I had trouble getting to sleep that night. What was it I’d felt inside me that afternoon? All I could say with certainty – and that, because I felt it so strongly – was that it was the same thing within Mick that had actually brought about his sudden change from fear-stricken to total command and control. And it wasn’t like it had been passed on from him to me – I’d felt it as clearly within myself as Mick must have felt it within him. It was like it had come from somewhere beyond the pair of us. And then it seemed clear to me that if it really was within both Mick and myself – two very ordinary yet very different young men – it would be a bit unreasonable to assume it existed in just the two of us and in no one else. It would be far more logical and reasonable to assume it existed in many others. Perhaps in a great many others.
That shook me up, rattled me. Is there something beyond our minds – something of which we are part, but of which we’re hardly, if ever, aware – something which makes our nagging worries, our fears and petty grievances transparent and reveals to us things as they actually are? Shows us life as it actually is – maybe even shows us, if we care enough, how to live it? If so, it means there is a depth within all human beings, most of whom are never aware of it. But that afternoon, I was aware of it. Would I, I wondered, ever feel it again.
I told very few about this. Those I spoke to about it wanted to know – not unnaturally – what it looked like, what it felt like, what I thought it was. So I tried – but couldn’t tell them. I struggled. The only response I could give was to tell them that although I couldn’t see it and couldn’t hear it, I knew it existed – because I could ‘feel it’. “Where,” they asked, “did you feel it?” I had no answer to that either – it wasn’t inside me or outside me – it simply ‘was’. A young lady, a regular at a local church – thought I might have had a visit from God! I told her I doubted God would visit me as I didn’t believe in Him. I was forced, in the end, to accept that whatever it was and wherever I’d felt it, it was ‘un-manifested’. And how do you describe the ‘un-manifested’? You don’t. I thought it best, henceforth, to keep it to myself.
As for Mick – saying anything to him, which seemed a perfectly natural thing to do, struck me as pointless. And who knows, it might even have been upsetting for him. His calling out to me, with a smile on his face, from the kitchen immediately after his sudden escape from a genuine fear of self-choking that there was beer in the fridge and would I like one was a voice from another planet. It seemed only fair to leave him there. Even so, in the following weeks, there were occasions when I was tempted to mention it to him. But that came to an end when His Majesty’s Government reminded me, politely but firmly, that it would very much like me to join the armed forces for two years National Service. I had no option but to get myself a one-way train ticket; an appointment had been made for me in the coastal city of Portsmouth at a place called Hilsea Barracks, the basic training establishment for those entering the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.
I sat by the train window. Tight faced, silent and grimly apprehensive, I watched the south-eastern countryside slipping past outside. Three other young men of similar age and wearing equally glum facial expressions were seated nearby. Four of us on the way to being more or less locked up for two years. And how many more worried young men might there be in the other coaches of the train? The thought shocked me. And the shock quite suddenly took me back to a place I’ve written about before – the riverside in Bedford six years earlier. It’s a lovely sunny day. I’m eleven years old, seated on the grass by the river Ouse. I hear the water splashing gently around the piers of that beautiful old town centre bridge. I get a lump in my throat – longing to be back there on that sunny day, as I once had been.
Suddenly, that thing came to me again: as on that day when Mick had nearly choked himself. I ‘felt’ it. And realized for the first time that on that other day by the river in Bedford when I had sensed so strongly that I was not my body, I had also felt it then. But I had not, at that time in my life, had the perception to sense its profundity. This time however, in this desperately dismal train to Portsmouth, it was different. I not only ‘felt’ it but sensed that it represented something beyond the little ‘me’. As before however, what it was and where and what ‘beyond’ might be, I couldn’t tell. All of it was simply ‘there’, indescribable and dimensionless. But then, with a deep shock, I sensed that if I’d had to give it all a name, I’d have had no option but to call it ‘I’.
If I accepted that – and I had no alternative but so to do – I had also to accept that ‘I’ wasn’t simply in a train going to Portsmouth. Mick then comes into my mind again. As far as I could tell, on the day he feared he might choke, he was not, at least for a few minutes, the Mick I’d known – or, I suspect, the Mick he knew himself. By his suddenly changed appearance and how he acted, he came over as a faultlessly calm, supremely cool and confident super human being. So had that short period been, I wonder, his ‘real’ self – his ‘real’ Mick? And had he been asked to give it a name, would he too have called it ‘I’ – his ‘I’? And if we are both ‘I’ – then the real ‘me’ and the ‘real’ Mick could be one and the same.
As could be all of us.
besonian 
