My Mother My Mirror Page 8

  Looking back, I think I was depressed for most of my childhood – or repressed, or suppressed. One way or another, whoever I once was or could have been had been pressed into a very small corner, and it was going to take a lot to wheedle her out again. And to do this I needed the whole package: the meditation, obviously, but also the supportive community of premies, and the satsang to keep me inspired; and also the guru, though to begin with I didn’t understand what an important role he had to play.

  11

  Moving in with Mark

  There were other things happening in my life as well, including a job with Mr and Mrs Milner, who made leather goods in Hitchin. I worked in the back of their shop, learning how to ‘tool’ leather belts, watchstraps and key fobs with intricate designs, then dye and polish them and fix on the buckles and so forth. Because the breath meditation was something we were supposed to do all the time, I would sit there consciously breathing as I banged the mallet or wielded the paintbrush. I found it improved my concentration, and made me feel more alive. I also got some work modelling for art classes at the college, which was an ideal situation in which to meditate.

  I made friends with Phil Milner, their son. He was tall, dark and handsome with olive skin inherited from his Swedish mother. He played bass guitar in a band called ‘Halcyon’, some of whom lived in a large communal house in Wiltshire. Once, when he was staying there too, I travelled up on my motorbike, now a Honda 90. We went to the local pub, and as the evening continued Phil and I started gazing at each other. That night we made love in a sloping field under the stars, and later back in Hitchin we made love in his bed. I remember his strong, fruity sweat and how his body got very wet. I tried to interest him in satsang, but it wasn’t for him. Years later he became a Christian and married a flautist.

  My caravan was quite small, with a bed that tipped up into the wall in order to make more space during the day. When I first came in on a winter’s night it was horribly cold, but once the coal-fired stove had been alight for twenty minutes or so, everything became nice and toasty. My favourite record was now ‘All Things Must Pass’ by George Harrison, which I played a lot. The minor keys and spiritual yearnings of the songs he sang reflected exactly how I felt.

  There was a tiny kitchen, and to begin with I kept it well stocked with food, but towards the end of my stay there I reduced the contents of my cupboard to a packet of rolled oats and a bag of brown sugar – and still I couldn’t stop eating. It would make a pretty story to say that all my inner craving was being completely satisfied by meditation, but that’s not true. I had been aware at home of how I couldn’t stop eating flapjacks once I’d started, or bits of cake or biscuits, and now I was on my own it had got a lot worse.

  There was something insatiable gnawing away inside of me. Perhaps I was longing for love, because food is very closely associated with love in the infant brain, and there must have been a part of me that was stuck back there, wanting to be nourished. I would eat, and feel full up, fight with myself for a few minutes then go and get more, eat it all, feel satisfied for a minute or two then be driven back to the cupboard again and again. And of course when I felt bloated I also felt very guilty, because guilt and food had long been associated in my mind, so I would become tense in my guts and then constipated, and then the craving got worse.

  I felt if I could just eat enough sweet stuff then everything would get moving again, but of course sugary things made me especially guilty, so I became even more anxious, and felt all uncomfortable and toxic and dirty because I was bunged up. I thought if my cupboard was almost empty that would solve the problem, and it helped a bit, but food issues haunted me for years to come.

  I became friends with a man who lived in a caravan half a mile away, up the deserted railway track that was rich with buttercups, meadowsweet, cornflowers and campion in the summertime. I would go to visit him on my bicycle. I found him attractive, but he was sensible and self-contained and had more important plans than frolicking with the hippy chick down the line; or maybe he just didn’t fancy me. He was a proficient sailor, or so he told me, and I was impressed with the tidy way he darned his socks.

  After about six months a premie called Tony came to live in Hitchin. He had come back to stay with his parents for a while, and hearing there was someone else with Knowledge now living in the area, he arranged to meet me. Tony had plans: he suggested we rent a house together, call it the ‘Hitchin Centre’ and begin to have satsang meetings there, hopefully pulling in more people who would then receive Knowledge and so expand our community of two.

  There was a lot of emphasis in Divine Light Mission on propagation, a strong drive to spread the word and gather more followers. It was great to really believe in something, and the more I experienced the more sure I became, so that I then had the confidence to tell other people about it. Being able to go out on the street and talk to people with conviction about something I believed in was a wonderful leap in my previously shaky confidence.

  Looking back, the only thing that embarrasses me and makes me feel slightly stupid is the fact that I was convinced it was the only way, the only thing that would save the world. But I needed to believe that, in order to give it my all and so it would work for me. I was at that adolescent stage of life where I needed a strong role model and a strong set of beliefs, because anything less would have left me drifting in the soup of my own self- doubt.

  So I left my little caravan and moved into number two, Common Rise: a semi-detached house close to the railway station in the middle of town. However, things didn’t turn out quite as Tony had planned. You see, there were ashrams, for those who were prepared to live the renunciate life and dedicate everything to Guru Maharaji, and then there were ‘centres’, which were for householders and general riff-raff: those who had other commitments, but were willing to put aside a few evenings a week for satsang meetings and perhaps offer their phone number for enquiries. Tony said he wanted to set up a centre, but I think really he had aspirations in the ashram direction.

  Anyway, he found the house and made arrangements with the landlord, and I moved in, and for a few weeks everything went smoothly. He was an ex-public school boy, with a button mouth, short curly blond hair, a posh accent and a strong sense of propriety. But it didn’t matter too much that our personalities were so different: we were there to meditate and to spread the Knowledge, and we could support one another in that.

  He suggested we find someone else to join us; we did after all have two bedrooms, so one could be for boys and one for girls, in true ashram style. So the next time we went to Luton for satsang I took a look around to see if there was anyone suitable. Soon I was speaking to a man called Mark whose parents lived in Hitchin and who had moved into the ashram a little while ago. He was beginning to feel that the lifestyle wasn’t really for him, and was soon persuaded that Hitchin Centre would be more suitable; and so it was decided that he should be our third house-mate.

  Mark and I used to sit up late at night in front of the gas fire, after Tony had gone to bed, and talk and talk. Often we would recount our LSD experiences, and just talking about them would put us into a slightly altered state; so we would lapse into silence and just stare at each other and watch as the other person’s face melted and changed into myriad different faces, eventually becoming a black gap where there was no face at all. Sometimes we talked about Knowledge and Maharaji; sometimes we talked about our past and our families. Until one night it suddenly seemed silly for Mark to creep into the ‘boys room’ with Tony, so he crept into my narrow bed on the other side of the landing, and slept with me.

  I will never forget Tony’s expression when he came into the bedroom in the morning! His face was pink and swollen, his eyes protruding, his small mouth stiff with horror... He was completely outraged! We had obviously violated some unwritten rules in his head. But the fact was, we were in the majority and we were quite happy with the situation, so in the end he moved out (later to join the ashram) and we took over the lease.
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  Mark and I lived there for a year or two, with various friends coming and going. John and Sue from London stayed with us for several months, and John grew a big dope plant at the back of the house which was eventually cut down and removed, probably by our next door neighbour who was a black man with an enormously fat white wife. Ronnie, who was always out of his head on one thing or another, slept in the back garden for a whole summer. He worked in the mortuary, belonged to the Bahai faith, and was rumoured to have once smashed up the local toilets in a rage. We met Chris at Fairfield Hospital when we went there to sing to the patients. He had tried to kill himself and needed help; he was also young and blond and rather cute, so I invited him to come and stay for a few weeks before moving on.

  Because we had something we felt other people could benefit from, we were eager to make friends and invite them to join us, provided they were open to our message and our way of life. From time to time we held a public meeting at the library, for which we would distribute dozens of leaflets and posters, and after a while enough people came to satsang at our house that we no longer had to go to Luton, though we still did so once a week.

  Colin came along as a direct result of one of the leaflets we had thrown off the big wheel at the fairground, before we were told not to. He was a sturdy local lad who could never resist a bit of lead from the railway roof or a cheap deal on timber. He spoke in a lovely down-to-earth Hertfordshire accent, which is a bit like Cockney, and when he got excited he had no inhibitions about replacing the words that had slipped from his mind with ‘fing’ so that the more he enthused about his passion for the inner light and his realizations about the meaning of life, the more we didn’t quite know what he was talking about... But his energy and fervour were so great that it really didn’t matter.

  Colin’s brother Gerald was much more shy, until it came to stealing the sheets and pillowcases off the neighbours’ line. He might have got away with it but for the fact that after using them for a week or so (he was staying with us at the time) he washed them and hung them out on our line; so the police were called and the bedclothes had to be returned.

  Johnny was more of a nice, middle-class boy. He looked like a wizard, with his long thin hair and beard and soulful eyes, and spoke very slowly, gently telling us about the peace he felt and the grace with which events in his life seemed to unfold. If he brought his guitar we sang devotional songs. Some of these had been written by premies and others were well-known love songs in which the words had been changed to make them suitable for our love affair with Maharaji.

  And there was Andrew Strange from Baldock, who would sometimes have his handicapped child sitting on his knee. He was a deeply compassionate man, and would wax lyrical about love, God and synchronicity in a way that I could listen to for hours.

  I had found what I had been looking for: these meetings were nourishing and inspiring, much deeper and richer than any social chat. I was so happy, sitting there with half a dozen people doing their best to humbly talk from their heart about what they felt and thought. It might have been in the context of a cult, but it worked. By the end of the evening we all had broad grins on our faces and a sense of lightness and freedom that we called bliss. We would have a cup of tea and a biscuit, then go our separate ways until the next time.

  The family next door played a lot of reggae, and the bass line reverberated loudly through the living room wall, so I decided to line the back bedroom with egg boxes and make it into a place exclusively for meditation. I put a thick rug down on the floor and found plenty of large cushions, then made a beautiful altar for the wall opposite the door. I cut out a large circle of polystyrene and painted it royal blue, then decorated it with red, orange and yellow everlasting flowers pinned in arcs around a central point, a bit like some of the stage designs I had seen for Maharaji’s festivals. In the middle of the display was, of course, a beautiful photograph of Maharaji, with an orange backdrop, his face glowing with wisdom and joy. I remember showing it to my father and being amazed that he couldn’t see the profound beauty of the guru... Typical of an artist, he just made some critical comment about the composition of the picture.

