It’s more than six decades since Shirley Leach swapped her debutante’s dresses for a nun’s habit and changed her name to Sister Agatha. But the “wild fury” she felt as a 21-year-old on the threshold of life at what she saw as God’s command to enter a convent is easily recalled. “It was the end of all my dreams, they were taken away in a single moment,” she said.

Now, at the age of 85, Sister Agatha has no regrets about the course of her life. “To have been asked by God to be in that particular relationship with him is the most amazing thing. I never doubted where I was meant to be.”



The former socialite has shared her story in a ghostwritten autobiography, A Nun’s Story, published this week, which chronicles her transformation from Shirley to Agatha. Despite her vivid recollections, the text cannot convey her cut-glass accent which locates her origins firmly in the British upper class.



Leach grew up in a 23-bedroom, 43-acre mansion in the North Downs of Kent. The house was requisitioned during the war by the military, but she, her mother and three much older sisters – her father had died – were allowed to remain. She remembers watching the Battle of Britain from the roof as a child. “War was the most wonderful time. Everyone was very kind to me,” she said.

Her mother, Ximena, was “a most devout member of the Church of England. Every day I had to read to her from the scriptures. We certainly went to church every Sunday. As a family, we were very ’establishment’.”



Shirley Leach as a young woman.

Despite such religious devotion, life was far from ascetic. There were dances and parties, ponies and tennis, frocks and pearls, a governess, cook, nanny and butler – and boys. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in love with someone, from the age of five when I fell for the stable boy,” she said.



Boarding school was followed by a 30-week cookery course at an establishment attached to a Catholic convent. Then Miss Shirley, as she was called, was prepared for presentation to court as debutante.



“My mother was determined to see at least one of her daughters presented to His Majesty … I was to be presented, packaged up, sold to the world of wealth and privilege and, even more importantly, to the cache of suitors seeking the hand of a rich young lady who was rapidly growing up,” her autobiography says.



After being presented to King George - “too much makeup on his face” - the debutantes “bubbled full of champagne and talked too loudly, with accents enough to cut the silk cushions to shreds.” Leach was one of the last debutantes to be presented; within a few years, the court ceremony would be abolished in a rapidly changing society.



At the same time, to her mother’s dismay, she was becoming ever more drawn to Catholicism. At 19, she converted. The following year, she became engaged to a young man, Jeremy Chittenden.



The couple planned a wedding for October 1952. A few months before, Leach was writing to her fiance to tell him about some Chippendale dining chairs she had spotted at an auction house. She suggested making a bid, “but my hand went on writing: ‘But there seems no point now as I am to be a nun’.”



She was appalled at what she had written. “It was a terrible shock but I immediately knew it was true. I was wild with fury. It was the end of my life, my dreams, everything. I was going to have 10 children and a lovely life!” she said. But, she added: “I never considered saying no. I couldn’t have lived with myself.”



A few months later, Chittenden offered to accompany her to the convent of the Congregation of Jesus, founded in 1609. “I scrubbed off all my makeup and changed into the most ghastly garments, and Jeremy handed me in,” she said.



Sister Agatha, as she became, later taught home economics at the same Catholic convent establishment she had attended as a teenager. In 1976, she was sent to be mother superior of the Bar convent in York, the oldest in England, where she still lives in a wing reserved for elderly nuns.



During her time in charge of the convent, she brought it to the brink of bankruptcy following a decision to open a business – a museum, cafe and shop – on the ancient premises. “I had no idea; I was completely clueless,” she said.



Through a man she met on a train, she was introduced to the American multimillionaire philanthropist John Paul Getty Jr, who bailed out the convent and helped it to establish a charitable trust. “He rescued me,” she said.



Sister Agatha gave up wearing a habit in the late 1980s. “It was absolutely marvellous. Everyone was frightfully courteous to a nun in a habit, and you had iron control over everyone. But if you’re in ordinary clothes, you hear a different story if you’re sitting on a bus, for example.”



Now “moving towards what supermarkets would call my sell-by date”, she has time to reflect on her life. Her memories increasingly return to “that big day, the day when I knew I’d been chosen, despite my belief I was quite unsuitable”.



During her lifetime, the focus of women in religious orders has shifted from teaching in schools to urgent contemporary issues such as human trafficking and migration. She welcomed this. “It’s a great joy to me to know that our sisters are so involved in issues such as anti-trafficking. Anywhere that women are being abused, we want to be there.”



A Nun’s Story, by Sister Agatha with Richard Newman, is published by John Blake Publishing.

