Ten Highlights of My Twenties
- Chris Maunder
- Sep 2, 2024
- 43 min read
Having completed the blog about the ten highlights of my childhood, I am going to continue the process for each decade of my life. And so on to my twenties. There is of course the great danger of leaving something important out because of forgetting it, or of someone believing that their own contribution to my life should be a highlight and has been overlooked! Note that there are no weddings included in any of my decades (despite the fact that I have attended some memorable ones), apart from my own! Nevertheless, suggestions for editing will be politely considered from those who remember something I have overlooked...
1. The Unintended Youth Club
Business people dream of the moment when you tap a rich source of demand for something you are offering. It’s happened to me twice, but I didn’t make a single extra penny out of either. The second of these was at York St John University in the 1990s and 2000s when Theology and Religious Studies suddenly took off in popularity, although it didn’t make any difference to my salary. The first occasion was back in 1974, when I founded, almost by accident, the Hanworth Youth Club.
My twenties began with dropping out of Southampton University. I was unhappy, in stark contrast with my two years in Rheindahlen. My poor attendance in year 1 had declined to no attendance in year 2, which is not sustainable in a steadily progressive learning subject like Maths. Because my family still lived in Rheindahlen and it seemed like a backward step to go home, I moved to East Anglia to live near my best friend Nigel, whose family had already returned from Germany. While there, I took a job delivering bread and cakes, a door to door job with a set round of a type which doesn’t exist today. It was a tough job, six days a week and getting up early with the near impossible task of balancing the books, hard even for someone with a Maths background.
When my time in East Anglia came to a natural end, I decided to return to the family home; they had arrived back in the U.K. in the summer of 1973. My father was stationed at the Met Office HQ, at that time in Bracknell, and my parents bought a house in the suburb of Hanworth. Bracknell was a Berkshire village which had been transformed into a new town with the lack of atmosphere that that implies. With homes built among the trees in a forested area, Hanworth looked to some extent like Rheindahlen, but it was socially much less vibrant, or so it seemed to me, because I didn’t have any friends there. All my friends were ex-Rheindahlen, dotted around the country here and there.
I found a job delivering cakes to shops and supermarkets, which was good for my Auntie Pam, as she lived in Windsor on my route and I gave her recently out of date stock free of charge! But what about my social life? In this relatively barren environment, I rediscovered the chess that I had played at school and entered a couple of tournaments. I was (and am) an average player, but good enough to compete in serious-ish games. And then I noticed that there was a chess club on the estate where I lived, in Hanworth among the trees. Turning up one evening at the community centre, I discovered a bloke called Dave who wasn’t that good a player and a couple of rookies aged about ten. This did not promise to be the answer to my after-work activity gap!
For some reason, I decided to undertake a messianic role and suggested to Dave that we encourage more young members by extending the chess club to include other games. By that, I meant board games, but the idea was floated in the community centre, and a couple of local dads saw it as the answer to the gap in provision for children and teenagers in the new settlement. They said they could get hold of some equipment, like a record player, and table tennis and pool tables. While setting the agenda and providing support, they skilfully ensured that I, a naïve twenty-one year old, remained the man at the helm. I was now the leader of what quickly changed from a games club to a weekly youth club for anyone on the estate between ten and sixteen. I can’t now remember in any detail the precise process by which all this occurred!
And, as it turned out, it quickly became an extremely popular youth club! I was on the door and required the children to enlist as members and pay a modest subscription, but I turned into a gatekeeper as children under ten or from outside the estate tried to gatecrash. Within a few weeks, the weekly attendance had risen to around two hundred children all jammed into the community centre. Despite the stress and potential chaos of all this, I did actually enjoy being the organiser and revelled in my role as Mr Popular (because I was the one who decided who got in!). And the local dads were as good as their word and gave me the support needed to prevent the whole thing getting out of hand.
I even arranged a coach visit to the Tower of London for a manageable number of the club, which worked well. In my early twenties, it felt good to be an adult at last. The whole experience – over about eighteen months or so – proved positive, and led me to a conclusion about my future career. Maths had not given me the direction I needed, but the success of the youth club inspired in me the idea of working with children, and so, after looking through adverts, I applied to Oxford Social Services to be a residential social worker in a children’s home. I was on the road of discovering that I am cut out neither for a relatively unstimulating job, like working in an office with little interaction with the public, nor for a highly stressful one involving people with intense needs and constant emotional demands. I need something in between. But working in a children’s home was definitely in the latter category! The path to finding out what suited me by trial and error was to be a long and winding one. The Hanworth Youth Club with its weekly two hour ego boost and superficial personal engagement was a world away from working with children from problematic backgrounds on an everyday basis.
2. Moving Across the 64 Squares
Despite the fact that the Hanworth chess club got lost somewhere in all the excitement of the youth club, I still went through something of a chess phase during those months back with my family. I entered a couple of big tournaments where you could wander about and watch the grandmasters even though you were in a much lower section and would never get to play them. I watched a long-haired ginger Englishman of about my age get a sensational draw against a foreign grandmaster. A couple of months later, I met him at a smaller tournament in Kent and gave him a lift back to London. We became friends although only for a short period, during which I was invited to a drug-filled party packed with people. This wasn’t really my scene, although I admit to smoking the odd reefer from time to time, more for social reasons than because my body wanted it. Anything stronger I avoided; my imagination was too strong even without drugs, I concluded - one of the better decisions of my young life.
Then a chess tournament I was looking forward to around Easter, 1975, in Hammersmith, West London, got cancelled for some reason, and that was pretty disappointing. So, almost in irritation, I decided that I would use the Hanworth Community Centre to mount my own tournament. I would be the adjudicator rather than a player. My mother worked for the electronics firm Racal, which had a big base locally, and I persuaded them to sponsor the tournament for a first prize of £50. I then advertised it as well as I could. Some people responded. It was not very big – maybe twenty or so players from what I remember, but I enjoyed running it and being asked to make the odd decision. And it turned out that three of the entrants, one of whom won, were very strong players indeed, not far from qualifying for the England team. So the battles between them were interesting.
