Head’s sermon, St Thomas’s Church, July 1958

A school-friend whom I have not seen face-to-face since the late Fifties has finally sent me a photocopy of an anthology of writings and drawings from that era, mostly my work. I think the best piece was written by the freethinking maths master Mr Dufeu, before he was fired. His writing the verses on the blackboard may have hastened his forced departure. Here are a few stanzas:

I can sing, said the Head, I can preach
Every subject in school I can teach
Ever game I can coach
I’m a joy to approach
Every statement I make is a peach

……

Mend your textbooks with tape or with paste
I repeat – they will not be replaced
Though pages are bent
And eighty percent
Are missing, detached or defaced

That I’m humble and meek you’ll agree
And a Christian as good as can be
When to Heaven you go
If you’re not sent below
Ask for Gabriel, Moses or me.

I wonder how much religiosity is lampooned in the States? Certainly it is in The Simpsons where the Reverend Lovejoy and Ned Flanders are depicted in a satirical style that was familiar to me in my teens.

I was 16 and had just been elevated to the highest class, the Sixth Form, and made a prefect, with certain authority over the younger boys. The end of the summer term was celebrated with a church service in the town, and the Head gave the sermon. Despite the documentary evidence, I have no recollection of writing down his sermon for posterity. Here it is, as recalled by me soon afterwards. (How much is true, and how much is my wicked exaggeration is anyone’s guess.)

“I am very sorry that our preacher was unable to come as planned because, as he told me, today coincides with the start of his annual six-months’ holiday. I therefore, as Headmaster of this ancient school, take this opportunity of addressing not only you boys, for I can do that during our daily devotions, but also the parents (each worth £19 a term).

“My sermon, if you could call it such, is not very inspiring; I have not even chosen a biblical text. My theme was in fact chosen for me by one of the smaller boys who hopes one day to become a minister of the Lord himself. It is that of Duty. I was very pleased that the boy suggested this, for it is a theme dear to my heart and shows that the spirit of loyalty and Christian gentlemanliness is not dead in a school based on the firm and in fact immovable foundation of the Established Church. So many fine young men have given up their lives cheerfully, leaving the school at the age of eighteen or nineteen, some of them, fighting for a just cause, their country, their God and their Queen.

“We all have our duties: mine is to see that the spirit which drove Englishmen to conquer all over the world in the first Elizabeth’s time, as the little boys in the front will doubtlessly [sic] know, is not completely extinguished in this harsh world of ours. All around us are the enemies of righteousness: workers selfishly trying to squeeze blood out of the innocent stones of their employers, workers who through strikes show they have not the interests of their country, their religion and their Queen at heart.

“We in this school try to fill the gap: England needs leaders, and only the best is good enough. That is what we try to teach you in the CCF [Combined Cadet Force], you know, boys. We are not a lot of bloodthirsty unscrupulous ogres training you for war, but we try to instil in you the qualities of leadership and obedience---and sparkling shiny boots---so important in all branches of life. Loyalty to your parents, your Queen and those set under her are very important, but loyalty to your Headmaster comes first of all.

“You know, we call ourselves Christians and we think we live in a Christian country but have you ever considered it? Now I am not very good at arithmetic but I think a few stark unadorned figures would be very revealing. There are 171 hours in a week which makes 8208 hours in a year. Suppose you go to church morning and evening every Sunday. You would probably think that a very good score. If you were fortunate enough to go to a service that did not take more than an hour, you would spend 104 hours out of 8208 in church in the worship of your Maker. My arithmetic works this out as roughly one eightieth of your time, which isn’t much, is it? And supposing you only go once a week? Supposing you only go to church to be baptized, married and buried? And yet we call ourselves a Christian country.

“I am sure that all of you including grandparents, if we have any here, will realize that we bring nothing into this world and take out nothing except our souls. All is given to us free. Consider how much you put in the Church collection---how much you are going to put in after this sermon. If you put in half-a-crown morning and evening every Sunday it will amount to twelve pounds and ten shillings. Taking the average wage as £500 p.a. this is 1/40 of the total. And yet we think we are generous. My long experience of collecting and counting collections has been that single pennies are still very much in evidence. I would ask you to think of these things during our offertory hymn.

“And now to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost be ascribed all manner of might, majesty, dominion and power, from henceforth and for evermore. Amen.”

HQ3: wisdom of the body

In order to understand the states we call “good health” and “illness”, and how they come about, we need to have a theory about the human being.

Do we consist of “mind, body and spirit”? Bookshops tend to have this as a category, alongside fiction, biography and cookery. Books about “mind, body and spirit” take a holistic view: for example what you eat and what you think have an effect on the spirit. But I am going to propose we set aside all such ideas and also notions of mind-over-matter, positive thinking and psychosomatic disorders.

I’ll try to express what I have learned, in the simplest possible language. The words are simple, but the ideas are different, perhaps radically different, from those you have absorbed from everyday discourse and books and doctors and alternative therapists.

There are two components, body and soul. The body is part of the soul and I can’t tell you what the soul is, even whether there is a distinct soul corresponding to every human being or just one global soul. It is certainly incorrect to say “I have a soul”. Whatever it is, the soul has me.

So we shall talk of the body. We shall not talk of body and mind, where mind is the intelligent part and body is the inert stupid part, because Nature is not like that. Intelligence is built into every cell and every part of a cell; and in particular the orchestration of the cells acting in concert. Intelligence of living creatures is directed at the development and survival of the creature. This is the point where we may be disturbed by the notion that the body’s intelligence is purely selfish. What about our urge to altruism? Well, altruism is a survival strategy, and the “selfish gene” uses the love of a mate and the consequent offspring to ensure continuity of the species. Perhaps altruism comes also from soul, which has wider horizons than the individual body, or the survival of the species. And beyond all this we may have “fancy ideas” of what’s good for others, and our duty to put them into practice. We’ll come back to those soon.

Now let us take the body and subdivide it into “head” and “body”. If this sounds like a paradox, it is one which we are familiar with, and it probably holds in most languages: that head is part of body and also opposite to body. We also speak sometimes of body and brain, though clearly the brain is part of the body. The important thing is to get rid of the concept of mind. It's fine when we are talking certain abstractions, but not in the context of health and sickness.

Every part of a body is intelligent. To think of mind as the controller is false. But we can distinguish two kinds of body-intelligence: the head-kind, which amongst other things is capable of “fancy ideas”, and the body-kind, which is the most important, for it is essential to life. In a psychotic episode, a man may be so mad that he jumps out of a high window with his children in his arms, like the Englishman who was tried recently for this offence by a court in Crete. His body-intelligence remains intact, regulating sense-inputs, temperature, nerves, glands, digestion and muscle actions as normal. His head certainly over-rode his body, for it is normal to be frightened of heights and the danger of falling.

By and large, we owe our still being alive to our body’s intelligence. Years ago I performed a contract at the company called London Underground, which operates a network of trains that has been running continuously since 1863. It was at a time of almost continuous reorganization, for prime minister Margaret Thatcher was scathing about management of public utilities and keen on privatizing everything. The effect was that management were preoccupied with telling consultants what to do, listening to consultants’ findings, then firing the consultants and getting new ones---or perhaps getting consultants to fire consultants and get new ones. I was a consultant. The point is that the trains still ran the same as ever, thanks to the actual workers on the trains, on the platforms and so on. Their routines were essentially the same since 1863 and had been perfected. So it is with the body. The way it works was perfected long ago.

So “head” is master and “body” servant? No! Top management needs workers, more than the other way round. To be constantly over-riding the body intelligence is a fast track to chronic illness. To acknowledge body as master---to obey its wisdom---is the biggest step towards positive health.

