Eager to get a slice of the action, I said, ‘Fred’s getting on a bit. I’m more agile than he is. Couldn’t I go up the ladder?’
Sister looked at me knowingly.
‘I have no doubt that you are more agile. But if you suggested to Fred that he was getting on and was no longer capable of going up a ladder he would be highly offended. We’ll leave it to him.’
Twenty minutes later Fred came downstairs looking, unusually for him, abashed. The fag that normally hung from his lower lip was not there. He looked different without it.
‘What happened, Fred?’ we chorused.
Knowing that we were agog with anticipation and that he was the only source of information, just to tease us he took out a battered tobacco tin from his pocket and started rolling another thin fag.
‘Oh, Fred. Don’t provoke. Tell us what happened.’
He lit his fag, scratched his head and looked at us with his south-west eye, before saying, ‘Well, I reckon as ’ow I must be ve only bloke in England wot’s seen a nun stark naked.’
‘Oooh!’
He was warmed to his story by our reaction.
‘Well, I gets up ve ladder to ve winder, like, an’ pokes me ’ead in. “Be off with you, fellow,” she calls out. ‘I gotta ge’ in, Sister,’ I says. “Come back another day, if you must; it’s not convenient at the moment.” And she splashes water in me face. Well, I wasn’t expectin’ it, an’ I nearly lost me balance.’
‘Oooh, Fred. Poor Fred.’
He was really enjoying himself.
‘But I grabs ve sides of ve winder an’ hangs on, and says, “I’m sorry, Sister, but I gotta get in. You can’t stay in ’ere all night. You’ll catch yer death o’ cold.” Nah, tricky bit is ve bath’s under the winder, so I ’as ter get in an’ over the bath, wiv ’er in it an’ not fall in meself.’
‘How did you manage that, Fred?’
‘Wiv difficulty ’an injinuity. Jest bein’ smart, like.’
‘Fred, you are so clever.’
‘Nah, nah, jest smart like,’ he said modestly. ‘Worse fing was I drops me fag some’ow, an it floats around ve ole lady. Then I unlocks ve door, and Sisters come in, an’ now I’m goin’ a put me ladders away.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea before you go, Fred?’
‘Well now, vat’s an invitation I can’t resist, if you girls will ’ave one wiv me.’
Of course we would. We would like nothing better. So we all sat down in the big kitchen for a cup of tea and some of Mrs B’s cake and a good old natter.
Upstairs we heard further sounds of movement and voices, then splashing of water and the gurgling of a waste pipe. Then no more. The Greater Silence had begun.
Sister Monica Joan was found in the bicycle shed one winter’s night by Chummy who had been called out at about two o’clock. Again, the angels must have arranged it. If Sister had remained in the shed until morning she would probably have died of hypothermia; she was very thin, having no protective reserves of fat to cover her old bones. Chummy was getting her bicycle out when she heard a movement in the corner of the shed and thought it was a rat – we were all nervous of rats in dark places. She shone her torch over the area and was horrified, and indeed terrified, to see an arm move. Then an imperious voice, accustomed to being obeyed, ordered, ‘Don’t shine the light in my eyes like that! Fetch me a pillow if you want to be useful, but turn the light off.’
Sister Monica Joan was curled up in some old camping equipment, probably dating back to someone’s Girl Guide endeavours. She was very cold and very sleepy, which is a dangerous combination. She resented being disturbed and tried to push Chummy away. ‘Go away with your nasty lights and bothersome noise. Why can’t I be left in peace?’ Chummy carried her into the house and alerted the Sisters as she had to go out to a labouring mother. The Sisters covered the old lady with warm blankets and hot-water bottles and gave her hot drinks. Astonishingly she came to no harm, not even a cold in the nose.
I was in her room a few days later and referred to the night’s adventure. She dismissed it as ‘a lot of fuss about nothing’.
‘Well,’ I remarked, ‘you were lucky that there was some old camping equipment in the shed to cover you, or you might have died of cold.’
‘Camping,’ she said, ‘such fun! We used to love it.’ Her eyes were alight and her voice animated.
