Maid of Orleans

So you think you're living a normal life. No one tells you any different. And then you find out you're a government experiment that has been paid for. You're a loan that's coming due.

In 1956 on my fifth birthday Dr. Cameron wrote my father a cheque and with that money my dad bought a new car and a modest house in a suburban project, formerly farmland that had been bulldozed for homes.

I still dont know how boys from England would have found it in those days without GPS but I guess there were maps. Unless of course my dad was the driver that day... which seems unthinkable but on the other hand once you know he was being blackmailed by his Air Force superiors anything is possible.

We were located in a suburb of Montreal which had been thrown up on the banks of the Back River which is what Anglos called la Riviere des Prairies, a sewer-like extension of the Ottawa or Outaouias as it was known to the Mohawks. It had a reputation as a place where children drowned.

To find our little bungalow you had to cross the Pont Viau bridge - that sounds redundant and it is - and our suburb was also called Pont Viau. When we first moved there in 1956, the streets had no names, just numbers - but in 1960 that changed and we were now living on Rue Dauphin.

Many years later - I was already grown up - my mother confided that when I was born she wanted to name me "Jeanne" which in French sounds like "Zhanne" but in English would unevitably become "Jean" or "Jan" and lose all its Gallic charm. So instead she settled for Anne, the silent "e" being a little extra flourish that she hoped would rescue it from total banality. Anne was a common name that year thanks to Princess Anne, born two years earlier, and many girl babies were saddled with it. I think I got the tail end of that fad. To Anne, they added a middle name "Julia" after Julia Jane which was my paternal grandmother's name - and always conjured up a bitter old lady but lately I see the wisdom of that.

My mother had a habit of sometimes asserting herself "in the shadows". So that our souls would not end up in limbo, she baptized my twin brother and me in an emergency ceremony using a pamphlet she obtained from a priest, and never told my father who raised us as reluctant little Presbyterians.

I always felt I had missed the boat by not being allowed to grow up French and Roman Catholic, which was what I felt I really was, or had been, in a parallel life. My soul was French but everything else about me could too easily pass for English.

Was all this about my mother's Norman bloodline or some Auld Alliance that nobody ever mentioned? Or was it about my dad's big mistake which was selling me to McGill - And ten years later in 1966 the military psychiatrists thought it was time to collect on their investment?

Is that how crazy things happened?

As far as my "Joan of Arc" complex, it manifested now and then e.g. in a game of charades in history class where we drew names from a hat and I portrayed the Catholic martyr by putting my hands together in prayer and muttering "Crackle crackle crackle" to symbolize gruesome death by burning at the stake.

As far as my secret life was concerned, it was like a plant deprived of light that learns to climb and adapt.  I'd made friends at my new high school in a sedate middle class neighborhood that had no poolhalls or after-school dives just a hot dog stand at the corner which I never even entered.

At the beginning of 10th grade my father all of a sudden decided he had to drive me to school and back every single day, morning and night, as if I needed police protection from having any social life at all.

I should have rebelled but I was afraid to add to his worries. He had borrowed my Underwood typewriter and was writing a mysterious spy novel that he later destroyed. He and my mother often acted like there was a war on and we were being invaded.

Thanks to YouTube I can now revisit how I felt watching the Stones performance on the Ed Sullivan Show on September 11, 1966 - a day that lives in infamy for another reason - it's the day some allege Paul McCartney was killed in a car accident.

I must have watched the show in our living room. The courtly love theme made me squirm a bit. Mick looked uncomfortable in his new Joan of Arc hairdo and the lyrics rang in my ears like a terrible verdict.

Some things are visible only in retrospect and even then ...

This was actually the fourth time I had seen the Stones on Ed Sullivan. The second time was on May 2, 1965 which would have been just a week after Mick came to our basement. Or let's say a week after they wiped my memory (according to the timeline which has him showing up at the house around April 24.)