I learned something about the media. I had informed the local newspaper in order to get coverage of the event, but the journalist turned up during the lunch break when no one was playing. So he asked two people to pretend to be engaged in a game of chess for a photo, and by good fortune one of these was the eventual winner. Consequently, the paper felt able to print a heading for the picture which stated that it depicted the winner during a ‘play off’. Anyone who had been there knew that he was on his lunch break sitting opposite a random player with a manufactured position. It wasn’t the biggest lie that you will ever read in the press, but it taught me to take what I read with a pinch of salt.
We repeated the event a year later with the same winner and, as I had moved to Oxford by then, I was glad that one of the strong players, who lived locally, offered to take the tournament on for future years. I don’t know whether it survived for long or what happened to chess in Hanworth after that. But a quick Google reveals that the Bracknell Chess Club currently (2024) meets at… the Hanworth Community Centre! What happened in the intervening forty-eight years I have no idea.
I have always enjoyed a game of chess (these days all of my games are on-line and you can play people from all over the world). When I moved to Oxford, I did find a lively club, at a pub on the ring road which had a chess team. Your chances against a stronger player increased with the amount of beer that he drank! My greatest chess nearly moment came in Oxford at some point while I lived there (from May 1975 to September 1977). I played in a simultaneous tournament against chess master John Nunn who was two years younger than me; later, he became a grandmaster and achieved a place in the world’s top ten. He was based at Oxford University. A simultaneous tournament is when a master player takes on about thirty people at once. His moves are all made within a few seconds, on board after board in turn. You must have moved when he comes back round to you, except for three passes that you can use during the whole game. In my game, Nunn attacked straight from the outset but, very surprisingly, his pieces got into a muddle and I won a piece (a bishop or a knight, I cannot remember which). In serious chess, this is usually tantamount to a winning position. The trouble was that this game went on for a long time as Nunn vanquished the other players one by one. Therefore, he came back to me more rapidly with fewer opponents, and I had to move more quickly. All the players who had finished came over to watch the game because it appeared that I had the best chance of beating him. With all that pressure, and the fact that I was playing one of England’s strongest players, my advantage was whittled away and eventually I lost. From what I remember, a couple of people got draws but no one managed to beat him. I could have been the hero!
3. The Rocky Road to Wembley
1976 was not an easy year for me. I started my job in the children’s home in Headington, Oxford, in May 1975; it wasn’t easy but manageable over the first ten months or so. Then some new children were admitted who, because of their backgrounds, were more confrontational and the atmosphere seemed to change; even those who had been fairly easy-going now became problematic. I am not really built for day-in, day-out conflict, although at heart I remained fond of the children and wished I could have been stronger. Added to that, the home itself was a bit of a mess as an institution, mixing the work of a reception centre for new admissions with providing long-term care. These two types should have been distinct. The home was mainly for teenagers, but there were also some younger children who were especially vulnerable and rather out of place. There were also problems and changes in the management of the home. Then, finally, I fell into a couple of involvements with female members of staff who were already in long-term relationships, the kind of thing that can happen in a pressured work situation.
Consequently, I became very stressed and visited a doctor. Perhaps because I worked in a children’s home, the doctor didn’t reach for the tranquiliser prescription and send me away as normally a GP might have done; instead, he suggested that I be referred to the psychiatric hospital as a day patient. This was probably an over-reaction, but he chose to err on the side of caution. I spent most of August 1976 living in the children’s home while on sick leave, going out each weekday morning to spend the day in the hospital. At some point during this quite odd situation, I handed in my notice. The time in the hospital, which included some group counselling sessions and plenty of free time, helped me to de-stress; I met several interesting people, among whom I remember the man who could whistle from memory any classical movement that you chose, the young blonde woman who craved ‘just nothing’ and had tried to achieve this through suicide, and the man who attributed his problems to his parents not letting him scream in the high street when he was an infant. I felt out of place in the right sort of way, and almost fell into the role of amateur counsellor. One thing I learnt during these weeks was that, while I may suffer from anxiety and over-sensitivity, I am most definitely sane. That was reassuring, at least. And while all this was happening, the film of the moment was… One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest!
But there was one bright moment in all this chaos! The fates must have decided to give me a little break in my misery and grant me one favour. Southampton reached the FA Cup Final at Wembley for the first time. The opponents were a Manchester United team which had been rebuilt very successfully from the side which slumped in the earlier 1970s, and so they were the hot favourites; at the time, Southampton were back in the second division.
And more good luck: the Final fell on the 1st May, a weekend when I was off duty in the work rota. I had been working the weekend of the semi-final win against Crystal Palace and, hearing the result, went on a lap of joy round the home garden, accompanied by children who had little sense of why they were cheering. The Final itself I could enjoy without any interruption, and I decided to gorge myself on all the traditional details: the interviews; clips of how the teams got to be in the Final; footage of the teams on their way to Wembley in the coaches; predictions; statistics. To enjoy this feast of football untrammelled by the cares of the children’s home with its communal television room (in which we had all watched Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody at number one on Top of the Pops for several weeks), I returned to the family home in Bracknell.
I watched the game itself on TV at my Grandad Small's flat along with my brother Andy. After my maternal grandmother died in 1974, spending her last days in a geriatric hospital, my grandfather had moved from Morden (having lived in the same council house for forty-five years) to Bracknell to be nearer my parents. He was much more interested in sport than my parents and so that's where we went. After Southampton scored the only goal of the game with seven minutes to go, I turned to my brother and exclaimed. ‘I think we’re going to win it!’ I hadn’t dared to believe until that point. And they did win it. I was then able to enjoy a Sunday of watching the team parade the cup around Southampton on an open-topped bus.
And then it was back to work in the maelstrom of childcare under pressure. Winning the FA Cup was not enough to keep the stress wolf from the door. But it did give me something to cheer about and look back on, and be glad that I watched my team win its only major trophy ever. And because it was the only major trophy, I can assure readers of this blog who detest football that this will be the last football entry, unless something dramatic happens in the future (i.e. after 2024)!
