thing to notice and rejoice in God’s Creation both in nature and in the glorious variety of humanity? Aren’t ‘love God’ and ‘love one another’ two sides of the same coin?
Was it this training that was responsible for her almost complete lack of emotional engagement with anybody – relatives, friends, acquaintances – when she came back to ‘the world’? As well as relatives, many strangers (of all classes and conditions) are extremely kind to her, and she is duly grateful, but she has no curiosity whatsoever about any of them. They are all, as she cheerfully describes her very good Scottish friend Miki, and husband and two sons who put her up for an extended period, ‘ghosts’. Does the self-absorption of somebody who has spent the best part of three decades chasing spiritual perfection turn into a kind of monstrous selfishness when the 24/7 focus switches from God to the self? Or did Baldwin’s vocation wither and die because she could not connect with her sisters in the convent? She never actually tells us why she left – her faith remained as strong as ever, and she didn’t object to any of the hardships, so maybe that was it.
Anyway, her book is totally absorbing and page-turning, and when she finds a place of her own eventually, a small, austere and isolated house on a cliff, the reader is glad for her. She was a courageous woman with a great spirit, and a very good writer.
Monica Baldwin, I Leap Over The Wall: a return to the world after twenty-eight years in a convent (London: Hamish Hamilton 1949). It was republished in 2015 by Robert Hale.
George Orwell, ‘Anti-semitism in Britain’ (1945) in Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg 1975).
Barbara Euphan Todd, Miss Ranskill Comes Home (London: Chapman and Hall 1946: Persephone Books 2003.) Originally published under the name Barbara Bower. Euphan Todd went on to write the Worzel Gummidge books.
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