THREETo understand the cultural divide between my background and my life with Rinpoche, it might be helpful to know something about my childhood and upbringing.
I was born Diana Judith Pybus at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London, England, on October 8, 1953, at midnight on the new moon. My great-great grandfather was the first British ambassador to Ceylon and a member of the Council of Madras. When he returned to England, the king honored him by adding an elephant to the family coat of arms, which is also part of the Pybus seal on the family signet ring.
David Humphrey Pybus, my father, grew up in a large country house in the village of Hexham in Northumberland in the north of England. The house was close to Hadrian's Wall and in fact was made out of stones from the wall, so it had enormously thick walls. Denton Hall, as it was called, is one of the famous haunted houses in England.
Denton Hall, Northumberland
During the reign of Elizabeth I, when many Protestants were being persecuted, a young woman who lived nearby was murdered by Catholics, and she became the ghost of Denton Hall. My father's family called her "Silky," because of the silky white dress she wore as an apparition. Silky was a very active ghost, somewhat of a poltergeist. According to some stories, she was looking for a treasure that was buried somewhere in Denton Hall. Although she usually inhabited the family home, she was also seen in the coal mines in Newcastle that were owned by the Pybus family. The miners used to say that Silky appeared when there was about to be a fall in the mine.
My father had a speech impediment, which he thought was due to his terror of Silky as a young child. The youngest of three boys, he was often sent to bed before his brothers John and Michael. When he was alone in the bedroom, the curtains would begin to move, and he would hear strange moans and groans. Sometimes his dresser would move of its own accord.
Visitors to Denton Hall often reported encounters with Silky. Once when a woman and her son were staying with my father's family, the boy came down to breakfast and asked, "Oh, Mummy, who was that nice lady in the pointed hat who covered me up last night?" Most of the Pybus family saw this ghost on a fairly regular basis, so they realized that the little boy was talking about Silky, but they laughed it off, pretending that he was only dreaming. Another time, when a Catholic bishop came to stay in the house, Silky tore his covers off the bed during the night and terrified him by rattling things and moving them around in his room. Remember, she was a Protestant ghost. The bishop left the house early the next morning. Eventually, after many incidents, the family arranged for an exorcism, which was apparently successful, as Silky disappeared from Denton Hall. They say, however, that she still appears in the church in the little village of Hexham.
Following the completion of his public school education at English boarding schools, which he described as a miserable experience, my father attended Cambridge, where he took a degree in law. For generations, the Pybus men have been barristers and judges, so my father followed in the family tradition, even though his speech impediment did not make him an ideal candidate for the legal profession. After graduating, he enlisted in the British army and became the commander of a squadron that was part of the Normandy invasion in World War II. My father had terrible memories of the war. When 1 was a young girl, he told me how he and his squad had run over a German soldier with their tank. This memory haunted him. He would say, "I wish we hadn't done it. We could have gone around him. What happened to his family? Did he have children? This was a human being." Shortly after the invasion, he was seriously wounded by a sniper in France, the bullet passing an eighth of an inch from his optic nerve. Father was evacuated to England where he had a long convalescence.
My mother, Elizabeth Cornelia Smith, was born in 1910 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Her mother was a baroness from Dutch nobility, while her father was an English businessman. When my grandmother decided to marry an Englishman, her family disowned her, for the Boers detested the English. My grandmother never spoke to her family again. (Estrangement seems a recurrent theme throughout our recent family history.)
My mother, Elizabeth, was the eleventh of thirteen children. Many of the older siblings had already left home before she was born. When she was five years old, her father contracted pneumonia and died, leaving a sizable estate to my grandmother. However, shortly after his death, the family discovered that he had cosigned on a large loan for a friend's business. The business went bankrupt, the friend defaulted on the loan, and the family lost everything.
My mother had a tough childhood in many ways. There was often not enough to eat; the children were lucky to have bread and milk for supper. Although my grandmother was a devout member of the Dutch Reform Church -- on the Sabbath, the curtains were drawn and everyone had to spend the day sitting quietly in the living room-after she became so poor, she stopped taking the children to church because she didn't have money for shoes for all of them. My mother was also physically abused by one of her older brothers, who used to tie her to the bed and beat her. She never said this, but I always wondered if she had been sexually abused as well.
When she turned sixteen, my mother moved out of the house and became a hairdresser. She had her own salon in Johannesburg within a year. At eighteen she got involved with an older man who owned diamond mines in Rhodesia. After a brief courtship, she married him and moved to Rhodesia, but she was never happy there. Her husband had grown children and didn't want any more, whereas my mother was ready to start a family. After a short time, he took up with her seamstress. When my mother found out about the affair, she briefly contemplated poisoning her husband or killing herself, but she decided to leave him instead. She had never been off the African continent but had always dreamed of traveling to London. So she told him she wanted to travel by steamship to England, and he agreed to send her. On the boat, she met my father, who was on a holiday, and fell in love with him (my father had been in Africa). When she reached London, she wrote to her husband asking for a divorce.
My parents married a few years before World War II. My mother was eight years older than my father, and their marriage was not well accepted by my father's family. The Pybuses were not at all pleased that my father was marrying a divorcee from South Africa.
