Chapter II: MOVING INTO AQUARIUS

I was born, in 1947, at the Alexandra Nursing Home, Maradana District, Colombo, Ceylon. My parents were Eurasians of mixed Sinhalese and European ancestry. The United States had dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and when at about the age of six I first heard of the event a great sense of fear entered into me. The world was a violent place and we all lived under the shadow of world war. My childhood had begun to break up. India had gained its independence the year I had been born and nationalism ran high through the entire sub-continent. Ceylon’s independence would follow in 1948.

Spiritually, my roots were Christian as well as Buddhist, ethnically Celtic and Norse as well as Dravidian — a heritage I did not begin to appreciate until I was in my ‘twenties. My first eleven years were spent on the island that had been known to the ancient Greeks — my father proudly told us — as Taprobane; to the Arabs, who came to trade there, as Serendib, and in our times Ceylon, the Pearl of the East. Lanka was to become my island in the sun and I an exile from a country of great beauty and sadness.

My father was a planter and managed the family estate. By the mid-‘fifties a series of ill-fated events forced him to retire. In 1956, the MEP (People’s United Front) rode into power on a ticket of fevered nationalism. Radio Ceylon had announced the victory and, on hearing it, I ran into an empty room to cry my heart out. Even though I was only nine years of age I knew somehow that it was the end of that life for my family and me.

“We will confiscate the land from the Eurasians and put them to work in the fields,” threatened their populist leader, Dias Bandaranaike.

For all they knew my parents believed it might happen. They decided to start again in New Zealand but, months before our departure, my father suffered from a nervous breakdown and a heart attack. Fearing that the Immigration authorities would turn us back on grounds of his ill health my mother exchanged our boat tickets to bring us, instead, to England. The estate could not be sold and finally it was nationalized without compensation during the ‘seventies and a chapter in family karma seemed to have come to a close.

We joined the steadily-growing exodus of Eurasians which had started to flow towards the Antipodes, Canada and England. My last years on the island were scarred with images of violence, racial strife, burnings and death. Ceylon had become both a paradise and a hell. Was the obsession with violence and fire something that this Buddhist culture had inherited from the demon kingdom of Ravanna and which had remained untamed ten thousand years since the events described in the Ramayana had taken place?1


One grey March day our ship dropped anchor at Gravesend in Kent — a name whose subjective meaning would be revealed to me many years later. I had to get used to those leaden skies. Not that they were unknown in equatorial lands. But these flat, depressing times left me with a feeling of asphyxiation as if I would never breathe free under the blue sky again. And though, during that first summer, we experienced a heat-wave it took me a long time to get used to the grey climate. Pangs of homesickness pierced me and I thought about the life that had come to an end so suddenly. I was an exile.

I remembered my friends, now so far away: the beaches, adventures, the illicit visits we would make, from our boarding school, along the railway line to the Mount Lavinia Hotel on Sunday evenings. The only way to get outside during term-time was to obtain an exeat pass. And we didn’t come by those precious little chits of paper so easily! I joined the Scouts and ostensibly on ‘chip-a-job’ would visit my aunt’s house during the weekend. Marmite sandwiches and sponge-cake for tea. What luxury! All very different to the spartan existence we knew as college inmates. A little bit of weeding would bring in five rupees to keep the scoutmaster happy. The rest of the time I would spend with my cousin gallivanting about town, going to the movies, swimming and visiting the houses of our mutual friends.

Then there were the caravan holidays at Koggala in the south where I had seen turtles swimming in over the reef at high tide; the jungles near Trincomalee in the north-east where we would camp near a water-hole. We swam in a deserted place we called Pirate’s Cove where the sand was powdery white and a sharp lookout for sharks had to be kept. They would cruise in from the Bay of Bengal, their sleek, predatory fins warning us of their presence.

I remembered the magnificent sunsets and the evening kite-fliers on Galle Face Green opposite the old Parliament buildings where my father took me for long walks and bought chili-hot kadallay (roasted gram) from the vendors. I thought of all these happy times. Now they was all gone and I had to learn to accept this new world whether I liked it or not. Yet, the question remained: Why had we been brought here? Why had our pleasant life-style ended so abruptly? And why had we come to cold, northern climes when we had planned to emigrate to New Zealand? I felt the hand of a malevolent God dealing out the cards.