4. Cosmic Connections
After leaving the children’s home, I stayed in Oxford and worked as a milkman, living in a rented house by the river with several housemates. A couple of people that I met there worked for the civil service. The jobs that I had up until then included delivering, which were six day and early rising, or the children’s home, which involved shifts including evenings and weekends. While doing the milk round, I used to go to bed early so that I could wake up for a 4 a.m. start, and then re-emerge from the bed during the evening when I heard that my housemates were having fun. How enticing was a Monday to Friday, 9-5 routine! So I applied to be a civil service executive officer for which my A levels were employed for the first time. I was allocated to the Central Computer Agency which was based in Bracknell when I joined, although it moved to London shortly afterwards in about November 1977. Computers then were huge in size; something which undertook what a small laptop does now needed an entire warehouse to be accommodated, along with several operators. But computer programming was exactly the opposite of my children’s home experience: cerebral, routine, and not people centred. It bored me and, to be honest, the mentoring was very poor; I got left to my own devices even though I didn’t fully understand what was going on.
To start with, I sought rented accommodation in London. I found it in Mortlake in the home of a young professional couple with a cat named Bonks. At the same time, I aspired to find my own place now that I had steady employment. Of course, London was expensive. One of the computer operators told me that the area of South London not on the tube system was the cheapest, and so it proved. In April 1978, I took a few days of leave off work and looked around at properties. I made an offer on a two-bedroomed flat in South Norwood, not far from where I had been brought up in Morden, just a 157 bus ride away! It cost just under £10,000. Nigel worked in a building society then, and he was very helpful in introducing me to an office manager in Ilford who offered me a mortgage. It wasn't easy to obtain mortgages and loans in the 1970s; all that changed in the 1980s. I had to plead with a bank manager to borrow the money for the deposit on the grounds that I would sell my car to pay it back. The bank manager asked me if I knew what I was doing. Yes, of course, owning my own home was one of the best decisions of my life.
For some reason, the effort of seeking a place to buy over those few days in April triggered anxiety. This was not like the stress of the children’s home; it had no obvious cause. It was an overwhelming feeling that something dreadful was about to happen to me, like a heart attack or brain haemorrhage. Rational thought would not shake it off. This was the first such occurrence of this anxious state in my life, and by far the shortest, as it ended after only three or four days with a sleepless night in Mortlake.
The children’s home did not leave me empty-handed as, while there, I had become interested in astrology. Some of the staff liked to understand the children’s or staff members’ characters in terms of their birth signs. I was a ready pupil and took to it like a duck to water; for some reason, it made perfect sense. Despite my parents’ dropping out of church when we left for Germany, I had continued to be interested in things spiritual, and read the Bible without ever committing to a church or Christianity as a faith. I had always possessed an intuition that there was more to life than the physical, a sense of purpose in the universe. But this feeling needed something more tangible, like a definite area to study, and astrology provided that. I went well beyond my mentors at the children’s home, and learnt how to construct horoscopes using a ‘Teach Yourself’ book.
I was always on the lookout for ‘arcane mysteries’ volumes in bookshops and had my copy of Nostradamus’ prophecies. At the beginning of 1978, I bought an interesting book that claimed there were thirteen signs of the zodiac rather than the traditional twelve. Another one claimed that the planet Venus had originated in the asteroid belt. With these rather speculative resources, during my sleepless night of the 20th – 21st April 1978 I mixed those ideas with some of my own, and something startling happened. The whole solar system seemed to order itself into the shape of the symbol for Venus, which is also the symbol for female, a circle above a cross. And a whole load of stuff that I had whirling in my mind suddenly made sense. I am not going to try to explain it all here, if indeed it can be explained!
Some years later, I read something by Carl Jung the psychoanalyst, who said that when the contents of the unconscious reach the conscious mind, it can feel like a great revelation has taken place, which is enticing and compelling. There is therefore a danger of getting quite overexcited in these circumstances, thinking one has found the secret key to everything. And that is how it did feel. In late 1978, I was asked by the Central Computer Agency to undertake a six week assignment in their Norwich office. Despite having lived in Norwich only four years beforehand, people had moved on and I knew of no one to spend time with after work. So I spent every evening typing up my ideas based on the April revelation. Everything was in there: a thirteen sign system, Nostradamus, the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah, the whole of the mystical kitchen sink, in fact.
I moved into my new flat in June 1978. After settling in, I joined the local astrological society in Croydon and also the Astrological Lodge in central London. I went to some teaching sessions by the man who ran the Lodge, Geoffrey, some eight years older than me although a lot more experienced in astrology and, when I felt the time was right, showed him my script. His polite but sceptical response poured sufficient cold water and I didn’t air my ideas with anyone again. Later, I could view it through his eyes, and I realised that it was a muddle of immature ideas which could never be published.
But what this experience did do was to bring into my conscious mind the idea that has shaped my spiritual development ever since, one which I discovered connected very well to the thinking of Carl Jung: that the spiritual world of the West is far too masculine in its images and we urgently need feminine ones. Shorn of all the Nostradamus and Kabbalah stuff, that was the basic intuition my experience had revealed to me in emphasising the Venus symbol: that I had to pursue the idea of the divine feminine wherever it might lead. In faith terms, I became a feminist and critic of patriarchal religion.
5. 15A Farnley Road
As an address, it doesn’t sound very interesting, does it? Yet it was the first home that I owned, where I lived, from the 27th June 1978 to the 5th November 1983, and it brings back all kinds of memorable associations. 15A was, as you might expect, an upstairs flat in what had once been an integrated two storey semi-detached house on a suburban road in South Norwood near to Croydon, only one street away from the Crystal Palace football ground where I first watched Southampton as a boy. It was leasehold, but the ground rent was low without any fear of it rising, and there were none of the terrors that leaseholders are suffering in the 21st century. I only once heard from the freeholders, as I had to be reminded that a small patch of grass, a short distance from the back of the building, was my responsibility and I had let it grow wild! It wasn’t the kind of garden where you put a table and chairs out in order to invite friends round for summer drinks.
The flat was two-bedroomed, allowing me to have a housemate. Over the five and a half years, there were four. The first had been one of my housemates in Oxford, Alan, who had been brought up in Zimbabwe, and was conscripted to what was then the Rhodesian army, fighting against Mugabe’s revolutionaries. He wasn’t prepared to put his life on the line to continue the white supremacist state and, having the good fortune of owning a British passport, went on leave to South Africa and flew to the U.K. from there, declining to mention that he was a Rhodesian national. Altogether four of them deserted by this means, and two of them were in the house that I moved into in Oxford. I admired their decision to leave, which meant parting from their families and friends until the war ended in favour of Mugabe, who was then of course the good guy. Admittedly, they were a bit wild, having just left an active warzone, but each of them settled in the U.K. successfully.
