The one who lit the flame

My godmother Kay

Photo: With Kay at the Victory Services Club, London, circa 1994

I met Kay Paddon, when I was a gawky seventeen year old and she was in her seventies. I have mentioned my self-appointed ‘godmother’ in various blogs, and those of you who have read the early chapters of my forthcoming book, The Good Karma Refuge for Elephants here on Substack, may recall something about her, because she appears in it as the godmother of Rob, the narrator. Why make up characters, I often think, when the ideal candidates are already vividly present in your life?

Kay has been a very important influence on me. Adventurous, curious, generous, she outlived three husbands, travelled between homes in Zimbabwe and Spain into her late 80s and for me, more than anything, it was her psychic gifts, her capacity to make other realms of existence feel close and heartfelt that felt extraordinary.

It was Kay who introduced me to Tibetan Buddhism, and who encouraged me to explore it. She led me to discover that surface appearances may not always count for very much. Despite suffering many hardships, including the loss of her much-loved husbands, there was always a joyous vitality about her, a determination to extract the most out of life which was especially important to me, experiencing adolescent angst trying to find my place in the world.

Given how very great an influence she has been on me, my writing, and the direction of my life, I thought that you may be willing to indulge this very personal post today.

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Photo: With Tudor in 1979, around the time I met Kay as a gawky 17 year-old. Much later in life, Tudor became the role model for The Queen’s Corgi. In the background is the home where I grew up.

Even though my memory isn’t great, I remember my first meeting Kay very clearly. It was the last term of school and I was at home on what we called ‘swot leave’ (‘study without teaching’), preparing for ‘M- level’ public exams which I would begin sitting the next week. Mum was friendly with the neighbours across the road. The lady of the house invited her to morning tea to meet her step-mother, Kay, who was visiting from her mountain home in Juliasdale. When she heard that I was at home, studying, she kindly invited me, too: ‘David can come and get some cake,’ she offered, recognising that a room full of middle-aged women was unlikely to appeal to a 17 year old boy – but that sweet treats were always most welcome!

Much in the spirit of the Dalai Lama’s Cat, I crossed the road eager for some delectation. I don’t recall anything about what was on the tea trolley. But I do remember glancing about the room of women and immediately being drawn to Kay. I went to sit next to her and soon discovered that we were both voracious readers who had enjoyed some of the same books. One was Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, suggesting that technologies of some ancient civilizations originated from visitors from other planets. We were both also intrigued by the memoirs of Lobsang T. Rampa, but wondered how authentic they may be.

My parents were church-going Presbyterians, and I grew up in a very conservative community, so it was refreshing to encounter someone so open minded and well-read. And I was riveted when Kay told me that she had visited Tibet, in the early 1950s, before the Chinese invasion. To me, Tibet seemed like a mythical kingdom, Shangri-la. I could hardly believe I was sitting next to someone who had actually been there! Seeing how intrigued I was, she suggested we take a walk in the garden.

It was there among the apple trees, that Kay told me the story that was the first I’d ever heard of someone’s real life encounter with Tibetan Buddhism. In the 1950’s, she told me, she had been living in London. There was a personal question she wanted to have answered, and she believed that the best person to answer it was a Tibetan lama.

What the question was, she never directly revealed, but in subsequent years, getting to know her, I have come to think it was probably about her third marriage which was by no means easy. Her husband had been in the Royal Air Force in WWII, was shot down over Germany and became a prisoner of war under the Nazism, in Colditz Castle, no less. He suffered from what we would now recognise as PTSD. I am guessing that life with him became very challenging.

Kay’s visit to Lhasa was, necessarily, a multi-leg exercise, this being well before the days of long-haul direct flights. After several days of travel by air and then gruelling hours on dirt roads, she finally reached Lhasa where she had to adjust to the altitude.

Eventually the day came when she was able to visit a monastery. I wish I knew which one, given that I now have a stronger sense of the various lineages. All I know is that Kay found herself with a small group of foreign visitors being shown around the monastery – the temple, dining hall and so on, with tour notes, of sorts, being offered by monks through an interpreter.

