Cedilla (38 page)

There’s nothing in modern life which remotely resembles meditation, except possibly making mayonnaise by hand. If you have the patient alertness to add the olive oil drop by drop in the early stages, you’ll probably get the knack of meditation quite quickly. Admittedly making mayonnaise was a two-person job as far as Mum and I were concerned – she did the beating and I concentrated on precisely that aspect of the process, regulating the thin dribble of oil. I really wanted to make mayonnaise out of fascination with the scientific aspect (behaviour of emulsions). Mum asked what was wrong with Heinz salad cream, and I had to say, nothing much. On the basis of
his tomato ketchup, his baked beans and his salad cream, Mr Heinz didn’t miss a trick.

With a little effort you could see meditation as an exercise in spiritual emulsification, suspending the ego in tiny dispersed globules. There’s licence for such flights of fancy in the Hinduism I follow, and plenty of precedent in my guru’s poems and conversation. In 1914 or so he wrote ‘Song of the Poppadum’. What could be more down to earth? It goes like this:

How am I supposed to resist a guru who effortlessly combines such contrary literary forms – prayer and recipe? The answer is that I’m not. I had already enjoyed the idea in
The Satipatthana Sutta and Its
Application to Modern Life
that there was no special time and place that needed to be set aside for the contemplation of the non-illusory. Now I was mad for the idea that everyday life actually supplied the material for its own dismantling, so that you could be plunged into self-enquiry even while you were cooking up a batch of snacks. Everything around me was a potential trigger of enlightenment. It meant that I could lower my little bucket into the ocean of contiguous moments at any point, and be sure of bringing up a sample that would yield the whole.

Admittedly I did much better on the meditation front once I had a regular mantra, even if it was that old shop-bought standby (yes)
Om
Mane Padme Om
, the Mother’s-Pride-sliced-white-bread of mantras. You never lose your fondness for your first mantra, in the same way that you’re always tender towards the car that let you learn to drive.

If I needed formal proof of the unreality of time, I would only need to think of the year I spent at High Wycombe Technical College after Burnham, a period which seemed purgatorial and endless but left remarkably little trace. For times that came before and after my mind is well armoured with the illusion of recall, but for that year the memory gun fires blanks. I nosed my way forward, studious mole, along the blind tunnel of language acquisition. I didn’t explore High Wycombe or make friends, in or out of college. It’s possible that I wasn’t interested in social life, that I was saving myself, socially, for
Cambridge, but I can’t imagine I would have put up much of a fight against overtures. I certainly wasn’t actively saving my virginity (assuming I had left Vulcan with that strange virtue intact), but still it lingered like a fog. There were no takers.

The ‘Tech’ had a strong vocational aspect. Many of my fellow students were doing something called Business Studies, which meant less than nothing to me. I was only a part-time student, turning up for a couple of lessons a week. I spent a lot of my time reading, not just for my course, but various arcane treasures unearthed by Mrs Pavey. I read Arthur Osborne’s
The Incredible Sai Baba
with fascination, but also relief that I had established a rapport with Ramana Maharshi before I could be tempted by such a tremendous spiritual showman. Sai Baba’s miracles were full of slyness and misdirection – he slept, for instance, on a plank intricately suspended by ropes. No one ever saw him climb onto it, though plenty saw him lying there. It seems to have been levitation with a few teasing strings attached. Sai Baba’s principle was that he would give people what they wanted, in the hope that they would gradually develop a hunger for what he wanted to give. One day he went to fill a jar with oil for his lamps, but was given water instead by a mischievous tradesman who followed him home to see what happened. What happened was that Sai Baba filled his oil lamps with the water he had been given, and they burned very merrily indeed. Ramana Maharshi’s miracles, on the other hand, were so discreet that they hardly stood out against the natural order. They made no attempt to impress. I prefer the lighter touch, the low-key miracle.

Mrs Adcock was a neighbour of ours, though a much closer one of Jon Pertwee’s. She lived in a substantial riverside house – in its basement, rather perversely, which meant that she spent her days and nights below the water level of our Thames tributary, the ‘brook’ of Abbotsbrook. When it rained in winter the brook rose even higher, and Mrs Adcock would get flooded. Sometimes the water seeped in at its leisure, sometimes it broke its banks and washed her out. Rescuing her was a winter ritual for the local services, who must have found
it irritating since there was nothing to stop her living on the ground floor if she had wanted to, or even on a higher level. Nobody else was in residence, but everything was kept in readiness in case her son Clive ever wanted to come to stay, which he hardly ever did.

Dad described her as a witch, but I think she was more of an elderly water-sprite, an ageing Undine, perhaps not of pure descent or she would have welcomed the seasonal floods which made her phone so disconsolately for rescue.

The first communication between our households (it must have been in the late 1950s) took the form of a plague of wasps. One summer while I was away at CRX a wasps’ nest had been found in the garden of Trees and Mum had been frantic about getting rid of it before I got home. I think Dad smoked them out, but Mum was terrified of vengeful survivors. She filled my mind with fear about what would happen if I was stung by even a single wasp, and hundreds might be waiting in ambush. I remember, though, that Peter had been stung a couple of times, and no great fuss was made about that. For some reason it wasn’t the same thing at all.