Alan was an intellectual who liked debate, and he proved to be good company in the flat. When he left to undertake his degree (and, after that, teacher training), his brother Tim was looking for somewhere and took his place. Tim, a draughtsman, was equally fun to live with, although very different from Alan, more of a drinking mate than an academic sparring partner. After Tim, I found Colin, the one of the four that I still speak to regularly. He was a VAT inspector from Birmingham, whose career took him temporarily to London. Colin is a natural joker; with him you can mix banter and serious conversation in just the right balance. He was the only one who shared my interest in football! Caroline came last, a housing officer from Kent. She was a loyal friend and good company; she bought the flat from me when I decided to move out of London in 1983, which was very convenient!
It is clear from the above that I couldn’t have asked any more of these four people as the flatmates who became friends. All four of them agreed fully with my request that we ate together and shared resources, and all four gave their commitment to the social life that we built there in 15A, and enjoyed it to the full. With the exception of Tim, who returned to Zimbabwe, the flatmates all got to know each other well. Alan returned regularly and so met and began a relationship with Caroline, which lasted a few years. He is now a university lecturer in education, and eventually married a former student, just as I have!
I was therefore really lucky with my flatmates. We all know that flat sharers can be a nightmare, whether one owns the flat or not, but I do not have a single painful memory about any of these four. They put up with my hands off approach to decorating and house maintenance, and they will all remember the wallpaper that hung peeling off the ceiling above the stairs. None of them was an astrologer when they walked in, but they all eagerly engaged with the astrology circle that gathered in the flat on a weekly basis and sometimes on other occasions. There were even astrological symbols on all the doors, thanks to a party that I had organised not long after moving in. Colin had to put up with the second of my anxious phases just after he moved in; it lasted two months this time. He will never let me forget that he moved in only to discover that I retired to bed at all times of the day. Fortunately, this situation passed and more fun times were ahead. And they all put up with my many unusual friends; Colin remembers an astrology woman who needed a temporary home for a couple of weeks and spent a lot of time eating sugar puffs.
There were several parties, which included the discovery that an upstairs floor in what had originally been a single house oscillated very alarmingly under the pressure of several people dancing. My old Rheindahlen friends were regular visitors, along with Alan's and Tim’s wandering Zimbabwean mates; everybody got along well. 15A was a phenomenon and not just a flat, a community and not just a building. London can seem an unfriendly place when you think of travelling on tube trains and walking down crowded streets, but behind the exhaust fumes and the concrete, there are a myriad small communities of people living eventful lives. Then there were the pubs of South Norwood, most notably the Clifton Arms around the corner from the flat, where I played the bass on the wedding day of Charles and Di, and the Goat House, which had regular Sunday jazz evenings. The 15A phase made up the second half of my twenties; it was a happy and sociable time until the moment came to leave London for good.
6. The Winged Fellowship Trust
I didn’t know many people when I arrived in London in 1978, and I had the idea of volunteering. I can’t remember what gave me this idea; it might have been a TV advert. I have done some kind of volunteering or another ever since, and it has certainly added a lot to my life, as well as some good friends. Before I describe these experiences, let me make clear that I am not claiming any special merit for being a volunteer. I am fully aware that I was a single man without children in the years that I did this kind of spare-time work, with the reserves of energy that others may not have had because of their situation. I have also rather chickened out after the late 1990s; my lecturing job was very busy and so volunteering has been restricted to looking after the Knaresborough chapel and serving on the Centre of Marian Studies committee, neither of which are anything like as demanding as working with vulnerable people. And now, of course, I have Bea to look after!
It all began at Crabhill House, a stately home deep in the Surrey countryside, owned at that time by the Winged Fellowship Trust (now known as Revitalise). This trust provided holidays for people with physical disabilities, both for their benefit and for those who cared for them on a daily basis. The volunteers took the place of those carers for a week, and in the process joined in with the holiday spirit at the heart of the experience. There were trips out (the Sussex coast was not too far away) and activities in house.
It was a tremendous learning experience, and a very emotional one. To share a week with people with severe conditions such as Motor Neurone Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Huntington’s Chorea, as well as birth disabilities like Cystic Fibrosis, gives you an insight that is probably impossible without a good period of time in their company. Then there were the people permanently disabled after accidents: I would pick out the man who had been over the alcohol limit at the wheel when he found himself under an articulated lorry, and the man who dived into a private swimming pool only to find that it had been emptied. One mistake and a lifetime of regret. Being cared for by temporary volunteers gave people such as these the chance to tell their story once again, when those at home had probably tired of it.
I went back several times, both to Crabhill House and later, after I moved north, the trust’s Nottingham centre, Skylarks. I introduced others to the work, such as my London flatmates. As I had already undertaken several driving jobs in my twenties, I always put myself forward for the driving. It takes a long time to load a minibus with wheelchairs using a lift! Miraculously, it all went well, apart from the one time that I braked too hard and heard an unwelcome clatter. As we were only two miles or so from the house, I was reassured by the passengers towards the back that the best bet was simply to get home, as we would have been at the roadside for some time if we had tried to sort it out. Fortunately, the disabled person who had been tipped out of their wheelchair was a young, otherwise fit, guy who didn’t suffer any injury and readily accepted my apology. Phew!
The person who moved me most during my visits to the Winged Fellowship Trust was a woman near to my age, around thirty, who had been born a quadriplegic. She only had slight movement in the fingers on one hand with which she tried to drive an electric wheelchair very haphazardly, otherwise no use of the limbs at all. She could not speak but communicated by raising the eyebrows for yes and lowering them for no. As someone who has a phobia of choking and always chews their food carefully, feeding her was absolute hell. She tipped her head back like a baby bird and you just dropped things in. Coughing and choking occurred regularly, but she always seemed to survive. Despite all this, she had an incredible zest for life and a wonderful sense of humour to match. I was amazed at how much we managed to communicate. I have never met a more incredible person.