To be continued

HQ2: Lion and Thorn

A lion crippled with pain encounters a man who finds a large thorn in its paw, and manages to remove it. The lion is forever grateful. The man is acclaimed for his compassion, wisdom and skill.

In all cultures there is awe for the power of healing. In Jesus it was a sign of divinity or at least a crowd-puller to his sermons. The wounded lion, from an Aesop’s fable or the legend of St Jerome, is the archetype of a patient unable to diagnose or treat himself. The treatment---extracting the thorn---is the perfect cure, for in one action the cause and effect of the pain are permanently removed. “If only it could always be like that!”---a wish shared by doctor and patient .

I had a book once about the healing work of Australian Aboriginal shamans. It was written in the Thirties by a white man involved in public health, who noticed that aboriginals throve poorly with Western-trained doctors and well with their own. So he studied the techniques of their healers and published the results.

I wish I still had the book, but I gave it away. I was being treated by someone who practised Shiatsu and I found it helpful. I went back after a year or so for some more, but she had given up Shiatsu, claiming that whilst it helped her patients, their negative energies went into her, and she became sick. She had therefore ceased practising a technique which involved physical contact with patients. Instead, she had started spiritual healing, in which she prayed, and kept her hands at least six inches from the patient’s body. She refused to charge money for this, since any beneficial effect would be due to Spirit and not her own skill. I know she would have gladly accepted a donation, as she was giving her own time, and needed to eat, even if Spirit didn’t. Spirit didn’t do me any good, so I withheld the donation. As a token of appreciation or social awkwardness I gave her that book, so precious to me and probably of no interest to her. It was just like the treatment: we both gave what we held precious, and valued little what we received.

Anyhow, from memory, one thing that the aboriginal healers did was to go into a kind of trance, perhaps with drumming or chanting and burning of herbs. Or perhaps it was the patient and onlookers who went into a trance. The veil of ordinary reality having thus been rent, the healer would extract a few small twigs or pebbles from the patient’s body: the ear, a nostril or whichever limb or organ was giving the problem. Without these “foreign bodies”, the patient felt an instant and long-lasting improvement. I admired the book’s objective style: respectful, free of judgement. It never made direct reference to sleight-of-hand tricks. How much better than giving antibiotics for sore throats, and anti-depressants for general malaise.

It is not my business to take sides. I hold conventional and alternative branches of medicine in equally low regard, but the shaman who pulls metaphorical thorns from the patient’s body is one I would travel miles to consult.

I’ve been looking up the Placebo Effect in Wikipedia. There’s a lot to be said for it, but like any other form of treatment it is open to abuse and misunderstanding. For our investigation to make any sense, we’ll need first to discover a theory of health and illness.

Stay with me! Oh and thanks for the good wishes by the way. I feel a lot better and have some ideas as to why, in these last few weeks, I succumbed to the virus. Succumbing is the operative word, for the critters are omnipresent, surely. How do you kill ’em anyhow?

HQ1: Nietzsche (Health Question series)

Edvard Munch Nietzsche
From flickr by gyuen

I’ve been wanting to know about health and illness for days now. I meant to say “write” but my fingers typed “know”, and they didn’t lie. I haven’t been feeling well enough to write.

I could write about my history of illness, but it wouldn’t be fun for you or me. Let’s not forget that this blogging business---or the writing and reading of books generally, when they are not prescribed texts in educational institutions---depends on fun. Any expectation to be edified isn’t enough. You and I want to enjoy ourselves. On the other hand, I’m not an author of pulp non-fiction. I want to change your life, for it’s a way to change the world, if only a little. That’s how serious I am. Seriously.

Are we to talk of good health, or illness? Perhaps both: but let us not fall into the easy assumption that they are mutually exclusive opposites. One might harbour both at once, like Nietzsche, sufferer of the progressive ravages of syphilis:

“I took myself in hand, I myself made myself healthy again: the precondition for this---every physiologist will admit it---is that one is fundamentally healthy. A being who is typically morbid cannot become healthy, still less can he make himself healthy; conversely for one who is typically healthy being sick can even be an energetic stimulant to life, to more life. Thus in fact does that long period of sickness seem to me now; I discovered life as it were anew, myself included, I tasted all good and even petty things in a way that others could not easily taste them---I made out of my will to health, to life, my philosophy . . . For pay heed to this: it was in the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist: the instinct for self-recovery forbade to me a philosophy of indigence and discouragement . . . and in what does one really recognize that someone has turned out well! In that a human being who has turned out well does our senses good: that he is carved out of wood at once hard, delicate and sweet-smelling. He has a taste only for what is beneficial to him; his pleasure, his joy ceases where the measure of what is beneficial is overstepped. He divines cures for injuries, he employs ill chances to his own advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger.”

(Unedited extract from Ecce Homo, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics. The “. . .” are not ellipses but author’s punctuation.)

Let us not be deluded about Nietzsche’s health. In the year he wrote the above words, “He experiences a delusive improvement in his health, and in the last quarter of the year is the victim of a morbid euphoria which is the immediate prelude to complete collapse.” (Op. cit: chronology of Nietzsche’s life.) Still, it’s an example of morbidity (in the medical sense) and positive health co-existing. And I think we all know---only too well---of long periods in our life in which we experience neither morbidity nor good health. So let us suppose they are not necessarily opposites.

Positive health is a state subjectively recognized. It’s when I feel able to meet life’s challenges with vigour, strength and fearlessness; clear in my head, energetic in my limbs and organs. I don’t need to go for medical tests to prove it. If I did, I might be told I have high cholesterol and blood pressure, in words whose immediate effect might be the opposite of therapeutic.

The fact that medical tests can show signs of illness when we don’t know anything is amiss, may cause us to think that doctors are the ones to tell us if we are fit or not. And if their tests don’t show anything wrong then they pronounce us fit, or perhaps suffering from depression, which they think of as “psychological”; so they suggest counselling. That is in UK, anyhow. Perhaps in other countries, where doctors are funded differently, they keep running more sophisticated tests till they find something significant, and then they prescribe a barrage of drugs and supplements, till the wheels of commerce have fully revolved and all parties are satisfied. But the patient is still not happy. “Oh, why didn't you mention it? Here are some happy pills.”

I think I shall write---as a complete amateur, a mere untrained owner of a human body---about that in-between state where one lacks both glowing health and detectable morbidity: the state in which one seeks a witch-doctor, or as we say in the West, “an alternative practitioner”.

The God-question (3)

I had airily dismissed Paul Martin’s comments on my last post. A couple of nights later, I lie awake in the small hours realising that something is not right. I have smoothed the bedclothes neatly but a monster lurks underneath, unacknowledged. I’m uneasy. I cannot rest.

Paul had spoken of those who accept the received answers of their religion and find no calling to be seekers. Their satisfaction comes from being in the bosom of a congregation. Cool and detached, I had responded that I would not write about the hypothetical experiences of others, for I would not judge them or guess what went on in them. I said it in all sincerity and now I am shocked at myself, for in writing that I was blind to almost half of my life, when I did accept received answers and knew myself to be in the select band of the saved. The guilt of knowing the “truth”, when others didn’t, impelled me to preach to every new-found friend. I had experienced a conversion, been initiated into a religious organization, accepted its philosophies, pursued its goals and defined my life in terms of its horizons.

So, I reflect wryly from my sleepless bed, I have reached the stage of denying my own past. Is the Vincent of those years a blank to me like the inner life of a stranger? It’s odd that I find it easy to refrain from judging others whilst remaining harsh on parts of my past life.

I lie restless, starting to construct a new philosophy which will allow me to deny that man. “It’s all right. Now I am being my true self. Then, I was living a false life. It doesn’t count because I was steeped in ignorance at the time.” It sounds good. Now I can get back to sleep.

