Call me Tetsugen

How a Zen parable spoke for me

My daily Zen text spoke to me across the ages this morning.

A parable called Publishing the Sutras told the tale of a Japanese Zen devotee named Tetsugen who took it upon himself to publish the Chinese Zen Sutras (collection of aphorisms) in his own language. “The books were to be printed with wood blocks in an edition of seven thousand copies, a tremendous undertaking”, I learned.

It took Tetsugen 10 years to save the money to publish the books but, just as he was ready to start, a nearby river flooded and the people of his area were threatened with famine. Tetsugen spent all the money to relieve the hardships of his neighbours. He then began again to save for his publishing venture.

More years passed. Again, he was in a position to begin the work when an epidemic broke out in his region and he spent everything he had saved to help his suffering neighbours.

Finally, after 25 years, Tetsugen not only got the money together but also published the books.

When he died, however, the people of his area erected a statue in his memory not for publishing the books but for his philanthropic actions.

What has this got to do with me?

In the summer of 1997, I sold the idea of a book about the Piper Alpha disaster (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha) to publishers and to the Sunday Times. I was in an extraordinarily advantageous position to write that book, having worked on the personal staff of Armand Hammer, Chairman and Chief Executive of Occidental Petroleum, the company that owned and operated Piper Alpha. In fact, it was at my urging that Hammer got on his plane in Los Angeles and arrived in Aberdeen on the day after the disaster. I was at his side all day. I was in the room when Margaret Thatcher visited Occidental’s offices. I was within earshot when he spoke to Prince Charles and Princess Diana at Aberdeen airport. I knew the whole story from the inside. I also knew Hammer and Occidental to be guilty of criminal negligence and believed they ought to have been charged with the corporate manslaughter of the 167 men who died in the inferno. It should, therefore,  have been an important book.

I also had a secondary interest in developing a project that would give me time in Scotland. That was in the person of a 14 year-old son who was living with his mother in Perthshire and who had let me know that he needed me to be around more often.

In mid-October 1997, I arrived in Aberdeen to start  work on the book. Within weeks, soon after his 15^th birthday, the boy had run away from his mother and placed himself in my care.

 I had long believed she was an alcoholic but I had no idea of the depths of her addiction and the horrors to which my son had been subjected until he told me the full story. Overall, the picture was as frightful as can be.  Before he turned to me, he had been thinking that his only options were being taken into care or suicide.

I then took sole responsibility for looking after the lad. I found us a small, attic flat in the centre of Perth and accepted the tasks of running a home and seeing him through his first public examinations at a mediocre public school where he had an assisted place. When the Rector of that school heard that my son had come to live with me instead of his mother, he generously cancelled that assisted place, making me responsible for paying the exorbitant fees at a school I would never have chosen.

At the same time, I was trying to work on the book. I did write the first two chapters. They were good. My agent and my publishers liked them.

But this was a hard time. I was completely on my own, with no friends, in a country where I found myself detested immediately I opened my mouth to speak. The words of the Psalmist were often in my mind: “Woe is me that I must lodge in Meshech and dwell among the tents of Kedar...the people of an obscure speech stammering in a language that you cannot comprehend.” Meanwhile, I had a marriage in Suffolk that was disintegrating as my wife increasingly found consolation for my absence in the company of a close friend and neighbour. I could see the attraction. They both loved The Archers.

That protracted estrangement - aggravated by a full complement of the lies and manipulation without which no such infidelity is complete - was so agonising that it felt like having a limb slowly torn off, fibre by fibre, without anaesthetic.

Eventually, by summer 1998, the only choice that made sense was to separate from my wife, stay in Perth, make a home there for my son and support him through his last years at school and into university while I tried to finish the book.

I bought a little house and did my best to get it ready for us to move in but one afternoon, while I was decorating the living-room, the full weight of my burdens and losses crushed me like a ragdoll. I lay on the floor, in the sawdust and the filth, sobbing uncontrollably. “This must be what they call a breakdown,” I thought.

