I Would Never Have a Home, Part 2

We flew from Oregon to Heathrow. In those days it was a long flight. I think we had a layover in Iceland. We arrived and got stopped at Immigration (the first of many stops in my lifetime). We told the guy that we were coming to Emerson College on student visas. We were all on the same passport. Can you imagine? I was "wife", Ariel, "daughter". God ! When I think of that from 2012 perspective it is inconceivable. It also was to cause great trouble during the year when I wanted to get out of England.

We were put in a detention room and questioned over and over again. We didn't find out the reason for a long time. As you can imagine we were pretty played out after a twenty hour trip with a two year old. The problem was that there was a Scientology center on the same road as Emerson and there had been a suspicious death there the previous week and we didn't have enough paperwork to prove that we were going to Emerson. The government of England had chosen to refuse entry to Scientologists. The upshot was that someone from the administration of Emerson had to come to London and vouch for us. That turned out to be just fine because we got  ride own to Sussex and didn't have to take the bus.

Pixton Manor was the estate in Sussex that the school had bought. It was straight out of Masterpiece Theater. It was a huge old country estate with a farm that had been farmed organically for thousands of years and was then producing veggies that rivaled those from Findhorn in Scotland. We did hitch hike a ride down to look at the Scientology place. It was also a mansion. But it had towers and turrets and huge brick walls all around and all the windows were covered by ivy. There were also armed guards at the gate house and on the walls. We booked it out of there as fast as we could.

But what we found at Emerson was pretty high on the 'strange' scale in its own right. Rudolf Steiner had died in the 1920s (about) and we came to a school of spiritual science were there was a bit of a reenactment happening. The people all looked like middle class farm folks from eighty years previous. And they talked funny and they smiled with their mouths but not their eyes. On the other hand, Emerson had had a nice smooth program running until we arrived. And actually, I perfectly understand how freaky we must have seemed to them when we arrived in the land that time forgot.

A whole bunch of families arrived with kids, having had the same reaction we did to the idea of "leave the wife and kids at home." Also the wildest bunch of fellow students were coming from all over. One guy had been in India eating raw carrots for three years. He had no shoes. People arrived from Ashrams all over. Kids who skipped the hippy movement and were supposed to be at the London School of Economics showed up. S. had  been with the Bader Meinhof group in Germany. Almost all of us had lived communally. Emerson pulled together and found accomodations for everyone. We ended up living in three different houses that year.. actually it was a good progression from nightmare to amusing.