The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Page 2

  Her granddaughter, Pauline Watson, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her aunt Freda, remembers Nellie well. “She was a strong woman, who I found rather formidable. She was very good with money, and held the purse strings. Later on she bought and sold houses. Nellie was also rather psychic, like myself and Freda. It runs in the female line. Nellie got ‘feelings’ and sensed presences. She once bought a house but never moved in because she felt unhappy ghosts there,” said Pauline, who lives near Bristol, in the United Kingdom.

  Freda, who famously never saw ill in anyone, had a distinctly rosy view of her mother. “She had a great altruistic spirit, loving her fellow man. I never knew of anyone near us in need who did not get a helping hand from my mother. Looking back, I think she was a natural bodhisattva, but since she was born in a Christian country, she never encountered the Buddha.”

  Freda’s most interesting family member was her great-grandfather Walker, who as a child had been shipwrecked as he was fleeing France and was plucked from the waves by a preacher named Reverend Walker. Rumor had it that he was the illegitimate son of the Dauphin, although there was no proof. Whatever his ancestry, he did very well, rising from a coach driver to a successful coal contractor. The beautiful pieces of furniture that Nellie eventually inherited came from him.

  When Freda was eighteen months old, Frank and Nellie’s second child, John, was born. With his blond curly hair and sunny disposition, Freda adored him from the start. They were exceptionally close and maintained a constant correspondence whenever they were apart. “He was a beautiful, strong boy, who inherited the Houlston beauty,” she declared. “Believe it or not, we never quarreled.” The siblings had very different personalities. Freda was a serious, sensitive, good child, who was rarely seen without a book in her hand. John, on the other hand, was mischievous, fond of playing pranks, and preferred sports to schoolwork. Both, however, had the kindness gene. In adulthood, John joined the philanthropic Christian-based organization Toc H, founded after World War I by Reverend Philip “Tubby” Clayton, to do good works for the sick, elderly, and disadvantaged. Its ethos was example rather than preaching. John was also strongly religious and wanted to enter the Church, but the funds were not available. Instead he opted for the Royal Navy, where he managed to bluff his way into the signals unit in spite of being color-blind. When he died, at age fifty-four from heart disease, the family received hundreds of letters from people expressing how John had helped them. Freda’s children reported that when she heard the news, it was the only time they ever saw their mother cry.

  By 1914, the clouds of World War I were gathering, threatening not only peace in Europe but the tranquility of the Houlston household.

  “The advent of war is very clear in my mind. We were sitting in the drawing room, Mother was pouring tea when there was a great booming sound. It was a bomb that had fallen on Derby station,” recalled Freda.

  Frank did his duty and joined the Sherwood Foresters as a private in the machine gun corps, and marched off to France. He was killed in the trenches of Aire, on April 14, 1918, just a few weeks before the end of the war. Freda, who was seven years old at the time, was devastated.

  “My father’s death overshadowed my entire childhood,” Freda admitted. “My sadness is that I never really knew him. I have only two vague memories, one of him digging in the garden and the other of him playing with me in the sitting room. I never got the chance to understand him. We had a painting depicting a scene from the English Civil War, in which a child is being questioned about when he had last seen his father. The boy replies, ‘I saw him last night in my dreams.’ For me it was just like that. To me father is a concept, a sacred concept.

  “The Remembrance Day service held annually at a school on November 11 to honor those who had fallen in the War used to open up the wound again and again. I would almost faint with grief,” she said.

  She later revealed that her father’s death opened her up to the pain and suffering experienced by all humans everywhere, preparing her for the Buddhist path. The Truth of Universal Suffering was the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths—his seminal doctrine, outlining the path to liberation.

  Nellie, who had seen her husband’s death when he appeared at the foot of her bed one morning, five days before the telegram arrived, suffered a near-collapse, but carried on. When she recovered, she announced, quite firmly, that she would never set foot in church again, on the grounds that she could no longer believe in a God who could take someone as good as her husband or separate a wife from the husband she loved so much. She later married another Frank, Francis Swann, a railway clerk, the youngest of eleven, who lived with three spinster sisters not far from Nellie. Freda was the first to concede it was not a marriage of young lovers.