I just now found this video and it might be the first time I've looked at it since 1965 barring reruns I might have seen back in the sixties - but then my forgetfulness is immense. Brian Jones breaks into a smile around 1:26 and that's something we even talked about at school the next day - my friends and I always feared he was a wee bit nuts. I remember my friend Irene Shanefield (who was always ahead of the rest of us) saying how raunchy and sexual Mick was as the Little Red Rooster:

My childhood was coming to an end, I guess. Although I've been told I never had one.

I almost forgot this May 2 1965 performance until I stumbled across it just now. But it sort of seared itself into my brain and that memory remains, incredibly precise. I think my father watched the show with me and my mother would have been somewhere nearby. What could they have been thinking? As for me, nothing at all. I was all about Mick and his singing. What did I love about him? Everything...

Another grounding detail: the haircut. Same haircut, slightly grown out, as in my dream of opening the door to Mick a week earlier. And let's be clear: I didnt see the Stones in Montreal, not on TV that week and not at the arena on April 23. So how would I know to recognize the haircut? That to me is confirmation even if no one else gets it. It might not be much but it's all I have before this theoretical construct of a recovered memory dissolves for lack of corroborating testimony. My parents have been dead for decades. My twin brother died in 2012. So that leaves only one potential witness.

I would say later - post 65 - they interfered with Mick's hair and those changes showed up in the songs. But here on TV the emotional lines were still open and the message was clear from the heart. So genuine - this was the Mick I thought I knew and kept on looking for.

There was nothing I could do to change the plot that was laid down -all that was left to me was to forget and watch it unfold over the decades.

Wipe Out

I can think of a few reasons why they - later I'll explain who "they" are - would have decided to wipe my memory of that strange weekend.

Eventually I may be able to access the truth but for now:

1. Maybe I had such a severe emotional reaction to this disaster - bordering on a major breakdown - that they felt they had to resort to extreme measures. That's the most cinematic option.  It even makes sense. Say I was catatonic after Mick's unexplained visit whereas before I'd been just a normal teenage girl with a promising future - the people who sent him, or my parents, might have panicked over what they'd just done.

Dont forget they took these pop stars very seriously and handled them almost like a secret weapon. In those long-ago days raw sexuality was explosive. One reason the authorities (MI5) hid Paul McCartney's sudden death from the public was they feared it would provoke a rash of adolescent suicides.

The footage of screaming girls addled and paralyzed with lust for their idols, suggests something new and deadly was in the mix. That they sometimes collapsed and pee'd their pants must have interested those CIA psychiatrists, who would have been onto it for their own nefarious purposes - in fact I know they were.

Dr. Cameron wrote that rock music could be used to spread mental illness which he believed as far back as the 1950s was contagious. In 1965 Cameron was no longer running the Allan Memorial but his "most enthusiastic disciple" Dr Peter Roper, had succeeded him and Roper was my father's psychiatrist and would have known our address which was "202 rue Dauphin"- a courtly combination recalling Joan of Arc's meeting with the heir to the throne of France. Maybe Mick imagined he was about to be crowned by some crazy girl and dragged into a war ...

Possibly Roper, the ex RAF pilot shot down over Normandy turned MKULTRA doctor was also in contact with the Stones on this, their first North American tour? Maybe Jimmy Savile was in the background too?

2. What could they have been thinking?  Send in a pop star to pose as a suitor, like a scene from a medieval play, and a 14 year old would have no defenses and faint on the spot? And then what? Was this some kind of belated birthday present from the Masons to us? I even suspect Roper of conspiring with my mother in the wake of my dad's treatment which left him unable to earn a living.

3. Anyway, my mother had to be in on the plan. Otherwise why did she go along when Mick showed up at our door, smoothing the way for a basement tryst? Was she envisioning another kind of future for me?

She once told me she'd been led to think I could have a career at the United Nations- but I dont recall being informed about that. Was this something she discussed with Dr. Roper who had connections in Aerospace and global intelligence? I did represent my high school once at some futuristic conference in a downtown hotel. All I remember is meeting four tall good looking boys who considered themselves to be geniuses and were devotees of Ayn Rand.

