Many Lives (2 page)

1) I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost… I am hopeless.

It isn't my fault.

It takes for ever to find a way out.

2) I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don't see it.

I fall in again.

I can't believe I'm in the same place.

But it isn't my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

3) I walk down the same street.

There's a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in… it's a habit.

My eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault.

I get out immediately.

4) I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

5) I walk down another street.

P
OEM FROM
T
HE
T
IBETAN
B
OOK OF
L
IVING AND
D
YING
BY
S
OGYAL
R
INPOCHE

T
hings can happen to us in our lives that defy all logic: something in a sentence, a daydream, a vision, a visitation; it could be that you suddenly find yourself in the presence of angels. When it's happened you ask yourself how long it lasted. It could have been minutes in our linear time, or just seconds. We think in such linear terms, but we are not linear. Our lives are not linear.

Sometimes we can go through months and months, with time just passing by. Then suddenly there's a flash. The detail of those months might be lost and forgotten, but that flash will stay with us for ever.

We're so interested in time, so caught up by time. We use a linear notion of time to try to pin down the magic of existence. Time stretches and loops. Our lives stretch and loop. Our existence
is
magic.

The question that dances like a firefly in my mind is: are we following a pre-written chronicle of our lives that's unfolding as
a surprise to us but that is as planned as a Disneyland ride? Or do we have free will, and a set of lessons to learn, which, if we don't get them the first time, will come back in a different form until we do?

My life has been a magic ride that could only have happened because I was born on the very day and at the very time I was. I don't think it was an accident that I was a child in the 1950s, that I
lived
the 1960s, had children in the 1970s and then came to represent, through my part in
The Colbys
, the 1980s. Are we just watching the unfurling of the inevitable or are we able to change everything, about ourselves and our future? I'm not one of the great thinkers; just someone experiencing and looking, and finding it all so incredibly interesting.

Everything in my life has been of its time. I went from a little deaf girl in Start-rite sandals in the 1950s to a voraciously inquisitive young woman in the 1960s; then from an actress and film star to a desperately struggling single mother in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the on-screen characters that I was best known for stood for that decade, while in the 1990s I went on a journey which, some years earlier, three psychics had, quite independently, told me I'd follow.

I had already started that journey way back. I don't even think it had started in this life. Like all of our lives, if you could line up each moment and look at them as if through a prism, taking them in from different perspectives, you'd see there were no contradictions; you'd see how it all connects. Just like a good haircut, everything joins up.

Flying has been a theme in my life for ever. As a very young child I can remember walking along the back of the sofa and thinking that if I carried on walking I'd be able to lift off straight into the air. I believed I could fly.

The idea of having wings wasn't strange. Angels were not alien.

Every night as a child I'd go with my two angel friends and we'd fly around and do good deeds for people. They were my night-time friends: two fairy angels. We might see an old lady who needed her shopping carried, or a cat stuck in a tree that needed rescuing. We were good flying people. I thought they lived in my pillow because they came out and played when my head was resting on it.

A memory-trace carried with me into this life from before I was born, perhaps.

Being Church of England was just who we were as a family, it went with being English middle-class residents in a safe, comfortable, quiet and leafy suburb – in Barnet, North London. ‘The nearest I want to get to church is the garden,' my father used to say, ‘and I'm very happy to tend it.'

My mother was a spiritual person by nature. She maintained her own faith, which included a belief in an afterlife. For her, the C of E was good for christenings, funerals and weddings but it wasn't where her spirit really lay. She was far more open and investigative; spiritually restless. Unlike people who suddenly take
up a definitive religious position just before death, my mother let it all unravel. When she was dying I asked her, ‘Do you know where you're going next?' With a child-like twinkle in her eye, she replied, ‘We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?'

Our parents sent me and my older sister Diana, who we called Didi (pronounced dye-dye), and my younger sister Jenny to a Catholic convent for our primary education. It was run by an order of French nuns. Our parents' decision to send us there was totally pragmatic. They knew we'd get the best education at the convent; at the very least, we'd learn good deportment and French.

I hated it at first; with its strict rules and regulations and a uniform that was meant to be kept neat and tidy at all times. In winter we would wear a scratchy green tunic, shirt and tie. The tunic was only cleaned once a term, and by the time the holidays began it was egg- and paint-stained. My tie would be tied just once at the start of term and then hung in a loop on the end of the bed at night, so all I had to do was slip it over my head each morning. I remember the desperately cold winters of the 1950s. So cold, we always dressed under the bedclothes. In the summer we'd change into green checked cotton dresses; our white knee-high socks held up by home-made elastic garters.

I enjoyed the religious aspects of the convent. The day was punctuated with prayer. There was chapel in the morning, prayers in between each class and at the end of the day, and we said grace before lunch. There were statues of Our Lady and of Jesus Christ throughout the school. A crucifix hung in each classroom and paintings depicting scenes from the Bible were hung on the walls. As a young child I was in awe. I took it all very seriously. I treasured my blue plastic rosary kept in a little blue egg.

During break I'd retreat to my secret places of sanctuary. In the winter months, or when it was raining, I'd slip into the little side chapel. I'd make the sign of the cross, genuflect and take my place in a front pew, then spend the rest of our 20-minute break-time praying. I didn't pray to Jesus or to God, but to the Virgin Mary.

When the weather was fine I'd skip down a path in the school's garden to a small grotto where there was another statue of Mary. I was entranced by her blue-and-white dress and the calla lilies that she held. I was drawn to her. I felt that we had a special relationship.

