WEEPIE

I was leaving my Protestant boarding-school and being sent as a potential convert to a Catholic convent. I was thirteen. As a parting gift - but really more as an awful warning about the wicked ways of nuns - one of the Protestant mistresses put into my hands FROST IN MAY by Antonia White. As an awful warning, it was a signal failure. I read it in ecstasy! Naturally I identified myself completely with her heroine the schoolgirl Nanda, glorying in the new romantic world of Catholicism as she encountered it. I confidently expected to meet my own Leonie at my convent: Leonie, the incredibly high-born foreign aristocrat, who carries her brain, like her old Paquin coat, lightly. Nevertheless you know that she - and the coat - are the Real Thing. So the ending of the book, when Leonie inadvertently betrays Nanda, by letting the awesome Mother Superior find Nanda’s secret (innocently sexy) novel, took me by terrible surprise. Nanda is expelled as someone who spreads contagion to others and she knows she will never, ever see Leonie again. My tears over this tragedy have never really dried.