# Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story

Karen Armstrong

Through the Narrow Gate is Karen Armstrong’s memoir of life inside a Catholic convent in the 1960’s.With gentleness and honesty, Armstrong takes her readers on a revelatory journey that begins with her decision, at the age of seventeen, to devote her life to God as a nun. yet once she embarked upon her spiritual training, she encountered a frightening and oppressive world, fossilized by tradition, which moulded, isolated and pushed her to the limit of what she could endure.

## KAREN ARMSTRONG. Through the Narrow Gate

A Nun’s Story


## Copyright

William Collins

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Macmillan in 1981

Copyright © Karen Armstrong 1981, 1995

Karen Armstrong asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

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Source ISBN: 9780006550549

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007382880

Version: 2016-02-22


In memory of my father

## CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION

1 BEGINNINGS 1962

2 POINTERS 1956-1961

3 A NEW LIFE 1962

4 TRIPTON

5 POSTULANT

6 A NUN TAKES THE VEIL

7 “THE DEATH I HAVE TO DIE”

8 BURIAL 1963-1965

9 THE SCHOLASTICATE 1965-1967

10 OXFORD

11 THROUGH THE NARROW GATE

AFTERWORD 1980

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Also by Karen Armstrong

About the Publisher

## INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION

Writing Through the Narrow Gate proved to be a watershed for me that was, in its way, every bit as important as those crucial years in the convent. I had decided to write the book because I was becoming uncomfortably aware that a period of my life that had been extremely significant was becoming trivialized. Friends would beg me to tell them about the convent, and I would usually respond by recounting some funny story (and, indeed, a lot of amusing things did happen) because it was easier than exposing memories that were still raw and painful. Yet I knew that I would have to discover what those years had meant for me before the memories disappeared beyond recall.

In fact, the process of writing redeemed the past for me, in ways that I could not have imagined. I have written several books since, but none has proved as difficult as Through the Narrow Gate, with the possible exception of its sequel, Beginning the World. Autobiography must be one of the most challenging genres because it becomes impossible to keep humiliating glimpses of one’s former self at bay. Not surprisingly, I tried to avoid this but was prevented from doing so by June Hall, whom I had met at a dinner party and who had agreed to act as my literary agent.

The first draft of the book was very black and angry. June read it, said that it was probably publishable but that she couldn’t help wondering why, if things had been that bad, I had stayed in the religious life for seven whole years. I could see that she had a point, and I started all over again. During the next two drafts, I began to remember the things that had made me stay so long—things that I no longer wanted to recall because I thought that I had lost them forever: the beauty of the liturgy, the belief that every single moment of the day had eternal significance, and, above all, the sense of a spiritual quest for meaning that would make my life wholly significant. I had gone into the convent searching for Something that remained tantalizingly elusive but that, with the optimism of youth, I felt certain I would one day find.

I did not find that Something (which, for want of a better word, we call “God”) in the convent. These pages explain why. The 1960s were a difficult time for religious orders, and I must have been one of the last people to be trained before the Second Vatican Council reforms were implemented. At that time, it had unfortunately become customary to train young nuns by making them excruciatingly aware of their failings. This meant that most of us lived in a state of such acute anxiety and preoccupation with ourselves that a positive religious experience could become well nigh impossible. After all, the great masters of the spiritual life insist that the true spiritual path leads us away from the ego. Guilt and an undue concentration on one’s own performance can only further embed the struggling soul in the self that it is trying to transcend. There were certainly nuns in my order who were well aware of this problem, but as a mere teenager I lacked the maturity or the confidence to see the particular obsessions of my superiors in a larger perspective.

When I wrote Through the Narrow Gate, I thought that I had finished with religion. Yet because of the book, I was invited to write and present a documentary series for British Channel 4 Television about Saint Paul. Much of the filming was done in Jerusalem, and there, for the first time, I confronted Judaism and Islam, Christianity’s two sister religions, as living, integral faiths. In order to understand the early church founded in large part by Saint Paul, I had also to learn about the Jewish world that gave birth to it. For the first time, Judaism became more to me than a mere prelude to Christianity, and I was increasingly fascinated by the differences and similarities between the two faiths. In the same way, living and working so intensely in the Middle East made me want to learn about Islam, and I was frequently enthralled by what I found. After I had finished the television series, other assignments followed—all concerned with religion. I began to flesh out the grounding in scripture, theology, and church history that I had acquired in the convent, but this time I was seeing it in conjunction with the development of other faiths.

At first my new involvement in religion remained on an intellectual, critical level. But as I went deeper into the history of religion, I began to experience that sense of being on a quest that had impelled me to become a nun and had kept me in the convent for all those years. It was different, of course, because I was an older and—I hope—wiser person this time around. Though particularly drawn to the study of mysticism, I knew from my attempts at meditation in the convent that I did not have it in me to be a mystic. Yet occasionally, when I am studying—either at my desk at home or in the British Library—I have what can only be described as a glimmer of transcendence. It only lasts a fraction of a second, but it gives one the sense that life has some ultimate meaning and value for that brief moment, in much the same way as a great piece of music or an inspiring poem. There is no way of categorizing that Something any more than it is possible to explain why art or music has this power; it cannot be summed up in a message or doctrine. But I now know enough to realize that what I am engaged in is what the Benedictine monks call lectio divina (divine study), which, they say, yields occasionally an inevitably brief second of oratio (prayer).

