Love is the only principle that makes life tolerable.
– Aleister Crowley
I sit in an ancient amphitheatre cut into the slopes of the valley, weeping willows below and above, a stone wall of pungent, bloomed white gardenia to our right, a meadow of daisies and horseflies to the left as this man looks out across his adopted and quite beloved homeland. The morning is unreasonably beautiful. It would be a shame to leave this sanctuary, especially given that the odds of returning are so slim.
I breathe in deeply and gratefully, while I observe with immeasurable fondness the humble decency of this, the most unchallenged, the most unchallengeable and surely the finest spot on the planet. Shangri-La.
On the flanks are sweeping stone terraces dotted with some young children of touching and eviscerating beauty. Behind me on the hillside, higher up, are many more rows, reaching to even more rarefied air. This crucible possesses a soothing tranquillity and palpable serenity. It is used for their Buddhist ceremonies, for performances and song by young and old. I have many happy memories here.
The knowledge, smiles and serenity of all of those here lend weight to Buddhism. A logical mind rightfully struggles with reincarnation, but one finds it easy to forgive them.
Adorned in my sack-cloth simplicity, I look at the skies and tell three young lasses of shaven head, who eye me with reverence as they pass, ‘The taking of pleasure in such minutiae might only be achieved by a man who is at peace with his world. Remember, we are the blue-lidded daughters of Sunset; we are the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.’
They giggle and shuffle off.
I digress! Let us speak vastly important nonsense and then let us visit those depraved and vulgar young goats of mine.
You have all seen me before. There I am on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, back row, second from the far left between Sri Yukteswar Giri and Mae West. My fine boy John knew precisely who the puppeteer of that frazzled century was.
There was surely a time when I would have boasted that you are only here because of my intentional nudges on the axis of the twentieth century, as I squeezed and fondled her centre of gravity. Those days of bluster are largely over. I shall instead approach the claim from a more modest position. Without my meddling as part of British Intelligence, sometimes intentional, sometimes utterly cack-handed, it is perhaps possible none of us would be here. I only bring this up as, since I may or may not have interfered with history that allowed the very specific conditions for this, our world to be, we might as well get the pronunciation of my name right. Crowley. It rhymes with Holy.
And it was not always Aleister. As a boy, I was Alick, though when I barrelled into this realm, on October the twelfth 1875, I was to be baptised, under the Lord’s font water, Alexander Edward Crowley.
I was born in one of those sturdy town houses in Clarendon Square, number thirty, in the Cotswolds town of Royal Leamington Spa, where the miraculous waters from font, tap or stream, allegedly healed and cured as if one were in the presence of a Christ. That Nazarene and I would have been marvellous chums; I so adored Him as a boy. I wonder whether I would have been dumbstruck, like the sodden autograph hunter at the stage door, had we met? Perhaps I might have been, for the minutest of moments, and long before even He would have chance to peer into my eyes of coal black in search of a soul. My father spoke of Him with much reverence and respect, but also with the proximity of a mindful and nurturing elder brother, who would shield us from any harm, as the days of pristine youth sparkled and the midges danced at dusk, until the final strides of another ambrosial day tripped over a gnarled, tangerine sun.
Or at least, that is how I recall them. Though these early years will always suffer from the patchiness of a childhood memory, it is naturally occurring in the atomic structure of the life story. Please bear this in mind as we hone in on the adult days, where I am able to tell you the exact slant of a morning shadow with the precision of a sundial. Some details shall always be meticulous, however. Papa, for example.
My father was Edward, a tall, handsome, lithe, dark-eyed brute with fine teeth and cheekbones like spanners in a sock. He carried a married tang of light oak from his subtle cologne and a stark, almost medical, soap. He was in his forties when I arrived. He was already retired. He had inherited a vast fortune from his family’s shares in a London brewery, Crowley’s Alton Ales. The rhythmic and perpetual soaking to the back teeth of pie-eyed and staggering swathes of the population of London in his family’s underwhelming booze allowed my dear father to do the great Lord’s work at his leisure, though Papa chose to do it quite tirelessly. We went from village to village with gusto, as we spread the joy of our Gospel. I was a plump little boy, so father was convinced the exercise and the fresh air were good for me.