Of course, for more intimate matters like going to the toilet and getting to bed, I only helped males. One man, also a quadriplegic, indicated that he wanted to go to the toilet. I undid his flies but with a shake of the head, he refused the urine bottle. Instead, he prodded himself with a finger and didn’t seem to want me to stay. Confused, I sought out a volunteer who knew him better and asked her about it. ‘He’s masturbating,’ came the reply. To achieve this, the poor man had to go through that song and dance with a volunteer and then sit in rather a public space, since he could not lock himself into a cubicle. And then there were those who could speak, but with difficulty. When a slightly-built volunteer called Dave bravely took his shirt off on a hot day, one man with cystic fibrosis commented what sounded like ‘Dave moccola’. It took me several minutes and asking him to repeat himself to understand that this was a piece of friendly sarcasm. He was saying, ‘Dave’s muscular!’.
I have done voluntary work in other areas too, such as holidays with children, both able-bodied and not, and weekly sessions put on for people with learning disabilities. I visited prison as a member of a university team, to raise debate and present academic subjects to those who were eager for them. Having had those experiences, I would recommend volunteering to anyone who has the capacity for it. It is not only a great learning experience, it is also a very sociable one, with lots of fun and other volunteers to share stories with. And it does help you to appreciate what it might be like for those who do the caring on a full-time, everyday basis, as opposed to the volunteer who breezes in once a week or for the odd vacation.
7. Stars in their Eyes: the Astrology Group
I joined the Croydon Astrology Society a few months after moving into 15A. The society held its meetings at a golf club because Jean, its president, was a keen player of some standing on the women’s golf scene. Just as at Hanworth, I entered the society with great enthusiasm and quickly took on an active role. Despite the fact that I was a relative newcomer to astrology, it became clear that most members were even less knowledgeable and confident about the subject matter than I was. And so, after getting my feet under the table, I agreed to hold weekly meetings at my flat which would include some teaching and some discussion. By then, Tim was my flatmate, and being a practical sort, made me a blackboard with a horoscope circle painted on it, which could be used again and again for demonstration. This became a staple feature of the flat, hanging on the wall above the gas fire in the living room.
The astrology group was a roaring success, although fortunately the numbers remained manageable for a small flat. It lasted for the rest of the time that I lived at 15A, and became a social hub, the meetings always finishing in the pub. The schedule was set at 7.30 to 9, but it became an in-joke for people to clamour for an earlier decamping to the pub, stopping me in mid-pontification. As some were not there for the astrology but for the social life, this wasn’t surprising, although one had to be careful not to upset the astrology people by reducing their time on the subject.
We did get a few rather odd characters; astrology attracted them! However, the group members were mostly really pleasant, friendly, and easy-going people, and they got on extremely well with my flatmates; several long-lasting friendships resulted. In particular, four stalwarts became the backbone of the group. One of them was a woman in her sixties keen on astrology: Liz, whom everyone loved. The other three were young women whose names all began with J: Janet, Julie, and Jude (Judith). Janet and Julie came via the Astrology Society, and were unquestionably very interested in the subject. They were both livewires with wonderful senses of humour. As for Jude, I met her through mutual friends at a party in Oxford. It turned out that she was moving to the Croydon area to take up a job as a teacher of children with special learning needs. She was an avowed atheist who did not believe in astrology at all, but she enjoyed the social aspect of the group; some years later, she admitted that she had been impressed by some aspects of the astrological work we did!
One astrological technique that proved popular was the asking of questions. If someone feels that an issue is urgent then you can construct a horoscope for the exact moment they ask a question about it. Relationships, jobs, lost objects are good examples. The chart will work best when the question is specific. One that I will always remember came up when Julie phoned her husband to check on something. Those were the days before the mobile phone! He should have been at home but didn’t answer although she phoned twice. She became agitated (I think the marriage was beginning to be in trouble; it ended a year or so later). So we constructed a horoscope. Using the rules of this technique, the planet signifying the husband was Saturn and it fell in the fourth house, the house associated with the home. We decided that he was at home, after all. She tried phoning a third time, and he answered; it turned out that he had been in the garden talking to a neighbour and didn’t hear the phone. This was a trivial situation, but it was a nice illustration of how astrology can work. And Julie had been genuinely concerned; astrology works best when people’s emotions are engaged. It is not advisable to test it with theoretical questions.
Another example that I discussed with the group was the theft of my briefcase. I had been in central London at an astrological event, welcoming people and checking bookings on the door; the briefcase disappeared while I was distracted. It contained no money but a few things useful to me, including a cassette tape recorder. I informed the police and then did the obvious thing for an astrologer: I asked whether I would get it back using a horoscope. There was just one promising aspect: the Moon was coming into a positive aspect to what astrologers call ‘the Part of Fortune’, within ten degrees. I wasn’t sure about that, and looked it up, discovering that good angles with the Part of Fortune indicate success in whatever matter one is engaged. I heard nothing and didn’t expect to, despite the horoscope, but ten days later the police called. My briefcase had been found with all of its contents still there. The police were of the view that the thief had only been interested in money or credit cards, and ditched the briefcase when they found nothing of interest, just my personal effects.
These examples and the many birth charts that we looked at kept us going. ‘Lady Di’ was of interest at the time, as she was preparing to marry Prince Charles, and her horoscope was an interesting one, with obvious signs of separation and distance in relationships, but suggesting someone who would be a natural with children. Marilyn Monroe’s proved to be another birth chart worthy of note, indicating someone who would attract people’s projections but whose real personality remained hidden. Interesting, then, that the two women were linked when Elton John adapted his famous song about Marilyn, ‘Candle in the Wind’, to relate to Diana after her death.
Jean the society president had seen me coming; she wanted to give up the role and so she asked me to take over. Astrology seemed to be a subject in which I could persuade most of the people most of the time that I knew what I was talking about! And so I applied to become a social member of the golf club so that we could continue to meet there. With Jean's backing, it was a formality. And so I enjoyed running the show on a bigger stage than the group meeting at the flat, although I could have never let the small group drop; it was the centre of my social life!
With all this organising and taking things over at Hanworth and now in Croydon, you might have the impression that I was a very confident, if not arrogant, twenty something. That’s not how I remember myself. It is true that I felt increasingly comfortable socially and also when I addressed groups, large or small. It seems as though I had a natural aptitude for it. However, on a more interior level, I look back at myself in my twenties as something of a lost soul. I hadn’t yet fathomed what my career was to be, and I even tried to be a full time astrologer for a few months, but I didn’t have either courage or conviction to see this through. I was overwhelmed by people who expected me to be a psychic, which I certainly was not. I just wanted to help people to take up the tradition for themselves, as it made so much sense to me, and it works, as far as I am concerned. And I just didn’t charge enough for what I was being asked to do, that is, delve deeply into people's personal lives.
