{"id":158470,"date":"2022-04-08T11:00:45","date_gmt":"2022-04-08T15:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=158470"},"modified":"2022-04-08T10:53:39","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T14:53:39","slug":"re-covered-i-leap-over-the-wall-by-monica-baldwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/04\/08\/re-covered-i-leap-over-the-wall-by-monica-baldwin\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: I Leap Over the Wall<\/em> by Monica Baldwin"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Re-Covered<\/a>, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photograph by Lucy Scholes.<\/p><\/div>\n

Ten years after Monica Baldwin voluntarily entered an enclosed religious order of Augustinian nuns, she began to think she might have made a mistake. She had entered the order on October 26, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the World War I, when she was just twenty-one years old. At thirty-one, she hadn\u2019t lost her faith, but she had begun to doubt her vocation; the sacrifices that cloistered life entailed did not come easily to her, and unlike many around her, she hadn\u2019t experienced a \u201cvital encounter\u201d between her soul and God. Eighteen years later, she finally knew for sure: it was time to leave. Granted special dispensation from the Vatican to leave the order but remain a Roman Catholic, Baldwin\u2014who was now forty-nine years old\u2014quit the only adult life she\u2019d known, that of the \u201cstrictest possible enclosure,\u201d and emerged back into the world in 1941, into a world that had just plunged, once again, into war.<\/p>\n

Baldwin relates the trials and tribulations that followed in her delightful memoir, I Leap Over the Wall<\/em>: A Return to the World After Twenty-Eight Years in a Convent<\/em>. A best seller on its initial release in 1949, it won its author plenty of fans\u2014including the film star Vivian Leigh, who named Baldwin\u2019s book as one of her four favorite titles published that year, in the Sunday Times<\/em>. It has been reprinted on a number of occasions since. All the same, its popularity has waned over the years, and it\u2019s not a book mentioned often today. I picked it up again as I began my own reentrance into the world, after two years of lockdowns, isolation, and quarantine.<\/p>\n

It would be wrong to draw too many parallels between Baldwin\u2019s experience and mine, though. Whereas the hiatus in our lives now has been a largely shared ordeal, the marvel of Baldwin\u2019s situation is its singularity: she missed the entire world between the wars while life went on. Her portrait of Britain in wartime is therefore unique. She\u2019s like an alien visiting Earth, taking nothing around her for granted; it\u2019s all equally fascinating, from the rows of \u201chatless\u201d young women sitting on trains and smoking cigarettes with their \u201cpadded shoulders and purple nails,\u201d to the ravioli she nervously orders from a caf\u00e9 lunch menu that seems to her written in gibberish. (When the meal arrives, she remains just as confused\u2014it \u201cmight have been anything from cats\u2019 meat to fried spam,\u201d she attests, bemused.) We\u2019re used to accounts of life on the home front that are steeped in the \u201ckeep calm and carry on\u201d wartime mentality, so it can be hard to find those that convey the sheer incongruity, as Baldwin\u2019s does, of the experience of a world turned uncanny. This is not to say that I Leap Over the Wall <\/em>could quite be described as an eerie or a haunting book\u2014if anything, Baldwin\u2019s portrait of a country during one of its darkest hours is lit with an oddly wondrous naivete. Nevertheless, she captures a world turned upside down and inside out, one in which everyone feels displaced and unmoored, and which she observes with eyes wide open. She had spent twenty-eight years trying to disengage from life. \u201cYou can\u2019t be completely wrapped up in God (and he is a jealous lover) unless you are unwrapped-up in what this world has to offer you,\u201d she explains. \u201cIn convents, this process of unwrapping is effected by a system of remorseless separation from everything that is not God.\u201d Thus her return to the world, which necessarily forces her to \u201csit up and take notice of what was going on,\u201d nearly drives her crazy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Baldwin begins her story by describing in detail the camiknickers, brassiere, and sheer silk stockings with which her sister presents her on the morning that she leaves the convent. These are responsible for the first of the \u201ccrescendo of shocks\u201d following her release. Not only are these garments unimaginable to her by the standards of those in the convent, where she had worn the thick, scratchy full-body serge shift donned by nuns since the fourteenth century, heavy petticoats, and cumbersome stockings \u201cthe shape and consistency of a Wellington boot,\u201d they also bear little resemblance to anything she remembers from her Edwardian youth. The surprises continue.<\/p>\n

