Vanished World

By Martha Duffy

FROST IN MAY by Antonia White Dial; 221 pages; $4.95

"Even the fourteen-year-olds looked at least twenty with their long skirts and their neat, small waists strapped in leather belts. There were curtsies all along the passage as Mother Radcliffe passed. Most were no more than quick, springy bobs, but some were deep and slow and wonderful to watch." These are among the first observations of Fernanda Grey, who at nine embarks on the frightening experience of going to boarding school at Lippington in the last decade before World War I. And an exotic place it is, tending to the daughters of "old, great Catholic families, the frontierless aristocracy of Europe." Nanda is a bright, pretty little girl, but she has two disadvantages: she comes from the middle class (rather than the upper class), and she is a "convert," having joined the church when her father did a year earlier.

Good novels about school -- like The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace -- are classics. Here, the common memories of childhood -- fear, rebellion, shame, what Yeats called "Youth's dreamy load" -- are set against the structured, unfair world of a convent school.

British Novelist Antonia White, who died in 1980 at 81, attended a school like Lippington (formal name: the Convent of the Five Wounds) with handicaps like Nanda's: she was the daughter of a classics master who had just converted to Roman Catholicism. Her autobiographical Frost in May, first published in 1933, has just appeared here in paperback, along with three sequels. As Elizabeth Bowen writes in the introduction, it is one of the best school novels ever written.

White's picture of Lippington is indelible. Nanda learns that each room has a name ("I was just rushing into St. Mary Magdalene without my gloves when Mother Prisca came out of St. Peter Claver and caught me"). The more pious children lay out their stockings at night in the shape of a cross. There are some hilarious set pieces. Nanda's group make their First Communion with students at the associated "poor school." Hurriedly helping one of these girls with her veil, a nun drives a safety pin through the child's ear. For the Lippington girls it is a lesson. Says Reverend Mother: "The poor little girl was in great pain, but she thought it was part of the ceremony, and ... thought of the terrible suffering of Our Lord in wearing His crown of thorns. She might have gone about all day with that pin in her ear, if she had not fainted just now at breakfast."

Nanda, an imaginative but docile child, is truly wounded when she finds out that for the nuns, and even her school mates, her new, deep faith is not good enough. The nuns, who can be shrewd judges of young folly and vanity, some times excuse minor infractions because they feel it takes generations to make their kind of Catholic. The girls are blunter. "When I die," says one beautiful young aristocrat, "my great uncle Cardinal de Wesseldorf and my great-great aunt the Carmelite Abbess de Wesseldorf, who had an affair with Napoleon before she entered, will say to the recording angel: 'My dear sir, you can't seriously send a Wesseldorf to hell,' and into heaven I shall go." To Nanda she observes, "You're a nicely washed and combed and baptised and confirmed little heathen, but you're a heathen all the same."

It is inevitable that Nanda should be expelled from this rarefied world. The occasion is the discovery of a novel she is writing. It is intended as a heroic celebration of God, with sundry evildoers redeemed at the climax by divine power. Alas, the manuscript, nowhere near completion, is found by a nun during a routine snoop through desks. Nanda's tearful pleas are in vain. Says Reverend Mother: "I have watched something growing in you--a hard little core of self-will and self-love." The gates clang shut.

Antonia White worked as a journalist and as a translator from the French. She wrote three more autobiographical books, which follow her heroine, now called Clara Batchelor, until she is 23. The Lost Traveller centers on her intense relation with her adoring but autocratic father. If Claude Batchelor lacks Dickensian vitality, he is drawn with a similar range of contradictory, deeply human strengths and weaknesses. The Sugar House and Beyond the Glass, covering a disastrous marriage and an emotional breakdown (which White also suffered), are less effective, but reflect the accuracy and honesty of the author's eye. White's weakness is for melodrama. A little of this occurs in her first novel, well covered by the hard accuracy of the setting and the characters. The conflict between father and daughter almost saves The Lost Traveller. The later books, which introduce cardboard men, are too high-flown. But in Frost in May, White wrote a permanent, crystalline book about a vanished world and a universal experience. --By Martha Duffy

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