The Reluctant Man: How Fighting Transgender for 60 Years Influenced My Life

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The Reluctant Man

How fighting transgender for 60 years influenced my life

A.C. Llewellyn

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Copyright 2016 © A.C. Llewellyn

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Also by A.C. Llewellyn

The Song of the Ivory Box

Blue Mist Café: A collection of short stories

And there was fury among the gods.

Loki wanted the foetation for himself

But Iduna, wife of Bragi, laid claim to it.

As the battle raged the conception happened.

And there was shocked silence in their heaven

about the space of half an hour.

Preface

I have revised the original manuscript, which I published in 2012 with the title Loki’s Joke under the name Penny Blackwell. Why that name and not my own? Answer: I was hiding.

Earlier this year I had an epiphany; I saw that all my life I have been hiding behind ‘My Secret’. This remained so even after I had the operation. My friends and family knew about it but with strict instructions not to tell anybody. I once told off a friend in no uncertain terms because he told somebody without my permission. But recently I thought, ‘Why? Why is it necessary to keep hiding? It is such a strain. Why is it necessary?’ and I realised it wasn’t. It isn’t. It doesn’t matter who knows. I won’t go around broadcasting it but neither will I make a point of hiding it any more.

And ever since then I have had so much energy. I am surprised at how much I have. Keeping that secret – hiding in that secret through all my seventy-three years – must have taken so much energy. Little wonder I have been tired all my life.

As for the changed title, that happened during the course of changing the cover. The original title suggested that the Norse god Loki had played a trick on me while in my mother’s womb. How obscure. It told nothing about the content of the book. Again, it was a cloak to hide under. So, with my new-found freedom I threw caution away and now look at it!

A.C. Llewellyn

October 2016

One:

The Ivory Box

When I was ten I was sent to an orphanage near Reading in Surrey, England. The place was a wartime army barracks converted when the war ended not long before. I can’t remember exactly how large the area was but it was large – as an army barracks would be – and I remember the flatness, which was like a billiard table surrounded by a high mesh fence. There were a couple of trees around the place, but not many. Some saplings had been planted but stood only about six feet high in the otherwise bare acres of short, dry grass.

There were eleven large box-like wooden dormitories in all, each bedding forty-eight boys. Each dormitory had a veranda at one end while at the opposite end the front door opened directly on to a dirt pathway. Opposite each group of four dormitories and the three senior dormitories was an ablutions block. Set apart, to the west and after the great dining room, were the barracks that were used as schoolrooms. Each master or mistress had a room at the veranda end of a dormitory.

The establishment was run in some ways similarly to an army barracks. The cry at six-thirty in the morning was ‘stand by your beds!’ and any boy remaining asleep had to report to Mr Leyden or the headmaster. The dormitory master then came around and checked each bed. Any culprit who had wet his bed had to parade his sheets to the ablutions block where he stood under the shower while the water washed the pee from both the sheets and the pyjamas. One unfortunate wet his bed every night and some boys looked on him with contempt. When the bed-wetters had gone, the rest of us, with towels over our shoulders, paraded out for our ablutions. No concession was made for the weather as the staff considered the boys would become better men by facing life as it really was. When I think about it now I think they were trying to raise cannon fodder for the next war.

Meals meant silence once the grace was said. To break this rule and be discovered was to stand out against the wall, miss the meal, and report to Mr Leyden or the headmaster. The headmaster had only a springy sapling cane. Mr Leyden had a leather strap cut into four strips at one end. When Mr Leyden was on duty the food would be eaten in total silence.

Mr Leyden was Danish but everyone thought he was a Nazi. He taught maths. Failure to find the correct answer to one of his sums meant the culprit would stay behind after school had finished. If failure still dogged the boy he would spend Saturday at the table in Mr Leyden’s dormitory in an attempt to find the solution. Mr Leyden had a large belly, grey hair on either side of his head, and a nose that looked sore. His voice was loud and carried right across the meal hall: ‘That-boy-there, talking! Get out!’ He gave the impression of being constantly indignant.