When I spoke of this experience to some of my colleagues at the Leo Baeck College in London, where I do a little teaching, they laughed and told me that I was very Jewish in my spirituality. Jews, they explained, immerse themselves in the Bible and the Talmud not simply to gain information; they see the text as a place where they can encounter the ineffable God. Sometimes they like to speak the Hebrew words aloud, savoring the words that God himself used when he revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, until they have learned them “by heart” (a revealing phrase). They sometimes sway backwards and forwards while they recite the Hebrew words, as though they were blown by the breath of the Holy Spirit, pliable before God as a flame before a breeze. Occasionally, they get a sense of Something greater that lies behind and within the words but defies explanation.

I am not claiming any great visionary experience, yet occasionally while studying theology, I too feel uplifted by a second of wonder and delight that momentarily illuminates the whole page. This type of spirituality would, it seems, have suited me better than the kind of meditation we learned in the convent. Everybody comes to the divine in his or her own way, and it seems that my writing and broadcasting career, which has often been critical of certain aspects of religion, has led me back to some form of religious life.

I could not have known this when I sat down to write Through the Narrow Gate in 1980. I am no longer a practicing Roman Catholic, but I usually call myself, slightly tongue in cheek, a “freelance monotheist.” At present I draw sustenance from other traditions as well as from Western Christianity. The study of comparative religion, I am told, rarely inspires a person to convert to another faith but it makes him see his own religion differently. I can now appreciate what the spirituality I learned in the convent was aiming for and, perhaps, where it went wrong—at least for me. It also seems that the quest that began on the fourteenth of September, 1962, the day I entered the religious life, has continued, and led me to paths that I never expected.

—Karen Armstrong

London, August 1994


Enter by the narrow gate, since the gate that leads to perdition is wide, and the road spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that lead to life, and only a few find it.

—Matthew7:12

## 1 • BEGINNINGS 1962

It was 14 September 1962, the most important day of my life. On the station platform my parents and my sister, Lindsey, were clustered together in a sad little knot, taking their last look at me. I was seventeen years old and was leaving them forever to become a nun.

Kings Cross station was a confused flurry of shouting porters, whistles, people dodging and tearing through barriers. A disembodied voice announced arrivals and departures. An old lady walked down the platform, smartly dressed, leaning on her stick and looking fixedly at the ground, lost in her private world. A group of soldiers drinking beer from bottles laughed gustily at the far end of the platform. A young girl and a boy were standing with their arms draped clumsily round each other, whispering intensely. Saying good-bye.

I looked at this from the windows of the train, but it was like watching a film or seeing it all through a thick glass screen. The whole day had been like this. I had gotten up that morning early, packed my suitcase and stripped my bed, folding the sheets and blankets neatly, conscious somewhere that this was the last time. I took a last look round the house, knowing that I ought to be feeling something, but actually feeling very little. Just a numbness, a blocking of all responses. But underneath all that I was aware of a fluttering excitement. At last the day had come. For the past year I had been looking forward to it with an intensity I had never experienced before, terrified that something would happen to stop it. I was beginning a huge spiritual adventure.

The night before I had read Monica Baldwin’s book I Leap Over the Wall, written after twenty-eight years in a convent. It was a book that was legendary to me. The nuns at school had always spoken of it in tones of dire disapproval mixed with a kind of pity. “Poor woman,” they had always said, “it’s so obvious that she hadn’t got a vocation.” Somewhat guiltily I had bought a copy and devoured it in the privacy of my bedroom. It was my last chance to read it and I felt compelled by furtive curiosity. I say I read it, but I skipped large chunks. I wasn’t interested in the author’s adventures after leaving her convent. I wanted to know what had happened to her inside. Her account of the austerities of the life didn’t put me off for a moment. I knew that it was going to be hard; I wanted it to be hard. It wouldn’t be worth doing otherwise. What were a few hardships if they led to a close relationship with God? I felt sorry for Monica Baldwin. How could she have given up?

I glanced impatiently at my watch and then instantly felt contrite. This was a wonderful day for me, but my family had not chosen this. For them it was not a glorious beginning but an end. I looked down at them, knowing sadly that even now they were hoping against hope that I would change my mind at the last minute. None of that showed, however. My parents, tall and elegant, smiled bravely up at me. My sister was looking at me with awe mingled with horror, hardly able to believe that this was really happening. She was three years younger than I but already she was far taller and looked much older. Even at fourteen she possessed a physical poise and confidence that marked her as the sort of child my parents should have had. Like them she loved life; nothing was going to make her enter a convent. But I wasn’t like that. To me the world had proved an unsatisfactory place. It wasn’t enough. Only God with His infinite perfection could complete me. “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” St. Augustine’s words in his Confessions expressed what I felt exactly. I had read them for the first time a few months ago, during the school retreat. If the Gospels were true, it seemed to me, then logically there was nothing else to do but become a nun and give my whole life to God. Only He could satisfy me.

My parents could not really understand my decision. They were Catholics and knew that if I had a religious vocation it was their duty to let me go. But for them religion meant Sunday morning Mass and a decent morality. They were bewildered at my decision to abandon all the good things of life and embrace an asceticism that they could only see as impoverishing. However, they had made up their minds to let me enter the convent and were determined to see it through with as good a grace as they could.

They had driven me down from our home in Birmingham that morning to see me off at Kings Cross. It was our last time together as a family, and our knowledge of this filled the car. Outside on the highway the traffic swooshed past with heartless speed. I looked out the window, mechanically counting the bridges. Lindsey, huddled at the other end of the back seat, as far away from me as possible, stared with deliberate nonchalance out the window. She had been horrified when my mother told her. “How ghastly! I can’t think of anything worse,” and she had refused to talk to me about it at all. It’s almost as though she thinks a religious vocation is infectious, I thought wryly, looking at her averted head.