‘Camping, Sister?’ I exclaimed. ‘You can’t be serious. You’ve been camping?’
She was offended.
‘Certainly, my dear. You don’t imagine I have done nothing in my life, do you? We used to go camping often, my brothers and sisters, and some friends, with the maid and the manservant. It was wonderful.’
‘A maid and manservant? Camping?’
‘It was perfectly proper – a husband and wife in our service.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of the propriety of the arrangements But servants! Camping ...’ My voice failed me.
‘We needed them, my dear. We needed the man to put up the tents and fetch the water and light the fires and things like that, and we needed the maid to do the cooking.’
‘Well, if you put it like that, Sister, I suppose you did.’
I chuckled quietly, but I don’t think she saw the joke.
One memorable Sunday afternoon Cynthia and I took Sister Monica Joan for a walk. The weather was beautiful, and we decided to take her up to Victoria Park, where there is a lovely lake, and where East Enders would gather with their children in sunny weather. But when the bus arrived it was full, so on the spur of the moment we changed our plan and took the next bus, which was going to Limehouse, and past the canal known as the Cuts. We thought we could have a walk along the towpath. The canal was dug in the nineteenth century to connect the River Lea to the Limehouse Reach of the Thames and was much used by commercial barges until the closure of the Docks in the 1970s. It was always a pleasant area for walking.
When we got there Sister said unexpectedly, ‘I don’t like the Cuts.’
‘Why not, Sister?’
‘A grim place. Bad associations.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The place of suicides. In the old days, the bad old days, when there was no money, no work for the men, no food for the children, every week a cry would be heard: “Body in the Cuts, body in the Cuts,” and always it was a woman. A poor, ragged, half-starved woman, driven to the limits of despair. Once a woman with a baby strapped to her body was dragged out, I was told.’
‘Sister, how terrible. Shall we go away?’
‘No. I want to go and see it for myself. I haven’t been here for forty years, since Beryl died.’
Cynthia and I glanced at each other. We both wanted to hear the story, but didn’t want to disturb her thoughts, in case they flitted off onto something quite unconnected, and the story was lost. But the dark water, barely moving, seemed to focus her attention, and she continued.
‘They told me she jumped off Stinkhouse Bridge one night, and her body was dragged out the next day. I wasn’t surprised. No one was. She had a brute of a husband, seven children, another expected, no money, and a hovel to live in – the usual story. It is only surprising more women didn’t do it. Every child’s fear, you know, was that one day things would get so bad that mother would jump into the Cuts.’
She raised her hand, took hold of the cross that hung around her neck and held it up over the canal. She called out, ‘Be sanctified, you black and wicked waters. Rest in peace, Beryl, unloved wife, weeping mother. May the lamentations of your children sanctify these turgid deeps.’
What the people around thought of this little exhibition I cannot say, but several of them gave her rather funny looks.
Sister was in good form and continued, ‘Do you know what that brute of a husband said when the vicar informed him that his wife was dead, and how she had died?’
‘No. What?’ we chorused.
‘He said, my dears – the vicar himself told us – the husband said, “Spiteful cat. Spiteful to the last. She knowed as ’ow today’s Newmarket day, and she knowed as ’ow I’m a delicate feelin’ sort o’ chap, so she goes an’ kills ’erself jest to put me out of sorts for the races. I knows ’er nasty ways. Spite it was; pure spite.” Then he walked out. The vicar was left alone in the derelict kitchen, with seven dirty, hungry children around him, for whom he would have to make some sort of provision, if the father wouldn’t. Then the man returned. But he had no thoughts for his children. He walked jauntily up to the vicar, tapped him on the chest and said, “Now you listen ’ere, mate. I wont ’ave no funerals on Friday. Vat’s Epsom day, see? No funerals. I wont ’ave ’er laughin’ twice.”
‘That was the last the vicar saw of him. He didn’t turn up for the funeral, which was on a Tuesday, and he simply abandoned his children. All of them ended up in the Workhouse.’
