Following up on Part 1 of the Barton Wood story:
One day one of my housemates, Dave, decided to explore the several sheds on the property, which unfortunately weren’t locked. I say unfortunately because they contained some pretty interesting stuff which immediately caught Dave’s aesthetic eye. Our landlord’s parents had been in the army, stationed in India, and had brought back loads of souvenirs which were stashed in the sheds. One of them was a fully-grown tiger’s skin complete with head and claws. Well, one night, after a bit of a party, Dave decided that an old shed was not the right place for four tiger’s claws, so he cut one off in the mistaken belief it would be much happier occupying a place of honour in his house when he returned to NZ.
Of course, the next day, when he came to his senses, he realised what he had done and felt the inevitable shame at having performed such a mindless act, so he offered the grotesque thing to us housemates. All refused of course and Dave was left to fess up when the landlord came to do her inspection and discovered the vandalism.
Needless to say, she was pretty livid but didn’t throw us out of the house, although she might have if she had known what was hung up drying in the laundry cupboard.
I had stopped eating meat soon after arriving at Barton Wood. I distinctly remember my last meat meal was rabbit, stewed in an olive-based sauce cooked over an open fire in a Moroccan earthenware dish called a tagine. Unfortunately, after taking the tagine off the coals, I placed it on the cold hearth where it immediately cracked in two with the obvious result. We scraped the spilt stew off the hearth and scoffed it down. I must say that despite the added flavouring of ash and chips of firewood, it was delicious.
One lasting memory of my time at Barton Wood was of a beautiful summer’s day. I was sitting beside the pond in the gorgeous English garden. Time suddenly seemed to stand still and I experienced an almost overwhelming sense of stillness and peace, a feeling of being totally present in that moment. I later read in a book that I found called Be Here Now, by a guy called Richard Alpert (also known as Baba Ram Dass), that this ‘nowness’ was what we should aspire to. However, despite many more years of living on planet earth, these moments of clarity have been few and far between since that day.
After the summer at Barton Wood it was back to London and more office work to save enough money for the return journey home. In those days, you could go to the NZ Embassy and ask for help finding accommodation and work. I was lucky enough to find both on the same day. Like in Auckland nowadays, different areas of London were home to different races. My new home was in Acton where the population was mainly Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi. My taste for hot curries was well satisfied there. I worked as an accountant doing temporary work for firms that needed one-off jobs done. Some of the work was easy but there were a few jobs in which I was out of my depth due to lack of experience accompanied by a lack of knowledge and a lack of passion for counting other people’s money.
I remember one job when the accounts refused to balance. In a business with thousands of pounds worth of sales there was a discrepancy of just fifty pence. I could not find that 50p anywhere, despite trying for the better part of a full day. It cost the firm 15 pounds in wages for me to try to find that damn 50 pence and I didn’t locate it, so, out of frustration, I did something unprofessional, something no accountant should ever do – I changed a figure by 50 pence to make everything balance. I figured that it must have been a clerical error like a wrongly-written invoice by a bored accounts clerk, or some other mysterious accounting anomaly and as I was leaving the job in a few days, no one would be any wiser. I hope the NZ Embassy didn’t receive any negative feedback for having recommended a corrupt accountant.
Accounting was a good money earner for Kiwis in London, who had a reputation for being better workers than your average Brit of the time, so despite not being real accountant material, I stuck it out for the money. The most exciting part of my brief accounting career, apart from receiving fat pay cheques, was being very close to the 1974 IRA bombing of Westminster House, a 900-year-old part of the British Houses of Parliament.
Shortly after arriving at work to audit the accounts of a small jewellery shop, in which the employees had obviously been stealing from their elderly employer, there was a huge explosion which shook the shop violently. We all raced out of the shop and saw a plume of smoke rising from the direction of Big Ben, the famous clock. Fortunately, no-one was killed although 11 people were injured and part of the building was wrecked. The Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army had struck again.
London was a great city for entertainment. There were buskers at every underground train station and day-long rock concerts featuring bands who later became household names. I remember attending one such festival where Van Morrison, the Doobie Brothers, 10CC, the Allman Brothers and Supertramp all played on the same day.
Before leaving England, I was lucky enough to score a temporary job as a barman at the twelfth century Llanthony Priory Hotel in Wales. It was an ancient site located in a tiny village near the Black Mountains, a hauntingly beautiful place with wonderful walks and night sky watching. The ‘village’ comprised two houses, one on either side of the country lane.
They were only 30 metres apart and yet we were told that the families who occupied them hadn’t spoken to one another for years and years because of some age-old family feud. This seemed extremely strange to me, as I remember thinking that a one-hour meeting or perhaps a meal together might be all that was needed to sort stuff out.
In hindsight, I realise this was probably an unrealistic expectation, as I have since learned that it can be comforting to have another to hate or blame or feud with. It somehow makes us feel better about ourselves, and besides, it’s not easy to look at ourselves and admit we were wrong or to let go of old grievances. If we can’t get on with our neighbours, what hope is there for our troubled world?
A few weeks after leaving the Priory, I flew back home to Aotearoa unannounced after three years of travel. I knocked on the door of my parents’ house and when my father opened the door, it was the first time I had seen him cry.
Words by Ross Liggins
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