The Holy Trinity didn't work for me: there was a God in the clouds who spoke with a voice of anger and judgement; then there was Jesus who seemed to have a nice life but then died in agony for our sins; then there was this bird that was called a ghost that radiated light and that people wore on badges. I didn't get it. Mary wasn't angry or judgemental like God and I didn't really understand what sin was, especially mortal sin. I couldn't understand why a baby who hadn't been christened wouldn't go to heaven. The bird didn't seem like anything you would want to talk to and God seemed so fierce. Not like Mary.

In the chapel, which was a place of silence and reverence, I never spoke out loud to her, but in the garden I would. I'd chat to her about so many different things, and she'd speak to me. They weren't conversations I was having with myself in my mind. I remember them as dialogues; they were real. I talked to Mary and she talked to me. I could see and hear her. Mary was my friend and I loved her.

I didn't know why sometimes I couldn't hear things properly but I could always hear Mary. I loved the peace and calm of her
grotto and the chapel; away from the babble and confusing noise of the playground.

The nuns had noticed that I spent a lot of time in the chapel or down the end of the garden in Mary's alcove. Late one afternoon, after I'd got home from school, my mother received a telephone call from one of the Sisters suggesting, in a softly spoken and gentle way, that they believed I'd be a good candidate for conversion. I think my mother was a little surprised. She was aware that I'd shown an interest in religion but thought it was just a passing phase. She also knew that the nuns were always on the look-out for new recruits and wasn't at all comfortable with the idea of me being corralled into committing to a faith I knew little about. Far too elegant ever to offend anyone, however, and also of the belief that you should never argue with those of the cloth, especially nuns, my mother listened till the Sister had finished, then simply said, ‘That sounds just lovely, Sister, and I expect that you are right, and if Stephie does want to pursue this when she is a little older then that would be simply wonderful!'

They didn't call again.

When I was a teenager I was out most evenings. On Mondays I'd go to the church youth club and jive to Everly Brothers' and Bobby Darin records. On Tuesday evenings we'd all meet at the Black Horse pub and then go to Barnet Jazz Club, where they had live music and we could spend the evening long-arm jiving to Acker Bilk and other traditional jazz bands. On Wednesdays we'd
head to the further education college for more dancing, and come Friday we'd be at the Finchley Jazz Club for short-arm jiving. The only night I didn't go out was Thursday. I stayed in to wash my hair. Saturday morning it was up the Devon Café, at the far end of Barnet High Street, to find out where the party was Saturday night. On Sunday afternoons I would spread all my books out over the dining room table and do my homework for the complete week while listening to Radio Luxembourg.

When Geoff, my first boyfriend, came along, I calmed down; my parents saw the advantage. My reports improved, I started to read and develop an interest in culture and art; if only, at first, to be able to keep up with Geoff in conversation. Geoff and his friends opened my mind to a whole new realm of concepts and ideas and I was there, absorbing it all. I was learning from them all the time: what to read, what to question and what to think. In many ways my relationship with Geoff was as much an education as it was a romance. He and his friends fed my hunger for knowledge. I was very lucky; I wanted to learn. I wanted to know everything. It was just what I needed.

Things do seem to happen at the right time.

New words like ‘hypotheses', ‘philosophy', ‘agnostic' and ‘atheist' came into my vocabulary. Suddenly, talking to… wait a minute? The Virgin Mary? Put those childish things behind you and think about ‘logic'. If you can't see it – does it exist? Reading about Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung; discovering that there were societies which had abandoned religion for ideologies of human communalism. I was ready to challenge everything, and I wasn't afraid of anything. Searching, questioning, examining; I had no fear in rejecting what had gone before.

At the age of five I won a fancy dress competition playing a Spanish señorita. Someone put a fan in my hand. It felt as if it was an extension of my hand and completely natural. I knew exactly how to use it. Some people can hold a musical instrument and feel its essence, its inner quality; whenever I held a fan I could tell if it was weighted properly – whether it was good or not. I have always known the art and language of the fan. It's a very slight talent, but it is mine. Where did it come from?

When I was 13 I spent the summer in France with Geoff and a group of his friends. It was 1960. We'd hitchhiked down from Calais to the Côte d'Azur and spent five glorious weeks on the beaches of the Riviera in a world so far removed from dowdy postwar England. When our money ran out and the summer was drawing to a close, we headed back to Calais. En route we stopped off at Versailles.

One of the largest palaces in the world, I was immediately struck by its scale, beauty and grandeur. At the same time, it wasn't unfamiliar. Reaching the entrance to the magnificent gardens, which led to the palace itself, I broke away from the others and began to explore on my own.

As I made my way along the main walkway, past the fountains and avenues of trees, I could see groups of tourists following a circuit around the gardens and into the palace. I began to follow them, and found myself going in another direction, along a wall surrounding an ornamental garden to the right of the main palace building. I wasn't sure why I was heading that way, I just seemed to be drawn in that direction. As I approached an archway
leading into the garden a guard halted me in my tracks, holding up a hand to stop me from passing.

‘Vous ne pouvez passer par là!'
He said officiously, blocking my way.

Without thinking, I replied,
‘Mais je prends toujours cette route.'

The words ‘But I always go this way' just fell out of my mouth. I've no idea where they came from. The guard gave me an incredulous look as if to say ‘Who on Earth do you think you are?' I turned and walked away. Rather than head back to the front of the palace building, though, I found myself retreating back to the garden, but this time by another route. I wasn't sure what I was doing or where I was going. For some reason I felt I had to be there.