BACK IN ENFIELD where my parents were, I found that my father had become a Spiritualist medium. When my mother unfolded the news she seemed charged with joy, her eyes fixed as if on the opening of the heavens to herald the second coming. The Spiritualist revelation had banished the sorrows of this world, so let us rejoice. My father, she indicated, was a prophet of the new awakening. Whereas before I had sometimes detected disparagement in her tone, now she spoke of him with pride and respect.
Suddenly the quiet, rather dismal little house tucked away behind the orchards was full of hushed, soft-footed activity, and had acquired faint churchy scents. Gentle smiling people came and went, exuding sympathy and understanding; all of them extremely kind to me. Just before my visit to Wales my surviving brother Monty, aged seventeen, had died suddenly – and to me mysteriously – and now these smiling strangers who came to our house took me in hand to explain to me that, much as in my present state of spiritual development I was unable to see him, he was in no remote heaven, but there in the house as ever, a permanent, almost tangible presence with whom I would soon communicate and who would assure me in his own words that nothing had changed between us, and that we were together as we had always been. They congratulated me on my membership of a happy, united family. There had been two other brothers I had never known. The first also had sickened and died, also at the age of seventeen, in a matter of days, and the second, dropped as an infant by a girl who was looking after him, was carried off by meningitis. My other brothers had left their earthly bodies in the cemetery at the top of the Lavender Hill too, but their astral and imperishable bodies were with us, and now that we were on the verge of communication, the last of their sorrows had been overcome.
As I later understood it, Spiritualism was an inevitable reaction to the bereavements of the first World War which, in its harvest of death, had left hardly a family untouched. The established churches provided cold comfort. Spiritualism made its bid for the allegiance of the bereaved with its proclamation, not that the souls of the dead awaited us in a Paradise the nature of which few could conceive, but that they were still at our sides, as we had known them. They remained eternally young, if young they had been before ‘passing on’ – grown only in wisdom – or if old, healed by death of the infirmities of age and, while still recognisable, restored to the vitality of youth.
Exposed daily to the reasonings and persuasions of these kindly people it was hard to reject out of hand what they had to tell me. In any case I was a small boy in the second form at Enfield Grammar School, and how could I possibly doubt the findings of such eminent men as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes, described to me as two of the greatest scientists of our times, who had accepted and proclaimed the Spiritualist message?
Suddenly my father, a lonely, retiring man, had been thrust into local prominence, for it was around him that local adherents of the sect had gathered. He was a qualified chemist, who had been dismayed to learn after the three years of study preceding qualification, and three more in the research department of a well known drug firm, that his only hope of earning a reasonable living was to open a chemist’s shop. This he did in Southbury Road, Enfield, purely because the rents in this remote and run-down outer suburb were the lowest in the London area, and thereafter conducted a business, which he considered undignified, in a spiritless and lackadaisical manner. This was evidenced by a shopwindow display, left undisturbed for many years, consisting of perhaps a hundred books on pharmacology and allied subjects, grouped round a box of Beechams Pills, and a card which said, ‘I read all these, to sell this.’
His attitude towards practically all the proprietary medicines and advertised drugs he was forced to sell to pay his rent was one of bitter disillusionment, and he insisted that at best they were ineffective and at worst noxious. Faith, he earnestly believed, could move mountains, and the bodily condition corresponded to that of the mind. Even accidents, he believed, people brought upon themselves, and with the exception of young children, people died because they had had enough of life. When someone brought a prescription to be dispensed, he would skip through the dog Latin and often laugh his scorn, then send the customer away advising him not to allow himself to be poisoned. For those who insisted, despite his pleadings and his contempt, on being dosed, he supplied an ‘elixir’, containing nothing but garlic-flavoured water, and a touch of quinine to impart the bitterness people demanded of anything they imagined likely to do them good. For this harmless but bitter and malodorous nostrum there was an immense demand – and eventually a franchise request from a pharmaceutical chain – and it was only this that kept the wolf from the door. It was the proceeds from the elixir that went to finance the building of the Spiritualist church – the Beacon of Light – in our back garden some years later.
Three years had passed since the last of my parents’ losses, and now they faced life with new courage and hope. The Spiritualists had robbed death of its sting, and the grave of its victory, and they had formed this rapidly growing circle to communicate their convictions and their assurances to others, many of whom had suffered equal or worse bereavement.
Some problems arose over the spreading of the faith locally due to the complexities of the English class system. My parents had bought their semi-detached in Forty Hill, two miles from Enfield Town, once a pleasant enough place with a half-dozen Georgian houses occupied by minor gentry and three or four village shops, but latterly overwhelmed by housing development to meet the needs of factories to the east.
Four unplanned terraced streets with great, gaping water-logged holes among them from which the sand to mix with cement had been dug, now replaced the meadows and coppices of the old days. Their occupants, whose breadwinners cycled every day to Enfield lock or were employed on local estates, were working-class, excluded therefore from any of the groupings or gatherings of the lower middle class, to which most Spiritualists belonged, just as they themselves erected a barrier to keep out members of the gypsy minority living in the neighbourhood, or outright farm labourers whose existence was virtually ignored.
Spiritualism, then, had no local mass appeal, and my parents were forced at first to cast their net elsewhere to recruit adherents, many of whom they found among the shop-keeping class, and the office workers of Enfield Town and other outer suburbs of North London. A few middle-class people attended the seances, some of whom had made an apprehensive and shame-faced reconnaissance into this unfamiliar territory, but had then stayed on. One of them was Henri Le Bas, French master at the Grammar School, a man whom it was impossible not to like and respect. He had lost his only son in the war when, as he told my father, German sappers had set off a mine under a strongpoint at Verdun, defended by the boy and fifty comrades, of whom afterwards not a single trace was found. It was Le Bas’ sincere belief that eventually, through my father, he would achieve the only thing he asked of life – to be able to speak to the missing son. His conviction, because I knew and admired him, mattered much more to me than the testimony of distinguished British scientists of whom I knew nothing apart from their fame.