During the war, my mother was on her own in London for several years. While my father was away at war, she made attempts to educate herself. To disguise her South African accent, she took elocution lessons. She wanted to be accepted as a member of the British upper classes. She also read voraciously to make up for her lack of formal education. It wasn't so much that she wanted to know more; rather, she wanted to be able to make good conversation with my father's English friends.
While my father was away, my mother also made her professional debut as an opera singer, and she had a short but successful career during the war. A talented mezzo-soprano, she had been taking voice lessons for several years, and during wartime there was a shortage of divas in London. She was given the lead in a number of operas, including Mimi in La Boheme and Violeta in La Traviata. She sang at Covent Garden; the premier opera house in London.
When my father returned to England to convalesce from his war injury, he and my mother moved to a small cottage in the south of England, where he' could recuperate. My mother wrote to the Pybus family asking them for financial support during this difficult period, but they sent no money. Instead, my grandmother sent down Some old discarded linens that had been used by the servants in Denton Hall. The towels were embroidered with the word "Tweeney," which stands for "Between Maid" (between upstairs and downstairs in rank). My mother never forgot this insult.
Some time later, she persuaded my father to move to South Africa, thinking that life would be better for them there. They bought a beautiful old farm on the east coast, which they named Willowstream Park. During their years in South Africa, my mother and father started their family. They lost the first child, a little girl named Carol, who died three days after she was born from a medical condition that would have been easily remedied in England. In 1950, when my mother became pregnant for the second time, she and my father returned to England for the birth of my older sister Tessa. When I was born in 1953, my parents moved back to England for good.
When I was four months old, we moved into a Queen Anne house in the village of Cobham in the county of Surrey in the south of England. The house was called Ham Manor and was situated in a walled garden on one acre of grounds just on the outskirts of the village.
I have heard that only psychotic people remember their infancies, but I remember a great deal about mine, and from my earliest memories I remember feeling disconnected from my mother. I can remember lying in my perambulator on the lawn at Ham Manor, screaming. I had some booties on, and I didn't like their color. I wanted to take them off but I couldn't sit up and I couldn't remove them myself. I must have been very small. I remember thinking about my mother, saying to myself, "She's in the house. She's not going to bother to come out and help me."
English babies spend a lot of time in their navy blue prams, which are made of coach metal and lacquered like an automobile. The baby's bed is large and sits quite high off the ground, with a luxuriously padded interior. There is a little seatback that you can set up in the bed, so that when the baby is awake, he or she can sit up and look around. I remember being wheeled by the nanny down to the village. I loved to daydream in my pram, and I can still remember the fantasy worlds I inhabited.
When I was about a year-and-a-half old, I remember standing in my bedroom, looking up at my dresses hanging in the wardrobe. They seemed tiny to me, and I thought, "Look at that. How ridiculously small they are! I don't know how I got myself into this situation. What on earth happened?" I thought it was quite amusing to be so small. My husband used to say that children before the age of five often have memories from past lives. When I look back on this incident, it seems that I was looking at my wardrobe through grown-up eyes from a previous life.
There was an apple orchard at Ham Manor, and in the middle of the orchard the children had a playhouse, which we called the Wendy House. There were terraced lawns in front of the house, and I was very good at riding my bicycle down the lawn and into the one and only tree on the front lawn, a huge spreading oak.
As you entered Ham Manor, there was a large drawing room on the left and a library on the right. My parents were avid antique collectors, so the house was furnished with a lot of dark wood and Chippendale antiques. If you continued past the front hallway, you entered the formal dining room, behind which were the kitchen, pantries, and the laundry rooms. There was nothing remarkable about the second floor, where my parents had their bedrooms. But on the top floor there was a central room completely encased in glass. It had been built as a wig room. When you powdered your wig, the powder would adhere to the glass. The children had their nursery on the top floor, and my father's study was there. The nanny's quarters were also on the top floor, next to the nursery.
In our family the nanny was the chief caregiver. She took care of my sister and me twenty-four hours a day, and that was her only responsibility. The nanny always wore a uniform, a pale blue or green dress that buttoned down the front and looked like a nurse's uniform. Over the dress she wore an apron and a starched white collar.
When I was three years old, we had a rather elderly woman as our nanny for a brief period of time. She was stocky and wore black stockings. I can remember riding my tricycle in the lane behind the house while she watched me. At some point, I escaped and took off down the lane. She came running after me, yelling at me to stop. I got as far as a new housing development in the village, where there was a circular traffic island. I rode around and around the island, while she chased me in her uniform and black stockings.
Our next nanny stayed with the family, on and off, for a number of years. Frieda Kopfli, a young Swiss woman, was very kind to us, and my sister and I loved her, although she was a bit eccentric. She used to play the violin for us while we were going to the bathroom. It was an unusual toilet training technique. Once, she came into the nursery and started pulling all the jigsaw puzzles off the shelves, throwing the pieces in the air; dancing and singing and mixing all the puzzle pieces up. Finally, my father came in and stopped her. She was sent back to Switzerland for six months to recover from her nervous breakdown, after which she returned to us.
