Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story. Karen Armstrong
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our minds.
My mother was sitting near me by the fire. She was smiling.
“What are you drinking?” she asked pleasantly, but with a heavy edge of significance. “Gin?”
“Gin!” Granny was horrified. “Gin! I hate gin, hate it,” she repeated emphatically. “No, I’m having a little sherry.” She held up her tiny glass, in which a thimbleful of amber liquid glowed in the angry firelight. “I never drink gin.”
I felt my parents’ eyes meeting over my head. Granny had taken her glasses off and her eyes flickered round the room. They looked frightened and alone.
“I’d better go and look at the dinner,” she said.
“Karen! Go and help Granny,” said my mother, prodding me urgently in the back.
I got up and followed her out into the kitchen, which was filled with a savory smell from the oven. Vegetables bubbled busily on the hobs of the old gas stove. It was a steamy, comfortable place. I perched myself on the formica-topped table and sat there, legs swinging, while she jabbed the potatoes with a fork.
“Nearly done,” said Granny. “It’ll be another quarter of an hour, I think. When I was at school,” and her voice was softened with memory, “I’d have been expelled for knowing what a potato looked like before it was cooked! A lady didn’t do this kind of thing then!”
We laughed comfortably, at ease together. This was familiar ground. Granny had been at a convent school in Liverpool run by the same order of nuns that taught at my own school. That had been an important factor in my parents’ choice of a school for me.
“You liked school, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she was smiling quietly to herself. Then suddenly she coughed loudly. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I’ve got a bit of a tickle in my throat.” She turned her back to me, and, with a nervous glance in the direction of the living room, she went to the tray beside the stove, which contained a large array of cooking bottles: vinegar, oil, brown sauce, and one squat green bottle. She filled a generous glassful of a clear liquid like water and, coughing markedly at me, knocked back the draught in one swift action.
“Hmm,” she cleared her throat. “That’s better. It’s a nuisance, this cough.”
I turned my eyes resolutely away from the green bottle and deliberately closed a shutter in my mind. This, I knew instinctively, was something that I mustn’t know about.
“Can I do anything to help, Mummy?” my mother called suddenly.
We both froze and looked guiltily at one another.
“No, thank you, dear!” Granny called back, “Karen’s doing a great job out here. We’ll be back presently. Help yourself to another drink!”
“All right!” My mother’s voice was deliberately casual.
Granny went on, dreamily. “I was terribly naughty at school! I remember once a priest came to give us a retreat. ‘In Heaven,’ he said, ‘you’ll be singing “Glory be to God!” forever and ever!’ and I whispered to the girl next to me, ‘How boring! I don’t think I want to go to Heaven.’”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “It sounds awful, doesn’t it? Glory be to God forever and ever.” But if you didn’t want to go to Heaven there was only one alternative. I shuddered. It was a dilemma.
“Unfortunately, the priest heard me whispering, and when he had finished his talk he said, very solemnly, ‘Who is the little girl who doesn’t want to go to Heaven?’”
“Oh no!” I breathed. “How dreadful! Did you own up?”
“Yes,” she smiled slightly and leaned against the wall, her eyes fixed dreamily ahead. “I had my Holy Innocents medal taken away from me as a penance.”
“Do you think you’ll go to Hell, then?” I masked the fearful import of the question with a giggle.
“Yes!” she laughed. “Oh, yes! I expect the devil’s got a nice warm spot for me down there! Do you think those potatoes are done yet?”
I prodded them. “Not quite,” I said, preoccupied. Hell terrified me. It seemed so hideously easy to go there. “But you have to commit a mortal sin to go to Hell, don’t you?” I asked. “A very serious sin indeed, knowing that you’re doing it.”
“Yes!” Granny laughed hollowly. “Yes, that seems to be the idea.”
I looked at her. She seemed so harmless. And I loved her with a great rush of tenderness.
“Well!” Granny said, looking wistfully at the green bottle. “I think we’d better be getting back to the others. You dish up those potatoes and leave them in the hot drawer, will you? Thanks. I’ll just put one or two things away in the larder.”
She disappeared into the tiny little room next door, carrying the bottle of Worcestershire sauce and—I saw out of the corner of my eye—the green bottle. Standing at the sink, waiting for her, I saw the darkening garden outside looking misty and sinister in the autumn twilight. The world seemed a puzzling place. “I think you’ll have to go to Heaven, you know, Granny,” I said. “I don’t think you’re bad enough for Hell.”
My mother’s eyes bored into Granny as we entered the room.
I went over and sat close to my mother, smiling up at her, feeling that, in some way I didn’t understand, I had been disloyal. Saturated with warmth, I gazed into the flames of the fire.
“Just time for another drink,” Granny said briskly. “We ought to leave the meat to stand for a few minutes, don’t you think? Is Karen old enough to have a sherry?”
“Oh, yes, I think so,” my mother’s voice was cheery, consciously filled with the birthday spirit. “Just a small one. Would you like a sherry, Karen?”
“No,” I answered promptly, without thinking. The refusal was automatic. For some reason that I would not analyze, it was impossible for me to accept. “No, thank you, Granny.”
I watched her walk across the room, replenishing my parents’ glasses. As she navigated the coffee table, she stumbled slightly, and my mother’s sharp intake of breath cut through me. But as soon as she caught me looking at her, my mother smiled and said, “What were you two gossiping about in the kitchen?”
“Oh, Granny was telling me about her school,” I answered. “It still sounds awfully like my school, you know. We do all the same things, have all the same customs.”
“Mmm,” my mother said vaguely. “You were happy at school weren’t you, Mummy? Like Karen.” For a moment her eyes were wary as she listened to what she had said, startled. “You like the same things.”
“Happiest days of your life, Madge?” asked my father genially.
Granny glanced at my grandfather, who was still quite oblivious to his birthday celebration, and her eyes wandered aimlessly round the room.
“Yes, I expect they were in a way.”
“School was?” I said, appalled.
“Yes,” Granny said musingly. “You know, you think you hate it while you’re there, but lately I’ve been looking back at those days over and over again. We were happy.” She sipped her sherry reflectively.
I looked at Granny in amazement. Surely not. Everybody knew that school was terrible; life began once you had left it behind you. Didn’t it?
“I suppose they were,” Granny repeated quietly. “You know,”she smiled inwardly, “when I was just a little older than Karen—oh, I must have been about sixteen or seventeen—I wanted to be a nun. My mother wouldn’t let me. You never know,” she added obscurely, “it might have made all the difference ... Yes, perhaps I should have been a nun.”
Seeds had been planted: