The horoscope

After replacing my old bookshelves, I was restless for more domestic improvements, so launched into tidying up a collection of papers I’ve been carrying around for years, and throwing away the dross. That’s when I found a document dating from December 1974, which I’ve taken care not to throw away throughout the vicissitudes of 40 years.

At the time it was written, my family and I were homeless. An unofficial ashram kindly let us stay. The address was 26 Emanuel Avenue, London W3 6JJ. One of the residents offered to do my horoscope, and in retrospect I have no idea why he went to such trouble. As you will see, it is not some clichéd prose dashed off. No money was requested or paid. We had got to know one another superficially, not really as friends. In fact when he handed me these papers, on which he must have spent hours or days, it didn’t feel like a gift of friendship but something sinister and confronting. Till today I have hardly looked at them, intentionally avoided them, as with a mirror that doesn’t show you to advantage. It so accurately describes, at the time the horoscope was cast, the situation of its subject (referred to as “the native”—i.e. the person with the birth details as supplied), that I have no explanation. And I am inclined to believe that the process of transcription, on this day in March 2015, after forty years’ neglect, must have a certain significance. Another reader couldn’t care in the same way, unless he or she has a similar sense of personal recognition: “This is by someone who knows me better than myself!” And if this should actually happens, then it’s a victory for the sceptic, for it explains the mystery in terms of an illusion exposed; another magic trick that humanity loves to play upon itself. And if that’s not the case, then I’m left wondering what is left thinkable in the situation. But I’m interested to learn what you think, dear reader.

I cannot properly recall its author’s name, but he signs off with a monogram, and that might just be enough to jog my memory and try to trace him, if there’s any point. (To thank him properly for prophecies subsequently fulfilled in succeeding years?) I’ve reproduced the whole thing below: report first, calculations afterwards.

ASCEN.—develops an extensive personality-attitude, expressing freedom associated with an urge to explore beyond one’s known environment

ASCEN.—gives an analytical, critical personality response

ASCEN.—gives underlying confused, self-deceptive and neurotic tendencies

—coolly affectionate, friendly, quiet, idealistic or touchy, uncompromising, unconventional desires. Intimate relationships could be formed through the native’s sense of uniqueness, power, resourcefulness; his sense of personal values will relate to an instinctive need for personal security (i.e. material possessions, direct environment, accumulation of money)

—gives a tendency to explore feelings

—generous, expansive emotional nature, ardent affections, charm, good understanding of values,beauty, harmony

—original, inventive, inquisitive or eccentric, abrupt, contrary. Communicative activities should be developed in the relationship of the native to his environment. Also the area in which necessary changes may be made

—gives extreme lack of confidence, apprehension, prejudice, procrastination, severed depression and melancolia

—gives good humour, wider opportunity for success in mental pursuits

—principle of self-integration is sympathetic, impressionable, artistic emotional or impractical, secretive, deceitful & timid. the native may best learn self-integration within his family, his role as a parent, his responsibility towards his home.

—gives conflict of Ego with others and with one’s own nature.

—gives greater struggle to overcome limitations, tendency to deep-rooted inhibitions, pessimism, self-pity, needless worrying, selfishness, fears and phobias, chronic ill-health.

—the native’s home and family may demand effort and sacrifice without reward. Possibility of ill-health in feet. Nebulous and/or impressionable attitude may bring misfortune.

—stable, methodical, endurance, constructiveness or materialistic, dour, avaricious. Personal limitation, frustration and suffering can be felt most in the area of re-creation and exposition of self (i.e. projection of self, offspring of mind (ideas) and possibly of body, expansion of creativeness or happiness, pleasures, creative art, speculation, love-making.)

—idealistic, creative impulses, given form and practical purpose.

—ambitious determined self-will, practical, mechanical-minded, alternating depressive and nervously tensed moods.

—the principle of limitation and form and the principle of communication work together although not in the same spheres of life and not in direct harmony with each other.