Frieda left the family when my sister was eight and I was five. My mother felt that we no longer needed a nanny when I was sent to a nearby private day school to attend kindergarten. After Frieda's departure, the live-in housekeeper looked after us when Mother was busy. Mrs. Wills, the housekeeper, was also the cook. Although she was quite a good cook, she herself seemed to survive on large tins of English biscuits, and she drank voluminous quantities of very sweet tea. She must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. Once or twice a year there would be a big drama when Mrs. Wills fell down in the lane behind the house. She was unable to get up by herself, so the men would have to be summoned from the garden to help Mrs. Wills up. She would then retire to bed for several days to nurse her bruises.
Mrs. Wills was a temperamental cook. If she was in a good mood, she would allow us to come into the kitchen and even help her with the baking, but at other times, she would scream at us, "You get out of my kitchen!" We ate breakfast every morning in the dining room, and we always knew what to expect for breakfast because Mrs. Wills had a weekly menu that never varied. Mondays would be tomatoes on toast, Tuesdays would be egg and bacon, Thursdays we had kidneys on toast, and Fridays we had cereal. I loved her puddings and the mince pies that she made at Christmas.
Once when Mother was giving a dinner party, she and Mrs. Wills prepared a special apple meringue pudding, which was put into the oven to bake just as the guests were arriving. While everyone was sitting at the table having their main course, my mother heard a crash coming from the kitchen. Excusing herself, she disappeared into the kitchen, closing the door behind her, only to find that Mrs. Wills had dropped the pudding on the floor as it came out of the oven. They conferred and my mother returned to the table. A little while later, apple meringue was brought to the table in dessert glasses. When one of the guests complimented my mother on the dessert and asked her how it was made, she replied, "You take an apple meringue, you bake it in the oven, you drop it on the floor, and finally you put it in glasses." Everyone found this amusing, not suspecting that she was telling the truth.
When we moved down to London when I was seven, Mrs. Wills came along and stayed with the family until shortly after my father's death when I was thirteen. When my mother discovered that Mrs. Wills had a heart condition, she let her go, telling us that it would be really unfortunate if Mrs. Wills were to have a heart attack during a dinner party. Mrs. Wills retired to a trailer park in, the south of England. I felt terrible that this was how her loyalty to the family' was rewarded.
Since my mother had been an opera singer, she had great hopes that her children would be musical. I was completely tone deaf and hated my piano lessons, which were forced on me at the age of four. However, when I was four, I was also allowed to start riding lessons, which I adored. My mother dropped me off at my first lesson at a stable near Ham Manor. She couldn't believe how excited I was. I can remember her saying, "Diana, I don't understand why you want to ride. You'll be out in the weather all the time and it will ruin your complexion."
At my first lesson, I was given a little white pony to ride. When it was over, I hung around the stall where my pony was stabled while I waited for Mother to pick me up. I was wearing a brand new outfit that Mother had bought me for my riding lessons. I took off my new velvet hard hat and filled it with water from a nearby trough. Then I invited the pony to drink out of my hat. After he finished his drink, he nibbled some of the buttons off my new blue sweater and chewed on the sweater as well. By the time my mother arrived, my clothes were pretty well ruined. When we got home, I was sent to my bedroom for the rest of the day as punishment. However, this didn't faze me at all. Horses were to become a lifelong passion.
My father had been working as a barrister, and he had prosecuted some rather important murder trials. But because he had such a terrible stutter, he became embarrassed about having to present arguments in court. When I was four, he went to work for a pharmaceutical company in London, about an hour from our home. By the time I was seven, my mother was bored with country life and wanted to move into the city. My father was glad to move into London; he was overtired from the commute and his long hours of work. I, on the other hand, had never known any other home, and I was sad to leave Ham Manor.
I had chronic bronchitis during my childhood, so when my parents made the decision to move into the city, it was decided that while they were getting the household set up in London, I would go for several months to South Africa to stay with my aunt Carol. My parents thought that the sunshine would do me good. I was sent by myself on the plane, and it was a really long trip. We stopped in Rome and in Nairobi on the way down.
Aunt Carol had a little bungalow outside of Johannesburg. There was a peach orchard in the back of her house, and she had several little dogs, with which I played during the day. I have fond memories of those months. Later, when I was thirteen, I returned to South Africa and at that time realized the extent of the racial prejudice. As a young child, however, I didn't take notice of it. My aunt was nurturing and caring in a way that I wish my mother had been. Tessa came down for the last month that I was there, and at the end of the summer we flew back to London together. I never saw Aunt Carol again. When I was nine, she developed lung cancer. My mother went back to South Africa and cared for her for six months until she died.
When Tessa and I returned to London, my parents had moved us into a large flat in the city. I found London claustrophobic. To my mind, it couldn't match life in the country. Our flat was located in Thorney Court, a Victorian block of apartments overlooking Kensington Gardens. The rooms were quite large, with high ceilings and tall windows, many of them facing the gardens, including those in my bedroom. The central hallway in the apartment was large enough to hold a grand piano and several wingback chairs.