But it won’t do. I had said exactly the same thing to myself when I experienced my conversion, all those years ago. Am I not doing the same thing, blocking off uncomfortable aspects of truth, just as I did then, to get the same illusion of peace?

People accept God into their lives because he is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving: the perfect ally to take with you wherever you go, in the altar of your heart. For His sake, you suppress doubt and the unenlightened behaviour of the “natural” man, the descendant of Adam after the Fall.

Today I was prompted to recall that as a child I had secretly read The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis. I’d found it amongst my mother’s books but didn’t want to discuss my religious mania with her. I may have been 13 but I can’t be sure.

This is the extract I looked up yesterday, part of which was quoted in the London Times the other day, in reference to a forthcoming book (Enough, by John Naish).

I will speak unto my Lord who am but dust and ashes. If I count myself more, behold Thou standest against me, and my iniquities bear true testimony, and I cannot gainsay it. But if I abase myself, and bring myself to nought, and shrink from all self-esteem, and grind myself to dust, which I am, Thy grace will be favourable unto me, and Thy light will be near unto my heart; and all self-esteem, how little soever it be, shall be swallowed up in the depths of my nothingness, and shall perish for ever. There Thou showest to me myself, what I am, what I was, and whither I have come: so foolish was I and ignorant. If I am left to myself, behold I am nothing, I am all weakness; but if suddenly Thou look upon me, immediately I am made strong, and filled with new joy. And it is great marvel that I am so suddenly lifted up, and so graciously embraced by Thee, since I am always being carried to the deep by my own weight.

It was very seductive to my young self, and still strikes a chord in my heart: but a warning note too. If “my Lord” is the divine within my own self, to behave like this may be harmless, and to many it may epitomize the worship of God. But suppose I project this notion of “Lord” on to some living patron, teacher or lover?

I see in the heart of religion both glory and peril, salvation and perdition. I have lived through it and survived. I'm drawn to the inner joy more strongly than ever, but have renounced the path of self-abasement prescribed by Thomas à Kempis.

The God-question (2)

It would be nice if everything about this question could neatly be covered in memoirs of a child growing up. Sorry, it takes more effort than that, yours and mine.

“What we need to know is stored within us, inviolate, unconscious, largely inexpressible.” That’s what I proposed in The God-question (1), as a destination or at least a rendezvous if we got lost. Then we wandered off to recall childhood impressions of religion. Was that a way to get lost? I hope not. Narrative is a good way to review what we know, expressing it in terms of a journey, sometimes even an expedition. I have been reviewing my childhood further, seeing how Mr Guppy, the Scripture master at the grammar school, influenced me with his explanations of Christ’s miracles, and the plagues of Egypt, and the parting of the Red Sea. He was a devout man and a lay reader, but he taught me to doubt the literalness of scripture. Then there was my mother, who tried to escape from an unhappy second marriage by visits to a Christian Spiritualist church. She wanted to get in touch with her deceased first husband, Jan Jacobus, to remind herself of the marital happiness she’d once known. There was thus something adulterous about her church-going. I could go on telling such tales but it would imply that our ideas comes from only from experience of the world.

Some kinds of knowledge come from within, where they have lain in the womb of latency until the time arrives for their manifestation. In this way, we learn through successive developmental stages: to stand, to walk, to understand language, to speak, to become socialised, to pass through puberty and become a sexual being. These things are inherent in our genes rather than learned from society. Ah, nature versus nurture: we have heard about that. In nurture we are taught many things: nature may say something else entirely. Do I really need to be taught about God anyway? Why not let God teach me directly, by letting the inner voice speak? If people stopped telling me about God, could I not reach inside and discover for myself, in the contemplative quietness when people stop shouting their truth at me?

I am not sure if there is a simple model which will clarify how we arrive at our questions about “God”---or our answers. But there is no harm in looking for such a model, for it is simplicity I need. When my brain gets over-excited with intellectual stuff, I’m doomed, for then nothing could be relied upon. It’s so easy to be seduced by our own theories, our own “cleverness”. So I’ll try a little model. Let’s look at sex first, it may be clearer how nurture and nature wrestle with one another. We can even call it the Sex-question: “How can I live happily with my sexuality?” It’s a question that each has to resolve for himself or herself, not necessarily once and for all, but progressively over a lifetime. To simplify how it plays out in the course of a life, I propose that there are three stages. First, a child absorbs information. The “facts of life” are the simplest part. Much more complex is the learning which begins in childhood: how to attract a compatible mate. The second stage is puberty, a wonderful example of knowledge originating from within: in this case an incomplete knowledge which the body teaches to the mind. The third stage is to resolve the sex question through adult experience: extremely complex. How to be independent whilst dependent on another for the fulfilment of instinct? How to be godlike as a self-actualising human being, whilst remaining an animal implanted with primitive drives? Our ancestors have ritualised the process and set norms, to tame the instincts, set guidelines and minimise neurosis. In our day, “advanced society” has undermined the rituals and challenged the norms. Has this made life better? It has made life more complicated, that’s certain. Expectations have never been so high and failures have never been more probable. A parallel dissolving of clear outlines has occurred in the quest for God. Sex and God: so different and yet mimicking one another in the mystery of Love.

The God-question can be viewed as three stages too. First a child absorbs information about its religion. Second, it undergoes a kind of God-puberty, in which it sees that life is fraught with uncertainty. Life is unfair. Like the young Gautama, who would later become the Buddha, the growing child sees old age, disease and death, as well as disorder, cruelty and violence. What am I do do about death, someone else’s or my own? How do I account for my conscience, my urge to prayer? Whence comes this inexplicable sense of being protected---when it isn’t buried under layers of anxiety? In the third stage, the adult has to take responsibility for his or her life, and resolve the swirling forces unleashed in the period of God-puberty.

Perhaps you don’t find a parallel as I do between the Sex-question and the God-question. I wish you can, because then, the God-question is permanently transformed. It becomes a quest to find a source of inspiration, to undertake meaningful rituals, to weave one’s own life into a greater myth. To survive the accidents and transitions of life with some tranquillity and joy.

Seeking the sun

Today is for doing nothing. My body wants to recuperate from strained muscle and virus, which as Jim pointed out, can interact on one another and with age too. I pace from room to room, not wishing to go out into the cold damp dark day. In the house it’s dark too, a dark house, a cosy refuge. I find a key-ring. As a child in hospital for a few months, still not seven, weak from a bone infection, I lay in my bed with just one toy: a little Bambi of red translucent plastic. I gazed into its glowing depths---then chewed its legs off. Don’t ask how I remember these things.

I hang the key-ring in front of the window, a reproach to the sky, an amulet for this day. I pick one of my books of Van Gogh reproductions and it opens at a cornfield. This one! I found a reproduction of the same on a website but the wheatfield was dark orange, the sky too blue. The colours in my book were too yellow: even the sky was yellow. Using irfanview, a shareware package, I altered the colour balance till it looked right. Without going to see the original in a private foundation in Amsterdam, I don’t know which is closest to the original, but mine looks best, and makes best sense of the sky.

Back to the God-quest soon.

The God-question (1)

Somewhere along the course of my life I became “spiritual”, or perhaps it would be better to say that I realized I could never be an atheist. Till possibly now ...

In approaching this I must tread delicately. Let us not excite our brain-boxes with the wording of the “God-question”, not yet. Our brain is a toolbox of different instruments, and we need to know which to use and in what order. First we need to set aside our formal education. It has taught us to glue facts together using reason; to distort language by using strict definitions; to distinguish real from unreal, true from false. These are artificial constructs. They help us fit in to their own world of artificiality, which is the world of politics and universities and technology and law and sciences.

I wasn't introduced to God via reason, but through repetition: “Our Father, which art in Heaven …” But then I learned arithmetic the same way: "Once two is two; twice two is four; three twos are six ..."