Le Bas and his wife, a little wizened, smiling Frenchwoman with a very red face, were present at the first seance at which, by agreement with the members of the circle, I was invited to take part. It was thought unsuitable that, at thirteen years of age, my first introduction to Spiritualism should be at a seance when my father entered into a state of trance, so this seance was conducted by a visiting clairvoyant, a Mrs Carmen Flint, who proved to be businesslike and a little abrupt and who shifted the position of every article of furniture and every object in the room before she settled to preside. Inevitably the seance took place in the gloomy middle room illuminated for this purpose by a single small red lamp, and an atmosphere was established by burning a cone of incense, and playing ‘Dare to be a Daniel’, and ‘Art Thou Weary, Art Thou Languid?’ on a musical box which only provided these two hymns.
Mrs Flint, who had been persuaded to journey some miles for this occasion and had been given a high tea, seemed a little critical of the arrangements. In addition to Le Bas and his wife, my mother and me, two members of the regular circle were present, a Mr Thresher who was a local auctioneer, and a Mrs Head, the manageress of the ABC in Lower Edmonton.
Mrs Flint found ‘the conditions’ poor, due possibly, she thought, to a lack of psychic development of the members of the circle; in my case, as well, to an incomplete aura. She explained, referring to the Le Bas couple, that the inclusion of ‘seekers’ in a circle as opposed to confirmed believers, while not damaging the vibrations, lessened the power. Nevertheless it was decided to go ahead with the seance and hope for the best. My own feelings at this moment were negative. While it was impossible wholly to resist the constant pressure to believe, I was probably too young in any case to feel much excitement or enthusiasm about what Spiritualism had to offer.
We now seated ourselves at a round table, lifted into the middle of the room, placing our hands on its surface in such a way that each of us made contact with our little fingers with those of our neighbours. Mr Thresher, who spoke in an exceptionally clear and deliberate way, probably as a result of his profession, then said, ‘If any of our spirit friends are here with us this evening, perhaps they would indicate their presence in the usual way.’ The table immediately rocked once.
‘Thank you, friend,’ Thresher said, ‘for evincing your desire to communicate with us. Would you please spell out your name?’
The table rocked three times.
‘C, probably for Charles,’ Thresher said. ‘Conceivably Cyril. Would it be Charles?’
This time the table rocked once.
‘Charles it is,’ Thresher said. ‘Now could we have the surname?’
Whereas until now the movements of the table had been very definite, this question met with some hesitation. The rocking became undecided and then stopped. This provoked a firm intervention from Mrs Flint, who had been against the use of the table from the beginning, saying that it used up too much power, and she could feel the conditions worsening. She advised us to put the table away and to sing a hymn to give the spiritual forces time for regeneration. We did this, and sang two verses of ‘There’s a Land That is Fairer Than Day’.
My father was anxious to convert Le Bas and through him, possibly, other masters at the Grammar School, and now suggested that he should try the planchette, a small board which ran on castors in which an upright pencil was fixed, and which fairly reliably produced messages. Mrs Flint showed herself impatient with this too, claiming that it would only prove an additional source of power loss, as well as distracting from the main purpose of the seance, which was her own demonstration of clairvoyance.
Nevertheless, the planchette and a sheet of paper were fetched. It required two persons to place a hand on it, and I was pleased, even flattered, when Madame Le Bas preferred that her husband should ask me to join him.
‘Address the spirit friend or loved one with whom you wish to communicate,’ Thresher instructed, and Le Bas said, ‘Jean-Paul, es-tu là?’
Immediately the board began to slide about under my hand. This took me by surprise, because I knew that I was not moving it, and I could not believe that Le Bas would do so – at least consciously. The pencil scribbled and wavered over the paper, then stopped, and I found that it had written a single sprawling word, barely recognisable as ‘out’. Le Bas was trembling when Mrs Flint moved over to inspect this. She nodded in a distant and dissatisfied manner, and then informed us that such diversionary experiments would have to stop forthwith, because otherwise she would be obliged to abandon her demonstration.
Everyone present, with my exception, now joined in begging her to go ahead as planned. She then made us form a semi-circle with our chairs at one end of the room while she stood at the other, wearing a pink eyeshade, and carrying in her left hand a small white fan. Le Bas had been warned to bring some object that had belonged to his son, of whom, we were assured, Mrs Flint knew nothing. He gave her a leather wallet containing a religious medal. Mrs Flint took this, closed her eyes and caressed its surface with thumb and forefinger for a while. Her lips moved silently and she appeared to be on the point of speaking for some minutes before she finally spoke.
‘I see a young man,’ she said. ‘He is trying to reach you from the other side. He has written something above your head. It is the letter J.’
‘Yes,’ Le Bas said. ‘Yes.’ His wife was holding his hand, and now he placed his other hand, which had been holding Mrs Head’s, over hers.
‘Do not break contact with the friend sitting next to you,’ Mrs Flint said. ‘You will interrupt the flow of power.’
Le Bas joined hands with Mrs Head again. ‘The young man is slender, not tall,’ said Mrs Flint, ‘with brown hair – say light brown. I see him as he was when he passed on. I am taking on his condition, and I feel a pain in the leg. Did he limp?’
Le Bas seemed doubtful. He murmured something to his wife and she shook her head.
‘Now the pain has moved to both legs, it has reached all the lower parts of the body. I feel this pain in the wrists, the fingers and the head. The condition I have taken on is connected with the passing.’
She was peering as if through a thick fog, then suddenly she shot out a finger over our heads. ‘Now he has appeared again, and I see him very clearly. He is holding up a small object. He is waving it. I believe he is showing us a toothbrush. Does a toothbrush mean anything to you?’
‘It does,’ Le Bas said. ‘My son was very fastidious about his appearance. He cleaned his teeth three times a day. We made a joke of it.’
‘Showing you the toothbrush was to prove to you his reality in the astral world, and his love as a son. Now the contact is becoming weaker. I am to tell you he is always with you.’
With this, the seance was at an end. It was regarded as having been a success, and the atmosphere was congratulatory. The Le Bas family were moist-eyed but smiling. Madame Le Bas kissed Mrs Flint on both cheeks and her husband presented her with a bunch of tulips and a brooch. Mrs Flint said that the demonstration had been less than she had hoped for, and listed for my mother a number of ways in which conditions for any future sitting might be improved. She advised her to spend more time in meditation, and recommended a correspondence course in the subject called ‘The Power of Thought’, to which my mother later subscribed.
Mrs Flint, who had been given an enthusiastic build-up by my mother, disappointed me as a person. I found her manner sharp and officious, and I had been disillusioned at tea by the way she had pounced upon the Welsh rarebit, and the cup-cakes to follow. For all that, her portrait of Jean-Paul seemed only explicable by her possession of extraordinary powers.