  “Frank Swann was thirty-five, and it occurred to him that it would be a good idea to marry the young widow—it was a union of two people who had decided they would like to spend the rest of their lives together. My second father was a good-natured, kindly man, who followed his own interests (mainly amateur dramatics), and who never interfered with our upbringing.”

  The second drama of Freda’s childhood occurred when she contracted diphtheria at age eleven. An epidemic was sweeping the country, killing many children. Penicillin had not yet been invented, and Freda grew increasingly weak. Seeing that her daughter was dying, Nellie followed her intuition and took her to a doctor in Nottingham, who prescribed putting her in a tent in the garden. Curiously, the unorthodox treatment worked.

  “He must have been a genius doctor because, under the beech tree and by the laburnum, I was soon on my way to recovery,” Freda wrote in her notebook. From that day on Freda had a predilection for tents, and at every opportunity would dive into them, taking her children with her—be it in the high, remote foothills of the Himalayas or in strange dirt parks in Delhi. In her journals she attributed her love of canvas to a previous life as a nomad in Tibet, as she did her empathy with the surrounding countryside she grew up in.

  “I loved the stark Derbyshire landscape. There is a mysterious, esoteric quality about it—the black rock forms, close-cropped grass, walls of stone like the mani stone I saw in Tibet. No other English county is like it, except maybe Cornwall,” she wrote.

  Freda and John spent hours roaming freely over the Derbyshire hills and dales, collecting mushrooms and blackberries, making daisy chains. They wandered through bluebell woods, explored the magical Sherwood Forest (Robin Hood’s hideaway) and visited Derby’s great old stately homes, such as Pemberley, now a pilgrimage site for devotees of Mr. Darcy, hero of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And they bought bowls of fresh butter from the small farms dotted over the countryside.

  “We were very happy,” she said simply. Freda’s love of nature, which bordered on pantheism, never left her. It informed her poetry, her writings, her very soul, and she would wax lyrical whenever she spoke of it. “I recall the exquisite perfume of the lilac tree outside the kitchen door, and the pear tree with its blossoms tumbling over the garden wall in the magical days of spring.”

  It was an unspoiled, ordered childhood of a bygone age.

  Nellie would sew; preserve fruits and vegetables; make jams, pickles, and herb root beer. The only entertainment was a crystal radio, brought into the house when Freda was eleven. They would gather around it in the evening, prodding it with a contraption called the “cat’s whisker” to find the sensitive spot to make it spring to life.

  During her formative years, Freda nurtured the innate spiritual side of her nature that was to persist and grow until it dominated her entire existence. She described its development this way: “I was a Christian brought up in a Christian family. My mother may have turned her back on God, but she sent me to Sunday school and then to church because she thought her husband would have wanted it. My godmother, Auntie Lilly, loved me dearly, and was a quiet influence with a quality of joy. She used to play me hymns.”

  It was her confirmation, at age fourteen, at St. Peter’s Church
, Littleover, that truly opened the spiritual door. “When I took Holy Communion, I felt there was something different there—a direct communication, a sense of awe in the face of the Divine,” she said. Her minister, whom she called Brown Owl on account of his spectacles and hooked nose, was wary. “He saw I was more interested in Mass than most girls and warned my mother that she should keep an eye on me. That was a typical attitude of the Church of England then, which was obsessed with fetes, and meetings, and showed an utter lack of understanding of anything connected to the spiritual life in its deepest sense.” It triggered a deep-seated yearning that was to last all her life. As always Freda turned to books to find out what this yearning was, and what it meant. “I read the Anglo Catholic writers, and the biographies of the saints. The life story of Saint Thérèse of Carmel, the book of Saint John of the Cross, trying to find out how they had reached this exalted state. It was a turning point. I discovered all these saints of the past had sought Reality, the Truth, and were not satisfied until they had reached some direct intuition of the Light, the life in the cosmos. This started a new stream of thought. If they can do it, why can’t I sit quietly and contemplate.”