None of this helps with the God-question.

I hope we can stay together on this exploration. Forgive me if it meanders, as if it’s somehow aimless. That’s only because it’s an honest reflection of life, yours and mine. In childhood, events fall upon our head like sunshine and rain. Or they are pieces of a puzzle, which we can only collect at first, for we don’t know what pattern they form. I would claim in fact that it is we, individually, who decide what pattern the pieces form. So I’ll set before us, in case we get separated on the journey, what I see as the final rendezvous, the place we can try and meet up if we get lost. I’ll express this rendezvous as a proposition, that sits waiting for us until we can understand it:

“What we need to know is stored within us, inviolate, unconscious, largely inexpressible.”

I won’t even formulate the God-question, except in the terms what we need to know.

Naturally, parents and teachers do their best to teach us what we need to know. The Australian aborigines used to draw diagrams with a stick in the sand, to illustrate the Dream-Time legends of their race. They would paint similar designs on their bodies and on rocks using ochre; they made music and dance: all for the purposes of passing on the vital traditions of their culture. For my part, I started Latin at the age of 8, conjugating “amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant”. Latin was the language of the Romans, whose law and Empire Britain took as a role-model, with Greek there behind Latin as the poetic and philosophic inspiration of the Romans. That was part of the secular side. To teach us about the ways of God, we had lessons called Scripture.

From the age of 6½ till 12, I was at boarding-school. I’ve just worked out that I may have spent 500 hours in Scripture lessons, plus 500 hours in the village church (illustrated above), for attendance was compulsory: sometimes twice on Sunday, especially when I was in the choir. We went two-by-two into that Ark, “walking in crocodile”, as the English say, to St John the Baptist Parish Church in the village of Sedlescombe, a mile from our school. Apart from the rows of little boys in their Sunday best, all born in the Second World War, most of the congregation was elderly: survivors of both World Wars. Once a year, those cataclysmic events were recalled on Remembrance Sunday. We all wore poppies on that day and sang special hymns:

O valiant hearts, who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame;
Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.

But I think for the older villagers, every Sunday was for remembrance of those who had not returned.

My own headmaster had a glass eye and a permanent tremor in his hands, which made his writing jerky. He’d been a telegraphist in the trenches, jerking out Morse code on a key, and suffering shell-shock somewhere along the way. But he encouraged us to learn Morse ourselves and we played a game of talking remotely in the school grounds using police-whistles. He taught us Scripture from The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature. The text was from the King James version, but it was laid out like a normal book rather than in double columns; so it didn’t have verse-numbers dominating the text. And so we read the stories as stories, rather than as Holy Writ; and I wondered if Monty Brummell-Hicks, headmaster, who caned me regularly on bare buttocks to stop me becoming homosexual (it seems to have worked) had this in mind. Was he really a Christian at all, I wondered.

We were a proper English school, fiercely loyal to the Church of England, observing all the rituals, such as the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, on the model of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge; starting with the processional “Once in Royal David’s City”, via “Adeste Fideles” and “In Dulci Jubilo” and ending up with the Christmas Day Hymn “Hark! the herald-angels sing” by Charles Wesley to the tune by Mendelssohn. You could say we lived those tunes and stories, as well as the mysterious tales of the Old Testament: Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar’s Feast, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego; the whole story of David, from his slaying of Goliath to the complicated relationships with Jonathan and Saul and beyond. This was the folklore of our tribe, it seemed, but I have not read it since. Later, at grammar school, we studied the New Testament, but more critically.

To be soaked in that Christian upbringing was like being a stone at the bottom of the sea: dredge it up, leave it in the sunshine a few hours, it will be utterly dry. For all the compulsory church attendance and study of Scripture, I didn't find God.

But I used to wonder about others. What was it like for those who went to Church as volunteers and prayed believing that someone was listening? What was it to believe?

The New Pub

These photos are specially for Jim, who asked what the ancient farm illustrated in my last post looks like now that it's a pub. I wanted to take some photos of the inside too, but the camera's batteries died.

The first photo was taken from the same position as the old one: on the footbridge over the railway line. The second shows how the pub looks from the road that runs between it and the houses.

(Click to see enlargements)

The swinging pub signs and crest show that Peacock Farm is a "tied" pub, supplied by Hall and Woodhouse, the Dorset brewers of Badger Ale. I ought to point out that that this new pub built from old components is no sentimental pastiche or travesty of the English Alehouse. It's real. The waggon nonchalantly posed under the barn overhang is the genuine rotting article. Looking inside I saw that it had been botched up with various modern boards inside to stop it falling apart. But the use of such a piece of farm machinery to decorate an inn is a venerable tradition.

Actually I am working on a new post, but it is of such potential profundity that some light relief is needed. Working title: "the God-question". May have to be in several instalments. Well, God and the drinking of ale go well together: that is certainly the principle of Olde England, though the Non-conformists (Wesley brothers & George Fox for example) quite rightly worried about drunkenness and its effect upon the poor.

MaxiRam revisited

This is MaxiRam Castle, my code-name for the place where I worked in 2007 from February to August. Each noon I emerged for an hour-long walk and in those seven months, taking no days of leave, I combed the parks and roads and byways, in a sort of sacred ritual. It connected me with my primitive being, which is one with nature and finds itself reflected therein. Those walks were excursions into ecstasy, and that is why I tried to capture some of their flavour in the blog posts I published for the period.

Yesterday I went back to call on a friend. We went to a new pub on the site of Peacock Farm, which appears in the middle ground of my picture below, taken last April. Its land had been purchased for the building of a hundred dwellings, now nearly complete. I’d been sad at the dilapidated state of the farm buildings, but they have been preserved and enhanced to produce a pub which celebrates bygone days in the famous English fashion, with the old ales too, and oaken rafters, and walls lined with old books, some of which were familiar to me from childhood: encyclopedias of practical mechanics and the like.

We came back to MaxiRam and my friend went back to his office. For old times’ sake I went for a walk, not for the full hour because I was still recovering from a virus. I took my commonest route which reaches Mill Pond via so many spots I’ve photographed or referred to verbally, whereI'd found blossoms, lichen, moss, horsetail, grasses, the “stairway to heaven”, Mill Park. I had even planned a book entitled Mill Park, for one day, going around its Pond, so many inspirations crowded in that I thought they could fill a volume.

I certainly remembered, and as I draft this post, I can mentally revisit every path I took in those months, the incidents and the inspirations, especially with the help of the “wayfarer’s notes” I posted. Oh yes, a harmless hobby, and one that’s good for the health too. But to me it is much more than that, or perhaps just the same as someone else’s hobby, for how can I deny others the possibility of the ecstasies which I have known? Ecstasies which I don’t think I have ever been able to convey, whether in words or pictures. Perhaps all I have been able to describe is the accidental backdrop, a set of living scenery. The real action has always unfolded on the boards of an inner stage, an ongoing soap-opera called Vincent's Life.

Whilst I worked at MaxiRam the ritual daily walk served a vital purpose: to rediscover my roots as a primitive man. Like eating and drinking, it had to be repeated regularly. Yesterday it was merely nostalgic, and though the scenery was exactly as I remembered it, allowing passage of time and seasons, the revitalising magic had evaporated. The scenery had become wallpaper. It was like the countryside seen through the windows of a car, or a silent bell.

Once again I proved something I’d known in a puzzled way since my teens, something expressed concisely in a stanza by William Blake. When I bend to myself a joy, I do the wingèd life destroy. But when I kiss the joy as it flies, I live in Eternity’s sunrise.