During the course of the visit, the question Kay wanted to ask was foremost in her mind. She dearly hoped for a chance for a personal conversation with a lama. But as their time unfolded, such a possibility didn’t arise. True, towards the end of the visit, the group was shepherded to a courtyard and questions were invited. But Kay didn’t want to reveal her own request in front of the others. I’m guessing that it was much too personal.

It looked like she had come to Lhasa in vain. There would be no opportunity to ask one of the wise ones for advice.

The visitors were being shown to the monastery gate, Kay was still mulling over her question and how she may get to ask it when one of the monks who had been observing the visitors approached the translator and tugged him aside. The translator, in turn, gestured to Kay. “This one,” he gestured to the lama, “wants you to know something.”

As Kay’s eyes met those of the lama, the translator spoke for him, “The answer to your question is as follows …”

I got goosebumps when Kay told me that. I still get goosebumps when I share her story today. It validated everything I’d heard about Tibetan Buddhism and made me hungry to know more. And of course, for the seventeen year old version of me, Kay went straight to the top of the charts as the most fascinating person I’d ever met!

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The Highlands Presbyterian Church, which our family attended, owned a cottage in Juliasdale, and a few months later my parents rented it for a week. Juliasdale was only a three-hour drive away, and we could also take our corgi Tudor, who enjoyed romping in the pine forests and around a pristine dam just below the Montclair Hotel.

I looked forward to this holiday, more than anything, as a chance to visit Kay, whose cottage wasn’t far from the church’s. We had exchanged several letters since that first meeting – this being long before the time of emails or messaging, and in an era when long-distance phone calls were expensive.

I loved those walks through the pine forests with Tudor, our corgi, to visit Kay. My sensorial memories of them inspire some of the descriptions of the forests around Dharamshala in my Dalai Lama’s Cat series. In my Africa book, I visit Kay, later in life with Aunt Carrie’s two dogs. I describe her like this:

To me, she had always seemed the same: tall and slender with curly hair, now tending more towards pearly than flaxen. That radiant, fey intelligence to her blue eyes. She’d been a great beauty and in her younger days had travelled the world modelling for a cosmetics company. But along with her assured poise there was always something indefinably different about her. An inner energy that made her sparkle … Whenever we met it was the same: as if we had just stepped away from one another for a few minutes, rather than months.

In her cottage Kay and I talked about everything and anything. We both loved music – I trained as a flautist, growing up, doing all my Royal College of Music grades, and playing in various orchestras and bands. Kay had moved in musical circles in Britain and had funny anecdotes about conductor Sir John Barbirolli which impressed me no end. She had seen the famous Russan ballet dancer Nijinsky perform and met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev.

Kay also had hundreds of books, and intriguing artefacts from her travels around the world. Before the days of models, attractive young women who showed designer clothes were called mannequins, and Kay used to be one for an American fashion company. She had many tales to tell, not least of them about families her own family had known who perished on the Titanic when she was a little girl.

When she wasn’t in Juliasdale, Nyanga, she travelled to a small apartment in Spain always following the same route: flying to London then by coach to Marbella, because “you always meet such interesting young people on coaches.” Even late in life, Kay loved meeting people and was especially curious about the views of young ones.

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What inspired me most about Kay was her psychic experiences. She told me how she was able to sense the spirits of those who’d passed on. She and other psychics on different continents around the world would sit at the exact same time for particular purposes – to connect with those who had passed, or to pray for peace – a practice I had never heard of before. Subsequently I have become friends with a number of people with similar abilities – most of whom feel awkward about the typical labels used such as ‘clairvoyants,’ ‘psychics,’ ‘channelers,’ etc – and like Kay they all convey a sense of other realms of dimension being available, ever-present, involving only a slight shift of focus. Like Kay, they are convinced that through practices such as meditation we can accomplish much more in the mundane realm than we may believe - including calming down aggression and war.

I was so enchanted by Kay’s home and her world that I wrote the following poem after my first visit to her.