Maybe Dr Roper was offering solutions as my parents struggled with health problems and fears for our future.

Which brings me to a slightly different scenario:

4. that Mick was sent to the home of one of Roper's patients to recruit his daughter as a groupie. Fourteen was the magic age in the music business. Brian Jones had already impregnated more than one 14 year old girl. When Leonard Cohen finally made it to LA his first words getting off the plane were "Where are the 14 year old girls!?"

Is it possible that my scrambled teenage brain sensed a trap, and that whatever spewed from my mouth raised fears (blabbermouth that I was) I might talk to my friends and end up exposing their child trafficking racket -

Which was what it was.

I could add (this got deleted from an earlier draft) that I have never, to my conscious knowledge, been involved in prostitution, as an adult. And perhaps owing to my very strong inner barriers I have no such memories from childhood. But if I was in the Monarch program I could very well have been deployed as a child in order to blackmail politicians- after which they would have deleted my memory of the encounter. And there are other reasons to think I had childhood "espionage" programming including photographic memory when I was younger.

These days we're quicker to spot child abuse but back then it was just one of those mysteries of the Church of Rock.

In this video we learn that Mick himself had started out as a rent boy servicing men at Leicester Square:

Was he just doing what he was told, working his way up the ladder of abuse?


Maybe the death of Brian Jones holds some clues. Maybe in the background ruthless handlers were always orchestrating trauma.

Seven years went by in sweet oblivion

I didnt attend this 1972 show, which I hear was great although someone planted dynamite under the Stones' equipment truck before the performance. Didnt seem to bother them, though.

My twin brother Sandy went to that concert and years later he still raved about it.
I was busy that summer getting arrested and going on trial with the Milton-Park citizens committee. I had no time to camp out to buy Stones tickets, or go to concerts with people on drugs. Paths had diverged. I drifted Left.

May 1972
The day we all got arrested

I had moved out of my family home and back to the old neighborhood near McGill and was living in a Women's Centre a few doors up from the address where my parents first met in 1943, when my dad was in the Air Force. The area was now a student ghetto overrun with hippies and draft dodgers but the buildings retained their faded bourgeois charm. I dated a Robert Plant lookalike who had dropped out of high school to found and manage DrugAid, a clinic for kids who liked to get high and needed help getting down.

I had started writing poetry after the shock of my first heartbreak: an older man whose father had been in the British Army Medical Corps and who told me I was "schizophrenic" after I dreamed of him in black robes at a scene of cult rape.

My parents were in the process of selling their house and moving to their cottage on the Ottawa River in Ontario and I was carving out a life for myself a few blocks from the Allan Memorial where my father had gone through depatterning ten years earlier- no wonder they were worried.

Looking back I now realize my first three boyfriends - with whom I was preoccupied for much of 1969 through 1971 -  had military backgrounds and were likely assigned to me because of my father. One by one, they entered my life as dashing but deceptive figures and exited just as abruptly, their lies exposed and dangling. I was too young to understand any of this but found it romantic to be drawn into radical causes and events -- the Computer Center riot at Sir George Williams was the first. I appeared in the Gazette dressed as a witch at an abortion demonstration.

I thought my exploits were well hidden because I never spoke to them to my parents, but it turned out they kept clippings from the newspapers of the causes I was part of.

The theatrics of polarization seemed to animate me but I was restless and searching. It never occurred to me to start a family - I only wanted to observe life in and around me and write about it.

When people asked if I planned to settle down with someone I laughed and said the only person I would ever marry was Mick Jagger. A lot of young women must have said that then but I passed through a phase of going to movies that had Mick in them - Performance, Ned Kelly, Ladies and Gentlemen: the Rolling Stones. Usually I was disappointed by the mask whereas I felt I knew the person wearing it better than most people knew themselves.

This phase passed and I forgot about it. Then in 1977 I met my fourth and last handler, Leonard Cohen, in pretty much the same way I met the first three: he phoned me one night and invited me over. By then I was used to this approach and didn't hesitate.