Fevered interlude

When you have a virus---cold or flu---it comes and goes in waves, and you don’t know what to do with yourself. I woke in the night, thinking about how to continue my memoirs. There’s plenty left in the pipeline. But after age 21 and before 59, there’s a waste land: not an arid desert, but something like the book of Job. I say that, but I had better read Job to confirm. It would be a sin against literature to say things merely for effect.

Apart from a tacit resolution to post daily, I started to write this piece because I could find nothing I felt like reading, apart from Bukowski: have you come across his stories? I haven’t yet learned how to summarise his style and content in a couple of crisp sentences. Suffice that it mirrors the laconic desperation I felt in my body this morning, and which made it impossible for me to enjoy anything.

Another reason for writing was to proclaim a Sickness Liberation Manifesto. Why should my creativity be based exclusively on rude health? What value can there be in such a biased view of the world, as if only the sleekly fit were worthy to give voice? Don’t the sick have a valid viewpoint? Perhaps, dear reader, but I will not inflict upon you mine, for it was gloomy and tedious. It may be pure coincidence but after reading a few of Hank Bukowski’s stories my temporal artery meandered across my forehead like the Mississippi River, bulging fit to burst. I never run to the doctor: but give me scant cause and I’m as ready to panic as the next man. I expected to lose the sight of my eye in the next few days, with other organs failing in turn like dominoes knocking each other over. I decided that when my condition was terminal, I’d hang a sign round my neck “Nil by mouth” and spend my last days under a kindly tree, weather permitting.

Now you can see I should have stayed silent. I did, I did, but there’s a restless blood in my veins, and not just in my temporal artery. My elder son phoned to arrange an impromptu visit: he said he would arrive with family in 90 minutes. I tried to guess his delay to the nearest hour: it’s the only way I know to end up pleasantly surprised. The reasons as ever were outside his control. This time, they were not for the squeamish.

My son has the same restless gene as I, and plans to install for me a high clothes-line with pulleys galore, like the rigging of a sailing ship; as well as build me a “tropical garden” in our backyard with a pergola covered in creepers. He’s a landscape gardener, professionally disappointed that I like things as they are, or as they will evolve with the gentle help of Nature. Setting that aside, I’m glad that he and my elder daughter (ages 41 & 37) are as resistant to the junk culture and hyped-up economy as I am. I don’t think I played any role in teaching them that resistance---in fact they achieved it years before I did. I didn’t teach them values, but I might have stumbled on something more important: to shield them from the world’s values, leaving a vacuum in which to discover their own.

Perhaps one day it will be possible to write about that Waste Land, and with my reader discover whether or not it was all waste.

But I owe it to you, me and Bukowski to convey something of his writing. Here’s the first paragraph of his story Animal Crackers in My Soup. Where it goes after that, you could never guess.

I had come off a long drinking bout during which time I had lost my petty job, my room, and (perhaps) my mind. After sleeping the night in an alley I vomited in the sunlight, waited five minutes, then finished the remainder of the wine bottle that I found in my coat pocket. I began walking through the city, quite without purpose. When I was walking I felt as if I had some portion of the meaning of things. Of course, it was untrue. But standing in the alley hardly helped either.

Fog on the Solent (Norfolk House 4)

Royal Yacht Squadron, 1921: Norfolk House would be behind tree at right of church tower

The Solent may have been the busiest sea-lane in the world and the most varied in its traffic. There were ferries between the mainland and our Island; the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth; the transatlantic liner port at Southampton; the Sawley Oil Refinery where tankers plied from the Gulf; and innumerable sailing craft. The Royal Yacht Squadron was just yards from Norfolk House. This was the spot where crowned heads of Europe, incumbent or in exile, would gather in the first week of August, and from their castle on the seafront, built by King Henry VIII, gaze disdainfully at ordinary mortals like me. Our own Queen seldom went but Prince Philip always did, and his bar-room yarns were repeated around the town, if you could believe the gossip. The Squadron had the largest yachts, with extensive crews to match; but Cowes was a centre for all kinds of yachting. My school was keen on sailing because it looked good in the Prospectus, and the geography master, Lt. Col. Ilton (ex Indian Army) ran the Sailing Club. Unfortunately it wasn’t free; so though I lived in Cowes I never got close to the humblest dinghy.

I can’t remember a Cowes Week. The locals would steer clear unless their business depended on it, for all the prices would go up and you could hardly walk down the winding High Street for the jam of tourists. But we never stopped talking of Cowes Week that year: it was make-or-break for us. Blackett was paying nearly twice his salary in rent for Norfolk House, but it reached the stage where we only had rent from Mrs Dominie and the “man in the scullery”. I never saw him enter or leave the building, or found out where his other rooms were: perhaps a secret annex, like Anne Frank’s.

We did a deal with the Gloster, the best hotel in Cowes. They’d pay us for every room we had vacant in Cowes Week. They’d provide the linen, the chambermaid, the guests. We’d get twice the weekly house-rent – each night! Naturally, I thought it would be fun, and dreamed up ways I could earn tips from the rich guests: carrying their bags, running errands, fetching their cigarettes from the tobacconist.

It never happened, I’m not sure why. Perhaps the bank called in a loan; more likely the figures still didn’t add up, for Cowes Week has only seven days and the house rent had to be paid all year round.

It was an adventure while it lasted, not least because we were so near the seashore. It was such a busy sea-lane that in a fog the Solent was a cacophony of foghorns, bells, whistles, klaxons and hooters. I’d lie in my dark bedroom, counting them, noting their rhythms and frequencies. Buoys would clang mournfully: the great liners would sound long bass notes in shameless flatulence. It was like a great exciting conversation coming through the window, and if I were embroidering this tale I’d speak of creeping out in pyjamas and dressing-gown to the rusty veranda for a ringside seat at the theatre of deafening fog. (When my younger son was four, I pointed out the window and said, “See? That’s fog.” “Where?” he replied. “I can't see it. I can’t see anything.”)

There’s more I could tell about Norfolk House, but not now. Time’s arrow goes one way only, but memory’s meandering path can loop back and criss-cross the timelines like a plough behind a tractor, till all is brought to the surface. I’ve had the idea to rewrite my memoirs anew each year, for the same time-period. Why not? Artists do self-portraits again and again, for the sake of something to paint.

But there’s one scene I’d like to depict, a wayfaring ecstasy of the kind I cultivate consciously today. It was an early morning fog, you could see just a yard ahead. The Solent’s orchestra was in full-throated fervour, a maritime dawn-chorus. I went on the beach where the tide had washed up a line of flotsam and jetsam. The Solent has double the normal number of tides, and the distance between high and low water isn’t much, except at the mudflats where you can never reach deep enough to swim. I don’t remember swimming near the house: it’s said to be treacherous. But the line of dried weed and flotsam was treasure: the smell, the colours, the sculpted pieces of wood, all washed and sanded and bleached, drifted perhaps thousands of miles to arrive here, or jettisoned from cargoes loaded anywhere in the world. It was at that high-water mark, crunching the shingle, making the flies and sandhoppers jump as I passed, inhaling the seaweed, seeing the rusty cans and floats and ropes, that I as a wayfaring mudlark first embraced the whole world, which had laid its treasures at my feet. And if I stooped to take up a handful, each grain of sand was a jewel, coloured and faceted. Each flea-like creature had its life-cycle, sex-life, hunger, preferences, survival instinct.

I couldn’t have expressed it then, fifty years ago. I wouldn’t have shared my ecstasy, but hid it. Such was my secret shame, not to be a “people-person”, but a lonely wayfarer, even then. Now I understand that I can’t be what I’m not. Deficits shouldn’t define us: they free up space for strengths.

Norfolk House (3): Vignettes

Illustration from a wood engraving by Eric Gill

Please note that the Norfolk House story begins at “Nest of Dreams”, so I’ve numbered that “0”. Also that the mention of my “man-flu” affliction introducing yesterday’s piece was a warning that it would be rough. It’s edited extensively now.