  At this time I was meditating for at least an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. It felt as important as food, sometimes more so. I was taking back my life, breath by breath, starting to feel my heart opening, my confidence growing. I felt hungry for it. I had long ago stopped trying to control my mind with my mind, but the more I grew to love my own breath the more I didn’t want to think, I just wanted to feel the life flowing through me.

  Mark’s father was manager of a construction company, and one summer he was contracted to work on his boss’s house on the other side of Hitchin. Because the boss was away, he told Mark he was welcome to spend some time in the sumptuous grounds. Mark took him up on this, and brought a group of his friends with him. I remember it particularly because it was such a gorgeously hot summer. I got up very early and sat in meditation at the back of our house at Common Rise, arranging my cushions on the concrete path close to the wall. I drank a mug of earl grey tea, then slowly followed my breath as the sun emerged from the early morning mist on the far side of the railway line. At last I was beginning to appreciate the beauty around me.

  After an hour I went inside and made lots of sandwiches, then after breakfast we bundled into the car to spend the day lounging around on the rich man’s lawn, admiring the trees and the flowers, chatting, eating, drinking and sunbathing. Some of the men liked to smoke dope, but I was always a purist and sought out my breath if I wanted to get high.

  I taught Mark the leather-work skills I had learned with the Milners, and soon we had set ourselves up with all the equipment we needed for a small business. We ordered hides from Scotland, bought buckles, rivets etc from London and dyes from the local ironmongers, cut down a railway sleeper for a strong surface to emboss the leather on, and started work.

  There were all sorts of different shapes of tool to make marks on the leather, from the ends of cylindrical spanners to a specially made yin-yang sign sold to us by a door-to-door hippy salesman. We cut the hide into long strips for belts and used the left-over bits for arm-bands or the thick part of watch-straps, then got thinner leather for the strap itself and used the leftovers for key fobs. It was satisfying and fun, and soon we had enough stock to take a regular weekly stall on Hitchin market. The winter months were challenging, with much stamping of feet and hugging of hot mugs, but of course Christmas was when we sold the most... And then there were also lovely summer days when it was great to be outside. Inevitably we used the stall to tell people about Knowledge as well, and I think our big smiles must have made up for any annoying dogma, because people kept coming back to buy more.

  12

  Wedding Bells

  That autumn Mark and I went to ‘Guru Puja’ in Copenhagen. I didn’t realize at the time just how much I was following the Hindu tradition: suddenly my world was full of colourful rituals, regular festivals and Hindi words, all of which I somehow imagined were unique to Maharaji. Guru Puja means guru worship. In India the festival is held every autumn, and now that Divine Light Mission had come to the West, we did the same thing.

  Most of the time was spent in a great hall, laid out in a similar way to Alexander Palace in that there was a stage at one end, decked out magnificently with thick carpets, a huge colourful backdrop and Maharaji’s throne in the middle. During the day we listened to mahatmas and other important people speak from just below the stage. There was definitely a hierarchy, but again, it didn’t really bother me. The thing is, all I was interested in was what Maharaji had to offer. A few years later, when I felt I was missing out by being a nobody, I did begin to slightly resent some of the ‘honchos’ and try to position myself more favourably. But in those early days I was happy just to go along with it all.

  The evening was the time we had all been waiting for. Everyone found a seat, and the anticipation began to build. We sang a few songs, perhaps there were so
me announcements, then a hush, like an in-breath, followed by an enormous surge of adoration as the small, round figure of Maharaji stepped serenely from behind the curtain, sat down and gave us all a radiant smile. Even before he said anything, he reminded me of God: the God that I had drawn when I was very small. There was something so familiar about that shape: the round head and round tummy. It was as if he fitted into a place in my psyche that had been waiting for him. Thinking about it later, he was of course a sort of parent, but at the time I experienced him as a completely new and exciting person in my life who I was learning to trust more and more.

  His words were warm and spontaneous, scattered with humorous anecdotes and Hindu stories. He spoke about love: how it was what we all needed, and yet most people look everywhere but within themselves, which is the one place where they will find it. I felt uplifted, full of hope and purpose, and as he spoke the atmosphere became charged with an expansive feeling of calm and joy. How much it had to do with us - our expectation, our faith, above all our projection – who can say? No relationship takes place in isolation. Perhaps we had more to do with it than we realized.

  Back at the camp-site there was mud everywhere, and big canvas tents to sleep in. Lots of people were cold, so I was especially grateful to have a man with whom to share my sleeping bag. There were queues for food and queues for the loo, and all the usual festival phenomena. Keen to be doing ‘service’ and to be part of it all, I volunteered in the kitchen and stayed up late chopping vegetables.