Today is the third day of my Ayurvedic treatment, Kati Basti. This is a special technique aimed at providing relief to the lower back using warm medicated oils. This involves the putting in place of a dam on the small of the back made from sesame flour and water. Hot medicated black sesame oil is warmed and then poured into the dam that surrounds the lumbar region of the spine. The oil is absorbed by the skin and muscles – which in my case are quite spasmed up. The process releases the spasm. After five treatments I will return to the city where bird song is mostly, but not always, lost in the sound of a bustling and drunken beachside suburb.
On the first day (of five) I had such a strong reaction to this Ayurvedic treatment that the nerves in my toes could feel again and my feet were much less numb than they were before. Now they felt blissfully fresh and I could move them quite easily.
The second day after treatment I returned to the house on Saddleback Mountain where I had to supervise the clearing out of the shed. It had hundreds of bits of timber and pipe, some copper, some PVC and collection of plumbing bits and pieces.
There was a stainless steel oven from Germany, covered in Hammer Horror film-like cobwebs. There was an ancient AGA (a wood- fired stove from England). This souvenir from the industrial revolution that made Britain the big guy on the block was, fortunately, quite beyond repair due to the rust that had crept like a cancer through its imperialistic innards. It was a collection of cast iron pieces like an children’s Iron Man's monkey puzzle. There were rings and short fat tubes like pieces of a cast iron bowel. Rats had eaten the heatproof lining of the two round and one rectangular tops that could be pulled down on top of the three cooking surfaces.
It reminded me of a cold Saturday night in 1971. We had just finished playing in a short season of Hamlet in Glasgow. Ian, now Sir Ian Mckellen had played Hamlet. Three of us, small-parts players had climbed into my mini van and drove off into the night – London-bound to surprise our unfaithful spouses.
About 4.30 in the morning we pulled into a beautiful posh English country house. One of us lived there and he took us into the large kitchen where a green AGA kept it all warm and mumsy. We made bacon and eggs on the hot plates in vast frying pans. No truck stops for these groovers.
The AGA stayed on day and night in that house (it was before the 1974 fourfold increase
in the price of oil - although those sort of people would probably still keep it going 24 hours a day, that is except for the annual the trip to Provence.)
I ran into the actor from that house two years later when I was cruising down the Kings Road dressed in the latest gear. I had a brand new car (nothing flash, just a Citroen Dyane) that had not been paid for by hard yakka but a windfall.
He said" well you’re doing alright then, I can see".
Acting had not paid for it. I wish! We had merely, by good luck, rather than ‘good management’ bought a house or three at the beginning of the great 1970's house price rise whilst on a disappointing trip back home to New Zealand, where I was born.
My girlfriend's mother, a wealthy Jewess in denial, on hearing that her daughter (whom she had sent to an English boarding school at the age of 7), was now pregnant; this titled, ice hearted, woman sent that same daughter a thousand pounds to have an abortion. The daughter, soon- to- be mother of my first child, bought a grand piano with most of it and cashed a few shares left to her by an aunt. With the proceeds we bought two houses and then a third.
We did them up in between rehearsal and performances. Fortunately she had just spent two years living off one hundred pounds a year, whilst she toured around the backblocks of India with an ex- Jain monk, Satish Kumur.
Having been living so simply in India, she was uninterested in normal suburban things like spending money for stuff. She spent two months burning lead paint off wooden walls in the kitchen with a blowtorch just before giving birth. Unusually for a daughter of the Upper Class she had learned how to work.
In India she had helped build houses out of mud, which was held together with cow shit. She had found joy in being able to cut and shape a window with hands that before were used to play the piano and oboe.
As we all know, any fool buying houses in a working- class suburb near the centre of a city in the 1970's could not help but make money. So with property development I joined the middle class and have not looked back. Of course I did not understand that this would lead to joys like private school fees and the rest of it.
We made a hundred percent on those three old house in less than a year and returned to old blighty before I shot any of my countrymen. When we transferred our underserved and inflationary gains, from New Zealand to London, Lakshimi smiled upon us. The money was transferred to the UK on the day New Zealand revalued its dollar by 20%. This was enough for the new wife and I to pop down to the local Citroen dealer in West Sussex and purchase a snazzy little car that later we found would only go up the Yorkshire dales in reverse. Those Frenchies know how to make a fun, if underpowered car that drove like a newborn foal all gawky and bouncy that startled and stared easily.
The old (first) wife had wanted to have a black baby. This was something that my pink skin would never deliver. Poor Frankie died when her beautiful black daughter was only one year old.
The new wife did not last long either. I was such a bad catch, although at least I was slimmer then. The lesson her anger at me taught her was that marrying a penniless actor with no prospects had been a bad idea. She ruined the next thirty years of her life by marrying two more husbands who had means but not the peace that would have come with marrying the ex-Jain monk.
Life's wonderful isn't it? Along with the AGA on the scrap dealer's truck heading for a new life, was a set of cheap, low-profile, pretend mags.
In exchange I finally had an empty shed with an old table and three wooden stools for guests. Rusty butchers hooks hung on the walls waiting for the new collection to begin.
Tomorrow, if it's not raining I will supervise my lanky 19 year old who lives in his head like the guy in the Neil Young song. He will move the heavy old railway sleepers that he pulled up from where they had outlined some kitchen garden beds. With those lines removed that ground will become a small gently sloping bank held in place by the dry stone wall and steps that we have built. Originally, all this had been constructed by a surfboard shaper. His partner was an art and ocean studies teacher working through his holidays.
The kitchen garden was created by the woman who used to live here. She was the dreamer who got hold of the old AGA. The garden beds did not work either. Too dry. I was told this by her ex-husband’s best friend a 50-something hippie who had been a history teacher at the local high school. The ex husband had put his garden in, down the hill a bit, near the orchard. It grew things but also provided a food source for the wallabys who came out of the trees - too far away to see easily and too far to hit with a 410 shotgun.
The ex-husband had been the deputy head of the local high school. It was there that he had met the aforementioned hippie who told me the story about the unsuccessful kitchen garden. I think the best friend might have been a misogynist. These two both quit their jobs as teachers and lived in cheap old houses where their wives, who had also quit teaching, went barefoot, floated dreamy-eyed into mothering.
We bought the place when it was sold to divvy up the worldy goods. We were loaded with cash from the hit movie (The Piano) that had been financed by the large French building company, Bouyges. The place was dubbed ‘Nirvana”by our movie’s Oscar-winning star ‘a North Carolina gal’,
Holly Hunter.
It feels isolated here; you can see the curve of the earth where the sky meets the ocean. The Pacific Ocean has various shades of blue and grey – depending on the sky. It also turns silver under moonlight and golden under a yellow moon.
The divorced couples each took their share of the house-sale and, with the assistance of financial advisors, lost it all within two years.
Tomorrow son Jack will load the old railway sleepers into the back of his old Jeep. Once loaded he will drive across the leech- ridden, wet grass, to start the new shed collection. There the sleepers probably will remain to my third wife's horror ( in spite of my best intention to cut them up for firewood.) Some other old fool will get someone else to take them away. (However, there will be no old AGA to tip the memory bucket over and expose parts of a life almost spent.)
Meanwhile, back in England that shining, warm well-remembered AGA will probably still be going quietly into another dark night whilst our grandchildren gaze through the low floating clouds at the ocean and wonder if it will ever stop raining and whether there is a seniors' discount on new AGAs.
Stephen O'R
