by Roger Dobson
Her own delightful dwelling in The Hermitage (at the end of The Vineyard) [now called Hermitage House] was at one time haunted, by a previous resident or a servant, until Wrenne, a member of the Old Faith, had asked a priest in to exorcise the troubled chamber. Apparently, the sprinkling had proved efficacious; but Wrenne’s own spirits had remained disturbed. I always remember seeing her, one morning before nine-thirty when the shop opened, come shuffling, carpet-slipper-shod, into The Kardomah, in the High Street, where I was drinking a preparatory pre-work cup of coffee. Obviously, for her, this was a ‘morning after’. I thought it might well have been a bad night—nuit blanche—rather than one over-dedicated to Venus or Bacchus. Somehow, her appearance, her desperate forlornless, prompted in me such images as that of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in late autumnal decay or of the Tower of Pisa the moment before its fall.
Somewhile later, when I had ceased my connection with the bookshop and was making a chance visit to Richmond, I met her behind the bus station. It was a sunny, early summer afternoon, blue, and with the canary-coloured acacia in blossom. But Wrenne was dolorous.
‘Do you know, Derek, I can’t pray any more.’
Well, she was an actress; but this time I believed her. Not long afterwards I heard she was dead.
Learning of Mr Stanford’s interest in the spectral, Wrenne managed to fix a lunch date for him with Montague Summers. Mr Stanford went along to the house at 4 Dynevor Road one steamy and thundery autumn morning to meet the ‘historiographer of warlocks and witches’. Naturally Mr Stanford was fascinated to see Summers’ formidable library, but it was to be their one and only meeting: Summers died shortly afterwards2. Mr Stanford relates an amusing tale of Wrenne’s relations with Dylan Thomas in Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs 1937-1957 (1977). On one occasion Wrenne arranged for Thomas to read his verse to some local poetry lovers at her home in Richmond. Dylan arrived an hour late:
. . . apologising, smiling, and woefully drunk. By a superhuman effort, he controlled himself, and read to the scandalised audience one of his best and newly written poems. Annoyance and boredom were conjured away by the spell of his magnificent voice. Royally, the poem drew to a close; and as the listeners broke into applause, Dylan turned his back on them and proceeded to retch and vomit in the hearth.
Wrenne took rather a dim view of Dylan. She narrated his behaviour at a Poets’ Club dinner, at which, drunk as usual, he had smoked throughout. ‘Don’t you think the writing of poetry ought to be limited to gentlemen, Derek?’ I agreed that would be an ideal condition, but doubted whether her proviso would produce the best verse.
Wrenne died of cancer in Westminster Hospital, aged forty-two, on 8th March 1953. Canon R.P. Phillips, of St Elizabeth’s Church in The Vineyard near Wrenne’s home—he had officiated at Summers’s funeral in 1948—gave her the last sacraments and said of her: ‘She was a great soul, and bore her atrocious sufferings with the greatest patience and resignation.’
The Jarman family grave at Richmond Cemetery has long been the centre of a romantic enigma. Letters and flowers from an admirer have been left on the memorial for years. Derek Stanford has written an effective ghost story, ‘The Other Stairway’, inspired by the mystery. Gardenia Holeshaw, a love-lorn poet modelled on Wrenne, lives in a haunted house in The Hermitage, and after her death messages are left on her grave. Eric Barton appears in the story as bookseller Miles Moncton, Montague Summers crops up (under a nom de guerre), and he and the protagonist, Paul Digby, based on Mr Stanford, lunch together. In the winter of 2000, one of the Lost Club editors wrote a piece for the Richmond and Twickenham Times enquiring whether anyone living in the town had any memories of Wrenne. It was not our intention to pry into the identity of her admirer, though the slant put on the story (which was rewritten, rather carelessly it must be said, by a reporter or sub-editor) gave that impression. Shortly after the story appeared in December, Mr Lionel Kenneth Watson, who lives at Isleworth, wrote to us identifying himself as the mystery admirer. He had been looking after the grave since the early 1980s, and over the years had left letters, flowers and trinkets there in memory of Wrenne. He explained:
Last summer some restoration work having been done, I got the impression that an unknown-to-me relative had taken an interest; my bits and pieces were all removed, and not wishing to upset anyone I haven’t touched it since, though I still keep a daily eye on the area re. weeding if necessary. . . .
I never knew Wrene personally, but as a young man (I’m now seventy) I came across her name at the London Poetry Society, a few months after her death. The unusual Christian name stuck in my mind; by and by, I came across both books of her poems, some of which I liked very much indeed, and eventually I came across her grave too not very far from here.
I was lonely at that time; after her brother’s death in 1982, it was obvious that no one else would, so I ‘adopted’ the grave . . . 1983 approx. to this year, and as I say, I still keep an eye on it.