“All right in the back, there?” my father asked with forced heartiness. A useless question but an attempt to communicate.

“Yes, thanks,” we chorused obediently. There was silence except for the engine’s purring.

“Daddy,” said Lindsey peevishly, “do you think we could have the window shut? My hair’s blowing all over the place—and so is Karen’s.”

“You girls!” my father sounded at the end of his tether. “What the hell does it matter what your hair looks like? Nobody’s looking at you at the moment, are they? Why has every bloody hair got to be in place the whole bloody time! Nobody notices. You’re fanatical about your hair—both of you! Yet you never think of cleaning your shoes. People notice dirty shoes far more than untidy hair, let me tell you!”

We let the outburst go. It was one of his favorite hobby-horses. But he wasn’t really angry about our hair or our shoes. He was angry with God for taking his daughter.

“Would anyone like a piece of candy?” my mother asked soothingly. It was strange hearing her be the peacemaker. Usually it was she who got irritated and my father who calmed her down.

It was odd, I thought, how she felt the need to fill us up with glucose while we were on a journey. Anyone would think we were climbing Mount Everest. But it had always been the same, one of those odd quirks of family life that would be closed to me forever after today. It was the sort of thing you probably quite forgot. In a few years perhaps all my life at home would seem unreal.

“We’ll just be in time to have lunch somewhere nice,” my mother said cheerfully.

We made pleased noises. I felt too excited to eat anything at the moment, but this was another ritual that would have to be gone through. The Last Meal.

“I wonder what the food’s like in there?” mused my father gloomily. The in there was delivered in a dropped intonation as though it meant a prison.

“Terrible, I should think,” said Lindsey grumpily. She was still feeling sore about her hair and my father’s attack. “It’ll be just like school food. You remember, Karen, the nuns always said they ate the same food as us. Imagine school food every day of your life!”

Gloom filled the car. It was not the moment, I knew, to hold forth on the unimportance of physical comforts. At the moment the issue of food seemed trivial. It would be like the fairy godmother urging Cinderella to sit down to a sensible supper before she set off for the ball, a distraction from the real issue.

“But I’m sure you must have nice food sometimes, Karen,” my mother was saying. “I wonder if you’ll have turkey and plum pudding on Christmas Day.”

“Mmm,” I murmured vaguely. How did I know? These random speculations were serving to impress on all of us the barrier that was so soon to divide us from one another.

“I wonder what you’ll be doing this time tomorrow,” my mother went on, desperate to keep up the conversation at all costs. Silence was much too difficult to handle.

“Unpacking, I expect,” I suggested cooperatively. “General settling in. And then perhaps we get down to normal duties. Mother Katherine said that postulants spend most of the time doing housework.”

“Good God!” said my father, “do they realize how bad you are at housework? You’re always dropping things and you never seem to see the dirt. I don’t expect they’ll keep you long,” he added facetiously, but he sounded suddenly hopeful. Somehow I knew that he would actually be angry if the Order sent me home like an unwelcome parcel. But, “You probably won’t stand that for long,” he added quite cheerfully.

“Oh, it won’t be too bad,” I added firmly.

There was silence once more. Then my father cleared his throat. I knew he was trying to say something important.

“Look!” he said awkwardly, swerving dangerously round a truck. “You mustn’t be ashamed if you decide that the life isn’t for you. Don’t feel, will you, that anyone will think any the less of you if you don’t stick it out. It’ll be hard to admit that you’ve made a mistake. But if you find that you have, we’ll still be proud of you—even more proud of you, if you see what I mean.”

Lindsey shuddered as though some indecency had been spoken. The air hummed with embarrassment. As a family we just did not say that kind of thing to one another. Reserve characterized our conversations entirely. We chatted endlessly about trivia but left the big things unsaid. My father, I knew, had said something important, but none of us knew how to cope with it. How sad it all is, I thought. Each of us is locked away from the others. And now we’ll never learn to talk deeply. So many things will never be said. Because now it’s too late.

“Candy?” asked my mother again, and this time we all accepted, filling the void with the business of unwrapping and sucking.

And now here we were at Kings Cross, still smiling cheerfully, more anxious than ever not to mar these very last moments with tearfulness and grief. Five more minutes. We ought to say something memorable, something to mark the occasion as a momentous one. I should speak this time; my father had done his bit. He was glancing round the station, trying to focus his attention on something that would distract him from what was really happening. What could I say to them? “Thank you for all you have done for me"? “I’ll be thinking of you and praying for you always"? It sounded so glib and meaningless, though I meant it all.

“Well,” my mother said brightly, “the train’s going to leave on time. That’s perfect. We’ll just have time to get to the theatre.”

They were all going to a matinee performance of The Sound of Music. We had the record at home. Those pretty nuns, that irrepressible postulant, the wise superior. A good choice in many ways. The religious life cut down to fit the limitations of the stage—cozy, comprehensible, and painless. I knew that the real thing wasn’t going to be like that. The nuns I was joining in a couple of hours must smile at it. Of course it would be different.

“Got your suitcase?” asked my father helplessly, though he had put it on the rack with his own hands.

“Yes!” I said heartily. “There it is.”

“What time do you get there?” asked Lindsey, making a huge effort. She still looked at me, lost in a dream of horror.

“Four-fifteen,” I replied, though we had been through all this hundreds of times already. “I’ll be there in time for tea.”

We looked at one another.

Silence.

“I do hope you enjoy it,” I said. “The Sound of Music, I mean. You’ll have to tell me all about it when you write.”

God, couldn’t I think of anything better than that?