We all preferred Miss MacDonald. Though she was strict, she was fair and overlooked minor infringements. She was bow-legged and we thought she walked like a gunslinger. The story was that she had once been very fond of horse riding until one day her favourite horse was shot from under her. The shock, so the story went, left her legs in an arc and forever after she walked with her legs bent round in memorial. That was why she never married. Miss MacDonald was liked second most by us kids, losing out only to the nurse in the sickbay. (None of the staff stood a chance in the liking stakes against the nurse in the sickbay.) After her accident Miss MacDonald’s interest had turned to singing and she led the choir and taught music. It was she who developed my interest in singing. In particular I liked Mahler’s Songs of the Earth, though I must admit I didn’t know them by that name. They were just songs to me, songs in a language and rhythm that folded around the tongue.

Once each month we were all made to strip naked and stand in line in the changing room of the always-cold ablutions block while we waited our turn for the steamy hot showers. The masters then paraded up and down the line checking our private parts with a stick, tossing and turning as if fearful of finding something nasty. I always felt I was being invaded. One boy had an extra-long part so it always took longer to examine him.

This parade each month increased our interest in our bodies. The boy with the largest part was named Reg and he was in the same dormitory as me. One day he excited the dormitory when he announced that he knew the proper, scientific name of the ‘cock’. It was the time of day when we had to stay in our dormitory and amuse ourselves. Some boys collected stamps or cigarette cards, others played with Dinky cars on their beds, but most just lay on their beds and talked. Gradually the procession to and from Reg’s bunk grew until I was the only boy who had not swapped something for the name. The contraband lay on Reg’s bunk: a packet of playing cards; cigarette cards; stamps; marbles; and a belt. I had nothing to swap and felt left out. I was the only person who did not know the name and I felt certain all the boys were laughing at me and was glad the bunk above hid me a little.

I took out my little ivory box. It was round, about half an inch in diameter at its base, broadening out in a curve to about an inch and a quarter at its widest part. The lid screwed on a very fine thread half way down. Carved elephants and lions chased each other around the outside. The ivory had turned a rich brown.

The mad Hermit had given me the box the day he had found me. He had arrived back at his camp to find me curled up in the snow outside his hut. When he turned me over he thought I was dead and the shock brought his mind back. He carried me into the hut and covered me with bits of blanket and then massaged my arms and legs. I woke slowly to hear him talking to me, saying things like: ‘… retreated from my Karma but you can’t escape it; you have to see it as it is; no point kicking, kicking makes more karma you’ve got to face at some stage …’ He talked on in this manner until he noticed I was awake and looking at him. Then he said, ‘You okay? Here, drink this.’ He gave me some tea.

It was a little later, when I had recovered somewhat, that the Hermit took out the ivory box and gave it to me. ‘You can keep it. It’s yours.’ The Hermit said it had been with him since he was in India twelve years before, but that it was really mine.

I turned it over and over in my hands as I lay facing the springs of the bunk above. It was all I had to swap. It was difficult to see whether the lions were chasing the elephants or the elephants the lions. There was nothing inside the box but it was smooth to the touch and I thought of my mother when I rubbed my finger there. It also made me think of my sisters, Helen and Beth. Its smell, when I sniffed at it with the lid off, brought peace; as if the devils about me flew away and the lead in my blood melted and was replaced by something soft. Then the air about would brush my skin lightly, some parts of which would tingle and I would be surprised to realise that I was still a boy. At that moment I was happy but that was not always the case. Sometimes sadness would well up, a great loss. At other times there was a girl crying distantly in despair, hidden in a lonely corner. Then at other times there would be a profound realisation but I wasn’t quite sure what of.

I closed the lid. Reg and his friends were grinning, not openly, but enough to make me feel self-conscious. I was the only one who didn’t know.

I turned the box over and over and rubbed the elephants and lions with my fingers. Why should I care so much about the box? It was only an ivory box. The Hermit would never know.

Two:

Father Shoots Through

I was born in the lamb time of March with the WW2 bombs falling about me. In my memory life began at the bottom of the garden in an air-raid shelter. The radio crackled out a voice while my mother stood at the open door. I ran to her and before she could shield me from the sight I saw the dark sky with our house bright against it as the flames licked their way over the roof. A man in a round hat ran across the garden and my mother shook her head when I called the figure ‘Daddy’.

I have two early memories of my ‘Daddy’. The first was being carried in his arms down the street to buy some sausages. ‘You like sausages best, eh? You can have some if you can spell your middle name.’ I was a little precocious with the alphabet. We passed the street corner where an area of rubble was all that remained of a house that had been standing a week earlier. My father explained that under the tarpaulin was a German tank that had been captured. I didn’t realise until much later in life that he must have been lying.

