"The Wanderer," Part 1

Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from another dimension, a deeper order of existence that is beyond both space and time: the brain is a hologram enfolded in a holographic universe.

Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe

In one temple in Amarna you have to imagine you are reading the hieroglyphic text twice, one on the wall in front of you, and simultaneously the other text on the other side of the wall, in the next room, out of sight . . . as if the wall was transparent. Translucent.

Peter Whitehead, The Risen

Meritaten in Cambridge

There is a high degree of probability that I was born in Liverpool, two years before the start of the war—1937. Although nothing can be certain . . . I knew that my father was a plumber working in the docks, and I was his only child. According to the way the English describe such things, I was born without prospect or privilege into a working-class family, into an undistinguished, impoverished social situation. My father was soon sent off to the war, after which my mother was forced to give up the home where we had been living as a family. Consequently I spent the war years drifting, wandering from town to town, living alone with my mother in numerous cheap single-bed sitting rooms in rented accommodation around Lancashire; on the run from V bombs and bombed cities and various other real-life disasters. On our fractured way, the two of us passed through unprepossessing towns like Southport, Leyland, Carnforth, never able to acquire a home or roots, my mother working in factories, helping to make Spitfires in Leyland, assisting the war effort to keep things afloat for the army as well as for ourselves.

After the war, my father suddenly returned. I had never known him, never missed him, therefore, and presumed he had gone forever. Consequently I accepted his return with mixed feelings, having slept in the same bed as my mother for the previous six years. He tried to set up a plumbing business in London, where we moved after a further year while I went to school in Carnforth. This time the three of us lived together in a single room, in a so-called Council "rest centre" for the war homeless in Victoria, Central London. I can never pass the street without a shiver. A huge multistory house full of noisy families, each living in one room. This is when I started to become what might be described as unpredictable. Soon I was playing truant every day from school, spending my bus fare and all my time, where I really felt "at home"—in railway stations, I knew them all, collecting engine numbers. I was in love with the huge, powerful, beautifully painted, streamlined engines of the LMS railway system, that left for the north from King's Cross. Engines I had seen hurtling through Carnforth Station (now a museum) on their ferocious way to Scotland. Magnificent beasts snorting steam and rage, unleashed onto steel roads beyond the city perimeter, heading for places I had only seen pictures of in magazines.

But my father became ill with cancer. It took twelve months and many operations, as inch by inch the cancerous tract was cut out of his body, in vain. We watched and waited. One day I saw the telegram that told us he had died. I was twelve by this time.

Despite all this (or because of it?) I was still able to do well at school. I was lucky. It came easily to me. I became one of the first beneficiaries of the post-war Labour government's scholarships for working-class boys. The New Education Act of 1947. This was considered a great privilege. Only a small number of such boys, who were top of their working-class primary schools, were sent off to "posh" expensive fee-paying public schools, their education paid for by the government. Perhaps in a brave attempt to infiltrate and deconstruct the elitist class-ridden education system? Presumably they thought, thanks to this "better" education, which only the...