We gazed at one another for five long seconds. The smiles never once faltered. If only we could get this all over with, I thought sadly. It’ll be so much easier for them once I’ve really gone. I couldn’t bear what I was doing to them. In a way their cheerful bravery was a reproach. If only they’d behaved a little less impeccably so that I could feel a bit cross with them. But that wasn’t fair, I knew. The next few minutes stretched ahead like a lifetime, filled with sadness and ambivalence. After that, once the train had disappeared in a smooth curve, there would be nothing between me and the convent. These last miserable moments were the first step along the road of sacrifices that would take me to God and a happiness and significance that were too great to imagine. In the meantime my family and I stared at one another, still smiling.

Then a whistle. Slamming doors. A hiss of steam.

“Good-bye!” I screamed, and at that terrible moment a feeling of panic and grief hit me like a physical force. I really was going. I’d done it now. I leaned perilously out the window, kissing my mother, my father quickly, snatching the last moment before I was torn from their embrace by the train carrying me slowly but irrevocably away from them.

“Good-bye, darling,” said my baffled father. “I know you’ll be very happy.”

I continued to wave, fighting back the tears that stung my eyes as we pulled out. For the first time in my life my family suddenly looked very small and distant. Finally they disappeared.

How had it all begun?

I was born in Worcestershire, some fifteen miles outside Birmingham in a little place called Wildmoor. Now it has been swallowed up in housing projects. Then it consisted only of a row of small artisans’ cottages half a mile from a little shop that sold everything from fuel oil and candles to groceries and sweets. On the third point of the triangle, two suburban semidetached houses stuck out incongruously. We lived in one of these. It was tiny, but it had a large garden that backed onto a ploughed field. This was also the local cess pit, for on Mondays huge pipes conveying the local sewage flowed through our garden, filling the house with a subdued but acrid stench. It was quite primitive. There was no running water downstairs and kitchen water had to be jacked out of a little pump in the garden. Every day my father would drive off to Birmingham to work and leave my mother alone in the house.

My mother so wanted to create a happy home for me, shielded from the disturbance that had been too much a part of her own childhood. She was the second daughter of a pharmacist and had grown up in Essex. Her elder sister, Mary, was my grandmother’s favorite—not my grandfather’s. I rarely remember him as preferring anybody or anything much to anyone else. He was a quiet, scholarly man. He should have gone to college, but there was no money, and he contented himself with reading—especially history. As the years went on his reading became a retreat. He had plenty to retreat from, poor man. My grandmother, a small, vital woman, was notoriously unfaithful to him and from my mother’s earliest years had a string of lovers, one being the father of her best friend at school. When Eileen, my mother, was twelve, Granny got tuberculosis—all her family died of it—and went to live in a sanatorium in Switzerland for two years. My mother went with her, thus wrecking her education. She learned skiing and Swiss-German but little else. There’s a cartoon at home done by one of the other patients there at that time. It shows my grandmother clasped passionately in the arms of a faceless man and my mother standing looking at them, a plain little girl with a skirt far too short for her, knickers showing. The caption reads: “I think I had better go to bed now, Mummy.”

On their return to England the procession of men resumed but, an added horror, my grandmother started to drink. By the time the war broke out she was an alcoholic, secretly drinking neat gin in the bathroom. From the time she was fifteen my mother felt she was in charge of the whole mess. But she escaped. My great-uncle, with whom she stayed sometimes, used to frequent the local pub, and, after closing time, he would gather up all his drinking companions and take them back to his house. There the drinking continued and my mother played the piano for them when she was on leave. On one of these evenings she met my father, who fell in love with her while she was playing the piano and singing a song called “Little Brown Bird”. Almost a Victorian set-piece.

My father, however, was no callow romantic. At this time he was in his forties, twenty years older than my mother, and a bit of a rake. At the age of four he had come over to England from Ireland, where his father had run a village post office and was a respected member of the little community. He never made it in England, however. My father grew up in a Birmingham slum, left school at fourteen, and, after various fits and starts, eventually began a quite successful business as a scrap metal merchant.

When my mother met him there had been many women in his life, but she nailed him. He was a handsome man. Very tall—well over six feet—he stood broad-shouldered and solid, with a firm face and a lot of black, wavy hair. He loved clothes and decked himself out with flamboyance.

The match came in for heavy opposition. My grandmother refused to have anything to do with it, and her family told my mother firmly that she was neglecting her responsibilities and was mad to marry a man so much older than herself who would never, it was clear, be much of a success. She stood firm, though. My father paid for the wedding, which was poorly attended on my mother’s side. And a very successful marriage began.

My father loved life and the things of this world. He adored good food and drink. He used to draw and paint and developed an interest in antiques, which he sought out with the zeal of a lover, filling the house with beautiful things. He loved travel and would frequently whisk my mother off to the French Riviera. He made quite a lot of money from scrap metal but never saved a penny of it. What he had he spent recklessly and generously. When their friends asked him how on earth he could afford to take us all to the south of France every summer, he smiled charmingly and replied, “I can’t.” He rescued my mother from the grimness of her youth and taught her to enjoy herself. Neither of them ever looked at anyone else.

Under his influence my mother opened out like a flower. From a pudgy adolescent, she became a slim, glamourous woman. She had dark hair, bright alert eyes, and a full mouth. With my father she ate and drank like a princess, entertained his enormous circle of friends, and went with them on perilous midnight tobogganing expeditions where, clinging to my father, she hurtled dangerously through the darkness. My earliest memories are of lying upstairs on my cot, listening to the hum of voices downstairs, the laughter of the assembled company, and the clinking of glasses.

