I woke this morning with that Richard Wilbur quote spinning round my head: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, something will come to you.” I have to remind myself that these are not a fluke, these daily posts that I get up and write every day. These episodes have been churning for decades. But here’s the thing, it’s only now when I string them together that they tell a story that I didn’t know. They’re no longer isolated fragments, they give context to each other. I didn’t know quite how lost I was, how rudderless, how vulnerable to the intent of others nor how intent I was on finding answers. Although my father had his eye on me from afar and my mother in her own way cared, though they both loved me, they were absent. It was no wonder that I found myself in a cult, it’s understandable that I was wide open to charlatans. From the charlatan who pretended to teach acting and liked to humiliate, a friend got me out. She came to see me. I said, I’m so unhappy, sitting on the counter in her kitchen, kicking my legs against the cupboards. She said, You have to get out of there. I returned to face the Svengali who’d discovered that day it was me who’d been opening the school every morning to give the third years a lie-in – a transgression that made him wild. I said, I don’t care; I’m leaving. He said, No one leaves, you’ll be back, but I knew I wouldn’t. As I write this the lights in my kitchen keep flashing, an electrical short of the kind he would have ascribed to his powers, not the drama school man but the charlatan who came next, the boy from Kent who swam into the void left by drama school. Two years from the day I walked out of the cult this boy would vow a curse of a thousand years upon me, my family and the hill. He said that. Those were his actual words. He believed totally in his powers to frighten, as the cult leader had done. They were no different. One called himself the headmaster of a drama school. The other called himself Shaman. These people who think it their right to terrorise. I am coming for you.
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