In “Nest of Dreams” I referred to awakening sexuality. A boy, especially if he has come into contact with no girls, doesn’t necessarily associate his burgeoning virility with those giggling, teasing creatures. It doesn’t surprise me that some take the other direction and stay that way. In my case, wet dreams had always been accompanied by images of sweet feminine kindness. Now that I was sexual in daytime reality, girls played no part; but the garden surrounding Norfolk House was scene, and possibly arouser, of my solitary excitements. Shrubberies had overgrown till they were well-nigh impenetrable. I could squeeze into cool spaces where only scandalised mother-birds and their gaping hungry chicks knew I was there. I know that something moved me profoundly in those spaces because I recall wanting to paint water-colours of the leaves and buds. I also had a project to carve a piece of old oak into an oak-leaf shape. These things were never executed, being works of art in the mind’s eye only.

The kitchen at Norfolk house was a flat-roofed extension to the original building, projecting into a wooded area. A large oak, hollow at the roots, stood opposite the window: Wattie used to amuse himself throwing carving-knives at the rats which cavorted at the base of the tree. There were blue-jays, robins, cuckoos, red squirrels. One day I found a large dead pigeon whose insides were still moving. It was full of a heaving mass of maggots. Another day I found a rotting leathern bucket. Archaeological remains have always fascinated me, ever since I used to wander on ploughed fields at boarding-school whilst the other boys played football.

We had a few guests at the house. There was also one man who rented a small apartment with his own kitchen, which I discovered one day: a former scullery with plate-racks and draining-boards of wood, in the old style. He kept it neat, and used it mainly to make tea. When he found me there in what I considered my own secret place, he wasn’t upset with me for trespassing, but said I was welcome any time. He wasn’t over-familiar, or anything creepy, but I realised---or realise now---that a well-behaved 13-year-old boy can sometimes go anywhere and not be an intruder. (It was a bit like Lucy’s boarding-house in Australia, or the ship coming to England: you could wander about and feel welcome. Except for the time I had walked up the white-painted stairs to the ship’s bridge, and been brusquely sent away by a uniformed officer. That was the sole exception to my freedom as a 4-year-old.)

Breakfast was served to the boarders in a huge “saloon” overlooking the Solent, with a veranda outside. It faced North and wasn’t very warm. Each morning it was my job to light the little square stove with mica windowpanes, using paper, sticks (I had to cut logs and split them with a hatchet) and egg-shaped lumps of moulded coal-dust. If I lit this early enough, the guests who found the nearest tables could eat their bacon and eggs almost in comfort. But sometimes I tried several times to get the coal to light, and a guest would have to help me.

The guests were male apart from Mrs Dominie, a rotund widow. My mother was reduced to acting chamber-maid and was amused to find apple-cores and chocolate wrappers under her bed. I invented a soap-opera to amuse my mother and it went on for years, fuelled by such little incidents. According to its plot-lines, Wattie our chef cast a romantic eye upon Mrs Dominie, but she coyly resisted his advances. We introduced another character, Mr Dorey. He was a tenant at my grandparents’ house at that time, a deaf old man who was constantly expecting telephone calls. As soon as it rang, he would rush from his room and snatch up the receiver. it was one of those candlestick phones, where you hold the mouthpiece in one hand and the receiver in the other, as in the Marx brothers’ movies. “Dorey here!” he would boom. “D O R E Y. To whom am I speaking? Is that Slazenger? Eh? Eh? Eh?” It was an issue because in their courting days, Blackett had used to ring my mother long distance; and if Dorey answered, it took several expensive minutes to get “that old fool” off the line, for he was too deaf to realize it wasn’t his call. Dorey, in our soap opera, was a rival for Mrs Dominie’s affection. He would attempt to ring her up but Wattie would answer the ’phone and tell Dorey to clear off, whilst the poor widow sat lonely in her room, munching chocolate (it was always Toblerone) to sublimate her frustrations.

At school Mr Bell, our dapper art master, had introduced us to scraperboard (scratchboard in US) as an art medium. I must have been quite creative, because I started a strip cartoon, executed in scraperboard, of the Life and Loves of Mrs Dominie. I suppose many children are multifariously creative but without a focus and a mentor it’s hard to get the skill. In my case there was such a huge gap between fantasy and achievement that I tended to give up easily. In those days it never occurred to me to write: essays were drudgery. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. But now I see it differently: a thousand words can express much more than a picture.

Norfolk House (2): the Back Story

Bungalow in Australia, with one of my “mothers”

Beth said I was teasing, in my post Norfolk House (1). It’s so long since these memoirs were interrupted (since early September) that I ought to tell you The Story So Far. I have a head-cold today, but let us give it true dignity and call it man-flu. A woman would just get on with it, but a man needs universal sympathy, cosseting, bed-rest, the cooing of “You poor baby!” in his ear and attentive room service, especially the medicinal hot lemon and rum. Provided with all these things, he can struggle on bravely, without too much in the way of delirium.

Now to the story so far. My mother at the age of 21 left the confines of her parents’ house in St Leonards-on-Sea to seek her fortune as an adventuress in the Far East. Influenced by Isadora Duncan, who had died in a freak accident 4 years before (strangled when her flowing scarf got caught in the wheels of her Bugatti), she (my mother) had accompanied her dancing teacher Miss Holdsworth. They had taught Greek dancing to the small children of Chinese millionaires and ballroom dancing to the millionaires themselves.

In 1935 she married a tall moody Dutchman, Jan Jacobus, in a society wedding at Singapore Cathedral. She gave up the dance-teacher thing: husband was jealous and wanted to keep an eye on her. So as a team, they managed the fashionable Gap Roadhouse and a branch of Ciro’s Pearls. But the war loomed. Jan Jacobus was caught up in secret activities which gave him advance warning of the Japanese invasion and she evacuated well before time to Perth, Western Australia. By way of diversion there were none but country hicks at barndances, but she met a sweet boy ten years her junior. He was 17 and living with Mum and Dad. She took riding lessons from him. I only can tell you what I have gleaned from different sources. Horses were doubtless involved in their relationship, but in any case I was a result. She didn’t tell me: I found out fifty years later. Her toy-boy (my father) went to fight the war and she brought me up in a lodging-house exclusive to women, though gentlemen were sometimes glimpsed in the morning. Some months after the Japanese surrender, my father returned, washed-out with hardships and malaria. On learning that the hostilities had made her a widow, he instantly did the gallant thing and offered marriage; but a haggard soldier had replaced her fresh-faced country boy. Perth was a dead-end in the middle of nowhere; her glory-days of the Thirties---glamour, social whirl, status, property, income---were all smashed by the ravages of war. St Leonards-on-Sea, where nothing ever happens, which she had fled as soon as she legally could, now seemed a haven of comfort in which to lick her wounds. In June ’46 we departed on the rmv Rangitata from Fremantle to Tilbury, a six-week adventure that took me away from the place I knew and loved. To me, aged 4, it wasn’t a finite transit but an endless new way of life. I was used to multiple mothers at the lodging-house but on the ship I had 800 doting mothers. My own mother was lacking in the maternal instinct so she let me wander from deck to deck on my own, everywhere petted by other women.

My arrival in England was a shock, for my grandparents were horribly strict. They made me speak “properly”, reprimanding me for sounding like an Australian child and emulating their table-manners. My mother became restless almost immediately. She must find a rich eligible man, but St Leonards was hardly the place. It was overstuffed with widows and spinsters left high and dry from the Great War of 1914-18. So she dropped me off at Jan Jacobus’ sister’s place in Holland, on the phoney basis that I was a nephew; then proceeded to Switzerland where she hung out in hotels till her money ran out. Fortunately she didn’t strike lucky, else I might have had a Nazi stepfather on the run from the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. So she collected me on the way home and we returned to my grandparents’ house. (I never lived anywhere long, till my late forties!)

