39. The Aftermath

A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries

Remember the girl we sprang from Hackney Marsh psychiatric unit where we danced to the broken strip light in the lift? We returned from Scotland to a chaos expressed by her – pyramids of used teabags all over the fields, and in the house, wedged into corners, teddy bears facing mirrors. She’d broken down. My man disappeared into Vispassana, meditating twice a day but I had no faith. And the stones went in, one by one, heaving their way toward completion through winter into spring. As the circle came together the commune fell apart, dividing into factions which fought and bitched. The metal barn complained that the house thought they were special. Those in the house said the metal barn lot were unfriendly. The tipis, yurts and benders assumed they knew best. Arguments at weekly meetings, the talking stick travelling. Was it right to keep an owl, eat wheat, let anybody in, even the ones who’d gone mad. The pixie girl who’d broken down disappeared into the woods. Fruitarians arrived, their skin and hair a matching grey. Breatharians sneaked biscuits in the middle of the night. Too many women in the kitchen. A baby was born. The Portuguese Wiccan who had once been May Queen got thinner. Across the hill was another commune of sorts, not a hippy pagan one but a Christian evangelical one; a hill of Golgotha, a cave with a stone, a cross that an actor dragged over his shoulder once a year in a Passion Play that stretched four hours, brought thousands of devotees to another religion, a life of Christ played out in the Surrey hills. The Director asked if I’d like a job, he was gathering cast and crew, he needed a stage manager. I drove my pink camper out of the commune to his converted barn, clean and bright, a different piece of England a mile down the road where people wore shoes and worried about the shopping, where there were no loincloths except on stage, and there, in his kitchen, met Jesus.