CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1 ‘A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.’
Lao Tzu
There is something mysterious about my arrival in this world: according to my birth certificate, I was born on 25 April 1932, though until I was 18, when the certificate was dug out of a cupboard for a passport application, I always celebrated my birthday on the 23rd. Rather surprisingly, I thought, my parents didn’t remember the date of the big event. I wrote down 25th on the application form but carried on celebrating on the 23rd.
Whenever it was, I was born in Ilkeston, a small Derbyshire mining town. My grandfather and father were both doctors and it was expected that there would be a third brass plate on the gatepost of Rutland House, which combined the family home with the surgery and waiting rooms of the general practice.
My grandfather, William, had moved into the house at the end of the nineteenth century and practised there until his early death in the mid-’20s. It was a large early Victorian house set in an extensive garden with two very big marble pillars at the front door. A conservatory was attached to one side of the house and an old cottage to the other. On the ground floor of the cottage there was an ancient well covered by a square flagstone with a metal ring in the centre. As a child, it fascinated me and I was always wanting to look down it. The joke was that this was where the doctors hid their mistakes.
The conservatory, which had a fruitful grapevine, was also the entrance to the surgery waiting room and provided extra seating on busy nights. My grandfather, who was much loved by his patients, encouraged them to eat the grapes while they were waiting, which they did in grateful moderation. I fear a similar offer made today would result in someone turning up with a supermarket trolley and taking the lot.
‘The greatest service we can do for another is to help him to help himself.’
Although we missed each other by quite a few years, I feel a great affinity with my grandfather. He was a very compassionate man and would often be called out simply to settle a family argument. I remember being told that during the General Strike of 1926 he would visit people and when he left there would be a half-crown, which was quite a lot of money in those days, left on the table for them. That’s the kind of man he was.
As my father later told me, he also had a profound interest in spiritual matters. He was a Freemason, a hypnotist, a Theosophist, a Spiritualist, a homoeopath and an esotericist with a special interest in Rudolf Steiner. In many ways he was decades ahead of his time. He was what we would now call ‘New Age’. He would spend many evenings with the local vicar, the Reverend Butterton, drinking claret and debating metaphysical matters until the early hours. He gave half of the garden of Rutland House to the Rudolf Steiner Society to build a school. Steiner was an esoteric philosopher with an extraordinary insight into the spiritual realms. He was also a homoeopath and an educationalist with unorthodox views. So Michael House School, built in the classic Steiner style with the minimum of straight lines and corners, became our new neighbour. Steiner believed that schools should be a place of joy. There was no shouting and none of the pupils misbehaved because there was nothing to rebel against.
My father had no interest or involvement in any of these things and so a generation was skipped. Once when I tried to discuss some spiritual matter with him I remember him saying with some amazement that I was talking just like his father.
When I was growing up our household consisted of my parents, Vincent and Hester, my sister, Beryl, who was three years older than me, a maid and a doctor who was my father’s assistant. Various other relatives stayed from time to time and we always had a cat and a dog as well.
Rutland House was an interesting and mainly enjoyable place for a child. The garden was a particular joy, with a beautiful weeping ash tree embracing a swing and a sandpit. My sister and I spent a lot of time there.
There were also lawns, rockeries, flowerbeds, a kitchen garden, a greenhouse, two garages and a small rough wooded area. We had a gardener, Mr Beardsley, an old red-haired man who always wore a bowler hat.
I also loved the house itself. My mother used to ask me why, because in her view it was a lot of work. It was hard for her to keep it clean. I remember on washdays she used to get the old tubs out and the mangle, and the maid and my mother would be working away pounding the clothes and hanging everything out to dry. It was hard work.
The house was also cold – there was no central heating and it was a big house. We had an old hearth and at night firebricks would be laid in it and when the fire died out, we’d each take a firebrick, wrap it in a blanket and take it upstairs to put in our beds to warm them. I used to suffer from leg ache – I’d wake up with my legs aching and my mother would come out and get a hot towel and put it round them. The bedrooms were usually damp and often the bedclothes were too.
We cooked on an oven over the fire in the hearth and my mother was always boiling up an old ham bone or making soup out of something. There was always some bit of food being reheated. One Christmas when I was around two or three, the oven door had been left open for a while before the fire was lit and the cat got in. Then the door was closed, the fire was lit and the cat was shut inside. We couldn’t hear it crying. That was awful. It died. I don’t remember the actual event, but I remember being told the story. Everyone was horrified.
