About nuns.

Nuns are on my mind.

Which is a strange thing for me to say because most of the time I make sure nuns are neither on my mind or anywhere near me.

But I’ve been listening to Karen Armstrong‘s The Spiral Staircase, her memoir of life in a convent, and life after leaving the convent. And without even realising the theme I had going, I began to read Maureen McCarthy‘s The Convent, a novel based on her family’s experience and life over decades in a local convent.

Yikes.

My view of nuns is coloured absolutely by my having been educated by them. In primary school, that also meant being abused by them. Strapped, slapped, poked, pulled, pummelled, thrown, whacked, shaken. Beaten. Screamed at. Punished.

The first couple of years at school, if you were lucky, you got a soft nun who didn’t lead with her fists. She possibly introduced a bit of slapping in the second year.

The third year there was the nun who in the first half hour opened her desk drawer and introduced the class to her ruler, which she hoped she would never have to use. On us. Which was a lie, because her reputation had preceded her. She loved having that ruler out of the drawer. Any excuse and she could be, and would be, ferocious with it. Particularly on our bare legs.

She taught a class of seven, and sometimes eight, year olds.

It was an unwritten law. No child bothered or dared tell their parents what happened at school. Mothers were all, “those nuns have given up their lives for God, I hope you’re not making things harder for them” about it. But someone’s mother came up to complain to the principal. As far as we knew, no parent, no mother, had ever taken such action before. The scandal electrified us.  The next day the girl said her mother had been told that poor Ruler Nun couldn’t help it. She just suffered with terrible headaches, migraines in fact.

We couldn’t understand the explanation.

In grade four, the nun used the stick end of the feather duster on our legs, arms, hands, backs and bottoms. She might also, if our desk lid was askew, whack us over the head with the offending book she found under it, before throwing it across the room. If needs must she made do with the pointer as a weapon, or threw the blackboard duster into our heads.

Grade five and six it was the strap. For which we queued outside the front office each morning. Boys had to bend over, girls hold up bare hands. Six whacks. Was it best to go first, before she was properly warmed up, or towards the end, when she must be tiring? Did it help to spit on your hands before, or blow on them afterwards? If you lost your nerve and tried to take your hand back at the last minute, your fingers could be lashed. And you’d get three more for your brazenness.

Whack! Whack! Thwack! You could hear the strap slice through the air. Was a random attack and a nun out of control better or worse than one tied to time and place and an orderly queue?

Don’t laugh, don’t cry. Let it be over. Let us be in secondary school, where the nuns don’t touch you, if you’re a girl. There will be other ways to humiliate and mortify and destroy you, but in primary school you don’t know this. You only know no strap!

Most of the punishments were for talking in class, at assembly, or in the morning line up. Sometimes, we were punished for laughing.

I grew up and older and tried to forgive them. I thought of those nuns, in the blaze of summer and weighed down by all those clothes. It must have been terrible! Often inadequately trained and with all those children to take care of!  I reminded myself that they were second class citizens in the church they gave up their lives for. Unlike the priests they couldn’t go out alone, drive a car, eat in public, visit their families, or be the centre of attention.

I tried.

These books make me realise how stripped down nuns were. They were trained to totally lose themselves, to have no thoughts, ideas, generosity, laughter, feelings or conversation outside a very narrow and limited square. They were lost, to themselves and to the world around them. They were, and had always to remain, ego-less.

They were brainwashed.

And while I’m sure there were lovely nuns, soft, kind and wise ones with twinkles in their eyes and goodness in their hearts, I know something else about them from my experience.

They were angry women. Extremely, enormously, and infinitely so.