The second memory of my father is one where I was standing in the street with my legs apart and both hands wiggling sneeringly from my nose. My father was halfway down the street and I was deriding him as my mother stood crying at the gate. There is no further relevant early memory of him. My childhood didn’t hate him, he just didn’t figure much in it, at least consciously. The unconscious mind was another matter.

The first break from my mother happened when I was five, in 1947, some years before being sent to the Reading Army Barracks, mentioned earlier. Our house was sold and we moved into a council house the neighbours said was haunted. Every family that had lived there had lost a son. The back garden was overgrown with household rubbish thrown about and the fences were falling down. We did try to repair the fences but before the job was complete the six youngest of us were sent away to children’s homes. I was put in an orphanage near a place named Thornton Heath, a suburb in the south of greater London. The dining room had one wall with a mural of a country scene complete with a farmhouse and farm animals. I was there long enough to have a memory of big, beautiful, green trees and a large yellowing oak leaf that was lying on the sunny brick path that ran beside the building, when Mother came to visit, sobbing that her husband had left her. If I was upset at all it was at seeing her cry. Some months later she came again, this time crying that John, her eldest son, had died. She blamed John’s death on my father and on the haunted house.

It was at this orphanage where I learned to lie. I remember I was standing outside the house when one of the adults called to me and started to grill me. Had I done something or other? I can’t quite remember what it was. I had done it but I shouldn’t have so I denied it.

‘Are you telling a lie?’

‘No,’ I assured her and I turned my head reassuringly from side to side. It didn’t persuade her and she mimicked my head turning with eyes rolling. It looked silly so I made a point of remembering not to head turn when I was lying but to look more innocent.

We all went home that Christmas because Mother was lonely. It was the first Christmas without John and we went to pray over his grave and put some flowers there. That was the first of forty-six such Christmas vigils Mother was to keep.

Three:

The Hermit

There is a happy land, far, far away,

Where we get bread and cheese three times a day.

Eggs and bacon we don’t see.

We get sawdust in our tea.

That’s why we’re gradually

Fading away

The first half of an orphanage children’s chant.

My life consisted of different children’s homes that now blend into one vague conglomerate. No matter how hard I try I can recall very little that might have happened in the following four years of my life. I do know it continued with a round of orphanages but try as I might it is all a haze in my mind. I do remember going out through a front door of a large house into the snow under beautiful winter trees, and a red letterbox. That was all I remembered of this period until in 2015 a children’s home named Shirley Oaks came into the British news because of child abuse there in the fifties and sixties. When I saw the picture of the house I fell back into my chair as if I had been slapped sideways. It was the house of my forgotten memory.

In recent years there has come to light a lot of information about children in institutions being sexually molested. At the time of revising this autobiography in 2015 it has emerged that there existed a big paedophile ring at Shirley Oaks. It has even been suggested to me that I can’t remember much of my childhood because I am blocking out such a thing happening to me. I don’t think so, though, as I feel no trauma about those years. I really don’t believe I ever experienced such a predicament. I have simply forgotten that part of my early life. Indeed, I find it difficult to recall any of my life at whatever age after my father left – or was it after the first children’s home? I think my mind has got into a habit of forgetting anything the moment it has happened. In my adult years my spouse joked that I was lucky because the world and familiar places in it were always new to me. This is why writing this autobiography is so difficult and I must rely on my cousin Gabrielle, a very close friend – more like a sister – to dig away at my memory. She has helped me a lot with this manuscript, mainly by digging hard for information. She is a cousin on the distaff side.

My memory clears a little with my ninth Christmas, which was spent at an orphanage in the seaside town of Hastings. It was not a bad place, somewhat better than the other orphanages. (I hadn’t yet been to the Reading Army Barracks.) I enjoyed the walks along the pebble beach, through Broken Bottle Tunnel, and on to Hastings Castle. For most of my life I was to remember the children who rode on the miniature railway on the sea front, not so much because I was a train enthusiast but because of the envy that I felt. There was a barracks for a Scottish regiment on the way from the orphanage to the beach and whenever we children passed it we would peep through the crack in the door hoping to see the Scotsmen dressing and so discover whether they wore anything under their kilts.

I had to join the Cubs but I didn’t like the silly squatting down to dib-dob with two fingers into the floor; it felt stupid. But what was good about the Cubs was the show they put on in which I played a fairy. While the director said that my fair hair and blue eyes were great for the part, what I liked best about being a fairy was the dressing up and acting.