—freedom and originality of expression, unconventional experiences and drastic changes may be experienced through conformity and service to the community, also the same sphere of experience will challenge the native’s initiative, physical strength and combative ability. Industrious, tenacious, practical, purposeful or sensuous, obstinate, violent tendencies.

—energetic, enterprising impulses deviating from the normal, rebellious passions, excitable emotions, erratic self-will, restless, impatient, impulsive, fanatical courage, high nervous tension, tendency to sexual abnormalities, self-assertive, disciplined, formative impulses with limited or controlled emotion, constructive or destructive energy, self-reliant, practical, materialistic, hard, severe, ambitious.

The next paragraph was tricky to transcribe so I scanned it instead:

It continues as follows:

—enthusiasm successfully directed, creative inspirations.

—imaginative, inventive, secientifically inclined mental faculties, combine with the subtle, intuitive, spiritually-inspired impressions and creativity—much emotional and mental sensitivity and nervous tension.

—the aforementioned Ego-conflict finds its expression in the field of conformity and service to community as an underlying exaggerative, extravagant self-opinionated attitude and a greater struggle to achieve desired expression and results, test of conscience, tendency to extravagance, exaggeration, conceit, serious misjudgements, false sense of superiority. (N.B. this is the other major feature of the chart.)

—highly intelligent, varied talents, broadminded or crafty, diffuse and scattered interests, indiscreet. Opportunities for material expansion or growth of consciousness and compensation for life’s disappointments may be found through conformity and service to the community.

—transformations resulting in explosive endings and beginnings to distinct phases of life through self-sacrifice and shared resources with others, true spiritual experience, ego-death, possible bequests, legacies.

—reserved, modest, meticulous or fastidious, timid, nervous manner of response. Special interest in the native’s need and capacity to establish himself successfully and usefully in the community—i.e. career)—will influence changes of habit or residence.

—very indiscreet, intolerant, impulsive, forceful, passionate.

—with greater sensitivity, limited response, emotional disappointments and misunderstandings, very self-conscious, deep depressive moods.

—the native may be attracted to mystical and religious ideals and may encounter peculiar, mysterious or chaotic developments through his material responsibilities and necessity.

—the native may expect to receive benefits through no conscious effort in the field of his career.

The report above was supported by the following workings-out:

The bench on St. Michael’s Green

the bench where I sat

Introduction
The piece below dates from about 2000, and remains displayed on a website I first created when the cybersphere was young and the web-log had yet to be invented. It belongs to a time when I would drive my daughter to Beaconsfield on a Saturday morning, and sit on a bench with a notebook while she went to her tennis lesson. A mysterious chronic condition prevented me from walking more than a few steps without risk of relapse.

Reading it again, I’m surprised how that sedentary bench provided a foreshadowing of the inspiration bestowed in subsequent years of foot-faring, as logged & blogged on these pages. Then, it was something rare and wondrous. Today, the wonder has not tarnished at all, but remains as fresh; although its occurrence has become commonplace & predictable. I sometimes feel that I have little to add to things I’ve said before.

“This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins,” says Hannah Arendt, as quoted in my last. But what if every beginning, every origin, is foreshadowed by something which happened earlier, as an oak tree is foreshadowed in an acorn?

Here’s that piece, without further editing.*

Engineering and Angels
“Structure” is an immensely pregnant word, like “pattern” (which has no equivalent in many other languages), “form”, “substance” & “style”.

Structure is a male word, relating to that part of the brain which does engineering. It’s related to discipline, in the sense that I might structure my day, or my life (which doesn’t sound a good idea—to have the engineer in me taking charge of the big project!) or this book.

[Though it was an entry in my journal, in my mind I was writing a chapter of a book. But I couldn’t decide what the theme of the book is, and I felt perhaps it doesn’t matter: perhaps themes will emerge. Hence my preoccupation, whilst writing this, with structure.]

