Canadian cottage garden, 19 July 2025

Meetings with RR Skinner

 

Photo of RR Skinner provided by Patricia Proenza in 1988

                                    

Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
Beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags, some in jags,
And some in velvet gowns.

-- Quoted by RR Skinner

What follows (in the following posts) are the events and narrative of meeting RR Skinner; our first meeting was in 1974, the last meeting was in 1986. This is taken from notes I made after these meetings; they were marathon sessions of talking with (mostly listening to) Reg, including what he told me about himself, his life, his family, and his observations on life. When I told Reg in 1985 that I would like to write about him he gave me a thick manila envelope containing copies of his various essays written over a thirty year period, I returned these papers to him later. The manuscript that I wrote became "Meetings with RR", it’s 125 pages of double-spaced text; it is unpublished and probably will never be published.

RR Skinner was born on  03 July 1909; he died at Bognor Regis on 31 December 1999 (these dates may not be accurate). From age eight to eleven he did not attend school because of frail health, he had a tubercular bowel and spent these three years in hospital or convalescing at home; this was a time of relative isolation and solitude. After returning to school he found that he couldn't pronounce certain words because of a stammer, but he overcame this through an effort of will. He was the seventh of fifteen children, plus two adopted children. Reg's mother, who ran and ministered her own spiritualist church in Bethnal Green, London, believed that her son would be the next world-teacher and she raised him for that position (this sounds terribly inflated today but it was also the aim of the Theosophical Society to find the next messiah or world teacher, a Buddha, and the person they eventually found was Jiddu Krishnamurti who eventually renounced this idea). In a letter to a friend RR's mother said that the child she was carrying, the future RR Skinner, would be the next messiah. RR told me that his ability to vet people was part of his training at his mother's church, it was his training to be a psychic and spiritual teacher. Many years ago I attended a few spiritualist meetings, these aren't seances but church services, sometimes these services were held at rented spaces in office buildings, and once at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah or, at other times, the Spiritual Science Fellowship, both located in Montreal; there is usually a non-denominational religious service, including hymns, followed by the medium addressing the congregation and communicating messages allegedly from the departed to their family members. I believe RR's mother, Elizabeth Mary Eagle Skinner, was the main influence of his life.

Oral history is an important source of information on the past; some of us, but not many, listen to the old folks and write down what they say. My mother spoke to me often about our family history, in fact it’s what we talked about the most and, now, years later, I am still impressed at the accuracy of what she remembered; I still have notes -- written on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper -- recording what she said about our family's history. Part of my interest in family history is that my mother would mention relatives that I had never heard of and I wanted to know who they were, how they were related to me, what was my place in the genealogy of the family, I needed to make sense of what she said; I was the youngest member of our family and I wanted a record of what people said, what people did, and who these people were; I knew even then that no one lives forever and this might be my only chance to record what happened in the past. This wasn't for entertainment, it was to make sense of life by writing things down, writing as a way to understand something; and writing is a way of finding order in things, of putting things into their proper order. I am neither obsessive nor compulsive but I am serious and I know that I have a calling to write poems and a great need to make sense and order of this life, to remember the ancestors, and to record the events of my own life; towards this end I have kept a diary everyday since January 1965 and I have written books of poetry and literary criticism. This has been my life’s journey. From my interest and research in family history I have compiled our Morrissey family history; and I have written about my paternal grandmother, and her central place in our family, in Remembering Girouard Avenue. 

Address of RR's sister, Rosemary Skinner on RR's appointment card;
I was leaving for Ireland and RR suggested meeting his sister,
but this meeting never happened. Summer 1978.