I was never, by the way, to my conscious knowledge involved in prostitution - but it appears I may have been groomed at some point, probably in childhood, to enter that world in connection with some sort of 'espionage' --

I saw myself as 'on call' - receiving signals from the universe. I also had psychic abilities which I consider to be only partially developed.

Basically I was like a lot of people in the subculture I had joined or been guided into. Hovering around the edges of that world were the psychiatrists who had known me as a child. Their children were becoming the editors and other gatekeepers I would end up dealing with as I cleared the hurdles and gradually started having a career in writing and the arts.

The Last Time

This is not what I remember because I remember almost nothing. But this is what I can piece together from the available facts, a video, and a dream I had about 10 years ago.

I was 14 years old and living at my parents' house in the suburbs of Montreal. It could have been a Saturday afternoon. My father and brother were not around and my mother was in the kitchen at the sink looking out the window. She said, "There's someone here to see you. Go let him in."

I stopped whatever I was doing and went to open the front door, and there was Mick Jagger. My first impression was that he'd recently had a haircut looked neater than when I'd last seen him, probably months earlier, probably on the T.A.M.I. show which my friends all watched on TV.

I opened the outer screen door and he stepped into the entrance and stood for a moment in the hall next to the living room, looking around. He was 21, very polite and well spoken, just the kind of boy my mother would have appreciated. She said "Why don't you go down in the basement and talk?" We walked past her through the kitchen and down the basement stairs and then we were in this cavernous room which had a ping pong table in the middle, crammed together with an upright piano and a little shelf with a record player.

I leaned against the ping pong table and Mick stood over by the door to the garage, and after a couple of minutes he said "I've come to ask for your hand in marriage." Those words. There was a pause and then something seemed to possess me and I uttered a string of ironic comments that might also have sounded crazy - I'm not sure what I said but my little tirade was just a prelude to what I imagined would turn into a serious discussion. But Mick apparently saw it differently because without a word he left.

In the time it took me to digest this scene and its aftermath and wake from the dream, I was flooded with a 14 year old's emotions. Maybe I cried, or maybe I thought well fuck him if he can't take a joke, or wondered why is he so vain? There was panic about how I would ever recover from this event - which luckily was only a dream and therefore just an artifact of my unconscious to be analyzed and forgotten once I had extracted its true meaning...

It didn't take much analysis to figure out it could not have happened and the proof was 1. I had no conscious memory of Mick coming to my house in 1965, and 2. what would have brought him there and 3. how would he have found it?

It didn't occur to me until this past April to go look up the actual date of the Stones' first concert in Montreal, but when I did find this video I recognized Mick's shy good manners, and the haircut.

In the video we learn that the Stones spent a few days in Montreal, not just at their hotel. We also know, from a 2015 story in the Montreal Gazette that they had wheels - a rental car. Which needed repairs on the afternoon they left for Ottawa.

April 24, 1965

Actually it was a broken mirror (seven years bad luck) that needed replacing and these little kids were there to record the historic moment...

The Vanishing School Girl

I never got a chance to explain - he was just gone. I must have felt judged, abandoned, lost before I even knew what happened. Like the twirling piano stool or the record player turntable - my head was spinning. In some future world I was waking up, but in this one I was spiralling into hell. And nobody saw - it was just me in the basement which was now the whole dark universe and what did I do then? In one world, 50 years away, I woke from a dream that had turned bad and was threatening to get even worse...

Then came the aftermath. There had to be an aftermath. Once Mick drove away in the rental car, the one with the broken mirror (seven years bad luck), maybe en route to the next concert in the next city, which was Ottawa on a sunny day in late April, late afternoon by the way the sun slanted in the photo and made the three Stones squint...  or maybe this happened on another day, like the Friday, April 23, the day of the concert, and me home from school. In fact it had to be either Friday or Saturday because I would have needed the weekend to recover from something like that, if I ever recovered...

And the aftermath would have been sitting in shock and then climbing the stairs and going to my room and maybe crying.... and where was my mother? Because the memories are just gone. There are no memories only fragments.