Sister Monica Joan said no more, and we continued walking. The sun was pleasant, and the ghosts of the past seemed long since asleep. Cynthia and I talked of our plans for the future. She was hoping to test her vocation in the religious life. I knew it was a huge step to take, requiring much thought and prayer, but I had always regarded Cynthia as a saint (or very nearly) and was not surprised. We came to a wooden seat and sat down, and she asked Sister’s opinion.
‘Do you think I am called to be a nun, Sister?’
‘Only God knows. Many are called but few are chosen, my child.’
‘What brought you to the religious life?’
‘The conflict between good and evil. The eternal battle between God and the devil. I tried to resist the call, but it was too strong.’
The nun sat looking at the water. I ventured the question, ‘Was there no other way?’
‘For me, no. For others it is different. You do not have to be a nun to be at war with the devil. To be in the fight, on the side of the angels, is all that matters.’
‘Do you believe in the devil?’ I asked provocatively.
‘Stupid, thoughtless child, of course I do. You only have to look at the record of the Nazis during the war to see the work of the devil.’ The atrocities of the war were vivid in the minds of everyone.
She turned her head away from me scornfully. I had offended her, and she muttered, ‘Thoughtless, empty questions,’ but then said more gently to Cynthia, ‘Test your vocation, my child. Become a Postulant, then a Novice. Time will reveal if you are truly called. It is a hard life, and doubts will always plague you. Just go with God.’
Mention of the Nazis brought to mind what Sister Julienne had told me some time earlier; that there was in Germany a community of Lutheran nuns, started in 1945 or 1946, just after the war, whose vocation was contemplative prayer and repentance for the sins of their fellow countrymen. The women lived a life of extreme privation, as near to concentration camp life as they could get: minimal food (the nuns were all close to starvation), scant clothing, no shoes, no heating in winter, and no beds, just a straw mattress and a thin blanket. And this life they lived in atonement for the sins of others. I had found this story deeply impressive, though I could not really understand the spiritual side of the vocation. I was grappling in my mind with the problems of sin, guilt, atonement, redemption, religious vocation and many unfathomable subjects, when abruptly Sister Monica Joan stood up.
‘The water is not very deep,’ she announced, ‘I don’t see how anyone could drown in it.’
‘It is in the middle,’ I pointed out. ‘It takes cargo barges.’
‘But you can see the bottom. Look, you can see the stones.’
‘That’s only at the edges. Anyway, the water level is low at the moment. I assure you it is deep in the middle.’
‘I don’t believe it. We shall see.’
Before we could stop her, and she was surprisingly nimble, Sister Monica Joan had crossed the few steps to the canal and now stood ankle deep at the water’s edge
.
‘There, I told you,’ she cried triumphantly, ‘the stories about people drowning in the Cuts are just fancy.’ And she took another step towards the centre.
‘Come back’ screamed Cynthia and I in alarm. We leaped into the water beside her, but Sister was too quick for us.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she called out, taking another step forward. But the Cuts was cut away, and instantly she fell forward into deep water.
Cynthia and I were not the only ones to hurl ourselves in after her. As many as a dozen East Enders dived, fully clothed, into the canal that Sunday afternoon. None of us need have bothered. It was immediately obvious that Sister Monica Joan could swim. Her habit did not absorb the water at once, and it floated around her like the wings of a huge black water-fowl. Her head was held high, and her white veil floated behind her like exotic plumage.
All might have been well, and Sister might have swum back to us, had it not been for the enthusiasm of three local lads who dived in from the other bank. They grabbed hold of her and began swimming back whence they had come.
‘No, not that side!’ I screamed. ‘Come back – this side!’ Everyone around, including those in the water, was screaming instructions. We all knew that if the boys landed Sister on the opposite bank there was no towpath exit to the bridge. But the lads did not or could not understand in all the confusion. They had pulled Sister to the middle of the canal and saw themselves as heroes. A powerful man, with muscles of oak and the speed of an Olympic swimmer, reached them first. He clouted one lad around the ear, pushed the other boy under, took hold of the protesting nun and swam back with her to our side.