My father seemed to me to remain strangely aloof in these transactions. He had joined somewhat mechanically in the hymn singing, but beyond polite exchanges had little to say. I sensed a reluctance on his part to become involved on this occasion, or perhaps to be dragged in by my mother. She had asked him to demonstrate the planchette, but he had asked to be excused. I sensed, too, the possibility of an underlying antagonism stemming from a conflict of personalities. ‘I am in charge, here,’ Mrs Flint had announced in a cautionary way at the beginning of the seance. There was no doubt that she had been informed that my father was a ‘direct voice’ trance medium, bound therefore to attract more attention than a mere clairvoyant in any such gathering of the faithful. My father, too, was an amateur, she a professional with a regular classified advertisement in the Spiritualist press. Such were the tensions, the trivial jealousies, the thrust for recognition affecting those with a vision of the other world, who communed with the dead and looked into the future, as much as for the rest of us.
Following this first sitting, it seemed that I had qualified, at least on a probationary level, for inclusion in our circle, and my mother began to speak of preparation for the great experience of a direct voice seance, conducted by my father, which several dignitaries of the movement living in various parts of London would be invited to attend. When pressed by my mother to set a date for this event it seemed to me that he was in no hurry.
I saw as much as I could of my father at weekends, or on Wednesday afternoons when he was free from business, and I hurried home from school. He was an excellent companion for a child, because his personality was childlike, and he was strikingly immature in his enthusiasms. In appearance he was my grandfather’s son, but was less competent than my grandfather, less ambitious, less attracted to money, power and prestige and the things of this world. Had my grandfather thought of the elixir, he would have contrived a way of inducing every man, woman and child in South Wales to drink it, have built himself a baronial folly, and bought another useless car with the proceeds. Instead, my father put up a chapel in his garden and, in what room was left, set up an aviary in which he kept such exotic birds as would withstand the terrible climate. He also bred, with great success, a rare and extraordinary form of poultry called Polish Fancy, a small black bird having a crest like a snowball of feathers, making it almost impossible for it to see its food. It amused him to hypnotise these birds by stroking them gently then laying them on their sides, where they remained in this position until released by a snap of the fingers.
Although from my standpoint my father’s life seemed bleak, even tragic, he was extremely lucky in small ways, and it fascinated me to note that when we sometimes amused ourselves by throwing dice, the law of averages seemed to be suspended in his favour and his score was consistently higher than mine. He invariably won at card games, but what impressed me far more was that when we visited fairs together – which we frequently did in summer – we invariably went home laden with the atrocious china ornaments won off hoop-la stalls. Sometimes the owner of a stall begged him to take his custom elsewhere and I was bathed in his reflected glory.
England, although he enjoyed the cherry orchards through which we wandered together, remained wholly a foreign country to him. After his caning at the Pentrepoeth school, he had lost most of his Welsh, but could never speak English except in a deliberate and premeditated way, like a foreigner, and occasionally, when words or phrases were missing he patched these in with pieces of hastily invented gibberish.
In analysing the difference between the people of Celtic Britain and the rest (the Saxons, as he still insisted on calling them), he concluded that it was largely a matter of the presence or absence of mistletoe in their respective countries. No mistletoe grew in the vicinity of Enfield, but in Carmarthen it abounded. My father arranged for many thousands of berries to be sent to him in the hope of remedying the situation. For some weeks we occupied ourselves sticking these on the branches of trees in our garden, on those of our friends, and then in the public parks, and by next year the plants were growing everywhere, many on trees in which it was believed that mistletoe would not establish itself, and there was an exchange of mystified letters on the subject in the Enfield Gazette and Observer.
Our home became the meeting place of people from all over North London having in common an insatiable capacity for belief and a detestation of the sceptic with his blinkered vision and closed mind. They drew together to probe the secrets of death and those of the future, and encouraged each other to look inwards in search of hidden powers they might possess. On a low level of achievement my parents’ friends practised such fairground skills as palmistry and phrenology, and told each other’s fortunes, inspiring what hope they could with the aid of the crystal ball, tea-leaves, Arabian numerology, pendulums, playing cards, a study of the ‘Aura’, or even of the flight of birds. All this was crammed somehow or other into a Christian framework, although they were tolerant of intrusion from any other religion. On Sunday evenings the seance was renamed a service, and Mr Thresher, the auctioneer, would read in his reverberant and confident voice a prayer or a passage from the Book of Revelations. Then we would sing ‘Lead Kindly Light’ before Mrs Head delivered an address, and my father might give a demonstration of clairvoyance which did not particularly impress me, although it was often rapturously received by those singled out in the audience.
After a year or so’s correspondence course in psychic unfoldment my mother had progressed to a point when she could conduct a healing session by laying on hands. A feature of the preparation had been two hours’ daily meditation in our front room which, with the advice of friends and the gift or loan of oriental bric-a-brac she had turned into something like a temple, reeking of joss-sticks, and containing such items as a lingam, the purpose of which she was doubtful, a Tibetan prayer-flag, and a tinkling wind bell imported from Burma by a neighbour who claimed to have been in the Colonial Service. The same widely travelled man assured my mother that the spirits of orientals who had passed on would be more likely to be attracted to my father’s seances by the beating of a gong than by the musical box. A fair proportion of the regulars claimed to have easterners such as Hindu ascetics and Buddhist monks as their spirit ‘guides’, so a pagoda gong was found and installed in a corner of the middle room, and from then on my mother struck this once at the start of a seance, filling the room with soft and solemn vibrations before the musical box tinkled out ‘Dare to be a Daniel’, and the proceedings got under way.
Very soon, with the advance on the psychic front, the time came when the Sunday congregation could no longer be fitted into the house, and had to be moved out into the garden, while the service was conducted through the kitchen window. The local church at Forty Hill began to feel the effects of the competition, and the congregation on Sunday at evensong dropped to an average of five. My mother, giving free treatment to patients on most evenings, may have hit the medical trade, for a Dr Distin wrote to the paper, complaining as a Christian of those who tampered with forces they did not understand, and defied God’s laws by calling up the spirits of the dead.