My relationship with Mother deteriorated significantly at Thorney Court. I didn't feel that I could share anything with her because I found her so critical. She was never what I would call understanding or accepting of any pain or discomfort that I experienced, so I kept those things to myself. Occasionally, I would talk about my feelings with my father, with whom I shared more closeness and warmth. But he wasn't around much, so most of what I felt had to be buried.
After we had moved up to London, my parents purchased a small sixteenth-century thatched cottage in Cambridgeshire. We used the cottage during the school holidays, especially the summers. It was near Newmarket in the small village of Snail well. It was quite primitive, with no electricity or central heating. It was set in the middle of a field. We would park in the field, where there often would be Jersey cows grazing, and walk from there through a gate that led into a small garden in front of the cottage. I loved being there in the countryside. I was able to go riding, as there was a stable nearby. My sister and I had a tree house at the cottage, and We had a fort in a hollow tree.
I have wonderful childhood memories of times spent at the cottage. My sister and I had more freedom when we were there. We used to ride our bicycles down to a nearby stream to go fishing. Once some gypsies came in a horse-drawn, brightly painted caravan and camped there, and I remember spying on them. Because we were children of the British upper class, in London we were not allowed to play with what my parents called "common" children. However, when we were at the cottage, the parents relaxed this rule. I used to go up to the nearby farm to see the Jersey calves and to play with several children who lived there.
One summer, my sister and I started the Red Riders Club. We invited our local friends to join, and we held our meetings in an empty house in the neighborhood. We broke into a house that was for sale, and we met in the attic. Initiations into the club were held there. To become a member, you had to sign your name in blood. At a certain point, one of the girls, Jenny, the farm manager's daughter, told on us. We all got into trouble for breaking into this house. I was furious at Jenny, and I decided to get back at her. There are natural deposits of chalk in that area, and I got hold of a piece. When Jenny and her family were away on holiday, I chalked a message onto the front door of their cottage. I wrote, "Jenny is a pig and we all hate her." When the family came home, they found the message, and it turned out I'd pressed so hard into the wood that I'd actually carved those words into the door. Understandably, my parents were furious.
From that time on, Tessa and I were not allowed to play with any of, the children there. It seemed that my parents blamed the incident on the fact that we had been playing with the local village children, who were a bad influence, according to my parents. They were in fact quite prejudiced. As a young child, I had a music teacher who came to the house each week. Once, she brought another piano student with her, a young black boy. I liked him, and we got along very well. However, when I told my mother I wanted to invite him over to play, she told me that I wasn't allowed to see colored children. When I asked her why, she said, "If you play with colored children, you get familiar with them, and when you grow up you might end up marrying one." Intermarriage, apparently, would be a great tragedy. (In my mother's view, Rinpoche was a black man, so her fears did come to fruition.)
Just before my ninth birthday, my parents made plans to send Tessa to boarding school at Benenden School. The thought of being at home without her was frightening. My mother criticized and belittled me, and my father worked long hours and was rarely at home. I got the idea that I would like to go away to school as well. I remember the day this thought crystallized in my head. I had been out playing tennis with a friend. When I returned, my mother was in the lobby of Thorney. Court, and we got in the elevator together to go up to the apartment. Ali of a sudden she started slapping me on one side of the head and the other. She was angry because I had a spot on my shirt. I remember thinking, "I've got to get out of here. I can't be left alone with Mother."
That night I asked my parents if I could go to boarding school too. I presented it as a positive idea, and although they were a little taken aback and worried because I was so young, they agreed. It was not that unusual for English children my age to go off to school. Before I left for school that autumn, Mrs. Wills taught me how to make a bed with perfect hospital corners, a skill that she knew I would need in the school environment.
I was too young to attend Benenden with Tessa, so I was sent to Ports down Lodge, in Bexhill-on-Sea, in Sussex. It was an old, very long brick building that looked more like a hospital than a school. The educational system they followed there could only be described as archaic. We learned to write with quill pens, which we dipped in the inkwells on our desks. Once we mastered writing with a quill, we were allowed to use a metal rub that we also dipped into the inkwell. Finally, we were given fountain pens to write with. For our uniforms, we wore navy blue tunics with white shirts and dark ties.
The children were put to bed at six o'clock in the evening, even in the summertime. There was no talking after lights out, and if you cried in your bed at night, you were punished. You had to spend the next day in silence, no one was allowed to speak to you; and you were not allowed any dessert. That was the punishment for the first offence. I was terrified to talk, and I would lay awake in bed for hours.
After a few weeks in this repressive situation, I became spaced out and disoriented. I can remember feeling terrible about myself The staff had my hearing tested because I was so unresponsive; they thought maybe I was partially deaf. Although life at boarding school was stark and lonely; I honestly wouldn't say that it was worse than my life at home. Leaving home and. going to boarding school was perhaps exchanging one prison for the next, but I preferred being in an emotionally noncommittal situation. In many respects, it was better to be free of the feeling of intimate personal attack from my mother.
At the same time, I missed my home .and family terribly. One day, I saw my parents' car parked outside the school, and I was so excited, thinking that they were there for a visit. I waited expectantly, but they left without coming to see me. That was devastating. When I asked my father about it afterward, he said that they had a meeting with the headmistress, who was concerned about me because I was so remote and withdrawn. They were trying to figure out what to do. He thought it wouldn't be good for me to see them because it wasn't a visiting day.