A twenty-eight-year absence from the world at any point in history would undoubtedly be destabilizing, but Baldwin\u2019s coincided with a period of particularly astonishing social, political, and cultural transformation, especially in the UK. World War I occasioned significant turmoil in all areas of life; in its aftermath, the rigid class system that had previously defined British society disintegrated, women won the right to vote, huge scientific and medical advances were made, and even the borders of the wider European map were redrawn. Whole empires had crumbled. When, on Baldwin’s first night of freedom, someone switches on the radio\u00a0after dinner at an aunt and uncle\u2019s London home, it\u2019s all she can do to not \u201cfly from the room, shrieking \u2018Witchcraft!\u2019 \u201d She\u2019s as discombobulated as the somnolent protagonist of H. G. Wells\u2019s speculative novel When the Sleeper Awakes <\/em>(1899), who finally stirs from his 203-year nap to find that he\u2019s been transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-second century. Baldwin herself makes a different analogy, drawing from her childhood: she repeatedly likens herself to Rip Van Winkle.<\/p>\n

That Baldwin\u2019s cultural references are confined to that material deemed suitable for a well-born young lady in Edwardian England makes for some entertaining confusion. But, aware of her limitations, she sets about a brisk reeducation program. Novels, she confesses, are enlightening (once, that is, she\u2019s managed to translate the modern slang), but newspapers have the unfortunate effect of making her feel \u201cparticularly idiotic.\u201d She complains that even the book reviews are packed with \u201cincomprehensible\u201d clich\u00e9s and allusions. Social historians of the interwar period could spend years combing newspapers, newsreels, and periodicals of the day, collating a list of the cultural touchstones of the era, but Baldwin does the same work for us in a matter of only two sentences:<\/p>\n

I had never heard of the Unknown Soldier, Jazz, Isolationism, Lounge lizards, Lease-Lend, Cavalcade<\/em>, Gin-and-It, Vimy Ridge or the Lambeth Walk; neither did the words Nosey Parker, Hollywood, Cocktail, Robot, Woolworth, Strip-tease, Bright Young Thing, convey anything to my mind. Unknown names, too, were always cropping up: Epstein, Schiaparelli, James Agate, Greta Garbo, Picasso, D. H. Lawrence and Dr. Marie Stopes \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Her first Disney film is quite the revelation. As is her first dry martini!<\/p>\n

She documents her steep learning curve with both an eloquence and a pitch-perfect comic timing that\u2019s unexpected from someone who\u2019s spent the majority of her adult life in enclosed, sanctified, silent contemplation. And there\u2019s amusement to be found in the revelation that this precise silence, prized above all else in the convent, now makes her something of a nuisance. While staying with another aunt and uncle, she learns that she has what others would describe as \u201can irritating habit of opening doors so quietly that nobody knew when I had entered a room.\u201d After the household tires of her creeping soundlessly about the house, suddenly materializing behind them when they least expect it, Uncle Stan\u2014as in Stanley Baldwin, who, during his niece\u2019s absence, has been thrice prime minister of Britain\u2014takes her aside for a quiet word. \u201cBefore a fortnight was ended,\u201d Baldwin cheerfully reports, \u201cI had taught myself to stamp up and down stairs, rattle door handles and bang doors in such wise as to make my presence felt by everybody in the vicinity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baldwin may be struggling to get to grips with the modern world, but, as it turns out, the life that she\u2019s left behind proves just as incomprehensible to those outside the convent. She tries to explain to friends that one of the most shocking things about the outside world is the stranglehold that food has over everyone\u2019s life. To eat beyond what is absolutely necessary would, in the convent, be regarded as gluttony. And part of every nun\u2019s noviceship is being taught to \u201cmortify one\u2019s palate\u201d\u2014whether by eating something one doesn\u2019t like, refusing something one does, not drinking or eating when one is thirsty or hungry, or, in extreme cases, eating the scraps that would otherwise be deemed inedible and thrown away. Her interlocutors\u00a0are in equal parts bewildered and revolted. \u201cIt was like trying to discuss radar with a goldfish,\u201d she reports.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Though some warn her that the \u201ccrazy turmoil\u201d of wartime is not the best moment to reemerge into everyday life, Baldwin recognizes that the confusion occasioned by international conflict also allows her to find common ground with others\u2014and to observe the world around her, mostly unnoticed. \u201cHow easy it would be,\u201d she writes optimistically, \u201cto plunge into the seething waters of the war deluge and splash about unnoticed, listening, looking about, experimenting, learning about things, till the floods died down!\u201d<\/p>\n

