Re: The Mahasiddha and His Idiot Servant, by John Riley Perk
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 12:45 am
Chapter 1: Black Birth
WAR, WAR, WAR, UNENDING WAR, TEACHING ONLY MORE WAR.
The feet came out first. There was a question as to whose feet, since they were blue-black because of the umbilical cord wrapped around the neck. Also because, days before, the mother had picked up an exposed electrical cable and received an instant shock. She had felt the baby turn in her body from head down to feet down. And because there was the Indian woman next door in the semi-detached house who had committed suicide. Because the almost black child was put into hot water and then cold water to stimulate breath, there was some question as to its identity my identity.
Later, as a child, hearing the story of my birth made perfect sense to me. Since I was born dead the spirit of the Indian woman had entered my body. I was born male but I felt female. I would often dress in my mother's clothes, putting on her make-up and perfumes, her stockings and her underpants. I had a great fear of electricity and the idea of electrocution in the electric chair was supremely horrible. The blue-blackness of the body made Celtic sense, as a reminder of the pigments used by the island warriors of pre-Christian times. Later, a Chinese doctor took my pulse and clapped his hands over his mouth, exclaiming, "Birth, no breath!" Gasping was a common feature of my breathing.
Even before I began school I suspected there was something disturbingly different about me. I saw things differently from other children. Colors were all mixed up for me and I could not identify colors with the right names when asked. I would say the name of the first color that came into my head. Everyone would laugh because they thought I was joking. But in actual fact I really did not know. Or was it that the colors did not appear to me as they did to other children? Then there was the light that emanated from life forms. Dogs, cats, people, rabbits, birds, and bugs seemed to have lights coming from their bodies. My judgment of distances expanded and receded sometimes during the day. Almost always at night my bedroom would become very large. Then the room would shrink so small that the ceiling was just inches above my head, with the window becoming the size of a postage stamp. Then everything would expand, with the ceiling suddenly forty feet above me and the window now the size of a shopping mall window. I would close my eyes when this happened, but the blackness behind my eyelids would continue to alternate between small and vast. There was no escape and the world became very jelly-like, shimmering, and wobbly. Sometimes it was difficult for me to tell living beings from dead ghost beings. I was always scared and anxious, as there was no one to tell all this to and I was afraid of being sent away to a place for crazy kids.
As a young boy with an active imagination I fabricated fantastic story after story about myself. The most famous one was my insistence that my father was a sheriff in Texas. I had a tin pin-on star to prove it and I fought any boy who tried to dispute my myth. My real father was someone like Gene Autry or Roy Roger not the man who cried and shook and hid under the kitchen table when the bombs fell. Not the man who lay soaking in sweat, trembling from malaria that he had contracted in India during the First World War. Not the man who chain-smoked Players and Craven A cigarettes, his fingers stained brown, who washed his black hair in spinach juice, who looked at me from a great distance. Who, as my mother said, was not a real soldier but a bandsman stretcher-bearer picking up the dead and mutilated bodies from Gallipoli to Flanders. A mustard-gassed living ghost who never smiled or played. His only refuge was music, which he taught to homeless boys. Conducting in his black uniform, he became alive in the vibrating sounds of quavers and semiquavers, in notes that I was unable to decipher. One time he tried to teach me the cornet, but my lips broke out in raw cold sores and the hollowness returned between us.
He had lived in a World War I trench, cooking his breakfast of bacon and eggs in a tin pot, and then making his tea out of the bacon tasting water. Born in 1888, he was a living ghost by the time of my birth in 1934. Suffering and unable to die, he was terrified by the prospect of having to live through another war. The only story he told me of his childhood happened before he entered the Army at the age of fourteen. His father, who had worked at the Birmingham Firearms factory, had been very concerned that my father was too small for his age. He filled my father's boots with horse manure and made him put them on and stand in a closet to see if he would grow. Everyone said my father had green eyes like my mother's, but to me they looked brown. He hardly ever spoke to me and never hit me. His last and only gift to me was a set of lead toy soldiers in full military uniforms of the Coldstream Guard's Band, frozen with their instruments of silent sound.
My mother was a Wicca spiritual healer and practical nurse. My grandmother, who was a nurse physician, would take my mother along on her rounds. One of the stories my mother liked to tell of her childhood travels with my grandmother was about the death of Freedom. Freedom was the first name of an old woman of the village who lived in a cottage where the animals still lived in the bottom half of the house, providing winter heat for the humans who lived upstairs. Word had come that Freedom was dying and my grandmother and mother went to the house where the old woman now lived alone with a cow. They climbed the ladder and found Freedom lying on her straw-mattress bed, her breathing shallow and her consciousness coming and going. My grandmother told my mother to stay with Freedom and to lay her out after she died. This entailed plugging her anus and vagina with cotton and tying closed her mouth. Then my grandmother left to visit another patient.
It was night and although it was not my mother's first experience with death, it was her first time of being alone with a dying person. She was terrified. The wind blew out the kerosene lamp. My mother clung to Freedom's hand, asking and praying for her not to die before my grandmother returned. The cow below made sounds like demons ascending the ladder and with the labored breathing and twitching of Freedom, the screeching of owls, the yelling of night hawks, and the house moving in the night wind, my mother was near to fainting.
It was at least two hours before my grandmother returned to find my frightened mother still grasping Freedom's hand. Lighting the lamp and inspecting Freedom, my grandmother exclaimed in a sharp tone, "Dolly, Freedom is dead. Go and get the Vicar's dining room table leaf and we will lay her out." I can always see my mother as a fourteen-year-old girl terrified and beset by spirits, yet crossing the village alone at night to return with the table leaf under her arm to lay out the dead Freedom. It was this story and her act of bravery that always inspired me to go beyond my fears. Even at an early age I admired her willingness to tell me this story, not only of her bravery, but of her fears in handling the beings and spirits that surrounded her.
