Alice Bailey - Autobiography

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Autobiography of Alice A. Bailey - Chapter V

Personally, I would like to see every boy and girl at the age of adolescence taken to an understanding physician and told the bald facts. I would like to have engendered in the younger generation a respect for their function as the coming parents for the next generation and I would like to have the mother and father of today (and here I am generalizing) leave the young people more free to work out their own problems. My experience has been that they can be trusted when they know. The average boy and girl are not naturally degenerate and are not going to take risks when they know the risks exist. I would like to have the sex problem approached by the physician as he talks to the boys and [203] girls as they are brought to him from the angle of parenthood, from the point of view of the dangers of promiscuity plus a warning as to homosexuality, which is one of the greatest menaces confronting the boys and girls today. Given the facts and given a clear picture, as a general rule we can trust our young people but, candidly, I do not trust the parents largely because they are full of fear and do not trust their children.

All this is in the nature of a preliminary canter because during the next few years I naturally had to face the boy and girl problem. I have three most attractive daughters and the boys began to gather around so that it was not only people, people, people all the time in my office but it was boy, boy, boy all the time in my home and it was there I learned to understand and like both groups. I respect, like and trust the younger generation.

About this time we moved from Ridgefield Park to Stamford, Conn. A friend of ours, Mr. Graham Phelps-Stokes, had a vacant house on Long Island Sound and he let us have it rent free for several years. It was a much larger and nicer house than the one in Ridgefield Park and personally I loved it. I shall always remember the mornings there. Upstairs there was a wing of the house which consisted of one large room over the maid's quarters downstairs. There were windows on three sides of this room and there I lived and worked. Craigie was with us and although there was an awful lot of housework to be done the girls were getting older and were much more helpful in the house. Foster and I used to commute to New York most days of the week as Craigie was there to look after the girls. They were all in their 'teens and extraordinarily good looking and we found it quite impossible to put them into a public school. The population of Stamford at that time was largely foreign and three beautiful blond girls were [204] almost irresistible to the Italian boy so they were followed everywhere. I laid the problem before a rich friend of mine and she paid for their tuition in the Low Hayward School. This was a very high class girls' private school, and they attended there every day until we left Stamford.

I cannot remember all the different boys that gathered around. Two of them are still our friends and visit us at times though they are both married and have their families. They drop in now at intervals and somehow there is always that happy, deeply rooted situation which eliminates all strain and enables us to pick up the threads of a close friendship no matter how long it has been since we last saw them. The others I forget. They came and they went. An outstanding recollection is sitting up nights in my room with three sides of glass, watching for the lights of the car that would indicate that a boy was returning a girl to her home. This used to annoy my daughters extremely but I have always felt that the psychology was good. Mother was always aware where her girls were, who they were with and when they got home and I have never regretted my stubbornness on this point. But I often regretted my lost hours of sleep. The three girls never gave me any real anxiety and never gave me any cause to distrust them, but I like to take this opportunity, now they are all married and living their own lives, to say how nice they were, how sound, how sensible and how downright decent.

So the years slipped away. From 1925 to 1930 were years of adjustments, of difficulties, of joys and of growth. There is little to relate. They were just ordinary years - years of work, establishing and stabilizing the Arcane School, of publishing the Tibetan's books and of gathering around us a group of men and women who were not only our staunch friends, working with us from then to now, but were also loyally dedicated to the service of humanity. [205]

We seldom went away in the summer as this house was on the Sound and had its own beach and the girls had all the swimming and clamming they needed. I'm really a great hand at clam chowder. Thanks to the kindness of a friend, we had a car and could drive to New York or anywhere we chose. Every Sunday, practically, we were at home to friends and guests and frequently had 20 or 30 people at the house. We mixed them all up higgledy-piggledy, young and old, people of good social position or of no position, and I believe a good time was had by all. We served cake and punch, tea and coffee, and no matter who they were everybody had to "muck in" and wash dishes and tidy up the sitting room when the day was over.

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