Just as my father was qualifying, about two or three months before he took his finals, his father died, followed three days later by his mother, both of influenza. So my father had to take over the practice before he really had any practical experience at all. His father had left him a pile of debts and his younger brother, John, was just starting to study medicine at Bart’s and was living off an allowance paid for by the family. On his deathbed, my grandfather made my father promise to look after John. So he quickly settled down, got married and took on the practice.
My father was a conscientious man and worked terrifically hard. In those days there was no National Health Service and a general practitioner was on call round the clock and also did his own dispensing. The cellar at Rutland House was full of shelves and cupboards laden with all the various liquids and powders from which my father made up his prescriptions. Once they were ready he would place them on a table in the hall, ready for collection, alongside a slate with the names and addresses of the house calls he had to make.
Uncle John, meanwhile, continued to live off the family allowance while studying at St Bartholomew’s. After about four years he told my father he had failed his finals for the second time and needed to stay on for another year. My father contacted the medical school and was astonished to find Uncle John had in fact been sent down three years earlier. All that time he had been blowing his allowance in London. Not only that, he had become an alcoholic. Years later I remember as a teenager going to a dance at Ilkeston Town Hall and seeing him swaying in the middle of the floor with an inane grin on his face before he simply fell over. I can also remember finding heaps of empty booze bottles in a room at the end of Rutland House where my father kept a workbench.
My grandmother had apparently been an alcoholic too, so perhaps a family weakness was handed down. Whatever the case, something had to be done to stop Uncle John’s dissolute life in London, and the family took matters in hand. Uncle John was engaged at the time to a young lady called Molly. That was broken off and Reverend Butterton was persuaded to write a glowing reference to get him into the army. He was accepted by the Royal Medical Corps and my parents breathed a sign of relief.
I believe we all plan our lives before we incarnate. Each soul decides where it is going to – where it will live and the family it will be born into. So this was the family I had chosen. We are all eternal beings and we are here to learn certain lessons. The family we are born into will be part of that. Each person in the family has something to teach us. We all learn from each other. We may have made certain agreements with each other before incarnating, deciding to play certain roles in each other’s lives. It is all meticulously planned and nothing is overlooked and nothing is missed.
To me, reincarnation is the only thing that makes sense of the apparent unfairness of birth. Otherwise, how do you account for a child that’s born into poverty in Ethiopia and dies of AIDS at two or three? Or children born into violent circumstances rather than to millionaires to enjoy lives of luxury? If this life is a one-off, where is the fairness in that? One person may be born into a tribe in Africa where there’s no education or facilities and another may be born into a family which can send them to university – where is the fairness in that? But when you understand about reincarnation, you understand that we are all spiritual beings undergoing experiences that are right for us at this time in our development. A soul will always choose the environment that suits its particular needs in that particular incarnation. And through reincarnation we move upwards in terms of consciousness and understanding and environment and education. This world, in effect, was created as a schoolroom, a place for all of us to learn and grow until we progress to other worlds and spheres of activity.
Until our consciousness is high enough we are born into the level of our worth. Like attracts like. Once we are conscious enough, before we reincarnate we work out the country, the parents, the physical condition, the circumstances and the experiences of our Earth lives according to the lessons we wish to learn. We are of course helped and advised by others around us. There is always help on request.
I loved my parents and they were both loving people, but not demonstratively so. I can never remember either of them being really angry with me but it has to be said that there was hardly any emotion of any kind in the house. My father never sat me on his knee and I don’t remember either of them ever raising their voices. I think it was part of the times but it has left a lasting impression – to this day it upsets me to hear raised voices. Mother and Father always seemed very happy together: they both played golf and enjoyed bridge parties. One of my most comfortable childhood memories is of sitting on the stairs with my sister, listening to visitors downstairs playing bridge and having a few drinks.
My sister and I got on well, though we didn’t have a lot in common. She had her own friends and in general she would do her own thing and leave me to get on with mine.
Sometimes, though, she would take advantage of the fact that I was three years younger. To reach our bedrooms we had to cross a long dark corridor connecting the bathroom, which was in the old cottage, to the main house. Beryl would always dare me to go down the corridor on my own and switch the bathroom light on. ‘You’re frightened, aren’t you?’ she would taunt. I would always fall for it and race down the corridor, just to prove I wasn’t scared at all. It took a while before I realized that Beryl was just as frightened as I was.
She would also love to set me off giggling. Almost anything would make me dissolve into fits of giggles, often at the most inopportune moment. I just seemed to have an over-developed sense of the ridiculous. At Rutland House the doorbell rang all day long with people coming to pick up their prescriptions and Beryl and I would take turns to answer it. When it was my turn, she would stand behind a curtain in the hall and make a sniggering sound. That would be all too much and I would find it almost impossible to keep a straight face, even when the caller was telling me about some terrible illness.
