Who are we, and who are we to become? Questions I have asked since I remember questioning, but where I believe I now know the answers. I know who I am and am not and I know that I am going to die, although I do not know when. That feels like the answer to the meaning of life, and the universe, in the Hitch Hikers guide, where the answer was in the question and the question was six times seven. The earth had been obliterated to make a super space highway after being created by mice, who then ordered another to be made, and where if you wished you could travel to the future and watch the end of the universe from a restaurant. Somehow in such a context my questions about my origins seemed irrelevant.
I used to believe I had better cause than most for seeking answers. Most children subsequently encountered as adults, asked their parents, a grandparent, or their friends. I was afraid to ask, because I feared that I would not like the answers. These days most children quickly learn the facts of life, long before they learn who Father Christmas is. Most parents begin the process of explaining from the moment of being asked the question, or taking the initiative when a new pregnancy begins. My childhood was weird and abnormal. I lived in the house of a then standard family, a mother, a father, and children, but I was aware from the earliest of memories that I was not part of this family.
I lived separately in this household, with five sisters who I knew as aunts, although we shared kitchen, toilet and bathroom facilities with the sixth sister and her family. Our room arrangements changed after two of the sisters died. One room was just used as a bedroom, in which I slept at one end of a double bed with an aunt, who provided mothering of a kind, while my mother, who I then knew as an aunt, slept at the other end with the eldest of the sisters, who was twenty years older than the youngest, and another who was deaf, dumb, blind and became immobile. It was a great puzzle to me who I was and how and why I was there. I would think of various possibilities, which as I became an adult, changed from being another Jesus or love child of a prince, to the father whose identity was perhaps unknown, or who was known but it was considered best that I never knew. It never occurred that he was a minor prince of the Catholic Church.
At one point a medical book was produced for me which was the only attempt made to explain the biology and physiology, and which I have to say I did not understand. Do I now?
I was actively discouraged from making friends when I went to school because it was explained at the earliest of ages that my existence had to be kept secret. So I did not ask friends.
When relatives arrived at the house I was kept in a bedroom and told to make no noise for what was hours and seemed an eternity of questioning. My isolation and sense of being different was reinforced. What had I done that had been so bad, except for being born?
I was about five when I learnt which sister was my mother and was disappointed. She seemed such a cold, withdrawn, serious to point of being severe person, towards me. Later, when I was an adolescent, I was told who my father was, and because there had been events that made this credible, I half accepted for next forty five years or so. The specifics affect others and their descendents and in any event they were not true.
I came to be told the truth from the best of my intentions. I had always hoped that my mother would be able to talk to me about us, but she never did, and used the oldest of the sisters, and the aunt who provided mothering, to provide information which I suspect was always discussed beforehand between them in Gibraltarian Spanish which was not taught to me, but where over my childhood I picked up a sense of what was being said, until I came to be able to understand parts of conversations in my adolescence. Later when I had a very busy and interesting life with a family, it did not matter. I had also learnt that my kind of situation was far from unique and then there were all those children who never got the chance to live at all, hunger, disease, war, and abortion? What did I really have to complain about?
However when it was evident that my mother was losing her memory, and becoming hostile and disturbed, I felt I ought to give her and me the opportunity. The answering explained everything, especially when I discovered something about his subsequent role in the church. My situation would have changed if my mother had married, or my aunt, as it was also planned for me to go with her as a package deal. In the event my route to knowledge and to empathy with them and everyone was different just as weird as my childhood, although in reflection there were aspects which were predictable, although not inevitable. Nothing is written as Omar Sheriff said to Lawrence of Arabia or was it the other way round!
Everyone can break out or away, although it will always be different from what you anticipate or hope for. I have also occasionally come across balanced, intelligent, creative and caring adults whose have described the kind of childhoods which everyone ought to have. They were treated as separate, adults in the making, they had a mother who always supported and encouraged and father who gave them of his time and interest. It is possible for a child to bond with its father almost as closely as with its mother, but nothing can replicate the mother's relationship with a child she has carried and given physical birth too, but the implications for the child will vary from brilliant to horrendous.
Such children were encouraged to understand themselves and the world and to explore and develop their innate and acquired spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional abilities to their maximum potential. Sometimes they came from modest households whose parents provided an appropriate shelter from which their children could develop and become independent, having trusting and meaningful relationships with others, and if they were lucky set up home for life with someone and produce another generation of responsible, balanced and caring people. I say lucky because when it comes fancying and wanting another human being all the good upbringing in the world cannot guarantee finding the right unity for you, or having found it, being able to keep it, when disease, an accident, a war or a senselessness act can terminate what you have in an instant.