I was born during the Depression, when people often had very little. Mining areas suffered particularly badly at that time. Ours was a middle-class household, but my mother was always quite frugal, always making do. There was no waste, no throwing things away. You repaired everything. You had little segs you could nail into your shoes to prevent them wearing out, leather patches on the elbows of your jackets, and you mended the inner tube of your bike. In short, you learned how to improvise, how to keep things going. You never bought anything new unless you had to. It was a very big change in your life, in fact, when you did.
My mother herself had had a very tough childhood. She was very artistic and musical and would have loved to have gone to art school or music school, but her father, Albert, who was something of a drinker, would have none of it. Instead she had to work in the family shop in Blackpool from the age of 14. It sold ice cream and sweets, and it was there that she met my father. He was about 16 or 17 at the time and had had rheumatic fever and been sent to Blackpool to convalesce. He used to ride past the shop on his bicycle and he caught my mother’s eye. He never came into the shop, but there was a big lamppost outside with a ledge on it and one day he put a note on it, asking her to meet him on the promenade. She went, taking a friend along as a chaperone, and he gave her a box of chocolates. This romantic gesture didn’t quite work out, though, because she daren’t eat them as she thought they might be drugged! It took several years after the box of chocolates before they started courting properly, but my father used to go back to Blackpool every year to see her. She was very strictly controlled by her parents and she wasn’t really allowed out, but my father was going to be a medical student at St Bartholomew’s in London and so later on her family encouraged the match.
Just as my father was qualifying, about two or three months before he took his finals, his father died, followed three days later by his mother, both of influenza. So my father had to take over the practice before he really had any practical experience at all. His father had left him a pile of debts and his younger brother, John, was just starting to study medicine at Bart’s and was living off an allowance paid for by the family. On his deathbed, my grandfather made my father promise to look after John. So he quickly settled down, got married and took on the practice.
My father was a conscientious man and worked terrifically hard. In those days there was no National Health Service and a general practitioner was on call round the clock and also did his own dispensing. The cellar at Rutland House was full of shelves and cupboards laden with all the various liquids and powders from which my father made up his prescriptions. Once they were ready he would place them on a table in the hall, ready for collection, alongside a slate with the names and addresses of the house calls he had to make.
Uncle John, meanwhile, continued to live off the family allowance while studying at St Bartholomew’s. After about four years he told my father he had failed his finals for the second time and needed to stay on for another year. My father contacted the medical school and was astonished to find Uncle John had in fact been sent down three years earlier. All that time he had been blowing his allowance in London. Not only that, he had become an alcoholic. Years later I remember as a teenager going to a dance at Ilkeston Town Hall and seeing him swaying in the middle of the floor with an inane grin on his face before he simply fell over. I can also remember finding heaps of empty booze bottles in a room at the end of Rutland House where my father kept a workbench.
My grandmother had apparently been an alcoholic too, so perhaps a family weakness was handed down. Whatever the case, something had to be done to stop Uncle John’s dissolute life in London, and the family took matters in hand. Uncle John was engaged at the time to a young lady called Molly. That was broken off and Reverend Butterton was persuaded to write a glowing reference to get him into the army. He was accepted by the Royal Medical Corps and my parents breathed a sign of relief.
I believe we all plan our lives before we incarnate. Each soul decides where it is going to – where it will live and the family it will be born into. So this was the family I had chosen. We are all eternal beings and we are here to learn certain lessons. The family we are born into will be part of that. Each person in the family has something to teach us. We all learn from each other. We may have made certain agreements with each other before incarnating, deciding to play certain roles in each other’s lives. It is all meticulously planned and nothing is overlooked and nothing is missed.
To me, reincarnation is the only thing that makes sense of the apparent unfairness of birth. Otherwise, how do you account for a child that’s born into poverty in Ethiopia and dies of AIDS at two or three? Or children born into violent circumstances rather than to millionaires to enjoy lives of luxury? If this life is a one-off, where is the fairness in that? One person may be born into a tribe in Africa where there’s no education or facilities and another may be born into a family which can send them to university – where is the fairness in that? But when you understand about reincarnation, you understand that we are all spiritual beings undergoing experiences that are right for us at this time in our development. A soul will always choose the environment that suits its particular needs in that particular incarnation. And through reincarnation we move upwards in terms of consciousness and understanding and environment and education. This world, in effect, was created as a schoolroom, a place for all of us to learn and grow until we progress to other worlds and spheres of activity.
