by Andrea Kitt
Edward and Hazel both had that lovely quality of always having time for you. With lives ruled by the seasons, the weather and the earth, they had a steadiness about them that so many people have lost. I would see Edward from time to time, sometimes when there was some little repair to do at the cottage, or when he was driving his tractor down the lane or collecting cider apples in the orchard, or when he was unloading logs into the woodshed at the back of the house. Always he would stop what he was doing and enter into a long, warm, chortling chat, his eyes sparkling with amusement. And even when I couldn’t see him, I often heard his laughter echoing around the valley.
There were moments of tension and strife over the years – such as when Judy put her fist through a window on purpose, as a furious teenager, and Edward just happened to be walking by; and when I was told I was breaking my side of the agreement by neglecting the front hedge; and times when the children ran around the graveyard in a disrespectful manner... But most of the time I felt well and truly blessed to have this dear couple living just the other side of the church.
I was given free rein to decorate the cottage as I wished, and soon set about making it my own. Downstairs was rather dark, with walls over a foot thick and small windows, so I used a lot of yellow, with in the sitting-room a great cascade of stencilled wisteria in purple and green. The upstairs had been added only a hundred years ago and was a little lighter. I painted my room a warm mauve with stencils of birds and clouds; Judy chose bright pink for a while and then turquoise, whilst Simon favoured yellow then red. All my improvisation and ingenuity were called upon again as I played around with furniture, curtains, rugs and ornaments in order to make the place as functional and beautiful as possible.
The front garden had once been well kept and was still rich with flowers, especially in the springtime when snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and multi-coloured primulas sprang up all over the place, followed by bluebells, then montbretia and roses. We were also given a generous plot up above the churchyard in which to grow vegetables. The previous tenant had dug one bed and covered it in black plastic, which I lifted up to find a nest of slow-worms: long, thick ones and tiny squiggly ones, all smooth as silk and gleaming in beautiful bronze. And there was a frog in the water tank, whom I kissed once in a desperate moment. The following spring I set to work clearing brambles and weeds and digging the soil, and soon we had plentiful supplies of parsnips, carrots, potatoes, leeks, Swiss chard and French beans, interspersed with nasturtiums and marigolds.
By this time I had done a lot of psychotherapy, both individually and in groups. I was feeling much more alive and inspired, but continued to be curious about different ways of exploring what it was to be a human being. One day I noticed something advertised in Totnes called the ‘Love Meditation’ and went along to find out what it was. It turned out to be not so much a meditation as a series of exercises, in most of which we interacted with another person: dancing, singing and hugging. It was great fun, and there was a sense of freedom, warmth, aliveness and celebration that I felt ready for. I had done plenty of digging around rooting out the negative parts of my psyche: now it was time to enjoy being alive, and to share this with other people. After a few weeks of ‘Love’ and ‘Peace’ meditations they told me about something called the ‘AUM’ – Awareness and Understanding Meditation – a rather clumsy name, but the letters fit in neatly with the Sanskrit word for ultimate reality.
The AUM meditation is an amazing, unique and life-changing experience. The first time I did it was with twenty people in a village hall, but there were many, many times after that, and each time was rich and helpful and made me feel far better afterwards, even if I thought I was calm and happy beforehand. It was like being in an emotional washing-machine, each cycle designed to clean a different part of my internal self, until by the end I was washed and rinsed and spun, leaving me far more open to life and love, more humorous, assertive, affectionate, reverent – yet at the same time more able to access the sadness and anger that are also important parts of me.
We began by taking a powerful standing position, legs shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, spine erect and fists clenched by our side. We practiced shouting from this stance: feeling the power in our belly and making ourselves heard, with no self-excusing smiles on our faces. Then when the music began we turned to another person and let vent our deep, raw anger in their direction, with the understanding that it was nothing personal: we were doing each other a favour by being a sounding board for the other person’s pent-up rage, allowing them to project their fury towards family, spouse, colleague or just life itself onto the blank canvas of our self, whilst we did the same for them.
After a minute or so, we would move on to somebody else. What with the loud, aggressive music and the fact that everyone was shouting together, I soon began to feel great cracks in an armour that I had hardly been aware was still there, and to yell myself free again felt like a terribly important and healthy thing to do.
After we had all let rip for about ten minutes with one person after another, the music changed and we were told to approach each other once again, this time saying, “I’m sorry if I hurt you” then “I love you,” and sharing a long, warm embrace. The contrast between these two stages often made people weep.
Even the hugs were quite specific. We were given a demonstration by two experienced volunteers, first being shown what was NOT a satisfactory hug. There was the truck-drivers hug, for example – all hearty, vigorous back-slapping but no sensitivity to the other person; and the English hug which joins politely at the shoulders but keeps the rest of the body a safe distance apart. The hug in which one is looking over the huggee’s shoulder for someone better to hug was also not recommended, and neither was the super-sexy hug where you’re getting so squirmy and excited that once again you are distracted from an equal meeting with the human being in front of you.