This deep cottage

Seeps into the forest shades;

From its roots – like the pine

It soaks through earth

And becomes drenched in tree spirit.

Inside its hollow a table rests for one

But she is not alone -

For bones and flesh dissolve away

Only tones of thought remain,

And mystic communion with the spirits

As the trees around groan out their prayers.

And she is filling little lamps

That mist a shroud of smoky flame,

Though flicker on the soul quite clear;

And in the silence – others here.

I sent her the poem as a gift, and after a while forgot about it. Poetry writing was my thing in those days. Poems evolved into short stories, and later I turned to novels.

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The day came that Kay decided that she was getting too old for her remote, Juliasdale cottage. Instead, she planned spending southern hemisphere summers with close friends in Natal, South Africa. With typical generosity, she offered me many of her Juliasdale book collection, which I gladly accepted. In a few of the more handsome hardbacks, she went to the trouble of writing a favourite aphorism at the front that, for whatever reason, seemed appropriate.

It was a time of massive transition, both personal and national. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Kay left for Natal, I left for university and my parents returned to Scotland from which they had migrated in the late 1950’s. I no longer had a home in my homeland. Kay and I continued to exchange letters, but perhaps inevitably we lost touch after a while.

In moving my own belongings, I had to find a home for the books Kay had passed on to me. I found most of them a very good home with a friend called Connie, an English teacher who treasured them. But I kept the few of books in which Kay had written as treasured possessions. I took them from Zimbabwe to South Africa then, after four years, to London and ten years later, to Perth, Australia. I still have them on my shelves beside where I write.

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Although Kay and I lost touch while I was finding my way in the world, she always occupied a special place in my heart. Once I was settled in London I got back in contact with her through her South African friends. Apart from letters, we’d got to see each other when she passed through London, always staying at the Victory Services Club where, as the widow of a decorated air force hero, she was entitled to special rates.

Kay got to meet my wife Koala on several occasions. We enjoyed taking her out to lunch at various hotels in London where she’d enjoy a hearty meal accompanied by several glasses of champagne which she’d quaff with delightful aplomb! The photograph at the top of this post is taken from one of those occasions. Kay, as always, is wearing a jade Buddha about her neck.

Increasingly, instead of writing, we used to speak by phone. There was nothing especially regular about our calls, and once when I phoned her in Spain she answered, “Oh hello, David! I knew you’d be calling. Your photograph on the shelf fell over this morning.”

Living in London, before the days that I seriously explored Buddhism, I had a lot going on in my mind and life. Although I wasn’t on an inner journey of any kind, Kay’s presence in my life was a gentle, ever-present reminder. I have always related this beautiful line by Albert Schweitzer to her: "At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us."

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After ten years in London, Koala and I moved to Perth. I began attending Dharma classes. I would call Kay in Africa and Spain and then in England when she moved into a retirement home in Bournemouth. She was always very encouraging of my Buddhist practice. I remember her telling me, “You have come far in a very short time,” which I found enormously reassuring, as I had the sense that her observation wasn’t coming from a conventional source.

Kay gave away a lot of her belongings before she died – just as Buddhist texts recommend. This included a generous gift to me. She told me that she had discussed, with close friends, who should be the executor of her will, and one of them said, ‘what about the boy who wrote you that poem?’ She had already been considering me, and her friend’s suggestion confirmed her decision.

Kay died after a short illness in her late 90s. Confined to a nursing home in her last two years, she was ready to go. She had had a wonderful life and confinement was no way of life for her. I have no doubt at all that she would have only been looking forward. My own contact with her at this time was limited. Deafness made it impossible for us to speak by phone. And unlike in earlier times when she had been a prolific correspondent, once she moved into the nursing home, she never picked up her pen to write again. I still sent her letters and we were able to get messages through to each other via intermediaries. I know that we both remained in each other’s hearts.

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When I went to clear away some of her belongings, among them I found the poem I had written her all those years ago. It was faded in places, but she had rewritten the words on top of the blurred originals in her own hand, making it a very special document for me.

