Dad had always been a true botanist, with a disinterested fascination for the workings of nature. He did all the gardening proper, but he regarded the garden as a laboratory as much as a showpiece. Mum’s attitude to the plant kingdom was different. She was a kitchen alchemist with no real interest beyond her herb garden.
Usually when people told me I was going to like something, I decided on principle to hate it to bits. This time, though, Mum and Mrs Pavey had got my number. If anything though, the phrase ‘right up your street’ understated things. Gardening for Adventure was so far up my street it had its tongue through my letterbox.
Inactive in bed between my linen sheets, their chaste rustling an audible mark of caste privilege, I was like some winter bulb, dimly thriving, from which little overt growth could be expected. No wonder my mind was attuned to the vegetable kingdom. I was almost part of it.
The introduction to Gardening for Adventure got things off to a flying start. It ended, ‘By growing the plants described in this book I think you will find that gardening can be an adventure – even if the realisation only comes in a police cell after you have been arrested for the possession of opium or Indian hemp.’
I couldn’t see what could possibly be so wrong about growing this plant, particularly when the author had explained so carefully how he tended his. On the other hand, I found the idea of sitting in a police cell strangely attractive. When I had been on Ward Two of CRX I had been terrified of moving up to Ward Three, and now I was there I found it wasn’t so bad. I was sure I could handle police custody and even prison if it came to that. I was used to institutions – hospitals and schools – and was sure I could turn it all into a game until I had collected the whole set.
There was even a picture of Cannabis sativa on the front cover of the book. Combined with the assertion on the back cover that all the illustrations in the book were taken by the author of plants he had grown himself, this seemed splendidly defiant – a gentlemanly way of drawling COME AND GET ME, COPPER!
Mr Menage certainly showed more knowledge of the plant than was common at the time. The leaves can be made into cigarettes known to the underworld as ‘reefers’ and hashish is prepared from the exuded resin. Other names given to the plant are bhang which consists of selected dried leaves and twigs, and ganjah (or gunjah) which is the flowering tops.
About opium he was similarly open-minded (‘Many experts state that opium smoking is in fact little more harmful than tobacco smoking – in spite of publicity given to the contrary’). His description of the methods of preparing it for smoking could almost be mistaken for instructions (‘It is then placed in the orifice of a special pipe which is puffed four or five times’). Specifying the number of puffs suggested a knowledge more than academic. OVER HERE, FLATFOOT! CRIMINAL MASTERMIND STICKING OUT HIS TONGUE!
I was excited by the possibility of invisible transgression in the allotment, civil disobedience in the rockery. I longed for a criminal record more than anything, while knowing that disability squelched any real possibility of going to the bad.
It was an annoying logic, but I couldn’t see any way out of it: I needed to be good in order to deserve to be looked after, but however good I was I would never be as good as the people who looked after me, since they were being ‘selfless’ and giving up part of their lives to make mine possible. I wanted to be ‘selfless’ myself, but perhaps I already meant something different by that word.
I was still indefatigably asking the question ‘Who am I?’, but not getting very far at this stage. I didn’t know whether I should feel special or not special at all, part of the broad sweep of humanity or only an afterthought, a slip of the creator’s tongue.
‘Handicap’ was the polite word then, not ‘disability’. I had ‘a handicap’, and so did our neighbour Arthur Foot, but that was only to do with golf. I knew that the word meant a different thing used in that way, but the co-incidence was still rather tempting. It set off new thoughts Arthur had a handicap because he was so good at golf, and a way had to be found for him to play with other people and not beat them every time. Otherwise everyone would soon become bored. And perhaps I was handicapped for the same general reason, to give other people a chance. I could manage to feel worthless fairly often, but the more desirable state of humility seemed to be beyond me.
A stink bomb come to life
There were plenty of other surprises in Menage’s book. Mimosa pudica folded up when you touched it or blew on it hard – I suppose the name meant that it was embarrassed, somehow – but it didn’t react to rain, whether a shower or a downpour. It could discriminate between stimuli. It ‘knew’ the difference.