Furthermore, I hadn’t sorted out my love life, my twenties being marked by several dalliances, but no steady coming together with a solid someone. As my parents had married at twenty and twenty-one, my brother and sister both had long-term relationships and would be married at twenty-four and twenty-two respectively, and my cousins married young too, I felt myself to be something of a failure in that department. So the outer sociability was not matched by much in the way of inner self-confidence (as reading my horoscope would make clear)!
8. Speaking at the Lodge
At first sight, my experience of the Astrological Lodge which met in central London (near the home of that famous fictional detective), seemed to be similar to that in Croydon. Namely, that my lack of both experience and in-depth knowledge of astrology would not be an obstacle in my becoming something of a front runner. But, in actual fact, the Lodge proved to be a very different place to the Croydon Astrological Society.
I had only been attending for a couple of months when I got into conversation with an American named Pam, who turned out to be the person who arranged the monthly speakers. Whether I impressed her or (more likely) she was a bit short on volunteers, I don’t know, but she suggested that I might like to take a slot. I went into all this with an easy confidence and readiness that indicated the naivety of my age: I don’t think I would have been so relaxed about it in a similar situation a decade or two later.
I’m not sure of the date when I gave what was to be my first ever public lecture in what would become a career in lecturing, albeit in a different subject. I think it was sometime in 1979, maybe the springtime. I put together an enticing assembly of ideas, which included Nostradamus, of course, but I couldn’t tell you much more about the content. And off I went. Whether it would have been a success without him, I don’t know, but I have to be thankful to a rather eccentric young gentleman called Chris. I had spotted Chris at previous visits. He was, quite simply, a damned nuisance. He sat in the front row, and thought nothing of interrupting the speaker with various unhelpful questions or remarks, and showed no awareness of the rest of the audience; rather, he had a narrow view in which only he and the speaker existed. He saw me coming, a mere novice, and waded in. Fortunately, I sensed his unpopularity and didn’t get distracted, but politely fielded or ignored his points as well as I could. He didn’t desist, and gradually people began to get angry with him, asking him to be quiet. When I finished the talk, I got a rousing cheer, more because of my having to put up with Chris than the brilliance of the content. My talk had provided the opportunity for the Lodge membership to silence the troublesome Chris, and he got the message; I can’t recall seeing him there much more after that.
Generally, people seemed content for me to take a turn on the programme, and so I had three more chances to speak to the Lodge before I left London in November 1983. The evening that I remember the best was on the 1st March 1982 when my talk was entitled ‘Our mother and father who art in heaven’. My growing sense of a mission to promote equal opportunities in the spiritual world came to the fore here (although, wisely, I did not discuss my ‘revelation’ of 1978). Looking back, it was probably a bit passé, if we’re honest, by 1982, although it was new to me. By then, I had become familiar with the leading group of the Lodge, all graduates and scholars, writers of books who, while accepting me fondly as a keen newcomer, saw me for what I was: a relative beginner. Geoffrey once introduced me with his own version of faint praise by referring to my ‘imaginative talks’.
And this was exactly what I needed. The critical edge that these people employed, which was a far cry from the average astrological debate in which people seemed to swallow anything, became the catalyst for my future career. They didn’t allow loose talk or a lack of learning to be left unchallenged. They had been through the academic system and attained at least degree level in the humanities, which I had not. They appreciated research and scholarship in the subject, including its intersection with other disciplines, such as religion, psychology, and social history. When I started my Theology & Religious Studies degree in 1984, I took all the lessons of the Lodge with me and had a head start.
During my time in London, I also started teaching astrology, which was included in local council evening classes as long as you recruited enough people for it to be viable. My first experience of teaching had been way back in Rheindahlen when a boy called Ray, studying Maths in the year below me in the sixth form, offered to pay me an LP each time that I helped him with ten A level questions! I then tutored individual children in Maths during the period that I attempted to study it (fortunately, the teaching was at a much lower level than the degree). Now, I turned to adult education teaching astrology and it seemed to work for me. I was even assessed by the newly formed Advisory Panel on Astrological Education, and passed OK. So my teaching of adults and lecturing, so important in my life later, both got going as the 1980s began.
I managed to fool most of the people most of the time in a subject where, in many instances, pretty well anything went. But the genuine intelligentsia of the astrological world challenged me in a way that proved to be very helpful. Sadly, when I left London and changed subject, I never met any of them again, except for one. Years later, at an academic conference, I bumped into a man of about my age called Nick who had been a rising star in the astrological world when I knew him, and he since wrote some really good scholarly books on it, especially its history. He told me that a man from the Middle East had given him one million pounds on the condition that he used it to set up an academic astrological centre. He therefore launched the Sophia Centre, which offers postgraduate courses in astrology, and is based at the University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter. I enjoyed seeing him again, and it brought back to me how fond I had become of the astrologers at the Lodge.
9. The Visitors’ League
On Friday 19th October 1979, I had a motorbike accident which put me in hospital for one month and a day. On that Friday, I was ill and therefore foolish to attempt the commuting journey by bike from South Norwood to Brixton, where I now worked. In early 1979, I had persuaded the Central Commuter Agency to transfer me to a civil service department with more in the way of working with people. They duly did, pleased to get rid of me, I suspect! I joined the Department of Employment as an adviser. I went from the very lukewarm frying pan into the scorching fire, as they allocated me to the London suburb of Brixton, with high levels of unemployment and poverty in a multi-cultural environment. It was to be the setting for a full-on riot in 1981 and the seeds were there much earlier.
I was assigned to the youth section of the Brixton Employment Office, located in an antiquated shed of a building shared with the dole office; it had not yet evolved into a modern job centre. It was full of characters of all kinds, some of them rather alarming. To give you a flavour, I would mention the vagrant walking in with a live bird on his head, healthy and chirping; the man who dressed in Nigerian tribal costume and stared people out; and the tall man who preferred to stand on the window sill, unchallenged by staff, their inaction based on an understandable sense of self-preservation. In all this madness, some civil servants attempted to do their bureaucratic thing, and still chased up people on the dole to get them into work despite national figures of three million unemployed, with Brixton being a hot spot. My priority was to help those who asked for and wanted my advice.
