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The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi

British Feminist, Indian Nationalist, Buddhist Nun

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Beginnings

At first glance, there was little in Freda's beginnings to suggest the exotic life she was to lead, although, as Freda liked to point out, if you looked closely enough, the portents were there from the start. She was born above a small watchmaker's shop in the aptly named Monk Street (hinting at a future life in robes) around the corner from Friary Lane in the heart of old Derby on February 5, 1911. This was England's Midlands — home of Florence Nightingale, Rolls-Royce, and the starkly beautiful Peak District. Snow was falling heavily when Freda came into the world and although she was the firstborn child, her mother birthed her with very little effort. The midwife commented, "Ohhh, Mrs. Houlston, you should be the one to have all the babies, you do it so easily." Freda was a fair-skinned baby, with a perfectly round face, a high forehead, fine wispy hair, and bright blue-gray eyes, inherited from her father who had Norwegian blood coursing through his veins. She was christened Freda Marie Houlston.

Home life for Freda during her first few years was decidedly Dickensian. A photograph of the jeweler's shop shows Freda's father as a small boy, standing outside 28 Monk Street, a typical poor brick, terraced house with a front door opening directly onto the street, and rows of watches hanging in the window like so many baubles. "Houlston" is written large above the lintel. In the doorway is George, Freda's paternal grandfather, in an apron and cloth cap.

Freda, who harbored a romantic streak, remembered it with fondness:

"It was tiny, as attractive to me as the Old Curiosity Shop. I remember my grandmother fussing around in the live-in kitchen, the jewels and the watches in the cabinets. We'd bake bread and cook casseroles in the coal-fired oven, make toast on a toasting fork, wash clothes in a gigantic copper and keep our meat and cheese cold on a stone slab in the larder."

When life inside the tiny shop began to get a little cramped, the family moved to Littleover, a suburb of Derby, on the edge of the countryside, close to Freda's maternal grandmother.

From all accounts hers was a happy, modest, reserved, and decidedly upright family. Her father, Francis ("Frank"), was a tall, strikingly handsome man with an open, honest gaze who cut a dashing figure in his tweed suit and boater. He came from a long line of watchmakers and jewelers, who had all worked in the same tiny shop before him. Francis was deeply religious, a staunch Methodist who favored the teetotalers, and had actually signed the Pledge, the certificate bordered by little homilies: "Look not upon wine, for at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder." It stated that Francis Houlston, "with Divine Assistance," would abstain from all alcohol that caused "practices of intemperance." He meant it. Freda recalled him saying that he would never let strong spirits pass his lips even if he were dying and his life depended on it.

Her mother, Nellie, was a stoic woman — tall and straight-backed, with a long face, and her dark hair worn up. She was a stylish woman, and an excellent seamstress who made all of her children's clothes. Nellie had met Frank in the Methodist Chapel of St. Anne's (where her grandparents also worshipped) and was married at age twenty. There was also an element of the adventurer about her, a trait her daughter inherited. Nellie liked to ride around the countryside on a motorbike, play bridge, and at one point was appointed captain of the Mickleover Golf Club, an unusual post for a woman in those days.

Her granddaughter, Pauline Watson, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her aunt Freda, remembers Nellie well. "She was a strong woman, who I found rather formidable. She was very good with money, and held the purse strings. Later on she bought and sold houses. Nellie was also rather psychic, like myself and Freda. It runs in the female line. Nellie got 'feelings' and sensed presences. She once bought a house but never moved in because she felt unhappy ghosts there," said Pauline, who lives near Bristol, in the United Kingdom.

Freda, who famously never saw ill in anyone, had a distinctly rosy view of her mother. "She had a great altruistic spirit, loving her fellow men. I never knew of anyone near us in need who did not get a helping hand from my mother. Looking back, I think she was a natural bodhisattva, but since she was born in a Christian country, she never encountered the Buddha."

Freda's most interesting family member was her great-grandfather Walker, who as a child had been shipwrecked as he was fleeing France and was plucked from the waves by a preacher named Reverend Walker. Rumor had it that he was the illegitimate son of the Dauphin, although there was no proof. Whatever his ancestry, he did very well, rising from a bus driver to a successful coal contractor. The beautiful pieces of furniture that Nellie eventually inherited came from him.