Desmodium gyrans, the Indian Telegraph plant, had leaves which moved round and round whenever the temperature rose above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The movement was very rapid in plant terms, easily visible. The hotter it got the faster they moved. They twirled and twirled until they dropped off, presumably from the equivalent (in the vegetable kingdom) of metal fatigue.
I learned the finer points of parasitism. There are plants which have photosynthetic leaves, like mistletoe, so that they don’t get all their nourishment from the host plant – hemiparasites – and there are holoparasites like the dodder we saw on the marshland by Abbotsbrook, with no ability to fend for themselves. There are even endoparasites, plants which live entirely inside the stems of the host, only manifesting themselves as a tiny bud opening into a diminutive flower. Rather like a pimple on your face suddenly turning into a carnation, a buttonhole worn rather too high up. I winced when I thought of that. My complexion was not at its best in those years. When no one was looking I’d sometimes try to burst my pimples with the point of a pencil. It’s not a technique I can really recommend, though it’s remarkably addictive.
Mr Menage also wrote about Sauromatum guttatum, otherwise known as Monarch of the East, and resolved an old dispute. Sauromatum was an old friend, though a bittersweet one who had produced a certain amount of conflict. I’d been given one of these bulbs when I was living in CRX, way back when Ward Two was still Ward One. Mr Mole was a porter who thought himself a gardening expert. He told me that it ate insects but I didn’t believe him. I knew and loved the carnivores, and this wasn’t on the list.
The great thing about Sauromatum guttatum is that it’s a powerful osmophore – that’s the scientific way of saying that it stinks to high heaven. What more could a boy want from a plant? Sauromatum was an Ellisdons Stink Bomb come to life. Look after it, keep it warm and it will flower. I waited for the big day, the day of pungent flowering. The girls on the ward duly cringed and coughed and said they needed clothes-pegs for their noses. I enjoyed watching them scream and giggle as they came closer to the source of the stink, then reeled away. The inflorescence only lasts a day or so. Then Sauromatum was put back on the windowsill and I forgot all about it. A day or two later Mr Mole took the shrivelled flower and casually prised it open. Inside there were two or three dead flies.
They proved nothing. Absolutely nothing! I hated Mr Mole for saying ‘Didn’t I tell you so?’, for imagining he’d proved his point and had won our duel of botanical expertise. Everyone thought I was in the wrong. It was almost physically painful to know that I was right. Mr Mole was hopelessly unscientific and just jumped to conclusions. When it came to Sauromata, he knew sod-all. He had no feeling for them, or he would have asked himself why a plant that – according to his theory – ate flies didn’t bother to digest them. It was agony to be dismissed by someone who knew less than I did.
Now, in the same hospital, I finally got the lowdown on Sauromatum guttatum. There it was plainly in Menage’s book: the plant attracted flies as pollinating agents, not as food. I felt vindicated but also mortified. There had never been any doubt in my mind that Sauromatum guttatum wasn’t a carnivorous plant. Now I had the evidence – and no one to show it to. I asked after Mr Mole with pretended fondness, but he’d been gone for years, no one knew where. I’m sorry to say that if I’d had a time machine at my
disposal at that moment, and only one return trip to make in it, I would probably have used it to turn up with a gardening book from the future, just for the satisfaction of proving Mr Mole wrong in front of witnesses. Of course on the return journey I would have found myself in an unrecognisable 1966, where with the refutation of Mole’s Fallacy all ignorance had withered away.
Sometimes Mum brought Peter along to visit me at CRX. Most teenagers sharing a bedroom with their older brother would see some advantage to having it to themselves, but Peter seemed not to think that way. He had never acquired the knack of consulting his own interests ahead of mine. He seemed to yawn all the time, partly with the exhaustion of healthy growth – he too was negotiating adolescence, in a way much more obvious than mine – but also because of his new schedule of early mornings.
We both wanted to grow up and find our own way in the world, but his path was clear. There was nothing to stop him from reaching escape velocity – he was practically on the launch pad already. During the holidays he was doing a paper round! He was earning already. Prepare for blast-off!
