3. Early Mentors

Grandpa

I nearly hyphenated that word, men-tors, because I am thinking specifically of two men. One was my maternal grandfather, Grandpa Holmes, mostly just called Grandpa, the husband and then widower of my dear Nana. In fact we were not related by blood. He was my mother’s stepfather. He was, though, the only father she ever knew. He treated her children, Denis and me, and our cousins, Uncle Ian’s children, as his beloved grandchildren in whom he took great interest – every bit as much as he did our other cousins, the children of his actual daughter, my Aunty Frankie. 

Grandpa lived until I was nine. He left me his Remington portable typewriter in his will, because everyone knew by then I was going to be a writer. I began using it immediately and have remained a two-finger typist ever since, because I became so proficient at it that I didn’t have the patience to start over and learn touch typing when I was older. I tried once or twice, but soon gave up. My bad habits were just so much faster and easier for me. 

I wonder if Grandpa was a touch typist? I took little notice of that detail, though I often saw (and heard) him typing away when we stayed with him at The Orchard House, or he came to visit with us. Trying to summon up the memory now, I have a notion he too used to ‘hunt and peck’ quite proficiently. A very well-read man, with a keen interest in global politics and all manner of other subjects, he kept up a busy correspondence with people all over the world. Some were relatives, some old or new friends, some famous thinkers with whom he exchanged ideas. He himself was no-one famous, but they were interested enough in his ideas to keep up the correspondence with him.

And he wrote long, frequent letters to his grandchildren. I used to write back, also at length, and we wound up discussing a lot of ideas – and also a lot of Great Literature.

He was the one who gave me many of the classics for Christmas and birthday presents over the years: Dickens, the Brontes, Alexandre Dumas; and Ivanhoe, Ben Hur, The Mill on the Floss ... all of which I read avidly, and loved, at an age which nowadays might be considered far too young for such adult books. (I was always precocious with language, and could read long before I started school.)

When I was very young, Grandpa would take me for long walks in nature, pointing out various plants, birds and insects, and telling me all about their lives and habits. He made it all fascinating for me. Needless to say, he was one of my favourite people.

Here I am with him in our back yard:

Perhaps it was having a grandpa like that, as well as some nice uncles – not to mention a father I adored, who was a fun playmate, a knowledgable advisor, and a great storyteller – which made it unremarkable to me that I also had an ‘imaginary friend’ who was not another child but a grown-up man. 

Mystery Man

At the time, I took him for granted. It was only when I looked back, many years later, that I perceived him as mysterious. It finally occurred to me only then that I never even had a name for him. Neither do I have a distinct visual memory of him — unlike those children who used to visit me, whose faces and forms come to mind clearly as soon as I think of them, and whose names I still know. I do have a vague sense of his form – tallish, and fairly slim – but his face is a blank in my mind. How strange that seems now! 

What I do remember is how safe and calm I felt in his presence. He himself seemed to exude calm, and a quiet protectiveness. I remember very well what I would now call his energy. If I try, I think I can almost remember what his voice was like.  And yet I don't think I heard it physically.

We had long talks, walking around the big back garden: a large lawn surrounded by bushes and shrubs, including raspberries, loganberries, red currants and gooseberries. When I was small enough, I used to crawl among those bushes to watch with equal fascination both the various insects going about their lives and the beings I identified as fairies flitting in and out, going about their business too. I remember trying to get one to pause so I could talk to her and ask her questions. She was quite cross at being interrupted in what she was doing, scowled at me and went back to her activity. I don't know what she was up to exactly, but she seemed very busy, doing something to the plant I found her in – with a lot of the ‘flitting in and out’ I mentioned. This was, essentially, flitting in and out of sight: one minute there, the next not, and then visible again. This makes me think that fairies inhabit both this and some other dimension, going in and out of each as easily as we might go through a gate from home to street.

Down the far end of the lawn was a small rockery covered in very low-growing plants. At least it seems small now, but it was big enough for several kids to climb up and sit on it comfortably. Next to that was a stand of skinny bamboo; and behind them the wooden lattice ‘summerhouse,’ one square room with walls and ceiling made of square holes. Beyond that separation was Dad’s vegetable garden, and just behind the summerhouse one of two big willows (the other was in the far corner of the veggie garden) from which my dad had suspended a swing for me: thick ropes and a flat wooden seat.

I did swing, daringly high at times, but most of all I liked to sit, enclosed all around by curtaining willow fronds, leaning back until my long hair almost swept the ground, pushing only very gently with my feet to get the swing moving a tiny bit, and drift and dream. (As an adult, I read in Robert Graves's The White Goddess that someone who spends a lot of time with willow trees is bound to become a poet – an explanation I was very happy to apply to myself.)

My mystery man never turned up when there was anyone else around. (Now that I think of it, neither did the children, my ‘imaginary playmates’.)

I was an only child for my first four years; and after my little brother was born he was for a long time too young to play with me outside. My parents encouraged me to ‘get out in the fresh air’ and so, between visits from the imaginaries, I often had hours of solitude, and learned to fill them with exploring the natural world, and with daydreaming.   

My daydreams were of adventure and travel, and being ‘grown-up’. I didn’t daydream the playmates or the mystery man. Although I call them imaginary here, to identify them, they were as unquestionably real to me as any other company I sometimes had, such as Grandpa and, as I got older, my visiting cousins and/or the neighbourhood kids.

Mystery Man was somewhat like a nice uncle, but one who was free to spend a lot of time with me like Grandpa – only not elderly like Grandpa. I'm vague about what age he might have been, but I had a sense of someone old enough to know a lot, and by no means  too old to be fit and agile.

Another thing which strikes me only now is that, although I have a strong sense that our long conversations were both fascinating and instructive – and filled with shared laughter – I can’t for the life of me recall the content. 

I never mentioned him to anyone, back then.

Neither of these mentors, living Grandpa and unknown Mystery Man, ever spoke to me condescendingly as in any way inferior to them in intellect.

********

At some point, as I grew older, this visitor gradually turned up less often and finally stopped visiting. I didn’t really notice. In fact he dropped right out of my conscious memory until he was recalled to me decades later, when I also learned exactly who he was. 

I'll tell you in much more detail how this came about when I get to that point in my story, but it happened such a long time later that it would be a bit mean to keep you waiting for so many chapters without at least identifying him. But you may really need to ‘suspend your disbelief’!

He turned out to be the Egyptian, Thoth (aka Tehuti), whom I discovered at the same time to be my patron deity* – a concept I did not have until then.

*A patron deity is a god or goddess who takes a special interest in a particular person, group, profession, or place, acting as a guardian, protector, and guide. While historically deities were associated with specific places or crafts (e.g. Thoth for scribes), in many modern contexts, particularly in Paganism, it refers to a personal, deep relationship where the deity has chosen the individual. This relationship is a significant commitment that often extends beyond ritual work into daily life.