She met a man---I shall call him Kenneth---who lived locally, and married him a few months before my half-sister was born. He’d been a bachelor till his late fifties and his eccentric habits included nudism. Accordingly, each summer we went to the Isle of Wight to stay at Woodside, an overgrown naturist holiday-camp run by an anarchistic old clergyman. For the rest, I was sent to a boarding-school.

After my mother left Kenneth she thought Woodside might be a good place to pick up a new husband. You could inspect the wares before committing yourself, I suppose. That’s how she met Blackett. So let me now tell you his story.

Blackett (his real middle name) was a Tynesider with a quaint Geordie accent who’d run away to sea as a boy and by dint of fearful study had passed exams as a ship’s third engineer in the Merchant Navy. Then he’d married E (he always called her that, after she became his ex, but her real name was Edith) and it was time to settle down as a landlubber when the children were born. So he got a job on the Isle of Wight at the aircraft factory Saunders-Roe, who in the early fifties were still building the Princess Flying Boat, the biggest of its kind, a luxury way to travel fast when the great ships Mauretania, Queen Mary, United States, still dominated the trans-Atlantic traffic: we used to watch them with binoculars from the lawn at Woodside, as they paraded slowly down the Solent from Southampton.

To supplement their income, Blackett and E used to run a lodging house for visitors to the company: engineering students, sales reps and the like. For this purpose the company let them a tall building, York House. E ran off with one of the lodgers called Satterthwaite (the name sticks in my mind), taking their children to New Zealand. He never saw them again, not a letter or card, but struggled on with the guest-house on his own. Under his sole management, it was more like a self-service hostel. At weekends he would escape the chores and bicycle to Woodside, where he could enjoy the company of naked ladies on a day-ticket. And so he met my mother and they consoled themselves till their divorces came through and that is how I moved to York House in East Cowes.

My mother had no intention of replacing E as a drudging landlady, serving up greasy breakfasts to engineers in a hurry. So they engaged a crusty old steward, Warrant Officer James Watling, ex-RN, ex-Havant Flying Club, to be their chef and factotum. He wasn’t keen on being a factotum: he hung around in the kitchen all day with his white chef’s uniform, cigarettes, indigestion mixture and vacant contemplation. I’d go there after school, hungry for a snack, and watch the ash fall off his cigarette as he spun his sailor’s yarns and grumbled about how things were not as they used to be.

Then Saunders-Roe said they needed to repossess York House to convert to office space. We had to move on. Normal people would have bought a little house all to themselves, something I had never known. My mother had never known it either, for her grandparents’ house was big and after the days of servants they had let out rooms to tenants. Out East, her household would have included Chinese “boys” and Malay syces (chauffeurs). I suspect Blackett had forgotten a cosy little home too for he’d spent years at sea. Anyhow we still had “Wattie” our adopted chef and my mother called him a treasure, though his cooking was plain and overcooked. So we (they: I was 13 and had no say in the matter) rented Norfolk House to maintain the fantasy of running a hotel. It only lasted a few months because we were never able to fill that big house. Blackett refused to advertise because then, he said, someone would report us to the municipal authority for not paying property tax at the business rate. It has always seemed odd to me, but I think he had enemies at work.

We didn’t stay there long but the memories are so rich I could write a book about those few months.

Now, where is that rum and lemon?

The train scribbler

This train to London goes quite smoothly. That’s the important thing, for it allows me to write legibly in this notebook: correction, would allow me to write legibly if I possessed that skill. Perhaps this trip will have a useful outcome: to provide some new pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of my existence. At present there’s some gaps in the income part, but if the pieces are forced in, rather than fitting naturally, another part of the puzzle will be wrecked and that is the writing part. Could a three-hour daily commute (walk-train-walk-Tube-walk, & back in the evening) yield 500-1000 words of finished copy, publishable after a year as The Train Diaries of a Wayfarer? That is what I’m experimenting now, as I write these words, on the way to an interview with a Japanese bank. Yes, yes, I have my doubts but (promise to self) this will be my last job.

Is it possible to write without feeling? This came up in a discussion on Beth’s blog. It puts me in mind of Sundays at boarding school. Best clothes, Mattins at village church, long walk on country roads, and then before Evensong, a dreary task: the “letter to parents”. Letters had to achieve a page-and-a-half and were censored. “Dear Mother and Father. (long pause) I hope you are well. (longer pause) . . . ” Even the first line was difficult. I wanted to write “Dear Mother and Father” but honesty of feeling prevented that, so I wrote “Dear Mother and David”. A stepfather could be a father too, but mine wasn’t.

Our education did not involve feelings, unless it were to suppress them. It’'s true that you were allowed to be passionate about cricket. No, not “allowed”: “expected”. Expected is perhaps too mild a word. Passion for cricket was “required”. I was in the last cohort of boys whose entire education was conducted in the context of Empire, with its connotations of the stiff upper lip, and the White Man’s Burden. One must never show weakness in front of the natives. So much for that upbringing: I am now married to a Jamaican negress. (The spellchecker rejects this lovely word: let that remain its problem, not ours.)

So I received my rolled-up paper at a degree ceremony in July ’63, whilst the colonies were being handed back, and the contraceptive pill became available. I panicked not knowing what to do with my life, and went to train for VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) to teach English in French Guinea, and chickened out after two days. Then I met a girl. I have spent more time successfully trying to forget her and then reliving her memory, than ever I spent with her. When at 59 my second marriage failed, it suited me to think of looking her up.

At that point, in my mind’s eye, I was still 21 and she still 19. The passage of time didn’t count: it was merely the waste-land of our separation. Checking registers, I found she had been married in Oxford. Perhaps she was the wife of a professor. Now I saw myself traversing a leafy suburb of houses with large gardens like those on Rectory Avenue (mentioned in my previous posts). As soon as I reach the gate, I see her, with gloved hands cutting off the overblown rose blooms, skilfully avoiding the thorns. She doesn’t recognize me on sight, nor do I see much trace of that girl of 19. “I’ve come to apologize. You were the one for me, as I have only just realized.” She pours tea into delicate china cups and we sit warily, talking of what might have been and can never be now. She hopes I can stay for dinner and meet her husband the Professor.

I checked the Worcestershire County archives and found the address of the house where I’d briefly met her parents. I talked to the elderly neighbours who vaguely remembered the parents and the dog, but thought they had a son, not a daughter. Odd, but it figures: she had been a tomboy. I checked a West Midlands phone book and rang everyone with her unusual maiden name. Eventually I spoke to someone who knew who I was talking about, who told me she’d killed herself 19 years previously. This was in 1982, 19 years after we had met. My informant made it clear that her death had been a relief to the entire family. My immediate tears of grief seemed incongruous in the circumstances.

Being chronic sick and without employment at the time, I devoted myself to the penning of a cloying memoir which included every last detail of our relationship, whose reality was five or six brief encounters over several months. Like Pygmalion’s, my creation came back to life and I fell in love with it. I even got in touch with her ex-husband, sending him a version of the tale I’d written. To my surprise it inspired him to write his own, covering how they met, their marriage, the manner of her death. He found it cathartic, and sent me each instalment as it was completed.

I suppose that’s how I started writing. I’ve learned that it suits me best to follow spontaneous impulse; not tell everything; not be a slave to chronological narrative; and always be anchored in the present. It’s more bearable this way and leaves space for both of us---you and I---to explore life’s wider truth.