But readers of Tell Me Strange Things will know that Father Brocard, referring to the mystery in his tribute to Wrenne, said that on examining an envelope left on the grave in 1988, after the headstone for Montague Summers was unveiled, it appeared to bear the message ‘From Arthur’. Mr Watson says:
A possible solution is my handwriting: mostly printing . . . but occasionally in ‘real writing’ . . . ‘Lionel’ could be misread as ‘Arthur’ . . . Especially if one’s eyesight was a little faded. Did Father Sewell have poor eyesight I wonder. For he mentions that the inscription under Job Jarman’s name was ‘completely illegible’ which it never has been. Faded out, so far as paintwork was concerned, yes, but at all times readable, being incised as he says in Latin. . . .
I wrote quite long letters for ten years or so—say 1985-1995. . . . Earlyish in this period, letters disappeared or were opened and disarranged a bit, fairly often, but later, hardly at all. I always thought it was council workmen, learning from experience that this nut’s letters weren’t worth bothering with.
Mr Watson has also been looking after Montague Summers’s headstone in another section of the cemetery. Unfortunately in recent years the Welsh slate stone has fallen over. (Lost Club members were alarmed to hear, in July 2001, that the memorial stone had gone missing.) As officials at the cemetery office didn’t seem to know what had happened to the stone, we feared occultists might have been responsible, purloining the Welsh slate slab for their own dark, nefarious purposes, and so were about to prepare a story for the press. Then, fortunately, a few days later, the stone was back in its rightful place, repaired and upright once again.)
Speaking to workmen preparing the Jarman gravestone for restoration in summer 2000, Mr Watson was told a relation—possibly a doctor—arranged for the work to be done. Mr Watson pointed out to us that near the grave is another Jarman monument—to a Gretel Joan Jarman, who died in May 1938, placed there by her husband, ‘Francis Jarman of this parish’. Mr Watson told us of a third book by Wrenne, The Inward Greatness. The eight-page booklet, published by The Fountains Press of Richmond (Wrenne herself?), consists of a poem dedicated to Winston Churchill. During the war Wrenne worked at the Hawker Siddeley aircraft factory; she also appeared at least once on the BBC, perhaps reading her poetry. In Mr Watson’s copy of The Breathless Kingdom there is a letter from Wrenne, to a Fred Daniels, presumably a photographer, of 17 Coventry Street, London W1. The typed letter is dated 31st January 1948, from The Hermitage, Church Terrace, Richmond, Surrey, and runs:
Dear Fred Daniels,
The photographs are right out of this world! Thank you, thank you.
And my Brother finds the photograph of the painting very interesting.
I enclose my small tribute to Mrs Daniels. (I told you you would go down on this.)
With all the best to you both,
Yours very sincerely,
‘Renjie’ Jarman [signed]
One wonders if one of the photographs referred to was the striking picture published in Nymph, in Thy Orisons.
And do any other photographs of Wrenne exist? It’s interesting to discover that Wrenne was known to her friends as ‘Renjie’.
The Jarman grave is located not far from the cemetery lodge at the Grove Road entrance. Take the path to the right and it is a few hundred yards away, A distinctive stone screen, with a tall brick surround, makes the grave easily identifiable. Nearby is the grave of the editor of the Bookman, Arthur St John Adcock (1864-1930), the author of Gods of Modern Grub Street (1923) and The Glory that was Grub Street (1928), and a fit subject for Lost Club investigation. According to Who Was Who, he lived at 55 Queens Road, Richmond.
Notes
1. Caton crops up as ‘L.S. Caton’ in five of Kingsley Amis’s novels, and as a seedy literary agent in The Terrible Door (1964) by George Sims (both were Fortune Press authors). He is shot to pieces in Amis’s The Anti-Death League (1966). Mr d’Arch Smith states that when Caton died, in 1971, he owned ninety-one houses in Brighton, with ‘not a bathroom among them’; but he had published more than six hundred books.
2. Mr Stanford’s impressions of Montague Summers from his London Magazine article are worth reproducing:
The top of his head, in his baldness, suggested a tonsure; but his white hair hung elegantly combed upon his shoulders. He wore a clerical collar and waistcoat, and what I can best describe as ecclesiastical knickerbockers. I am not sure that his shoes were not adorned with buckles.
I found him to be a very hierarchical character—at which, I, in no way took umbrage, having lately emerged from my ten-year-old cocoon of Anarchism in order to become a sceptical chain-mail Tory who would have welcomed Disraeli but regarded Margaret Thatcher with horror.
What I registered of Summers were visual rather than intellectual traits. Dressed in black, he made a sombre impact; and his combination of formal courtesy and hauteur did not make for a plenitude of communication. The look of the man was emphatic, however. His head was large, his countenance white. There was almost a bloodlessness about it; and he told us his health required that he took no vegetables with his meat. To see this pale-skinned necromancer wearily forking up slices of cold white chicken was a strange experience: sensual, carnal and yet curiously ectoplasmic. The fowl seemed to be the substance—the element—of some esoteric Communion: some white, or not so white, Mass.
