ROCKETMAN

by Richard Banks    

On my final day at school, the ritual of the school leavers’ assembly was held, certificates of one kind or another were handed out and the headmaster addressed the impatient escapees with an inspirational message that would have been better directed at zealot missionaries about to convert the heathen. I still remember his assertion that our school days were just the beginning of our education which would continue throughout our lives. I think he must have been referring to the university of life, to the life experiences that steadily and imperceptibly add to our knowledge of the world and its people. At the time I thought he was extolling the virtues of lifelong evening classes and the words, ‘you must be kidding mate’ flittered across my mind. What flittered through it next I don’t recall, but thoughts of evening classes were not to return for another four years. When they did it was because I had come to realise that learning was only a chore if you were required to do it.

      My voluntary return to formal education occurred when a local Institute advertised a new course in the history of London - the City of London to be precise. It rang all the right bells, appealing to my lifelong interest in English history and my recently acquired fascination with the City, where I now worked. I enrolled, and in the course of some thirty sessions, an engaging panorama of London life unfolded. Its success prompted the College to run a follow-up course on Georgian London, after which our tutor departed and a new man, Professor Troutman, took his place. The Professor was engaged to be our guide through Victorian London. To the disappointment of those attending, the Professor’s geographic concept of London stretched no further west than Aldgate Pump, while his idea of the average Londoner comprised a long list of socialist revolutionaries who had at some point sought refuge in the East End. Having failed to convert us to the revolutionary cause, he too departed, to later appear on the nation’s TV screens as a historical pundit. The college, noting the declining numbers attending his lectures, decided to run no further courses on the Capital’s history.

      This left me with the dilemma of what to do next. By now I had become an evening class junky and was prepared to try any subject in order to get my fix. After closely examining the college prospectus I decided to enrol on a course entitled, ‘The Asian World of Meditation and Levitation’. I suppose it would never have occurred to me to do so had it not been for the Beatle’s flirtation with transcendental meditation under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For a few months everything Indian was in vogue and the first session of the course was attended by over thirty persons seeking the inner light that apparently came after many hours of sitting cross-legged on the floor.

     The tutor selected to take us on this spiritual journey was the Maharishi Matatashe, otherwise known to the local populace as Mr Singh of the Bombay Tandoori in Walthamstow High Street. At the beginning of each session, he would hand out fliers for his restaurant and then instruct us to contemplate various objects in the classroom as they might appear in orbit around the moon. To facilitate our meditative state he would strum a sitar, chanting hypnotic mantras in Hindi, which he had written on the blackboard with English subtitles. After six weeks, several students complained that they wanted to travel around a more interesting planet. Mr Singh, sensing that he was beginning to lose his audience, wisely decided that our meditational skills were sufficiently developed for us to move on to levitation.

      The first session was curiously like the meditation, in that we were required to visualise objects in space, but this time we were to imagine that we were travelling towards them. In order to achieve the intense mental effort that was needed to thrust ourselves upwards, we were told to shut our eyes and maintain complete silence at all times. Mr Singh began each levitational ascent, as he called it, by slamming the door of the classroom and ending it an hour or so later by slamming it a second time. Those students of a cynical disposition later expressed doubts as to whether Mr Singh was actually in the room between the slamming of doors. He was certainly very quiet, but I prefer to believe that he was in the sixth stage of inner karma, known as Karmadowna. My faith in our tutor was confirmed three weeks later when I saw him levitating several feet above the blackboard, although I can not discount the possibility that I may have been asleep. By the tenth session, I felt the weight of gravity slackening and a delighted Mr Singh confirmed that I had risen two centimetres above ground level. His attempts to convince other students that they too had ‘gone solo’ were greeted with scepticism by those less accomplished than myself. Indeed, several of them expressed dissatisfaction with Mr Singh’s teaching methods and threatened to report him to the College Principal.

      Mr Singh’s reputation was vindicated by an event as unexpected as it was dramatic. During the fourteenth session, the collective peace of fifteen persons pursuing various objects through various galaxies was interrupted by a loud thud and a shower of white debris from above. Awoken from our contemplative states, we looked up to see the flailing legs of one Herbie Lechenstein protruding from the ceiling. It later transpired that he had become tired of drifting around in space, and instead visualised himself strapped to the outside of an Apollo moon rocket. He was a keen astronomer and had watched all the space launches broadcast on TV. He knew every stage in the launch process and when he saw the engine ignite and the rocket begins to lift off above a cushion of orange flame he also took off with a sudden velocity that found his upper half peering into the ladies gymnastics class. The ladies were not amused, and neither was the Principal, who threatened to sue Herbie for criminal damage. The class was subsequently terminated and we received a partial refund of our fees. Herbie sustained a severe concussion and to the best of my knowledge never ‘flew’ again. Indeed, I understand that the incident so unnerved him that he could not bring himself to close both eyes for nearly two weeks.

     For my part, I have continued to practice the levitational techniques taught by Mr Singh. Although I have yet to make the breakthrough briefly experienced by Herbie, I consider it my greatest gift that in over forty years I have yet to wear out a single pair of shoes. So much is owed to further education.

                                                                                      Copyright Richard Banks