I’d read that an actor should never turn his back on the audience so, when it came to skipping around the throne that was really a chair, I made certain that I skipped backwards up the side and sideways, face front, across the back. I was the only fairy who did so and the audience found it funny so I decided that they couldn’t have heard of the rule or read the book, though I also felt a little silly.

Another time for dressing up was when the Scouts held a game where one group defended an area of woods and fields while the other group tried to get to a point within the first group’s territory without being seen. This second group was itself divided into two groups: the Scouts who started their journey from Hastings Castle, and the Cubs who started from a point much nearer. The members of this second group were at liberty to disguise themselves so that they might not be recognised. I dressed as an old woman and got through. It was at this time that I began to get carried away with pretending to be other than who I really was.

Cousin Gabrielle: ‘That’s twice you dressed up as a girl or a woman this early in your life. Do you think that might have triggered this gender problem?’

Me: ‘No. I had felt I was a girl for a long time, for years, but I tried not to because I knew it was wrong. Anyway, I’ll go on before I lose the thread.’

Four:

The Prince

I’d grown tired of playing marbles so I joined a group of boys swatting flies with their belts. ‘If I was a king,’ said one boy, ‘I’d make everybody swat flies until there wasn’t none left.’

‘Don’t talk silly,’ another boy, Tom, ridiculed him. ‘Even a king couldn’t get rid of all the flies in the world.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said getting the spark of an idea, ‘it’s a lot a king can do.’

‘Not that though.’

‘Yeah, even that. A king can do that.’ Tom just sneered so I felt that I had to defend the point. ‘I should know,’ I said.

‘Why? What do you know about being a king?’

‘We-ell, about actually being a king,’ I paused, ‘I suppose I don’t know, not about actually being a king as such, but a prince is nearly a king and I know about that.’ I had gained their attention and some other boys had come up to listen.

‘What do you know about being a prince?’ Tom persisted. ‘You’ve read books but they’re not real.’

‘No, they’re not real,’ I agreed. ‘They only tell half of it and that half they make sound easy.’ When Tom turned his back I blurted, ‘I should know, I’m really a –’ but I stopped just in time. Maybe that would be going too far.

‘Yeah? Go on then, say it,’ Tom sneered. ‘You’re really a prince!’ and he laughed.

‘No! We-ell, not really, I shouldn’t have said that. Of course I’m not,’ but I made it sound unconvincing. Tom left in disgust but most of the kids were interested.

‘Are you a prince, then?’ asked Ralph with the red hair.

I made as if to dismiss the whole thing and shrugged. ‘I can’t say. It doesn’t matter.’

‘You don’t look like a prince,’ said another boy.

‘Have you ever seen an Indian prince?’ And I walked away, though not too quickly, in the direction of the boys playing marbles.

‘But you’re not brown,’ objected a boy with a cleft lip. ‘Indians are brown.’

I simply shrugged my shoulders so Ralph said, ‘Not all Indians are brown are they Paul?’

I shrugged again as if I’d lost interest. The fair hairdo boy who didn’t think I looked like an Indian prince said, ‘All Indians are brown. I know that.’

This made Ralph appeal to me. ‘They’re not, are they?’

I sighed as if not wanting to be drawn into the conversation. ‘No, they’re not all brown. Some are nearly black and others are nearly white.’

‘What ones are white?’ Ralph asked.

‘Not white, nearly white, like me. So nearly white you’d think they are white.’

‘What ones are nearly white?’ the fair-haired boy asked.

‘The upper class ones,’ I admitted reluctantly.

‘Are you a prince, then?’

‘I can’t say. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s a secret.’ And I made as if to walk away again.

Some kids, including Ralph and the fair-haired boy, followed. ‘You can tell us, we won’t tell anybody. Are you?’

I let them ask a couple of times before admitting that I was. ‘But don’t tell anybody, please, you mustn’t!’

‘Why? What happened? Why’re you here?’

So I had to explain there had been a war in India. The brown and black people didn’t like the upper class nearly white, and the more white one was, the less one was liked. Because of the war the king of the region, my father, was killed and my mother had fled with me to England. But people were still trying to kill us so I had come to the orphanage to hide until I was old enough to return to India and defeat the renegades. ‘They call it, waiting until I’m old enough to raise the stone.’

