Nun Story

I was last night talking about the book Cloistered by the amazingly named Catherine Coldstream, a memoir about her years as a nun, and it made me think about nuns, generally, who loomed over me throughout my childhood, and have come to occupy a peculiar spot in my imagination.

I went to a convent school for primary school - not a Catholic school, a convent school - in which the majority of our lessons were taught by nuns. It was a strange place. For a while we weren’t allowed mirrors in the bathrooms, because they promoted vanity. If we misbehaved, we were dragged to the front of the class, so that the nuns could remove our underwear (!) and smack our bottoms (!!!). Approximately once a year I have to confirm with my sister that this actually happened, because I’m scared it is some deranged false memory. 

The nuns gave me and my sister preferential treatment, because we were from a Polish family, and thus proper Catholics, so we didn’t experience too many smacked bottoms. Good for us.

My parents once left us at the convent for the weekend, for reasons unclear. We spent a lot of time in mass, and when we weren’t in mass, we took it in turns to ride the stair lift at the convent. I can’t remember where we slept, or if we did anything else, other than attend mass and ride the stair lift.

I was taught to swim by the nuns, by one nun, in particular: Sister Marie Claire. A tiny, white-haired French lady we were all terrified and in awe of, in exactly equal measure. She ran swimming classes at a local RAF base, and one of her strategies in teaching us to swim was tying a rope around our waists, and walking us like a dog, from one end of the pool to the other, then back again. She wore her full habit while doing so. This is all true.  

We went on a school trip to another convent in France with Sister Marie Claire. If we walked anywhere she made my sister go in a pram, which she would push, even though my sister was laughably too old to be pushed in a pram, that it was ridiculous and weird to see her in a pram. 

I wanted to be a nun for a long time. I’d hang pillow bags over the back of my head, read the Bible an awful lot, even though reading the Bible is not an especially Catholic activity. 

Films like The Nun’s Story, Ida and Black Narcissus fill me with such aesthetic pleasure it feels like my brain is being caressed. I’ve not yet seen Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, because I’m not sure I can cope. 

I ran into Sister Marie Claire about seven years ago, back home, in Lincoln. She ran over to me, cosmically identical to the last time I’d seen her, maybe twenty years earlier. Are you a Miss or a Mrs? she asked. She was absolutely mortified to find I had not married. I think she actually tutted. But you’re still a writer, she added. I told her I was. We always knew you’d be a writer! she said. Even when you were little! 

She told me she hoped I still say my prayers, which I do sometimes, even though I have no idea what I believe anymore. I really hope I get to see her again; to tell her I still have all these memories of her; that I will never forget.