Ports down Lodge closed after my first term there. I think they had financial problems. I transferred to Sibton Park in the village of Lyminge, in Kent. It was also a repressive environment, but after I adjusted to it, I liked it better because of the facilities and some of the activities they provided. I was especially excited about the opportunities for riding at the school. There was a large stable, and they also had tennis courts and swimming pools.
Sibton Park was a large, sprawling Georgian building, with a beautiful facade onto the road. The students there, particularly the older girls, were especially cruel to new girls, in the best tradition of English prep schools. When I arrived at Sibton Park, one of my most precious possessions was a black doll with long hair, which I called my golliwog. At that time, golliwogs were very popular dolls in England; there were many children's stories written about them. Later, they largely disappeared because of the racist implications. For me, my golliwog was a precious possession, for which I felt great affection. Tessa had made the doll, and I always took it to bed with me. My first night at Sibton Park, the older girls ripped the golliwog out of my hands and shaved his hair off.
There were other incidents, some relatively harmless (such as tearing the covers off my bed just before our rooms were inspected), some sadistic. We bathed in cubicles lined up one next to the other. While I was in the tub, the girls would throw dead birds and insects over the top of the wall into my bathwater. During my first term, many early mornings around five A.M. a particularly nasty group of girls would gather at my bedside. One of them would grab me by the hair and yank me out of bed so that they could pour a pitcher of ice water over my head.
When I went home for the first school holidays, I tried to talk with my mother about what was happening at school. She laughed and treated it as a joke. She said to me, "Oh Darling, don't worry. If they aren't nice to you, just kill them." I took her advice quite literally. When I got back to school, I was determined not to let the girls tease me anymore. There was one especially nasty girl who abused me verbally. She was twelve, one of the oldest girls in our dorm, and she was the prefect, the girl in charge in our dormitory. She went out of her way to be mean to me, constantly teasing and making fun of me.
One night when she started in on me, I got out of bed and grabbed her hair with one hand while I punched her time after time. She started screaming, but I kept hitting her over and over again, on her body and her head. Finally, the girls ran to get the school matron, who burst into the room shouting at me to stop. I told her that I wouldn't. I said, "Oh no, I'm not stopping. My mother told me to kill her, and she's not dead yet." At that point, several of the staff pulled me off her and dragged me downstairs, where I was held until my mother came and picked me up. I was suspended for two weeks. When I went back to school, however, nobody gave me any more trouble.
The approach to many things at Sibton Park was old-fashioned. When I came down with chicken pox, I was put into isolation in a sick room and wasn't allowed to eat anything for twenty-four hours. I remember being so hungry. They felt it was bad to feed you very much if you had chicken pox. I was kept in isolation for two weeks with another girl who also had chicken pox. Her name was Sonam, and she and her sister Dechen both attended Sibton Park. She was a Bhutanese princess, the sister of Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who is now the king of Bhutan. She told me magical stories about Bhutan and its crystal mountains. She talked a lot about her brother, how tireless he was and how he could ride for days on end. I found her stories exciting. She also told me that she could do black magic, so if I didn't give her all my candy, she would do black magic on me. I believed her and gave her my whole stash of candy. I believe this was the first time I heard anything about Bhutan, a country closely connected with Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.
At Sibton Park, the stables were across the courtyard from our classrooms. When classes were done for the day, I would go and help in the stables, and I could ride the horses there. After I'd been at the school for a while, my parents told me that if my marks were really good, they would get me my own horse. My father, being a lawyer, drew up a detailed document in Latin promising me an equus callibus unum, which means "one horse" in Latin, ifI got a certain number of high marks during the term. This was a great motivator. I decided that I was definitely going to obtain my pony, whatever it took, so I got the equivalent of all A's in school that term.
My mother took me to a dealer's yard, where there were a number of ponies of different sizes and colors all running around in a field. Not knowing anything about horses at all, my mother picked one based on its color. She picked out a Welsh bay pony, with four white stockings and a blaze. Appropriately enough, it was named Blaze. We arranged for the( horse to be delivered to the school. When he arrived, it quickly became apparent that he had never been ridden and was totally untrained. After he was turned out into the field, nobody could catch him for several weeks. Eventually we did catch him, however, and he proved rather easy to train. It was the fulfillment of my dreams to have my own horse. In the spring and early summer, after school, I would ride Blaze through the woods and across the fields.
In the spring of 1966, when I was twelve, I took the common entrance examination so that I could attend Benenden School in the fall. Benenden was -- and I think still is -- one of the top private schools in England. When I was there, Princess Anne, who was three years older than me, was a student there. The sister of King Hussein of Jordan and his daughter also attended Benenden, as did the Princess of Malaysia and Hailie Selassie's grandchildren, Princesses Mary and Saheen. The school was housed in an old building with beautiful grounds near the village of Benenden, in Kent. You had to perform quite well academically to be admitted, so I was very happy that I passed the entrance examination and was admitted to go there. I looked forward to joining Tessa, who was three years ahead of me.