‘But Paul’s not an Indian name.’

‘My real name is PaudRIC.’

‘Is that Indian?’

‘Not exactly. Before the revolution we had an Irish Minister and I borrowed his name. I mustn’t tell you my real name – that’s the biggest secret of all. If I told you my real name you would have too much power over me. Nobody would believe you if you said you thought I was an Indian prince, but if the name got out they’d know and I wouldn’t be safe. Nor would my mother.’

My eldest brother, who later in life turned out to be a bit of a spiv, taught me a rhyme:

We three kings of Orient are

Selling soap at twopence a bar,

Matches sevenpence,

Fags elevenpence,

All at the church bazaar

As an adult he was a salesman and I can see by his choice of this ditty that his destiny was already worked out when he was a child.

A few weeks before Christmas the orphanage was attacked by a vast cobweb of string. It covered the ceiling and the hallway walls and travelled out through the doors: It went up the stairs to the landing and down the stairs to the workshops. The fifteen foot bamboo stick with which the Master could reach the furthest table in the dining room was chained to a truce by the cobweb. The windows were crazily patterned by it. Nametags were attached to the loose ends of string in the hallway and at the other ends, at various points in the building, presents hung wrapped in coloured paper. We found our nametags but it was impossible to follow the string to the present at the other end. Christmas day promised to be exciting.

Two miles away in a wood a man lived with his dog, at the bottom of a slope below the London to Hastings railway line, half way between the orphanage and the defences dug into the hills during the war. He had been in the slit trenches across the Channel.

Cousin Gabrielle: ‘But they didn’t have slit trenches in the Second World War, did they.’

Me: ‘No, they didn’t, but we kids didn’t know that. We got the first and second world wars mixed up.’[1]

Anyway, one winter we found him in the woods outside the coastal town of Hastings. He had built a hut out of packing cases and bits of other stuff, corrugated tin and stuff, parts of tea chests tied together with bits of wire and held up by the trees, a simple construction which forced him to bend when he went inside. He had a mongrel, which had followed him home from one of his begging trips, a little scraggy black and white dog that wouldn’t go away. It seemed to us that it was the only living thing he cared to talk to.

It was this man whom we kids at the orphanage called ‘The Hermit’. He was magic to us, and it was to him we went to find out about the presents on the string. We found him puffing his pipe and staring with his small bright eyes into the fire. He didn’t shave and his black hair was uncombed and knotted. Even his little scraggy black and white dog hated visitors and would run away whenever anyone came or anybody passed by. We nearly always found the Hermit sitting on a jerry can and stirring his tea; staring in silence with unfocused eyes. Often his stirring the tea slowed until it stopped and he just sat, holding the twig in his cooling drink, his face not sad, merely expressionless. Only the occasional intruding person would disturb whatever went on in his head. It was in this position that we found him. Knowing by then that he was harmless we asked our question, and waited. Other than for a slow focusing of his eyes his expression remained unchanged. Suddenly he resumed stirring but without speaking. We waited. Finally, slowly, he stood up, turned and bent into his house, returning almost immediately with a little tin box. Still he didn’t smile. He opened the tin slightly, just enough to allow himself to peep into it. The birds suddenly stopped their singing and the wind held its breath in anticipation. The flickering of the fire slowed as the man peered in to the little tin box.

It had taken us a long time to get this familiar with him. Five or six visits over three months had produced no reaction but he fascinated us. Our persistence paid off and one day, when we had asked him a question relating to a future event that involved us, we at last saw him move and he found an answer to our question in his box. This was now the third time we had visited him with a question. It was wonderful how the box seemed to work, as it didn’t look to be anything more than an old tobacco tin.

‘There’s a present for each of you.’

There was an audible sigh from everyone but the news was not really all that surprising as we could have guessed as much, so we waited in anticipation. The Hermit peered into the tin and his face grew dark. We had told him that the nametags were coloured and the presents were wrapped in different coloured papers. ‘Look for the complimentary colours,’ he growled. We were confused. He took the box away from his face and his eyes were no longer vacant. We continued to wait for some further explanation.

‘This is Christmas!’ he snapped as if finding it painful to return to the real world. ‘The message is unclear. Go away!’

We didn’t understand the message. We trusted he’d given us a true answer but it wasn’t detailed enough. There was no hope of anything more so we started to leave. On impulse I turned and called to him, ‘Thanks. Thank you Hermit!’

