Карен Армстронг – The Spiral Staircase (страница 7)

Willy-nilly, I found myself drawn into the climate of protest. Somewhat to my astonishment, I had been approached the previous term, while still a nun, and asked if I would let my name go forward as a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the Junior Common Room committee. I had been reluctant – a humiliating defeat seemed inevitable – but my supporters were insistent and it seemed churlish to refuse. For a couple of weeks I slunk past the noticeboard, wincing at the sight of my photograph, complete with veil and crucifix, beside those of my wild-haired rivals. What student in her right mind would vote for me? I looked like a creature from another planet. I scarcely dared to approach the noticeboard on the morning after the election, but, amazed, I saw the same photograph prominently displayed, informing the college that I was now the secretary of the Common Room.

So now I found that, whether I liked it or not, I was being drawn into student politics. I had to attend protest meetings in the JCR, and take part in intense committee discussions about how to bring St Anne’s into line with the 60s. The most pressing issue was cohabitation in the colleges. Until the early twentieth century, women had not been permitted to attend the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It was assumed that the effort of studying to the same level as men would blow their inferior little brains to smithereens. But some women had refused to accept this exclusion, had set up colleges of their own, and the university had eventually accepted them. The five women’s colleges of Oxford had been a Trojan Horse, smuggling the weaker sex into the male preserve of academia, but now, some believed, their day was over. All the colleges should be open to both sexes. Men should be allowed to come to St Anne’s and women should be admitted to the prestigious male colleges of Magdalen or Balliol.

The present arrangements did not penalize women educationally. All students attended exactly the same lectures and took the same examinations. Men and women competed against one another on equal terms. The college could arrange for us to study with any tutor of our choice. Fellows of St John’s and Merton had taught me, for example, and the St Anne’s Fellows, especially in the English department, which had an exceptional reputation, tutored male students. In fact, the women’s colleges often had a higher rate of academic success: because there were fewer places for women, the standard of those selected at the entrance examinations tended to be higher. During my years at Oxford, St Anne’s regularly came top of the Norrington Scale, the league tables which charted the performance of undergraduates in the final examinations. By the 1960s, therefore, women had proved that they were quite capable of holding their own in the university.

So to many, mixed-sex colleges seemed the next logical step. But that might take time. Women, for example, would require better bathroom facilities than the gruesome arrangements in the men’s colleges. But as a preliminary, students all over the university were demanding that the ‘Gate Hours’ be abolished. We all had to be in college by midnight, and visitors were obliged to write their names in a book at the Porter’s Lodge, and sign out before the gates were closed. Of course, people disregarded these ‘Gate Hours’. There were several places where it was very easy to climb over the college wall; everybody knew this and most turned a blind eye. If somebody were caught, he or she would suffer a mild reprimand and pay a small fine. But in these heady days of revolution, these rules seemed absurd to the more radical and, in my new official capacity, I had to attend heated meetings in which students and dons argued about them. As far as I was concerned, the question was wholly academic. There was no man clamouring to spend the night in my small college room, and the possibility of my climbing over the college wall after a love tryst was about as remote as my scaling the Great Wall of China. Moreover, until a few weeks before, I had been a very visible representative of an institution that condemned all sex outside marriage as gravely sinful.

But those days were over. I still regarded myself as a Catholic, but I was aware that its traditional teachings on sexual matters had become extremely controversial within the Church itself. Some of the nuns had been devastated the previous summer when Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae had outlawed the practice of artificial contraception. In one of our convents, I had heard, one of the more adventurous nuns had caused a minor sensation, on the morning after the papal ruling, by putting a pill (a mere aspirin, of course) on each of the sisters’ breakfast plates. Nuns naturally had no personal stake in the Pope’s decision, but the encyclical had become symbolic of the authoritarian government of the Church: by ignoring the advice of married couples, doctors and psychologists in order to reassert the Church’s traditional position, Paul VI seemed to be withdrawing from the new spirit of the Vatican Council, retreating yet again from the laity, and turning his back on the plight of those married couples who were loyal Catholics but who wanted to limit their families responsibly. The Catholic Church was undergoing its own sexual revolution, but most of those who campaigned against Humanae Vitae would not have condoned the use of the contraceptive pill by unmarried people and many of them would have expected me to take a strong line on the ‘Gate Hours’ issue and speak up for good Catholic values. A few weeks earlier, I would probably have done this without hesitation.

Now, though, I was no longer an official representative of the Catholic Church, and while I listened to the arguments from the Common Room floor, I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I felt no desire to support those students who fought against the abolition of the ‘Gate Hours’ on Christian grounds. My indifference was in part the result of an anxious preoccupation with my own personal drama. I was drained and exhausted by the events of the past few weeks, and had little energy to spare for this battle. But there was more to it than that. When I thought about the issue, I found only a question mark where the old conviction should have been. I had experienced this time and again recently; it seemed as though I had discarded a good deal of my old religious self when I had taken off my habit. Beliefs and principles that I had taken so completely for granted that they seemed part of my very being now appeared strangely abstract and remote. In fact, I reflected uneasily, I did not seem to think or feel anything very strongly any more.

I had now been studying at Oxford for nearly eighteen months, and for two years before that I had been preparing for the rigorous entrance examinations to the university. Academia had its own disciplines that were as exacting in their own way as those of the convent. One of these was already ingrained in my heart and mind: do not pronounce on subjects that you know nothing about. I had now acquired a healthy respect for the limits of my own knowledge and expertise. One of the chief effects of my education so far had been an acute consciousness of everything that I did not know. What did I know about sex? I asked myself during the explosive Common Room debates. What did I know about men, relationships or love? What did I know about the brave new world of the 60s? I knew nothing at all, and was not, therefore, entitled to an opinion. And, remembering my own protests against an outworn system only a few months earlier, I felt that I should listen carefully to those who demanded change. In the meantime, there seemed no need for me to contribute.

I was not allowed to remain on the sidelines, however. The college had appointed a new Dean of Discipline. For years Dorothy Bednarowska, my literature tutor, whose approach had been liberal and relaxed, had filled this post. The new Dean was Emily Franklin, a large, bovine woman who, I learned with some astonishment, was only a few years older than I. Her pupils told me that she was a fine teacher, if a trifle dull. But despite her relative youth, Miss Franklin had no time for student protest, and had decreed that not only would there be no change in the current ‘Gate Hours’, but that the gates would be locked an hour earlier. Furthermore, she had increased the fines for offenders, and, as her pièce de résistance, a barbed-wire hedge had appeared, without warning, underneath the favourite climbing-in spot. The college was in an uproar.

‘Of course, this is quite absurd’, Mrs Bednarowska said, drawing me aside one day in the corridor. ‘The silly woman is out of her mind. The Virgin Vote will be delighted, but it won’t wash.’

‘The Virgin Vote?’ I asked.

‘Oh – the conservative wing on the college governing body,’ Mrs Bednarowska replied. ‘You know who they are! They’re not all virgins, of course, but they might as well be. Anyway, the point is, my dear, what is the Common Room going to do about this?’