Yet “structure” is about the relationship of parts to the whole and therefore involves the idea of “relationship” which is a female word. It’s a male idea to stand alone, to be independent, to exist for oneself, but a female idea to be most alive whilst in the state of relationship.

I once played the psychotherapeutic game where you pick out pebbles according to choice and lay them on a surface so that they stand in relation to one another. You identify a certain pebble as yourself, and then by the qualities of the pebbles but principally their distance from each other, you produce a map of your childhood family relationships. Relationship is here the main thing and pattern is merely a side-effect. But the diagram of pebbles will not show structure, for structure is more than pattern. It is a linkage of forces, and it is the forces which give structure its maleness.

But these words “maleness” and “femaleness”, so convenient, so seductive—can I use them? A man is not composed entirely of male attributes, nor a woman of female attributes, any more than a black person is black and a white person is white. Indeed, people with awareness find that many of the more “abstract” attributes of being human, observed in themselves and in others, are distributed rather similarly between men and women. Whilst male attributes are more in evidence in men, and female ones in women, the differences between individual men, and individual women, can be much greater than those between the average man and the average woman. Being man or woman is, in the most advanced societies today, a relatively minor aspect of being human. Male and female attributes have become abstract notions detached from their original points of reference!

St Michael & All Angels

But from these themes I am pulled to the beauty of the scene in the midst of which I write these words. I’m sitting on a public bench. Behind me is the Parish Church of St Michael and All Angels, Beaconsfield, in the County of Buckinghamshire. In front is St Michael’s Green, an acre of grass bounded by the hedges of bordering properties and bisected by a public road. Behind the tall hedges, you can see the upper storeys and roofs of substantial houses. This September sun is hot, tempered by a strong breeze. The sky is exquisite shades of blue, with fluffy clouds, tall and dramatic, being propelled across the firmament. The drone of some garden tool, and now a helicopter, the caressing swish of passing cars; none of these drowns the chirping of garden birds and the chatter of pedestrians who occasionally pass in groups. Though it’s 11am, and hasn’t rained for some hours, the grass is still spangled with raindrops which catch the sun. A jetliner passes low enough above the clouds for me to see its red logo on the tail fin. And here I am, in contact with this damp bench. I am physically alive and grateful for it.

I see that structure exists in service to individual human contentment, somehow: or else it is nothing.

For I am asserting that individual human contentment is the highest value! Not that this simple idea was my creation: I got it from a Master. There cannot be the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Each individual creates his own world, which is in constant change, and no one else can judge his happiness. Indeed, when I am not content, I am often in a state of not knowing if I am content or not. But when I am truly content, I know it!

As to the worth of any structure, I suppose you can judge it according to whether it achieves some stated end. So, such and such a bridge design supports a certain load and will resist winds of a certain speed.

But all of a sudden—since sitting on this beloved bench on St Michael’s Green—I see that I don’t care about that. I only care about ultimate ends. And how can I judge whether, in building my well-structured bridge, or writing my eccentrically-structured book, those ultimate ends are being achieved? To repeat, the ultimate ends are the individual fulfilment and contentment of someone.

I’m not a genius and I cannot compute the interactions that determine whether human motivation and effort results in truth and beauty, or their opposites. I’d like to follow my impulses all the time wherever they lead but that’s the antithesis of structure. It must be my education and conditioning which seeks to persuade me that structure is a good thing. Yet my impulses carry authentic creative energy.

A solution offers itself, but it’s arrived at by an extraordinary leap of faith. And a leap of faith, indeed, is one which should not be taken arbitrarily, and never on the recommendation of another. It can only be taken in obedience to an inner certainty, e.g.: “I know this, but I cannot explain why” or “I want to go this way, and I’ll stake my life on it.”

So now I will tell you in what this leap of faith exists. It is nothing less than to trust forever more in further leaps of faith! This can be expressed in many ways, such as: each one of us has a guardian angel. In a team with this being of light (that personally I have not seen or heard, for I am not advanced in such powers), I can work confidently for the true value of the universe.

----------------
* The original page is here. I’m not sure when the paragraph in square brackets was added.

Spruce

This could describe me:

While out walking I’ve formulated perfect phrases which I can’t remember when I get home. I’m not sure if the ineffable poetry of these phrases belongs totally to what they were (and which I forgot), or partly to what they weren’t. (1)

This too:

I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I’ve sought—as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line—the longest distance between two points. I’ve never had a knack for the active life. I’ve always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I’ve always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. (1)

And I wish I’d been able to think clearly enough to say this:

It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins. Thus, the origin of life from inorganic matter is an infinite improbability of inorganic processes, as is the coming into being of the earth viewed from the standpoint of processes in the universe, or the evolution of human out of animal life.
. . .
Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?” (2)

All the same, I do try to say things for myself, such as this:

In the spring and summer of this year 2006 I opened all my senses, not just the usual five, to Nature. I’m searching here for an adequate word, but Nature will have to do. I exposed myself to the sublime and intricate world of non-human life, its pathos and grandeur. (3)

But most of the things I want to say, and haven’t the ability to express, have been said by others, and I discover them in the authors I admire.

ADMIRATION, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves. (4)

Sometimes I read things that have special meaning for me, perhaps meanings adrift from the author’s intention.

. . . every animal is in the world like water in water.
. . .
Nothing, as a matter of fact, is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended. Nothing is more foreign to our way of thinking than the earth in the middle of the silent universe and having neither the meaning that man gives things, nor the meaninglessness of things as soon as we try to imagine them without a consciousness that reflects them. (5)

I’ve lived as a rolling stone, more Sisyphus than Jagger, and if I have gathered any moss it has been in the form of books: the love of them and sometimes the possession. In my youth I’d transport them in trunks and lay them out somewhere at my temporary destination; till a divine madness, as it seemed then, overtook me in 1972 & I gave away all I possessed. In recent years I’ve been avidly buying again, and keeping them in the cheapest option, IKEA bookcases each called Billy, till I realized how unsuitable and heavy these particle-board monsters really are. You wouldn’t bury your worst enemy in a coffin that plain. I won’t call them ugly, but a pig is still a pig, however pretty the lipstick, you may try to apply; no matter how precious the books you want to display. So I’ve been giving those Billys away to The Central Aid Furniture project, which offers them to its low-income customers.

That was the easy part. What to replace them with? I’ve scoured the world-wide web for ready-mades on sale or even pictures of what I sought. There are plenty of zany ideas, but I found none which truly respected their function, none which had a notion of the elegance possible. I even checked out bookshelfporn.com. Surely there’d be something there? But alas, Freud was right. Mankind is polymorphously perverse: that site drools over quantity with a dreary monotony. The truly erotic must have more finesse. Bookshelves are to books what clothing is to the naked human form. The one should draw you to the possibilities of the other.

So I had to design my own, from first principles. I’ve just completed Mark 5, the most advanced. The whole process, from design to model, from cutting to assembly, has been a major project. Mark 5 is based around a central spine or keel, as in a wooden ship from the long era of sail. One day I might add several layers of yacht varnish, but it’ll do as it is. And I hope when I’m gone the next house-owner will keep it there intact.

The 12mm spruce plywood from which it's built is rather soft, but surprisingly light. One thinks of Howard Hughes’ famous “Spruce Goose”, that huge flying boat which flew only once and became a museum piece in Long Beach California, where I missed going to see it for some reason when I went there in 1989, and lodged in the RMS Queen Mary. The plane is actually made of birch, and has been moved to another museum in Oregon.

And here I must digress and say how similar was the fate of the Saunders-Roe Princess, built in East Cowes, where I briefly lived with stepfather no. 2 who worked for that company. See http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-19279791 and also this post. And again, how similar was the fate of the R100 airship, not to be confused with the ill-fated R101, which I wrote about in this more recent post.

