Convent Quotations

My parents sent me from Venezuela to the Convent of Our Lady, a boarding school in Hastings, which was horrible - like Harry Potter without the magic. Sometimes we went into town, and if we were caught chewing gum in our uniform, members of the public would take down our names and report us to the school.

I've lived on a military base and in a convent boarding school with dobermans at the bottom of front stairs to keep us in and intruders out, and in college I spent some time at the Naval Academy, where everything was run by the numbers.

Let me tell you about those convents. All that crap about extending the pinkie finger while sipping tea is a myth. Convent schools are breeding grounds for great broads and occasionally one-of-the-boys. Convent schools teach you to play against everything, which is what I'm still doing.

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.

At the church, we could only handle 15 to 18 people tops and we had to turn people away much too much. We decided as a committee that we needed to take that really big step so we located a vacant convent on Beach Avenue and convinced the Roman Catholic Diocese to rent it to us.