Cedilla (36 page)

I liked this no-authority principle. It extended to exactly the sort of thing a religious leader might be expected to value. It’s true that there is no equivalent of the Pope in Hinduism, but there is a sort of scattered college of cardinals, people who claim the authority to decide who has authority. The word in this context is
diksha
, ‘protocol’ perhaps. You can’t just say ‘I bagsy Enlightenment’. There’s a proper procedure to be followed, a formal initiation, and Ramana Maharshi didn’t seem to have followed it.

A swami came by one morning to check his spiritual paperwork. It wasn’t enough for Ramana Maharshi to get the right answer, he had to show his workings. He was living in the Virupaksha Cave on Arunachala at the time. This swami (actually a Sastri, but never mind) wanted to add him officially to the line of gurus, and requested him to submit to
sannyasa
, the ancient ritual of renunciation. He wasn’t asking on his own account merely, but had been deputed. The swami said that he would return at three that afternoon with everything that was needed for the ceremony. It wouldn’t be necessary for Ramana Maharshi to wear the full ochre-coloured robes. A loincloth of that colour would be sufficient. He went away.

Then an elderly brahmin came along, with a bundle of books. His face looked familiar. Four or five books would be enough in this context to establish a high level of learning. Ramakrishna, for instance, was relatively ignorant in linguistic terms. Sanskrit was more or less a closed book to him, though it was a closed book he loved to carry around. There was one particular book which he carries in a number of photographs. Eventually it was pointed out to him that this was a volume of erotica. He didn’t seem in the least put out, saying simply, and irrefutably, ‘It is made up of the same sacred letters.’

While the brahmin went to bathe in the local water tank, Ramana Maharshi picked up one of his books. It was a Sanskrit book in Nagari characters, with the title
Arunachala Mahatmyam
. He hadn’t known that this book existed in Sanskrit also. He was surprised, and opened the book on a passage saluting the greatness of the place in the words:

Those who live within the radius of three yojanas
{
30 miles
}
of this
place, i.e. this Arunachala Hill, will get My Sayujyam, i.e. absorption
into Me, freed from all bonds, even if they do not take any diksha. This is
my order.

Living on Arunachala superseded initiation. Ramana Maharshi copied out the passage and the scriptural reference, replaced the book in the bundle and tied it up again. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again there was no sign of the bundle, and the brahmin never reappeared either. The swami returned but went away again once he had read the citation, the vital authentication which had drifted towards Ramana Maharshi like a blown wisp of wool landing on a twig.

Part of the appeal of this story was that the book in it behaved exactly as I would want it to, materialising with the crucial information and then resolving back into the void, lending the weight of its authority without the burden of its physical presence, the volume so heavy to lift, the pages so awkward to turn.

I wasn’t living on the holy mountain of Shiva but in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, and I would have loved a bit of initiation, a spiritual diploma to go with my driving licence. I longed for recognition, and if it wasn’t going to take the form of worldly success then it would have to be an esoteric form of belonging. I hadn’t altogether left behind the scheming child whose campaign to raise funds for the PDSA was really a bid for a mention in the
Busy Bee News
. I was still the unappeased teenager who would have joined the Rosicrucians by post if their acronym had been less ugly. Ramana Maharshi showed me that every time I sought endorsement, acknowledgement, a pat on the back from a hand in the sky, I gave away what I was hoping to be given. If you need to be admired for your independence, you’re going to have to find a different name for it.

Dad came to visit me in hospital a couple of times on his way to work. He would say, ‘I can give you ten minutes, Chicken.’ He was horrified, though, when he saw the book about Mary Baker Eddy. ‘So those lot have got their claws into you, have they?’

‘No, Dad,’ I said, perfectly truthfully. ‘Don’t worry. I’m perfectly safe. I’m a Hindu.’ Which only made him pull another face.

Then he said something surprising. ‘Your mother went shopping yesterday. Ran into that radio man … Aspel. Seems they had quite
a chinwag.’ This was a remarkable breakthrough. Michael Aspel, teddy-bear uncle turned demon driver, wouldn’t be my first choice of celebrity for her to deal with, but at least he wasn’t intimidatingly clever.