Although I made friends in our new home-town I also spent a lot of time alone. Mostly making aircraft models. I loved aeroplanes and had read all the flying journals and every book I could lay my hand on: the Biggles books, Douglas Bader, Pierre Klostermann and Johnny Johnson were familiar companions. My bedroom became cluttered with models of Spitfires, Messerschmitts, Stukas, Wellingtons, Lancasters, Heinkels and every other WWII ‘plane I could get hold of. Sometimes I would become bored, take out a model into the back-garden, simulate an air-crash and set it on fire, photographing it as it burned. Years later the meaning of this incident was revealed to me when I underwent past life regression.2

I had decided that my family’s downfall could be attributed to the take-over of Ceylon by socialists and communists. I became rabidly anti-communist and at the same time was fascinated with Hitler and Nazism. The National Socialist swastika had an almost mesmeric quality about it. If ever there was another war it would be with Russia and I decided I wanted to be among the heroes who would fly over Moscow, drop their atomic bombs and enter Valhalla.

At the age of fourteen I applied to join the Air Force. But the medical officer found out that I had had two fits of petit mal as a child. It was enough to keep me out of the services. I didn’t have the qualifications to fly as a pilot so I tried for other jobs as air-crew in civil airlines. I had to fly somehow. But lack of schooling let me down and I failed the entry exams. I cursed my fate and all the teachers who hadn’t cared enough to teach me anything worthwhile.

By the age of fifteen I had read the entire thousand and more pages of William Shirer’s RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH. We had an old air-raid shelter in the back-garden and I would imagine the times it had been used. Sometimes I had nightmares where formations of bombers flew over our house. Bombs whistled down to blast open the doors and I would wake up, startled and in a cold sweat. The War felt almost like it had all been a nightmare. My nightmare. Yet, I had never lived through it so why did I feel this way? As a young child I used to spend hours, listening to old 78s on an ancient wind-up gramophone. One disc had Adolf Hitler’s voice on it as part of a war documentary Series. The voice scared me but sensing its magnetic pull I kept playing it. Eventually my mother sneaked the record away, broke it and buried the fragments in the ground!

Leaving school with no qualifications, I entered a west London polytechnic where I studied for four years. In modern European history I was able to investigate a deeply-held, subjective curiosity to learn everything I could about Europe’s recent past. I wanted to find out about the Second World War which had ended not long before my birth. Why had it happened and, anyway, why did nations have wars? The society I lived in seemed to accept wars as a necessary evil but part of me kept questioning the apparent need that humans have for changing the normal world from time to time and indulging in organized violence towards each other.

My attitudes began to change. As for the interest in fascism, I could never accept the anti-Semitic race-hate inherent in its philosophy. My own traumatic memories of racial strife during the last years we had lived in Ceylon had taught me the evils of nationalism. Now, I learnt about Lenin and Stalin as well and began to develop an interest in the doctrines I had loathed until then. I began to consider the possibility that it had not been the spread of socialist ideas in Asia that had led to our downfall. Its seeds had been sowed by those who had colonized those countries in the first place and we with so many others had become the victims of their misdeeds. The nationalism under which our kind had suffered was a kind of cultural and political emetic those once-subject people had taken to rid themselves of the yoke of their unwanted masters.

In the early ‘sixties the drama of the Cuban Missiles crisis had personally shocked me into awareness. I no longer thought of nuclear disarmament as part of a Communist plot by CND stooges.3 For the first time in my life I had known how it felt to be close to war. I began to see beyond the newspaper propaganda which blamed everything on the Russians. A still, small voice inside me began to ask whether anything was worth the destruction of all the Earth’s life. This inner process of change was to grow.

By the mid-‘sixties, the West was in a time of social and cultural change. Like so many other young students I found myself in the midst of those changing attitudes. The mass-bombings in Vietnam converted many of us to the liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people. Politically and morally the behaviour of the Americans in South-East Asia could not be justified. It represented an old political system which was living on borrowed time. All Europe was in a student revolt and the self-immolation of Jan Palach in Wenceslas Square, Prague — following similar acts of non-violent resistance by Buddhist monks in South Vietnam — symbolized the collective attitudes of many young Europeans who had had enough of the bad old ways and dreamed of a different kind of world.

“Don’t forget that you are part of this country’s intelligentsia,” our history teacher reminded us. “You are in a privileged minority so don’t waste your opportunities!”

Gradually, I became part of a protest movement which rejected the worn-out values of the past. The older generation simply had no understanding of our libertarian aspirations. Though we hardly understood them ourselves we could sense that we were within the grasp of a different kind of life where the world would be as one. It was so vast but we could feel it just beyond our reach and we wanted it. We didn’t want the drab future that was on offer. We wanted something better!