When I came home for the summer holidays in 1966, it was apparent that the relationship between my mother and father had grown quite difficult. My father looked stressed, and he had aged considerably in a short period of time. Because his mother had treated Mother so badly, he was forbidden by Mother to see Grandmother or take us to see her. Secretively, my father would go with my sister and me to visit Grandmother, He told us that we absolutely mustn't tell Mother about this; she had threatened to divorce him if he defied her. Father told me that he actually wished he could divorce my mother, but that he wasn't going to do that because of how it would affect his children. There was a terrible stigma attached to divorce. It was not as it is in this day and age. He felt that if he were to divorce my mother, we would become known as the children of divorce and become less socially acceptable.
The family took a holiday that summer in Portugal. We stayed at a villa about fifty miles from Lisbon, up in the mountains above the beach. Our house was on a road opposite a convent for a silent order of nuns. One day when my sister and I were sitting in the villa garden, a. man came by driving a herd of turkeys with a stick. We felt sorry for the turkeys, so we went out and bought two of them, which we kept in the garden for the rest of the summer. They made unbelievably loud screeching noises. It must have been very unpleasant for the nuns.
We were there with my mother for about two months, during which Father came out for a three-week visit. When he was there it was even more evident that my parents were having a great deal of difficulty. He cut his stay short, in fact, and went back to England to stay by himself and work.
When I think back on it, I realize that my mother had tremendous anxieties and insecurities that arose from trying to secure her position in English society. It was quite a stigma for her to have come from South Africa. In fact, she didn't tell anybody that she had grown up there. She was always struggling with her past. She really was not who she presented herself to be, because she felt that she wouldn't be accepted for who she was. As a result, she had an extremely strong desire to mold us into perfect, British upper-class children, her perfect products.
I realize now why she was incapable of having good communication with her children. Her overriding need for us to succeed where she could not prevented her from seeing who we were or what we needed. She had no ability to connect with our emotional life at all. The heavy burden from her past produced many of her emotional problems and made her dysfunctional as a parent.
I don't seem to have a single memory from childhood of feeling nurtured by my mother. In fact, it's difficult for me to think of even one time that my mother and I spoke openly and honestly to one another. I was always afraid of her, and I was afraid .of exposing myself to her. If I let down my guard and allowed her to see my vulnerability, she was extremely critical and would tell me who I should be, what I should be, and why everything else was bad. I was never able to break through that. When she died, I realized, standing over her deathbed, that I had never in my entire life communicated with this woman, my mother, even once. That was both poignant and painful.
In 1966, after we came back from Portugal, I was lying in bed one morning in London when I had a very strong flash that one of my parents was going to die. Throughout my life, I've had these premonitions, usually in dreams, but this was not a dream. I lay there for a while looking at the sun coming through the curtains, thinking, "I hope it's my mother." When I caught myself having that thought, I felt tremendously guilty. Obviously, it was a very unpleasant thought. I tried to put it out of my mind.
My father was having a professional as well as a personal crisis at that time. He had started his own company a few years earlier, a company that was producing a new type of children's vitamin. He had used almost all his savings in the start-up. The product went on the market at almost exactly the same time that the problems with thalidomide came out, and this gravely affected sales because customers were afraid to try anything new and untested on the market. The company failed, and he lost everything he had invested. He was under tremendous financial strain. To keep my sister and me in private school, my father and my mother realized that they had to buy a smaller flat. While we were at school that fall, they moved into a modest flat in the Kensington area of London.
It was on that note that I started at Benenden School in September 1966. When you were accepted at Benenden, you received a long list of clothes that you had to purchase. There was a special department store in London where you went to get the things for your uniform. You had to have long-sleeved viyella -shirts, and the younger children wore navy blue tunics with a tie. After the first two years, you didn't wear a tunic anymore. You had a navy blue pleated skirt. I was assigned to Guldeford House, and Guldeford wore orange ties. There were six houses, and each house had its own color.
For outings, we had to have navy blue straw boaters, hats with brims that stood straight out. Men used to wear them in the 1930s. You had a band around your boater that was also the color of your house. Just by looking at a girl's tie or her hat, you could always tell what house she was from. The younger children wore navy blue overcoats. When you were a bit older, you wore a long woolen cloak. We also had regulation shoes. There were four or five styles that you were allowed to choose from. We wore navy blue stockings with our uniforms. In the afternoon, we could change into a velveteen dress. The dresses were exactly the same for all the girls, but you had a few colors to choose from.
When you got into the sixth form, which Tessa was in, you were finally allowed to change into your own clothes in the afternoon. I remember that Princess Anne had quite unfashionable clothes. I believe that she was only allowed to wear clothes made by the tailor for the Royal family. She wasn't allowed to wear the sort of hip clothes that other girls had.
Three houses at Benenden were located in the main building, and the other three were in freestanding buildings on the grounds. Guldeford was in the main building. Each house had its own dormitory and common rooms. You tended to identify with your house and socialize with girls from that house. I didn't have many friends in the other houses. There were about fifty children in each house, of all ages, and there was a housemistress for each house.