Then Dad said something so surprising there had to be another word for it, a word to be kept behind glass and used only in emergencies. ‘It’s good to have her back.’ It was like hearing a tree speak.

I hope at least he didn’t say anything similar to Mum herself. There’s nothing so disruptive of a fragile equilibrium than a fleeting taste of what you want.

It had been touch and go for quite a time. We weren’t even sure if Mum should be going to Muriel’s for the sewing circle – it was her only social outing, involving only a short exposure to harmful brainwaves. But it was at Muriel’s that she was most likely to hear news of the radiant thinking machine which was stopping her from sleeping.

She kept going. Dad wouldn’t escort her, but he did give her the cue to set off (‘Quick march!’). And then it was at Muriel’s that she had the first inkling of deliverance. The bush telegraph of Bourne End was all of a twitter. Jose Stoppard had started to behave strangely after the birth of another son. She had made rather a scene at the chemist’s, shouting that it was she who had written the plays which had made her husband famous.

Mum wasn’t the sort to take pleasure in another woman’s troubles, and marital breakdown was still a troubling rarity in her circle. Even so she had a sense of consolation, of reprieve. It was tragic that a crack in the core of that nuclear brain, some defect in its shielding, had exposed an innocent party to toxic overdose, but at least it meant, surely, that the danger to the public would be taken seriously. Then she wouldn’t be alone with her thoughts any more. This wasn’t a case of estrangement but of contamination, radiation sickness in its marital form.

Later bulletins confirmed the fact of breakdown. Late in 1969 Tom Stoppard moved out, taking his sons with him, and Thatch End was put on the market. Mum began to breathe more easily. Her world returned to something like normal. She still had the rituals she needed to perform before leaving the house, rapping softly with her knuckles on either side of the hall mirror in patterns of five and eleven. But
after that she could do her chores, and even get some joy out of going shopping. After a while we all relaxed, until we didn’t feel we needed to hide the local paper in a panic just because it reviewed an amateur production of
The Real Inspector Hound
.

Towards the end of rehabilitation I went to a convalescent home in Bognor Regis – the local authority paid for it. I can’t imagine that a great deal of creativity goes into assigning rehabilitation patient to convalescent home in the normal run of things, but perhaps on this occasion someone gave it a little extra thought, reasoning that a non-standard patient might suit a non-standard home.

It was certainly an eccentric set-up, run by a Scot called Mr Johnson. This was an establishment with a guiding principle. The guiding principle was ‘næ wummen’. He wouldn’t employ women because, he said, they were too bossy. If you had women around then it turned into a hospital ward in no time, and that wasn’t the point, was it? So the staff were all male, all young and mostly nice to look at.

When Mr Johnson showed us round, Mum put up some token resistance. She said, ‘If it’s only men doing the work – and young ones at that, from the look of the ones I’ve seen – then surfaces won’t get properly wiped and hoovered and dusted, will they? And the pee bottles won’t be emptied promptly, which means they’ll start to smell …’

Mr Johnson needed only one word for his answer. ‘Exactly’, he said. That was just the atmosphere he was aiming at. In a way it was surprising that Mum didn’t drag me out of there right away, but she actually quite approved. If I was to be looked after by anyone else, then she would prefer it to be someone entirely her opposite. She would certainly prefer to entrust me to a sloppy man than a rival stickler of a woman. Perhaps she was hoping I’d see the merits of good housekeeping from exposure to neglect. I might come to love her on the rebound.

It’s true that everything was amazingly slapdash, close to hazardous in some ways. Pee bottles sat around till they got good and pongy. The male staff just slobbed about in jeans, smoking cigarettes and drinking cups of tea. They would sit on your bed for a chat, which was still unheard-of in hospitals. I thought it was cosy. I thought it was heaven. Of course we were all young. It wouldn’t have suited older, more settled people.

The rule about ‘nae wummen’ didn’t apply to girlfriends of the inmates or indeed the staff. There was a plentiful female presence, who were forgiven for washing up the odd plate as long as they did their fair share of the smoking and chatting. Naturally the wummen had to be ‘oot’ by nine o’clock in the evening, and after that it was boys and men together.

My first morning at the Home set the tone. A member of staff (he’d already told us to call him Mike) came in, clapped his hands loudly and called out, ‘Right, you rabble, wake up! OK, first interrogation of the day: Who’s been a good boy and who hasn’t?’

