"An Obsession Revisited": Dinah Brooke on Her Unobtainable Father
By Dinah Brooke
The essay that sparked our editors' interest in Brooke's novels.
“Our relationship was one of intense passion, devotion, rage, hatred, anguish, desire, disgust, but it was all on my side,” writes Dinah Brooke in this essay about her father. “I don’t know what he felt about me. He read the book I wrote about his life, but made no comment.”
“An Obsession Revisited” is a phenomenal piece of writing – excoriatingly raw, visceral, an intimate confessional – the prose crystalline, precise, and as unforgiving as Brooke is to both her father and herself. It was the first thing of hers that I read, and I knew instantly that I needed to read more.
Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady is not the book Brooke wrote about her father, but it is a novel full of all those feelings that she describes. As Emma Cline writes in her new introduction to the novel, the “despair” Brooke depicts therein is described so well Cline’s “stomach tightens” as she reads it: “The discomfort, the unease, life broken into unfulfilled wantings and failures, the deep confusion of a human being trying to survive the pain of consciousness.” It’s the story of a young wife and mother’s fracturing sense of self, elements of which Brooke drew from her own life. Relationships between parents and children loom large in all her novels, and there’s monstrosity on both sides.
—Lucy Scholes, Senior Editor
The following essay first appeared in Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, published by Virago Press in 1983.
I was obsessed with my Dad for twenty years. You could almost say I made a career out of him — or out of the lack of him. Do people whose fathers are more present in their lives become so obsessed? I never lived with him after I was three, hardly saw him between the ages of seven and twenty-five, yet the amount of energy I focused on him was phenomenal.
It would be hard not to describe his life as a failure. He started off all right. He was the second of four sons, the fifth and youngest child was the only girl. While the children were still small, his father became managing director of Lysachts Steel Works, in Scunthorpe, and built a large, comfortable house near the works, with a rose garden, kitchen garden, orchard, Chinese water garden, tennis courts, everything that the prosperous middle classes could think of to make life enjoyable in the golden years before the First World War. The family grew up untouched by that war — all it did was increase the demand for steel. Their mother was gay, fat and eccentric; they had loyal servants, delicious food, endless parties, dances, concerts, charades — to me it always sounded like the perfect idyll of family life. The boys all went to public school, Charterhouse, and then two of them went on to Oxford, but Joe, fascinated by steel-making, went straight into the works, and started to learn the business from the bottom up.
I was fascinated by steel-making too, when I used to visit Scunthorpe as a child. At the bottom of the garden were rows of conical slag heaps like miniature Japanese volcanoes, glowing scarlet at the top as fresh slag was poured on; and by the side of the road as you biked downhill were the huge, elegant shapes of the three cooling towers, so close that you could put out your hand and touch them. Sometimes my Dad would take me, when I was five or six, holding my hand tightly, to see the molten steel being poured, in an immense dark building like a cathedral. We climbed up hundreds of steps and walked along the narrow gantry, with people being very polite because my Dad was the boss, and then a sort of crane with an enormous dipper on top trundled with a great roar up to our end of the cathedral and tipped a stream of molten steel into the mould far below. The blast of heat would hit me thirty feet away, I’d gasp and have to shut my eyes. The stream of blinding heat and light poured down and showers of sparks bounced up like golden rain; two or three more times the crane trundled back into the darkness, and then the last glorious moment was over, and it was time to go home for lunch. Even as a child I saw why people feel they have put their heart and soul into steel-making. My Dad felt that way.
He only had one hobby, flying aeroplanes, which came in useful during the war. He always promised he would teach me to fly when my legs were long enough to reach the rudder bar; but by that time his life had started to fall apart somewhat. He joined the air force as an instructor; he was too old to be a pilot. With my mother, who had TB, and should have been in a sanatorium, I followed him round England from one air force base to the other during the first two years of the war, one ghastly lot of digs, one horrible new school after another. My mother got sicker and sicker, and I don’t remember seeing Joe at all. But he ended up as a Wing Commander flying bombing raids over France — until they recalled him to Scunthorpe. The need for steel was getting desperate, and they wanted someone who could treble production in a year; apparently he did.