I’m glad in particular to speak again of Nevil Shute’s book Slide Rule, which describes his role in the construction of R100, because I thought of it during the design and construction of my bookshelf. Would its lightweight elegance be robust enough to bear the weight of Harrap’s French & English Dictionary, & various coffee-table books we’d been given that you can hardly pick up? In the end, I may have over-engineered it, to be on the safe side, but I don’t think it shows.

Here’s another passage from his book, the gist of which stays in my memory from reading it more than twenty years ago:

Sixteen steel cables ran from the centre of the polygon, the axis of the ship, to the corner points, bracing the polygonal girder against deflections. All loads, whether of gas lift, weights carried on the frame, or shear wire reactions, were applied to corner points of the polygon, and except in the case of the ship turning these loads were symmetrical port and starboard. One half of the transverse frame, therefore, divided by a vertical plane passing through the axis of the ship, consisted of an encastré arched rib with ends free to slide towards each other, and this arched rib was braced by eight radial wires, some of which would go slack through the deflection of the arched rib under the applied loads. Normally four or five wires would remain in tension, and for the first approximation the slack wires would be guessed. The forces and bending moments in the members could then be calculated by the solution of a lengthy simultaneous equation containing up to seven unknown quantities; this work usually occupied two [human!] calculators about a week, using a Fuller slide rule and working in pairs to check for arithmetical mistakes. In the solution it was usual to find a compression force in one or two or the radial wires; the whole process then had to be begun again using a different selection of wires.(6)

There is more in the same vein, but the above is enough, or more than. In my case, I’ve been aware that the bookshelf’s load is spread in a fashion I prefer to call “unquantifiable”; balanced and cantilevered in myriad ways. It seems rigid enough: you don’t see it flex or hear it creaking, and I don’t suppose it would fall off the wall in an earthquake.

There is a satisfaction in engineering, even on the miniature scale I’m capable of. Let Nevil Shute, though, have the last word.

When all forces were found to be in balance, and when all deflections proved to be in correspondence with the forces elongating the members, then we knew that we had reached the truth.

As I say, it produced a satisfaction almost amounting to a religious experience. After literally months of labour, having filled perhaps fifty foolscap sheets with closely pencilled figures, after many disappointments and heartaches, the truth stood revealed, real and perfect, and unquestionable; the very truth. It did one good; one was the better for the experience. It struck me at the time that those who built the great arches of the English cathedrals in mediaeval times must have known something of our mathematics, and perhaps passed through the same experience, and I have wondered if Freemasonry has anything to do with this. (6)

In my own case, I have been consciously building shrines of spruce in thanksgiving to a host of authors for their generosity in sharing “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”, and thus to be mirrors to the reader’s soul.

* * * *

(1) From fragment 399 of The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa (tr. Richard Zenith)
(2) From “The disclosure of the agent in speech and action” in The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt
(3) From this blog, post titled “The Human Condition”
(4) From The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce.
(5) From first chapter, “Animality” of Theory of Religion, by Georges Bataille (tr. Robert Hurley)
(6) From pp 72-73 of Slide Rule, by Nevil Shute (Pan Books, 1968)

scale plan; all pieces cut from 12mm spruce plywood 8' x 4'

paper model


assembling the pieces


Billy from IKEA and its new replacement


Mk5 shelf, freshly installed


This one is Mk 3


William Shaw, aged 16, my ‘apprentice’; at the end of 2 days building Mk 3. The old Billy looms behind


left: part of Mk 1, sitting alongside a three-tiered corner shelf, the original inspiration for all of them. I got it in a charity shop, added an extra tier and made a clone, building more shelves till the whole wall was covered in books. My camera won’t pan to show them all
right: Mk 2, at the side of my desk

The happy ending

Three years ago today, on a certain occasion, I received this gift bag

A couple of weeks ago I had a visit from my headmaster. He’s long dead of course, but dreams have something in common with memory and ghosts—which the French call “revenants”—returning ones. With no difficulty, they can span the passage of time. They can bring closure to an unresolved past, through forgiveness and understanding. Until this dream, I probably misjudged a man who I last saw alive sixty-one years ago. In earlier fragments of memoir on this blog, I’m sure I’ve conveyed an erroneous impression of him. When I left his school soon after my twelfth birthday, I’d been there 4½ years a boarder. It is only in the last ten years that I’ve started to appreciate the influence it had upon my life.