We relished the different accents that the countryside would bring. If Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion could locate the birthplace or current street of residence of a chap outside a West End theatre, then Father was equally as capable with the wretches and bumpkins of the Midlands, the Cotswolds and the eastern edges of the West Country. When he dozed after a meagre lunch under Gloucestershire or Warwickshire trees, I read the Bible, Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’ or Martin Rattler Adventures of a Boy in the Forests of Brazil by R. M. Ballantyne. He taught me, as a school would have, but without the harshness of those vicious martinets in charge.
Father had been born into the Quakers. As a young man he left them over a minor difference of opinion in the Scriptures.
He became a Plymouth Brethren until he then splintered from the main corps of that lot as well. The differences become minute at this stage, and barely worth considering, but for the record, 2 Corinthians was the bone of contention. His interpretation was at the core of his disagreement with the Plymouths. The issue was with whom one was permitted to eat. Father believed we should be allowed to dine with the poor, the uneducated, the unfortunates and the lepers; the Plymouths did not. We were now to be known as the Exclusive Brethren.
I would mimic such strops and such splintering with my own religious pursuits many decades later.
Our lengthy and daily exertion of saving souls, from hamlet to village to town, aided the maintenance of Father’s fine physique, but only seemed to aggravate my fat ankles and force my chubby toad neck to sweat like a squeezed teabag. When we were not marching in search of the next door upon which to rap or seeking some poor soul trimming his lawn or awaiting his tennis partner in the park, he would be preaching and I would be stood erect by his side, not permitted to slouch or shuffle from foot to foot. I listened to the word of God. In my heavy black suit cut of the same cloth as his, and with the same heavy application of starch on my upright collar, I believed myself to be the happiest and freest boy in England. I did not see the inside of a school until I was eight years old.
I was a hard-boiled and applied lad, fascinated by the truth of evidence and proof, though this was still submerged by the wonder I saw in my old man and in the Scriptures. Once as we traipsed through a field to the next village, my father advised I circumnavigate a clump of over-green and erect nettles. I pushed him on why I ought to be so concerned.
‘Will you learn by experience or will you take my word for it?’
‘Learn by experience, of course, Father,’ I said before I dived in.
Yet I was disciplined. I read the Bible with a ferocity that made my father joyous. I remember reading as early as the age of four, and this can be bookmarked by history, as January the first 1880 was the final Leamington Fair to welcome in the Maximus de Paris Rouge circus. We had slipped through the ropes to the rear of the burlesque caravans, under the busy washing lines, past the steaming backs of the munching ponies of sagged spine, and through the thick and pungent brewed clouds of marvel from the pots of the cackling pink elephantine cooking ladies, as ecstatic in bawdy and ribald song as any man or urchin had likely ever witnessed.
There we found our unwitting prey: a plump lion-tamer and a weak-willed elephant master in their nightly preparation. Father approached to sell to them both a penny pamphlet on that wildly mild January evening, the eighth day of Christmas. For such an early memory, the image is a strong one, though it may be have been prodded and embellished first by my dear father, Edward, and then by me over the years, for it seems so full and vibrant to this day.
‘Why are you doing that?’ Papa asked the first chap with the large cat, as he moved the crown of his head along the beast’s teeth and gum.
‘Well, I am training my lion. I must.’
‘And then?’
‘Err … I do it to survive tonight.’
‘And then?’
‘What? To be alive to collect my Friday wage.’
‘And then?’
‘Ummm …’
‘And then?’
This continued until the poor man was faced with the absolute futility of life and the inevitability of a lonely death. The fellow was called Gerald de Montneuf-Baton, a fancy name for someone of such a broad and lowly Bristolian twang. Gerald risked his neck for glory each evening and, at least it seemed, was firm friends with his charge, an elderly lioness in the finest fettle and teeth of pearled brilliance. Within a minute of having engaged with my father, this fleshy man, shirtless but with his suit trouser on, was nose-to-nose with his eternal damnation. The elephant master, known only as Small Man, nodded along, unable to counter my Edward’s well-used gambits.
The will of the corpulent entertainer, Gerald, was then broken by Father. The pair handed over a coin each, to everyone’s relief. We all then sat down on a large Arabian rug on a bank of grass outside the towering Big Top, and we chatted.
Unlike the Plymouth Brethren, we, the Exclusive Brethren, allowed ourselves to sit and eat with such unfortunates. We believed their ignorance and commonness gave them the excuse to be unholy and to err. We preferred gypsies and freaks to our own kind, who should know better. This was the Christ’s way, after all; He who adored whores, thieves and cripples alike. And so, being supine with circus trainers was permitted, but almost never with others of our ilk. And so began my lifetime of apparently inexplicable contradictions that puzzled and angered a prudish (or at least, hypocritical) England.
As I pestered the trio, with careful measure and timeliness, to allow me to see the circus freaks who were accompanying the troupe for the first time, Father cut me off and told me to read to our new friends from his favourite passage of the 1611 King James Bible: Genesis 5. My belligerence was minimal then, but I read instead from my own favourite text, the Book of Revelations. I could sense the wonder that came from the circus pair, and I could feel my father’s stare as I spoke the sacred words.
I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.
I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die.
I also remember with absolute clarity the wonder Father appeared to broadcast. But it was nothing compared to the lengthened and then renewed gasps that came from our two gullible pals, as I continued to narrate, but did not turn the page.
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.
Instead, I closed my eyes and the words poured out.
I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.
And poured out. Until the written words of the Revelations came to their inevitable conclusion.
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.
The pause continued, until my father eventually broke the silence, with a bellowed, ‘Amen.’ Gerald and Small Man followed with a staggered amen too. The lioness roared, the elephant defecated vast barrels of filth with a disturbingly pleasant musk.
We would perhaps see the circus again, but never in the town of Leamington, for that night there was a death in the ring, and their licence was revoked. We stared as the lioness sunk her teeth into Gerald’s neck, almost apologetically. Within the hour, we heard the ensuing bullet as we walked away towards Clarendon Square. Oddly, there was a second one. I saw my father tilt his head as this rang out. We looked at each other.
‘I told him so,’ said Father. ‘I did hint at such matters.’
Father regularly told me that he was always right, though I struggled to see precisely how in this instance.
The actual explanation was a far more logical one, for in having interrupted the training of the lioness, Gerald had also forgotten to feed his largely loving, but unforgivingly habitual darling. A comment by the veterinarian in the Royal Leamington Gazette, and picked up on the news wires by Giuseppe Chiriani’s La Hippodromo Mysteriosa, the circus owners’ own bi-monthly pamphlet to which we later subscribed and purchased all back copies, was that the poor beast’s ravenous state was magnified by the presence of a vast and billeted tapeworm in her guts. It had appeared from the deceased lioness’s rear, just as the old girl was being euthanised, and deserved a bullet all to itself, so chubby and worryingly agile was it. All trainers and owners of animals were now advised to seek the advice of a professional to keep their beasts worm-free and therefore to prevent such capricious mood swings from the animals, of jungle and plain, whose impeccable behaviour was the main reason tickets were sold.
It was to be a time of death. On the twenty-ninth day of February, my sister, Grace Elisabeth Crowley was still-born. I was quite unaware of the scale of such an event but, with hindsight, it became quite clear that the impact of this would resonate across my world. Many times, perhaps twenty or thirty, I was taken, at the insistence of Mother, to see her corpse. Most things are confusing to the young, and are only explained with age. The perversion of these visits (or what later seemed perverted to me) seemed quite natural to me then, as a boy of four in short trousers that revealed the wide girth of my miserable ankles. I was more bothered about my physical defect than the slab of greying pink coldness in front of me. But as an adult, this has only led me to wonder at the lack of decent logic and the hollow sickness of those who would have this done. The room was frigid with a whiff of a spiky and unpleasant chemical, its hideousness partially abated by tangy Indian incense, procured by the caseload through mail order from Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly, as if this would mask the indecency. I recall my late sister’s marbled and translucent skin. One could see through several layers now, blue veins that bulged out from patches of grey. I had to sit and stare at this installation for hours, while repeating the Lord’s words from the Scriptures.
This was all the malevolent work of my vile mother. She was full of such tricks. As a small boy, I recall her mental abuse. Like the typical abuser, the horror takes place in private, and the tortured is threatened to never speak of the ‘secret’. I was told and perpetually reminded that she was a clairvoyante. This was not just her supposed ability to forecast the future, but she said she knew of my dark intentions and wicked thoughts as a young boy; a scared wretch barely able to go through the night without pissing himself.