Norfolk House (1)

As I mentioned in my last, Norfolk House was destroyed long ago. It was crumbling when we moved in, and that was 1955. To write more about my sojourn there is more than the work of a day, but meanwhile, here is the Medina Estuary, showing West Cowes at the far end on the left, East Cowes on the right. Beyond is the Solent and the mainland. I recommend clicking on the picture, then clicking again, to obtain the maximum size (1575 x 1961 pixels).

I'm going to London on business later today and that has put me in a rather rational mood, and it made me start to describe the reasons why we moved to Norfolk House, but frankly, dear reader, let's leave that to one side. (post unfinished. to be continued . . .

Nest of Dreams: introducing Norfolk House (0)

Pic credit: Grete and David. Click for their site

I have just dyed my hair orange: a sort of coppery burnt-sienna. I have decided to take up smoking again after all these years, so I leave the house to buy half an ounce of Golden Virginia and some rolling-papers. Do they still sell tobacco in half-ounces, I wonder. Perhaps I will have to ask for it in grams. I’ll need matches as well, but I don’t want the shopkeeper to think I have just started smoking, so I decide to buy the matches in a different shop. On the way, a grizzled man with a beard accosts me, with something in his hand:

“Do you want to buy a film?”
“What of?”
“The film is about you and me. I haven’t made it yet.”

What he’s holding is a small picture-frame, nothing but the edges, no back. He waves it about, to show how anything visible may be caught in the frame.

He changes the subject and asks what university course I’m on. This amuses me and I do a quick mental calculation.

“I graduated forty-four years ago.”

My words are wasted, for he has already vanished. Perhaps the effort of doing arithmetic in a dream has woken me up from it.

Now, writing this down, I see that the grizzled man must be me. I stopped the flow of my memoir-writing a few months ago, when I moved to this house. Will it be possible to continue? I’ve been inwardly debating this since September 17th. If my life is a burning twig, the writing part is the bright glowing end, increasingly ruled by impulse, not reason: a fact which I accept with complacency.

The spontaneous part of me increasingly outwits my clumsy will. I’m more excited by the intermingling of memories with the present moment, than with those fixed narratives of long ago. Fixed? They are more or less copyrighted by fact and policed by occasional photographs. Usually the evidence is destroyed. For example Norfolk house, today’s topic, was pulled down long ago.

We moved there from Powys House, a tall granite Victorian building which still stands, a mile from Queen Victoria’s holiday home at Osborne. Norfolk House was in West Cowes: an Edwardian mansion with broad veranda and balcony overlooking the Solent, that busy strip of water separating the Isle of Wight from the English mainland. The house had lain empty so long that we had to chop down thickets to make a pathway to the front door.

“Young, handsome and melancholy, he sought in solitude everything he could not find in the company of other men: serenity, sincerity and purity. Wandering on his trusty steed he arrived, one day, at the dark forest. Being adventurous, he decided to explore it. He made his way through slowly and with a struggle, for the trees and bushes grew in a thick tangle. A few hours later, now losing heart, he was about to turn his horse and go back when he thought he could see something through the trees . . . He pushed back the branches . . . Wonder of wonders! There in front of him stood a castle with high towers.” (from the tale of Sleeping Beauty)

Tiles a bit like this: click for site

Inside was a grand hallway, always cool, with an interesting fragrance and acoustics. The floor was patterned in fake medieval tiles of indigo, cream and ochre; overlaid with patterns from stained-glass windows in the porch. A stone staircase curved to a first-floor gallery, and half-way up was an alcove with two doors, one leading to my bedroom.

For nearly four months, I’ve held back from describing this phase of my life, shy of my ability to describe that house, and what happened to me there. It was the end of April, 1955. I know the month because in trimming back the thickets we exposed nests with eggs still unhatched, turquoise and speckled ones from the blackbird or turdus merula.

It was in that bedroom aged thirteen that I stumbled upon a hitherto unknown function of my adolescent male body. It was an event too momentous to be passed over unmentioned in a memoir. The exact details remain vivid for they fascinated me by their awesome novelty. I was reticent then, and remain so today. Compared to my peers I was prudish, a fact I know with confidence because forty years later, I attended a small reunion of school friends---all men, it was a boys-only school. It wasn’t any crudeness in the conversation, but just a remembrance of how they were as teenagers, and how I was: different, apart.

Masturbation---at any rate I can utter the word---became a shameful habit thereafter, morally indefensible, weakening to the will, fatiguing and aesthetically repugnant; or so I thought, doubtless influenced by lurid old books. Understandably they went into horrid detail about sexually transmitted disease. But why were they so hard on “self-abuse”?

There was one genuine drawback to the practice: it put an end to wet dreams. Till then, these had offered solace to a lonely adolescence. I’d awaken clinging to the memory of a sweet feminine presence, gracious and full of virtue. Was she an outstanding beauty? That didn’t matter. She took different forms, but always the main thing was that she loved me.

The Call of Nature

entrance to the park

Yesterday I mentioned a psychedelic tree, now strangled by ivy, on the corner of Rectory Avenue. I haven't finished telling about that road.

One day at Christmastime when my younger children were little, I took them out of the warm house to breathe the crisp fresh air. We used to live nearby and went up Pretoria Road, then Rectory Avenue, making a game of looking in at Christmas lights in the windows of the big houses. They were mostly set far back from the road, so it wasn’t an impertinence to peep in during the long-drawn-out dusk of winter afternoons in these latitudes when the curtains were not yet drawn. In my new house I make a point of never closing curtains completely, so as to glimpse passers-by and in return offer them sight of the warmth within, especially our Christmas tree.

The children were of an age for fairy tales and I wove one into our stroll: Hans Andersen’s The Little Match Girl. That urchin’s entertainment was to look into the windows of restaurants and rich people’s houses, imagining their warmth and feasts, whilst igniting her own matches one by one to try and keep frostbite at bay. We pretended to be ragged children envying the rich who lived in those big houses, with their neat gardens and fancy gates.

As it happened, I passed a man yesterday who was installing a new pair of gates. The wood was pale, freshly planed and sanded, with the aroma of pine. It was yet to be painted with preservative, and looked good enough to eat. He was stretching over to nail up some final piece of trim, and I could see he found it hard with only two hands. I nearly offered to help, or he nearly asked for help, I am not sure which. But when our eyes made contact, the moment had passed already, and he became a distant stranger like someone glimpsed from a train. Passing him again on the way back, I felt even more distant. I wasn’t with the little match-girl, or my children, or the Christmas lights of twenty years ago: nothing so specific. I was merely knowing my place, being an ageless tramp, like Hesse’s Steppenwolf, or myself as a child near my grandparents’ house: someone who gazes like a fascinated tourist at the manicured prosperity of the bourgeoisie.

our Christmas tree

In a moment, my attitude changed from respectful to lawless. My bladder was needing relief, and I was far from home. Might there be an empty house with secluded garden? It’s easy enough for a man, just needs a little cover; but the act implies scorn for property and requires discretion. If there’s to be a delay, mental control is needed. I could have waited with some discomfort till I got home, yet I was confident of finding somewhere, and this very confidence made the need more pressing.

At the end of Rectory Avenue there’s a little park on the hillside, with winding paths and children’s swings. It overlooks the valley and a hill on the other side: pretty exposed. But one of the paths takes you into a wood, and the very imagining made me hasten my step. As if from nowhere, a tall teenage girl appeared with a dog on a lead, going in the same direction. I overtook her in long strides, and dared not look round to see if she were following. I must get to the woodland path first, then she might be dissuaded from going the same way. I didn’t want her to think I was interested in which direction she took, and be thought a pervert. We had made momentary eye-contact when she had first appeared and---it’s not my fault, dear reader!---she did look attractive. Fortunately, she lagged behind, allowing my mission to be completed in tranquil privacy.

Half a century earlier, I’d have slowed till she caught up, then addressed some friendly remarks to her dog, to see where things might lead.