The Hermit raised his head and looked intensely right at me in a scary way. I wished I’d said nothing. ‘Thank you, prince,’ he growled.

For a moment my world seemed to shudder. How did he know about that? Was it true, then? Could it be true after all? Did he see in his tin box that I really was a prince after all? Maybe it was not only a story then. Maybe I had stumbled on the truth.

There was murmuring among the other children while Ralph and the fair-haired boy walked tall beside their hero. Their hero walked slightly bent, feeling confused and guilty and wishing I could be somewhere else. The discussion on the way home was largely about the Christmas presents and the meaning of the Hermit’s message, but underneath there were secret whisperings about ‘the prince’. There was greater respect for me, but I felt guilty. The lie had grown its own life.

Yet the Hermit had said, ‘Thank you, prince’. How could he, sitting alone under his tree all day, know about that? But he did, so maybe I was a prince after all. For a long time I’d felt that I wasn’t what I appeared to be. I seemed stupid – at least I was a dunce at school in everything other than reading, music and art, and I was hopeless at sport, yet, well, somehow I was not so sure. There was something inside which, if I could just get at, I knew would prove to the world that I wasn’t quite so dumb. I was sometimes, on occasions, not often, inclined to think I might be clever over some things. If I could only find out who I really was. I felt so different from the boys about me – a stranger.

The beginning of the ‘spider’s web’ was seven days away when the announcement came that I was to go home. That was good, I suppose, to be with the family for Christmas, but the present – whichever one would have been mine – receded into a land suddenly foreign.

I had two days to get ready so I sneaked out to see the Hermit. I’d visited the Hermit alone a few times because the man seemed to prefer it when there were not too many people about, yet he did seem to like a little company. His dog didn’t. The dog didn’t seem to have a name but it didn’t matter because any time somebody visited it slunk away into the trees.

The grey wintery camp lay quiet and deserted under a crisp layer of snow. A robin flew up from the hut entrance and perched silently out of harm on a frosty branch. The fire was cold and black.

The snow on the ground absorbed and silenced the world. I stood with my hands in my heavy grey overcoat pockets and felt the freedom offered by the woods and the frosty fields beyond them. I felt relaxed with the absence of other people and their demands. There was an unusual and peaceful sense of isolation.

Yet I was not alone, as much as I would have liked to be. There were still demands. The dark open mouth of the hut called me to enter. Slowly my gaze became fixed there until I felt myself being pulled into that darkness, drawn to the box and its secrets. The box could give me the answers to all my questions. Nobody was there to stop me. I took a step closer; the mist of my breath rising in the still air while the black mouth of the hut called me, ‘Now’s your chance.’ The hesitant shuffle of my steps made a crunching in the snow. One more step and the box was mine. ‘Come child,’ the darkness beckoned, ‘let me show you your worth. The world doesn’t know you – why should it? But you needn’t be lonely here, not like out there.’ The darkness spoke loudly but I didn’t want it. I tried to turn but the darkness spoke to me again. ‘They’re not like you. They come and go. You’re in a different home each year and you don’t know them for long. They’ll all have a good Christmas. You’re not a prince, that’s a lie; you’re Helen of Troy. Thousands fought for you, you were so beautiful. ‘course you weren’t, you were Jesus. Nobody really knew Jesus and not many liked him – at least while he was alive. He didn’t fit in. He was lonely like you. Helen of T wasn’t lonely. How could you be Helen? She wasn’t lonely! You’re not a prince.’

My voice said, ‘be quiet,’ but it was barely a distant whisper.

‘Okay, you’re not Jesus, but you’re better than you think you are. You’ve got more in you than they let you show. You’ve got as much as Helen had. You’ve got more in you than you could have got from your mother. She only gave you the Blackwell pain. You’ve got more than that. Just open the box, Paul. It’s good in the box. Do you want to know who you really are? Open the box and you’ll never be lonely again.’

‘It’s wrong! It’s private!’

‘Don’t worry about the Hermit Paul; he’s just another chap. He’s like the rest of ’em; they only let you under their skin but they won’t let you go further. You can go further into yourself. Go there; it’s there; it’s inside. Come on Paul …’

I shook my head. To stop my legs taking me any farther I dropped to my knees. I wouldn’t go into the hut. The Hermit was good.