Having gone through all the no-nos, the perfect hug at last appeared before us. First looking in the other person’s eyes and making a connection with them, then creating a foot sandwich, bending slightly at the knees and gently embracing them so the whole trunk of the body is touching; holding each other not too hard and not too soft, shutting the eyes, breathing together and perhaps sighing gently: a fully aware, wholehearted, satisfying hug for both participants.
As the process continued we explored every aspect of being human. There were periods of free dance – so much more free because of the inner gunk we had already released. There was a challenging aerobic exercise where we had to run on the spot with our arms in the air in time to the music, joining in with words that celebrated our personal power and said ‘yes’ to life. There was ten minutes of whole-body shaking; and ten minutes of complete and utter madness in which we exaggerated crazy parts of ourselves and were free to make socially unacceptable faces, noises and movements.
There was also a crying stage, in which I sank into my sadness. Again, so easy to do with the sad music and the support of all the other people who were also feeling what it was to be sad. To start with there was a short period of pretence – of playing into it – making a wailing sound and seeing what happened; but with a few thoughts about recent sadnesses, or if none came to mind then times in the past when my heart had been broken, or of the way that Sam hurt the children, or, always at the heart of things, my longing for my mummy... Before long the tears were genuine and sobs welled up from deep inside.
This stage was followed, challengingly, by laughter! From sinking deep into grief, the music changed dramatically and we were invited to see the funny side of it all, approaching each other with playful humour. To start with it was hard; I approached someone, pulled my lips into a smile and said, “Ha ha ha,” still aware of the tears on my face. But sadness and joy are close cousins, and emptying your heart of one does make room for the other, so it wasn’t long before the smile became genuine and the laughter bubbled up from inside.
One woman hitched up her skirts and pranced around like a da
ft thing, tweaking peoples’ bums, another pushed a cushion under her jumper and barged into people like Billy Bunter. A man stuffed kitchen-roll into his trousers and waggled it like a tail; someone came and tickled me, then I chased him round the room; another man invited me to ride on his shoulders. In the middle of the room was a puppy-pile of people giggling and making human sculptures, and then a couple of them crawled away and started biting peoples’ trousers. It was all completely mad, and because of everything that had led up to it, we revelled in a sense of freedom, hilarity and closeness that opened my mind to a whole new world of possibilities.
Towards the end of this two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza there was an exercise called ‘Dance of the Lovers’ in which we found a partner and explored our sensuality. Once again, such an unusual experience – something that under any other circumstances it would be impossible to do; but in this highly structured environment I could explore other people and my own body feelings without the danger of implications and repercussions.
A nice young man walked up to me whom I would never have normally approached: it was fascinating to be so close to someone quite different from me, to feel their body and get a sense of what it was like to be them. Next I was with a large, warm woman who brought out my feelings of wanting mummy as I rested myself on her ample bosom; and finally I angled myself towards an attractive man and enjoyed connecting with him for a few minutes in a sensuous dance.
There was a stage when a candle was placed in the middle of the circle we had made, and we gazed at it and chanted ‘aum’; another stage of quiet contemplation; and right at the end we approached each of our fellow travellers with deep reverence, clasping our hands together and bowing our heads to the God in them, then after fully acknowledging their divine nature, sharing one last heartfelt hug.
These meditations were run by the followers of Osho, who died in 1990. His was, I suppose, the main alternative to following Maharaji if you wanted an Indian guru in the 1970s: a much more extroverted, risk-taking, fun-loving choice which would have terrified me at the time but had now become very appealing. And the AUM was just the beginning. It gave me a taste of what they had to offer, and there followed many years of breaking out of my comfort zone into whole new areas of freedom, self-expression, sexuality, celebration, confrontation – and above all, a huge amount of dancing and hugging.
36
Teenager
Its time I wrote some more about Judy and Simon, and I shall mainly talk about them separately, because that was always the best way to experience them. When they were together and in harmony, laughing and having fun, it was glorious – and times when I lay in bed reading a story with one on either side of me, I don’t think I have ever felt so complete and at peace. But they were very different from each other, and Judy was always the dominant one, so a lot of the time it was hard work.
I do remember one time when all three of us went to London together. They must have been about eight and nine, maybe a little older. We spent two nights with my cousin Hugh, who kindly took us round the Millennium Dome, and the morning after the second night we went off on our own. We visited the Natural History Museum, especially enjoying skeletons of whales and dinosaurs and enormous clusters of crystal; then we went on the ‘London Eye’ and Judy huddled as far away from the windows as possible because she was afraid of being so high up.
We crammed a lot in to that day, returning exhausted and ready for bed. Judy had been bossing Simon around in a more and more aggravating way the more tired she got, and Simon had been putting up with it quietly, trying to be tolerant. As it happened it was around the time of Halloween, and when we were back in my bedroom he picked up a gory plastic axe filled with blood-like red liquid that sloshed around when it was wielded.