Those were the days, when he was back at the works at the end of the war, when his London address was the Savoy. He took me there once, but I have a feeling it was when the good times were already over. Somehow, during the nationalisation of the industry after the war, he got shuffled out. He and my mother got divorced; my mother went back into the sanatorium; I went to boarding school, Joe married the widow of an air-force pal, and emigrated to Kenya.
Things didn’t work out in Kenya either. He became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror. Actually the horrific ones were the ones he preferred. They added a rich touch of realism to his paranoia when they kept him with fifty other men in a locked, evil-smelling ward; but when they moved him to a room with chintz curtains and his own armchair the security of his world began to shake. If he could have that, why not the Savoy as he had been used to? His madness began to lose its sharp, sustaining edge. But he did have his moment of glory. He played possum for a whole year, being the good, obedient patient, until he was allowed to go for walks in the garden. One day he simply strolled through the main gate and set out for London (the hospital was in Bristol). On the way he stole a car, and when he arrived went straight to Scotland Yard to report the theft, so that he could be charged, and the issue of his sanity brought up in a court of law. Nobody got the point at all, stupid fools, they didn’t even appreciate the joke; and they locked him up again for several more years.
As for me, I couldn’t hate him, or blame him for not living up to my expectations of what a proper father should be. He had removed himself neatly from any possibility of hatred or revenge — all I could do was try to save him, and take out my rage and frustration on the world which had treated him so badly; which, translated, means myself and my nearest and dearest. Our relationship was one of intense passion, devotion, rage, hatred, anguish, desire, disgust, but it was all on my side. I don’t know what he felt about me. He read the book I wrote about his life, but made no comment. Whenever I made an emotional demand on him he retired rapidly into his madness; otherwise he was polite, humorous and amenable.
Melanie Klein described the genesis of a work of art as the desire to make a reparation; to give back to the parent the gifts they have offered in defective form — the good breast that is not always good. Infantile anger and consequent guilt fuels the shaping of a work of art — and that, goddammit, is perfect.
I mean look, a book, printed pages, hard covers, shiny pictures. Just look at you, see what a mess you made of your life? You’re much better like this. Neat, full of good things, fixed, appreciated. You really fucked it up, didn’t you, you silly old man, but don’t worry, I’ll make it OK. I’ll rewrite your life for you, not improving things much — playing around with the facts a bit, yes; putting you into the army instead of the air force so I can have some nice games with Monty at El Alamein, but not papering over the cracks; not trying to make you appear better, more successful, a better father. You were a disaster as a father by any standards at all — and pretty much of a disaster as a human being, except that you were, alive, yourself. That’s what always floored me. And why couldn’t other people see it the way I did? Why did they want to lock you up in an asylum because you were mad? Deprive you of All That Makes Life Worth Living, and condemn you to the Worst Fate a human can imagine — bastards, unthinking brutes — you were innocent of course, and I would rescue you — be the knight on a white charger — oh, you did provide me with some good roles. As your next of kin I became your legal guardian when I was twenty-five, when the new Mental Health Act came in. I hadn’t seen you for ten years, and there you were, toothless, scabby, filthy, stinking, incarcerated — and innocent! And you didn’t even sound that mad, either.
For years you were my crusade, and trying to get you released was my reason for being alive. The doctors simply said, ‘No, he’s chronic, he’ll be here till he dies.’ Then one year, while I was living in the States I came over to take you away on holiday, and when we got back to the hospital after a fortnight in Ireland they said, ‘Oh, didn’t you get our letter? He’s been released into your care.’ There you were, on my lap, a great big Christmas present — all my dreams come true. Teach me to have dreams. My American lover, Frank, stayed in England and married me, and we forgot all about our flat and possessions and lives in New York.
The shock of freedom was too much for you, Joe. Dreams coming true again. What the hell do you do then? They’re never quite what you expect. You walked under a car — by mistake of course, then moved into our two-room summer rental near Charing Cross with a broken arm, a broken leg, two cracked ribs and a cracked head. It made a good excuse. We used to take you round to visit friends and dare them not to be truly warm and accepting. But it was all a dream world. No one was quite living in the real world. Where is the bastard anyway? The longer I live the more I realise how hard it is to find the real world. Yes, I know it’s here all the time; but finding it, or rather recognising it - that’s the problem. When, years later, my recreated You came out between hard covers, I took you along to the Arts Council launch, expecting somewhere, somehow, that all these literary characters would stand up and cheer - and give you back all that you thought you had lost. No one would have known you were a loony; I was quite proud of you. But they were all busy hustling as usual, and nobody realised what an event your presence was. You thought they were a tough bunch, tougher than the iron and steel magnates you used to play with. No wonder you went mad. I don’t think I’ll compete any more either, thank you very much. Sense of anticlimax. But I was really hooked on fathers; I wrote another book — deep stuff this - incorporating the father. A suicidal daughter pursues her father through the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, and finally, in the heat of the afternoon, she makes love to him, and as he comes he has a heart attack and dies. Thank goodness I’ve finished with that little lot. Burned out.
