14. WEAKLINGS INTO MEN?

With the school certificate behind me, with distinctions in everything except French, I passed to the Sixth form. Behind the scenes pieces were moving so that one day my father announced that if I wished I could be apprenticed to an architect in Plymouth.

It took no more than a minute to see that I could not accept a form of slavery as an apprentice. In any event I never had, and did not at that time have, any forward-looking gaze to a future in any form. So I stayed in the Sixth and opened up my experiences in chemistry and physics with a great interest starting to develop in artistic expression.

One incident during the school break is perhaps worth recounting, for it shows clearly my impetuosity (that seemed to have been inherited), and illustrates the freedom of choice I was always given.

One day at a circus and fair in Plymouth I was watching the crew take down the large marquee. I saw that they needed a hand so I pitched in.

Afterwards one of the chiefs asked if I would like to travel with them. I didn't pause. I said "yes," and rushed home to tell my mother, receiving her approval without questions or fears of what may occur.

I realized years later on reflection, that my freedom from both criticism and foolish praise together with complete confidence in my decisions was as much my mother's doing as my father's, for she played both roles when he was way out to sea.

I rushed back to the fairground and set off on another short adventure. I traveled and slept with a few other youths on top of the hay reserved for the animals. I had never developed a self-image, but had always looked at those Charles Atlas ads (shown above) that appeared frequently in the papers in which he talks of the weak and skinny with ribs showing. He was not a hero, but I got the message. Were my ribs showing? Was I weak? I thought of getting his course because the ads said that he had been a 97 lb weakling before becoming the world's most perfectly developed man. Well, I didn't want perfection but the ad captured my mind.

I had  always avoided violence and only once had a fighting skirmish with a boy in Plympton Grammar in the second year. He called me "black-ass" because I wore black trousers and not gray. His name I remember was Drake. I wonder if he remembers, if he is still around.

Anyway after several days of travel I was lying down way on top of a traveling hay wagon when I heard two of the biggest boys talking and one of them, referring to me declared, "That new kid, I wouldn't want to mess with him."

They were talking about me, a potential Atlas student. I was shocked and then realized that I was not so skinny, had good muscles, was strong in arms and legs, but what was more, had projected to them a confidence... it was that self-assured confidence that was the best defensive weapon that I had.

Not long after that, after learning many of the circus people's tricks (some dishonest), I escaped, for I was told  that beating up was normal if they caught you, to silence you for the future. It was a lie, of course, but I had developed what future psychologists would call self-esteem, something that years later I would learn to eradicate completely as inconsistent with all that is natural.

I continued playing football, accepting a small stipend from a local team to play and eventually that same year entered what today would be called a "quarry" for young potential players with Plymouth Argyle. I attended training sessions in home park, but thought nothing about the future. I think that the romantic success of Peter Anderson impulsed my sport dedication, but I didn't have the heart of  a footballer, rather perhaps that of a future trainer, for I was much more mental than intuitive.

Not long after that my father brought home a French fisherman in the off season called Pierre, who had come to the Barbican with his ship. I suppose his idea was that I could practice my French. Pierre was from Pouancé, a small village in  the Pays-de-la-Loire region of France. When he left I was invited to go to France and stay with his mother and family for a while.

My father accepted the invitation for me.

It was my first voyage abroad and as I went alone, the experience was more vivid. Paris was impressive for the couple of days I stayed there and there was so much to see. Eventually I went on to Pouancé and met the family, who had a relative in the village called Janine.

The bread, the large breakfast cups and Janine, oh I remember you well. She was a couple of years older than me, and in one moment I was mortally wounded when sitting by the small village bridge with her flirting with me outrageously, a friend of hers asked if she was my sweetheart and she replied,"Ah no, he is too young."

Nevertheless, every day when I could I was with her courting and kissing and when I could not be with her I was alone down by river, fishing for frogs to eat with a fishing line and red wool as bait and training for football trying to increase my force by "tossing the caber", using a long heavy tree trunk.

Eventually a card came from Plymouth Argyle asking if I wanted to sign for the next season. Janine and the frogs were forgotten and I returned to Plymouth to train.

My social life was expanding and I joined the Plymstock Labor Party without the slightest idea of politics, but I took to the ideals of Keir Hardie, an old time Independent Labor Leader born in 1856 in a one-roomed cottage in Scotland. His mother, Mary Keir, was a domestic servant and his father, David Hardie, was a ship's carpenter.

Perhaps because I liked his face and his humble beginnings and his resolute actions at the time and because of the influence of my grandmother, I signed up. My father, apolitical then, had nothing to say.

I was elected president of the newly formed Labour League of Youth at Plymstock and soon after was elected to the Executive Committee of the Tavistock Division Labor party.

I had also entered the Plymouth College of Fine Art and Design, but with no clear idea of what the future might hold. I was still living clearly in the present.

I do remember an interview in the College when I was told by William Mann, a professor of painting, that if I wanted to be an artist, the only way possible was to be 100 percent involved, using the eye and vision of an artist every waking second of the day.

He was correct, of course, and it applies to anything that one wishes to fully grasp with the mind, which includes the Dharma.

So my life was dominated  by the College of Art, every noon buying those fantastic Sellick's pasties and walking over to my grandfather's carpenter shop to share the break. I continued naturally with Argyle and my political involvement, in which I became a speaker at political rallies for the cause.