He seemed an aloof man, somewhat aristocratic in demeanour, often dressed like a gentleman farmer in tweed, breeches and gumboots, a pipe clamped in his mouth, giving him a skull-like grin, accentuated by receding yellow-white hair, longish at the back. The Great War did not leave him unscarred. His glass eye often tended to water in its socket. When writing he always had to apply great pressure to the pen, struggling to control a shaking hand. But on winter evenings, you might hear him at the grand piano: typically bits of the Moonlight Sonata, slow and sonorous, often with long pauses, as if he was in the process of composing it, or playing distractedly out of some unrelated reverie. I didn’t know then that before he acquired the school he had been a piano teacher, qualified A.R.C.M. & L.R.A.M. People said he was a descendant of Beau Brummell; he didn’t deny it. In the Great War he had been a private soldier, a telegraphist,

nice idea

tapping out Morse Code at high speed; and I wonder if his tremor was a combination of that and shell-shock. The only classes I remember him taking were beginners’ Latin (amo, amas, amat . . .), mental arithmetic, dictation, carpentry and Scripture. There were piano lessons but they cost extra, so I never got any. The rest of the time he really was a farmer, mowing the playing fields and lawns, tending the apple orchard, ploughing the potato fields, keeping everything trimmed almost single-handed.

In my dream he appeared as I had never known him: pleased with me and showing it. He approved the tireless efforts I was making on a project, something I’d decided that “somebody ought to do”. He even came over to embrace me. During our hug I saw that his shirt was not fresh, and had an L-shaped tear near one armpit. A group of others entered the room, fellow old-boys of my generation, and he hugged me again to show them (and me) that it was a public accolade, not some secret thing between us. Then I woke up.

To convey the significance of this dream would require the context of my whole life-story, before and after that school, but I shall merely summarize the early part.

Monty (that’s what his wife called him) was the nearest I’d had to a father-figure. By the time I left, I’d spent a third of my life in that school. On this very day, I was born in Australia, and spent my first years in a house of women: my mother, the landlady, and other lodgers. I recall an easy-going life under the sun, making mud-pies in the backyard with neighbouring children. Then my mother took me on to a ship along with nine hundred war brides, sailing from Fremantle to Tilbury in England. To me it wasn’t a voyage but a new life. I took to it and I was rather dismayed when it ended after six weeks.

Then we lived at my grandmother’s in St Leonards-on-sea. I was sent to a nearby school run by severe nuns, where I stayed for a term. I didn’t learn much, as I already knew how to read. The religious indoctrination made no impact. Then another boat took us to Holland, where my mother left me with my so-called aunt and I went to the local school there until I spoke Dutch all the time and adapted well to this new life with no thought of its abrupt end. In those post-Liberation days there was a great sense of safety. It was quite normal for a five-year-old child to walk a mile to school on his own, clutching a little tin of jam sandwiches for lunch, frightened only by a barking dog. Indeed, it had been similar when I went to the convent school in St Leonards.

One day my widowed mother returned from an abortive husband-hunt in Switzerland and brought me back to Granny’s. So I readjusted to that, and to speaking English again. But then a stepfather was found. We lived in a small upstairs flat with a view of the sea beyond the cliffs, where in summer you could hear the distant sound of children playing on the beach. It was a strange lonely time. When I could get out I played with the ragged local children, climbing on the worn cliffs, beset by a misery that I could not understand at first, until it became apparent even to me that my mother’s marriage was foundering almost as soon as it began. This is when I was sent to boarding school. In fact it was only seven miles away, I could have been taken daily or gone by bus; but I think I was better off with the boarding arrangements, even aged 6½. My half-sister was born at that time but I don’t remember her as a baby at all.

