Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story. Karen Armstrong

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