After one rally I had two encounters that at the time appeared rather strange, but were indelibly recorded and give some idea of my mind at the time. After a very large political rally in Tavistock after I had made a speech based upon party data, a young woman came up to me and introduced herself. Her name was Thelma and I will withhold her full name.

We talked a while with the usual youthful flirtations and then she told me that she had experienced visions that she would soon die and wanted full sexual experience before she died. I was elected.

She had made an error... I may have been of mating age, I was then seventeen, but my sexual impulses were not the same as most. I grooved on feminine beauty and a face of innocence with long flowing hair and a sensual way of walking and dancing, but intercourse didn't even enter my mind for the slightest moment, probably due to my Aversive temperament.

At that same public meeting afterward I was supposed to stay at the country manor of the labor candidate. He eventually lost the election. It was there I encountered my second indelible experience.

The candidate  was a rather jolly portly man, a knight of the realm. We dined and afterward I went to bed, only to discover after a while that someone had come into the room and was slipping in beside me. It was our  prospective candidate. He touched my back and I recoiled in immediate shock.

"None of that",I declared, although I had no idea what "that" was. He slipped away and afterward I realized what was really going on. I said nothing for it was his little quirk. I received a note from him and the Labour party thanking me for my work and he had added personally his own note saying that the Party expected that I would have a brilliant future with them.

I even considered then the idea that perhaps I could become Britain's youngest Prime Minister. Pitt, the youngest, was PM at the age of 24 and was ridiculed for his youth. I was just seventeen and had time.

Those are the things that dreams are made of and perhaps realized, but the government had decided that the Nation required me in another urgent matter.

I was due for National service. Goodbye soon to football dreams, political dreams and whatever else was running in my fertile imagination.

At that Tavistock meeting an even stranger and more unexplainable event occurred. At the time I was going out with the daughter of Jefferies, the dance instructor, and I had not told her of the Party plans for me to speak at the meeting. The night before I remembered that I had not told her. I started to consider the power of mental energy and sat for several hours transmitting the message that she was to go to Tavistock and encounter me in the town, wherever I was.

I hoped, and with strong energy and self-interested intense passion, directed the message, never expecting anything.

That is correct. Walking in the town immediately after the rally, there she appeared in front of me. Was it the transmitted energy? I was never sure at that time, but it was freaky, because she simply, on impulse, had decided to take a day trip there.

But while everything was roses with me, elsewhere there was a problem brewing that I knew nothing about.

What I did not know was that at that time my father was having serious trouble, for the Labor government was imposing crippling taxes. My father defended himself by supporting the Conservative party. So there we were, on opposite sides of the fence.

It was 1950, when I compounded my father's stress by my continued support of the Labor party, particularly in Devonport where Michael Foot was running against Randolph Churchill, who was Winston Churchill's son.

Winston himself came down to support his son and spoke. I met Winston and there was still fire in the old man, but the brimstone was gone and I was quite disappointed. Michael won and the following year Randolph tried again without success, once more supported by Winston.

At that time my father received a second blow. My young sister, Christine Veronica, about four at the time, walking in Plymstock with my mother hand in hand, was hit and carried off by an army truck. She was rushed to hospital and lost her leg. It was a bitter blow to add to my father's other troubles and for the first time I saw my mother fall into a distressed state as she felt responsible for not having been walking on the outside.

My father had always been like Achilles. He seemed invulnerable, but the government had struck his unprotected heel with the taxation arrow and though he tried to get compensation for my sister, he fell foul once more with government silence. With my mother now no longer his support at the moment, he then did the only foolish thing he had ever done in his life.

He went to the Drake's Arms and quenched his sorrow. All his life he had never touched even a beer and now he fell to neat gin. It deadened his sorrow I suppose, but it created a monster.

He started coming home in that borderline state which is verbally aggressive and although we never had direct contact in those moments, for I stayed by my mother, who, with great wisdom, always steered clear.

I began to loathe him.

Of course, years later after my National Service when I went abroad to Germany with the second Tactical Air Force and to Canada for Navigator training I saw that I should have given my understanding, but I did not.

At the moment I could not understand why my mother supported this constant anger and sometimes verbal abuse. Every day when I had the opportunity and knew his ships were coming in I would go to the Barbican and let her know when he was coming home so that she would be prepared for the onslaught.

When he came home, he sat in his favorite chair with his pipe firmly clenched and began his tirades. After eating he went to bed. Then came the point which I hated most. From upstairs came three blows on the floor. It was the signal for my mother to come up. She did, and now I understand, but for me it was an undignified oppression.

Perhaps it was fortunate, perhaps not, but I was called up rapidly and left rapidly while my father, mother and brother were left to deal with the situation. The problem of my father's intoxication went on for about a year until he finally committed himself to a rehabilitation program.

Physicians dealt with the problem, giving him continued Valium for his nerves, which solved his anxiety and his escapes, but it left him a far cry from the man he had been. Valium was theoretically a mood-stabilizing medication, but it had a wide array of dangerous and frightening side effects, including a false sense of well-being, depression, confusion, loss of coordination and motor function, inability to concentrate, fatigue, lack of fear in risking-taking behaviors, and compulsive thoughts and behaviours.

They were hardly the characteristics necessary for a Captain at sea in a high-risk profession. I feel certain that its constant use year after year, even when he had recovered, prescribed as a preventative measure, contributed to his death in his early sixties.

After that I avoided all traditional medical treatment in any form and consider medical professionals that are not experimental or diagnostic as less than professional and without value for me. Perhaps an unfair evaluation, but that is how I felt.