At the outset of her married life, my mother was an indifferent housekeeper. Unlike her neighbors, she sat quite happily amid the breakfast debris, reading the paper until well into the morning. She scandalized Mrs. Jefferson next door by not getting her washing out to dry until Saturday. What cleaning there was was done by Mrs. Meacham, a fat, gingery woman with a loud cheery voice who came in daily from the cottages. “Meachey” was not much of a one for cleaning either. When she had had enough she called to my mother, who was reading in the back room: “I’m just going to take Karen to see the pigs!” and my mother would agree happily, settling back to enjoy a peaceful half-hour, knowing that I would be well looked after. Meachey would put me on the handlebars of her bicycle and wheel me to her cottage. I loved her, purely and simply. We went through the front door straight into the downstairs room where I was given a glass of orange juice. Then, as a part of the ritual, I visited the outside privy, which I considered a great treat. Finally we went down the narrow strip of garden to a corrugated fence and Meachey lifted me up. There, inside the little enclosure, were the pigs: one pink and one black and white, snorting and messy. I used to look at them solemnly, thinking what a nice, sensible life they led, wallowing in the mud and straw. Sometimes I helped to feed them and relished the decaying smell of the sloppy food. It was even more special when there were squealing little piglets, too, shrieking and sleek, fighting to be first at the trough, hankering for life. Next time I went they had disappeared, and some instinct of self-preservation told me not to ask where they had gone. The sty seemed very empty.

Apart from my parents, Meachey, and the pigs, I had no other companions. There were no children of my age in Wildmoor and I lived in a little cocoon of family. I was never lonely. As soon as I could walk and talk I lived an intensely imaginative life. On Sunday afternoons my father would take me for a walk. This was a special event. We went right down to the little brook and played “pooh sticks”, and on my way home I visited all my “friends”. Certain bushes and trees along the country lanes housed fairies, and we used to knock at a bush, enter, and have tea and a chat. I always felt very proud to show my handsome father to these friends of mine, and he patiently sat there, crouched on a tree stump, pretending to drink tea, entering gamely into the spirit of the thing. He had not been keen to have children initially; he felt he was too old to adapt to their demands, but once we arrived he loved being a father. He never wanted sons.

When I was three and a half my mother presented me with a sister, Lindsey Madeleine. She was too young to play with for a long time. She was a noisy, vivacious baby and extremely restless. As soon as she could sit up, she ruined the pram by forcing her head through the canvas hood. We must have looked an odd trio on our afternoon walks, my mother pushing a battered and muddy pram with Lindsey’s head thrust through the hole in the hood, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, waiting patiently while I stood chattering into a thornbush.

When he got home in the evening, my father always read to me before I went to bed. My mother also read to me during the day, and together we listened to the story on “Listen with Mother,” and later I joined her for the story on “Woman’s Hour.” No matter that I could not understand it; I loved the words. My father bought me a lot of books and I quickly knew them by heart, we read them so frequently. If my mother tried to skip a page, I knew instantly and made her go back and read the thing through in full. Reading was not just a matter of finding out what happened in a story; it was a ritual. It was the words that mattered. The characters of the books became realities to me when I played alone. I had endless conversations with Little Grey Rabbit and her ménage. There was one book that was a special favorite. It concerned a hedgehog called Harry and featured human beings as creatures called “mortals”. I can’t remember much about the story, but the word mortal, once I knew what it meant, colored the rather somber story with melancholy. Whenever my mother or Meachey offered to read to me, I produced Harry the Hedgehog till they both got heartily sick of it. But it was no use offering me anything else. My mother thought the book was morbid and quietly disposed of it. I noticed its absence and guessed what had happened. It was no use complaining. Adults were omnipotent and I mourned the lost book, trying to recapture the beautiful sadness as best I could. I bided my time.

One day when my grandmother was staying with us, she took me on the village bus into a nearby market town for tea. We did some shopping and she offered to buy me a book, which was the best present I could have. In the children’s department I scoured the shelves with eagle eye. I knew exactly what I was looking for. Granny offered me one or two books, but I shook my head. At last I saw it. I couldn’t read but I recognized Harry himself on the cover.

“That one!” I cried.

Granny looked at it.

“Harry the Hedgehog?” she read. I nodded firmly.

“Are you sure that’s the one you want, dear?” She was puzzled by my insistence but finally agreed.

My mother and Meachey were having a cup of tea when we returned. I tried not to look too triumphant. I wanted to be generous in my victory.

“Granny’s bought me a new book!” I said, cuddling up to my mother with a winning smile.

“Aren’t you a lucky girl! Say thank you to Granny!”

“I already have,” I answered truthfully and produced my parcel. “Look, Meachey!” I said innocently.

She looked. “Oh, no!” she wailed. “Oh, my God! Not Harry the Hedgehog! Oh, Mrs. Armstrong! I can’t stand it!”

“It was a pity we lost the old one,” I said sweetly. “Isn’t it kind of Granny? Let’s have it tonight.”

But mortality had already entered our safe little home. I had been told that my mother would be bringing home a new baby. She prepared me for the event very carefully and bought me a doll, a crib, and a pram, so that I could be occupied with my baby and not feel jealous. The baby, alas, was a breech birth, and the little blonde girl, christened Caroline, died of a lung infection. I remember nothing of my own expectations about the baby, nor my disappointment when my mother came home alone. But I do remember the sadness and the sense of loss that pervaded the house, bravely hidden but strongly felt. I once came upon Meachey and an aunt in close conversation in the kitchen.

“It’s a shame,” Meachey was saying, “a crying shame!”