Judy taunted him one time too many, and suddenly Simon snapped: he couldn’t take any more. With a mighty thrust he hurled the axe in her direction, yelling in anger and outrage, followed by tears of exhaustion and despair. She managed to duck the axe, but it hit hard on the bedroom wall and burst open, then flew up and over the room in a perfect arc, splattering red liquid in a trail across the ceiling and the carpet, which remained for months afterwards as a reminder that even Simon could be pushed too far.
After our trip to the Canary Islands, Judy and I went on one more holiday, when she was twelve, to the Greek island of Kefalonia. We visited caves and an underground lake, hired a car and drove up into the mountains, swam and snorkelled in the sea... But there was always the feeling that she would rather be looking at the shops or lounging around the hotel pool, and though on this occasion we managed to compromise and have a reasonably good time, it made me think that perhaps I wouldn’t try again for a while. I always loved the wild places whereas she favoured luxury and civilization: we simply had different ideas of what it meant to enjoy ourselves.
Judy grew up early. Partly she had a passionate curiosity about life and its pleasures, but partly she felt compelled to stand up to her father and give as good as she got: to assert herself and shout back. She told me later that she was still at primary school when she first experimented with smoking: she found a packet of cigarettes in the telephone kiosk opposite the cottage. In her early teens she was shy and quiet at school, but outrageous and outspoken at home; although even here she could be a little embarrassed when it came to showing off her talents.
I was always convinced she could have been a brilliant actress or dancer. She had a natural way, when she was describing something, of completely turning in to it, whether it be a moth or a motor car or another person. And when a piece of music grabbed her, she moved like a professional – so utterly responsive, gutsy and – yes, sexy. But she had no such ambitions, and after a while her dance demonstrations were a rare treat for my eyes only.
She had one or two close friends from school, and from time to time they would spend the night at each others’ houses. Then before I knew it they had discovered alcohol, and were going out in the evenings. The very first time she had an evening out, she passed out in a cold field due to too much vodka and ended up, very fortunately, being found and taken to Torbay Hospital in the middle of the night. I have always been convinced that Judy has a powerful guardian angel.
This was a time, more than any other, when I missed having a strong, boundaried man by my side. Judy’s interactions with Sam would follow a totally predictable pattern: she would ask him for something, usually money or a ride to somewhere or back from somewhere, often in the early hours of the morning. He would kick up an enormous fuss and yell and shout and lecture and harangue and reduce her to tears. Then he would completely cave in and do whatever she asked. A more hopeless example of parenting its hard to imagine; yet I know he did his best, bless him, battling with assertiveness versus kindness and in the end not really able to do either.
And I didn’t do much better when it came to preventing her from doing what she wanted to do, though we did maintain a basically loving relationship, and I did make some stalwart attempts at discipline, experimenting endlessly with different rules and bargains, sticks and carrots, punishments and incentives. I can remember writing long letters, trying to appeal to her sense of justice. It became harder and harder to find a point of leverage: whereas twelve years before she would have done almost anything for a raisin, and then a small square of chocolate, the stakes had now risen to the dizzy heights of midnight rides and hard cash.
When Judy was fourteen she found a boyfriend, and before long Niall had become part of the household. With no mother, and lots of experience in foster homes, he spent much of his time ‘sofa surfing’, and I found it hard to refuse his appeals for a bed for the night. I became fond of him: he was a cheerful, friendly boy and would often be willing to purge Judy’s pit. He gathered the under-bed accumulations of dried-on pasta and fag-ends, the cold mugs of tea, empty beer cans, chocolate wrappers, half-finished pot noodles and revolting deposits of old fish and chips; then took it all downstairs, scraping the muck into the bin and washing the
crockery. Even if I had to rinse it afterwards, I was terribly grateful.
Judy’s mess was overwhelming. Even apart from the food side of it, you couldn’t see the carpet for all the dirty clothes, or possibly clean clothes – it was hard to tell – and CDs and DVDs and bags and make-up and shoes and every imaginable thing strewn all over the place. So any help to keep it under control was very much appreciated. I would leave it for weeks, hoping for a miracle (which did occasionally occur) when Judy herself would decide to tidy and clean; but more often than not I would reach the point where I just couldn’t stand it any more, and choose a time when she was away to go up and sort it all out.
Judy and Niall would chase each other round the house, giggling and tickling, shrieking with delight. It was good to see her behaving more like she used to, because she sometimes seemed to be becoming quite morose, though this was partly because she was now only showing me the moany side of herself, saving the more vibrant side for her friends; and partly because Niall was keen on dope, so of course Judy joined in, and sometimes there were half a dozen people draped all over her bed and the cushions on her floor, smoking themselves into oblivion.
Not that I didn’t kick up an enormous fuss, and threaten and insist. But she was the queen of manipulation. Her biggest weapon, of course, was her self. I loved her and wanted to make her happy, and she was very persuasive. If I said yes to something she wanted, I would be treated to a little while of that mummy-love and sweet connection that had become so rare. If I said no, she would be grumpy and moody and horrible, and refuse to co-operate in the slightest way, coming down and raiding the kitchen then leaving it all in a yucky mess, not communicating, making me feel totally used and abused.