Peter McNab and his colleague Mario Sikora are editing an exciting new book on the Enneagram provisionally called The Ennagram from the Inside. The inspiration for the book emanted from a conversation they had about the best Enneagram Literature coming from authors who write about their own type.
So here goes.
Think a could begin with a scattered list.
Chapel-en-le-frith, Victorian School with outside tiolets that would get iced up during Derbyshire’s harsh 1960s winters. Mouth soap inflicted upon those who said anything deemed rude. The relief not to be the ‘smelly’ child in the class and the progressive fascination with the emerging single parent families as marriages fragmented. Was consistently off school until 7 as had bouts of bronchitis, tonislitis and double pneumonia three times. Buxton Hopsital had a grand old dome and rememeber feeling very important and like my hero Robert Louis Stevenson as was tested for TB. Mother fed me with a spoon and next door neighbour had no thermometer and fed me Smash instant potato whilst waited for mum and Dad to return from their special ‘furniture shop’ in new Mills. A desolate place, bleak enough with smoke, a hundred and eighty degree bend that mum once had to negotiate uphill with a failing clutch in our MOrris 1800.
hated brownies with a passion. wednesday during Needlework( and there always felt a fraud) would get stomach ache as after Star Trek and the loathsome johnny Morris( his sing song voice such an anchor with impending horror of going to Brownines) and then the parental turns with Sian’s much older father whose Zephyr car smelt of ancient leather and cabbage. I always felt Brown owl( also called janet) knew I was a fake and that my weekly excursions back to my infant school and up those woooden stairs were at my mother’s imposing behest. She didn’t wnat me to be shy and antisocial. So I went and mum made nests and cakes and I had to pretend they were my enthusiatic creation. I felt that I didn’t fit and that my behaviour had to shape itself around conventions that others seemed to find fun and natural whilst I just felt awkward and out of place and even time.
I remember a car crash in the Morris Minor on the way to Brownies and cutting my head open on the metal dash board. I thrilled to the dripping blood, the stitches and THE announcemnet at the top of the stairs to Brown owl that I would not be going that week. 3 or 4 stitches in my head infintely preferable to the plague that were the Brownies.
We moved towns so I could have the chance of a Grammar school and my new teacher had a white sports car, blonde girl friend and read Allan garner’s Elidor to us and I knew that books could make me cry and this I know changed my life. I wd write plays for school and wd always assign the most heroic part to myself. I remember proudly dragging a wooden sledge my dad had made all the way to school so I cd be Captain Scott. FRiends were important though none had the sense of fated intensity I had read about until one May afternoon I was ‘assigned’ care of Emma who had lived in Kenya and whose family were briefly renting a house on my road.