One fragment is of her - inexplicably- telling me with maternal gravity: "You know, you'd attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar." That old saw. She'd heard from my brother that at Baron Byng High School I was part of an all-girl gang of four who were becoming notorious for our hallway wordplay and general outrageousness...  but my mother looked genuinely sad for me. And as usual, faced with criticism, I was silent and groped for a response. Finally seizing on "But Mom - I'm not trying to attract flies!! Who wants flies?"

And with a sigh, she turned away and dropped the subject.

To be perfectly factual I didn't even know any boys. They were all in the Science class and I was in the Latin class, populated by girls, very smart girls mostly from Jewish or Greek families, mature for their age --  there were no boys, just a frightened handful of midgets some with primitive moustaches plus a redhaired giant named Hamish Stewart on whom I once played a practical joke as his locker was next to mine and in retribution he dropped a whole pile of his textbooks on my head nearly knocking me unconscious... that's one thing I do remember happening in Grade 8...

I remember some of our teachers seemed like mental patients and often  being confused by what they were teaching us...

But boys whom I would want to attract like flies to honey? It never even came up. For boys, we had the Beatles and Stones and Ilya Kuryakin - that was it. So what was my mother talking about, with that serious look on her face? Meanwhile my dad had told me in no uncertain terms (after the 18 year old son of the organist at church asked me out thinking I was older than my 14 years) "You're NOT going out with boys!"

And that was fine with me- I wasn't menstruating yet, still awaiting boobs - who needed flies?

Nevertheless my mother's remark, coming out of nowhere at the time, revolved in my mind for a long time after. And then it was May, and time for the school production of the Mikado, and somehow after seeing it only that once the music has stayed with me all these years and the songs come back as if I'd memorized them on the spot. My favorites being the one about the Lord High Executioner and my favorite character the hideous rejected Kadisha, whom I found strangely sympathetic...

Sometime that month I also learned I was being transferred to another school in another distant suburb. No more girl gang, no more exciting walks past the chicken slaughter market, no more Baron Byng melting pot, no more wild rides on the 55 bus with my besties -- the future I had embraced was suddenly cancelled and - worse news - our evil authoritarian ex-British military Principal Mr. J.R. Leroy (who for some odd reason had told me he knew my father) was coming with us-  following us to our new school and would be glowering at us over his half-glasses for the next three years.

Ours not to reason why. We sucked it up. We soldiered on through tearful goodbyes -

And I also recall a strange medical exam in which they weighed us (naked) and wrote down our height (I was probably 5'8" that year but kept on growing 2 inches a year until i was 6 feet) ... and then they made us run around the gym or something, followed by visits with the school Guidance Counselor who if i recall was a sandy haired man with a moustache who fixed me in his gaze and asked "Having any problems?"

"What kind of problems?" My marks were high. I had lots of friends.

"Problems at home? Emotional problems?"

Well, my mother had just been diagnosed with a crippling illness and two years earlier my dad had been depatterned by the now notorious Dr Ewen Cameron and had to retire from his teaching job due to having his memory wiped -- but no, no problems to speak of.

"Are you sure you dont have  problems?"

And then I remembered my dad telling me "They tried to put me in group therapy at that hospital and get us all to talk but I didnt tell them anything."

So I said "My only real problem is that we're always talking about going to war with the Russians and I think that's propaganda. Well, I love Russia and The Man From UNCLE and we should be trying to work together for world peace."

He wrote that down and let me go.

*****

And the next thing I remember from that spring of 1965 was it was June and I was in the kitchen listening to CKGM when Mick's voice blasted out of the radio singing "(I Cant Get No) Satisfaction" and I was transfixed, thinking how much he had changed. And I didnt know if I liked the change. He was angrier- he'd always been angry - but now he was more confident in his anger? Almost like he was on a mission..

And then I think I went downstairs and sat in the basement on my piano stool and twirled.

I had the whole summer ahead of me, but that too is a blank. A year went by. Still no boys. Just a close encounter on a bus one afternoon with a French boy with electric blue eyes who couldn't seem to look away, and then he got off and I never saw him again.