Dr Distin’s letter only served to provide welcome publicity, and the seances increased in frequency, with ever growing attendance. Pushed forward by my parents I joined most of them. In the first weeks curiosity helped, but then my interest began to wane, and it was no more than a matter of duty, and boredom set in. Twice a week a clairvoyant would stand up to give tidings from the Other Side. Their information seemed to me vague and uninteresting, and above all unimportant.
‘Do the initials GHW mean anything to you?’
‘They belong to my Aunt Heather.’
‘And the name “Rosedale”?’
‘That was the house she lived in.’
‘She asks if you remember Torquay, and the boat trip?’
‘Yes, I do. Very well. We had a wonderful time.’
Often the evidence offered appeared blurred and generalised.
‘A girl is standing at your side. She has very long, dark hair.’
‘I don’t think I know of anyone with hair like that.’
‘She passed on many years ago.’
‘It could be my sister Mary. She had dark hair.’
‘She says to you, “I have unfolded my wings”.’ (Mrs Head whispers to the sitter, ‘That means she’s become an angel’, and the woman smiles with a trace of pride.)
Many of the revelations from the other world were on the level of messages scribbled in haste on holiday postcards by writers who could think of nothing much to say. I soon discovered that the spirits of the dead had no sense of humour, and there was a terrible flatness, a lack of enthusiasm in their communications suggestive of convalescence, fatigue, even boredom. Sometimes messages from beyond the grave were fragmentary and meaningless like the random sentences of radio hams, intent only in testing their equipment. Once when a sitter put the point-blank question, ‘What is it like in the Beyond?’, he received an answer Hemingway might have given. ‘It is good.’
The great and long awaited moment of my brother ‘getting through’ came when belief was weakening but before all my illusions had collapsed.
‘I see a boy, aged about seventeen,’ said the medium. ‘He is wearing a peaked cap, and a short jacket, and is carrying what appears to be a musical instrument. Will someone claim him?’
It was still hard for me to articulate in the presence of adults, but this was an occasion of such urgency that it was impossible not to speak up, and I forced the words to come. ‘It’s my brother,’ I said. ‘He used to play in a band.’
‘Have you a message for him?’ the medium asked.
‘I would like to ask him where he is,’ I said.
‘He tells you he is in another place. He wishes you and his mother and father not to go to Lavender Hill to look for him. He is not there. There must be no more flowers.’
My disappointment was crushing. My brother, once frank and open, had become guarded and evasive, sounding as I would have imagined like a prisoner answering a visitor’s questions in the presence of a warder. Another issue came into this which I had already taken up with my mother. Why should my brother, who had been an excellent musician in life, and whose favourite composer was Bach, now be attracted, as she assured me he would be, by the simple and even sickly melodies of her musical box? Why should our neighbour Mr Olding, who had been on the editorial staff of The Times, and a mine of lively information and comment, have nothing more to say of eternity than, ‘I read a little sometimes. It’s very pleasant here. I sleep on a small bed’?
Many of the spirits too seemed, so far as anything could be learned of their activities, to be engaged in trivial occupations. All Spiritualists – some claimed all human beings – had spirit guides, most of whom, it appeared, had been persons of significance in their life on Earth. Now these once distinguished entities found themselves at the beck and call of earthlings who, for the most part, lived unremarkable existences. My mother’s first guide had been a Red Indian – they were very popular in the movement – but now she had moved up to a French lady, once at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who had passed on at the time of the French Revolution in tragic circumstances. Besides monitoring my mother’s spiritual evolution she also advised her on household matters, and had been recently responsible for the redecoration of the middle room, which seemed to me to have been carried out in deplorable taste.
My mother had done a little to prepare me for what to expect at my first trance seance with my father, although the reality remained shocking. I was embarrassed, feeling myself in some way personally affected by my father’s gross loss of dignity, and longed for the strength of character that would have enabled me to get up and leave the room.
My father sat writhing in his chair as if under torture. His hands were clenched, his eyes closed, his cheeks covered in sweat and tears, and, rolling his head from side to side, he emitted the most blood-chilling sounds. The circle consisted of twelve persons, including Mr and Mrs Le Bas, our hands touching as usual. The light from the red lamp was less than that of a single candle, and I had been warned by my mother of the dreadful consequences at such a time, causing the medium’s insanity or even his death, of switching on a strong light or startling him in any other way.
Incense smoke curled from a joss-stick, the musical box had tinkled into silence, and my father mouthed and blabbered, watched by the sitters, of which little but expectant faces showed in the lamp-lit gloom. There was spittle on my father’s lips and chin, he opened his mouth wide as if half-strangled, and an incoherent gush of words came from his throat: the voices of men, of women and young children, some calm, some shrill, some argumentative; the sound of drunken brawling, a snatch of a sea shanty, then the mixture of voices again, none separable from the other. Later I was to conclude that this was, and probably always had been, the performance of a medium the world over, because many years after this I realised that the almost inhuman sounds made by the medium in the film Rashoman, set in medieval Japan, were precisely those produced by my father at this moment.
Something had gone wrong. Although my mother had explained to me that my father was highly esteemed for his gifts, his development was unsatisfactory, as he had no control over the spirits who spoke through him. Hence the chaos at this moment, the great disorderly queue of souls all demanding to be heard, none of them subject to the discipline a developed medium knew how to impose.
Her method of dealing with this crisis was to stand over my father and wave her arms in his face with stern commands, whenever an unacceptable – and often ribald – voice became audible, of, ‘Step out, friend. Please step out.’ This took effect, the babel quietened leaving a residue of disconnected words, of sense and nonsense drifting into soft muttering, then silence.
There followed a lucid passage of trite uplift that might have been attributed by the sitters equally to my father himself, or an occupying spirit, but this was soon crowded out by the invading voices, producing from my mother more agitated gestures of exorcism. Once again her arm-wavings produced results and the interlopers were silenced. Then suddenly and with absolute clarity a voice called out, ‘Papa! Où êtes-vous?’
With this outcry the seance achieved its purpose and came to an end. A single audible question had squeezed through a chink of silence in all these unstrung sounds, and this litter of random words. The only comfort it could offer to Le Bas and his wife seemed a cold one. Even if their son had reached them across the barrier of death, he seemed to have come as a wandering spirit, lost, displaced, searching as desperately for them as they for him. This was only the second contact, and my mother assured them that there were better things to come. With the sitting over, my mother resuscitated my father, who returned gasping and groaning to normality. We then tidied up the proceedings with a verse from ‘The Sweet By and By’ and a polite vote of thanks proposed by Mr Thresher to the spirit friends who had encouraged and assisted us by their presence. Mr and Mrs Le Bas had stolen away into the kitchen where they fell into each other’s arms.