There was nothing unusual in this. Meachey’s conversation tended to be rather lugubrious at the best of times. What was different was the way they both stopped talking as soon as they saw me, bustled me out of the room, and talked with affected cheerfulness of something else. Something was being kept from me, something sad, and I felt frightened and excluded. I took to carrying around the house the doll my mother had bought me. Her name was Trudi and she went everywhere with me. I felt obscurely that it was vital to keep Trudi safe, and that if I kept a stern eye on her it would ward off this terrible thing that had entered the house. I found great comfort in the fact that Trudi was rubber.

“She won’t ever break, will she?” I pestered my father. “She’ll be with me always, even when I’m old?”

“No, she won’t break,” he answered.

“Will she break if I drop her?”

“No. Try it and see.”

I closed my eyes tightly and flung Trudi on the ground and then dared not look. “It’s all right,” my father promised. It was. Trudi lay there on the ground, undignified and outraged but still miraculously whole.

“It’s all right,” I promised her that night. “I’ll always look after you. Nothing will ever happen to you.”

My mother was in bed for a long time after she came home from the hospital, and I felt that I must be near her to keep this thing, whatever it was, at bay, to assure myself that everything was really just the same as ever. (Of course, once death entered my life, nothing would ever be quite the same again.) Book in hand, I waddled sternly into her bedroom, climbed up onto the bed, and nestled down near her. The closer I got, the safer she’d be. “Sing it! Sing it!” I demanded, thrusting the book firmly into her hand. Sensing my need of her, my mother read on bravely, hour after hour. Sitting close together, we made a cocoon of security. It was an incantation holding away the sadness of life.

To all intents and purposes life continued smoothly in the same peaceful, uneventful way. Yet fear, dating perhaps from Caroline’s death, was always there and emerged in my dreams. Dragons pursued me endlessly over terrifying, undulating hills night after night. I remember dreaming once that my father was dead, and a desolation filled me as I knelt beside his strangely changed body, weeping, “Come back, Daddy! Come back!”

It must have been about this time that I hit upon a magical way of leaving this frightening world behind and entering into my own world of beauty and order. Sometimes on weekends or on summer evenings when my father got home we went for a picnic in the nearby Farley woods. Once we hit upon a perfect place, but we never went there again. It was a beech wood and it was bluebell time. The little glade was completely enclosed by walls of pale green leaves broken only by sharp shafts of sunlight. The ground was a blurred mass of blue. It was the most perfect place I had ever seen. It was not just the beauty, it was the peace. The fears and that horrible shadowy reality that now lurked at the corners of my life were shut out and I was safe with my parents. They were talking together and I was left to listen or to think as I chose, knowing that they were there. I gave the experience of that hour a private name. I called it “putsh”. Peace, safety, beauty, and privacy.

“Putsh” became an important concept for me. Whenever I thought we were near the woods, I called out “Putsh!” from the back of the car, to my parents’ bewilderment. Whenever life became troublesome, I repeated the word over and over again as a talisman, trying to bring that beauty and order back into my life. Nobody could understand what I wanted, but I didn’t want them to. It was like a magic secret. If I told anyone, the magic would go away.

Though I longed to go back to the little glade, there was one special means I discovered for arriving at “putsh” inside my own head. We had an old wind-up Gramophone, and I learned to work this myself. I found the exact spot on the carpet, and then, crouched in a fetal position, I rocked backward and forward to the music. Swaying to and fro like that, I found I could empty my mind of everything but a heightened sense of things. Death and sadness no longer existed and I moved in an atmosphere of limitless perfection. This lasted for years and left in me a hunger for infinite horizons that later I learned to transfer to religion. After all, God is the ultimate perfection, and as the world grew more and more distressing when I grew older, I found myself searching for Him to find that peace permanently.

The seclusion of my childhood ended abruptly on the day I first went to school. I’d looked forward to it for weeks. My mother had told me enthusiastically what fun I would have. I felt important trying on my school uniform—bottle-green gym slip, bulky tie, fawn sweater, all several sizes too big for me to allow for growth. But now, as I sat next to my father in the front seat of the car, the thick Harris tweed coat felt like a suit of armour. It was a wet, dark morning, and the long journey into Birmingham seemed a trek from one world into another. I peered with difficulty from under the huge brim of my green velour hat and saw the trees straining despairingly in the wind, which blew shrilly and threateningly.

The windshield wipers shrieked as they made their jerky journey backward and forward, sloshing the rain into deep pools and rivulets.

“How does the uniform feel?” Daddy asked. I could hear the strained heartiness in his voice and tried to reassure him.

“Very nice, thank you, Daddy.” My voice seemed squeaky and came out in a rush as though it didn’t belong to me. I swallowed and felt a great lump in my throat, and when I tried to breathe my chest was constricted with fear.

My father looked at me. Pigtails stuck out awkwardly beneath the hat. My face, never very rosy, was now almost the same greenish hue as my uniform, and the sprinkling of freckles across my nose stood out in stark relief. They seemed an incongruous memento of a carefree summer.

“You do look smart!” he said. “The nuns will think you look nice! Just like a proper schoolgirl.”

I did my best to smile. The nuns. What a strange word that was! I had heard a lot about them recently. I must call them “Sister” or “Mother”, and they loved Jesus and would teach me to read. They were very kind people and I would love them dearly.

Clutching my father’s hand I made my way down the school drive. Everywhere there were little girls. But they didn’t seem little to me. Most of them towered above me. Still trying fiercely to smile, I let go of my father’s hand. I wanted him to go quickly so that he would not witness my possible failure in this frightening new world. But I also longed for him to stay, to take me home.

“Hello, Mr. Armstrong.” I looked up quickly and thankfully; that somebody knew his name was reassuring.