By chance, I had the good luck to find a GP practice staffed by kind young doctors who propped me up with Prozac and Valium. Those potions allowed me to stagger through my days and nights but they couldn’t provide the strength of purpose to finish the book. Orwell once described the effort of writing a book as being like a long bout of a really nasty illness but I was already contending with one of those without having to write a book, as well.

As the months passed, the deadlines came and went. The publishers grew impatient and then demanded their money back. That wasn’t easy to find on top of the mortgage and the school fees. By Easter 1999, I was on the verge of going seriously broke.

While the book was going down the drain, however, my son was making all these trials worthwhile. Living together in that little house, he and I cemented a loving connection which has endured ever since and will, I am sure, last forever.

He was touchingly grateful to be given a safe home and regular meals. Conscientious, thoughtful, helpful, sober, he never gave me a moment’s worry or embarrassment over his conduct but applied himself to his studies to the point where his report described him as “Morally and intellectually, the star of his year”. At the end of the summer term, he was awarded a bursary which would pay half his school fees. At the same time, I got a commission from The Daily Telegraph to write a series of weekly columns over two years about becoming a self-builder and creating a house. Overnight, therefore, my income doubled and my expenses halved.

With the boy set on going to Edinburgh University, I thought I would find a plot to build a house near enough to the city so that he could easily get home but not so close that he would feel I was in his face.  My plan was to create the house and write the book while he was completing his studies. Finally, then, I might get back to England, my homeland. I had only intended to be in Scotland for three months. Already, that had turned into three years.

God – or whatever may be the name of that force which makes a mockery of human plans – apparently had other ideas. At a yoga class in Perth, my eye had been taken by an attractive young woman who was there most weeks. Eventually, I inveigled her into conversation though she was initially puzzled that a man obviously approaching the far end of middle age should apparently be taking an interest in a woman 20 years younger. After a while, however, she overcame that reserve and consented to meet me for coffees and meals. One thing led to another, as they do, and by August 2000 she was telling me that, if I liked, I should think of her as being my girlfriend.

In pursuit of the house-building project, I found an acre of rough pasture for sale on a hillside in Fife overlooking the Firth of Forth, with distant view of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and set to work negotiating with architects and builders. Despite many reverses and fiascos, the house was eventually finished. Over a number of years, however, the woman who had described herself as my girlfriend was becoming my wife and the mother of two girls. The house that I had intended as a home for me and my son was about to accommodate a new family, including a flat for her mother.

None of this had been in my plan at all. No thought of another marriage, still less of more children had been remotely in my mind. However, life was actually presenting me with what I had always wanted but never achieved – a successful marriage, a happy family and the chance to be a father in the way I had always intended. From the age of 19, I had known that I wanted to be a father in an equal relationship with the mother but I had never been with a woman who agreed that was a good idea. Now, in my late 50s, I had stumbled into a relationship with a woman who both welcomed and actively encouraged that approach. When they were babies, therefore, she and I equally divided the time needed to look after our daughters and the work we had to do to support them. When they went to school, she went back to work full time and I took responsibility for getting the girls up and dressed, giving them breakfast and driving them to school. In the afternoon, I would be the one collecting them from school and making the evening meal for the family.

This was all lovely and incomparably the best time of my life, but it allowed little time for the creation of a major book. I was at full stretch every day just churning out some routine journalism in the few hours that were available for work. Down the drain it went again.

Now, however, as my wife and I are about to celebrate 25 years together and 20 years of marriage, those girls are both away at university. Meanwhile my son has created a fully independent life, including a profession in which he is saving lives as a routine aspect of his working week. I may, therefore, finally be in a position to write that book.

No matter how good it might turn out to be, however, it could not possibly match the achievements that have been demanded of me by unplanned events and unexpected developments.

“Life,” as a great sage once observed, “is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

(Father’s Day arms full for lucky, lucky old man)