For me it was the first of many such experiences. Having at first been persuaded to join in the seances for the sake of the spiritual benefits to be derived from them, my presence was now welcomed and sought after for the new reserve of psychic power I was believed to provide. Mrs Flint, returning to us after a recreative absence of some months, and sniffing at me like a retriever, had carried out a fresh investigation of my aura, which, she said, had made astonishing progress. From being dim and flaccid in the previous year, it was glowing and vibrant, to be seen as a violet radiation, particularly marked in the areas of the temples, the stomach and the palms of the hands. This was later confirmed by a visiting ‘astra-aural physicist’ who arrived with a smoked-glass screen through which he and the members of the circle inspected me in turn, and agreeing that this was so. Like many people steered by the pressure of custom to profess a religion to which in reality they have hardly given a thought, I neither believed nor disbelieved these things. It gave my mother and father great pleasure when I offered lip-service to their convictions, but at heart the best I could manage was indifference, coloured with scepticism. My father made progress in the matter of control, and his direct voice seances were less subject to disturbance, but whatever the voices speaking through him told us, it was nothing of significance, and life beyond the grave remained insubstantial. Slowly the image I had of my brother was beginning to fade from my memory and there was nothing in the few disjointed phrases that reached me from across the void that could recreate anything of him as he had been. I had read somewhere that the ancient Egyptians had done what they had done, carried out their great works and built their enduring monuments in fear of, and in the hope of mitigating, what death might hold for them. It was a fear, I had come to believe, that was wholly justified.
The dramatic change in Mrs Flint’s attitude, coupled with the marked interest shown in me by the members of the circle, set me wondering where it could all be leading to. My mother had taken to questioning me in a way that seemed ludicrous, as well as faintly embarrassing. Did I hear voices? Of course, in the same way as anyone else did. She meant inner voices. I never heard them, I told her. If I ever did, I’d let her know. Well, then – visions? To give an example, she mentioned unaccountable lights seen in the darkness. Once again I had to disappoint her. For me the dark remained dark. Did I ever feel unseen presences in a room? I was beginning to feel guilty at letting her down, but I had to admit that I had never had this sensation. Some people could read the thoughts of others. Had I experienced anything like that? I shook my head regretfully. My mother remained undismayed. I was still at an early stage in my psychic development, open too to the disruptive influence of negative forces that were encouraging me to resist. It seemed kinder to agree with her that this was so.
Mrs Head tackled me. ‘You are very gifted,’ she said.
‘I don’t see why.’
‘We go by the power you bring to a seance. When you join with us the manifestations are so much stronger. We are all helped by your new guide. He has great spiritual force.’
It had been explained to me that I had received a kind of spiritual promotion, following which my first guide, a Methodist minister in a Welsh coal-mining town in this life, who sounded a dull man in our sparse communication through my father, had been replaced by a Tibetan lama.
The lama was imbued with the authority and the incontrovertible wisdom of the East. The interest flattered me and I was gratified for the sake of my parents, because the upgrading advanced their standing among their friends just as if I’d done particularly well in my school examinations. The possibility was slowly emerging that my parents hoped that I would one day become a Spiritualist medium. The pressures and the constant suggestion to which I was submitted made it hard for me to oppose this ambition. Instead, remembering the years that lay ahead before adult decisions would have to be taken, I was content to be carried along by the tide.
Following my experiences in Wellfield Road, Carmarthen I had adopted a posture of non-commitment like a personal camouflage. I never argued, seldom offered a point of view. Nothing was impossible, but I had no real faith in marvels. When a visiting clairvoyant told me the date on a penny I was carrying in my pocket I felt no special surprise, and my only internal comment was, what does it matter? The house was full of poltergeist sounds that might have excited anyone else’s curiosity, but they left me indifferent. Several times of an evening when we were sitting alone in the kitchen there would be a loud rap, seemingly on the face of the clock, which my mother and father, accepting the presence of a ‘spirit friend’, would cheerfully acknowledge with some welcoming phrase, and at first I was reprimanded for my breach of good manners in failing to do the same. Occasionally, when we went on a visit to friends, we exported the phenomenon with us, and my parents would allude to the sudden interruption from the beyond in a pleasant and proprietorial way, while I was inclined to say, ‘Rap, did you say? I didn’t hear one.’
It was probably in an attempt to kindle a livelier interest that I was taken to London to witness a demonstration given by a materialisation medium, Miss Mildred Frogley, who had once come to our house, and who possessed the rare power, shared by only two other mediums in the country, of reinvesting the spirits of the dead with their human form of old.
Neither my mother, my father, nor any member of their circle had seen a ‘materialisation’ before, and they promised the supreme experience of my life, as they assured me it would be of theirs. For a week before the trip my mother spent most of the time in deep meditation, hoping in this way to conduce to the success of the materialisation, even, perhaps – as she admitted – to assist one of our own loved ones to take visible shape.
The small London hall was crowded, full of the soft murmurings of anticipation against a background of sacred music played by a white-haired pianist in tails on a grand piano, with the accompaniment of a lady harpist. After a brief address Miss Mildred Frogley was introduced.
I immediately remembered her, because she had been younger than most of our visitors, and almost pretty, with malformed teeth but a sweet smile, and a soft, kind voice, and above all devoid of the pretentiousness which seemed to affect many of the mediums we had dealings with. I became intensely interested in what was about to happen.
The back of the stage and the boards themselves were covered in a dark material, and apart from the grand piano the only article of furniture it contained was an armchair, to the back of which had been fixed a dim red light, spherical in shape and hardly bigger than an orange. Miss Frogley wore a plain navy blue dress, high at the neck, and with long sleeves. When she sat in the chair the light was two or three metres above her head. She closed her eyes, and her lips moved as if she were saying a prayer. In the ordinary way her teeth seemed to show, but now, with her mouth closed and her head thrown back, she seemed really pretty in a religious way, like the picture of a saint. The lights were switched off, and I could see nothing of her but her face, suspended under the lamp.