Deuteronomy 18:9–14 tells us to condemn such sorcery:
*
When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations.
There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts a spell,
Or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead.
For whoever does these things is detestable to the LORD; and because of these detestable things the LORD your God will drive them out before you.
You shall be blameless before the LORD your God.
For those nations, which you shall dispossess, listen to those who practise witchcraft and to diviners, but as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do so.
Thus, the Bible condemns clairvoyance in all forms. The text brands it (and such misplaced claims to it) as evil. They would have burned her at the stake as a witch. So, with her Brethren piety in the company of others, this made her a clear hypocrite, a state so rank that even a very small boy such as I spotted it and gagged. And she had the nerve to call me The Beast, though this may well have been proof of her talent, for that is precisely what I became.
She and I were flighty. We were unbroken stallion and nervous rider. And when this happens, each party simply gets worse and rapidly so. They say that the wild dog and the dark-skinned gent rarely get on, for the canine sees only a pronounced contrast in the whites of the eyes and the prism of nature translates this as aggression. This perception is magnified when the fellow is scared and further pins back his eye-lids. The hound only sees danger – and off we go with a vicious circle of misunderstanding, anxiety and terror, when they really should be sound chums. Well, so it was (sort of) between Mother and young Alick.
Mother made the error of underestimating me. She thought her bullying and lying lecturing would box, crush and break me, and that I, silent and cowed, would be hers. But I knew that all I had to do was to tell Papa of her witchcraft, something she had not predicted, and no longer would she be such a clairvoyante. Q.E.D.
Her future and mine were both in MY hands. I kept my counsel for now.
Mother constantly spoke of cutting one’s coat in accordance with one’s cloth, but I would teach her that she ought to have cut it in accordance with the size of the man, in this case, a very young boy, her transgressive spawn. Do what thy wilt.
After weeks of these morbid gatherings around my disintegrating sibling, and as the furnishings at home receded to almost nothing, I remember that we left Clarendon Square. I did not know we would not return, but I suspect I might have thought some form of change was coming. And so began a year of my life that has never been documented. I guess those spa waters were not so special, not so potent after all, for they could not save my dear Grace, aged zero. Perhaps I should have been shocked, or at least grateful, that the decaying mite was not bundled up in swaddling or in a picnic basket of cherry-red gingham and brought along for the ride. From the raised voices that I could hear from my room, I knew that Mother and Father were troubled. I sensed from the bellowing down the cavernous halls that he was repulsed by her behaviour around Grace.
Our intended destination was Redhill, Surrey, one of those affluent and burgeoning villages to the south of London. The journey from Royal Leamington Spa is ninety-three miles as the crow flies. Yes, there is the complex majesty of London in the way, but my journey took thirteen months, daffodils blooming as we left and perishing as we arrived at that vast mansion of arched hallways, billiard table lawns, stacked libraries of arcane treasures, lavish and mossy frog ponds, and musty greenhouses of unworldly orchids, tennis racquets and croquet hoops.
My year in the wilderness was quite unintended. Father had intended a two-day dog-leg, a release valve, and a brief but sacred rustication, more intended as a bow to the Nazarene’s forty days in the desert. I shall explain very shortly, but we got marvellously sidetracked that year. There were answers to be found, I was told. If that is what Edward Crowley said, then it was as robust as the Gospel to his young Alick.
By the time we arrived in Surrey in that glorious May of 1881, the days of the daily schlepp of that father-and-son double act, annoying the natives with the advent of a doom, avoided only by handing over a penny for a leaf of reasonably pleasant paper stock (my father did not need the penny, of course) were over.
We had travelled instead through a phantasmagoric prism, a kaleidoscope of the vastest of boyhood joys. I know my father agreed on the sunniness of both of our souls throughout that year. Even my ankles appeared to become less grotesque by a fraction, marginally thinner even, and my frog neck less moist by a sliver. Oh! the blessed mind is so playful, so willing to lark.
But how did all of this happen?
Well, I shall start with the day that the first issue of Giuseppe Chiriani’s La Hippodromo Mysteriosa landed on the checked tiles in the airy hallway of 30, Clarendon Square. The mat was already gone, packed away after Grace’s death with the desks, chairs, tables and beds, so we were close to departure. Father, always so measured and disciplined, appeared to canter in uncharacteristic fashion, in the cerise, teal and lemon light cast by the stained glass in the heavy oak door, warming in the spring sunshine.
He turned to see me watching him, and slowed marginally, but only before he grinned like I had never seen him smile before. He beckoned for me to come to him. I walked to him, and he lowered himself to his knees, and swept me up as I approached. His embrace was firm and intentional. He loosened his grip and spoke at a volume that was unnecessary given my proximity, as if he needed to say it in something more than a whisper for his own peace of mind.
‘Be ready for eight o’ clock, Alick. We have something we must do today.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Oh! and son. You had better have a small overnight bag with you. Bring your Book and the chess set. We shall head up to London1 alone, you and I.’
‘Yes, sir.’
We were on the 8.34 train from Royal Leamington to London Marylebone. We would rejoin the unwitting world in a morsel over one year from now. I am sure I heard my father guffaw, as the whistle blew and we moved down the train. We took the last two seats in the First Class car. In the rush, we had not noticed the lofty uniformed company of soldiers, in whose presence we now were. Most of the troops stared at these two civilian interlopers, some through monocles, others from a single eye next to a patched or glass one. There were those who did not stare, for they were blind. They all wore the same uniform: red and blue with white piping. The blind ones had chums who whispered to them, each line met with a tiny acknowledging nod.
Other than the hushed reporting of our arrival, these soldiers remained absolutely silent. They all seemed to regard Father and me, even though some turned their heads to marvel at the English countryside, particularly verdant, pleasant and blooming in the Cotswolds in May. We were within a daily pamphlet traipse of Stratford-upon-Avon to the west and Warwick Castle to the east of the rattling track. The cradle of security and peace appeared quite contrary, even to this unseasoned lad, to where these poor souls had been. They maintained the orderliness, the restraint and the unity of a battalion. It was as if the Boers might appear at our next stop of Banbury station, the Zulu might attack with a vicious pincer movement from between the sleepy morning anglers on the lush banks of the Cherwell.
Once Banbury had been safely traversed, their silently appointed spokesman, who was stationed directly across from me, leaned forward, and addressed me. He had a shock of carrot hair, abundant freckles, a nose upon which one might have hung a Homburg, ears smaller than mine with a lining of soft ginger fluff, and magnificent eyes of summer-frog green. His smile betrayed the likelihood that he might have suffered from bullies as a boy, which cannot have been long ago by the elevated pitch of his supremely friendly voice, which I was seconds away from hearing for the first time, and which stays with me to this day. I could not stop looking at him.
‘Good morning, sir!’
I sensed my father’s approval, and I was rarely wrong on such a matter.
‘Good morning, sir!’
‘I am Captain Orr of the Warwickshire Yeomanry. How do you do?’
‘How do you do? I am Alick. And this is my father.’
With no dog collar, there was no obvious clue that Father was a religious man.
‘How do you do, sir?’
‘How do you do, Captain Orr? I am Edward Crowley.’
‘A pleasure to meet you both. I see you possess a chessboard. As we say in the Yeomanry, “Gleaming!”’ He had a soft Midlands lilt, but spoke at a volume so that even those who might be hard of hearing in the unit could hear above the din of the train, the tracks and the hum of the warm breeze pervading from the open windows.
‘Would you care for a game, sir?’ I spoke without thinking, yet my father did not correct me.
‘Very much,’ the captain replied. ‘I should warn you, however, that we play as a unit.’
‘Well, so do we,’ said my father barely allowing the soldier to complete his final word.
‘So be it. Remember that whoever said that the white queen is mightier than the sword, has never encountered the Orange Boers of Kapuitshuit before breakfast.’ The unit laughed as one, for even those who were receiving an audible transcription from their guide were aware of Orr’s bluster before the sentence was finished.
‘But at least, are we permitted to know the names of OUR enemy today, please?’ Father asked.
‘Yeo-man-reeeee!’ Orr shouted.
The unit then presented themselves with an astonishing rhythm and precision. The order was clearly not alphabetical, nor was it by rank, it seemed to Father when we later de-briefed, post combat.
Fairfax! Runciman! Trench! Guinness! Byron! Fanny! Talbot! Vane! Coote! Ball!