South Norwood to Brixton was not an easy commuter journey by public transport, and so I decided to buy a second-hand motorbike, not a particularly powerful one, a Honda with a 125 cc engine. In London commuter traffic, this was a very good way of committing suicide and I knew that I was taking a sizeable risk but, for reasons unknown, I soldiered on, rain or shine. On the morning of the accident, it was raining. What’s more, I was suffering from a very nasty cold which had kept me in bed for two days, but I felt obliged to venture out on the Friday as the work was building up and we had a special youth employment roadshow with BBC Radio 1 to prepare for the following week.
As I’m sure you know, riding a motorbike in heavy traffic involves overtaking stationary cars in queues. This can be a problem if a car driver leaves a space for someone else to drive out from a side street. The biker needs to be ready for this eventuality. Unfortunately, it was too wet and I was too woozy and full of cold to stop when this happened on a London road called Beulah Hill, Upper Norwood. The bike being small, my left leg hit the car pulling out rather than the bike, which was undamaged in the collision! The leg was badly broken, with compound fractures to tibia and fibula, and I still bear the scars today. The accident was a relatively slow and minor one which, if I had been in a car, would have left me with a small dent and a broken sidelight; because it was my leg that took the impact, a doctor informed me after they operated that I was lucky even to have a leg. And so, a month in traction began. I was in the Orthopaedic Ward of the wonderfully named Mayday Hospital, which is now the Croydon University Hospital. The hospital was named after the road in which it was built, Mayday Road, rather than any reference to distress signals (interestingly, thanks to Wikipedia, I discover that ‘Mayday’ as a distress signal was developed at Croydon Airport on the basis that it would be understood by the French as ‘m’aidez’, ‘help me’ – a wonderful piece of trivia, and one which strengthens the connection between the suburban town of Croydon and the word 'Mayday'!).
I was poorly at first, due to the shock combining with the nasty cold which now kicked in with 104 degree temperatures but, within a couple of days, I was well in all but the broken bones, and faced with the prospect of lying in bed for several weeks. This was before the age of the mobile phone, tablet, and laptop. There was one TV at one end of the ward which became blocked from view if anyone in between needed attention and their curtains were closed. I asked for some books to be brought in and illicitly managed to get a tape recorder into my bedside cabinet with headphones. The staff probably thought I was listening to hospital radio! But, even with those entertainments, I became very dependent on some good souls visiting: family and friends mainly, but I also got a visit from the person whose car hit me, and whom I reassured that the accident was not their fault, and the person whose house it had happened outside, who retrieved the motorbike.
And I did what I always do when a bit bored with time on my hands; I drew up a league table! Visitors got points for visiting and extra points for how long they stayed and whether they brought gifts or fetched something that I needed. Quite brazenly, I told my family and the closer of my friends that I was doing this, and everyone enjoyed the joke of people vying for extra points. Yes, incentives can work! It was no surprise that my flatmate of the time, Tim, was the clear winner. He was an easy-going and loyal character and was quite content to wander in several nights a week and chat. It was useful to get reports on the flat and know that it was safe and secure. And I returned the favour by finding him a draughtsman’s job, via the Employment Office, with a firm which was also based in Brixton, and so we bought a second hand VW Beetle between us and travelled in together after I returned to work. I didn’t mount a motorbike again, from that day to this! Tim sold mine for me.
Tim was a strange man who gave up heavy smoking in one single day and never looked back. After living in my spare room for a year and a half or so, he suddenly decided to return to Zimbabwe and I didn’t hear from him again, although he returned to Britain some years later. But I did stay in touch with his brother Alan, my first flatmate, and through him found out that Tim had married an evangelical and therefore converted from a lax agnosticism to committed Christian with all the missionary zeal that that implies. He was an easy-going character, yes, but when he changed his life, he did so with decisiveness!
On Tuesday 20th November 1979, my parents picked me up from hospital so that I could convalesce with them for a couple of weeks. The journey home in a car from Croydon to Bracknell spaced me out, as I had been in one room for four and a half weeks and had not travelled since that fateful morning. I can see how a shock can have a lasting effect; my accident was not so bad, but I did feel shaky on that journey. That night back in my parents’ home in Hanworth, I had a dream in three parts; I woke up twice but resumed the dream on returning to sleep. It was a striking dream that I later came to regard as outlining what the next thirty or so years would bring (without my trying to force it to come true, as all the developments were quite natural and beyond being manipulated). Why this should have happened the night after leaving hospital, I don’t know, but it seems that I was in an unusual state and at the very beginning of a new phase in my life. Although I returned to the civil service after four months away on sick leave, the bureaucratic five day a week 9-5 existence was not where my sense of direction was leading me. And notable coincidences and interesting, occasionally prophetic, dreams became the norm for at least a decade to come.
10. The Holy City
One of my hospital visitors was Jude, who had recently moved from Cheltenham to Croydon to take up a teaching job. I was the only person she knew in the area, and I had only met her once before she arrived. Fortunately, it went well; she became a close friend, enjoyed the astrology group meetings, and we socialised together regularly. I left the civil service on my birthday in 1981 and attempted for a few months to make a go of self-employed astrology. But it didn't bring in enough money, and so I returned to delivery work in order to make ends meet, working for a ceramic tile company.
At a New Year's party at the very beginning of 1982, Jude and I moved from friendship to a romantic relationship, and it seemed as though it might be stronger for the two years of knowing each other. After the promise of Rheindahlen, my twenties just hadn’t delivered in terms of a relationship that I really cherished. Some relationships lasted a few months, and there were many more near things and encounters, but nothing that had really left me feeling better about myself and love! More than once, I found myself in the position of someone drawn in to shake things up by a woman who said that her long-term relationship had come to an end, but then it turned out that it hadn’t. I tended to attract people who were erratic, or unstable, or neurotic – maybe that said something about me! And there were also really good people whom I just didn’t feel enough for, and at times I was insensitive as a result. The folly of youth!
I felt that Jude had the potential to bring more stability to my life. She was down to earth and practical but with a good sense of fun, and a teacher who had a clear commitment to her vocation. She taught children with learning difficulties. I remember giving her a lift so that she could visit the inventor of Makaton, at that time quite a new sign language. The first few months went well enough. We saw Simon and Garfunkel at Wembley Stadium; they were so far away on the stage that I asked a person next to us whether I could borrow his binoculars to see if it really was them!