Nothing happened for a long time. A soft-voiced choir sang a lullaby, came to its end and began again. Presently, as my eyes got used to the darkness, I could see something moving in sort of stealthy undulation like the umbrella of a jellyfish down close to Miss Frogley’s ankles. Her head was rolling from side to side, and her mouth had opened. She was moving her hands about in a rhythmic way, like an oriental dancer, and the jellyfish stuff, which I took to be what the Spiritualists called ectoplasm, was gradually building up and taking shape as what could have been a veiled figure. Then somewhere in the darkness behind us, a torch flashed and Miss Frogley, the ectoplasm trailing from her hands, was illuminated by a sudden beam. She jumped up with a little scream, someone shouted, there were cries of protest and the lights came on. Men broke away from others trying to hold them back and rushed the stage, and the last I saw of Miss Frogley was as she was being half-dragged, half-carried away, dragging a collapsed parachute of ectoplasm which in the strong stage lighting looked remarkably like curtain material.
My father burned the Daily Mail next morning within minutes of its arrival, leaving its telltale ashes in the empty grate. The position he and my mother had taken up was that this was just another shocking instance of the malicious interference of an ill-wisher who had not only put a stop to the arduous and difficult processes of materialisation, but had placed the medium’s life in jeopardy.
Their story failed to impress me. On my way to school I used a penny, constituting one third of my weekly pocket money, to buy a paper where the headline ‘Medium’s Hoax Exposed’ was spread across an inside page. Miss Frogley, said the paper, denied the allegation that twelve yards of chiffon found on the stage had been concealed in her vagina, which had been operated on to permit the accommodation of so much material. Her unmasking had no effect whatever upon my attitude towards Spiritualism, and I imagine that went for most Spiritualists too, who could take such setbacks in their stride.
I was sorry that my parents should have wasted their money and had a disappointing evening out, but I knew their faith had only been strengthened, if that were possible, by the paper’s opprobrium and scorn. Most of all I was sorry for Miss Frogley, whom I still enormously preferred to the unshakeable Mrs Flint; sorry too, that we should not see her again.
*
Forty Hill had a strangely unfinished look, fostered perhaps by its haphazard sandpits, and could quite well have been a settlement in rural Turkey where building materials were precious. Its landmarks were the Urban District Council’s rubbish dump smouldering incessantly like a pigmy Etna at one end of the village, and the large, but never quite completed parish church at the other.
The Vicar in those days was Canon Carr-Smith who, with his glowing pink cheeks and white beard, looked like an embittered Father Christmas. The Canon had only just taken over the living, which must from his point of view have been a discouraging one. The church, a cut-price Victorian Gothic structure, stood in an untidy thicket all too convenient for the villagers as a public lavatory, and few pews were occupied for a service. In the autocratic days of the present squire’s father, farm-workers were checked off against his factor’s list at the church door, and failure to attend entailed the deduction of two shillings from the week’s wages, averaging sixteen shillings a week at the time. As soon as compulsion was removed, the farm-workers stayed away and joined the proletarian abstainers of Goat Lane, none of whom had ever set foot inside the church.
A full complement of thirty or so shopkeepers, retired persons and impoverished gentry turned up in force for the Canon’s first service, where he was to be judged by a single yardstick; whether or not, as he entered the church, he bowed to the altar. The Canon bowed, and instantly lost half of his small flock. What little popularity he retained ebbed swiftly as a result of his authoritarian manner and the emphatic expression of his dislikes. For example, he detested small boys like myself, whom he described as filthy animals, sometimes waylaying one to bellow in his ear, ‘Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.’ When the Canon found his Sunday evening congregation reduced to five elderly ladies and the permanent staff of a churchwarden, the bell-ringer and the organist, he was ready to blame the Spiritualist opposition and preached a sermon entitled ‘Oh Ye of Little Faith’, then went to Colonel Sir Henry Ferryman Bowles of Forty Hall, the lord of the manor, to discuss what if anything could be done to uproot the dangerous heresy that had taken root in his parish.
The Colonel was a phenomenon of English rural life hardly changed since the invention of the open-field system of agriculture. He had represented Enfield as a Tory MP longer than anyone could remember – although he had never made a speech in Parliament, he wielded huge and uncontested power, paid the lowest wages in the county, and was understood to possess a harem of three young, gracious and well-bred girls. Nobody in the village begrudged him these. It was assumed that the ruling classes, compelled by custom to eat meat every day, suffered sexual desires from which the peasantry were spared by a diet which included meat only once a week and limited sexual activity to Saturday nights. The poor applied different moral standards in their judgment of the rich. They knew only too well from the accounts of those who served them what went on in the big houses, but they had a sneaking admiration for their casual adulteries and their calmly supported cuckoldries. In Goat Lane spouses remained on the whole faithful because they had not the time or the energy to do anything else. Also they had hardly more privacy than goldfish in their bowls.
About two years before this I had actually met the Colonel, when I rang the front door bell of the Hall and asked his permission through the butler to go bird nesting on his estate. The Colonel came on the scene and permission was instantly granted. He glanced down at his watch and said regretfully that he would have come with me but for the fact that he had to chair a meeting of the Primrose League, an association of toilers for the Conservative cause. He seemed delighted to talk to me, relaxed perhaps, as a painful stammerer, in the company of someone who could hardly formulate his words at all. Before he let me go he insisted on taking me to see workmen engaged in digging a trench across his splendid lawn leading to the lake. Down this channel, he assured me, the electricity would flow harmlessly into the water should his house ever be struck by lightning again, as had just happened. It was his own idea, he said, and he could not imagine why nobody seemed to have thought of it before.
Sir Henry was our British village version of a Mafia chieftain, although by comparison Giuseppe Genco Russo, a much larger-scale landowner and head of the Sicilian Mafia whose character and doings I had occasion to study at a later date, was a progressive and socially responsible man, and I cannot imagine that Giuseppe would have recommended – as Sir Henry did, speaking on the bench – the re-introduction of mantraps to put an end to poaching. Both men rewarded their friends and dealt with their enemies after their own manner. The main difference between them in their respective feudal environments was that Giuseppe was companionable and relatively democratic. If a peasant came up to him in the dejected square of his home town, Mussomeli, and bent to kiss his ring, Giuseppe would embrace the man over whom he exercised power of life and death, and invite him to have a drink. Sir Henry – although not for me – remained aloof and Godlike, isolated from such contacts by his underlings. Sir Henry owned the houses his workers lived in, and they were entirely dependent upon him for work. If any of them quarrelled they would go up to the Hall together and, just as Giuseppe did, Sir Henry would settle the dispute on the spot, in the way, short-circuiting the lawyers, that such disputes had been dealt with since the Norman Conquest. If a man displeased him – as for example in the case of a tenant who put up an election poster for the Liberal candidate – Sir Henry’s factor paid him a visit, not armed in Sicilian style with a sawn-off shotgun but in the English fashion of the period with the no less deadly threat of destitution. Ninety-five percent of the electors of Forty Hill, few of them believing in the true secrecy of the ballot, cast their votes for Sir Henry, and his supporters were invited annually to a lavish entertainment at the Hall, with swings, roundabouts and coconut shies for their children in the grounds. Liberal and Labour voters, besides being certain of defeat, were debarred from these pleasures and other small inducements, such as sick-bed visits from the charitable ladies of Sir Henry’s Primrose League, with which loyalty was rewarded.
As my family owned their own house in a tiny enclave of independence called The Freehold, a call from Sir Henry’s factor to investigate the facts of Spiritualism would have been unsuitable. Instead my mother received a visit from a Miss Phoebe Tupperton, a young relation of Sir Henry’s whose branch of the family had fallen upon hard times, and who had come to live with her mother in one of his houses.
Miss Tupperton was one of the three young ladies forming, as it was supposed in the village, Sir Henry’s harem and who, by gossip conveyed through servants at the Hall, shared his company with each other on a one-month-in-three system. She was tall, willowy and beautiful, with the famous English upper-class clear complexion, based on plain but nutritious food, plenty of exercise and a damp climate. She appeared a member of a different race from the village girls who lived on suet puddings and chips, thus clogging their cells with starch, and in consequence had murky skins and heavy, brooding expressions like young feminine versions of Beethoven. This ethereal presence in the village caused some excitement among the village youth, who formed a club to exchange gossip and personal fantasies about her, and thus stimulate each other to acts of indecency.
The visit to my mother took place without warning, and therefore at an unpropitious moment. My mother dared not risk damage to the favourable vibrations gradually built up in the front room set aside for meditation, and the middle room was piled with Spiritualist paraphernalia of all descriptions, so Miss Tupperton was seated, gracious and smiling, at the end of the kitchen table, as far as possible from the work area, and slowly the inevitable odour of cooking vegetables was suppressed by that of Coty.
I was just home from school when this encounter took place. For the first time I was within a matter of feet of the woman I suspected of being the most beautiful in the world, and I was intoxicated, almost faint, after inhaling the assorted fragrances of her body spreading through the atmosphere of our kitchen, whether negative or polluted. I longed for her to become a Spiritualist.
What must it be like, I wondered, for this splendid and delicate creature, accustomed as she was to the palatial settings of the Hall, to find herself in a room with steamed-up windows, decorated by a framed advertisement for Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, a stuffed rat in a case having a fifth paw growing from the side of a thigh, and a plaster angel on the mantelpiece clasping a tiny box which I knew to contain the cured thumb of one of the crew of the Zeppelin shot down in flames in the year 1916 at Cuffley, two miles away.
I scuttled about, pushing out of sight such unappetising sights as the dog’s bowl with the turkey’s feet it had not been able to finish. There was nothing to be done about the mouse-nibbled chair, which was sacrosanct since a visiting medium had reported seeing the ghost of James IV of Scotland seated on it the year before. Miss Tupperton appeared not to notice these things. Small silver bells chimed in her voice as she asked my mother if it was true that she was a spiritual healer, and my mother readily agreed that she was.
She had read some criticism of her activities by a local medical man in the Gazette and Observer, Miss Tupperton said, who had even suggested that what she was doing might be illegal. My mother told her that she had seen the letter too, but that according to advice she had received from the association to which she belonged she was doing nothing wrong. She laid no claim to medical knowledge, gave no medical advice, and charged nothing for her services, which were wholly concerned with the treatment of the psyche, or if Miss Tupperton preferred the word, the mind.
In making her point my mother’s tone was conciliatory and affable. She told me later that she found Miss Tupperton exceedingly charming, and quite devoid of upper-class affectation of a kind that seemed often to produce an asphyxiating effect on people struggling for a foothold on the lower rungs of society.
‘Could you explain just how this is done?’ Miss Tupperton asked winningly, and my mother explained that by communing with the infinite she was able to switch on something that felt like a current coursing through her, which then, as a healing force, flowed out on contact with a human body through her hands.
‘And you place your hands on the affected bodily part?’ Miss Tupperton asked.
‘Where possible,’ my mother said. ‘Or in the case of the internal organs, as near as I can get to them. Healers who have reached a higher degree of development than myself are able to heal at a distance. Even by post.’
Miss Tupperton shook her head in sweet wonder, scattering soft lights through her hair. ‘Would you show me your hands?’ she asked.
My mother wiped her hands, which were permanently damp from the sink. They were almost as large as a man’s, with stubby fingers, reddened and coarse from work. The lines which interest students of palmistry had become grooves in the soggy flesh of the palms, there were roughnesses left by ancient chilblains over the knuckles; and the fingernails were broad and flat, slightly corrugated, cracked in places, and flaked with archipelagoes of white spots of a kind said to derive from a calcium deficiency.
Miss Tupperton gazed down at them with the deepest interest, and possibly amazement. She caressed my mother’s splayed-out fingertips with her own, which were as smooth and as delicately tapering as those of a porcelain Chinese goddess of mercy which had been recently brought from Hong Kong and added to my mother’s collection by a grateful patient she had cured of long-standing arthritis in the knees. ‘How wonderful it must be to have found such a mission,’ Miss Tupperton said, and my mother agreed in her rather flat, downright manner.
‘What do the people who come to you tend to suffer from?’
‘Well, headaches,’ my mother said. ‘Headaches they can’t get rid of.’
‘Only headaches?’
‘Back aches, too. Bad legs, varicose vein trouble. Fallen arches. A lot of people suffer with the kidneys these days. Half of it’s in the mind.’
‘Do you ever treat them for stomach troubles?’ Miss Tupperton asked.
‘Once in a while, but two pennyworth of castor oil usually does the trick. It’s the people who are out of tune with the psychic forces that I can help. I give them a fresh start along the right path. After that they manage for themselves.’