Mum made enquiries, and found that Mrs Adcock (‘that woman’) had had the wasps first. Her way of tackling the infestation struck Mum as even more sinister than the wasps themselves. Mrs Adcock had taken household rags and pieces of cloth, soaked them in cyanide, and hung them round the house, much as she might have hung out her washing. As far as Mum was concerned, there was a cyanide breeze blowing through Bourne End that summer. She would sniff the air for traces of the bitter-almond odour we knew from Agatha Christie mysteries.

If Mrs Adcock had known she was already a convicted poisoner (if only in the kangaroo court of Mum’s prejudices) she would hardly have sent food over from her kitchen, out of the kindness of her neighbourly heart. Clearly she loved cooking, and didn’t allow living alone to deter her from catering on a grand scale. Usually she sent cakes, covered with a variety of unearthly icings. Green was her favourite colour, purple the runner-up. Perhaps she was colour-blind? Her icings were phosphorescent and alarming.

I didn’t need much prompting from Mum not to eat these offerings – but she insisted I must write a note thanking her and saying it was
very nice, which I did. Consequently cakes and dainties continued to issue from the Adcock kitchen in a lurid procession, until it was a real problem finding any sort of home for them. Then Mum had a brainwave. I should say I was giving up cakes for Lent, and that everybody else in the family was going along with the fast. It wouldn’t be fair to sit around eating delicious things in front of someone who was abstaining for religious reasons. That bought us a reprieve of forty days and forty nights, at any rate.

Mum tried to put me off Mrs Adcock by telling me that she was not only a vegetarian but an atheist. I certainly found this a strange combination. My visceral dislike of meat seemed to be part of a reverence for life, and I didn’t understand how you could revere something which just happened and had no deeper meaning. I cross-examined Mum about this atheism business. Under pressure she admitted that Mrs Adcock might actually be an agnostic. It took me quite a while to understand the difference. God was so very real to me, that I grew up thinking it was the same for everybody else. God didn’t say anything, and He couldn’t be tricked into revealing his secrets, but he was real all right. When I tried to find out what this ‘I’ of mine was and where it came from, I came up against a brown, warmly pulsating wall, and hadn’t been able to go any further. And that seemed to be that. It wasn’t God’s job to get me behind the wall. It was mine.

I had managed not to notice that Mum had manias rather than a faith, and that Dad was only in the most token way a believer. I think of him now as a spoiled atheist as others are spoiled priests. He had no religious feeling, but the family tradition of ministry stifled any pleasure he might have taken in his unattached state.

Mum didn’t hesitate to present Mrs Adcock as a warning of the dangers of vegetarianism. The path that was laid with lentils and rice led to damp basements and estrangement from God.

Mum wasn’t always an effective psychologist when it came to her warnings. Mrs Adcock came to fascinate me. Despite the stories of rags dripping with cyanide and the poisonous purple cakes, I decided I would go and seek her out in her lair. Her part of the house was
down about half a dozen steps. Peter carried me down and then sat discreetly on the steps to wait. He didn’t want to come any closer than he had to.

She seemed to be expecting me, though she could have had no notice of my visit. It may be there was a certain amount of social spontaneity in Bourne End, just not at our address. The only neighbour I remember just calling by was Joy Payne, and she was known to be unstable – she had been locked up, she told us, for being too happy as well as not being happy enough. One winter Joy tapped on the window and handed our presents through, not wanting to bother us by ringing the doorbell. Unstable or not, the purity of Joy’s impulses showed everyone else up.

Mrs Adcock was certainly very old, but not decrepit. I couldn’t imagine her young, which I could normally manage, even with Granny. She must have been born old.

At that age I assumed that anyone who was uncertain about God would be in a constant state of terror, particularly as the grave came closer, but she didn’t look frightened. She made coffee for us, Nescafé made with all milk. We made a little small talk about schools and hospitals, and then I did my best to rattle her by saying, ‘I gather you don’t believe in God. What about death?’

‘What about it?’ she said, and now I was the one who was rattled.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you are rather …’

‘Old?’ she said.

‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘and …’

‘And you think that because I’m old I must be afraid of dying?’

‘Yes!’ I said. ‘That’s it …’

‘Well, so far I’ve asked all your questions for you. Am I expected to answer them as well? I’ve no intention of answering a single question more unless you have the courage to ask me directly. That will be a good lesson for you to learn …’

If I hadn’t cut my teeth on Granny, I would certainly have been shamed into silence. In the end I managed to articulate the question as directed. ‘Aren’t you afraid of death, Mrs Adcock?’

Mrs A looked straight at me. ‘Oh no!’ she said, breaking out into a heart-warming smile. ‘Why should I be? Life without death would be so dull!’

‘But what happens when we die?’

‘We’ll find out when the time comes. Do you really want to know in advance?’

‘Of course.’

‘There’s no “of course” about it. Are you one of those funny people who  turns to the end of a book and reads the last page first?’

‘No!’ I said, rather shocked by an idea that had never occurred to me, though of course such criminals exist.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘What’s the difference? If you were reading a really good story book, would you thank me for telling you how it all worked out in the end?’ I saw what she meant. She had a point and more than a point. Uniquely among the adults I knew, she had answered more of my questions than I’d been able to answer of hers.

After that I became a regular caller. Mrs Adcock showed me her portfolios of sketches. She had been quite an artist in her day, earning a living by doing drawings for fashion magazines and clothes catalogues. Sometimes we had coffee, and though sometimes we had tea she never made it in the samovar which she showed me as something she had ‘picked up on her travels’. I wanted her to start a little fire in it.