It was the autumn of 1939 and the rumors of war were in everybody's conversation. I was just beginning to attend classes at the local grammar school and my father would often pick me up in the afternoon. He would put me on the saddle of his bicycle and push it home, walking beside me. I remember asking him, "What's war?" He said, "It's like when two people get angry with each other and they start to fight." And I said, "Does that mean German people and English people will fight?" And, he said, "Yes."
On September the third at 11:15 in the morning I stood on the apple tree stump in our back garden in the town of Sidcup, County of Kent, some twenty miles south of London. My father had the wireless radio hooked up outside so we could all hear the Prime Minister, Mr. Chamberlain, speak. I remember him saying we were at war. The adults were very serious and many began to cry. Then the sirens sounded and the children, alarmed at the wailing sound, cried also. I was five and my childhood of war had started.
The announcement of war helped relieve the tension. The adults were now preoccupied with survival and the war effort. My father took action and dug a great pit in our back yard. In the yellow clay we piled up sod bags and he put corrugated tin on top to make a roof. It was a replica of his trench in France during World War I. He made bunks for us. It looked great and we played war, killing Germans. Then, about a week after construction, it rained very heavily and the fortification became a water hole with bunk beds floating in it. The very next night a soaked, mud-splattered policeman came knocking at the back door. Apparently, one of our window blinds had showed some light and he had crossed our garden, only to fall into the water-filled bunker. My mother dried him off by the kitchen stove while he drank the ritual cup of tea.
The next shelter we had was a steel table about the size of a king bed inside the house. We all slept on the mattress beneath it with our gas masks next to us. My parents' thought was that if the house fell on top of us during a bombing raid someone would be able to dig us out. At that time, unknown to me or my sisters, my mother had a stash of cyanide she planned to give us if we became trapped in rubble or suffered from gas exposure. We all expected the Nazis to invade and my parents made petrol bombs to throw at the Germans.
There was a Jewish man who lived across our road who cried in our kit hen. He used to play the violin with my father. He had a bald head and always wore velvet slippers. He was given tea. The home guard played war with an old Bren gun-carrier track tank. They threw chalk bags at each other. We picked them up and threw them too. We filled sandbags to pile in our front gate. We stuck tape over all the windows. My stepbrother, Charlie, came back from Dunkirk, his uniform torn and stained. He smelled of whiskey. He cried in our kitchen. He told us that Nappy, my father's music student and our lodger, had been killed in the sea off the coast of France. Charlie continued to cry, snapping the hammer on his empty service pistol over and over again. He was given tea. I began to associate drinking tea with times of crisis. Every time somebody sang "Polly put the kettle on," I would tremble with anxiety.
In one bombing raid the entire front of our house, all three stories, was destroyed. We had a large canvas draped over the house front while it was rebuilt. I had to be evacuated and was sent on my own to Cornwall. My mother took me to the train station with my gas mask and a luggage label tied to my collar. She said goodbye.
In Cornwall I was housed with three other evacuees. Two were teenage girls from London and then there was Freddy, a boy of seven like myself. He had fleas. One afternoon he and I were playing on a bridge, throwing sticks into the brook on one side and then running swiftly across to see them whirl out from under on the other side. I saw the lorry coming across the bridge, but Freddy did not and it ran him down. Some soldiers coming by took me home. This was the first time I had ever seen someone die. It was fast.
After Freddy died I slept in the same room with the girls. We would play Truth, Dare, and Promises. I would always choose Dare and lose. They would rub my penis to make it hard and then dare me to put it into their vaginas. I always did and was puzzled why they liked it so much. Although my penis got hard I had no orgasm or sperm.
Every night I walked to the post office with the hope of getting a letter from my mother, but they were few and far between. Although I was now school age, my early classroom encounters in Cornwall were a series of escapes or ejections. I was kicked out of one institution for breaking another boy's arm while playing King of the Castle. I ran away time and time again and got the cane time and time again. In yet another school I set fire to the wastepaper basket under the teacher's desk in which were all the class records. Their charred remains freed me to be sent back home to Sidcup.
I was then sent to my Aunt Lil's house near Portsmouth. One early morning we were picking mushrooms in the field when, with a loud roar, three German bombers came over not more than five hundred feet above the ground. They were so close I could see the men in the glass nosecones and the big black crosses on the wings of the planes. We ran as the ground around us spurted up clods of earth. At full gallop I jumped into a ditch of stinging nettles. The roar of the engines was so loud I couldn't even hear the noise of the machine guns. Moments later the planes were gone and no one was hurt.
There was a German prison camp near Aunt Lil's house and two of the prisoners, Kurt and Carl, would come over to the farm to help. Carl liked to kill things and he pleaded with my aunt to let him kill the unwanted kittens from the barn cat's litter. I watched, fascinated, as he strangled each one with his hands and threw the bodies on the manure pile. Kurt made me a wooden airplane and gave me rides on his back. He cried when I came to the camp to say goodbye, taking my hand through the barbed wire fence and kissing it. I was returning home. I had no tea for him.
The war had scattered our family in all directions. My mother was still in Sidcup, driving a fire truck for the town. My sister was in the Land Army, stationed on a farm at some distance away. My father was in Devon, helping to care for the homeless boys he taught, all of whom had been evacuated there. We had a young woman in her early twenties as a lodger and occasionally a couple of billeted soldiers from Canada, Australia, and even Egypt.
Food and supplies were in short supply and my mother readily agreed that I become the family provider by stealing. I imagined myself as Dick Turpin, the highwayman. I raided, I stole. At night I took a sack and crept into a farmer's yard, outwitted the dog, and stuffed four chickens from the pen into my sack. I took them home to my approving mother. I stole coal from the train cars at the railway station. During the night air raids, when everyone was in the shelters, I entered the empty, unlocked houses. I stole odd things that would not be missed: knives, forks, food, soap, door mats, kettles, flower pots, jam, hair brushes, sugar tongs, napkins, towels-just one of each thing. It was the excitement of being a shadow, ghost-like. John the Phantom, moving unseen through their empty world. I could imagine them returning home, saying, "Where did I put that comb, that empty box of pins?" Then the objects would become forgotten, like the sock lost in the washing machine.
The Phantom hid in the clothes washer in the bathroom to watch the young woman lodger in our house undress for a bath. There was a small window in the top-filled washer from which I intended to peek out. I heard her come into the bathroom and run the water. I listened with held breath to the unfastening of clothes. I was just about to raise my eyes to the window when a thought struck me. What if she saw my eyes in the washer window? How could I explain why I was in the washing machine? I struggled with logical explanations. "Well, Miss, I was looking for a lost sock." Who would believe that? I couldn't think of anything plausible, so I just hid in the bottom, trapped in my own adventure, listening to the splashing of water, until she dressed and left. Then I lifted the lid and vanished.
During this time I began attending the Sidcup Elementary Modern School for Boys in my home county of Kent. The English schools had a form system where the first year you entered into either Form One-A, One-B, One-C, or One-D, depending on the assessment of intelligence. For those of questionable mental capacity there was Form One-X. Based on my behavior and general strangeness, this is where I was assigned. In part it was because of the big mistake I made of telling a teacher at school about my dreams and visions. On and off for years I had had these glimpses of other worlds that I considered to be as real as everyday existence. The school authorities wanted to send me to a doctor, but my mother would have none of it. Then they tried to beat it out of me, but I responded with either lies or silence until they gave up.
Form One-X was quite a relief for me, as we were expected to be crazy. There was Nutty Herman, who drank ink, Philip the Clubfoot, and Plug Fenton, who had holes in his shoes from riding a bike without pedals. We had William the No-Sight, whose glasses were as thick as bottle bottoms, and Michael the Butcher, who pulled the heads off of birds and flowers, mice and bugs. There was James, whose mouth was so full of saliva it overflowed his chin, covering his shirt with stains, and Charlie the Trembler, whose head twitched and hands shook. Filling out Form One-X was Smitty, who was fat, Hamish, who was from Scotland, Jimmy Big Cock, Paul, who was strapped into a wheelchair, Cassidy, from Ireland, and me, John the Silent, who had decided not to talk to adults.
Being in Form One-X was like finding my family. They were like me. We were an outcast clan of the other school forms. Mr. Jones from Wales was our main teacher, and we all knew something was wrong with him because he was not in the war. Mr. Jones was exiled to Form One-X, and because it was assumed we could not learn the regular curriculum, he developed his own. He had that singsong Welsh voice and he read us lots of stories: Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood, Harold: Last of the Saxon Kings, The White Company, Arthur, and Boudicca, Queen of the lceni. Time and again we would get Mr. Jones to tell us the tribal stories and myths.
All of us young boys in Form One-X became real Celts and Boudicca was our Goddess. We never worshipped God because he was a male and for us all the tribal gods were women. We built a shrine to Boudicca in the woods and would paint ourselves blue. Blue was the Celtic bond in our tribe, and we would always wear something blue -- blue tie, blue socks, blue shirt, whatever. Crazy Herman used to drink all our blue ink with the hope that it would turn his skin permanently blue. We were all surprised when it did not. But that did not stop us from experimenting.
Half the day we would have classes and the other half we would do something useful like work in the garden or polish floors. Mr. Jones trooped around the school with us on our afternoon jobs as we swept the school halls, mopped the bathrooms, and dug, weeded, and planted the school gardens. We took turns pushing Paul in his wheelchair, which became a chariot for us, the "One-X Celts." The other forms were the Romans, marching from class to class in double columns at the sound of the period bell. We were ragtag, skipping, hopping, slouching, and hobbling along with Paul in the chariot, with our mops and brooms as swords and spears. We shot spitballs at the Romans as they marched past and thumbed our noses at the administration.
We often made tea for the teachers as part of our duties. One day my pal, Plug, pissed into the tea water to see if the dumb Romans would notice. They didn't! They thought it tasted just fine, even special! After that discovery we all excitedly took turns until we came to Wally. Wally was part gypsy and I suspect he had really strong and exotic pee. When the administration began to investigate the school water supply, it was getting too dose to home, so we stopped. We knew they thought we were dumb, and it never occurred to them to wonder what we thought about them. In fact, all of us in Form One-X figured out very quickly that if the teachers thought we were crazy by the way we acted we would be free from their regimentation. Outside of our group we were viewed as crazy. Within the group we accepted each other with our individual oddities.
Once the Head Master, retired army officer, came to our class and was pleased that we were learning so much about history. He told us a story about how great the Roman army was because it brought law and order to Britain. We could not believe our ears. We sat frozen in silence. He must have thought we were enthralled, because he went on for hours about Roman accomplishments. And at the end he said, "Boys, you are doing so well that you will soon be out of here and into the regular forms."
That was it. We had an emergency meeting down at the end of the playing field.
"We have to go underground," said Cassidy, the Irish boy, "just like the IRA."
"No, no!" said Plug. "They're just a bunch of murderers." We all looked at each other in desperation.
"Why don't we just act more like ourselves?" suggested crazy Herman.
That was it! We all turned to look with new admiration at Herman. He saved the tribe that day with his brilliant idea. Later we lost him. This happened when the woodworking teacher, who bullied everyone, hit him about the head in a rage and Herman lashed back. Other teachers came running in and dragged Herman off to the Head Master's room.
We did not see him again until the next morning when the whole school assembled in the hall for the daily singing of school songs, hymns, and Roman anthems. The song we liked best was Blake's "And Did His Feet in Ancient Times." Most of the words were tribal until the God part. After hymns there would be announcements and then punishments, which could mean anything from having your name read out loud to being called up in front of the whole school. This day two teachers marched Herman into assembly. Between them a stool was set up on the stage. Herman faced the school while the charges were read out. We were in the front row. He looked at us. I remember the pain and anguish in his terrified eyes. Then an amazing thing happened. Seeing us, his heart-brothers, he winked.
It was the bravery of a true Celtic warrior that winked. After that they dragged him over to the stool, took down his trousers, and gave him twelve cuts of the cane -- one for each Fucking Apostle. Toward the end he sobbed uncontrollably. We flinched at each stroke. We never saw Herman again after the caning but we heard they sent him to a school for boys on a training ship. We imagined him chained to the oars in a Roman galley. But we had learned our lesson. Never hit a Roman on his turf and never let them know what is going on.
Form One-X graduated to Form Two-X, and the tales told by Mr. Jones of the historical figures Nelson, Wellington, and Drake subdued the Celtic wildness. The sun of the British Empire rose in my mind. There were Churchill's stories of his adventures in the Boer War. And here he was, still alive, nonchalantly smoking his cigar in the face of the hysterical and demonic Hitler. I was ready to fight on the beaches as we changed from wild Celts to the Thin Red Line. Paul in his wheelchair became the artillery. We patrolled with wooden rifles, our bare bayonets glinting before the enemy-the nose-picking, stupid, dirty, Nazi horde. It was just us, defending all that was good, all that was English, all that was fair play, all that was clean. As we marched along we would sing:
For Christmas of 1944 my mother took us to London on Boxing Day to see the stage show Peter Pan and afterwards, as a special treat, we went to a Chinese restaurant. I clearly remember walking into the entrance of the restaurant with its unfamiliar smells and sounds and looking up at a large golden statue of the Buddha, who looked back at me smiling. There was something quite shocking about that encounter, and while eating I kept looking around to see if he was watching me.
A plague of measles and pneumonia struck many of the children at our school. From my bedroom window I looked across the street to the bedroom of Alice Green with whom I was distantly in love. She contracted pneumonia and within a week had died. The curtains were drawn and I visualized her lying waxen-like upon her deathbed. I too became ill with both measles and pneumonia. I heard the doctor talking to my mother in the hallway and he said, "If his breathing becomes labored, call me right away." I think they were expecting me to die. The curtains of my room were open and I remember looking into the sky at the sunrise and being somewhat delirious with fever. I imagined the golden Chinese Buddha appearing in the sky and coming down toward me and entering my heart. The fever broke and gradually I recovered. From then on I was always attracted to images of the Buddha.
Toward the end of the war I hardly ever went to school, but I read constantly. Even now I can hear my mother saying, "John, get your nose out of that book." I thought that escape was possible within books. Perhaps I could be like Allen Quartermain with my Lee-Enfield rifle, strolling unafraid through the snakeinfested jungles where even the natives were afraid to go. Or perhaps like one of the endless array of Victorian writers who trekked, hiked, climbed, or hacked their way through impenetrable wilderness, bringing afternoon tea, cricket, morals, manners, arid stiff upper lips to unenlightened barbarous tribes. Or a white-skinned, blonde Tarzan, with only a knife, knowing more than even the black natives. Taking tea would never be a problem because he was an English lord. In turn I reveled in becoming Hornblower, Alfred, Mallory, Scott of the Antarctic, Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood, and Ulysses. Sometimes I was Hawkeye, with my rifle and my two trusted Indian servants, in the American wilderness.
My stealing stopped. I took a test at school in the last part of my second year. The masters were astounded by the results. I was Mr. Jones's success story. I was put into Form Three-B. Being English instead of a Celt had paid off. Relentlessly I set to work. I read all the required books by the end of the year. I was top in exams of Form Three-B. In my last year I was put into Form Four-A and never saw the boys in Form One-X again. I watched Lawrence Olivier in the film Henry V with the fullness of pride that I was English. A great Union Jack hung on one wall in my room. The cross of St. George the Dragon Slayer hung on the other. I carried it to London for the Victory Over Europe parade. Vera Lynn sang "We'll Meet Again."
At fourteen I left school, worked for a while at the K. B. Radio factory in Foots Cray, and then became a commie waiter at the Savoy Hotel. At fifteen I was a bar boy at the University Club in London and saw Churchill puffing on his signature cigar. I signed papers to join the Royal Navy but was rejected because of my color blindness. Somewhat disappointed, I applied to the Merchant Navy and the P & 0 Line, which would train me to be a steward.
By coincidence my mother wrote me at this time, offering to pay my way to the United States and also that of my older stepsister, Mickey. Some years earlier my mother had married an American sailor and had left for America with my two younger sisters. My father, at the age of sixty-four, ran away with a twenty- two-year-old woman to a cottage by the sea. I, alone as usual, filled out the emigration forms at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and decided that whichever papers came through first would decide whether I entered the Merchant Navy or journeyed to America.
The American papers came first, by post. We were to sail aboard the USS America from Southampton the first week of March, 1950. Our old house in Sidcup was sold and in the back garden I built a bonfire with a wooden toy ship on top. I lined up the lead soldiers of the Coldstream Guard's Band, formally saluted them, and lit the fire. The blue baby, the Indian woman, the mental retard, Form One-X, my father, the Celts, and the war all went up in flames. I left the ashes. From the tourist deck of the USS America, I took the acceptance papers from the Merchant Navy's P & O Training School and dropped them into the expanding gap between ship and dock. They fluttered into the oily waters. Within a week I would be sixteen, English, and in America.
