Here is a copy of the first of many interviews:

1 DEBORAH

Deborah: Before Subud, I was an agnostic. I trained as an artist at St Martin's, London, 1931 - 1936 and then at the Royal College of Arts. Through Sir Kenneth Clarke, then director of the National gallery, I was commissioned to play a big part in his scheme, 'See Britain as it is'. I did many drawings and paintings for this series, as well as illustrating the programme in the Radio Times, 1948 - 1966.

I received the first prize in George Bells competition bringing the union of art and religion together. I illustrated several books 'Loneliness of a Long Distance runner', 'Book of Poems', by John Betjamen and 'Sea Poems' in conjunction with John Piper. Eventually I had my own art gallery with my husband in Muswell Hill for some years, before my eye- sight began to deteriorate.

Patricia: How did you come into Subud!

Deborah: Well, I had for a long time realised that just to travel on my own on the spiritual path wasn't really going to get me very far. I had heard somebody say that our sins were like the wrappings of a mummy. We were mummified in our sins and it was necessary for an outside force to release us, because a mummy can't get out of its wrappings. And the only thing was that so many people offered various masters and they always insisted that one had to surrender oneself entirely to them. This just couldn't do. Then I heard of Subud and that all that one was required to do - I say all but it was a big All, was - just to surrender to the will of God. I heard about Subud from Fiar. She was a probationer at the time as we used to call applicants then, and she thrust Mr. Bennett's talks at the Conway Hall into my hand and said they might interest me. And of course I only had to read a few lines to see that this was exactly what I had been looking for. I could hardly wait to get down to Coombe Springs. I was opened at Coombe Springs on the 15th of June 1958. I was supposed to go into the Djami but due to a slight muddle the latihan started so they took me up - Margaret and Kate - to a little room that I think Bapak had used as a little sitting room while he was there. He wasn't there any more; he had gone to America by then. My opening was fantastic! I'll tell you a bit because in those days there were no books or anything about Subud. Kate had taken us into Bennett's study and told us a little bit about how we should approach it. She told us we mustn't think about it, just to surrender. So I went into this little room with Margaret and Kate and one other applicant and one other Subud member. The sun was shining brightly outside and I just stood there and I said inwardly, 'Here I am God. You can do anything you like with me. I can drop down dead or I can stand here like a pillar of stone for half an hour or whatever happens'.

Margaret then said a few words, not the whole of the opening statement, just a few words, 'We are here to surrender to God, now we begin.' So I stood there and suddenly I was aware of a great force of power going around the whole room, in a great circle of power, and then suddenly this power went into me and my arms began to levitate, very, very slowly. I could smell incense and I felt the back of my head was seeming to enlarge. And later on when I saw a phrenologist chart I saw that these were the emotive centres, the loving centre. Behind the back of the head, just in front of the ears.

It was so blissful and I was so happy I fell on my knees and I said, 'Thank you, thank you.' I wasn't sure whether I was saying thank you to God or whether I was saying thank you to the helpers. There were other sorts of things: sensations in my hands and all sorts of things. And then I finally lay down on the floor like an embryo, curled up in a foetal position and after a minute or two Margaret said, 'Finish', and that was it. So I hadn't any doubt that there was something happening in my opening.

An interesting thing happened at Coombe Springs, one evening towards the end of the summer that I'm talking about - about four months after I was opened. I was doing latihan in the Djami with my back to the wall where they had - do you remember - a bench all the way round. I had my back to this and when I was doing latihan, suddenly I felt a cloak placed on my shoulders. And a few minutes later somebody said, 'Finish', and I turned round and Mariama was sitting on the bench behind me. She took my hand and took me over to Elizabeth Bennett and said, 'This is the one I mean.' And Elizabeth said, 'Oh yes, right.' Well a few days later I was asked if I would become a helper. And I felt that that cloak was what had been laid on my shoulders. Sometimes in later years I used to wonder whether it was a yoke rather than a cloak and I think that's true of all helpers. That it's a great privilege but also it can be quite a burden to carry at times, and that was rather interesting.