  Freda had discovered that what she was looking for could not be found in dogma but only through going within. “I realized that Brown Owl’s sermons and all the things that went on in the Church had no meaning for me at all,” she said.

  There was no one nearby to help her. England in the 1920s had not even heard of meditation. Christmas Humphreys, a judge and scholar, opened the first Buddhist Society in 1926, at Eccleston Square, London, based primarily in Zen. The Theosophists had thought about things Buddhist, but nothing had percolated through to provincial libraries, schools, or homes.

  Freda was not only sincere, she was extraordinarily determined—unusual traits for a girl that young. “The only thing I could think of was to go to church when nobody was there. I used to slip away from home in the early hours before school, sit alone in the pews, and just wait. There was always a prayer in my heart to reach God, or whatever you call that power or love beyond thought. I was only deeply interested in what I could find out from direct, intuitive understanding.”

  She had taken the first step of the spiritual seeker, setting out on a journey that was to last nearly forty years, when she eventually found the path that she was looking for.

  In the meantime she kept her head in books. There were hints in her choice of reading of where she was heading. “Whenever anything from the East came into my hands—poetry, literature of any sort—there was always more than an ordinary depth of response,” she said.

  2

  Expanding World

  FREDA WAS DRIVEN as much by her brain as by her innate spiritual impulses. She was known as a clever and studious girl who excelled at her lessons. She attended the newly opened Parkfields Cedars, established on Kedleston Road in 1917, which had as its guiding motto “To Produce Girls of Distinction.” Freda loved it. She described in glowing terms its rolling lawns, magnificent oak paneling, sweeping staircase, well-equipped library, stately cedar trees, and dedicated unmarried staff, “living for their work and loving the children. I can still see the head, Miss Kay, a Scot, who was a rather strong, bulldog-looking type, with the winter sun streaming in behind her, illuminating her white hair as she said morning prayers. She had an unsentimental way with the Bible, especially the Old Testament and the psalms of David. Beside her was one picture, Botticelli’s ‘Annunciation.’ Morning prayers were a time of joy for me.”

  Freda eventually became “head girl,” a student leader who served as the official representative of the school. “We knew that she was brainy, completely into books,” said Pauline Watson, Freda’s niece. “When I visited one of her school friends, she told me that Freda was not like most of them—she wasn’t interested in parties or boyfriends. She had her goals and went toward them.”

  This was 1920s postwar Britain, and while most young girls were amusing themselves with flappers, fringes, and frivolity, Freda was content with ballroom dancing, arts and crafts, and following her mother around the golf course, the only sport that interested her. She loathed swimming in the local baths but was grateful that she had learned how to swim, because swimming in the lakes of Kashmir gave her hours of pleasure later in her life.

  But it was in her schoolwork that she excelled, especially literature and languages. It helped that she had a photographic memory, a fact that she made little of. One teacher in particular, Miss Glass, earned her lifelong gratitude for teaching her French. Freda had a particular aptitude for the language, owing, she thought, to her mysterious French maternal great-grandfather.

  “Whether it came from my great-grandfather or not, Miss Glass recognized and encouraged my special talent for French, lending me books, getting me to the stage where I could read rapidly, and giving me a great appreciation for French literature. All that I achieved in French got me to Oxford, and was due to her. I can’t be grateful enough,” she said. “The story of my childhood is all about developing myself to the point, whether consciously or not, where I could be admitted to Oxford University.”

  In spite of her natural cleverness, university had not originally been on Freda’s agenda, especially not Oxford. She was never ambitious in that way, and had assumed that she would stay in Derbyshire and lead a quiet, domesticated if industrious life, like her mother. It was a masterstroke of fate that determined Freda’s future and it came in the form of Elsie Ludlow, a school friend whose Quaker family wanted her to get into Oxford.