WAR, WAR, WAR, UNENDING WAR, TEACHING ONLY MORE WAR.
The feet came out first. There was a question as to whose feet, since they were blue-black because of the umbilical cord wrapped around the neck. Also because, days before, the mother had picked up an exposed electrical cable and received an instant shock. She had felt the baby turn in her body from head down to feet down. And because there was the Indian woman next door in the semi-detached house who had committed suicide. Because the almost black child was put into hot water and then cold water to stimulate breath, there was some question as to its identity my identity.
Later, as a child, hearing the story of my birth made perfect sense to me. Since I was born dead the spirit of the Indian woman had entered my body. I was born male but I felt female. I would often dress in my mother's clothes, putting on her make-up and perfumes, her stockings and her underpants. I had a great fear of electricity and the idea of electrocution in the electric chair was supremely horrible. The blue-blackness of the body made Celtic sense, as a reminder of the pigments used by the island warriors of pre-Christian times. Later, a Chinese doctor took my pulse and clapped his hands over his mouth, exclaiming, "Birth, no breath!" Gasping was a common feature of my breathing.
Even before I began school I suspected there was something disturbingly different about me. I saw things differently from other children. Colors were all mixed up for me and I could not identify colors with the right names when asked. I would say the name of the first color that came into my head. Everyone would laugh because they thought I was joking. But in actual fact I really did not know. Or was it that the colors did not appear to me as they did to other children? Then there was the light that emanated from life forms. Dogs, cats, people, rabbits, birds, and bugs seemed to have lights coming from their bodies. My judgment of distances expanded and receded sometimes during the day. Almost always at night my bedroom would become very large. Then the room would shrink so small that the ceiling was just inches above my head, with the window becoming the size of a postage stamp. Then everything would expand, with the ceiling suddenly forty feet above me and the window now the size of a shopping mall window. I would close my eyes when this happened, but the blackness behind my eyelids would continue to alternate between small and vast. There was no escape and the world became very jelly-like, shimmering, and wobbly. Sometimes it was difficult for me to tell living beings from dead ghost beings. I was always scared and anxious, as there was no one to tell all this to and I was afraid of being sent away to a place for crazy kids.
As a young boy with an active imagination I fabricated fantastic story after story about myself. The most famous one was my insistence that my father was a sheriff in Texas. I had a tin pin-on star to prove it and I fought any boy who tried to dispute my myth. My real father was someone like Gene Autry or Roy Roger not the man who cried and shook and hid under the kitchen table when the bombs fell. Not the man who lay soaking in sweat, trembling from malaria that he had contracted in India during the First World War. Not the man who chain-smoked Players and Craven A cigarettes, his fingers stained brown, who washed his black hair in spinach juice, who looked at me from a great distance. Who, as my mother said, was not a real soldier but a bandsman stretcher-bearer picking up the dead and mutilated bodies from Gallipoli to Flanders. A mustard-gassed living ghost who never smiled or played. His only refuge was music, which he taught to homeless boys. Conducting in his black uniform, he became alive in the vibrating sounds of quavers and semiquavers, in notes that I was unable to decipher. One time he tried to teach me the cornet, but my lips broke out in raw cold sores and the hollowness returned between us.
He had lived in a World War I trench, cooking his breakfast of bacon and eggs in a tin pot, and then making his tea out of the bacon tasting water. Born in 1888, he was a living ghost by the time of my birth in 1934. Suffering and unable to die, he was terrified by the prospect of having to live through another war. The only story he told me of his childhood happened before he entered the Army at the age of fourteen. His father, who had worked at the Birmingham Firearms factory, had been very concerned that my father was too small for his age. He filled my father's boots with horse manure and made him put them on and stand in a closet to see if he would grow. Everyone said my father had green eyes like my mother's, but to me they looked brown. He hardly ever spoke to me and never hit me. His last and only gift to me was a set of lead toy soldiers in full military uniforms of the Coldstream Guard's Band, frozen with their instruments of silent sound.
My mother was a Wicca spiritual healer and practical nurse. My grandmother, who was a nurse physician, would take my mother along on her rounds. One of the stories my mother liked to tell of her childhood travels with my grandmother was about the death of Freedom. Freedom was the first name of an old woman of the village who lived in a cottage where the animals still lived in the bottom half of the house, providing winter heat for the humans who lived upstairs. Word had come that Freedom was dying and my grandmother and mother went to the house where the old woman now lived alone with a cow. They climbed the ladder and found Freedom lying on her straw-mattress bed, her breathing shallow and her consciousness coming and going. My grandmother told my mother to stay with Freedom and to lay her out after she died. This entailed plugging her anus and vagina with cotton and tying closed her mouth. Then my grandmother left to visit another patient.
It was night and although it was not my mother's first experience with death, it was her first time of being alone with a dying person. She was terrified. The wind blew out the kerosene lamp. My mother clung to Freedom's hand, asking and praying for her not to die before my grandmother returned. The cow below made sounds like demons ascending the ladder and with the labored breathing and twitching of Freedom, the screeching of owls, the yelling of night hawks, and the house moving in the night wind, my mother was near to fainting.
It was at least two hours before my grandmother returned to find my frightened mother still grasping Freedom's hand. Lighting the lamp and inspecting Freedom, my grandmother exclaimed in a sharp tone, "Dolly, Freedom is dead. Go and get the Vicar's dining room table leaf and we will lay her out." I can always see my mother as a fourteen-year-old girl terrified and beset by spirits, yet crossing the village alone at night to return with the table leaf under her arm to lay out the dead Freedom. It was this story and her act of bravery that always inspired me to go beyond my fears. Even at an early age I admired her willingness to tell me this story, not only of her bravery, but of her fears in handling the beings and spirits that surrounded her.
It was the autumn of 1939 and the rumors of war were in everybody's conversation. I was just beginning to attend classes at the local grammar school and my father would often pick me up in the afternoon. He would put me on the saddle of his bicycle and push it home, walking beside me. I remember asking him, "What's war?" He said, "It's like when two people get angry with each other and they start to fight." And I said, "Does that mean German people and English people will fight?" And, he said, "Yes."
On September the third at 11:15 in the morning I stood on the apple tree stump in our back garden in the town of Sidcup, County of Kent, some twenty miles south of London. My father had the wireless radio hooked up outside so we could all hear the Prime Minister, Mr. Chamberlain, speak. I remember him saying we were at war. The adults were very serious and many began to cry. Then the sirens sounded and the children, alarmed at the wailing sound, cried also. I was five and my childhood of war had started.
The announcement of war helped relieve the tension. The adults were now preoccupied with survival and the war effort. My father took action and dug a great pit in our back yard. In the yellow clay we piled up sod bags and he put corrugated tin on top to make a roof. It was a replica of his trench in France during World War I. He made bunks for us. It looked great and we played war, killing Germans. Then, about a week after construction, it rained very heavily and the fortification became a water hole with bunk beds floating in it. The very next night a soaked, mud-splattered policeman came knocking at the back door. Apparently, one of our window blinds had showed some light and he had crossed our garden, only to fall into the water-filled bunker. My mother dried him off by the kitchen stove while he drank the ritual cup of tea.
The next shelter we had was a steel table about the size of a king bed inside the house. We all slept on the mattress beneath it with our gas masks next to us. My parents' thought was that if the house fell on top of us during a bombing raid someone would be able to dig us out. At that time, unknown to me or my sisters, my mother had a stash of cyanide she planned to give us if we became trapped in rubble or suffered from gas exposure. We all expected the Nazis to invade and my parents made petrol bombs to throw at the Germans.
There was a Jewish man who lived across our road who cried in our kit hen. He used to play the violin with my father. He had a bald head and always wore velvet slippers. He was given tea. The home guard played war with an old Bren gun-carrier track tank. They threw chalk bags at each other. We picked them up and threw them too. We filled sandbags to pile in our front gate. We stuck tape over all the windows. My stepbrother, Charlie, came back from Dunkirk, his uniform torn and stained. He smelled of whiskey. He cried in our kitchen. He told us that Nappy, my father's music student and our lodger, had been killed in the sea off the coast of France. Charlie continued to cry, snapping the hammer on his empty service pistol over and over again. He was given tea. I began to associate drinking tea with times of crisis. Every time somebody sang "Polly put the kettle on," I would tremble with anxiety.
In one bombing raid the entire front of our house, all three stories, was destroyed. We had a large canvas draped over the house front while it was rebuilt. I had to be evacuated and was sent on my own to Cornwall. My mother took me to the train station with my gas mask and a luggage label tied to my collar. She said goodbye.
In Cornwall I was housed with three other evacuees. Two were teenage girls from London and then there was Freddy, a boy of seven like myself. He had fleas. One afternoon he and I were playing on a bridge, throwing sticks into the brook on one side and then running swiftly across to see them whirl out from under on the other side. I saw the lorry coming across the bridge, but Freddy did not and it ran him down. Some soldiers coming by took me home. This was the first time I had ever seen someone die. It was fast.
After Freddy died I slept in the same room with the girls. We would play Truth, Dare, and Promises. I would always choose Dare and lose. They would rub my penis to make it hard and then dare me to put it into their vaginas. I always did and was puzzled why they liked it so much. Although my penis got hard I had no orgasm or sperm.
Every night I walked to the post office with the hope of getting a letter from my mother, but they were few and far between. Although I was now school age, my early classroom encounters in Cornwall were a series of escapes or ejections. I was kicked out of one institution for breaking another boy's arm while playing King of the Castle. I ran away time and time again and got the cane time and time again. In yet another school I set fire to the wastepaper basket under the teacher's desk in which were all the class records. Their charred remains freed me to be sent back home to Sidcup.
I was then sent to my Aunt Lil's house near Portsmouth. One early morning we were picking mushrooms in the field when, with a loud roar, three German bombers came over not more than five hundred feet above the ground. They were so close I could see the men in the glass nosecones and the big black crosses on the wings of the planes. We ran as the ground around us spurted up clods of earth. At full gallop I jumped into a ditch of stinging nettles. The roar of the engines was so loud I couldn't even hear the noise of the machine guns. Moments later the planes were gone and no one was hurt.
There was a German prison camp near Aunt Lil's house and two of the prisoners, Kurt and Carl, would come over to the farm to help. Carl liked to kill things and he pleaded with my aunt to let him kill the unwanted kittens from the barn cat's litter. I watched, fascinated, as he strangled each one with his hands and threw the bodies on the manure pile. Kurt made me a wooden airplane and gave me rides on his back. He cried when I came to the camp to say goodbye, taking my hand through the barbed wire fence and kissing it. I was returning home. I had no tea for him.
The war had scattered our family in all directions. My mother was still in Sidcup, driving a fire truck for the town. My sister was in the Land Army, stationed on a farm at some distance away. My father was in Devon, helping to care for the homeless boys he taught, all of whom had been evacuated there. We had a young woman in her early twenties as a lodger and occasionally a couple of billeted soldiers from Canada, Australia, and even Egypt.
Food and supplies were in short supply and my mother readily agreed that I become the family provider by stealing. I imagined myself as Dick Turpin, the highwayman. I raided, I stole. At night I took a sack and crept into a farmer's yard, outwitted the dog, and stuffed four chickens from the pen into my sack. I took them home to my approving mother. I stole coal from the train cars at the railway station. During the night air raids, when everyone was in the shelters, I entered the empty, unlocked houses. I stole odd things that would not be missed: knives, forks, food, soap, door mats, kettles, flower pots, jam, hair brushes, sugar tongs, napkins, towels-just one of each thing. It was the excitement of being a shadow, ghost-like. John the Phantom, moving unseen through their empty world. I could imagine them returning home, saying, "Where did I put that comb, that empty box of pins?" Then the objects would become forgotten, like the sock lost in the washing machine.
The Phantom hid in the clothes washer in the bathroom to watch the young woman lodger in our house undress for a bath. There was a small window in the top-filled washer from which I intended to peek out. I heard her come into the bathroom and run the water. I listened with held breath to the unfastening of clothes. I was just about to raise my eyes to the window when a thought struck me. What if she saw my eyes in the washer window? How could I explain why I was in the washing machine? I struggled with logical explanations. "Well, Miss, I was looking for a lost sock." Who would believe that? I couldn't think of anything plausible, so I just hid in the bottom, trapped in my own adventure, listening to the splashing of water, until she dressed and left. Then I lifted the lid and vanished.
During this time I began attending the Sidcup Elementary Modern School for Boys in my home county of Kent. The English schools had a form system where the first year you entered into either Form One-A, One-B, One-C, or One-D, depending on the assessment of intelligence. For those of questionable mental capacity there was Form One-X. Based on my behavior and general strangeness, this is where I was assigned. In part it was because of the big mistake I made of telling a teacher at school about my dreams and visions. On and off for years I had had these glimpses of other worlds that I considered to be as real as everyday existence. The school authorities wanted to send me to a doctor, but my mother would have none of it. Then they tried to beat it out of me, but I responded with either lies or silence until they gave up.
Form One-X was quite a relief for me, as we were expected to be crazy. There was Nutty Herman, who drank ink, Philip the Clubfoot, and Plug Fenton, who had holes in his shoes from riding a bike without pedals. We had William the No-Sight, whose glasses were as thick as bottle bottoms, and Michael the Butcher, who pulled the heads off of birds and flowers, mice and bugs. There was James, whose mouth was so full of saliva it overflowed his chin, covering his shirt with stains, and Charlie the Trembler, whose head twitched and hands shook. Filling out Form One-X was Smitty, who was fat, Hamish, who was from Scotland, Jimmy Big Cock, Paul, who was strapped into a wheelchair, Cassidy, from Ireland, and me, John the Silent, who had decided not to talk to adults.
Being in Form One-X was like finding my family. They were like me. We were an outcast clan of the other school forms. Mr. Jones from Wales was our main teacher, and we all knew something was wrong with him because he was not in the war. Mr. Jones was exiled to Form One-X, and because it was assumed we could not learn the regular curriculum, he developed his own. He had that singsong Welsh voice and he read us lots of stories: Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood, Harold: Last of the Saxon Kings, The White Company, Arthur, and Boudicca, Queen of the lceni. Time and again we would get Mr. Jones to tell us the tribal stories and myths.
All of us young boys in Form One-X became real Celts and Boudicca was our Goddess. We never worshipped God because he was a male and for us all the tribal gods were women. We built a shrine to Boudicca in the woods and would paint ourselves blue. Blue was the Celtic bond in our tribe, and we would always wear something blue -- blue tie, blue socks, blue shirt, whatever. Crazy Herman used to drink all our blue ink with the hope that it would turn his skin permanently blue. We were all surprised when it did not. But that did not stop us from experimenting.
Half the day we would have classes and the other half we would do something useful like work in the garden or polish floors. Mr. Jones trooped around the school with us on our afternoon jobs as we swept the school halls, mopped the bathrooms, and dug, weeded, and planted the school gardens. We took turns pushing Paul in his wheelchair, which became a chariot for us, the "One-X Celts." The other forms were the Romans, marching from class to class in double columns at the sound of the period bell. We were ragtag, skipping, hopping, slouching, and hobbling along with Paul in the chariot, with our mops and brooms as swords and spears. We shot spitballs at the Romans as they marched past and thumbed our noses at the administration.
We often made tea for the teachers as part of our duties. One day my pal, Plug, pissed into the tea water to see if the dumb Romans would notice. They didn't! They thought it tasted just fine, even special! After that discovery we all excitedly took turns until we came to Wally. Wally was part gypsy and I suspect he had really strong and exotic pee. When the administration began to investigate the school water supply, it was getting too dose to home, so we stopped. We knew they thought we were dumb, and it never occurred to them to wonder what we thought about them. In fact, all of us in Form One-X figured out very quickly that if the teachers thought we were crazy by the way we acted we would be free from their regimentation. Outside of our group we were viewed as crazy. Within the group we accepted each other with our individual oddities.
Once the Head Master, retired army officer, came to our class and was pleased that we were learning so much about history. He told us a story about how great the Roman army was because it brought law and order to Britain. We could not believe our ears. We sat frozen in silence. He must have thought we were enthralled, because he went on for hours about Roman accomplishments. And at the end he said, "Boys, you are doing so well that you will soon be out of here and into the regular forms."
That was it. We had an emergency meeting down at the end of the playing field.
"We have to go underground," said Cassidy, the Irish boy, "just like the IRA."
"No, no!" said Plug. "They're just a bunch of murderers." We all looked at each other in desperation.
"Why don't we just act more like ourselves?" suggested crazy Herman.
That was it! We all turned to look with new admiration at Herman. He saved the tribe that day with his brilliant idea. Later we lost him. This happened when the woodworking teacher, who bullied everyone, hit him about the head in a rage and Herman lashed back. Other teachers came running in and dragged Herman off to the Head Master's room.