‘The healing process,’ Miss Tupperton said. ‘Is this something an outsider like me is allowed to see?’
‘There’s nothing secret or mysterious about it,’ my mother said. ‘It’s no different from first aid. I work without bandages and splints, that’s all. We hold a simple service on Sunday evenings, and anyone who cares to can join in. After that those who require healing stay on, and I do what I can for them.’ Something occurred to her. ‘Is there any way in which I can be of help to you?’
‘Not personally,’ Miss Tupperton said. She tinkled brief laughter. ‘Let’s say not at this moment, thank goodness. I’m terribly interested in what you do, but I wasn’t thinking of myself.’
‘It doesn’t matter who comes to me in search of help,’ my mother said. ‘All are welcome, irrespective of their beliefs, and no appointment is required. Some Sundays I may deal with a dozen requests for healing. Sometimes nobody comes. I’m always there if called upon, and you don’t have to sit in a waiting room. There’s nothing miraculous in what I do. I’m dealing with a body in a state of rebellion against the psyche, and I try to put a stop to that rebellion.’
Miss Tupperton shook her head in wonderment. What a great day it would be for me, I thought, if only my mother could make a Spiritualist of her.
‘Come along if you can,’ my mother told her. ‘I can’t promise you any great surprises, but I think you’ll find it a happy experience.’
Miss Tupperton said she would very much like to come, and thought she might be able to.
*
The seance preceding the service and the healing on this particular Sunday night was a very special one. It was to be conducted by a celebrated medium, brought at some cost from Sydenham, whose speciality was the employment of a trumpet through which the spirits made direct communication, speaking therefore quite independently of aid provided by the human vocal cords, and in voices recognisable to those who had known them before passing on.
There was a touch of hard-edged professionalism about these proceedings of which Mrs Carmen Flint would have heartily approved. The medium, a dark, stern-faced young man, arrived with a middle-aged Indian lady assistant with a red spot painted on her forehead, and a portmanteau full of equipment. The medium and his assistant scampered through the downstairs rooms, checking them for their vibrations and astrological alignment, lighting incense cones and making sure that when the lights were turned off not a chink of daylight could be seen through the curtains. The use of my mother’s musical box and her gong were spurned, instead of which the lady assistant plucked the strings of what might have been an Indian zither for a few moments, before the lights were turned out, and the seance began.
Instantly the room was filled with the sounds of shuffling, bustling movement; there were soft-winged bats in the darkness above us and a strong breeze as if from an electric fan stirred my hair. A muffled megaphone hooting began in the darkness several feet above my head, then, linked to a sound of the kind a balloon makes when suddenly deflated, blew itself away round the invisible cornices.
The bats flapped back, there was a sound – reverently received by the sitters, no doubt – of an artificially prolonged fart, a gush of gibberish, some insane tittering, a catcall, the drone of a preacher in an unknown language, then a few lucid sentences on some insignificant topic. Just before the lights went on, something like slobber splashed copiously across my cheek and lips, and a moment later the other sitters gathered to congratulate me as a recipient of materialised spittle from the beyond.
The supreme moment of surprise and delight followed when one of the sitters, putting his hand into his jacket pocket, discovered something unexpected and brought it out, holding a small spherical object, in appearance like a badly made marble, upon which mystic signs had been painted. This was an ‘apport’, also from the other world, and a moment later there were cries of astonished pleasure as more apports turned up in pockets and handbags. Communication with the other side had been less than satisfactory, the medium explained, through various adverse circumstances which he listed, but he hoped that the apports would help to compensate for that. He was assured that they would.
For me this was a wretched performance, and I was immensely grateful that my mother had held back from persuading Miss Tupperton to be present.
The laying-on of hands took place, as it often did on a fine summer’s evening, in the garden. A number of chairs had been grouped in a cleared space in front of a greenhouse full of pot plants on which my father was endeavouring to grow mistletoe, and here the patients awaited my mother’s ministrations.
There were seven of them, all women, and Dr Distin had given them up. They were all imprisoned in the long humdrum years called middle age, which here occupied the half of a lifetime. Their bodies had lost shape, were over-fat or distorted into crippled angularities. They suffered from stiffness of the joints, swollen knees, pains that rejected diagnosis, skin ulcers, bed-wetting and bad dreams, and, although they often wore expressions of shallow satisfaction, despair masquerading under as many forms as the death which waited so many years ahead cast its long shadow upon them.
My mother had learned that in some of the more stubborn cases the purely spiritual processes of the laying-on of hands could be bolstered by at least a pretence of manipulation, about which at this stage she knew nothing, although she had begun to study this also by correspondence. The illustration to the first lesson, to deal with fibrositis of the neck, had shown something like a simple jujitsu hold to be followed by a sharp tug, and on this occasion the method was used for the first time. Other bodily parts that had resisted the power of thought were kneaded and pounded in accordance with instructions, and in all cases my mother was rewarded by claims of instant relief.
The medium and his assistant, who had packed away their gear, stood looking on with supercilious smiles until the time came to leave to catch their bus. They had been asked by the excited members of the seance for an explanation of the mystic signs on their apports, but this they were unable to give, saying only that they were of unusual interest as materialisations from the third astral level.
It was a fitting end to a successful evening, although with all the members of the congregation going off home, the musical box at last silenced and the last incense cone burned to a tiny crater of ash, my mother was a little perturbed and disappointed that Miss Tupperton should not have put in the promised appearance.
Then, with a squeaking of brakes, a rattle and a cough, Sir Henry’s Lanchester limousine drew up. The chauffeur jumped down to open the passenger’s door, and Miss Tupperton stepped down just as the last of the departing patients hobbled past. She came into the garden, full of apologies. The car, she said, had absolutely refused to start. My mother had hoped and even expected that she would have been accompanied by a friend in need of treatment, and later explained to me that she had held in reserve part of her spiritual resources to deal with this possibility. But Miss Tupperton was alone, apart from the chauffeur carrying a receptacle like a large hamper basket. This he put down and opened to disclose a French poodle lying on a soiled and malodorous cloth. ‘The most terrible diarrhoea,’ Miss Tupperton explained. ‘The poor pet’s been like this now for more than a week. I’m utterly shattered and the vet’s quite useless. I felt sure you’d help me if you could.’