When I came back to London from my Newquay experience in October 1959, I was no longer a virgin in any sense. I had met an attractive girl called Ann who was also a virgin, and we had left that state behind together. It was a very uncomfortable event for both of us: she because of her tough hymen, me because of my tight foreskin. After, laying there together on my staff dormitory bunk in the Byron Court hotel, she said that she thought we should get married when we returned to London. I indicated that I was not exactly prepared for such a step, and she arose from the bed. I asked her where she was going, and she replied, “I’m going down to the sea.” An instant image of her wading, rejected, into the uncaring surf entered my mind. So I acquiesced to the marriage proposal, and we were married the following year. It lasted 4 years, during which time my taste for sex increased while her own declined. At the age of 21 she took to wearing a long white Victorian nightdress to bed as a barrier against sexual advances. On one such night in our Finchley flat I tore the garment to shreds, then I flung some stuff into a small suitcase and rode off into the night on my Heinkel scooter - which had been painted by a musician friend, Mike McGann, to resemble a Gothic cathedral.

A few miles down the road it occurred to me that I did not know where I was going, so I stopped on the North Circular, alone in the amber streetlight, and thought about it. I had been working as an art student’s nude model at Hornsey College of Art, and I remembered that the teacher had given me her phone number. I found the slip of paper in my wallet, and drove to the nearest red telephone box. And that’s how I connected to my second wife and the mother of my children.

I explained to her over the phone that I needed a place to stay overnight, and she said I could use the day bed in her studio. I arrived at her flat in Notting Hill at about 11pm, and was introduced to her guests. Ivan was from Jamaica and John was from New York. The music playing was Buchdehude and Feodor Chaliapin. We immediately embarked on an intense conversation about spiritual fulfillment, fed by tea and black bread supplied by our hostess. The guests left at about 2am, and I settled down to sleep on my studio bed, wondering what would become of me. 30 minutes later, I was awakened by my naked hostess joining me in bed. As before, I welcomed this as a message from the gods that I was on the right path. The hero was progressing towards the unimaginable goal through these trials and rewards.

During the following months of 1965, Ivan, John, our hostess and now-resident I assembled at the Notting Hill flat at night to conduct exploratory ventures into the spiritual effects of Congo Big Stick, a blend of cow’s blood and hashish, supplied by Ivan. Many interesting experiences were gained thereby, including my experience of marching up and down the room clapping my hands together for an hour to prevent myself vanishing forever into the inanimate furniture to the music of Elizabethan love songs, and the experience of making a plaster mould of mine own hand which stuck because I had forgotten to apply vaseline, and the experience of submitting to a Jamaican voodoo ‘pot-pilot’ called Rupi, who actually taught us to fly around the room. He stood at the end of the dining room table and solemnly held out his arms as if wings, and said, “We’s all flyin’!” And we were. My new partner used to drive me to the art school in the mornings following such sessions, and I asked her how she could drive. She said it was easy, all you had to do was realise that the car was standing still and the landscape was moving past it.

I had found a job at a theatrical stage manufacturer’s factory near Shaftesbury Avenue, where, among other things, I helped to make the props for the original performance of ‘Camelot’. My wife Ann, having tracked me down, called several times, but I explained to her that I was on a new cycle. She sent a friend, a Newquay associate called Arnold, around to the flat to inspect us. But he had recently converted to Catholicism, and he found that our knives and forks were satanic because they had black handles. This myth, that I had been abducted by a ‘black witch’, spread around my erstwhile friends in a similar manner to the Tom myth (see ‘Beatnik Story’). From the night of the intolerable Victorian nightdress, I never saw my wife again. Her very nice Scottish mother, I heard later, had commented, “Well, you lost him, didn’t you?” I would love to know what she meant, but never will. I imagine her stoically subjecting herself to the sexual demands of her husband through uncounted years, like a sacrificial goat. But perhaps the truth was different.

After exploring Buddhism and Theosophy, the Notting Hill group started to read the works of George Gurdjieff, and found therein a practical system for gaining higher consciousness. My new partner, the art school teacher, became set on joining a community which devoted themselves to Gurdjieff’s teachings, and so we decided to move to the closest such community, which was at an estate called Coombe Springs in Kingston upon Thames.