We both shared the enthusiasm of the time for outer space and exploration, though we had cried when Laika the dog, first creature in space, died in orbit, trapped in a metal box with none of the smells that she loved. I must have been seven at the time, and Peter five or six. We couldn’t understand why no one else was upset – but then we hadn’t realised that there had never been a plan to bring her back. Death was part of her mission, as it is of ours.
A thwarting engine
Fired by my reading, I wanted Dad to put up a greenhouse next to the house, so that I could raise specimens of Drosophyllum lusitanicum in there. The Portuguese Sundew. One of the few carnivores that likes dry conditions, temperamental, a real challenge. Dad wanted a greenhouse too, but Mum wasn’t too keen. Could I mould them both to my sovereign will? It didn’t seem likely, since they never seemed to agree about anything. Deadlock was inevitable unless I used subtle strategy.
Dad wasn’t easy to handle, even when you and he wanted the same thing. He was less a person in any conventional sense than a sort of thwarting engine. He was strongly counter-suggestible. If there was something anyone wanted, then his reflex was to rule it out, and he found it much easier to come up with reasons against than to wonder why he was so opposed to it in the first place.
It was a curious piece of psychological wiring. If you made any sort of claim on him, he would smack you down. But if you built a wall against him, as Peter and I were busy doing, then a helpless fondness would show through the chinks of it.
For weeks the McKee pin installed at such expense of pain seemed to be a dud. My left hip had no more than a little grudging movement, like a hinge so rusty that nobody can get at it with the oil can. Then I suppose the endless physiotherapy, although painful as well as boring, built the muscle up sufficiently for me to notice the difference. My new mechanical hip changed its tune, starting to make murmurs of competence. It responded, after a fashion, to instructions. It fell into line. I began to be able to sit approximately, not as most of the world sits but to half-sit at a jaunty sideways angle. Sitting with a bit of leaning built into it. This was a welcome change.
Walking was also mildly transformed. I needed a stick to help my balance, but as long as I had that I could get about fairly smartly. Still at a snail’s pace, but a limber, youthful snail, impatient to find what was round the corner.
To beguile the tedium of healing the Platonic Librarian of Bourne End worked hard on my behalf. She cast her net widely. Mum had been filling Mrs Pavey in about my foibles and fascinations. She must have mentioned my interest in the occult and mystical, and so various books came along that were attuned to those vibrations. I remember Psychic Self-Defence by Dion Fortune, which made me want to join some sort of esoteric Order. But how to find one, and how to know it was the right one? Through Mum I ordered a monthly journal called Prediction from the stationer’s in Bourne End and pored over the cryptic small advertisements. Of course the occult wave-lengths are jammed with trash. I needed the equivalent of Mum’s indispensable consumer guide to pick and choose among the hundreds on offer, a sort of Which Cult? The desire to retreat from the world was fierce in me, perhaps because the world seemed to care so little whether I was in it or not. It was the same they’ll-miss-me-when-I’m-gone motivation as lay behind my ‘suicide attempt’ at school.
Mrs Pavey also unearthed books on astral projection and the Tarot. I read the astral projection one first. Hardly surprising that I was drawn to an occult practice that promises so much. I needed no convincing that the physical body was a rubbishy contraption, hopelessly inefficient and outmoded. The book gave instructions for travel in another dimension, no ticket required.
Autofellation
You needed neither driving licence nor working hips. All you needed was ‘a dream of knowledge’ – a lucid dream, to wit a dream in which you knew you were dreaming. I had plenty of those. It’s just that I was accustomed to using them in a rather vulgar way. It turned out I was already an old hand at astral projection, I just didn’t project myself very far. To be exact, I projected myself just far enough away from the physical body to get astral cock into astral mouth. Autofellation. On the astral plane I turned out to be remarkably limber. In lucid dreams I became Ouroboros, mystical worm swallowing its own tail. If my tail was good enough for Luke Squires at Vulcan School it was good enough for me. It had never occurred to me before I read the book from Mrs Pavey’s library that I could use the same technique to leave the room.