I did fairly well academically at Benenden, but in other respects I was a less than model student. The new girls were all expected to play lacrosse. We went to practice several afternoons each week, and in the evenings after practice, we would look at a bulletin board to see how well we'd done that day. Next to your name on the board were five empty squares. If you did very well at lacrosse practice, you would find that one square had been filled in with the color of your house. If you performed adequately, half of one square would be filled in. If you had done poorly, the square would be empty. After about two weeks, the girls who were quite good at lacrosse got five squares, and they were allowed to play in a house game. Girls who were unathletic might take three or four weeks to fill in their squares. I managed to go three months without getting my squares filled. Finally, they gave up and allowed me into a game. During the first game, I managed to do an over pass and hit the teacher on the head with a lacrosse stick. My school report card at the end of the term said, "Diana is a complete and thorough danger on the lacrosse field." Eventually I found my way into the position of goalie. I could wear a lot of padding and just sit in the goal and let the balls fly by.
Once again, at Benenden I found myself becoming disoriented and unhappy. In part I think this was due to continuing problems at home, but I can't blame it all on that. I came into this world feeling disconnected. At school, I didn't feel I was one of them. Fundamentally, I didn't know why I was there; as a result, I failed to engage with my world.
My sister was also at Benenden for the first three months I was there. She was a monitor, which is like a prefect. I had been looking forward to being at school with Tessa, but in fact we didn't get along well at school. I'm afraid that I was a bit of a pest and I think it embarrassed Tessa. She decided that after the Christmas holiday, she was going to transfer to Kirby Lodge, near Cambridge, to prepare for her A-levels.
When we came home for Christmas, there was still a lot of tension between my parents, although they put on a good face so that we could enjoy the holiday. On New Year's Eve, 1966, the family stayed up together to welcome in the New Year. Just past midnight, after we ,made toasts to the New Year, my father took me aside and said that he wanted to give me the family seal, the Pybus signet ring with the elephant on it. He said, "This is always handed down in our family, and I want you to have this." I was shocked. I said, "Why? I'm so young. Why now?" He simply said again, "I want you to have it." I felt terrible about this because it brought back my premonition that one of my parents was going to die. Suddenly, I felt that he was going to die -- quite soon. That night, Father slept on the couch in my bedroom. I asked him why he was sleeping in my room, and he said, "Life is precious. I don't have that many opportunities to be with you." There seemed to be a certain unspoken understanding between us that he was nearing the end of his life.
Two days later he left to take my sister to school. After dropping Tessa at Kirby Lodge, he was going to spend the night at our cottage. He told me that he wanted to get it ready to open up in the spring, so that I could come out and go riding. Perhaps he also wanted a night or two away from my mother. I remember hugging him good-bye. He was a heavy smoker, and I still remember the smoky smell of his cashmere overcoat as we embraced, the touch and the feel of it as we said goodbye. Later that evening, he called my mother and wanted to talk to me to wish me good night. I told Mother that I didn't want to talk to him. I couldn't bear to speak with him on the phone. Somehow I knew this would be the last time I would ever talk to him, and I just couldn't do it.
The following morning, I was in the flat with my mother, and she was having a fit because I had lost one of the rollers that she used to curl her hair. She was screaming and throwing the curlers at me one by one. The doorbell rang, and I went to answer it. It was the police, and I knew why they were there. They said to Mother and me, "You need to sit down. We have to talk to you." Immediately I said, "I know. My father's dead. How did it happen?" They told us that he had made a mistake when he turned on the gas, which we used for the stove in the house. Apparently, he had a fire going in the fireplace to heat the cottage. Gas from the tank leaked in the house and built up, and eventually the open flame in the fireplace ignited it, and the house caught on fire. My father apparently ran upstairs when the fire started to try to escape the flames, and he was overcome with smoke inhalation. By the time the fire engines got there, my father was dead. The cottage was completely destroyed.
In the days after his death, I felt a sense of unreality, as though there had been a mistake and he was going to show up again, just walk through the door at any moment. At the funeral, when I saw the coffin, I accepted that he was dead. Nobody talked to my sister or me, however, about how we felt.
After the funeral, we all stayed together in the flat for about a week, then Tessa and I were sent back to boarding school. My mother seemed overcome by her grief during this time. For my part, I was never able to express my feelings. I didn't cry much at all. There was the lingering feeling of unreality. From that time onward, the sense of being disconnected from my life became stronger.
A few months after Father's death, my mother moved into an ugly little house, which today we would say had terrible feng shui. It was off Exhibition Road in London, behind a block of large flats that overshadowed it. During the school holidays of 1967, the summer after my father died, my mother decided that it might do us all good to take a cruise to South Africa. We were on the boat for about ten days, traveling on the Union Castle Line on one of the magnificent English ships of that era. I remember drawing into Cape Town and seeing Table Mountain rising behind the city as we docked. As we were preparing to disembark, I noticed that there was an area cordoned off, where we were supposed to walk. As the captain was walking down the center of this gangway, a black porter was walking in the opposite direction. Suddenly the captain grabbed this fellow, kicked him, and said, "Don't you dare get in my way. Don't you dare walk so close to me." I was shocked. Initially, I thought this man was crazy. I thought he was just some horrible, aggressive, out-of-control person, but as the visit went on, I realized that this went on all the time in this country.