By then, my accent had changed from west London cockney to middle-class Surrey & home counties. Learning to change it, like a chameleon, to fit in with whomever I was I began to feel uncomfortable with an apparent lack of roots and genuine self-identity.


When I left the polytechnic I still had no idea of what I really wanted to do with my life. All I had ever cared about was flying but — given my change of political perspective — I began to think that I had really been quite fortunate to have avoided a life in the military. Having read Ernest Hemingway’s FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS I felt the need for adventure. The plan was to go to Israel and work on a kibbutz but the Arab-Israeli War had broken out and I volunteered. Everyone at the recruitment centre thought I was a Jew — even the Rabbi on the interviewing panel!

“But what can you offer us,” they asked. “Can you drive?” I couldn’t.

I decided I wanted to be a writer and, to make a living, I considered journalism. But that wasn’t the kind of writing I had in mind. I discovered that D.H. Lawrence had eked out a living as a school-teacher while writing his early books. Maybe I could emulate him I thought and applied to train as a teacher. I was accepted and embarked dishonestly upon an unhappy career.

College was a boring place and the values which our lecturers attempted to instil in us I found stuffy and bourgeois. I was a poet and a writer who felt surrounded by mediocrity. But a teacher’s certificate might secure my freedom and provide a ticket abroad. Perhaps New Zealand or Canada?

It had been a traumatic time. My parents had died within years of each other and soon after I had injured myself in a motor-cycle accident. I too had come close to death and on one occasion suicide. I began to drink a lot and to spend the money I had been left on other distractions. I bought a sports car and ended up smashing it regularly. I was very unhappy with my life and no amount of spending made any difference. Through the friend who had introduced me to radical-chic politics I discovered LSD.4 I knew Mike well and his recent behaviour-change intrigued me. One day he came in with a sprained wrist and I asked him how it had happened.

“We were taking Acid5 and I jumped off the balcony into the back-garden!” he replied.

I thought he was going crazy and questioned him more closely. What he told me about the effects of the hallucinogen interested me. Was it possible, after all, to reach Nirvana this way? One night we all went out to the controversial US Rock Musical, Hair, which was playing at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. Inspired by its message, I decided to try LSD and at his flat that night I entered into a psychedelic Pandora’s Box experience. Much to my disappointment, my own girl-friend had refused to share the trip with me. I had to take the journey by myself it seemed. Somewhere, there was another world which I had to discover.

Twenty minutes after ingesting the small, transparent microdot I began to feel its effect. It was like Alice in Wonderland. Standing in the middle of the living room I became a midget. Next, I grew as tall as an oak tree. Then I found myself in a kind of hall of mirrors where everything moved and changed in waves. I sat in an armchair and disappeared into it. A young woman knelt before me and I saw Eden in her eyes. I wanted to say the most beautiful thing I could say with words.

“I could paint you as a picture of the Dawn,” I blurted.

“But I don’t want you to paint me!” she replied.

Then things began to change again. Someone had replaced the Incredible String Band album with Jimi Hendrix and dissonance turned the room into a hellish place. A hoarse, shrieking voice on the hi-fi pierced into me as if the gentle love and peace of Aquarius was being crucified.

I was in an uncharted land going deeper and deeper into myself, leaving all the others behind, all the stars of the universe inside my brain cortex. Hours later, I awoke naked into a windswept day to find myself lying on an untidy bed in a strange house. I could hear the others giggling strangely as they put on their overcoats to take an early-morning walk. I watched them go down the drive and into the avenue. Someone appeared to float by on a bicycle and I pinched myself to see if I was really awake. The branches of the trees outside seemed to swoop towards the sky. Gradually, I began to feel myself returning to the world I had left behind the night before.

I dressed and returned to my college. Getting into a hot shower I decided never to touch the stuff again. My experience hadn’t been all beautiful by any means and I felt angry with Mike for having led me on and with myself for having followed so blindly. But a year later I began to take LSD again. In an empty, meaningless world the hallucinogen provided me with a sense of inner beauty and holiness nothing else had. I began to touch into a magical, immortal being and kept wanting to return to it. Now I could actually live out my inner poems without writing them down. Coming off a trip one morning I decided to burn most of what I had written until then. It was pretentious rubbish. But some I kept...


© RW 1989.