What’s left? An old man; a senile wreck; a shell. Where are you in all this, Joe? Were you ever there? You were just a screen for me to have mad daughterly fantasies about; for me to act out all my frustrated rages and passions and Joan of Arc and Mother Teresa roles.
When I last saw you you were living in an old folks’ home. Nice, not very different from the better sort of loony bin; your own room, wireless, TV, good food, lots of care. You’d been on your death bed again. You were an expert at deathbeds — loved them. Innocent, of course; your sort of going mad relieved you of all responsibility. You just went to the pub, got pissed, fell over and broke another bone — or got pneumonia —and bingo! another deathbed scene. My mother and I went to the first one together, though you’d been divorced for twenty years. I think she felt responsible for landing me with a father like you. She kept on taking over when my fantasies landed me in trouble. She’d remove you, look after you, find somewhere for you to live outside the hospital; eventually took you in herself when her second husband died, until you broke your ankle and couldn’t get to the loo, and she’d had enough. I’d escaped to India by then. I did suggest that you come along too, but you didn’t fancy that idea, thank God. Anyway the last time I saw you, several deathbeds later, you wheezed so much you could hardly breathe, and had to piss every three minutes. You shuffled half in half out of the door of your room; three steps in three steps out; should you go to the toilet again, or try to stay and be polite? Who were these two women? You could no longer go down to the pub so chocolate had become your passion — you could hardly wait to tear the silver paper off the bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight before stuffing it into your sunken mouth. Your eyes were huge and blue, and it seemed to me when I looked into them that they were full of terror. You’d been dragged back from death so often — what was so bad about it that they wouldn’t let you go? In the end you had a heart attack while sitting down to lunch. I only heard about it casually. My daughter wrote saying I suppose you heard that Joe died a few months ago.
You’d given it all up years before, I think. And so had I. I wasn’t sad when you died; I didn’t miss you. I don’t think anyone did. The person that we might have loved, or missed, seemed to have disappeared a long time ago. I never really knew you. I was never your little girl who could come to you for comfort and cuddles. I was the strong one. You even called me the Boss. You seem to have finished with your own life twenty-five years before you died. It took me another fifteen. Then I had finished with you too. All the emotions had been played out. There was nothing left.
And yet perhaps I failed to see you completely. Obsessed with you for years, but blind — seeing only the huge holes you had left in my life, and not you at all.
Looking at photos of you on your wedding day, and holding me on your lap when I was a baby, there is such a tender, sweet expression on your face. You were handsome, dashing, all the local girls were in love with you before you disappointed them and married my beautiful, independent mother, who was an artist, and must have appeared infinitely exotic to you. You were the reliable hard-working son, who took it upon himself to keep everything together, the works, the family, the steel industry. You had a highly developed sense of responsibility. You were also a very shy man; you never looked directly at the camera, but gazed with utterly naive love and pride at your wife or your daughter. But even then you were living in a world of dreams and definitions that left them out. My mother said you always used to find someone to blame when things went wrong, and brooded and sulked for days. Not one to look at yourself and think maybe you did it wrong, and try again, Or forget about the past, drop it and put all your energy into today. No, you preferred to brood and sulk until it was all the fault of the Russians, who read your letters as soon as they dropped through the slot in the pillar box and had managed to implant into your broken arm a microphone, which could pick up not only your conversation but your thoughts. Clever chaps, those Russians.
