What's Needed

Fiction is good for the soul. Other books, like the one I’m reading now about girls’ boarding schools, have a rather different effect. This one is what I would call a ‘trigger’. Read Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939-1979 and you will be immediately transported to a time and place where you were made to gargle with TCP or had grazes and cuts swabbed with barely diluted dettol – though admittedly not something described in the book so far.

Wounds healed pretty quickly with the Dettol treatment. I think this book is a healing book, even if painful to read for those of us who endured the boarding school experience at any time during the period it covers. It rekindles associations; the smell of polish and Dettol among others. But far more significant than these sensory associations are the buried memories of toxic relationships which these associations trigger in later life. 

It is strange to think that adult women – nuns in my case – could with impunity vent their internalized anger, frustration, loneliness and perhaps bitter loss on a select few among a couple of hundred girls aged 7 to 15. No physical abuse occurred, but the memory of Sister Dismas endures. She would appear silently in a dormitory, gently stroking the leather strap the nuns wore around their waists as she raised a single dark eyebrow, her attention bearing down on one terrified child, until a frozen silence gripped us all and, in some weird and disturbing way, bound us to her for the rest of our lives. You don’t forget such people.

There were times, when you were still quite young – 8 or 9 perhaps – when you wanted to love these nuns. You might even have tried to hug them. But they did not know what to do with a hug. They had lost the knack. I think they sometimes wanted to return it, but could not, because their straightened lives had accustomed them not to need whatever it is that an eight year old’s needy hug might elicit from them – what needs of their own it might trigger.

Perhaps our own needs as children were channelled into a kind of ornate beauty which stood out all the more because of the starkness of these emotional surroundings. There were the Corpus Christi processions, the silence and safety of the chapel, a sensed presence of something or someone coming through all the Latin and the incense in whom we small girls in our veils (repeatedly darned by the nuns during the holidays) could confide with complete trust. We learned very quickly, I think, that there was no need to say anything or even to think holy thoughts, although I did admittedly once ask to become holy.

My father visited me shortly afterwards (a rare occurrence) to reassure himself that I wasn’t going to become a nun. I wasn’t. Such moments of wanting ‘something else’ for one’s life often come, and then go, in a person’s early years. But they leave behind a sense of need for something like holiness. It might re-surface later, triggered by circumstances or a crisis, or by something evoking what the Corpus Christi processions left in their wake, like trailing incense. It is easy to confuse holiness with ‘atmosphere’. But worse is the way we can render ourselves incapable of recognising holiness, and our need for it, when we come across it in other people, which we do whenever love is returned.

Children feel holiness initially as having to do with being made to feel uniquely significant and wanted. The same is true of the elderly and the vulnerable. So governments, though secular, have a duty to be holy and to nurture holiness in others, beginning with children and all vulnerable people. Their duty does not lie in shoring up the system but in loving the people. The same could be said of the Church.

Governments might begin such a systemic transformation by focusing on schools where there are insufficient teachers, or where teachers are hampered in their duty of loving care by the kind of perverse legalism which forbids them to hug a child or tend to him or her physically if that child is hurt. Governments could focus their attention, and their funding, on hospitals where cuts have rendered whatever medical care they can give ineffectual in the longer term. Or they could look to the real needs of understaffed care homes where loving care is sometimes in very short supply.

As with the convent of my school days, holiness, which is love, is no less available to policy makers or senior clergy than it is to children. Indeed, it is required of us all and is there for the asking. Christ has promised as much.