Please note that this memoir disassociates identified participants from my account of events with which they may not agree. This is my memoir, and I’m telling it in my way. All participants were subject to the tide of the times, and none can claim the authoritative version. I state this rider because now we move from hitherto unreported accounts to accounts of events which have entered the general sphere, and which are still subject to controversy. Try Googling < Gurdjieff Coombe Springs>, and you’ll see what I mean.

After several weekend visits to Coombe Springs, my new partner and I were accepted as residents into the community - a truly eclectic assembly of about 70 persons, some of whom had been there since 1946 - and we moved in in 1966. I was 26 years old.

At that time, the Coombe Springs ‘Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences’ Ltd., under the direction of John Bennett, was running two very different spiritual disciplines: Gurdjieff and Subud. The former was based on practices of willful control of everything, the latter on the complete opposite. Nevertheless, the core ethos of the community remained Gurdjieffian. We used to play host to Subud practitioners on some weekends, and came to call them the ‘helpless helpers’ because of their inability to organise anything: they used to hold group meditation sessions to decide who would peel the potatoes.

We were there for just over two years, during which time my partner and I were married and produced a son. I attended the delivery and witnessed the forceps- aided birth which I was later to associate with his mental illness. I was among the first husbands to venture into the delivery room of the Kingston Hospital, and was rammed into walls by trolleys pushed by resentful elder Matrons. It is strange for today’s minds, but in those days some considered that the husband’s attendance was an abomination. But more enlightened spirits there allowed me to sleep under the doctor’s desk during the 36 hours of the delivery.

I worked at building sites during the first part of our residency, and then switched to a job as a designer at a nearby advertising agency.

My memories of Coombe Springs contain the following highlights: treading through the snow down to the ‘Jami’ at 6am every morning to perform my morning exercise; having a sauna and walking naked at night through the snow down to the Springhouse to jump through the ice surface of the well therein; being ejected from a Gurdjieff movements exercise because I was “spoiling the pattern”; reading aloud from Gurdjieff and Rumi texts to 70 guests at ‘silent dinners’; designing a backdrop for Mr Bennett’s play about a medieval christian episode only to see my drawings drop rejected from his careless fingers; practicing Gurdjieff’s ‘Super Effort’ while digging ditches for a stream bed during a ‘Work Sunday’, and thereby experiencing 2 hours of altered consciousness in which I saw everyone as machines which did not know they were machines; witnessing the shame of a resident who had been caught during a ‘fasting weekend’ shinning up a tree to retrieve a stored hamburger; witnessing the befuddlement of a GPO delivery man as he walked up the drive during a ‘Stop Exercise’ in which the people trimming hedges around him froze into immobility when Mr Bennett’s distant voice called “Stop!”; feeling in another ‘Stop Exercise’ a delicate sweet infusion descend on my head and fill my body. Attending a lecture given by the Chief Druid, in which he asserted that when Jesus returned the Druids would “have him”.

Several other leaders of different spiritual persuasions were invited to speak to the community during our stay. Towards the end, under the influence of Idries Shah, we were asked individually to complete a survey which included the question, “What do you think Coombe Springs is?” I answered that it was a spiritual supermarket, you paid your money and took your choice. Whereas leaders of other groups focussed on a single discipline, Mr Bennett was predisposed to ‘try anything’, and in later life even became a Catholic. Like me, perhaps, he was always looking for an authoritative and authentic tradition to which he could commit, and never found it. Or perhaps he discovered that no such tradition existed, and that all traditions were equal in efficacy.

Those interested can Google for further details of Coombe Springs history. So far as I know, no memoirs have yet appeared from ex-residents - other than depersonalised accounts of historical events.

Idries Shah was the last in a succession of spiritual ‘path’ representatives to influence the Coombe Springs community. He claimed direct connection to the Sufi tradition which was the source of Gurdjieff’s ideas and methods. Led by Mr Bennett, the directors of the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences Ltd. handed the Coombe Springs estate over to Shah in 1966. All community members were asked to leave. Shah organised a 3-day party for about 500 guests, then sold the estate to property developers. Years later someone asked Mr Bennett what he had got from his contact with Shah. Mr Bennett replied, “My freedom!”