I wanted you to love me so much, and I can see from your expression as I sat on your lap, aged one, that you did — you loved me like any other father loves his daughter, after his own fashion, as much as you could manage. You drove down to my school, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, in a hired Daimler when I was about fifteen, and took me out to tea, though you were up to your ears in debt and working as a labourer at the time. You told me about Africa. You had recently come back from Kenya in circumstances not of your own choosing, and we talked about buying a Land-Rover and driving from the Cape to Cairo. People have these fantasies. Some people act on them. We didn’t. I didn’t really think we would. I can just about count them on one hand, the times I remember being with you in my childhood. There was one Christmas at Scunthorpe; my mother was in the sanatorium, I must have been six or seven. You were sitting at the end of the polished mahogany table, surrounded by brothers and sisters and cousins and nephews and nieces, all our rations combined to make a feast, and I kept climbing onto your lap to suck your ear lobe, which embarrassed you no end. And you’d rashly made one of those resolutions to give up smoking because of your horrible, permanent cough, but someone had given you a box of Havana cigars, precious as gold. Overexcited by the festivities, I seized the box, and threatened to hold them under the tap. You didn’t believe me, but horrible little creature, I did! You were caught in the trap of your own logic, but for a moment you were really angry.
And then there was the time you went to have a drink with some air-force cronies in a pub, and I had to sit outside in the car. You brought me some orange squash, and had one of your coughing fits when your face went a deep purple, and you brought up horrifying noises and substances from the very depths of your bowels, or that’s what it sounded lie, and you went on and on and on, and I sat and watched, forgetting all about the orange squash, waiting for you to choke to death. And then the time when you had shaved off your air-force handlebar moustache and asked me if I noticed anything different, and I didn’t.
I could rake up a few more instances — like the time when you took me on a bike ride past the cooling towers and told me you and my mum were getting a divorce, and I feII off my bike; and the time I asked you if you loved me best of aII the children (my cousins), and you said you loved us all the same. Threadbare relationship; mingy little threads to weave into fatherhood; there’s stiII a taste of bitterness in my mouth. Love, warmth, cuddles, kisses, guidance — you knew the sort of things a father is meant to do, and you tried. But circumstances and your other preoccupations made it impossible. Once, when my own children, your grandchildren, were five, they went down to stay with you in the farmhouse in the country where you were living. It was Mrs Selway’s idea, the farmer’s wife. She and her husband gave them rides on the tractor, and had their photograph taken, and showed them the animals; but you didn’t take any notice of them. You had other things on your mind. Another of your characteristic poses in photographs is you with your hands on your hips — legs spread wide, gazing over one shoulder into the middle distance. Even if we had lived together I don’t suppose you would have noticed me much.
You were a charming and entertaining man in your own way, so long as no one expected too much of you. Perhaps that was the best time in our relationship, the time when you’d been let out of the asylum, and because you’d been run over and had a broken arm and leg the embarrassing question of where you had been for the last fifteen years did not need to rise, and it was perfectly clear why you weren’t working. You were the focus of my life. AII my friends were judged by how they reacted to you. Frank and I had this secret agreement that people could only pass — be accepted in the fellowship of the truly human — if they could not only accept you but follow the convolutions of your fantasy, which pedestrian and unimaginative doctors had labelled paranoia.
A middle-aged man, about five foot ten, sparse grey hair combed back very neatly — your hair had always been sleek and smooth — good solid features, a rather severe expression, grey toothbrush moustache. Nothing there to give you away. And you were always neatly dressed. Cheap clothes, bought by your daughter at Marks and Spencer, no more going to Savile Row — but always neat. And you were good company a lot of the time, with a fund of stories you didn’t repeat any more often than other old men; and even your paranoid fantasies were quite often entertaining if you weren’t too pissed. Chinese coffins was your favourite, your signature tune, as it were. Solve the problem of overproduction in the steel industry and make friends with China at the same time by manufacturing stainless steel enamelled coffins with pictures of Chairman Mao on them for sale to the Confucian Chinese. Everybody knows that the Confucian Chinese are willing to spend more on their coffins than they are on their houses and you can’t get better quality than stainless steel. We might not have been able to figure out what Chairman Mao was doing in there and where to find Confucian Chinese these days, but you could.
You did have a few little habits though, which spelled out Institution. You always used to clean your nails with matchsticks, and file them with the striking edge of the matchbox. (You don’t get files and nail scissors in a mental hospital.) And you’d collect dog-ends from the ashtrays and use the tobacco to make roll-ups. It was agony for you to let a dog-end lie. The same with people’s unfinished glasses of beer and wine. Before leaving the dinner table, and before going to bed at night, muttering some casual excuse about ‘waste not, want not’ - you had a developed sense of correct social behaviour - you would swig down the dregs, one after the other, eyes darting from side to side as your head went back, to see if anyone had noticed. Then it was the turn of any bottles which were open, but not empty. You were very good at the little start of surprise, ‘Oh,’ addressed to the wall, ‘might as well finish this up,’ with another quick look round to see that no one, especially me, was within earshot. I quickly developed a nasty habit, when you were staying with us, of locking bottles up. You also had a wonderfully guilty expression when caught, lower lip sucked in, upper lip right down to your chin, covering up the evidence, eyes round as egg cups. Just William, about ten years old. But that expression didn’t come from madness, it came from school and the nursery. I can do it pretty well myself.
Trouble was when you first came out of the mental hospital, with the whole glorious world of London at your feet — even though one of the said feet was in a plaster cast - what were you going to do with it? London, I mean. There were still connections to be made. You went along to the Savoy to see if there was anyone there you recognised; there wasn’t, but you tipped the doorman a fiver for old times’ sake. It wasn’t the same doorman that you used to tip a pound in the thirties, but he was very polite. Trouble was, that was your old age pension gone for the week.
And there was the time you bought several hundred pounds worth of pictures. You disappeared all day, and about eight o’clock in the evening we got a call from a young man called Bob, an unemployed trapeze artist. You had met Bob, and a very nice man called Max, in a pub in Sloane Square at lunchtime, and after a few drinks had gone round to Max’s place to have a look at his pictures, and you thought they were great, and after a few more drinks decided to buy the lot, but unfortunately you didn’t have your cheque book on you, so you were just ringing your daughter who would come round with the money. Oh. She wouldn’t? Um . . . Bob, the trapeze artist, came back on the line. He wasn’t surprised, he’d been expecting something like this. Max could turn nasty — but Bob would explain things to him, and bring Joe home himself. They left, Joe promising fulsomely to send a cheque.
Frank and I decided that what we needed was not so much a baby-sitter as a father sitter — who could go to pubs with Joe and see that he didn’t get too pissed and have a chat with him, and listen to his stories, and then to bring him home. We were trying to earn a living, and didn’t much like pubs anyway. Bob, who brought Joe back, good as his word, and stayed To supper, thought this was a very good idea, and would have done it himself, but he had a job next week, back on the high wire. He liked Joe, had had a fine time together, and swapped some good jokes.
Joe, while I’m writing about you I feel as if I’m pushing something uphill. Making a tremendous effort, as I have to act both parts at once, the parent and the child. I did so want you to be a father to me. I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.
When I became a sannyasin in 1975 and went to live in Poona, at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, my last novel, about your life, had just come out. When Bhagwan read it he sent a message back saying, ‘You don’t need to do Primal.’ Primal was a group that many people did when they first came to the ashram, to give them some insight into the life patterns that had been set up in their early childhood. I had been wallowing in the pains of my childhood for too long already; I was imprisoned by my own pain and the ego’s involvement with making art out of it. If you want to let go of the pain you have to let go of the goodies that you get out of it as well. Bhagwan kept on talking about ‘dropping negativity’, and I was furious. Where would I be without my negativity? What would I be? The essence of Bhagwan’s teaching is, perhaps, that in order to experience God the ego must be dropped; the ego is only an illusion anyway, just our fantasies about who we are, not about who we really are, and the ego makes us miserable. I saw it. But I only saw it after I wallowed for thirty years in the misery I created out of the events of my childhood - and through meeting Bhagwan, living near him, sitting in his presence every day, I began to have a glimpse - just a faint glimpse - of the possibility of being happy, not only happy but overflowing with joy, for no reason, not because book has been accepted, praised, a movie made of it - I have become rich and famous, appearing on TV chat shoes, ever-present fantasies - but just sitting, cleaning - cleaning? - dancing - help! I’m a serious woman, an intellectual, a Great Talent, a ‘Female Hemingway’.
I shaved all my hair off and wrote my obituary as I would like to see it. Full of purple passages, ‘literary genius’, ‘turning Agony into Art’, and ‘because you didn’t appreciate her enough, you rotten sods, she’s killed herself, so there’. I almost sent it off, that obituary, really pretending that I was dead. But it was because of you, dear Joe, that I had to stay unappreciated, just as it was because of you that I couldn’t handle being loved. I had never learned any behaviour patterns that fitted in with being loved and appreciated. But I’d learned to like it that way. What do you write about if you haven’t got a tortured soul? My soul was so used to being tortured it didn’t know what to do with itself without a good dose of anguish. And when a man told me he loved me my reaction was not pleasure, but rage and terror. It was so extreme that I went to see Bhagwan about it in Darshan, an evening meeting for maybe twenty sannyasins. When I had calmed down a bit he told me that I was like a child who had been hungry for so long that when her mother finally offers her food it is too humiliating to accept, and she hits the cup away in a rage.
A lot of my psychoanalytically oriented friends think that a guru is a sort of father figure, and that the reason I went to Poona is because of obsessive ‘fatherlessness’. They may be right; I mean that may be the reason that I was lucky enough to find my way to Bhagwan. He’s an Enlightened Master — someone who has dropped his ego, so when you come into contact with him you can project anything you like on to him, and he can fulfill all your needs because he is simply mirroring you — reflecting your contortions, not judging or condemning you, accepting you totally and yet not taking you seriously. Whatever image is reflected perfectly in the still waters of a lake is beautiful. He is a lake, and his stillness is perfect. All the frenzy is my own. If my frenzy is the desire for a father, it is there, reflected. Because of his stillness I can, occasionally, be still.
Maybe in some way Bhagwan was a father for me in that he loved me and allowed me to grow. But the love of a Master is very different from any other sort of love — it is at the same time more personal — he loves every part of me, there is nothing that is hidden from him, I am more totally myself in his presence than in the presence of the most tender parent or passionate lover — and yet less personal because it is not limited to me; it is undirected; the waters of the lake are simply there for anyone who wants to come.
Have I forgiven you, Joe, for not being the sort of father I would have liked you to have been? Have I learnt anything? That your life is yours, and mine is mine, and we are not responsible for each other. That it was my free choice to torture myself because of you. Am I still scratching away at those old wounds? Probably, from time to time, when l’m in a bad mood, or Mercury is travelling backwards in the heavens, or just before my period.
Yours is a life to be pitied, to be condoled with. What a tragedy, what a waste. But you never saw it like that. You seemed to have chosen it very deliberately, to reserve your innocence. And who knows what was happening in those last years of your hfe? Who knows what is happening in the soul of someone who appears mad or senile? Were you acting out in penance? Were you perhaps removing yourself to just the right distance so that your daughter could spend thirty years tying herself in knots about your absence? What were you doing, Joe? Why were you doing it? I don’t believe in wasted lives. It must have fulfilled some purpose for you, taught you some lesson you were too stubborn to learn any other way. Was that it? Did you ever learn that lesson? What have I learned from your absence? The strength of my own need for love, my destructiveness when that need is thwarted — I learned very well how to cut off my nose to spite my face — and the painful process of accepting the rage, the anger, the destructiveness, the pain, the need, the emptiness and finding that love is all around if I could only see it. I was a bitch to my mother for years because I couldn’t accept her love. I wanted it the way I wanted it, the shape and size I wanted it, now. All right. Enough. No - take it away, it’s the wrong sort, I’d rather starve, thank you. Most people are bad at expressing love. You were, Joe. Hopeless. Any emotional demand and you took to the bottle as quick as you could. Perhaps that was why you went mad - so no one would be able to make any demands on you. But looking at your expression as you gazed at my mother on your wedding day, or so proudly at your pudgy little one-year-old daughter, there was love in your heart, tears in your eyes, probably. Tears in mine too. Sentimental cow.
Dinah Brooke left Cheltenham Ladies’ College at sixteen to go to Paris, where she studied sculpture and Greek. She read English at Oxford, attended film school in London, briefly worked for a documentary film company, and spent a year in Greenwich Village. Back in London, she married, had twins, and, in the early 1970s, published four critically acclaimed novels, including two recently republished by McNally Editions: Lord Jim at Home and Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady. In 1975, she took sannyas, was given the new name Ma Prem Pankaja by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and lived for the next six years in his ashram in Poona, India. She returned to London in 1981, where she lives today.