I recoiled. There peering up at my father was the strangest creature I had ever seen. It was covered from head to foot in black robes that formed a solid wall of musty-smelling darkness, like winter coats hanging up to dry. Glancing at the ground I saw two feet shod in gleaming black leather. Then the wall rose in perpendicular folds. No legs. Cautiously, the little girls quite forgotten as I stared in fascination, I reached out for the skirt and touched it gingerly, lifting it slightly to see whether I could discover the missing limbs. Yes, ankles. I lifted it further to see for a brief second two sturdy black calves. Then a hand reached out and deftly seized my hands, ending any further exploration, and I was pulled gently up against her. Somehow I knew that this creature was friendly. My eyes traveled up. Some way above me a black and silver object gleamed. I recognized it from my few visits to church but had never seen such a big one on a person before: Jesus on the cross, I told myself wonderingly. Then I looked up, puzzled, to the face, small and putty-colored. I searched in vain for hair. The voice was deep. Did it belong to a man or a woman? It was explaining things to my father.

“Yes, four o’clock.”

“Right, Mother, I’ll be there,” he said. Mother? A woman, then. I gaped incredulously. I looked up again at the face. There was so little of it that I could see. There was a wart, I noticed, on the top lip. Did all nuns have one?

“Come along, Karen,” and I was led away from the alarming din; this friendly “Mother” would interpret the world for me. I was safe with her.

Gradually I learned to adapt to the aggressive and turbulent life of the classroom and the playground. I learned to read very quickly and discovered the joy of losing myself entirely in books without my parents’ help. Otherwise work bored me somewhat. As I grew older and was set small tasks for homework, I skipped through them as best I could, relying on my wits to get me through. But during my time in the Junior School two incidents impressed themselves forcibly on me, setting a pattern that would profoundly influence me in the future—my love for a challenge.

The first occurred when I was eight. We had by then moved into Birmingham, and my parents decided that I should learn to swim. Three times a week we went to the strange echo-filled swimming baths where a fearsome lady called Mrs. Brewster gave free instruction. The first stages of swimming were pleasant enough, but at length it was time to learn to dive. I was terrified. The idea of falling head foremost through the air, seeing the glittering water rush to meet me, was appalling. I refused to do it, hating myself for my cowardice. At length Mrs. Brewster had had enough of my evasion. She picked me up in her brawny arms, taking no heed of my frantic kicking and screams for help, and strode to the brink of the pool. “One, two, three!” she called and hurled me head first into the water. I flew dizzily; the sinister blue water dazzled terrifyingly for a moment, and then there was nothing but a confusion of water and sound.

I found myself standing in the pool, dazed, yes, exhausted, but also exhilarated. I had survived. And I had done it. I had done it. From that moment swimming became heaven for me. A chunky child, I was altogether without physical grace, but now the water became my element. And I’d learned that to find freedom from my limitations I had to push myself beyond what I thought I could do.

The second incident centered that same year on an encyclopedia called A Path to Knowledge. It was a four-volume work that my father had seen advertised and he urged me to read a little of it every day.

“While your mind is young, you’ll learn lots of things that will stay with you all through your life. Knowledge is one of the most important things in the world. It gives you freedom.”

The volumes looked important in their dark green binding with gold lettering. Glancing through them I discovered that the best part was definitely Volume IV, where there was a lot about writers and poetry and some history, too, the things that I liked best at school. But I closed that volume firmly. Knowledge was a serious business. I had to start at the beginning and work through to the end. Dipping in here and there was a frivolity. I knew the rules of life: before you were allowed cake for tea you had to eat your bread and butter. Also the title of the work enthralled me. A path lay ahead, down which I would heroically overcome all obstacles, grappling with huge intellectual difficulties until at the end knowledge loomed gloriously. And I would do it alone.

So chapter by chapter, page by page, I dragged myself on through all four volumes. My eyes glazed with boredom, I ploughed my way through the dusty paths of mathematics, science, industry, and commerce. One evening, as I was engaged with a study of the iron and steel trade, my father came into the room.

“Oh, you’re reading the encyclopedia, are you?”

I glowed with satisfaction at his pleasure.

“What are you reading now?” he asked, looking over my shoulder, and, ablaze with virtue, I announced:

“Trades.”

“Trades?” said my father, surprised. “Do you like that?”

“Well, no, this bit is awfully boring.”

My father scratched his head, bewildered. “Then why on earth read it?”

I explained. My father looked at me as though he had spawned a monster and then threw back his head and roared with laughter. Helpless, he staggered to the bed and collapsed, shoulders heaving with mirth. Then, seeing my indignation, he explained to me how to use an encyclopedia. It was a relief to put Volume II back on the shelf and open the enticing Volume IV. But I had a lingering suspicion that I had cheated.

One thing that school did for me in those early years was to introduce me to religion. At home religion was cut down to a minimum. My father was a recent convert to Catholicism and never felt completely at home in the church. When we went to Mass he knelt there, glasses on the end of his nose, peering dubiously at his English translation of the Latin that was being gabbled mechanically at the altar.

It took years for religion to mean much more than this to me—an hour of excruciating boredom on Sunday morning which I longed to be over and done with. “Can’t we go to seven o’clock Mass, Mummy?” I’d plead, knowing that we would then be home just after eight and the rest of the day would be my own. Often I got up at six on Sunday mornings and walked to Mass by myself, arriving home just in time to wave off my family who were dutifully setting off for the nine o’clock Mass. I watched them go with a heady sense of freedom.

