Bedouin of the London Evening (3 page)

In November 1980 she moved into Old Forest Lodge, an unremarkable three-storey house tucked away behind the sea-front, where she was known to neighbours as Mrs Lightband. Here she cut herself off totally from her former life, refusing to see or to respond to letters from relatives, old friends, or publishers like myself whose hopes had to be dashed. It wasn’t an easy place for anyone to find, with no nameplate or number on the door; the curtains were kept closed to deter would-be visitors, and knocks on the door and rings on the doorbell were rarely answered.

There she resolved to free herself of all the remaining kinds of ‘bondage’. She had broken with her last healer, who had failed to cure her eyesight problems, having realised she’d become psychologically dependent upon him. To escape the pull of other healers, mediums, spiritualists and evil spirits, she turned to the Bible, which became her ‘complete manual’ for living. Next to go were sleeping tablets, which she’d been on for most of her life; shaving a little more off each tablet with a razor each day, she managed to
wean herself off them totally after a year. Once totally free, she would be baptised.

Still troubled by what she took to be supernatural occurrences, she felt she must still be in bondage to other forces, and embarked on an act which was later to sadden her family when they learned of it after her death. She decided to destroy her collection of Oriental treasures – a bequest from an aunt by marriage – which were ‘graven images’ that had to be burned by fire, according to the Second Commandment. Retrieving the five suitcases by taxi and train from London, she filled two garden incinerators with over 40 artefacts itemised in a handwritten list titled ‘The burning of some idols (11 August 1981)’, and set fire to them. These included three Tang horses with riders, four Sung priest figures, a Japanese warrior, a Korean dancing figure, Chinese jade and small bronzes, Chinese silk robes embroidered with dragons, carved Chinese letter seals (rose apricot stone), Chinese dogs on stands, chess-set and lion mask, along with other artefacts of marble, terracotta, porcelain, plaster, mother-of-pearl, ivory, wood and stone, from China, Korea, Japan, Africa, Greece, Bali and Persia.

Over the next few days she smashed and hammered at the still intact Tang and Sung figures until she got the remnants down to ‘dog-biscuit size’. All this while, she said, there were noises in the house, and a mile and half away, another house was wrecked by flying objects and furniture thrown about by a poltergeist which had to be exorcised. The local Bournemouth newpapers for that week document those other occurrences (she kept the cuttings), which were witnessed not just by the household concerned but by four other people including a policeman.

That left what she called her ‘profession’ to be confronted. She still had the manuscript of an unpublished novel (‘the best thing I had ever written’), about a man’s search for God, written during the six years leading up to her eye operation, but a medium had recounted the entire plot to her, complete with detailed descriptions of all the characters, which meant the book must be dangerous and could lead others astray. Into the incinerator it went. She had
already contacted John Moat withdrawing the selection of poems which the Phoenix Press was to have published. The fate of an extended essay on Baudelaire is unknown: this was to have been appeared in the US in 1977, probably in the
New York Review of Books
, where she had earlier published two other articles.

That October she travelled to Jerusalem and was baptised near the River Jordan on 17 October 1981, the day before her 53rd birthday. Obliterating her former identity as the writer Rosemary Tonks, she dated her new life from that ‘second birth’. Mostly keeping herself to herself, for the next 34 years she lived an insular, private life, quite comfortable in her circumstances, defiantly independent but isolated in her continuing search for God, always alert to the ‘brainwashing’, controlling or manipulating tendencies in the religious groups and beliefs she encountered.

Ever restless in spirit, she fought daily battles with her inner demons, plagued by self-doubt and frequent bouts of debilitating depression which could only be lifted by asserting her absolute belief in God’s love for her. In this she was helped by the ways in which her magical thinking had developed over the course of her later solitary life: birds were her soundscape, and birds were associated with her mother, whom she called ‘Birdie’; and she would interpret soft calls or harsh caws or cries from crows and seagulls in particular as comforting messages or warnings from the Lord, and would base decisions on what to do, whom to trust, whether to go out, how to deal with a problem, on how these bird sounds made her feel. Depression was Satan trying to weaken her, but a positive feeling from God would drive him out and restore her well-being. She also only had to hear particular pieces of music on the radio and what she called ‘the Flood’ would immediately be lifted from her: Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade’, Borodin’s 2nd String Quartet (‘a message of exquisite sound from the Lord stilling & resting the whole body with the heart’s joy’), and Bach’s ‘Jesus Joy of Man’s Desiring’.
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All these were pieces her mother had loved and played to her in her childhood. And of course Scheherazade saves her life every day by telling stories.

Clearly, Rosemary suffered in her later life from what some would categorise as a “borderline personality disorder”. She avoided talking to other people wherever possible, keeping any verbal or physical contact (including necessary communication with people in shops and on buses) to the absolute minimum, sometimes handing people notes because talking personally with almost anyone could push her into one of her black depressive states, as would any kind of stress or emotional upset. Sadly, she blocked attempts by concerned family members to offer help or to stay in touch with her, finding any such contact so emotionally overwhelming that she became terrified even of speaking a few words on the telephone, knowing this would set off another attack of ‘the Flood’.

But she adapted her life to this condition, managing practical arrangements in appropriate ways, and analysing everything that happened to her with intelligence and articulacy in the notebooks she kept, right through to her mid 80s, using these as a kind of self-therapy. Believing totally in the efficacy of what most other people would see only as signs or omens, she interpreted symbols and metaphors in quite literal terms. Her bouts of depression were caused by Satan and her thoughts at such times were not hers but ones he was putting into her head. She was married to the Lord and therefore couldn’t feel lonely; when she did so, or had other doubts or anxieties, this was Satan undermining her.