At the time there was a bus strike and so one had to walk quite a long way up to Coombe, but one thought nothing of it. People came, in those days, from all sorts of places. They flew down from Edinburgh and they came down from Birmingham and they came from all over the place. Thought nothing of it. But a lot of them lived at Hampstead, quite a lot of musicians and people from Hampstead. And they decided after a time - and I suppose they consulted Mr Bennett - to open a group at Hampstead. Of course that was a bit of fruit, a bit of fortune for me; Phillip (my husband) didn't want to know anything about Subud to begin with. But after about three months he saw such a change in me; 1 looked so radiant with it. Of course that was the honeymoon period, and he wanted to know Subud and as a result he was opened, which was very fortunate for me. We used to go twice a week on a Sunday and a Wednesday to Coombe Springs but then afterwards the group at Hampstead started in an old church hall called Bickersfeth Hall. And there must have been about fifty or sixty members and in fact it went on until there were well over a hundred members and some of them then broke away and opened a group in Muswell Hill. In those days Subud was proliferating all over the place.

Patricia: As I remember it was quite a large hall and it was marvellously placed, because it was on a sort of island and we could make a noise and it didn't disturb people.

Deborah: At the beginning of Hampstead we were first committee and helpers; the committee consisted of Stephen and myself. Stephen for the men, and me for the women. We were called elders, which was a bit unfortunate because I thought I was supposed to be a sort of mother superior. Stephen and I were really like chairmen of the two committees. And Vernon and his wife May secretaries and Hubert was the treasurer together with Virginia, now Mary. It's rather difficult with these name changes whether to use the old or the new name. We were then also designated as helpers. After that Bapak separated them and you couldn't he on the committee while you were a helper, so as to keep the two functions separate.

Phillip and I then bought our first house and it happened to be in East Finchely so it was really closer to Muswell Hill than it was to Hampstead. And gradually people moved away from Hampstead and some died and so, forth and the Hampstead group now doesn't exist. It faded away about two or three years ago, I believe. This is very typical in Subud that people move about such a lot and groups rise and fall.

At the beginning we had rather a lot of signs and portents, and very strong experiences and very strange coincidences and so forth. I think these have rather lessened as the years go by. One doesn't recognise the change so much because it's going on inside. To talk about what has happened over the last thirty odd years, one has to sort of begin at the end and work back. All I can say is that I think I'm a more, humble person than I was. I was very, very arrogant I realise now. That's one of the things, that it isn't until something has happened that you realise how different you are now to what you were before. You don't see it happening at the time.

I had some rather interesting experiences like one that I had when a fellow helper was in a very distressed state. And I said, 'Let's do latihan,' and I expected her to throw off the feelings she had. But instead she sat as quiet and peaceful as anything while I felt her state pouring into me just like a jug at the top of my head, pouring down into my body. And after- wards she said she'd felt the same thing happening to her. So one gets experiences like that.

I had certain highs where I thought, Oh I can never be any different to this, it was so real. And then it was a terrible disappointment when I found that it was only just a glimpse at something, it was like a visit to somewhere, not to stay but just to see it. If you read Saint Teresa of Habile, she says that's one of the signs of these revelations that she had is that they don't last. But while you're there you can't believe that this one will last because it's so, so real.

And I had one very, very remarkable experience, I suppose the most clear one that had nothing to do with any kind of imagination, and that was at the funeral of a woman called Muriel, she was a viola player. Before she died of cancer the helpers at Hampstead used to visit her and do latihan with her and a violinist Maurice used to go and play for her. She was particularly fond of Bach. At her funeral at the crematorium at Golders Green, the little chapel was absolutely packed with Subud members and I couldn't help wondering whether the clergyman would get opened, the atmosphere was so strong. At one point the organ began to play the orchestral part of the second movement of the violin concerto by Each, the single violin concerto. Maurice began to play the violin and there was this long note at the beginning, a sustained note and this note went into me and I became a violin. It's very difficult to explain what that means; I can hardly credit it myself. But every note of that sermon, which lasted about ten minutes, was playing on me and in me it wasn't just what is called the tingle factor but I was a violin. Now what that means I don't know except that it shows that we are very responsive to music, we are affected by vibrations. It certainly taught me to be jolly careful what I listen to.

