Aid memoir: Anne Wade revisits her youth, her training, and a tussle with the Peace Testimony

‘I am not required to provide all the answers.’

I have described previously how I began to learn the Quaker practice of centring down (‘What does it mean to “centre down”’, 21 June). The method allowed me to make peace with my own anger, and then to make peace in my immediate environment. I was exploring how to do this while trying to live an ordinary life, integrating the mundane and the transcendental, chatting normally while maintaining awareness that everything is shot through with something from beyond.

After training in general and psychiatric nursing, I went to work at Leigh House, an NHS adolescent psychiatric unit run by two Quakers, Bill Allchin and Lotte Rosenberg – I am glad of this opportunity to honour their memory. The unit was not labelled Quaker, but the way it was run, as a therapeutic community, gave opportunities for all of us to practise peacemaking. I was also involved with Young Friends, and at that time we held a Peace Caravan for a week every year in different areas around active Quaker Meetings, with the support of Home Service Committee. The experience of both Leigh House and Peace Caravans took me further into understanding peace and living from the depths.

Bill had survived the nightmare of Japanese prisoner-of-war (PoW) camps, and the Burma railway. He lived simply and gave away a lot of his money. He lived with his partner, Tom, at a time when being gay was illegal. He strove for reconciliation with the Japanese, having worked through his wartime trauma in his training analysis. At first, the British ex-PoWs and prison guards were mostly too bitter to co-operate in reconciliation, but Bill got a quicker response from the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bill was able to bring one of these survivors, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, over on a speaking tour. Bill also helped to set up Glebe House (Friends Therapeutic Community) in 1965, giving them psychotherapeutic support for some years. (I am dismayed about the closure of this institution (see page 10). It has done amazing work over these decades, the only work that has been successful in the prevention of paedophilia.)

Lotte and her son narrowly escaped the Nazi death camps after her husband rejected her for being Jewish. She described finding Nazi oppression intolerable after the liberty of the Weimar Republic, when she had been able to study and work freely, while spending her summers wild camping, skinny dipping and sunbathing in the Black Forest. Lotte organised a children’s summer camp in the mountains with some friends just before war was declared, and they all walked over the Alps to escape from Germany, and then through Italy, desperately trying to find a boat to take them anywhere they would be safe. She was grateful for asylum in Britain: ‘The physical climate is awful, but the political climate more than makes up for it.’

I trained to be an adolescent psychotherapist, again finding that being able to centre down was invaluable to the job, which is not ‘talking therapy’ but ‘listening therapy’. I was part of the Dialectics of Liberation, an international congress with the Philadelphia Association. I was in London every week for lectures and a training analysis, and I would often have an open-air swim at the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, sometimes skinny dipping. The police patrolled the perimeter strictly, arresting would-be voyeurs, and it was wonderful to feel safe enough to do this as a young woman alone in London. Often I would get a cheap returned ticket for the theatre afterwards. 

‘The job required empathy, intuition, and kindness, but balanced with challenge.’

Young Friends met regularly, and we went to various events, including the yearly CND Easter march. When there was a coup in Greece, imprisoning the composer Mikis Theodorakis and banning his music, a lot of us protested by Greek dancing, and singing Theodorakis songs. All this contributed to our thinking.

At Leigh House we had a daily group meeting, and the young people were offered individual therapy sessions. We ran international conferences in adolescent psychotherapy, which were exciting. We provided masses of activities, and widened the young people’s experiences of the world in every way we could. We might exchange poems and dreams over coffee, climb trees in the orchard, admire the progress of an oil painting, or enjoy a band spontaneously syncopating. The job required empathy, intuition, and kindness, but balanced with challenge, and a relaxed but total focus – the same need to centre down and tune-in that I had found when I sat with people who were dying, or that I found later with breastfeeding and home education. I loved the young people; we had good support from each other, and I found the work immensely satisfying.

Lotte was part of the group working on Towards a Quaker View of Sex. She was interested in hearing what Young Friends had to say. We were incredibly ignorant, and afraid of becoming ‘queer’. We did not understand how it might happen, and we knew little about the emotional aspect of relationships. The central understanding that Lotte and the other members of the group gave us, and that Towards a Quaker View of Sex gave the public, as well as Quakers, was that same-sex relationships are as natural as cross-sex ones – that it is the quality of a relationship that matters, not its structure, and that same-sex and cross-sex partnerships can be of equal value. The Towards a Quaker View of Sex group hoped that, eventually, the difference between gay and straight sexual orientation would be as unremarkable as the difference between right- and left-handedness, which exist in similar proportions to sexual orientation in the human population. 

During the Young Friends Peace Caravans, we learned a lot through silence, but also through intense discussion, and we acquired a wonderful repertoire of peace and protest songs. We camped out, mostly in Meeting houses, and held meetings, usually open to the public, with local groups. We attended local Meetings for Worship. One time we met with a Young Zionist group. We really liked each other, yet we were deadlocked about the rights of Palestinians. Sometimes we showed films, such as The War Game, which the BBC had banned. 

But one day I came to an unexpected standstill as I was speaking. The others covered for me, but I was shaken. I could not do any public speaking for the rest of that week, so I just did the cooking. My understanding of the Peace Testimony shifted seismically, and, as it came back together, I saw it all in a less simplistic way. I saw the Peace Testimony as a support for our efforts to make peace in every aspect of our lives, not as something making us aware of our failures. I am not required to provide all the answers. We just have to take the next step as it opens before us. I also dimly saw what a long way I had to go.

We begged Friends House for training in nonviolent action, but it was many years before the Turning the Tide and Alternatives to Violence projects were developed. We read all the books, and Peace News. We would gladly have gone to prison if we had found anything worth breaking the law over, but we had no ideas for meaningful peace activism. Nuclear war still loomed, but apart from the Easter marches we did not know how to protest effectively. We understood that we had to do so in ways that would change minds, not intimidate and bully, but what could we actually do? We were trying to create a paradigm shift, but we still had no idea how.

During demos and protests, I looked deep within for images and symbols to change minds towards peace. But this was in vain: this was not what was required of me. What I was being led towards was another question: what makes people become violent in the first place?

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