Blue, Green, Red and Purple: Stella Maris
‘Mortify the flesh’, they cried, rapping us
on the head with the wedding rings they wore as the Brides of Christ,
and helping us do so with sharp cuts over the knuckles...
Betty Collins writes of a pain-filled convent education.
a stone convent cuddled in damply to fit
mossy bushy mountainside facing east of the peninsula:
the sun sets at 2.30 p.m. in the winter, and my parents are
ushered into the shadowy parlor whispering ‘pull your socks up’
while a distant bell dongs: One, pause; One: pause (which
I afterwards learn is the call for the Mother Superior;
my suited father sits cross legged with his fedora on his knee,
and my freshly marcel-waved mother coughs a little nervously.
beneath the Sacred Heart of Jesus in a large frame on the wall.
I am being inaugurated to the sisterhood of navy blue serge
and long black stockings, and offering up the heat in summer for ‘the Souls in Purgatory’:
‘Mortify the flesh’, they cried, rapping us
on the head with the wedding rings they wore as the Brides of Christ,
and helping us do so with sharp cuts over the knuckles
with the edge of a metal ruler on cold mornings;
‘staying in ‘ after school to rewrite badly written homework
and to practise pages and pages of copperplate handwriting:
or Italic script with special pens:
or just to write a hundred lines like
‘I must not make fun of the teachers’
We thought the nuns were hypocritical,
because they were always all smiles to our parents
while to us they seemed torturers.
Yet on my last day at school,
I cried and cried and cried and cried.
They made pretty good citizens of us, I suppose,
and I often think of the Souls in Purgatory.