  “Elsie was an enterprising girl, but not very bright. She asked me if I would study with her for the entrance exam, because she knew she wouldn’t have the incentive to do it by herself. On the spur of the moment, I took the exam with her, without much preparation at all. To my great surprise I was called for an interview, though Elsie wasn’t. I was told I had a good chance of getting in the following year, to read French, if I brushed up on my language skills.”

  Nine months spent living with her French pen pal in Reims and attending the local school did the trick. Although Freda confessed she didn’t actually like the sound and pitch of the French voice—she said it got on her nerves—when she next took the Oxford exam, her new French accent helped her pass. It was an extraordinary achievement, but one that was still tantalizingly out of reach. Her family simply did not have the money. Undeterred, Freda set her sights on winning a scholarship. Competition was stiff for England’s oldest, most prestigious university—with only twelve places being allotted out of three hundred applicants, but Freda succeeded. She received the news with remarkable equanimity.

  “One day I got a letter saying that I had been awarded an ‘exhibition’ for St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. I really had no idea what it meant. In fact it was a scholarship worth so much money per month. I put the letter in my pocket and set off to school on the Huddleston Road tram.” As it happened, Miss Glass, her French teacher, was sitting at the other end. “When we reached the Parkfields Cedars stop, I took the letter out and showed her. She looked at me in an unbelieving way and said in a shaking voice, ‘You mean you’ve sat there on the tram all this time without rushing up to tell me?’” It was indicative of Freda’s very calm, controlled, unemotional response to the dramatic things that life presented her.

  At Parkfields Cedars, Freda was hailed as the first girl to get into Oxford, and with an exhibition at that. But still Freda was far from being able to go. She now had the money for the fees but not enough for the boarding and living costs. Again, with the encouragement of Miss Glass, she put her mind to getting two further scholarships, one from the county and the other from the state—both of which she duly won. “Finally there was enough money for three terms plus thirty-three pounds in pocket money. My mother would provide me with the clothes I needed.”

  In the autumn of 1929, a naïve eighteen-year-old Freda traveled by train, tram, and bicycle to St. Hugh’s, one of Oxford’s prettiest colleges, founded by Elizabeth Wordsworth (gre
at-niece of the poet William Wordsworth) specifically for girls of modest means. It was strictly segregated. St. Hugh’s was one of only three women’s colleges, Oxford being a bastion of male privilege where women’s degrees were not even legally recognized until 1920. Nevertheless, St. Hugh’s had rapidly developed a reputation for producing women of unusual radical and determined character. Men were not admitted until 1986.

  “It was a very quiet little student who came up to St. Hugh’s and wore the long exhibition gown to the lectures,” Freda conceded. Oxford opened the doors of the world to her. At St. Hugh’s she drew to her a small group of girls who were to go on to become some of the most powerful figures of their time. They stayed friends for years. From this time on, Freda was to mingle effortlessly with the great and the good from all cultures and ways of life.

  Leading the pack was the inimitable, feisty Barbara Betts, later better known as Barbara Castle, the first woman to become First Secretary of State under Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and hailed as one of the most important Labor politicians of the twentieth century. She was a major influence on Freda’s life, steering her away from her provincial upbringing into an infinitely bolder, more sophisticated life.

  “Barbara brought with her a flavor of the north of England, where I was brought up, as well as the sturdy atmosphere of the great pioneers of English socialism,” commented Freda. There was also Olive Salt Gorton, who became a pillar of the BBC and broke down class barriers by introducing regional accents to the airwaves to balance the clipped tones of “received pronunciation.” “Olive brought the people of England into the BBC with programs like ‘Underneath the Arches.’ She took the microphone onto the pavements.” And there was Olive Chandler, whom Freda was particularly fond of and with whom she maintained a lifelong correspondence: “She was a quiet little nun of a girl with a dove-like quality who was like my good conscience. When she saw me getting too excited with outside activities, she used to bring me back to my books and look after me.” While Freda was appraising her friends, they also had their opinion of her, summed up by Barbara Castle in her autobiography, Fighting All the Way: