Monica's Coming Out

I LEAP OVER THE WALL (313 pp.)--Monica Baldwin--Rinehart ($3.50).

Devout or not, thousands of U.S. readers have plowed through the books of Trappist Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain, The Waters of Siloe) with wondering attention. What makes a man give up the world? What is his life like when he does? Monica Baldwin's I Leap Over the Wall is Merton in reverse: the story of a British nun who went back to the world.

The year was 1914 and Monica Baldwin was 17 when she took the veil of a Roman Catholic religious order and vanished behind convent walls. Ten years later she began to think she had made a mistake. Nevertheless, for 18 years more of inward strain and stress she lived the life of the convent.

At last she asked for release, convinced that she "was no more fitted to be a nun than to be an acrobat." Rescript was granted by Rome, and in 1941, when she was 45, Monica Baldwin "had leapt over the wall." She landed hard in a world full of new, sharp angles, but she was soon dithering about England as gaily as a debutante at a coming-out party.

London Without Railings. I Leap Over the Wall, a sort of deb's diary of Monica's coming out, is a bubbly, effervescent report that is certain to become a lending-library smash. With a smile she recalls the habit she wore for 28 years. It began next the skin with "a nice, thick, long-sleeved 'shift' of rough, scratchy serge . . . Stays, shoulder-strapped and severely boned, concealed one's outline; over them, two long serge petticoats were lashed securely round one's waist. Last came the ample habit-coat of heavy cloth, topped by a linen rochet and a stiffly starched barbette of cambric . . ." Discarding this medieval costume, Monica donned the fashions of the '403, beginning with "an airy nothing" and an uplift bra. "Frankly, I was appalled."

Worse shocks were to come. Her sister, with whom she had expected to stay for a few days, was living with a "friend . . . who . . . flatly refused to let me spend a night beneath their roof." Monica hurried to sanctuary with an aunt in Sussex, then on to visit her uncle, Stanley Baldwin. But not even an ex-Prime Minister could preserve her from the sight of American soldiers pinching British womanhood, or --most "sinister portent" of all--"the spectacle of London without her railings. It was almost like seeing Queen Victoria without her clothes ... The parks . .. the sacrosanct squares . . . flung open to the vandal incursions of children and dogs." Even that oak of ages, the English language, had changed. Monica heard for the first time of such things as jazz, lounge lizards, isolationism, the Lambeth Walk, cocktails, robots, striptease, Hollywood and bright young thing.

Job Without Fleas. Monica's old friends did their best to wise her up. One of them said she was like "a piano, half of whose keys had gone dumb for want of use." The friend added: "What would really do you good would be six months on a battleship."

Failing that, Monica went looking for a job on shore--a procedure that was educational enough. For a while, she grubbed around in vegetable gardens as a worker in the Land Army. Later she struggled as a matron in a camp for conscripted girl munitions workers, then as an army canteen hostess. But her job as hostess seemed to consist chiefly of peeling potatoes and being attacked by hordes of fleas. Once she found herself in a cellar with a self-styled photographer who offered her a job developing dirty pictures. Finally she tried herself out as an assistant librarian and then as a War Office employee.

Monica had learned to handle a drink and even "flung my bonnet over the windmill and accepted a cigarette." Except that she had trouble balancing herself on high heels, the nun had become as much a woman of the world as she cared to be. At present, still as devout as when she first entered the convent, she is living in the country.

"The moral of all this," concludes Monica, "seems to be that the actual career which one selects is in itself of only secondary importance. The thing that apparently matters to God is one's motive for embracing it. A ballet dancer may be--and I cannot help believing often is--quite as pleasing to God as a nun."

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