It's superbly written by a talented author with a wonderful gift for the language who has obviously lived through a tumultuous time all but forgotten: deep joy, ecstasy, huge sorrow and pain, wonderful camaraderie, amid the great dedication of nurses and mid-wife Anglican nuns to their respective callings in the squalor and material deprivation of the East End of London following WW2.
Monica Joan at a Church Concert
Sister Monica Joan, Jenny has concluded, is difficult to categorise as senile or as eccentric. She can eerily flit between the two; but is it guile or affectation or her unique personality?
She looks serene in the accompanying photo but she effortlessly manages to wreak holy havoc at a church concert to which she is somewhat reluctantly taken by Jenny accompanied by the pacific Cynthia (the young woman above on the left of the book cover photo). The Rector has persuaded a 'world famous' cellist to play accompanied by a pianist.
For starters, Monica Joan decides she will take her knitting -she is knitting a complicated pattern requiring three needles simultaneously- and then to sit in the front seat of the church!
Then she decides almost immediately that her seat is too hard; hardly surprising given her sparse frame. But what is then for the reader hilariously described with brilliant metaphor is for all at the concert agony upon agony.
What with searches by curates for cushions that turn out not to suit, to needles falling and needing to be retrieved, to the dropping of wool and having a small, dedicated band of those around her trying to get it back to her with the coup de grace being Monica Joan complete inability to moderate her 'stage whisper' to anything less than a level that could be heard by the entire audience, Jenny is quickly driven into a state of acute embarrassment.
At the interval, Jenny and Cynthia hastily remove Monica Joan from further involvement at the concert to ambiguous applause from the audience who ought to be applauding the musicians.
Jennifer
Jenny began with these Anglican nuns as a 'irreligious girl' (p. 318), an 'agnostic in whom large areas of doubt and uncertainty resided' (p. 318). Ironically, she finishes this first book of her series opening up to faith in God through time spent with Sr Monica Joan.
Jennifer had visited her when the waspish nun was convalescing after suffering pneumonia. The doctor had given her antibiotics when she came down with pneumonia which in those days performed miracles; they worked also for Monica Joan preventing her from slipping into certain death.
Jenny found out that the nun was a poet; Jenny was granted the honour to read her work. That reading produced many questions from Jenny. Interestingly, it was the bluntness and sheer truthfulness of Monica Joan's answers to Jenny's questions that arrested her.
For one example, Jenny asks the nun about how she could have abandoned the privileged life she has once had, to work in the slums, suggesting that perhaps a love for people had been the cause.
The old nun dismissed such speculation irritably refusing to see her love for the people or the surrounding as compelling her love at all. 'One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people' (p. 319).
Jenny's further questioning elicits from Sr Monica Joan some simple, wisdom pearls:
1. No one can give you faith. It is God's gift.
2. Seek and you shall find.
3. Read the gospels.
4. 'Do not pester me with your everlasting questions.'
5. 'Go with God, child; just go with God' (p. 319).
These three words -Go with God- 'were for me the beginning of faith'. That evening, she began to read the gospels.
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