My oven and The Nun's Story (From Gazette & Herald)

My oven and The Nun's Story

MY kitchen floor was newly-mopped; my U-bends were thoroughly scrubbed. Even my socks had all been paired up and placed neatly in the drawer.

There was now nothing but a well-earned coffee break between me and the evil moment when I would have to square up to the inside of my oven.

So I did what any sensible woman would do. I flopped miserably on the sofa in the hope the telly would take my mind off it - or even make me forget it until it was too late.

I did some listless channel-hopping for light relief, and there she was - Audrey Hepburn, looking iconically luminous as Sister Luke in The Nun's Story.

Audrey's one of the few women capable of prompting a response from my other half, who generally flicks through magazines with a bored yawn or a disdainful sniff.

"She's all right," he once said charitably when he spotted Audrey in a posthumous ad campaign. "Who's she?"

Audrey had a deeper impact on me when I first saw The Nun's Story as a schoolgirl.

It was all that doe-eyed devotion to the Mother Superior, the tormented forsaking of the beloved family and the inner torture of a noble soul.

One glimpse of her in that novice's habit and I was convinced, aged eight, I was destined for holy orders.

So no sooner had Audrey walked out of the convent for the last time and disappeared into a Belgian street than I wiped the tears from my eyes and rushed out to share my vocation with Sandra Brice down the road.

Sandra was a good mate, but more importantly, her parents had a garden shed I knew would be perfect for a chapel, and a pair of blackout curtains we could wrap around ourselves, nun-fashion.

Once draped, we looked more like Brian's mother in The Life of Brian than Audrey in a wimple, but we didn't care.

We had been marked out by God for a life of service and contemplation.

At our age, the vow of silence was obviously the trickiest to negotiate, but, at least in my case, it was popular with my parents.

My father was particularly keen to enforce it. After all, this is a man who made kids play a silence game at parties. We had to sit around in a circle and the first to speak was sent to bed with no cake.

Not surprisingly, my parties were always small affairs.

Anyway, it was no easier for Sandra and I to be quiet as nuns than it was when playing the silence game, so of course we had to invent a penance for our sins.

Neither of us being Catholic, we had no knowledge of real guilt, and we scratched our heads for a long time to decide what would be suitably awful for us to have to do.

In the end I hit on the idea of drinking salty water, which was fine for me but made Sandra sick.

I was sent home in disgrace for proper punishment, which no doubt involved tidying my room.

Nowadays, the penance would probably have been scouring out the oven.

Still haven't done it.

The Nun's Story did the trick.

Updated: 10:44 Wednesday, January 28, 2004