Until our consciousness is high enough we are born into the level of our worth. Like attracts like. Once we are conscious enough, before we reincarnate we work out the country, the parents, the physical condition, the circumstances and the experiences of our Earth lives according to the lessons we wish to learn. We are of course helped and advised by others around us. There is always help on request.
I loved my parents and they were both loving people, but not demonstratively so. I can never remember either of them being really angry with me but it has to be said that there was hardly any emotion of any kind in the house. My father never sat me on his knee and I don’t remember either of them ever raising their voices. I think it was part of the times but it has left a lasting impression – to this day it upsets me to hear raised voices. Mother and Father always seemed very happy together: they both played golf and enjoyed bridge parties. One of my most comfortable childhood memories is of sitting on the stairs with my sister, listening to visitors downstairs playing bridge and having a few drinks.
My sister and I got on well, though we didn’t have a lot in common. She had her own friends and in general she would do her own thing and leave me to get on with mine.
Sometimes, though, she would take advantage of the fact that I was three years younger. To reach our bedrooms we had to cross a long dark corridor connecting the bathroom, which was in the old cottage, to the main house. Beryl would always dare me to go down the corridor on my own and switch the bathroom light on. ‘You’re frightened, aren’t you?’ she would taunt. I would always fall for it and race down the corridor, just to prove I wasn’t scared at all. It took a while before I realized that Beryl was just as frightened as I was.
She would also love to set me off giggling. Almost anything would make me dissolve into fits of giggles, often at the most inopportune moment. I just seemed to have an over-developed sense of the ridiculous. At Rutland House the doorbell rang all day long with people coming to pick up their prescriptions and Beryl and I would take turns to answer it. When it was my turn, she would stand behind a curtain in the hall and make a sniggering sound. That would be all too much and I would find it almost impossible to keep a straight face, even when the caller was telling me about some terrible illness.
Eventually my father gave us a warning about this, as it was hardly benefiting his patients. That very evening I answered the door. A man stood there.
‘Good evening,’ I said carefully.
‘Good evening,’ he replied. ‘Could I see the doctor, please?’
‘Who shall I say is calling?’
‘Mr Onions.’
That was it. I burst out laughing right in his face. Leaving him on the doorstep, I staggered into the drawing room and literally collapsed with laughter.
After a while, I managed to actually ask Beryl if she would tell our father there was someone at the door. Seeing the state I was in, she couldn’t resist telling me to go myself.
Trying hard to compose myself, I knocked on the surgery door.
‘Come in.’ My father had a patient with him. They both turned to look at me.
‘There’s… there’s a Mr…’ No, I couldn’t do it. I reeled out of the surgery, howling with laughter.
Beryl and I got the biggest ticking-off of our lives for that one. But it still didn’t cure me of giggling.
When I was four-and-a-half years old, my mother took me to a nearby terraced house, Chilwel House, in Lord Haddon Road. Its front room was actually a school.
I really only remember my first day there. When we walked in, accompanied by the teacher, we saw two wooden desks with benches attached. Seven or eight children were crawling underneath them on the floor. They paid no attention to us at all. Eventually the teacher managed to make a small speech welcoming me to the school, but I didn’t stay there long. I soon moved on to the Steiner school next door to Rutland House.
It was Steiner’s philosophy that children should be educated in a free and loving environment full of music, dancing and painting, and formal education should not be imposed on them until they were ten years old. It was my great fortune to enjoy all this for two-and-a-half years at Michael House School.
What we learned more than anything else was to care for other people and take responsibility for our own actions. Strangely, discipline was not needed, as it seemed out of place to misbehave. There was a feeling of harmony which no one wanted to disrupt, and there was kindness and patience from the teachers which dissolved all aggression. It was a very memorable and colourful experience, and no doubt helped to nurture the seeds that would later flower into spiritual awareness.
‘You get back what you give out in thought, word and deed.’
It was also at Michael House that I appeared on stage for the first time. It was as a tree. I think it was an oak. A non-speaking role. The play was one of the school’s regular theatrical performances and I had to stand in the background with my arms outstretched. This soon became agony and I decided to support myself by surreptitiously holding on to the curtains behind me. This move brought the house down – or more literally the curtains – and that was the end of the show.
My mother, who was herself a keen amateur actress, was quite angry with me, not for bringing down the curtains but for spoiling my own performance. So I learned that it didn’t matter if you ruined the whole production as long as your own performance was good! A valuable lesson for the future, as it turned out.