I remember a fellow student at the adult education college, returning from an interview for a place at one of the great Oxford colleges, having had a strawberries with cream tea on the lawn with his prospective tutor, and with the college organ playing in the background. He was so thrilled about being given the opportunity, having had a hard life which included working in the pit, in a steelworks and serving his country as a marine. Did either of us envy those beautiful young people of wealth and breeding who had been given Brideshead fast track tickets, of course we did, and would we have exchanged their upbringing for ours, of course we would, until of course we got to know some of them, and became educated about life, and then of course we were so glad that we were who we were and had been?
It is those who are never given the opportunity who should be the focus of politicians and the rest of us who have been freed from whatever it is that imprisons, freed to then become and do what we wish, but with responsibility, care and love. But this does not mean that all voids will be filled by the love of others and through the experience of being what we want, remembering always that the Gods also punish by giving what people ask for.
One of the greatest gifts to children can be grandparents, although I have known situations where great harm was caused by them, so it is difficult to make such general statements. But grandparents are more than living histories, they can fill voids created by parents preoccupied with their own lives and problems, and sometimes act as peace makers, or buffers when relationships between parents and children become strained. How many young people might have avoided the experience of being on the street if there was a gran or grand dad willing to give refuge and asylum?
I have rushed these words arising from recent communications with friends, before making breakfast, washing up from yesterday and continuing to make a celebration volume of photos and words to mark the 100th birthday of my mother.
Her mother and father, my grandparents, who both died before I was born, together with the eldest sister, previously mentioned, and other sisters and brothers, were alive to experience New Years Eve 1899, when Queen Victoria, then the longest serving British Monarch, was coming to the end of her reign. My mother and two of her sisters were alive to witness New Years Eve 1999, and saw in the start of the third millennium since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. It is something to regret that I never knew my maternal grand parents, who may have told me about their father who left the town of Calne in Wiltshire as a young man to join the British Army and then travelled across the world and whose who parents had married before Victoria became Queen. And oh to have known my father and his brothers who were of a generation older than my mother, and whose grandparents were active before the industrial revolution.
But I do not regret any of my experience, the pain and living with my mistakes and sin. I only regret that my time for further experience draws to an end, and with what seems increasing rapidity, and I will not be able to share in the adventure of the era of the electronic revolution and the world of Myspace indefinitely.
I have been lucky, with lots of guardian angels providing the support and understanding of the parents and grand parents who went missing. There are those who believe that the spirits of ancestors live on and are there to be called upon. The Native Americans left the lifeless bodies of their relatives ground to facilitate the release of souls. It is not unknown for me to talk things over with them, or seek their opinion, although I try and avoid doing so out loud when driving these days less someone thinks I am on the phone. My Space is also great because it is another means of talking, and I had had a great chat with Lord Bertrand Russell the other day and with Frida Kathlo, although it is a little scary when they contact back.
I used to believe I had better cause than most for seeking answers. Most children subsequently encountered as adults, asked their parents, a grandparent, or their friends. I was afraid to ask, because I feared that I would not like the answers. These days most children quickly learn the facts of life, long before they learn who Father Christmas is. Most parents begin the process of explaining from the moment of being asked the question, or taking the initiative when a new pregnancy begins. My childhood was weird and abnormal. I lived in the house of a then standard family, a mother, a father, and children, but I was aware from the earliest of memories that I was not part of this family.
I lived separately in this household, with five sisters who I knew as aunts, although we shared kitchen, toilet and bathroom facilities with the sixth sister and her family. Our room arrangements changed after two of the sisters died. One room was just used as a bedroom, in which I slept at one end of a double bed with an aunt, who provided mothering of a kind, while my mother, who I then knew as an aunt, slept at the other end with the eldest of the sisters, who was twenty years older than the youngest, and another who was deaf, dumb, blind and became immobile. It was a great puzzle to me who I was and how and why I was there. I would think of various possibilities, which as I became an adult, changed from being another Jesus or love child of a prince, to the father whose identity was perhaps unknown, or who was known but it was considered best that I never knew. It never occurred that he was a minor prince of the Catholic Church.
At one point a medical book was produced for me which was the only attempt made to explain the biology and physiology, and which I have to say I did not understand. Do I now?
I was actively discouraged from making friends when I went to school because it was explained at the earliest of ages that my existence had to be kept secret. So I did not ask friends.
When relatives arrived at the house I was kept in a bedroom and told to make no noise for what was hours and seemed an eternity of questioning. My isolation and sense of being different was reinforced. What had I done that had been so bad, except for being born?
I was about five when I learnt which sister was my mother and was disappointed. She seemed such a cold, withdrawn, serious to point of being severe person, towards me. Later, when I was an adolescent, I was told who my father was, and because there had been events that made this credible, I half accepted for next forty five years or so. The specifics affect others and their descendents and in any event they were not true.
I came to be told the truth from the best of my intentions. I had always hoped that my mother would be able to talk to me about us, but she never did, and used the oldest of the sisters, and the aunt who provided mothering, to provide information which I suspect was always discussed beforehand between them in Gibraltarian Spanish which was not taught to me, but where over my childhood I picked up a sense of what was being said, until I came to be able to understand parts of conversations in my adolescence. Later when I had a very busy and interesting life with a family, it did not matter. I had also learnt that my kind of situation was far from unique and then there were all those children who never got the chance to live at all, hunger, disease, war, and abortion? What did I really have to complain about?
However when it was evident that my mother was losing her memory, and becoming hostile and disturbed, I felt I ought to give her and me the opportunity. The answering explained everything, especially when I discovered something about his subsequent role in the church. My situation would have changed if my mother had married, or my aunt, as it was also planned for me to go with her as a package deal. In the event my route to knowledge and to empathy with them and everyone was different just as weird as my childhood, although in reflection there were aspects which were predictable, although not inevitable. Nothing is written as Omar Sheriff said to Lawrence of Arabia or was it the other way round!
Everyone can break out or away, although it will always be different from what you anticipate or hope for. I have also occasionally come across balanced, intelligent, creative and caring adults whose have described the kind of childhoods which everyone ought to have. They were treated as separate, adults in the making, they had a mother who always supported and encouraged and father who gave them of his time and interest. It is possible for a child to bond with its father almost as closely as with its mother, but nothing can replicate the mother's relationship with a child she has carried and given physical birth too, but the implications for the child will vary from brilliant to horrendous.
Such children were encouraged to understand themselves and the world and to explore and develop their innate and acquired spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional abilities to their maximum potential. Sometimes they came from modest households whose parents provided an appropriate shelter from which their children could develop and become independent, having trusting and meaningful relationships with others, and if they were lucky set up home for life with someone and produce another generation of responsible, balanced and caring people. I say lucky because when it comes fancying and wanting another human being all the good upbringing in the world cannot guarantee finding the right unity for you, or having found it, being able to keep it, when disease, an accident, a war or a senselessness act can terminate what you have in an instant.
I remember a fellow student at the adult education college, returning from an interview for a place at one of the great Oxford colleges, having had a strawberries with cream tea on the lawn with his prospective tutor, and with the college organ playing in the background. He was so thrilled about being given the opportunity, having had a hard life which included working in the pit, in a steelworks and serving his country as a marine. Did either of us envy those beautiful young people of wealth and breeding who had been given Brideshead fast track tickets, of course we did, and would we have exchanged their upbringing for ours, of course we would, until of course we got to know some of them, and became educated about life, and then of course we were so glad that we were who we were and had been?
It is those who are never given the opportunity who should be the focus of politicians and the rest of us who have been freed from whatever it is that imprisons, freed to then become and do what we wish, but with responsibility, care and love. But this does not mean that all voids will be filled by the love of others and through the experience of being what we want, remembering always that the Gods also punish by giving what people ask for.
One of the greatest gifts to children can be grandparents, although I have known situations where great harm was caused by them, so it is difficult to make such general statements. But grandparents are more than living histories, they can fill voids created by parents preoccupied with their own lives and problems, and sometimes act as peace makers, or buffers when relationships between parents and children become strained. How many young people might have avoided the experience of being on the street if there was a gran or grand dad willing to give refuge and asylum?
I have rushed these words arising from recent communications with friends, before making breakfast, washing up from yesterday and continuing to make a celebration volume of photos and words to mark the 100th birthday of my mother.
Her mother and father, my grandparents, who both died before I was born, together with the eldest sister, previously mentioned, and other sisters and brothers, were alive to experience New Years Eve 1899, when Queen Victoria, then the longest serving British Monarch, was coming to the end of her reign. My mother and two of her sisters were alive to witness New Years Eve 1999, and saw in the start of the third millennium since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. It is something to regret that I never knew my maternal grand parents, who may have told me about their father who left the town of Calne in Wiltshire as a young man to join the British Army and then travelled across the world and whose who parents had married before Victoria became Queen. And oh to have known my father and his brothers who were of a generation older than my mother, and whose grandparents were active before the industrial revolution.
But I do not regret any of my experience, the pain and living with my mistakes and sin. I only regret that my time for further experience draws to an end, and with what seems increasing rapidity, and I will not be able to share in the adventure of the era of the electronic revolution and the world of Myspace indefinitely.
I have been lucky, with lots of guardian angels providing the support and understanding of the parents and grand parents who went missing. There are those who believe that the spirits of ancestors live on and are there to be called upon. The Native Americans left the lifeless bodies of their relatives ground to facilitate the release of souls. It is not unknown for me to talk things over with them, or seek their opinion, although I try and avoid doing so out loud when driving these days less someone thinks I am on the phone. My Space is also great because it is another means of talking, and I had had a great chat with Lord Bertrand Russell the other day and with Frida Kathlo, although it is a little scary when they contact back.
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