“We work to-day to turn out, not accomplished young women, nor agreeable wives, but soldiers of Christ, accustomed to hardship and ridicule and ingratitude.”
These words express the mission of the Convent of the Five Wounds, where nine-year-old Nanda Grey is sent shortly before World War I. Nanda, the daughter of a recent convert to Catholicism, plunges eagerly into the world of the Five Wounds—a world where the only storybooks allowed are martyrs' lives (“the pressing to death of the Blessed Margaret Clitheroe had nearly turned her sturdy stomach”), and the pupils do penances so God will make them victorious against their hockey rivals.
Frost in May, Antonia White's novel drawing on her own convent education in the years leading up to World War I, layers satire, anguish, and tenderness with exceptional delicacy. The school novel is always a novel of the gap between what's taught and what's learned. The faith of the Convent of the Five Wounds is sentimental, it's cruel, it turns truths into propaganda and breaks children's spirits in the name of humility. And yet it's also beautiful. In one paragraph we learn that their letters home are censored, and “Occasionally a letter that was considered particularly stupid or objectionable in tone was read to the whole school and publicly criticised.” In the next, we see the girls “strewing rose and peony petals from silver baskets” in a Eucharistic procession. Their devotions are encrusted with sentiment like an over-gargoyled church: “The donkeys in the paddock reminded her that all donkeys have crosses on their backs since the day Our Lord rode into Jerusalem; the robin's breast was red because one of his ancestors had splashed his feathers with the Precious Blood trying to peck away the thorns.” Their exposure to contemporary social questions is defined by a priest's comment: “Our Lady had no vote and did not want one.” Nanda tries to mortify her flesh by salting her dessert; when a girl drops her bread and jam in the dirt, it's the occasion for a lesson in humility for whichever pious girl will eat the fouled treat.
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