‘How do you do, sirs?’ Father and I said together.
I set up the board, before holding a black pawn in my right hand, a white one in the left.
‘Major Fairfax!’ yelled Captain Orr.
‘The boy’s left hand,’ replied Major Fairfax, even though he was clearly blind, and should not have known I was holding two pieces before my sternum.
‘We are white, lads.’
And, to a unified and synchronised bawl of ‘God Save the Queen’ off we went. Orr moved first, and yelled his opening gambit to the battalion. Then he screamed my reply. Then each turn thereafter, an initial Sicilian defence, was the responsibility of the other ten to shout their move in the precise order they had announced themselves to Father and to me, punctuated by Orr informing them all of our move.
A couple of them could see the board. The blind ones chuckled, the others purred and stared out at the villages, the steeples, the ponds, the sparrows and the wood pigeons, the orchards, and the farms, or above to the soft royal blue, speckled with thin and unthreatening balls of fluffed and woolled cloud.
The soldiers barely skipped a military marched beat in belting out a seemingly faultless defence, followed by a sturdy consolidation prior to the relentless grinding down of a stunned preacher and his astonished son. Father could not bear fools or shamsters, and was notoriously difficult, some might say impossible, to please. He was also an excellent chess player, so, when checkmate came seventy-seven moves into the mammoth conflict, he would not rest after a solitary game. I urged him on. Such was the alacrity and efficiency of the soldiers’ game, they chalked an eighth victory without reply, as we slowed through the outer limits of the capital. They might even have pushed a ninth by the time we trundled into the shade, dust and endless romance of Marylebone Station.
We all disembarked with far less efficiency than their mobility on the chessboard. Father insisted the chaps join us in the Station Hotel for luncheon. We were an odd lot, as we moved from platform seven through the marbled halls and towards the bright sunlight and the potent marvels of that thrumming city at large. Orr, when he unravelled his full frame, stood at almost seven feet; all the more impressive to a tiny and unathletic scamp with fat ankles and a fleshy neck. Two fellows were lifted into wheelchairs, three, without sight it seemed, were walked by comrades. They moved as one; amorphous and shapeless perhaps, but still with a strong military understanding and camaraderie.
It was still middish morning, but some of the men had become excited at the possibility of a drink from the bar on the broad terrace, so pleasant on that May morning. Crowley’s Alton Ales were being served, though not one of the squadron took one, preferring instead small glasses of liquid that made them wince upon imbibing. How odd, I thought.
Father took Orr to one side at the bottom of the railed steps into the pleasant station gardens, wrapped in a quadrangle of honeysuckle, scarlet roses and tulip trees. He appeared to be making his usual move to his small case to access his pamphlets, when he stopped, and Orr began to speak instead, moving his face closer, and with a thoroughly unthreatening intensity, to my father’s. Orr seemed to soothe and disarm him, and the pitch on the Lord’s behalf was seemingly over before it had begun. Then after several minutes of apparently protracted and unrelated questioning from my father, the two sat down on the lower steps. My father did not even sweep detritus from the stone. For the first time in my life, I saw Edward Crowley accept a cigarette, take a light, smoke and then shut up, unable to counter. I can barely communicate my excitement all these decades later such was the profundity of how my father was jack-knifed by this quiet-ish Orr chap. The unstoppable force had lost out to the immovable object.
After several minutes, my father turned his head towards me. He knew I would be eagerly awaiting his gaze, and extended his palm an inch towards the pavement, where the remnants of his cigarette now fumed wilfully. He lowered his eyelids. I knew we would discuss fully later. I must, for now, remain quiet. Little boys, after all, should be seen, and not heard.
I sat at the far end of the long dining table to my father. He looked at me from time to time, and smiled, while he held my gaze. He spoke with each of the men within his sphere, privates and officers alike. All importance leant to rank seemed to have been eradicated, not by him, but by the soldiers. I could barely wait to have my father to myself, so as to discover what he had learned.
In my mind, I turned to the Scriptures to remind me of the value of passivity, even temper and grit. I whispered Ecclesiastes 7:8–9:
Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.
Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.
And from Revelations 14:12
Here is the patience of the Saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.
*
And so that day, I taught myself meditation and the Tantra, without having a name for either process but with the very precise prompting of the Lord.
I recall, next, sitting with father on that same lower step, where he had smoked and listened, by the wrought-iron railing under the stars; two soldiers now slept in their luncheon chairs, adequately covered in tartan blankets, while from three vast windows of lemon-yellow light on high, military bawdiness filled the chorus while my father shielded my ears from the verse. The men’s song and laughter seemed to fill the cavernous chambers of generous luxury, and rush in rhythmic waves across the delicately gas-lit London streets, along which gentlemen and hansom cabs flitted to and from private club, sumptuous dining, the anticipation of small children past bedtime and illicit love affairs. The joy from on high seemed to mean far more coming from the blind, the infirm, and their fraternal carers from the battlefield than it would were it to come from a regular crowd of revellers.
This was the moment I took to speak to him, as I had wished. Of Mother.
‘Sir, I must tell you something.’
‘Yes, son.’
‘It is a matter that concerns Mother, sir. Something is horribly wrong …’
‘Speak of it. Speak of it all.’
And I did thus, telling of Mother’s bullying, claims of clairvoyance, sorcery and even branding me as The Beast. Aided by the relief of my confessed secret, I even added in her most recent gem of blaming me for the stillness of my icy and decaying sister.
I am convinced this was the moment that he became determined to elongate our hours and days in the wilderness into weeks and months. He betrayed no venom or disappointment in his eyes but, within twenty-four hours, I would see him hover over the writing of a lengthy letter that I knew to be to her. He seemed to relish the process and would drop it with a proud vigour into a pillar box the next day before planting a firm and determined kiss on the crown of my head.
As I stared at the stars above that night in Marylebone, Father spoke, finally. For his son and heir, his thoughtful words seemed to join together the bright points in the heavens into a pattern that would set this boy on a path of righteousness.
‘What Captain Orr told me today is a magical thing, my boy. And it affects you and me.’
I waited, while he chose his words, seemingly fearful I would not grasp it all.
‘These men are not the Warwickshire Yeomanry, Alick. Well, one is. The other ten are prisoners of war. They are Dutch. Boers. I am sure they would have engaged a Zulu, had it been at all possible. Trench, Vane, Fanny and Coote still go by their real names. The others have converted to the English Army. They seem to have seen the light,’ and he laughed like I had never seen him do so.
He then took a deep breath, and settled himself. I knew he would elaborate.
‘They are remarkably similar to you and me. They are travelling salesmen, if you will. They are spreading their word. They are paid well by our government to travel around the country, to barracks and military academies and give lengthy presentations on this and that, before revealing at the end of the programme precisely who they are. The audience shall learn the most valuable lesson any of us may learn. First, to look upon life and men with an intensity – and secondly, to presume nothing.’
He stared at me to see if I understood.
‘Father. They only want to see the good in our fellow man.’2
My father closed his eyes for several seconds, and when he opened them, there was a definite dampness, as he swallowed and ruffled my hair.
‘It is only by doing this,’ Father continued, ‘that the world shall understand God’s work. Do you follow me, my boy?’
I think I nodded. He told me later that I nodded.
‘Captain Orr kindly invited us to move with them from town to town, and it seems only right, given the way things are.’
I believe he was referring to my sister. And now, my mother.
He then said, ‘We have much in common, and they can teach you much.’
On this point, he was correct, for that summer, short trousers, fat ankles and all, was the first time I witnessed many revelations, such as the majestic effects of opium on them; one of the few perks those poor, mangled lads could enjoy. ‘Gleaming,’ was how the men, known to themselves as The Legion, described almost everything. I would one day see how and why the world seemed this way to them, for the poppy in all her forms, well, she is a true marvel.
The men were in London to attend the annual Harrow versus Eton cricket match at Lord’s. The Dutch are an odd lot, and the barometer of this is that they adore cricket. It is even quite feasible that the summer game originated in the province of lower Holland. It was certain, it seemed, that the central reason all the prisoners were still in England, even though hostilities in Africa had ceased, was that they could not imagine leaving the cricket field.
The day after their excesses in Marylebone, they billeted themselves in a Camden military academy hostel that shared a high stone wall with the chimpanzee enclosure, that vortex of mischief, in London Zoo. The soldiers insisted that Father and I join them. We did so with no fuss.