Now, armed with new knowledge, I was ready for some proper exploring. I learned to drift away from the physical envelope through the escape hatch of a dream of knowledge. One night I found myself in a sort of astral maze, opening doors which just led to grey corridors full of other doors, which led to more of the same. An esoteric labyrinth from which there seemed to be no exit, a dreadful place.
Another time I made better progress. I remember leaving the body and venturing forth into the æther. The night sky received me warmly. I looked back, and I could see myself sleeping. The book said I would see a glowing cord linking the astral body and the gross bundle back in the bed, a sort of mystical umbilical, but there was no sign of anything like that. I was untethered. I was a kite without a string. Undeterred I started off into the welcoming void, waiting to feel the astral breeze on my face, to gaze on the placid features of eternity, when suddenly I had a rush of panic. It wasn’t a feeling that seemed to belong to me but (of course) a disembodied panic. Then I had the sensation of returning, actually twanging back to the physical plane with great force. There was an almost audible snapping of the spiritual elastic. I woke up with a start, re-identified with the gross, inefficient, outmoded body. This wasn’t an outcome foreseen by the book I was using as my guide. I took it seriously. There had been no umbilical cord! I had gone exploring on the cliffs of the infinite without being safely attached to base camp. If I had ventured any further I might never have been able to get back.
From then on I stayed put in my sleep. The dream of knowledge seemed to be an unreliable contraption, as much an ejector seat as a gateway to mystical experience. Soon I stopped having the dreams of knowledge, as if I had closed the door on them myself. I was missing an important clue. What I was being offered was something subtler than an escape from this uncoöperative body.
The dream of knowledge, the dream in which you know you’re dreaming, is a microcosm or a metaphor. If it’s possible to be dreaming but also to know it, then it is possible in ‘waking life’ to be aware of life’s illusory nature. The technical term for illusion being Maya. The guru, the adept, the – as he’s called – jñani dreams as much as anyone else, but he (or she, though really neither he nor she, since gender is only another of Maya’s little notions) always knows he’s dreaming. He’s awake in his sleep, and in his waking hours he sees through the illusions of life.
I had much more joy from the other book, The Tarot by Mouni Sadhu. The
book’s subtitle was ‘A Contemporary Course of the Quintessence of Hermetic Occultism’, which was a mystical thunderbolt in itself. I also loved the epigraph, frustratingly unassigned to a source: Peu de science éloigne de Dieu / Beaucoup de science y ramène. A little know ledge estranges one from God – great knowledge brings one back into the fold. The moment I read it I recognised this as my own motto. Since then I’ve seen it ascribed to both Pasteur and Francis Bacon.
My mind salivated when it read the description of the Tarot on the first page of the Introduction as ‘a truly philosophical machine’. I read the book all the way to the end, not wanting to admit to myself that I was completely baffled and bogged down. Privilege Teth: the Adept is in command of the universal therapeutics. This means, that he possesses the art of the absolute criticism (in the mental plane), the art of disinvultuation in the astral, and the use of medical magnetism on the physical plane. 500-odd pages in that vein. It certainly wasn’t plane sailing, on any plane I knew.
Even so I was bewitched, partly by the author’s name, and would say it over and over again under my breath. Mouni Sadhu Mouni Sadhu. It became a sort of mantra, but it worked the wrong way round, stirring up my thoughts instead of dissipating them. I’m rather embarrassed by the book now, but at the time it nourished me with dark hints and cryptic formulas. I had to crawl through a thicket of obscurities before I could emerge from the gloom and see daylight for the first time.
Gardening for Adventure was partly responsible. Thanks to R. H. Menage I now saw the vegetable kingdom as a place of instructive freakishness, paradox and transgression. His book was a sort of botanical Apocrypha, even a Kabbala. Plants set traps to hunt meat, they fanned themselves when they got hot (Desmodium), they brewed deep inside their own tissues the liquors of enlightenment (Lophophora willamsii). It turned out that nature didn’t bother much with the Laws of Nature, as we so confidently formulated them on her behalf. And that was the part of nature I felt part of, mercury-nature, pumice-nature, platypus-nature, where a metal could be a liquid, a stone could float and a mammal lay eggs.
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