When I'd been in South Africa at the age of seven, I hadn't noticed the racial climate. I was now starting to see that many things in the adult world. were not as I had thought before. I think this is a fairly common part of growing up. At some point, you begin to question things that you took for granted as a child. Throughout this visit, I became acutely aware of the atrocities in the apartheid system in South Africa.
I also remember feeling psychologically dissociated from my world and depressed during our time there and thinking to myself, "Maybe I should just kill myself and get out of this misery." On the other hand, I was terrified of dying. I felt groundless.
After we toured around Cape Town, my mother wanted a few days by herself, so she sent my sister and me, along with a boy that Tessa had met, to Victoria Falls in Rhodesia -- by ourselves. In retrospect, this seems like an irresponsible thing for my mother to have done. I was only thirteen, my sister was sixteen, and Tessa's boyfriend Charles was seventeen. However, we thought it was a great idea at the time.
Shortly after we arrived at the hotel in Rhodesia, we learned there was a casino near the hotel, but you had to be twenty-one to get in. So my sister went to work with all sorts of eye shadow and other makeup. We did ourselves up and managed to get into the casino, where we spent all of our money. We had money set aside for the return trip, which we also gambled with. We put the money for the tickets home on number thirteen on the roulette table, and amazingly enough, thirteen came up. We were lucky; it could have been disastrous.
We met up with my mother in Johannesburg, and she took us on a tour of the area. We visited Willowstream Park, the farm where she and my father lived with my sister when she was an infant. My mother told us stories about being there with Father when he was recuperating from his war injury. When they first moved there, he had bandages over his eyes and was very ill. My godfather, Walter Westhead, a retired naval commander, lived with them during that period. He was a bit of an alcoholic. One time when the car broke down, he was so desperate to get his gin that he drove the tractor twenty miles to town.
My mother was completely pro-apartheid, but I knew, even at the age of thirteen, that this was absolutely wrong. I began to hear terrible stories about the racial situation there. For example, when the people in the neighboring farm went to town to purchase groceries, they brought along their black servant to help them with the packages, but they didn't want him in the car, because they said he smelled. They made him ride in the trunk. We heard lots of stories like that.
When we returned to Johannesburg, we visited my mother's relatives, who were very religious. We visited her mother, who was ninety-eight at the time. She had taken to bed at the age of eighty-five, having decided that she was dying. She had spent the last thirteen years in bed. She was moved from one daughter's house to the next. When we were there, she was staying with Aunt Sarah, one of my mother's oldest sisters. Sarah would call to have her groceries delivered, but she wouldn't let the black deliveryman into the house with them. She made him put the box of groceries outside the door because no black people were allowed in her house. Altogether, I felt that South Africa, an exquisitely beautiful country, was ruined for me by the terrible prejudice that was prevalent at that time.
At the end of the summer, my sister went back to Kirby Lodge, and I returned for my second year at Benenden. This is when I began to look into approaches to religion and spirituality beyond the Christian beliefs I had grown up with. I had always had questions about the nature of existence, even as a young child. Something felt out of sync to me, right from the beginning. When, as most children do, I questioned my parents about why things are the way they are in the world, I didn't believe the religious explanations they gave me. When I was about six, I asked my mother, "Why am I me?" I had thought about this for a while. She said to me, "You're you because God made you you." Even at that age, I thought, "This doesn't work for me. I must have a little bit more responsibility in this than that!"
I could never connect with the Christianity with which I grew up. I found it impossible to believe in an unseen, God. God was supposed to make all the decisions and know what people were thinking and feeling and help people through their hardships. To me it seemed like a fairy story. It never made sense to me.
We went to church, in the Church of England, every Sunday when I was growing up. A few years before my father died, he had a crisis of faith, and my parents started going to Billy Graham rallies and got rather fanatical about religion for a short time. This lasted for less than a year. In the last few years of his life, my father got interested in Eastern religion, and specifically in Tibetan Buddhism, but I only discovered that after his death.
Throughout the school year at Benenden, I read books on comparative and Eastern religion. The first Buddhist book I picked up was one by Christmas Humphries. When I read something like "The goal is to have no ego" or "You have no ego; you don't really exist" -- or something along those lines -- I put the book down and I thought, "I'm not going to read about Buddhism any more." I went back to reading about other religions. However, I came back to the books on Buddhism because they made the most sense to me, in spite of my fears. I connected with the emphasis on taking personal responsibility for your own state of mind. Beyond that, I was drawn to the Buddhist teachings because they talk about a path, a real means, to work with yourself and your state of mind. This felt more real and grounded than anything else I had encountered.
As I mentioned earlier, in the summer of 1968, when I was almost fifteen, we traveled to Malta. That summer I became convinced that Mother was trying to poison me. It was a ridiculous idea, but I couldn't get it out of my mind. When I did something she didn't like, she would yell, "I could kill you!" I took her at her word and I absolutely refused to eat anything she cooked. I spent my summer holiday being paranoid about Mother and reading books about Buddhism. It was just four months later that I first saw Rinpoche at the Buddhist Society. My life was about to change in ways I could never have anticipated.