Dave's first time written about in the press

Daily Express September 10 1964; inside page; headline “Beatniks quit a Royal Pad” then followed in smaller print “Bearded Poet and his friends found the door open at the Queens house --- and moved in.”

“David Benn, an unrecognised poet from the Lake District, who for three months has been an uninvited guest of the Queen said last night: “With respect, she shouldn't have left the front door open.”

Then long haired Mr. Benn who sports a fine beatnik beard, shouldered his shouldered his blanket and trudged off to his next “pad” – a park bench.

With him went Fredric Bechtel, another former rent book less tenant of the Crown Property No 6 Charlton House Terrace.

Benn 23, from Milnthorpe, Westmorland; who said he wanted to go back to Lancashire was given an absolute discharge.”

I returned to my mum’s home and got a job working for the local council on the sewer here I saw what humanity was about just a load of crap. The work seemed easy and involved and generally involved cutting grass around the sewage tanks with a scythe and a sickle while watching hawks fly high gliding on the updraught in the blue sky I summer and brewing a kettle for tea of a coke brazier made from an old petrol barrel.

I was happy and growing with my intellectual reading with Goethe’s Faust and Dostoyevsky’s tragedy “The Devils” sometimes call "The Possessed"; a reworking of the theme of the person who was possessed by devils and Jesus casting out the devils who took over the poor pigs that jumped into the water and drowned. Later I was to read a book on this by the Arch Bishop of Canterbury as I try to work out the effects of my negative actions.

Om Vajrasattva Hum. 

I was probably at my happiest in this period and though I hadn't met my wife at that time and found the happiness of marriage I walked through the valley of the shadow that follows us all.

My poor old Mum who has to endure this notoriety from the press as I settled back into the growth of my individuation and as soon as I had the bus fare back to London I went to find that the scene was changing but bought my first “Tibetan Book of the Dead” in the Evans West version; in those days there was not the profusion of Tibetan translations so Zen had to suffice. My interest in topics Tibetan was growing faster than an Oak tree in a forest glade as the sixties moved from beatniks to long haired hippies..