We did not see him again until the next morning when the whole school assembled in the hall for the daily singing of school songs, hymns, and Roman anthems. The song we liked best was Blake's "And Did His Feet in Ancient Times." Most of the words were tribal until the God part. After hymns there would be announcements and then punishments, which could mean anything from having your name read out loud to being called up in front of the whole school. This day two teachers marched Herman into assembly. Between them a stool was set up on the stage. Herman faced the school while the charges were read out. We were in the front row. He looked at us. I remember the pain and anguish in his terrified eyes. Then an amazing thing happened. Seeing us, his heart-brothers, he winked.
It was the bravery of a true Celtic warrior that winked. After that they dragged him over to the stool, took down his trousers, and gave him twelve cuts of the cane -- one for each Fucking Apostle. Toward the end he sobbed uncontrollably. We flinched at each stroke. We never saw Herman again after the caning but we heard they sent him to a school for boys on a training ship. We imagined him chained to the oars in a Roman galley. But we had learned our lesson. Never hit a Roman on his turf and never let them know what is going on.
Form One-X graduated to Form Two-X, and the tales told by Mr. Jones of the historical figures Nelson, Wellington, and Drake subdued the Celtic wildness. The sun of the British Empire rose in my mind. There were Churchill's stories of his adventures in the Boer War. And here he was, still alive, nonchalantly smoking his cigar in the face of the hysterical and demonic Hitler. I was ready to fight on the beaches as we changed from wild Celts to the Thin Red Line. Paul in his wheelchair became the artillery. We patrolled with wooden rifles, our bare bayonets glinting before the enemy-the nose-picking, stupid, dirty, Nazi horde. It was just us, defending all that was good, all that was English, all that was fair play, all that was clean. As we marched along we would sing:
Goebels he only had one ball
Goering had two but very small
Himmler had something similar
But poor old Hitler had no balls at all!
For Christmas of 1944 my mother took us to London on Boxing Day to see the stage show Peter Pan and afterwards, as a special treat, we went to a Chinese restaurant. I clearly remember walking into the entrance of the restaurant with its unfamiliar smells and sounds and looking up at a large golden statue of the Buddha, who looked back at me smiling. There was something quite shocking about that encounter, and while eating I kept looking around to see if he was watching me.
A plague of measles and pneumonia struck many of the children at our school. From my bedroom window I looked across the street to the bedroom of Alice Green with whom I was distantly in love. She contracted pneumonia and within a week had died. The curtains were drawn and I visualized her lying waxen-like upon her deathbed. I too became ill with both measles and pneumonia. I heard the doctor talking to my mother in the hallway and he said, "If his breathing becomes labored, call me right away." I think they were expecting me to die. The curtains of my room were open and I remember looking into the sky at the sunrise and being somewhat delirious with fever. I imagined the golden Chinese Buddha appearing in the sky and coming down toward me and entering my heart. The fever broke and gradually I recovered. From then on I was always attracted to images of the Buddha.
Toward the end of the war I hardly ever went to school, but I read constantly. Even now I can hear my mother saying, "John, get your nose out of that book." I thought that escape was possible within books. Perhaps I could be like Allen Quartermain with my Lee-Enfield rifle, strolling unafraid through the snakeinfested jungles where even the natives were afraid to go. Or perhaps like one of the endless array of Victorian writers who trekked, hiked, climbed, or hacked their way through impenetrable wilderness, bringing afternoon tea, cricket, morals, manners, arid stiff upper lips to unenlightened barbarous tribes. Or a white-skinned, blonde Tarzan, with only a knife, knowing more than even the black natives. Taking tea would never be a problem because he was an English lord. In turn I reveled in becoming Hornblower, Alfred, Mallory, Scott of the Antarctic, Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood, and Ulysses. Sometimes I was Hawkeye, with my rifle and my two trusted Indian servants, in the American wilderness.
My stealing stopped. I took a test at school in the last part of my second year. The masters were astounded by the results. I was Mr. Jones's success story. I was put into Form Three-B. Being English instead of a Celt had paid off. Relentlessly I set to work. I read all the required books by the end of the year. I was top in exams of Form Three-B. In my last year I was put into Form Four-A and never saw the boys in Form One-X again. I watched Lawrence Olivier in the film Henry V with the fullness of pride that I was English. A great Union Jack hung on one wall in my room. The cross of St. George the Dragon Slayer hung on the other. I carried it to London for the Victory Over Europe parade. Vera Lynn sang "We'll Meet Again."
At fourteen I left school, worked for a while at the K. B. Radio factory in Foots Cray, and then became a commie waiter at the Savoy Hotel. At fifteen I was a bar boy at the University Club in London and saw Churchill puffing on his signature cigar. I signed papers to join the Royal Navy but was rejected because of my color blindness. Somewhat disappointed, I applied to the Merchant Navy and the P & 0 Line, which would train me to be a steward.
By coincidence my mother wrote me at this time, offering to pay my way to the United States and also that of my older stepsister, Mickey. Some years earlier my mother had married an American sailor and had left for America with my two younger sisters. My father, at the age of sixty-four, ran away with a twenty- two-year-old woman to a cottage by the sea. I, alone as usual, filled out the emigration forms at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and decided that whichever papers came through first would decide whether I entered the Merchant Navy or journeyed to America.
The American papers came first, by post. We were to sail aboard the USS America from Southampton the first week of March, 1950. Our old house in Sidcup was sold and in the back garden I built a bonfire with a wooden toy ship on top. I lined up the lead soldiers of the Coldstream Guard's Band, formally saluted them, and lit the fire. The blue baby, the Indian woman, the mental retard, Form One-X, my father, the Celts, and the war all went up in flames. I left the ashes. From the tourist deck of the USS America, I took the acceptance papers from the Merchant Navy's P & O Training School and dropped them into the expanding gap between ship and dock. They fluttered into the oily waters. Within a week I would be sixteen, English, and in America.