After my first term at the school, on a dark January evening after church, I tripped in the street and got a deep glass-cut on my knee. A bone infection developed and I spent months incarcerated with no visitors, due to the hospital’s quarantine restrictions. Prayers, I discovered later, were said for me every week at the church. They hoped their intercession would avert an expected amputation above the knee. Fortunately I had no knowledge of their fears, but it was a grim time. I wasn’t able to adapt to it as with earlier episodes in the patchwork of my life.

So after my spell in hospital, I went back to school, and its Spartan regime. It made more sense than my home life, provided a continuity. In the holidays, I often stayed with my grandmother, when she wasn’t in Kenya, where she hoped the hot weather might alleviate her painful arthritis. My grandfather was unworldly, selfish and remote, commuting between a smoke-filled study and his Club. Perhaps he will appear in a dream one night to show me how I’ve misunderstood him too, who knows.

The dream encounter with Monty has been like a pointing finger, showing past scenes like tableaux in a magic theatre, as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf. So I watch, and see that despite an aloof and sometimes harsh exterior, Monty cared. To care is to understand what needs to be done, and take as much ownership of the issue as one can. Caring is fulfilled by action, not emotion or gestures.

Monty’s school was very small. I don’t think it had more than thirty boys at once, in my time there. The prep-school ethos was for the boys to learn leadership through teamwork, cricket, soccer; to pass the Common Entrance examination; to behave as English gentlemen, regardless of background; and to be initiated into the culture and traditions of English life.

The separation and divorce meant that my mother could no longer pay the fees, but Monty awarded me a scholarship, for I shewed promise. (He always spelt “show” as “shew”.) And so I suppose he expected more of me. There were boys he seemed to favour, who could do no wrong. I was not in their number but some kind of mongrel, always top of the class though it embarrassed me to be so, and a bookworm. I found it most comfortable to live my life in a daydream, disconnected from the everyday; lacking all sense of what I needed to learn socially. I suppose it was my way of blotting out the dysfunctional aspects of my situation.

I could write a book on Merrion House School and its headmaster, but a few fond memories will have to do:

---He once locked me in a large outhouse where the central heating boiler was stoked. There was supposed to be a secret passage there. I didn’t find it, but after much trial & error managed to escape through a small window high up, and was proud of my Houdini-like ingenuity, and wanted to tell him. But he never gave me the chance, never mentioned it, as if he’d intended me to stay there until I starved. What he was doing, of course, was forcing me to confront reality.

---He had noted with silent disapproval that I used to wander off over ploughed fields during our breaks between lessons, inventing private pastimes while the other boys played knock-up football or cricket, according to season. He gave me a police whistle and suggested I learn Morse code. We would each wander across the extensive grounds whose various hedgerows and trees made us invisible to the other; calling up one another and sending messages with whistles. It caught on amongst several of the boys and so we were able to keep in touch as if by mobile phone or email. Like any children's craze it died out naturally but kept some of us interested for a couple of weeks.

---On two occasions he asked me, over dinner, what I would like to be when I grew up. The first time I said “a cook”. He treated this with a snort of contempt. I wonder if he would have done the same if I had said “a chef”. The second time I said “a missionary.” without knowing what a missionary did. He laughed and said I’d be so absent-minded I’d call a meeting in the African village and forget to show up myself. This turned out to be almost prophetic, as it so happened, but that would be another tale. Anyway, whatever answer I had given, it’s clear he was intending to show that my absent-minded ways would be a fatal handicap.

I have no doubt now that he cared, and was the nearest thing I had to a father in those days. If only I could reach him, convey my affectionate thanks, across the years, across the grave! But then I realize that he graciously got there first, offered me his congratulations, in a dream—what other way could there be?—and saw that this waif consigned to his care has made it at last, has found the happy ending that he must have wished for me.