I visited a record store and bought the Stones Aftermath which had just come out. Not that I knew that- I just wanted something by the Stones and decided to take a chance. And as it turned out, after initially not liking it, and being offended by its shocking misogyny, I listened to Aftermath for months - sometimes skipping Stupid Girl but gradually overcoming my aversion to Under My Thumb which you could really dance to.

The track I probably listened to the most was the long and in my opinion underrated Goin Home which I soon noticed had a harmonica solo that gradually degenerated into sex - at least for me it was like eavesdropping on a guy having sex with his absent girlfriend three thousand miles away and I was very interested in hearing what that was like, up close. I was still a virgin obviously but this was the next best thing and I would play it over and over, all by myself, and somehow it made up for some of the other tracks about failed relationships, not that I knew what a relationship was ... but I would put myself in Mick's position and then in the girlfriend's shoes and try to decide who was right or wrong.

And that was how I spent my summer. I do remember one overnight pyjama party with my three best girlfriends where we stayed up all night and vowed to be friends forever, but little came of that --

And the mystery remains of what really happened that caused my mother to worry about my success with boys at an age when the only boy I really liked was Mick Jagger. And Ilya Kuryakin - who was just a fictional character, considerably older but still fascinating as he was "Russian". On the other hand Jagger was a real person, albeit a pop star, and the only pop star whom I ever desired with a deep, sublimated passion... a passion so sublime it turned into a nagging feeling that I knew him from Somewhere...

Somewhere that even predated the first time I laid eyes on him on the Ed Sullivan Show, October 25, 1964.... an unshakeable sense that we had met in the past but of course that was impossible...

And as for what happened in the afternoon or late morning of April 24 (or 23) 1965, a very clear memory recently surfaced of our brief encounter, but everything after is a blank, and by the following Monday it was gone - it had to be - because quite clearly I couldn't have remembered a lethal event like Mick Jagger visiting and not talked about it to my girlfriends- and their reaction would have been sheer disbelief followed by (possibly) ridicule or (possibly) jealousy and doubts followed by a consensus that I was totally crazy and no longer allowed in the club. And my summer would have been ruined and possibly my confidence and even my future...

And so I think it's possible that (and possibly with parental consent) the pshrinks at the Allan Memorial who had wiped my dad's memory, also wiped mine. Using the methods of the time: drugs, hypnosis and electroshock.

Thereby killing two or three birds with one stone. Oops - I'll stop for now.

Happy birthday

Only one person knows if I am telling the truth or barking at the moon.

And today is his birthday.

Apollo landing

April 24, 1965

What could make me forget the most extraordinary event of my life? So that by Monday I remembered NOTHING.

A 50 year memory blank.

If it happened at all, that is...

But if it did:

Who ordered it? Who carried it out and hid it from me so I would never remember who visited?

What connected the mirror that got repaired with the one that stayed broken for a lifetime?

Broken Mirror

SO WHAT HAPPENED ?

That corduroy jean jacket rings a bell....

Up until recently, I hadn't thought much about all this at all.When I woke up from the dream in Greece I instantly dismissed it as some odd fantasy, not a recovered memory (which it resembled) because on the face of it, it was impossible, could not have happened, made no sense except in some world of dreams. And the ultimate proof is that, the following Monday, April 26, 1965, I listened with mute envy as other girls described the concert Friday night at the Maurice Richard arena and their inability to hear anything over the noise of hysterical fans.

 I concluded I hadn't missed much after all. I hadn't even bothered to beg my parents to let me see the Rolling Stones, knowing their answer would be a firm No.



In this retrospective news item from a few years ago we also learn they rented a car in Montreal. They broke a mirror on their way to Ottawa for the April 24 concert, and stopped in lower NDG to get it repaired. That's where these children found them. And 50 years later, this photo appears in the Montreal Gazette, commemorating the moment. Obviously, these kids never forgot their meeting with Mick Jagger.