When Freda was eighteen months old, Frank and Nellie's second child, John, was born. With his blond curly hair and sunny disposition, Freda adored him from the start. They were exceptionally close and maintained a constant correspondence whenever they were apart. "He was a beautiful, strong boy, who inherited the Houlston beauty," she declared. "Believe it or not, we never quarreled." The siblings had very different personalities. Freda was a serious, sensitive, good child, who was rarely seen without a book in her hand. John, on the other hand, was mischievous, fond of playing pranks, and preferred sports to schoolwork. Both, however, had the kindness gene. In adulthood, John joined the philanthropic Christian-based organization Toc H, founded after World War I by Reverend Philip "Tubby" Clayton, to do good works for the sick, elderly, and disadvantaged. Its ethos was example rather than preaching. John was also strongly religious and wanted to enter the Church, but the funds were not available. Instead he opted for the Royal Navy, where he managed to bluff his way into the signals unit in spite of being color-blind. When he died, at age fifty-four from heart disease, the family received hundreds of letters from people expressing how John had helped them. Freda's children reported that when she heard the news, it was the only time they ever saw their mother cry.

By 1914, the clouds of World War I were gathering, threatening not only peace in Europe but the tranquility of the Houlston household.

"The advent of war is very clear in my mind. We were sitting in the drawing room, Mother was pouring tea when there was a great booming sound. It was a bomb that had fallen on Derby station," recalled Freda.

Frank did his duty and joined the Sherwood Foresters as a private in the machine gun corps, and marched off to France. He was killed in the trenches of Aire, on April 14, 1918, just a few weeks before the end of the war. Freda, who was seven years old at the time, was devastated.

"My father's death overshadowed my entire childhood," Freda admitted. "My sadness is that I never really knew him. I have only two vague memories, one of him digging in the garden and the other of him playing with me in the sitting room. I never got the chance to understand him. We had a painting depicting a scene from the English Civil War, in which a child is being questioned about when he had last seen his father. The boy replies, 'I saw him last night in my dreams.' For me it was just like that. To me father is a concept, a sacred concept.

"The Remembrance Day service held annually at a school on November 11 to honor those who had died in the War used to open up the wound again and again. I would almost faint with grief," she said.

She later revealed that her father's death opened her up to the pain and suffering experienced by all humans everywhere, preparing her for the Buddhist path. The Truth of universal Suffering was the first of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths — his seminal doctrine, outlining the path to liberation.

Nellie, who had seen her husband's death when he appeared at the foot of her bed one morning, five days before the telegram arrived, suffered a near-collapse, but carried on. When she recovered, she announced, quite firmly, that she would never set foot in church again, on the grounds that she could no longer believe in a God who could take someone as good as her husband or separate a wife from the husband she loved so much. She later married another Frank, Francis Swann, a railway clerk, the youngest of eleven, who lived with three spinster sisters not far from Nellie. Freda was the first to concede it was not a marriage of young lovers.

"Frank Swann was thirty-five, and it occurred to him that it would be a good idea to marry the young widow — it was a union of two people who had decided they would like to spend the rest of their lives together. My second father was a good-natured, kindly man, who followed his own interests (mainly amateur dramatics,) and who never interfered with our upbringing."

The second drama of Freda's childhood occurred when she contracted diphtheria at age eleven. An epidemic was sweeping the country, killing many children. Penicillin had not yet been invented, and Freda grew increasingly weak. Seeing that her daughter was dying, Nellie followed her intuition and took her to a doctor in Nottingham, who prescribed putting her in a tent in the garden. Curiously, the unorthodox treatment worked.

"He must have been a genius doctor because, under the beech tree and by the laburnum, I was soon on my way to recovery," Freda wrote in her notebook. From that day on Freda had a predilection for tents, and at every opportunity would dive into them, taking her children with her — be it in the high, remote foothills of the Himalayas or in strange dirt parks in Delhi. In her journals she attributed her love of canvas to a previous life as a nomad in Tibet, as she did her empathy with the surrounding countryside she grew up in.

"I loved the stark Derbyshire landscape. There is a mysterious, esoteric quality about it — the black rock forms, close-cropped grass, walls of stone like the mani stone I saw in Tibet. No other English county is like it, except maybe Cornwall," she wrote.

Freda and John spent hours roaming freely over the Derbyshire hills and dales, collecting mushrooms and blackberries, making daisy chains. They wandered through bluebell woods, explored the magical Sherwood Forest (Robin Hood's hideaway) and visited Derby's great old stately homes, such as Pemberley, now a pilgrimage site for devotees of Mr. Darcy, hero of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. And they bought bowls of fresh butter from the small farms dotted over the countryside.

"We were very happy," she said simply. Freda's love of nature, which bordered on pantheism, never left her. It informed her poetry, her writings, her very soul, and she would wax lyrical whenever she spoke of it. "I recall the exquisite perfume of the lilac tree outside the kitchen door, and the pear tree with its blossoms tumbling over the garden wall in the magical days of spring."

It was an unspoiled, ordered childhood of a bygone age.