Silence. What could he mean? ‘What are these bits of white stuff in your bottles, eh? Been blowing your noses in the night?’

People didn’t suggest such things! Surely?

‘Pleading the fifth amendment, eh? Bunch of wankers! And I mean that most sincerely. You won’t escape me so easily.’

He picked up my piss bottle and peered inside. ‘Mmmm … not enough evidence. Try harder next time, John! Come clean! For the moment I have to say the verdict is Not Guilty. Not innocent, mind! What Mr Johnson would call, “
Not Prrroven
”.’

He moved over to the next bed and picked up my neighbour’s bottle. ‘Aha! Just as I suspected. Lots of little white floating thingies – we have a dedicated self-abuser here!’ He bent his ear over the bottle, as if listening to the whispering spermatozoa. ‘What’s that you say, boys? You didn’t jump? You were pushed? How disgraceful. We shall have to see what Mr J has to say about all this (relax, he won’t mind). Oh, and don’t worry if any of you ever have trouble giving yourself a good tossing-off. Don’t be shy – what do you think we’re here for? Not everyone has a girlfriend, you know. We’re here to help in any way we can.’

Not quite the prevailing atmosphere at Trees in Bourne End. Mum had underestimated the threat to her way of doing things presented by Mr Johnson’s home. It was a revelation that men without women could create such a welcoming atmosphere, and the element of rough good humour was just what I had been missing.

There was one resident called Jack who particularly befriended me. He was in the Merchant Navy, and hated it. He was recovering, very slowly, from dysentery. He could walk a few tottery steps, but then he needed to rest. He was weak, although the signals he sent were strong. He had worked for the Palm Line, owned by Unilever, transporting palm oil from Nigeria.

I couldn’t decide whether the oil they loaded for the return journey, to be processed into margarine, soap and candles, sounded disgusting or delicious. Jack explained that it was bright orange and almost solid. The local people dressed their food with it, though it had no particular taste and the sweetish smell wasn’t appealing.

The crew weren’t well paid, but they didn’t need to be. Barter was the prevailing system, and they had the goods to exchange. A Unilever product such as Lifebuoy soap, returning to Africa after its grand tour, had gained enormously in economic buoyancy. A bar of Lifebuoy soap for a sack of pawpaws, a sack of lobsters or a woman. Admittedly these weren’t the sort of soap bars we bought in shops, being the size of a pet’s gravestone. ‘The only trouble is,’ he said, ‘that I get sick of pawpaws long before I finish the sack and lobster doesn’t agree with me in the first place. Women don’t either.’ I didn’t quite know what to say, and missed the moment.

Another time he asked me if I had noticed that the staff of the home were all nutty, or queer, or both. ‘Of course I’m broadminded,’ he said. ‘Travel does that for you, it broadens the mind. But then my mind was pretty broad before I left home.’

There was no privacy for the residents, but Jack was great pals with Mike. He told me that Mike had agreed to lend us his room when we were both a little stronger, just so we could light some joss-sticks and listen to music in peace. This was a very generous offer of Mike’s. Perhaps a bar of Lifebuoy changed hands. Then in the end by the time I was strong enough to think this tender little scheme was practical, Jack was still too weak. And after that I had to leave Bognor and go back to Bourne End.

Before I left, a number of people from the Home autographed my cast. There was a lot of mischievous laughter while they worked. I inhaled the delicious stink of the felt-tip they were using, but everyone had chosen to make marks where I couldn’t read them. I worried that
I was innocently carrying back into Mum’s zone of power any amount of incriminating commentary.

In a way I needn’t have worried. Mum inspected the cast and made a non-committal noise, a genteel grunt. She didn’t read them out, so I had to wait for Peter to come home and put me out of my suspense. Jack had written
DON’T DO ANYTHING I WOULDN’T DO
! Mike had added
IF YOU CAN’T BE GOOD AT LEAST BE CAREFUL
! Mr Johnson’s contribution was
DON’T TAKE ANY WOODEN NICKELS,
SON
! There was nothing overtly objectionable about these slogans. Their mischief-making was indirect. But Mum must have realised my hair had been ruffled by a permissive breeze.