The Convent House

14 June 2007

We came to live in a blue collar suburb of Los Angeles in one of those endless tracts of stucco houses that sprung up after the Second World War to house all those servicemen from all those cold states who shipped out through California and promised themselves that, if they survived, that's where they would make their homes.

I remember being stuffed, seven of us, into the battered green Plymouth that Mom called "Brutus" because it was always betraying her by not starting, and heading off to find a house. I was the youngest and had to sit on Grandma's lap which I thought was unfair and I grumpily wondered if I would still be expected to do this when I was a teenager! Fortunately, by the time I was teenager, a car carrying seven people who were not wearing seat belts would soon find itself pursued by red flashing lights.

My mother was a devout Catholic so the first place she enquired was the local church and it turned out the priest knew a house directly across the street from the church and the school that was for sale. My mother thought it sounded perfect and didn't even bother to look at another house before she bought it.

When I walked into the empty house for the first time, I knew that this was no ordinary suburban home. For a start there was an altar in the living room! The house had been a convent for the nuns from the school across the street, and before we could move in it had to be "deconsecrated".

And so I grew up in an ex-convent. Which did have its advantages. Exploring the new house, I discovered abandoned on a high shelf in the garage reams and reams and reams of school drawing and writing paper and stacks of exercise books. They were slightly yellowed with age and the nuns didn't want them back as they had no use for them. But I certainly did.

I wrote stories and more stories and more stories gripping my pencil so furiously that huge callouses appeared on my middle finger. When I was nine years old I wrote on that yellowing paper my first novel. It was a ridiculous childish story about two girls who find themselves alone in the South Pacific during the Second World War who are rescued by the crew of a US Naval battleship. Thinking back I wonder if I was trying to picture the father I never knew as a hero who would even now come back and rescue me. It ran to over a hundred hand-written pages of descriptions of a world that existed only in my head, that was entirely my own and in which nothing happened or failed to happen unless I ordained it. Suddenly it didn't matter that I was the kid with cooties, the last one to get chosen for teams of dodgeball or volleyball (I was entirely uncoordinated and useless at any kind of sports), the girl who picked her nose and probably smelled if you got too close, which no one did! I was God of my own Imaginary Universe!

My grandmother had a book called "Connie Bell MD" about one of the first woman doctors, which she tried to get me to read. She was always trying to get me to read one sort of book or another. Classics like "Little Women" were big favourites, but they were all about stuff that happened a whole long time ago and anyway I was more interested in shlocky romances and pulpy Man from UNCLE spinoff novels (using the term as loosely as it is possible to use it). Nothing she or any of my family could say or do could impress me. My family was dull and uninteresting, the house I lived in (despite having been a convent) was identical to every other house in the tract, the place I lived was flat and gray, even in the California sunshine, and anything exciting on the planet must exist beyond those borders.

I don't know what made me finally open "Connie Bell MD" and, though I can't remember much at all about the story, I will never forget how it felt to find the handwritten inscription on the flyleaf: "To Loretta, a wonderful human being, beloved of her family and friends, and a credit to her Church! With love and best wishes, her friend the author, Helen Tann Aschmann". 'Loretta' was my grandmother! My grandmother knew an actual published writer! And what a eulogy! To somebody who wasn't even dead yet!

And then I thought that if in this flat, gray place, in this dull tract house my unexceptional grandma could know an actual published writer, then surely it could be possible to become one too!

My grandma warned me that Helen Aschmann had had countless rejection slips before her work was published.

"I don't care," I said. "I'll string the rejection slips together and make a necklace!". The arrogance of extreme youth. But rejection was going to be a central theme in my life. And it was going to be, and remains today, a lot tougher than I thought.


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