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From mutual friends I learned how Kay had once expressed the wish to have her ashes scattered on her husband’s grave, in the small churchyard of St. Catherines-in-the-Downs at Troutbeck in her beloved Nyanga mountains.

For several years her ashes remained in a cupboard, here in Australia, until we visited Zimbabwe. When we did, Koala and I made a special trip to St Catherines-in-the-Downs where, at her husband’s grave, we recited the Tsong Khapa Sadhana, a beautiful series of verses in our particular Tibetan Buddhist tradition, before releasing her ashes into the wind, chanting the Tsong Khapa mantra.

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Photo by Rutendo Petros on Unsplash

Photo: A Nyanga vista

I personally am not at all sentimental about mortal remains. I expect Kay was the same. But it seemed appropriate to be able to do this, with an accompanying Buddhist ritual. I had no idea until afterwards, when looking among the small number of graves, but in that same churchyard is the grave of Daniel Carney, who was a famous Rhodesian novelist, author of The Wild Geese, Under a Raging Sky and others. On his gravestone I found the quote from Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa about her partner, Denys George Finch-Hatton: ‘He brought us joy. We loved him well.’ I love this line and it is one I have used in my own Africa book in describing my fictional father.

In death, as in life, Kay seemed to be offering connection. In scattering her ashes I came to sense contact with other African authors. Their focus may have been different from mine, but the revelation in a very remote churchyard in the mountains seemed to transcend those differences.

Writing and Africa and sacred places, and especially a powerful and energetic connection to Buddhism - through the warp and weft of both life and death, these enduring themes connected Kay and me.

I am, of course, especially interested in how Kay’s consciousness has evolved. What happened to her after Bournemouth? Where is she now? Have I already connected to a new manifestation of her without realizing it? This, to me, is where the real interest lies.

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Kay continues to inspire me, sometimes in a very direct and unexpected way. In The Good Karma Refuge for Elephants I have a scene where the narrator Robbie goes to sleep in Kay’s guest bedroom. Before turning out the light, he glances at the wall and sees a copper plaque with an inscription of a particular verse which encapsulates his situation.

But what verse should I use? I had a particular one in mind when I dreamed up the scene, but when I came to write it, I didn’t think that the line I had in mind worked any more. The problem was, I had written myself into a corner and without an appropriate aphorism I’d have to scrap the whole idea.

‘What do you think, Kay?’ I mused, getting up from my desk one morning. Which was when I spotted three of her books on my shelf. I lifted one off – and came across the line she had quoted by Kafka which couldn’t have suited the narrative more perfectly. I had to chuckle:

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This post is about double the length I had planned. It has been a joy to write, to invoke Kay’s spirit. We all need a Kay in our life, especially when we are young and need to feel validated, worthy, loved. I was so fortunate to have her in mine.

Now that I am getting old, I feel it is time to give as I received, to be a Kay-equivalent to others. I am not Kay and will never try to be. But if I can help give other people a sense of connection, of purpose, most especially a sense that we are only a breath away from a more sublime reality, then I may be able to pass some of Kay’s presence.

Wherever we are in the world, and whatever the reality we appear to be experiencing, we can always withdraw to our own personal cottage in the mountains and to the peaceful, numinous realm within. We are all the possessors of Buddha nature. Being reminded of this can often be the most precious gift we may offer others.

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Lastly, this week, just one photograph from Twala Trust Animal Sanctuary which you help support by subscribing to this newletter.

From Sarah at Twala Trust:

Tiger Too arrived a couple of weeks ago in the boot of a car with a massive chain around his neck, severely malnourished and with pressure sores from sitting and lying permanently on a hard surface, his ears torn and infected, with severe fly strike. He was purchased as a German Shepherd. His owner lives in a nearby town, drives a nice car and was well dressed, so no economic excuses for this blatant neglect. Fortunately for Tiger, he's been welcomed in to the Waggley Tail Club to learn how to be happy and start a new life

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"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us."

Albert Schweitzer