I went home after this experience. It was just most exquisite and excruciating at the same time because I couldn't do anything about it. I put on a record of this bar, in the hope that perhaps I would be able to express it in some way like dancing or something, but nothing happened and nothing like that has ever occurred since. So you see one gets special experiences but they are all woven into the whole. Which is, I think that the whole - the end product - is something very simple like being more humble and things like that. Not so much the interesting experiences but the slow change in oneself. Because one of the things that has to happen to us is that we become cleaner human beings.

Patricia: Don't you think that so many Subud experiences are like that expression you used: Exquisite and excruciating? As if one is seeing both sides of the coin. The up and the down, the good and the bad.

Deborah: Yes, that's right. I sometimes think of that old advertisement for soap powder which says, 'I thought my whites were white until I used ...' I think all sorts of things in myself that I may have been rather proud of, have been shown to be not at all kosher. At the beginning, a lot of us - I know I wasn't alone - thought that we would make such tremendous rapid progress that we would be quite sort of saintly or very wise. And people would come to us and ask us questions and we would go off into a state of latihan and answer and they'd think how remarkable it all was. But all that's sort of fallen away, hut I think the people who really know what's happening underneath do stay on. They're happy. Of course, quite a lot of people have left because they're disappointed that they haven't made such rapid progress as they'd thought. But we have such a lot to clear, not only ourselves, but also our ancestors. Our fathers and mothers and grandparents and so on.

Patricia: How far back do you feel you've managed to clear, or rather is being cleared, through your latihan?

Deborah: Yes, I'm so glad you made that distinction. We don't do anything, it's done to us. We're like patients who submit to an operation. We just lie down on a couch and wait for it to happen - to be done. But you asked me a question of how far back ... I think I'm still with my father and mother, bless their hearts.

In 1981 I was registered blind because I'd had a lot of recurrent eye infections over many years and we were finding life rather difficult. It was all right when we were well but not when we weren't. So we decided to apply to go to Wisma Mulia (the Subud-run nursing home in Gloucestershire) and in 1982 it happened that a double flat became vacant just at that time so we felt that was very good. We moved in and we were very happy there for about a year. But unfortunately they had to raise their fees tremendously in order to meet their obligations for the repairs and so forth. It meant that either we spent up all our capital from which we were deriving an income and hope that at the end of the time the DHSS would pay for us. Or else we had to go straight away, get out and start life together in a little house and look after ourselves. We discussed it with our family and we discussed it together and we looked at all the pros and cons. We didn't like the idea of throwing away our money as it were in order to become dependent on the state but we didn't know what to do. I did a latihan offering the whole thing up. A few days later at about four o' clock in the morning, which seems a very significant sort of time for this to happen, I woke up with the absolute conviction that we had to get out, and Phillip quite went along with that. Within a few months we'd found a little house in Gloucester and settled down and lived really quite happily there.

A lot did happen then. Phillip had a tremendous revelation which really made such a difference to him, and he's a completely - not a completely different person of course because he's always been a very good, very sweet and loving man. But there was so much that stood in his way of making a real commitment and this is what happened, he was able to make a total commitment for the first time in his life I should think. And it made all the difference to our relationship and we found that we were back to where we had been right at the beginning only, I hope a little way further, better. Soon after this time we began to attract people, to the latihan.

We put a book in the library and somebody came. And somebody else heard about us being in Gloucester who hadn't been doing latihan for years and they came. And another person spoke to somebody about it and they came. We were supposed to be retired helpers, honorary helpers. But we found ourselves quite unwittingly, as it were, hack into harvest again. And we found a hall nearby which was a very wonderful place, a huge place where you could really shout and dance and sing and do anything you wanted to; it was great.

After a certain time it was time we began to feel that this group looked after itself because they were rather dependent on us and we knew it was time that we moved out of this. At this very time our son got in touch and said he saw that we could now afford to buy a house in Oxford, which we hadn't been able to do before, so that we could be near him and his wife, and they'd be able to look after us for a bit if we needed help. They knew we were very independent but could do with a bit of help from time to time. So that's how we came to Oxford and it all seems to be one step after another, all fitting into place like a jigsaw puzzle.

Now we really do feel that we can retire. But who, knows, you never know what's the next thing in front of you.