Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 10 (The Four-Gated City 4)

Eventually the bad time, as Doris Lessing called it in her novel, ended and a new liberal wind was already beginning to blow in London and the West in 1956.  With Lynda Martha began to seriously explore alternative consciousness.  They didn't use drugs but they thought that there were some strong connections between so-called mental illness, psychic and clairvoyant experiences, and altered mystical states.  Martha began to buy and read a huge range of books by mystics, psychics and authors of fantasy and science fiction.  Her appetite for knowledge and information was voracious and she trusted in her instincts to guide her on her quest.  She remembered painfully her own ecstatic spiritual experiences when she first arrived in London.  She had almost nothing but the clothes she was wearing and what she could pack in her small suitcase.  She explored, went everywhere, met people, let them adopt her temporarily and love her as kith and kin and then move on to the next page.  She found that by not eating, or eating only very little, sleeping little, she could hone and sharpen her mind into a delicate instrument of reception and communication.  She was endeavouring to recapture that experience of the soft dark receptive awareness that was her unidentifiable self, the very centre of her being.

Now, as a woman approaching middle age and charged with running a household and providing secretarial duties to her off and on lover, she had become thickened, dulled and in a way comatose.  She wanted to wake up again, experience herself and simultaneously the universe.  In the late fifties the antinuclear movement was born in England and began to take off.  The children under her care and their cousins were now adolescents and largely involved in the peace marches.  The house opened up and became a kind of community brain and nerve centre as well as a growing extended family that ran well beyond the ties of blood and common DNA.

Then began the Swinging Sixties of London.  The changes were radical everywhere.  Everyone was suddenly kind, loving and generous.  Drugs, marijuana and LSD in particular were infusing and influencing the popular culture and music and art.  London became a happening, a party, one massive be-in.  It was in this context that Martha embarked on one of her most risky and terrifying experiments.