Trials and Inspirations Autobiography of John Myhill Contents 1 Hong Kong Child 2 Primary Guides 3 Annals of the Parish 4 Secondary Boyhood 5 University 6 Research 7 Real Life 8 Wisdom from the Past 9 Mental Distress 10 Hethel, Norfolk 11 Born Again 12 Busyness Copyright 2013, John Myhill, all rights reserved. The views contained in this book are those of John Myhill alone. The names of some people have been changed to protect their anonymity Hong Kong Child Birth I was born in a tropical thunderstorm, never to be forgotten by the doctor called out to attend my mother. It was reminiscent of the storm outside Wuthering Heights when the ghost of Cathy tries to get in. But it was the spirit of Gandhi that entered my life. The date was September 28, 1948. We were living in Hong Kong, where my father was headmaster of St Stephen’s College missionary school I cannot remember a time when I just experienced events without reflecting upon the experience, but my reflections were determined by what I saw and what I saw in dreams was more powerful than what I saw when awake. What I saw in films and cartoons, and later through books and conversation, was closer to my dreams and thus more influential on my thinking. Before my memories begin, my father mentions in his diary: “Miss Scott Moncrieff” 12/03/1952. I would not be writing if the Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930) translation of Proust’s (1871-1922) great work had not inspired me. The certainty that one memory will provide another, until we not only understand the characters and their author, but ourselves and our own fulfilment of Being. The detail of a life entirely different from my own provokes parallels in my own experience, revealing subconscious longings and deconstructing symbols and relationships; enabling me to get back to the source of who I am. Prison My very first memory is of holding the bars of my metal cot and looking out at the land of freedom beyond. Dad was interned by the Japanese at Stanley Camp, Hong Kong. He never talked about his experience, but others have published accounts of this modest horror. Those years of unjust incarceration began my life-long fascination with control systems and unpalatable containment. Dad did speak highly of William (Bill) Sewell (1898-1984) the Quaker, and that rare praise led me to pick out the word Quaker, when studying history, which led to some excitement on finding that these strange people were still around and still peculiar. At the end of the war, dad was dying of dysentery. Even if the Japanese had not carried out their plan to kill all prisoners before accepting defeat, dad would have died if the war had lasted much longer. He was saved, and my birth made possible, by the dropping of the hydrogen bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a teenager I woke many times from a nightmare of nuclear explosion. I entered a Quaker Meeting House (Bull Street, Birmingham) for the first time in order to see the film “The War Game”. It was opposition to nuclear weapons, without which I would not exist, which led me to involvement with Quakers. Likewise, if my mother’s first husband had not been killed by a landmine, she would not have married my father and I would not exist to campaign against land mines. Mutilation Before I can remember I fell over on the veranda and cut my lip on a geranium pot. Throughout childhood I was sensitively aware of the scar. But with puberty it became a sign of manhood, a “Red Badge of Courage”. Similarly when the tip of my little finger was hanging loose, having caught in a door, I was more concerned by the deformity than the pain. How ironic that when the girl I was in love with proposed that I should be her blood brother, I was unable to cut my own. She cut both with ease, releasing only a token quantity of blood. When a student in sandals, I stood on an upturned library shelf, the metal penetrating deep into my bare heel; the sudden loss of blood caused me to pass out. Yet I have never had a similar sensitivity to the pain or loss of blood of others and found nursing an easy occupation. The geranium pot was like a second circumcision (an operation still common in the forties and normal within my family). A purification of impure lips. My nursing, on a urology ward, made me aware of the advantages of circumcision. So often I have found a medical value in practices “from God” which must have seemed crazy to people living at the time. Thus the prohibition of pork in the Middle East or beef in India, of sugar, alcohol and tobacco amongst Adventists. In contrast the vanity of “rational” medical science in opposing alternative therapy, struck me as wholly unreasonable given my nursing experience of few cures and much iatrogenic suffering. Mad Dogs and Englishman They decided that the dog which bit me was not rabid, but gave me a course of penicillin injections, till my four-year-old bottom felt like a pincushion. I have no memory of the dog, but recall the pain and indignity of the treatment, as if it were yesterday (treatment worse than the disease). The story was reinforced in my mind by a record often played on the wind-up gramophone, of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”. I played it even after it was cracked. It was the songs of Noel Coward (1899- 1973) that inspired my sense of Englishness as a colonial phenomenon. But despite Hong Kong’s mention in the song, despite Hong Kong’s similarity to the anonymous colony in his play “South Sea Bubble”, Noel did not visit until the 1960s, nor did he visit “very flat Norfolk” either. He travelled for pleasure not inspiration and spent most of his life in Jamaica (“No, he went of his own accord”). Danny Kaye (1913-1987) At the age of five I was taken to see the film “Hans Christian Anderson”. I was enthralled. I was the ugly duckling who would one day become a swan. Only 26 years later, when my daughter reached that age, did I realise that I was at my most irresistible aged five. Instead I was taken into hospital twice. First for a grumbling appendix, which was left to grumble till I was 14 (unnecessary suffering to enhance my disbelief in medical science), then to remove my tonsils. A child of my parents’ friends had just died of the operation, so they were more worried than I was. Sucking on ice-cubes after the operation and unable to speak, I was enchanted by the visit of Danny Kaye. My hero said: “de fond ich biery dearie coch; esh qualle de fuery bamba; nish feed und meinen krindan bloch; well dragget el carie conga.” Thus I realised that sound and rhythm are as important in communication as the meaning of words. When I saw “Walter Mitty” I knew I was not alone. I had a life to live, imaginatively. Egg Beach School beach was where I learnt to swim, aged four, holding a football under each arm and kicking with my legs; then letting one ball go and swimming with three limbs. Beyond the cliff edge, where you could walk only at low tide, was a smaller bay, where the rocks had been shaped into eggs by the tide. It was a magic place, like the “Secret Garden”, because it was ours alone and so I have visited it in waking imagination and sleeping dreams. I vividly remember one special boiled egg, because I ate it in the morning before my first day at school. I was so excited, that boiled eggs have been special to me ever since. I was seven when I kept my first hens and I have had very few years of my life without hens. Beatrix Potter’s story of Mrs. Tiggywinkle, whom I associate with my mother and Denise, because they both loved ironing – that “singy smell”. The story begins with Henny Penny, who scratches holes in her stockings and has to “go barefoot”. We would blow eggs for Easter as the empty shell was a symbol of the empty tomb. Jesus, who said he longed to gather the people together, as a hen gathers together her chicks, was himself the new life of the spirit that would hatch out, to leave the empty tomb. My starting school left an empty nest at home during the day. But I was at home for the rising and setting of the sun. To get to the school beach, we walked through the military cemetery, dominated by its grand cross, of those who had died during the war. The empty lives of the buried, the tombs, empty of spirits who had risen with Christ: or did their ghosts linger as darkness drew in? The Chinese boys at the school were very fond of ghost stories and delighted when they managed to frighten the headmaster’s five-year- old son, by telling him that there was a ghost on the other side of a door. We could not open it, because a bigger boy was holding it closed at the other side. But I feared it was a ghost, and started to have nightmares. Thus was born the story of “The Little Ghost” (produced by dad’s deputy, Rod Bowie) about a little boy called John, who makes friends with a little ghost.