But gradually religion got through to me. At school we lived the rhythm of the church’s year, and that rhythm formed the liturgical background to my own view of life. At Lent the drapings of the altar turned to purple. Gloomy hymns were sung; I listened to the story of Jesus’ fight with the devil in the wilderness after his six weeks’ fast. Lent became a heroic and arduous pilgrimage. We were taught to make “acts”. “What are you giving up for Lent?” we asked one another. Sweets, sugar in tea, watching television? Or, “What are you going to do for Lent?” Go to Mass twice, three times a week? Every day? Say the rosary regularly? Make a special effort not to quarrel?

The possibilities were endless, and, for me, Lent became another race with myself. Can I keep it up? Can I go to Mass every day for six solid weeks, through the wet, cold spring mornings? Can I force myself to say the rosary every single evening? Lent grew darker; at Passiontide the statues in the convent were covered in purple drapes and stood there clumsy, bulky, and reproachful. For always by that time I had failed. There would be the morning I slammed down the alarm clock as it pealed heartlessly at six o’clock and turned over for another half-hour in bed. Or the orgy of eating sweets. Failure. But I persevered. Now let’s have another go during Passiontide. Only two weeks—you can do it; you can do it. Then Holy Week: the long dramatic services that spoke to me more deeply than I could readily put into words. The long lines of people on Good Friday bending to kiss the feet of the crucified Christ, the aching knees. The church stripped and empty in deep mourning. And then suddenly it was Holy Saturday night. We’d stand outside the church at eleven o’clock while the priest struck a new flame and lit the great Paschal candle. Flame passed then to each of us as we handed the Easter light to one another. And then the procession wove its way into the pitch-black church, the light of Easter piercing the darkness, overcoming it as more and more of us entered the church with our candles.

“The light of Christ!” chanted the priest.

“Thanks be to God!” we replied in unison.

The ancient symbolism spoke to something very deep in me. There was the joy of that moment at midnight when suddenly all the electric lights were switched on, flowers were rushed to the stark altars, the organ—silent during the six weeks of Lent—pealed joyously, and all the congregation took out the bells they had brought and rang them: “Christ is risen.” Death is swallowed up in victory.

I must have been just twelve years old when death once again threatened our family. One Sunday afternoon my sister Lindsey, who was then nine, complained of a sore throat. I didn’t take much notice.

Lindsey and I rarely got on well together; we were too different. She was an attractive child with huge blue myopic eyes and long, dark plaits. Her beauty threw my own plump toothiness into harsher relief, I felt. So did her charm. She was a charismatic child who, wherever she was, attracted a swarm of friends. I had friends, too, in a quiet sort of way, but not spectacularly like Lindsey. At home I liked to be quiet and I resented Lindsey’s constant claims on my time and energy. I wanted to read; Lindsey wanted to play. I hated conflict and quarreling. She, turbulent and dramatic by nature, loved it, goading me into arguments and rows. So on that first afternoon of her illness I glanced briefly from my book as she was shepherded up to bed and smiled to myself at the prospect of a couple of days of peace.

But her temperature soared up and up. After two days she was weeping with the pain in her throat, until finally she could scarcely breathe. I heard people whisper “Diphtheria” darkly, and the house was filled with doctors and muttered consultations. My parents crept about looking pale and stricken and I was left to my own devices. Huddled miserably in a corner of the dining room, I tried to read but couldn’t. I could scarcely think. Outside the cold March evening blew wetly. Oh, my God, if she died how would I ever forgive myself? I kept thinking of that afternoon when I had repeatedly refused to play with her, and she had gone to my father and climbed on his knee. “I do love Karen so. Why is she always so horrid to me?” At the time I had been disgusted, wondering how anyone could descend to such a sentimental method of getting her own way. Now, inevitably, the words returned with terrible poignancy. If she died, how would my parents ever be able to forgive me for my rejection of my little sister? And how would I be able to forgive myself? She was so small. Death seemed monstrously unfair.

If God took Lindsey away now, He could take anyone at any time. The world once more seemed a frightening and unpredictable place, as it had after Caroline died and those dragons pursued me over endless hills in my dreams.

In bed that night I thought I should be quite unable to sleep. “Dear God,” I prayed before getting into bed, “if you make Lindsey better I’ll always be nice to her.” Outside I could hear the specialist going downstairs to make a phone call. I heard the door closing behind him, and my ears strained in the darkness trying to catch a sound. Nothing. Death made everything fraught with anxiety. “Dear God,” I found myself continuing, “if Lindsey gets better I’ll think about being a nun.”

I listened to myself in astonishment. Why had I promised that? Never in my wildest moment had I ever considered being a nun. The thought of the renunciation involved took my breath away. I heard the surgeon padding quietly upstairs. I heard my mother’s voice, strained and anxious, talking about an ambulance. Just a word here and there. But I didn’t hear any tears. My mother despised tears. And then suddenly I dropped off to sleep.

In the morning Lindsey was better. She had had a huge inflammation in her throat, and the surgeon had been just about to perform a tracheotomy when the poisonous thing broke and she could breathe again. We could all breathe again, but now once more the world seemed ringed round with a threat. I had forgotten how insubstantial life really was; Caroline’s death had been so long ago. There would be many times in the next three or four years when I would forget this again, but Lindsey’s illness had scarred my trust in life, and from time to time I would taste again that frightening emptiness of the world I lived in.

I kept remembering the promise I’d made to God. It almost seemed as though someone else had made it for me while I was off guard. Who? God? Had He been trying to tell me something? I turned away from that idea; it was full of disturbing implications, but time and again in the years to come I would flinch at the memory uneasily. Now I tried to salve my conscience. I only said I’d think about it, I reassured myself. I didn’t say I’d actually do it.