I’m not qualified to attempt a psychological reading of her condition, which seems to have evolved and become more complex over many years, but discussions I have had with three psychotherapists
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suggest that it must have been rooted in childhood separation and rejection trauma, and in never having had any sense of a strong, secure attachment to other people from birth, exacerbated by her mother’s death, her feelings of betrayal and rejection, her near blindness with prolonged sensory deprivation and isolation, and the other personal crises. Depression is often associated with rage which cannot be expressed, and having only one fragile parent – with her dead father experienced as an absence she could never fill herself – would have made anger unsafe for an insecure only
child. Anger is internalised, directed more inside the self, and the more that anger grows, the more frightening it becomes; and so is configured as a Satan or self-damaging voice inside as a way of containing it, as an inner world response to trauma.

Rosemary Tonks’s own analysis of Colette’s personal crisis is apposite here: ‘The shock to her ego was more than it could bear; there was nothing inside capable of withstanding the blow, her personality was fragmented, and she collapsed into a nervous breakdown’ (p.131). This reads almost like a textbook description of trauma, very like the one which Freud gives in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
: when our ‘protective shield’ is shattered, it leads to fragmentation.

Her belief in God served as another kind of protective shield. Everything could be explained and made safe with the Lord protecting her from Satan. Unfortunately, her extraordinary literary talent was the great casualty in this scheme. ‘I couldn’t read a book now, it wouldn’t have meaning for me,’ she noted in 1999:

But all this takes nothing away from the brilliance and originality of the regrettably small body of poetry she wrote as Rosemary Tonks in her 20s and 30s, before she was overwhelmed by events and changes in her life (and in her being) outside her control.

After undergoing what was by design and effect a complete change in her identity, Rosemary Lightband, as she became, rejected not just her own books, but
all
books apart from the Bible (the Koran along with sacred texts from other faiths all served false gods and were anathema to her).

When Rosemary Lightband visited libraries – which remained favourite haunts, along with cafés – it was to read Scripture, preferably from the Tyndale Bible, the first English translation, if they had it, or if not then from later King James Bible which drew on
Tyndale. More modern Bibles were travesties of the Word.

Contrary to what everyone who had known her believed, Rosemary was not a recluse. During the early 1980s she ‘began to search for a church bicycling across England’. And just as in her London years, she continued to inhabit cafés and parks, and was active as a silent, often solitary evangelist working outside any church, giving out Bibles around Bournemouth and in London. Ordering Bibles in different languages from the Trinitarian Bible Society, she made numerous trips on Saturdays or Sundays to Speakers’ Corner in London to give these to potential converts, from the mid 1990s until August 2012, by which time the travel and effort involved had become too much for her.

Every summer she reviewed the investment income she lived off, and made sure she had donated exactly ten per cent of her earnings from the previous tax year to charities. On 30 May 2012, she noted: ‘Spent all day doing sums re my Income & my tithing: I love tithing, it makes me happy. Then ran down to Barclays in the sunshine, & got in just in time. Bank closes at 5pm.’
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She mellowed in her more peaceful later years, and is said to have been popular with staff at the Piccadilly Hotel just round the corner from her house, where she went to have Christmas dinner every year on her own. She even made one friend there, who remembers her as kind, happy and always laughing. In April 2012 she decided she ‘must do something about being so cut off from people’,
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and started attending Open Air Mission meetings in Bournemouth on Saturdays, even having tea in cafés with some of the Christians she met there and rather reluctantly attending a few of their church services.

Finally, in November 2012, she wrote to the cousin she had cut off years earlier to apologise: ‘I was boxed up, under the most
frightful
,
frightful
mental
pressure
. I was
not
myself
. All my decisions were wrong, inhuman, appalling. Give me time, please, I long to explain it to you.’
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But no such opportunity was to arise.

In February 2013 she spent several days in hospital, moving into temporary accommodation in the Piccadilly Hotel on being
discharged, from where she wrote two further letters to the cousin, but only about her difficulties and immediate plans. Her failing health had made it impossible for her to continue to live alone at Old Forest Lodge, which she sold in May 2013, downsizing to a serviced garden flat not far from her old house after selling, giving away or destroying most of her possessions.

She had only been there for four months when she was again taken to hospital by ambulance, having collapsed with exhaustion, caused by ovarian cancer. After three weeks of treatment, she was taken to a nursing home: ‘Horrors!! All the residents either demented or on the way to it. Staff very nice. Was absolutely terrified & lost. Decided I must leave at once. That very day. They wanted me to stay overnight. No. Must leave at once. […] called a taxi & I came post haste back to the flat. Loved it! Slept all night!!’
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She spent the last three months of 2013 back in her flat, but much of January 2014 in hospital, and then had a few more weeks at home before she had to be taken to a different nursing home. She died on 15 April 2014 and was buried two weeks later in her mother’s grave at the Church of St Thomas à Becket, Warblington, Hampshire, without a funeral or any ceremony, in line with her wishes: the body was only a vessel for the spirit. She left instructions that the inscription on her headstone should read: ‘Rosemary Desmond Boswell Lightband’.

The list of treasures recorded in ‘The burning of the idols’ could have graced a Sothebys catalogue. This was a collection of works created by devout artists from other faiths assembled by a knowledgeable collector who loved the art of ancient China and other cultures, all given to Rosemary Tonks on trust. Reading through this account, line by line, felt like the antithesis of Edmund de Waal’s redeeming tale
The Hare with the Amber Eyes
, in which a family history is brought to life through the netsuke figures passed on from one generation to the next through times of war, devastation and great personal loss.

The treasures passed on to Rosemary Tonks from her aunt are lost forever. The one great gift she has left us – her books of poetry
used to survive only in the libraries of collectors. Commenting on this situation in the aftermath of her death, Oliver Kamm wrote in
The Times
: