Categories
Twenties

Linking The Past With The Future

There are some activities we need to stop and some we have to get on with, for our own good. We cannot know what the future holds, so we should be wary of giving up anything that might be useful later on. I didn’t want to go back to Liverpool but I knew I must make sure to get my degree. I had no intention to ever take another one. Can I here Fate laughing? I needed to get my degree but I didn’t know why. Much later in my life when I was a psychotherapist I had the chance to do an M.A. related to my work with clients. I was then in my sixties. I never thought I would see Manchester again after my father’s death. Would I be up to returning to the fields of academia despite running a bookshop and print and poster shop in Cambridge for twenty years?

Yes I was. I enjoyed the M.A. so much that I went on to do my PhD at Brunel University when I was seventy. It was very hard work and it took me a while to get a subject after reading many books on the theme of Conversation Analysis. My preference for not asking for advice and doing things my own way was perfect for a PhD. It was published by Karnac under the title of “Not Just Talking.” We were a group of about a dozen of which I was the eldest: all of us in very different areas in the field of the Social Sciences. In the first year we had to attend a few lectures related to this field and I enjoyed them all. They were a kind of test, I think, to show we had enough ability to think and write well. I was amazed that both degrees were considered to be very well written. I had always wanted to be a writer. My love of words never faltered and I wrote bits and pieces now and then because I wanted to. It never occurred to me that I always had been since I first began to read books. My love of languages was very helpful. I speak and read French and English well, some Italian and now I am struggling with German. I have always read widely and that creates a range of vocabulary that has stayed with me. I often find a phrase or adjective that pops up in my mind just when I need it. My magic camera gets to work again especially well when I have begun to write, as I have done for many years. It is under the control of my inner daemon, my inner guide who always leads me once I get started: often down a path I had not thought of. He wakes me up at any time of the day or night to keep me on track. He always seems to be right. I could never have learned what he does for me from any other person except those who wrote all the books I’ve read.

I am interposing here the future into the present, which at this moment is in my late teens and early twenties. He told me to do it. It passes on a very important piece of advice. Trust your instincts. I have a fair number of books I took home from my shop for reasons I did not yet know. Every now and then when I am working on a new idea I find my hand making its way to a book I have never read that contains just what I need at a particular time.

Categories
Twenties

You Are Your Own Best Friend

Back in England again I had three difficult years before me: the final two years at university and having to live with my mother again in between and for nearly another year before I finally left England to join Bob in Venezuela. These were hard times for me. I thought that when I left home and went to university I had put my worst fears behind me. I had made the assumption that having a degree would put me on the path to success and money. But things rarely turn out as we expect. External circumstances get in the way. Those of us who always do what we want to do, not what other people want us to do, live adventurous lives, as I have always done. However we change as we grow older and begin to understand our life’s needs better. We unexpectedly have experiences that send us in a different direction.

I thought I wanted a great career and I achieved success enough in three major ways but that was not the most important thing in my life as you will see later. I often cannot believe that I have passed eighty years on this planet. Since Bob died three years ago I am still working on my books and intend to take up my painting again. I am reading more about philosophy and any other interesting book that comes my way, usually through new friends. I have gone over my life several times and I find that there is nothing that I wanted to do that I have not tackled. Living on the right lines I have still more to add to my research about people and how strange we all are. We are such complex beings that the search for self-understanding is endless. I can still be surprised by something new I recognise in myself and in others who are close to me. When people ask me if I am retired I say “Unless I am non compus mentis I shall retire on the day I die.”

I have read many books about people who have done what they wanted to do. I have not come across any of them who have not lived and suffered their way through two extremes, failure and success. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem “If” on this same theme. People who take risks that most of us would not dare to, must accept greater diversity in life; such as good luck and bad luck. In fact it is a mistake to think that good luck is going to drop from the heavens, although it rarely happens. Most luck, good and bad, is the direct result of what we ourselves have done, out of our own efforts. There are certain qualities without which no-one can follow his or her own star. They are patience, bravery and persistence. Throughout my life many people have asked me “How did you do this?” I had to reply “Only you [ie. Oneself – ed] can know”. The world is full of envy because there are many people who do not rely on themselves and their own efforts.

When I was young I did not want to be old, but that was so far off it did not bother me. Now I live in a community of flats for old people who have done many different things in the world. We all have our privacy and some of us, including myself, still drive. I have been surprised by how well most of them manage their lives. There are enough of us here that we can find a few people with whom to share ideas. I am considering writing a short book for people nearing the end of their lives about how we can pass our time in an interesting way, if we want to, without relying too much on our friends and families. However, if we still value our own lives and pursue what we like to do they will still enjoy coming to see us.

Categories
Autobiography Twenties

A Difficult Time

Bob and I wanted to go to South America. His friend, Jim, whom he had met when he was twelve years old and who also read Spanish at Liverpool University, was already settled in Maracaibo in Venezuela with his wife. He had a job with Royal Dutch Shell. He sent glowing accounts of their life there. When Bob graduated, two years before me, he took a job in a London bank that wanted someone who knew French and Spanish. His intention was to apply to Shell after a while, because it wasn’t easy to be accepted by this company. In fact it was more than two years before he was offered a post with Shell.

I missed him very much as I had to stay in Liverpool for two more years to get my degree. I spent long periods on my own in the library reading literature with occasional visits to London. My enthusiasm for studying was waning. I found it hard to concentrate. I still felt I must go back to Mother in the holidays and that was always very depressing. The strain of all this had a psychosomatic effect on me. My hair began to come out in handfuls every time I washed it. Some nasty- smelling thick ointment was prescribed for me by the hospital. I had to massage it into my scalp, leave it for a while and then shampoo my hair. It actually worked. At that time we never heard about psychosomatic illness. Yet we now know how common it is when we are under severe stress.

I went to Spain in my last two summer holidays as part of my course. First to Santander with the other people in my year for two weeks. It was quite enjoyable except for our attendance at a bull-fight. All of us felt utterly disgusted by such cruelty.

The next year I went on my own for nine weeks in Barcelona. I was the only one studying Catalan, an extremely difficult language that I only partly mastered. The other six fellow students in my year all chose to learn Portuguese, which is much easier, so they were sent to Portugal. I have never felt so alone in my life when I stepped off the train at Barcelona. I had been given the address of a boarding-house by another student who had stayed there the year before. It was very cheap. It had to be. My grant was only £90 for 9 weeks

I have always been very susceptible to atmospheres. Barcelona had a particularly depressed aura, partly caused by the soldiers in uniform who guarded mounted machine guns outside every bank. The atmosphere of the civil war was still there. The boarding house I had booked into was dark, untidy and full of rough-looking working-class men. The food was the worst I have ever seen before or after. I didn’t feel safe there. Within a week I found somewhere else , I can’t remember where, but it was a godsend to me. I met a lady called Doris. She spoke upper-class English and had come some time ago to live in Spain. She was a painter and she lived in an attic where only a painter could live. It had big windows letting in the light, lots of room with pictures and easels all over the place. One picture dominated all the rest. A portrait of the ballerina in the film “The Red Shoes”. She had one small spare room and she offered it to me. She asked for a very small rent, one I could manage. Her only proviso was that I move out occasionally when her tall, handsome Spanish lover came who was also a painter and spent his time travelling all around the country.

Doris was always short of money. She only sold a painting occasionally. She lived on the money she got from teaching Spaniards English in a nearby building. She suggested that I apply for a temporary job there. They were pleased to take me on. I was very Spanish-looking with my black hair and dark eyes and I was good-looking, although I didn’t yet know that. Most of the students were men, so the owner liked to employ women who were not only educated but looked good.

Doris and I got on well. We were both outsiders. Like me she wanted to make her own money. One day she asked me if I would like to go to Majorca to visit the writer Robert Graves, another ex-patriot who was a friend of hers. Of course I would! There was one drawback, neither of us had the money for the trip. Nor did we up to the time I went back to England. What a pity that I missed such an opportunity.

Ostensibly I was supposed to visit university libraries, find something that interested me and write about it. I only went a few times, made a few pages and notes and that was all.

When I got back no-one asked to see them to my great relief.

Bob met me at the station when I got back. “How thin you’ve got!” he said. We’ll go out tonight and feed you up.” I have never enjoyed a meal as much ever.

Categories
Autobiography Twenties

Two Families

In my first year at university I discovered the work of Sigmund Freud through a student who was reading psychology. I had never heard of him. I read one of his books and I was hooked. I wished I had changed over at that time. First, because I could have a greater number of lectures in a new and exciting subject that would help me to understand myself and my own peculiar parents and second, because the only lectures I enjoyed were those delivered by my Professor, Allison Peers, who could bring the past history and literature of South America to life.

My relationship with Bob grew stronger. For the first time in my life I felt I was supported and loved by a man very different from my father, in spite of the many things that we did not share. I expected far too much from him. I now know that if we do not get a good enough childhood, we expect perfection.

I had a lot to learn. I was more grown up in some ways than most other young people, but in other ways I was not.

Bob and I settled into what we now call a relationship, which relieved us of frustration, but we had to be very careful. We did not particularly want children. Thus our constant thoughts of “How far can we go”reminded us all the time. Bob asked me to marry him and I refused. However, when I had thought things over, I changed my mind and he accepted me. I still felt fragile emotionally and he had most of the qualities I needed. I thought I might never again find someone whose background and forebears were so similar to my own. For instance:

We both had grandfathers who were drowned before our own fathers were born. Although I was not a single child, I felt like one, and Bob had no siblings. We both had parents who quarrelled in front of us. Both of our fathers treated us like adults after we reached about seven years old. We were both responsible and could be trusted to look after ourselves. Each of us had one parent with which we clashed. Bob’s was his mother and mine was my father. Both of them died from cancer when we were both about twenty. Since Bob was seven years older than I, I never met his mother. Bob never mentioned her unless I asked. He never said anything about missing her, but it took his father many years to get over it. Bob was fond of his father, but I was not. They looked alike but they were very different. I felt that there was much unfinished business in the effect his mother had on him. I was right but it took me decades to find out what it was all about.

My father fell sick at the end of my first year away. It was an unusual cancer that began under his left eye. It was very close to his brain so he died in six months. Bob never saw him. I found the whole thing very traumatic. It took me several years to get over it. It wasn’t because of my missing him, rather for the wasted years when we had not formed much kind of communion together. I can still click my magic camera and see my father lying in hospital in Manchester having radiology treatment. The roof was high and made of glass. The sunshine was coming in. He looked unusually happy, kissed me and said “Isn’t it wonderful in here! It’s just like fairyland!” This was a favourite phrase of his.

I didn’t know just how ill he was. I regret not seeing him again because I did not want to miss an exam. I missed him by one day.

My mother showed very little feelings. She just went on as usual. In those days she received a sum of money, £500, Father’s salary for one year. It doesn’t sound like much today, but then it was a very good income. Needless to say she went through it in no time. Then she had nothing. But she still lived in the house and took in lodgers. She had great charm and could always find people to do things for her.