Eventually my father gave us a warning about this, as it was hardly benefiting his patients. That very evening I answered the door. A man stood there.
‘Good evening,’ I said carefully.
‘Good evening,’ he replied. ‘Could I see the doctor, please?’
‘Who shall I say is calling?’
‘Mr Onions.’
That was it. I burst out laughing right in his face. Leaving him on the doorstep, I staggered into the drawing room and literally collapsed with laughter.
After a while, I managed to actually ask Beryl if she would tell our father there was someone at the door. Seeing the state I was in, she couldn’t resist telling me to go myself.
Trying hard to compose myself, I knocked on the surgery door.
‘Come in.’ My father had a patient with him. They both turned to look at me.
‘There’s… there’s a Mr…’ No, I couldn’t do it. I reeled out of the surgery, howling with laughter.
Beryl and I got the biggest ticking-off of our lives for that one. But it still didn’t cure me of giggling.
When I was four-and-a-half years old, my mother took me to a nearby terraced house, Chilwel House, in Lord Haddon Road. Its front room was actually a school.
I really only remember my first day there. When we walked in, accompanied by the teacher, we saw two wooden desks with benches attached. Seven or eight children were crawling underneath them on the floor. They paid no attention to us at all. Eventually the teacher managed to make a small speech welcoming me to the school, but I didn’t stay there long. I soon moved on to the Steiner school next door to Rutland House.
It was Steiner’s philosophy that children should be educated in a free and loving environment full of music, dancing and painting, and formal education should not be imposed on them until they were ten years old. It was my great fortune to enjoy all this for two-and-a-half years at Michael House School.
What we learned more than anything else was to care for other people and take responsibility for
our own actions. Strangely, discipline was not needed, as it seemed out of place to misbehave. There was a feeling of harmony which no one wanted to disrupt, and there was kindness and patience from the teachers which dissolved all aggression. It was a very memorable and colourful experience, and no doubt helped to nurture the seeds that would later flower into spiritual awareness.
‘You get back what you give out in thought, word and deed.’
It was also at Michael House that I appeared on stage for the first time. It was as a tree. I think it was an oak. A non-speaking role. The play was one of the school’s regular theatrical performances and I had to stand in the background with my arms outstretched. This soon became agony and I decided to support myself by surreptitiously holding on to the curtains behind me. This move brought the house down – or more literally the curtains – and that was the end of the show.
My mother, who was herself a keen amateur actress, was quite angry with me, not for bringing down the curtains but for spoiling my own performance. So I learned that it didn’t matter if you ruined the whole production as long as your own performance was good! A valuable lesson for the future, as it turned out.
CHAPTER 2
School and War
‘It is not possible to have an earthly existence freed from problems difficulties or troubles, because that is why you are born into your world.’
I was seven years old when the Second World War began. I remember clearly sitting in the drawing room at Rutland House with my family listening to the declaration of war with Germany. At the time I had no idea how it had started and whether it was morally right or wrong; I just knew how it affected us.
The main thing was that food was rationed and sweets were rare. I didn’t see a shop full of sweets on general sale until I was 14. Sometimes even now I get a sense of excitement when I see a shop window or a counter full of sweets and chocolates, and can hardly believe that I can actually buy as many as I want.
The two wrought-iron gates at the end of our drive were taken away as part of the war effort. I remember the feeling of sadness when they were taken down. They were never replaced.
Our garden was given over to flocks of ducks and hens. They wandered everywhere, including down the now gateless drive and onto the road. They didn’t have any proper nesting boxes, so one of my jobs was to hunt for the nests and collect the eggs.
All the windows of the house had to be covered with heavy curtains or blinds as part of the blackout precautions. At night everything was blacked out and you couldn’t show a light. We were also issued with gas masks, which we had to carry in cardboard boxes hung round our necks with string.
Everyone had to have an air-raid shelter or a safe room in the house. We didn’t have a shelter and our safe room was the kitchen. This was at the back of the house. It had just one window and had rooms on the other three sides, so it was fairly well protected. We put steel shutters over the window and whenever the air-raid warning went off we all went and sat there. Of course, if there had been a direct hit, you would have been a goner, no question. But it was warm and cosy sitting round the fire drinking Ovaltine and listening to the radio, and I never really felt threatened by the war. The only thing was, my sister told me that if you walked on the cracks on the pavement the Germans would come. I avoided the cracks.
Not long after the war began I was sent away to boarding school. After the relaxed atmosphere and creativity at Michael House, this was something of a shock.
At that time my cousin Harry was at Rydal School in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, and his sister Audrey was at Penrhos, a girls’ school in the same town. Because of this connection, and the fact that the area was fairly remote and free of bombing, my parents decided I should go to Rydal too and Beryl to Penrhos.
When I arrived the senior school buildings had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Food and the senior school had been evacuated to Oakwood Park in Conway. So there was just the junior school there at the time, at Beech House, a very big house set in a large garden.