The world she enters, of course, has already been made unfamiliar by war. Even the physical environment is uncanny: ripped-apart ruins of Blitz-bombed buildings have turned once recognizable streets into unknown terrain; the names on railway stations have been painted out; park railings have been removed, smelted down, and turned into weaponry.<\/p>\n

Early on, she describes herself as \u201ca being with no background,\u201d a feeling that might have been shared by many\u2014in Britain, Europe, and beyond\u2014during these years, not only by those struggling on the home front, or by the soldiers who found themselves deployed across the globe in unknown territories, but most of all by those hundreds of thousands of displaced persons made refugees by either advancing troops, physical destruction, or hatred. \u201cI have sometimes wondered whether there may not be some vague, physical sympathy between the rootless members of the human race; those who have been completely severed from their backgrounds by the guillotine of circumstance,\u201d Baldwin perceptively and movingly writes later in the book, when describing a connection she forges with a soldier whom she meets while working as a skivvy in an army canteen. This soldier friend had recently lost everything when a land mine fell on his house: his home, his possessions, and every single member of his family\u2014his parents, his sisters, his wife, and their three small children. It was a loss of such incomprehensible magnitude that Baldwin recognizes it has bestowed on him a \u201cterrible loneliness.\u201d<\/p>\n

And indeed, a current of loneliness courses through this book, too, beneath its optimism and picaresque-style escapades. The descriptions of the days Baldwin spends trudging the streets of London in the pouring rain\u2014often getting hopelessly lost, being rejected for one job after another (each application sunk due to her lack of qualifications or training), and hunting for lodgings cheap enough for her meager budget\u2014bring to mind the most desolate moments of Jean Rhys\u2019s novels about down-and-out women in London between the wars, or even those myriad homeless citizens forced to wander the streets during the Great Depression that Helen Zenna Smith depicts<\/a> so candidly in Shadow Women <\/em>(1932) and Luxury Ladies <\/em>(1933), the sequels to her famous First World War novel, Not So Quiet \u2026 <\/em>(1930). Baldwin\u2019s age adds another dimension to the bleakness of her situation; in its darker moments, this memoir might be read as a portrait of the invisibility and isolation of that long put-upon and looked-down-upon figure: the middle-aged spinster. But, as every reader of the English classics knows, one underestimates such women at one\u2019s own peril. Baldwin certainly wasn\u2019t someone easily vanquished, as proven by the title of her second memoir\u2014published in 1965, when she was in her early seventies\u2014Goose in the Jungle: A Flight Round the World with Digressions<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications. Read earlier installments of\u00a0Re-Covered<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe marvel of Baldwin\u2019s situation is its singularity: she missed the entire world between the wars while life went on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[88,67827,22270,31210,68405,12729,68292,14456,6329,2021],"class_list":["post-158470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered","tag-england","tag-featured","tag-interwar-period","tag-lucy-scholes","tag-monica-baldwin","tag-nuns","tag-re-covered","tag-rereading","tag-word-war-i","tag-world-war-ii"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRe-Covered: I Leap Over the Wall by Monica Baldwin by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 8, 2022 \u2013 \u201cThe marvel of Baldwin\u2019s situation is its singularity: she missed the entire world between the wars while life went 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