However, on that New Year's day in 1982, at about lunchtime while we are all recovering from the party, someone had crashed into my VW Beetle whilst it was parked. I should have read the runes; my life and not just my car was about to get a shake up! In the spring, Jude’s sister Rachel, a midwife, went off to spend a few months nursing in Israel which included some time on a kibbutz. Jude suggested that we go to Israel on holiday in the summer; she would go on ahead to spend a couple of weeks with Rachel in the kibbutz, and then I would fly out for a further two weeks when we would tour round.
Jude was a dark-skinned woman who tanned easily, and she had already been a little scornful at my own pallid complexion and reluctance to sunbathe in the summer months. So I should certainly have tried harder to get browner before I set off! When I arrived, Jude and Rachel were both tanned and I was still lily white. It was clear to me very quickly after arrival in Israel that Jude was no longer relishing spending time with me; I was cramping her style! She had settled into her holiday and had been enjoying herself without me. It didn’t help that she had become conversant with all the finer points of travelling in Israel, the haggling when buying, etc., whereas I knew little and I am not the most switched on person when travelling. And I get much shakier when I feel that someone is judging me. Then I got sunburned when we visited Eilat in the far south. Consequently, the first few days weren’t very much fun although I tried to keep up the appearance of enjoying myself.
Faced with this situation, I conceded defeat. Without saying anything, I simply accepted that we had returned to being just friends and tried to make the best of the trip. It helped that we were with other people. Our second week was to be spent in Jerusalem, and I was very excited about that, having developed by now a strong sense of spiritual tradition and the importance of the sacred. We entered Jerusalem on Sunday 29th August 1982; it would have been my Nan’s birthday had she lived. The old city, I discovered, is a magnificent ancient metropolis, most of its streets impassable by traffic, full of daily bustle, with packed markets, echoing calls from the minarets for Muslims to pray, and the shouts of souvenir sellers and tour guides trying to get your attention.
Jerusalem was the perfect remedy for my feelings of disappointment over the relationship. I scoured the city for every holy place and interesting story. Our hostel was near the famous Via Dolorosa, the path along which Christ was supposed to have walked to his crucifixion. I spent more and more time on my own. I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the claimed site of the crucifixion and tomb of Christ, and therefore of his resurrection. Like many large and famous churches, it is dark inside and full of little chapels and interesting nooks and crannies. Completely on my own in the gloom with no other tourist in sight, I discovered a low door with a red light at the entrance. As red lights in churches normally mean a tabernacle or shrine of some kind, I stepped through. I had made a mistake; the red light was a warning because of works! In the dark, I slipped into an unguarded hole. To this day, I have no idea how deep it was as I managed to stop the fall by hanging onto the rim of the hole by my elbows. As I clambered out, somewhat shaken, it felt to me like a symbolic resurrection in the very place of Christ’s rising from the dead.
Then, I found the Abbey of the Dormition on Mount Zion. Because I had made that connection with the feminine and the sacred back in 1978, Mary had become a figure of some fascination for me, although I was also interested in the goddesses of Greece, Rome, and the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. Mount Zion is the traditional site in Jerusalem of Mary’s death (Ephesus also claims it). What had the greatest impact on me was the floor of the nave, which included a great zodiac, each sign associated with one of the twelve disciples who in the Christian legends returned to Jerusalem to be with Mary at her death. As my revelation in Mortlake had involved the planets and signs of the zodiac forming the feminine symbol of Venus, everything once again seemed to fit into place. In actual fact, when I returned to Jerusalem two years later with the Winged Fellowship Trust as a volunteer on a holiday for people with disabilities, the zodiac was covered up by a carpet. So it might have been sheer luck that I saw it that day.
Finally, I discovered that the last day of our visit was a special holy day in the city. It was the 5th September, the nearest Sunday to the traditional feast of the birth of Mary on the 8th. A famous icon of Mary and Christ Child in the Holy Sepulchre is taken down on the feast of her death and assumption, the 15th August, to the shrine that is supposed to have been her tomb on the east of the city in the Cedron Valley. It is then returned to the Holy Sepulchre on the Sunday nearest the birth feast, a kind of resurrection of Mary. On the way, the procession carrying the icon stops by every Orthodox Christian’s house in the old city for them to show their devotion and to kiss it. It was a stunning procession, the first of many such events that I have experienced from then to now and probably one of the most compelling of all. My devotion to Mary, the mainstay of my life since then, came into being on that day.
Perhaps the fact that I had found an alternative passion helped to revive Jude’s respect for me, as we remained good friends after returning home. In November 1982, just a few weeks short of my thirtieth birthday, I was invited to the sixty-fifth birthday party of her father, who with his wife was a strict Roman Catholic. This had caused their daughters to rather veer away from that faith, especially Jude, who declared herself an atheist! I needed a present and found a biography of Pope John Paul II written by Lord Longford. Perusing the book before parcelling it up, I found that the Pope was known for his Marian devotion, which says something in a Church already obsessed with Mary! On that same weekend in Cheltenham, I found a book in a church bazaar titled The Book of Strangers. It concerned the journey of a young man who converts to Islam; I found it quite inspiring. And so, thanks to these two very different books, the crazy idea came to me that I should seek to become a Roman Catholic. It made sense; Mary had become all-important to me and here was a Church in which she was highly venerated. What better place to make a home, and yet, of course, there were many issues on which I did not and never have agreed with the teaching of the Church. But belonging from my point of view does not necessarily require blind obedience!
Jude's place in my life was that she had unwittingly helped me find the faith tradition which would now become crucial to my future direction. There were two further periods of us going out in my early thirties, in 1983 and 1986, between which Jude taught for the voluntary services overseas in Nigeria. But although these were fun (and helped me to lay the ghost of my feelings of rejection in Israel), there was never any thought from either of us that things would become serious. Jude needed someone more practical who shared the overseas experiences that she came to enjoy, and I needed someone who shared my spiritual journey. We both found what we were looking for but, in my case, the love of my life had not yet been born!
Another compelling read and such an insight into many things I didn't know about you! Thanks for sharing C-J. Looking forward to the next installment x