It was now their turn to insist upon luncheon in the rear of the property, where Orr was almost tall enough to shake hands with the frisky caged rogues from our own back gardens. He could almost touch their digits, barely brushing chimp finger fuzz, in a playful echo of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.
Before we ate, Father and I strolled on the small lawns, and he explained, now in more detail, how the men had been given a special dispensation by Sir George Pomeroy Colley of the British Army to pose as our own soldiers. Our military had always been a stuffy and inflexible machine. But there were the occasional bright and thoughtful fellows, visionaries you might say, such as Colley and the Yeomanry who saw that the business of warfare was about to change in the next century. Soldiering would soon become a far more complex business, and deception might be the key to victory. The day of the gentleman would one day end. To lose a war through honour would be a crime, punishable by the loss of Empire.
He did not need to remind me of Genesis 3.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’
*
Perhaps, the British Army’s was not such a progressive and pioneering idea after all, for deception has a lengthy past. What was certainly a strange military stratagem, however, was the adoption of preacher and son, and this process was now well underway.
And so began that lost year, centred in the city of London in a garden elevated by the sweet whiff of smoked opium, the frequent visits of women who were most certainly not soldiers (quite unknown to my father, I believe) and friendly chimps. Yes, Father and I again traipsed from borough to borough spreading the good news, but it was marvellously punctuated by and cosseted with the company of the most bizarre set of teachers and comrades, smiling through their aches and hardships.
That year informed me of much. The soldiers taught me that the unfortunate, disenfranchised and misunderstood were to be heralded. I had learned from sister Grace that death might be lauded. I knew I could not live without my father. And that our common foe, the Germans, were penetrable, as well as a source of malleable fun and such reward. Quite vitally, I found out that sometimes one’s identity must be kept secret in order to preserve one’s own value to a nation and beyond. I knew that summers and friends were abundant and the greatest fun of all.
And so we travelled across England with these marvellous men until Father had a vision. He thought it would be worthwhile to visit his favourite travelling circus, the Maximus de Paris Rouge, which would soon arrive on London’s northern hillock below Alexandra Palace.
It was here on the fifteenth of February 1881 where Father would be struck down on a soapbox in the middle of Deuteronomy 7:15.
And the Lord will take away from you all sickness,
and none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which you knew, will he inflict on you,
but he will lay them on all who hate you.
His tongue simply stopped working. I now know this was the first sign I would see of the cancer that would take him from me, and forever change my life. According to a humbler god than I, this perhaps allowed for the squeezing, fondling and moving of that centre of gravity of the twentieth century, thus allowing you all to exist.
But why would the Lord take, of all things, that organ of his own Good Word? Why would he interfere with my bliss and cause such pain to this great man over his next six truly horrific years? Yes, I still believed in God and the Devil, but now, for the first time, I asked myself, as I thought of men in black who one day soon would be dropping my dear, dear Papa into the earth, ‘Which one was which?’
And so now we resolved to return to her. To Emily Bertha Bishop, my cunt of a mother, in whose charge I would be left to fester and weep and rot.
We spoke of the imagined wrath she must have brewed at our disappearance. This was when Father held both of my shoulders on the day we crossed the Thames, came nose to nose with me until I could smell the rising illness in his mouth and whispered, ‘All shall be well, my boy.’
He then laughed as loud as I had ever heard him, but sadly, laughter is not always the best medicine, and was quite useless here.
And so began my own Anno Domini, my year zero, as I invoked the spirit of the Dracule in denouncing Them.
‘Fuck you, Jesus. Why have you forsaken me?’
‘The people who have really made history are the martyrs.’
– Aleister Crowley
1 I have always cherished the idiosyncratic English way of going up to London, no matter of the direction, and down to the country, again with no regard for compass. We should do more of this as a nation.
2 This part was true, though they were merciless when it came to the intolerance, the bloated mystery and the foolishness of the Prussians they had encountered in South West Africa and back in Holland. Their only exceptions to their distaste of Germanics were Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach, whose cantatas were a supreme favourite of Coote, the trumpeter. The Prussians, they would reveal, have an Achilles heel. It is not women, neither opium nor gold. It is not even traditional power. It goes deeper and darker, and would be pivotal in my life’s work. The Occult.