ThE CONVENT GiRls: KAREN ARMSTRONq

Double-think and dreary dances
Peter Stanford talks to former nun Karen Armstrong about her schooldays
FROM her earliest schooldays until the age of fourteen Karen Armstrong was convinced that she was damned. Her sin had been to find a penny on the cloakroom floor of her Birmingham Convent school, and to pocket it to pay her bus fare, rather than hand it in to the nuns as conscience dictated. To the young Karen such a crime was a mortal sin, despite the fact that she had lost her bus fare, and that, even by the standards of the 1950s a penny hardly constituted the "grave matter" which the catechism spoke of. Subsequent concealment at confession compounded her guilt and unhappiness, and it was only when she had the occasional impure thought at the age of fourteen that the stolen penny loomed less large on her burdened conscience.
Convent schooldays led straight onto entry into the convent itself for Karen Armstrong. However, after seven years of growing disillusionment and a nervous breakdown, she left her order and went to study English at Wadhant College, Oxford. She later wrote of her experiences both as a nun and afterwards in two books, Through the Narrow Gate and Beginning the World. and recently presented a series on televison on the life of St Paul.
In between hours of research in London's libraries for her forthcoming study of women and Christianity, which will examine the continuing legacy of Christian models of womankind on society today, Karen Armstrong found time to talk to me in her north London home about her schooldays and their subsequent effect on her life.
Although a timid and shy child, "an over-good little girl", she admits that she has now developed a "bulldozing, convivial approach", with a liberal smattering of an invective "learnt at the knee of nuns". Her surroundings are spacious and elegant, far removed from any image of a nun's cell, yet amid the colourful hut tasteful furnishings and discreet prints, there is a starkness and a simplicity which is evocative of Karen Armstrong's past.
From the age of five to 17, the convent school, "basically a grammar, but it became a public school while I was there", was the centre of Karen Armstrong's Catholic world. Daily doctrine lessons and catechism drilling built up a frightening picture of the outside world, full of nonCatholics, armed with questions to tear down the Faith — "we envisaged non-Catholics pouring down in droves upon us as soon as we set foot outside of the convent". Her home life revolved around her parents' friends who were 80 per cent Catholic "and that's a bit on the
mean side".
For the young Karen Armstrong there was no cult of youth but only what she now sees as "dreary clothes, safe Adam Faith records" and the occasional dance where she would mix with "limp people from Stonyhurst and Catholic boys with acne and wet palms, doing the quickstep, foxtrot and tango".
The teaching she received at the convent ill prepared her for later life and its challenges. Her overriding residual impression of her days there is "a mixture of absolute fear and boredom". Boredom because subjects were badly taught, and fear of the "public dressing downs" administered to erring pupils. The whole school was based on the concept of sin, with even wearing the correct games outfit taking on a "moral significance".
Later when she had left Oxford, Karen Armstrong taught at a "big C of E school" and was "amazed at how humane it was".
There was little or no science teaching, but that was not a specific weakness, but a general symptom of low standards. However, the school was regarded as "one of the best in Birmingham", its former pupil points out.
Her sense that the instruction she was receiving somehow didn't come up lo scratch only came in the sixth form. Part of her 'A' level instruction in English was to paraphrase in prose lines of poetry. Thus Byron's "Roll on thy deep and dark blue ocean roll", became "Byron urges the ocean to continue rolling", in her text.
In the sixth form, Karen Armstrong became aware that she was a "star" in the academic sense, and felt less shy and introspective. She also realised, "subliminally" that she would have to do a lot of work on her own if she was to do well. In retrospect she does not regret those hours of private study for one of her firm beliefs is that "the only true education is what you give yourself in terms of reading and commitment".
Looking hack though, she is now critical of what she sees as an "anti-intellectual strait jacket" imposed on all teaching in the convent. "In the Catholic approach there are answers, no matter what doubts you encounter on the way. This does not encourage free intellectual activity such as when you start at point A and you might end up at point Z or anywhere else along the way". Blossoming out from religious instruction, and permeating all disciplines, Karen Armstrong encountered this "flawed" intellectual system where you gear the intellect to produce the right answer.
In Through the Narrow Gate,
she tells of an episode when, as a postulant, she was asked to assess the quality of the evidence of the resurrection. She knew what to say and reproduced it "with a sinking feeling of integrity". At the end, another nun conunended her on a good essay. "But Mother it isn't true", she protested.
Such "double-think" in academic subjects was less apparent in the convent school's provision for sex education. Quite what was apparent was a mystery to Karen Armstrong. They knew all the reasons why contraception and abortion were wrong — lest the non-Catholics should ask. But the question of how sex actually happened, was never discussed. All that was revealed was that men had "uncontrollable urges" and that women should beware of dressing in such a way as to unleash them. The idea of the
boys she encountered at the Catholic dances having any urges at all, rendered the whole thing quite ridiculous to Karen Armstrong.
Such an approach though did couch sex in many hang ups, which she firmly believes affect convent girls thereafter.
As a child at the convent, Karen Armstrong loved the nuns who taught her, but it was a love "based on fear". The nuns appeared "so mysterious", and there was a certain romantic ideal to finding what lay behind the green door which divided the school and their living quarters. Looking back, Karen Armstrong sees amongst the reasons for her vocation, an element of entering into this mystery. There was also a part of her which craved for the safety that the convent could provide. Once her academic talents were noted in the sixth form she became a "big fish in a tiny pond" and at last received respect from her contemporaries! "I'd found somewhere where I could survive. The nuns loved me. The girls looked up at me". The convent did not give her the confidence to take on what had been painted as a frightening outside world.
Karen Armstrong has now lost her faith, a result of her experiences as a nun, and of her studies of church history — "it's very hard to see it as divine". The freeing of her intellect at Oxford added to the process, although she was full of admiration for the priests of Blackfriars who supported her during her time at the university.
One of the major legacies of her convent days was the inability to become close to someone. The Church is an Unkind and unloving institution in some of its manifestations, she comments. She has only discovered the love which the Church failed to give her late in life.