I arrived there with my parents after dropping Beryl off at Penrhos the previous day. Beech House seemed an impressive place. An imposing front door opened into a hall as big as a ballroom. Its centrepiece was a striking oak staircase.
My parents took me in and Matron, a pleasant woman of indeterminate age, met us. She was in uniform, a simple blue dress with white starched cuffs and collar and a white apron. She took us up the staircase to a dormitory which had six unsprung iron beds in it. On one of them was a dark blue tartan rug that I recognized from home, and that was my bed for the next year.
Watching from the window as my parents got into the car and drove away, I felt rather lonely and frightened. But soon more boys arrived and I noticed that the new arrivals were all well looked after. We were each allocated a senior boy who was to look after us. Mine was called John Howarth. That first day he arrived back at the school with his father, Jack Howarth, a small round man who ran the repertory company in Colwyn Bay. He carried an ivory-topped cane, which I thought was very impressive.
He asked my name and where I came from. Where did I come from? After some thought, I said, ‘England.’
Jack thought that was very amusing and he reminded me of it 20 years later when I met him again, when he was playing Ken’s Uncle Albert in Coronation Street.
I was a little frightened at first. The bed was hard and it was strange to be living in a new place with so many people. But Matron, known as ‘Tronna’, was not unkind and she became the centre of our lives. We turned to her for everything during that first year. It was quite a wrench in the second year when another batch of new boys arrived and we had to start coping without her.
‘As you strive with others, so your own brightness increases.’
Some things were difficult to get used to, of course, most notably the cold baths. Every morning in the summer we would stand stark naked in a line in front of a bath filled with cold water and each of us in turn would jump in. Tronna, sitting in a chair by the bath, would not let us get out until we had completely submerged ourselves. She would then hand us a towel and we would run back over the cold linoleum to the dorm. If it was supposed to be character building, it didn’t work with me – to this day I cannot stand cold draughty houses and keep the central heating on all year round.
I found I could get along easily with the other boys and throughout junior school I even had a nickname. This came courtesy of Mr Lewis, the junior school headmaster, who remarked one evening, ‘Do you know that a roache is a fish? I think Roache should be called Fish, don’t you?’ Fortunately that was dropped when I moved on to the senior school.
Michael House had been an inspiring place, but the focus had not been on academic work and I found that I was way behind all the other boys in the basic subjects. I was also left-handed, which was regarded as an abnormality by our form teacher, Miss Corbett. She was a straightforward, no-nonsense, jolly-hockey-sticks type and whenever I wrote with my left hand she applied ‘remedial treatment’ by hitting me across the knuckles with a ruler. Reluctantly, I had to start writing with my right. Apart from appalling writing, this caused some interesting effects such as writing letters back to front. Nowadays it would probably be called a form of dyslexia. It became so bad that on being asked to write an essay on dogs, I wrote ‘god’ all the way through. Should have made interesting reading.
I also started to stammer a little, and in this I was in good company, as the stammer of King George VI is usually attributed to the attempts to make him right-handed. At this point the remedial treatment was stopped and I was allowed to carry on using my left hand. Soon afterwards the dyslexia and the stammering fell away.
Another problem, and rather an embarrassing one, was my persistent bedwetting. This had been going on for some time and got worse at Beech House, if anything. It was terribly shaming, because if the bed was wet, it would be stripped and the mattress put out to air where everyone could see it. Every morning I would lie there, afraid to move in
case I encountered a wet patch.
The only comfort was that I wasn’t alone in this. There were four of us and we were all put together in one dormitory. Fortunately, we were all good at sport and well liked, so were protected somewhat from the humiliation normally inflicted on bedwetters.
The school did its best to cure us of our problem. We weren’t allowed to drink after teatime and were woken in the night to go to the loo. When this didn’t work, Mr Lewis decided not to let us sleep on our backs, as he had read that bedwetting only occurred when you were on your back. Pa Louie, as he was known, had harnesses made of white fabric tape with cotton reels threaded along it. The idea was that we would sleep wrapped in this tape and if we rolled onto our backs the cotton reels would dig in and wake us up. But morning after morning we would be found, having shrugged these Heath Robinson contraptions off in our sleep, flat on our backs in a wet patch. Within a week this plan was abandoned as well.
Fortunately, we all grew out of bedwetting in time. I was around ten when it finally stopped.
Now I know that it’s only by overcoming some form of suffering, some problem, that we get the strength and the wisdom to move forward. And so we have all set ourselves tasks to overcome. It is very hard to accept that all the difficulties and suffering we encounter were planned. And, what is more, planned by us, with a little help from higher beings. But they are necessary for our spiritual unfolding. So we should always welcome our difficulties as opportunities and remember that we are never given more than we can stand. I believe the problems I had at school did strengthen me in some way.
Soul on the Street Page 2