Nellie would sew; preserve fruits and vegetables; make jams, pickles, and herb root beer. The only entertainment was a crystal radio, brought into the house when Freda was eleven. They would all sit around it in the evening, prodding it with a contraption called the "cat's whisker" to find the sensitive spot to make it spring to life.

During her formative years, Freda nurtured the innate spiritual side of her nature that was to persist and grow until it dominated her entire existence. She described its development this way: "I was a Christian brought up in a Christian family. My mother may have turned her back on God, but she sent me to Sunday school and then to church because she thought her husband would have wanted it. My godmother, Auntie Lilly, loved me dearly, and was a quiet influence with a quality of joy. She used to play me hymns."

It was her confirmation, at age fourteen, at St. Peter's Church, Littleover, that truly opened the spiritual door. "When I took Holy Communion, I felt there was something different there — a direct communication, a sense of awe in the face of the Divine," she said. Her minister, whom she called Brown Owl on account of his spectacles and hooked nose, was wary. "He saw I was more interested in Mass than most girls and warned my mother that she should keep an eye on me. That was a typical attitude of the Church of England then, which was obsessed with fetes, and meetings, and showed an utter lack of understanding of anything connected to the spiritual life in its deepest sense."

It triggered a deep-seated yearning that was to last all her life. As always Freda turned to books to find out what this yearning was, and what it meant. "I read the Anglo Catholic writers, and the biographies of the saints. The life story of Saint Thérèse of Carmel, the book of Saint John of the Cross, trying to find out how they had reached this exalted state. It was a turning point. I discovered all these saints of the past had sought Reality, the Truth, and were not satisfied until they had reached some direct intuition of the Light, the life in the cosmos. This started a new stream of thought. If they can do it, why can't I sit quietly and contemplate."

Freda had discovered that what she was looking for could not be found in dogma but only through going within. "I realized that Brown Owl's sermons and all the things that went on in the Church had no meaning for me at all," she said.

There was no one nearby to help her. England in the 1920s had not even heard of meditation. Christmas Humphreys, a judge and scholar, opened the first Buddhist Society in 1926, at Eccleston Square, London, based primarily in Zen. The Theosophists had thought about things Buddhist, but nothing had percolated through to provincial libraries, schools, or homes.

But Freda was not only sincere, she was extraordinarily determined — unusual traits for a girl that young. "The only thing I could think of was to go to church when nobody was there. I used to slip away from home in the early hours before school, sit alone in the pews, and just wait. There was always a prayer in my heart to reach God, or whatever you call that power or love beyond thought. I was only deeply interested in what I could find out from direct, intuitive understanding."

She had taken the first step of the spiritual seeker, setting out on a journey that was to last nearly forty years, when she eventually found the path that she was looking for.

In the meantime she kept her head in books. There were hints in her choice of reading of where she was heading. "Whenever anything from the East came into my hands — poetry, literature of any sort — there was always more than an ordinary depth of response," she said.

Expanding World

Freda was driven as much by her brain as by her innate spiritual impulses. She was known as a clever and studious girl, who excelled at her lessons. She attended the newly opened Parkfields Cedars, established on Kedleston Road in 1917, which had as its guiding motto "To Produce Girls of Distinction." Freda loved it. She described in glowing terms its rolling lawns, magnificent oak paneling, sweeping staircase, well-equipped library, stately cedar trees, and dedicated unmarried staff, "living for their work and loving the children. I can still see the head, Miss Kay, a Scot, who was a rather strong, bulldog-looking type, with the winter sun streaming in behind her illuminating her white hair as she said morning prayers. She had an unsentimental way with the Bible, especially the Old Testament and the psalms of David. Beside her was one picture, Botticelli's 'Annunciation.' Morning prayers were a time of joy for me."

Freda eventually became "head girl," a student leader who served as the official representative of the school. "We knew that she was brainy, completely into books," said Pauline Watson, Freda's niece. "When I visited one of her school friends, she told me that Freda was not like most of them — she wasn't interested in parties or boyfriends. She had her goals and went toward them."

This was 1920s postwar Britain, and while most young girls were amusing themselves with flappers, fringes, and frivolity, Freda was content with ballroom dancing, arts and crafts, and following her mother around the golf course, the only sport that interested her. She loathed swimming in the local baths but was grateful that she had learned how to swim, because swimming in the lakes of Kashmir gave her hours of pleasure later in her life.

But it was in her schoolwork that she excelled, especially literature and languages. It helped that she had a photographic memory, a fact that she made little of. One teacher in particular, Miss Glass, earned her lifelong gratitude for teaching her French. Freda had a particular aptitude for the language, owing, she thought, to her mysterious French maternal great-grandfather.

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Excerpted from The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi by Vicki Mackenzie. Copyright © 2017 Vicki Mackenzie. Excerpted by permission of Shambhala Publications, Inc..
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