After Attending Krishnamurti's Talks in July 1974

In the fall of 1973

I had no real plans for my future after I graduated from university in 1973; with no plans and no ambition it was a fairly aimless time that followed. But I did have two interests, one was writing poetry, the other were the writings of the Indian teacher J. Krishnamurti who had once been a famous speaker, a famous guru, but by 1973 his fame had somewhat faded. It was only by chance that I came across Krishnamurti’s writings, there is a chapter on Krishnamurti in Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life, and this is possibly where I first heard of Krishnamurti. I also remember hearing and visiting Swami Shyam who was popular in Montreal in the early 1970s, I was one of many who received a mantra from him. I was one of the young seekers, just a face in a crowd, who visited Geof Stirling’s house where Swami Shyam was staying. But I was never a follower, never a believer, never a joiner of groups or organizations, I never have been and I’m still not. I think what Krishnamurti was to me was therapy, not really learning about spiritual ideals but learning about myself. After I received a mantra from Swami Shyam I sat every night for about three months repeating it but by early 1973 I was wary of mantras, swamis, and meditation; but it wasn't just Krishnamurti who dissuaded me from following a guru, it was my own innate disbelief in gurus and the people who followed them. Krishnamurti didn't want you be a follower or believe in anything, he wanted people to think for themselves. The months of late 1973 and early 1974, after graduating from university, dragged on and in the spring of 1974 I decided to go to Saanen, Switzerland, to attend Krishnamurti’s public talks given there every year; at the time I still didn't know anybody who was interested in Krishnamurti's teachings or in Krishnamurti. One of my professors had become a Tibetan Buddhist and published a book length poem on Milarepa, I think his complaint was that Krishnamurti was too intellectual for him, too lacking ritual, but this is what I always liked about Krishnamurti, that he was not a part of the guru industry being exported to the West by India and Tibet. So, in early July 1974, I flew from Montreal to Zurich and from there I took a train to Sannen which is about two miles from Gstaad, a holiday resort for wealthy people. I think it was my first day there that I met Patrick McCarty, who was from California, and Sally Lake, from England. The three of us, Pat, Sally, and myself, became friends and between attending Krishnamurti’s Talks we travelled a bit, for instance to Lake Maggiore; at the end of the Talks we decided that we would meet again in the UK; perhaps it was only a week or ten days later when we met at Sally’s mother’s home in Crowborough and we planned to meet Sally's uncle, Reg Skinner, of whom Sally often spoke; Reg was also interested in Krishnamurti, and he seemed to be someone worth meeting.  

      

This is Reg Skinner's home, Boisville, located at 7 Sandhurst lane, Blackwater,
Camberley. Photo from Google Street View

Meeting RR                                      

It was in mid-August 1974 that I met Reg (Reginald Rice) Skinner, or RR, at his home in Blackwater, near Camberley. Reg had retired the previous year, he had worked as a chiropodist (not, as he told me, affiliated with the NHS) with his surgery at his home and he was about 66 years old. Joan, Reg’s common law wife, had died of cancer in 1972 and he recounted to me his married life with her. Reg's home, Boisville, was named by the contractors who built it about forty years before and it had been given to Reg and Joan by their friend and the previous owner of the house, Mrs. Scott, with whom Reg and Joan lived, and who was affectionately named Mu; Mu had worked for the post office and now, in her mid-eighties, she lived in a residence, near Tekels Park, in Camberley. It occurs to me only now that Joan must have been the sister of Sally’s father who had died when Sally was young, she referred to RR as Uncle Reg. Boisville is pronounced “boy’s ville” and not “bois ville” with a French pronunciation; the “boys” having been the contractors who built that particular house. It was a white stucco building with a small garage beside it that was used as a workshop. There were a few topics that preoccupied RR, among them was his brother, Welby Skinner, his mother who had also been a spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti, Joan, beekeeping, and his own life experiences; but what interested him the most were “things appertaining”, his term for understanding life in its complexity and depth. Everything eventually devolved to “things appertaining”. I was to hear a lot about these topics from Reg.

Stephen Morrissey (right) with Reg Skinner in the garden at Boisville,
Camberley,  26 August 1974

      

Reg Skinner 

Canadian Cottage Garden, 12 July 2025

 

Tree trimming time

Yesterday, the old apple tree that shaded our garden was trimmed; it had darkened most of the garden, especially this summer. The time had come, the time to let in the light! 

Here we are in the garden the day after the tree was trimmed.

Vertical garden at Loyola Park

The "vertical garden" was opened in early June, it is a project of our local burrough; this is a garden for a small space, a vertical garden, a garden that grows upwards, and growing upwards it is expected to increase the amount of food possible to grow in this space. For weeks, maybe months, city workers laboured to make build the vertical garden located in the north-east corner of Loyola Park, and then it was done and it was announced. Photographs were taken. Food grown here will be donated to local food banks. These photos were taken on 11 June 2025. But now, a month later, the garden is still padlocked, so no one is walking in this vertical garden, and no one is picking vegetables grown there, it looks like nothing is growing there. With the amount of space they have to work with the city could have laid out some garden plots, there is probably a long list of people who would like the have their own garden. And what did this cost? I hear it cost around $190K, and you can buy a lot of turnips, tomatoes, and beans at the IGA a few blocks from here for $190K and not have to grow them yourself. 

Canadian Cottage Garden, 5 July 2025