Looking Back by Douglas Harding

Author:Douglas Harding [Harding, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Headless Way, Douglas Harding, Shollond Trust, Self-knowledge, indestructible joy
Publisher: Copyright The Shollond Trust
Published: 2023-04-26T22:00:00+00:00

Well, I could do his washing up. Father was delighted, of course. Little did he realise that, from the age of about ten, his eldest regularly ambled home from Meeting with inside aglow, through strangely luminous and mobile streets. Thus early and thus agreeably was I initiated into the alcoholic variety of mystical experience. I have found no need or inclination to pursue the matter further.

And, even if Father had tumbled to what was going on, he wouldn’t have given me a hard time. Not so, Mother.

4. Mother and Son

Not so, Mother.

You will have gathered that she and I didn’t get on at all. Oh what wounds we inflicted on each other! The tortuous and painful track of my early life with her is signalled by five or six landmarks:

The first. I’m no more than three. Either my brother Geoffrey is about to be born or has just been born. Anyway, here am I at the foot of the stairs, howling and stamping and flailing my arms because I’m not allowed to go up and see her. The real reason for my rage, of course, is this intruder into the family, this monster who’s usurping her attention and love...

The second landmark, though more prominent, is shaped somewhat like the first. I’m now six. The year is 1915. The War is in its second year. Aunt Margaret and four bumptious cousins are staying with us because her husband, Uncle Earnest Yaxley, preferring prison to putting on a uniform of any sort, has left his family destitute and homeless. Result: our house is disgustingly full. I say as much, and more, to these bouncy cousins, with unveiled indications that the Yaxley lot are intruders, and as such have less right to the limited amenities of the place than the Harding lot have. Tearfully, this appalling rudeness is reported to their mother, who even more tearfully reports the same to my mother. Boiling over with indignation and shame, she commands Father to beat the hell out of me. Or PB words to that effect. Which he, bless his darling heart, can’t bring himself to do. So Mother, I guess almost as furious with him as with me, snatches up a cherry-wood walking stick and rushes upstairs and larrups me on the bottom with the thing. I writhe about a good deal on the bed, but the pain goes almost unnoticed. The mental agony (inconceivable, inconceivable that she should be doing this to me!) is so sharp that any physical agony is overridden, if not obliterated. Stuck-up, self righteous, amoral kid that I am, I have no sense of guilt whatever, only of outrage. Horribly insulted and humiliated, I spend the rest of the night scrawling messages of black hate and hurt on scraps of paper and distributing them around the bedroom. In the morning, Dorothy, the maid or mother’s help, finds them and, duly shocked, takes them to Mother. Pretty soon, everyone knows the whole story. For some days a reserve — as if a sudden death or some unmentionable disease has struck us — descends on the joint families.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.