However please BE WARNED
My Story is quite long. !!!!
so this is Part I (1948- 1972)
are you sitting comfortable then I will begin ….
I am pretty sure I have been searching and waiting for this moment NOW since I first incarnated October 1948, as a sister to Roger who was already three. I had chosen an ordinary family with a loving mother and father. I had come in with a decent level of intelligence. I was quite nice looking and had a fit and healthy body, and a personality that was popular with my peers and elders. TYG
Highlights I remember of my childhood were riding with everyone from our Sunday School on the back of an open lorry in the Whitsun Parade, seeing who could collect the most sweets and I vividly remember the exhilirating feeling from winning the 25 yards sack race to become the Kidderminster and District Schools Champion for two years 1954 and 1955. The secret I discovered was to put your toes in the cornet of the sack and run with little steps – not jump or hop in which case you would probably fall over! Also being Angel Gabriel twice, once in the school nativity and once at the local church.
Interestingly also, whenever I hurt myself and with focused attention I could ‘mind over matter’ to put my awareness elsewhere away from the pain.
My brother and I were the first ones amongst our many cousins to pass the 11+ and go to grammar school where we quickly discovered everyone else was bright. However there was no one in the family to explain the benefits of working hard and that you could better your life if you really tried. Our parents were quite humble people who ‘just got on with life as it happened’ whilst living in our 3 bedroomed house on a newly built council estate.
Our early teenage years in the 60′s were very innocent. Many evenings getting together in the Flamingo the local cafe, listening to the juke box. It was the time of the lads on their scooters or motorbikes, Mods and Rockers. In our cafe one of the Mods was a good looking chap with an unusual voice, named Robert Plant, who always stood out as being different and would sing to me and I perhaps naively thought him a boyfriend for a few days.
Both my parents were fairly optimistic people and I can remember my mother had a copy of Norman Vincents Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking tucked away somewhere in the lounge but I never saw her read it. She enjoyed visiting the local spiritualist church occasionally and I think I may have joined her once or twice. However nothing I ever heard was very memorable.
In our family no-one had gone on to sixth form let alone University so we both left school at 16. Roger using his natural flair of design and mathematics went on to eventually become an accomplished architect.
The Universe knew exactly the lesson that I needed at that time, when age seventeen I naively applied for a teachers position at a local large hospital for young people with a multitude of disabilities. They weren’t fussy and I got the job thinking I would be a Mary Poppins and a natural teacher, however I quickly found out that with no training – and there wasn’t any in those days – I was completely out of my depth as I struggled to gain any control over the large classroom of about sixteen children aged from 10 to 15.
At that time all disabilities were lumped together, mental and physical – we had little understanding of their needs in those days. However, I felt great warmth towards most of them and was able to see that within this unusual group of people, there were those I really liked and those I wasn’t so keen on; those who were very bright and those who weren’t, those who were sweet and those who were bullies.
What a first real life spiritual lesson that was for me – that you cannot generalise about any one group of people – I could see that they were all different and unique, all looking for that someone to love them, often waiting for their family to show at the weekend , who more often than not, never did.
A choice of jobs were always available in those days. Looking back now with awareness, an interesting one for me was going to work as a dental receptionist, especially as I had a real fear of dentists. This was due to a traumatic experience from when I was about four years of age, when I am told, I was quite poorly and needed all my teeth extracting leaving an intense dread of dentists and that awful smell of ether which would meet you at the bottom of their stairs. So to be given the opportunity to prove to myself that I could overcome such a fear, and to do so quite easily, definitely was another lesson learnt.
Other opportunities to prove I could learn more skills came in a short space of time and after doing clerical work and a short, uneventful marriage in 1968 to a very sweet man who was the lead singer in a local pop group (more Herman and the Hermits than the Rolling Stones!). I found myself realising for the first time that what I was doing, I didn’t want to do for the rest of my life. My first experience of Self Awareness and, two years later I chose to move on, and move in with two kind sisters who offered me a room in their flat.
I found a part time evening job as a barmaid and was Georgie of ‘The George’ in Bewdley, where I met a most handsome Greek who came in early every evening for a glass of Chivas Regal whisky and I was surprised when he asked me out. We had a most exciting & romantic 6 months before he had to return home to Athens driving his new Ford Capri, with me accompanying him as far as Geneva and then, after a sad & quite traumatic farewell, flying back to the UK. My other regulars were a lovely bunch of guys who were camera menat the University of Birmingham Television Service. They got me a job working with them to produce programmes with their director whose claim to fame had been Percy Thrower’s Gardening Club!!
I didn’t realise that I was being given an option by the Universe for a career in television, when I was distracted one evening driving back with the lads from work, I found an advert in the evening paper for air crew and the Universe knew that that was the road I should take.
It was at this time that I discovered my gift for persuasive writing when I had to convince the director of cabin crew, that even though, not yet legally divorced, I would make a good air stewardess.