TERROR BY NIGHT: THE SLEEPING PARTNER
‘The Vampire’ (1897) by Philip Burne-Jones.
Strange Attractor Journal 2, 2005
For many years I have shared my bed with a complete stranger: a woman older than myself, whose name I do not know and will never know; and it may be that she is, in H.P. Lovecraft’s memorable term, ‘the unnamable’. For this is not a human being. Perhaps she was human once; I have no way of telling. So who is this mysterious creature? Well, if she has no personal name, she has a title—many in fact: Nightmare, Old Hag, Mara, the Boo Hag, the Night Hag, the Night Wraith, the succubus. Or, as I like to think of her, Madame Darkness. She comes in the dead of night and I awaken to find her crushing my chest, clasping me, silent and utterly malignant. It is indeed a terrifying moment and seems as real as life or death. No wonder the figure of the demon looms so large in the history of religious thought in so many countries and cultures. Is it any wonder ancient and medieval man trembled at the thought of such entities, for did he not have living proof of their existence? No priest, no holy water, no prayers, no bible could drive the thing from his bedchamber for long. These were surely the creatures of Satan himself, permitted to roam the earth for no reason known to the wise to terrify even the most godly of the Lord’s servants. For those ridden by Old Hag there was little hope. She might vanish for months on end, but the night would come when she would return to the sleeper in all her dark majesty. And for the victim hell’s gates must have seemed to yawn. . . .
I never experienced the Night Hag phenomenon until my thirties when I’d been living at 50 St John Street, Oxford, a former residence of that proleptic professor J.R.R. Tolkien, for some years, and so wondered whether the hag was wedded exclusively to the property. Our first encounter there, perhaps fifteen years ago, was by far the most vivid and alarming. There was an erotic dimension to it, for the Boo Hag, as she is termed in some parts of the southern United States, was (ahem!) straddling me, and I actually felt, or imagined I felt, her hair tumbling in torrents over my face and torso, so that I had difficulty breathing. Like any virginal youth I hadn’t the faintest notion what to do with my hands. Whatever the intruder was it seemed unlikely to be my elderly landlady seeking some nocturnal company, but at least the incident illustrated where the term ‘hag-ridden’ originated. In legend succubi are said to ride men to death; there are worse ways to go, I suppose.
In December 2002 I moved from central Oxford to East Oxford. It would have provided food for thought if, after relocating to the wastes of Cowley (Blackbird Leys, alias the Land of Mordor, is just a mile down the road), Old Hag had never troubled me more. But early in 2003 I ‘awoke’ to find her crushing my chest, silent, baleful and pitiless as of yore, my muscles frozen. Like my pestiferous clothes moths, she’d moved with me, though the moths are actually more of a nuisance. (Why do they always chew your Sunday best and ignore your old garments? A mystery.) ‘We’re flitting,’ as the family said, trying to leave their boggart behind. ‘Aye, we’re flitting,’ piped up the spook.
The word ‘nightmare’ originally referred to a nocturnal monster, its equine derivation relating to ‘the riding of the witch’. In Idylls of the King Tennyson tells how ‘. . . King Arthur panted hard,/Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed/When all the house is mute.’ The word comes from the Old High German mara, meaning incubus or evil spirit. In Old Norse the word is also mara; it’s mære in Old English and mare in Middle English, while the French for ‘nightmare’ is cauchemar—the fiend that tramples. A book examining the subject exists, The Terror that Comes in the Night, by David J. Hufford, Ph.D.
Succubi can hardly expect much of an erotic response from their victims if they insist on manifesting as Neanderthal old crones. (Is there such a thing as a young crone?) Ideally what is required is a comfy, hourglass superstructure built along the lines of Marilyn Monroe or Kim Novak. A relation by marriage of Ms Novak lodged at 50 St John Street in the 1990s, but that’s another story. Although rather skinny for my tastes, someone resembling that Scully woman from TV would do at a pinch (The X Files actually featured an Old Hag storyline). What turns up in one’s bed, however, is akin to the Wicked Witch of the West. Awaking to find a glamorous blonde on your pillow—practically unheard of in my case—would be wonderful, even if it was some foul slime from the nethermost pits assuming a devilish disguise. Could one resist lustful yearnings even in these circumstances? A $64,000 question if ever there was one.
Nowadays in her visitations the old thing seems content just to lie slumped and inert; not that I’m complaining, you understand. Creeping eld must have afflicted her libido; but what a blow to the ego that one can’t arouse some poor supernatural drab. Whatever the opposite of a babe-magnet is, I fear I’m it. Still, things could be more unpleasant: at least I’m not assailed by the male version, an incubus (from the Latin incubare: to lie upon). Now that would be a nightmare. Though reading in the works of the Revd Montague Summers, demonologist extraordinaire, I found a disturbing nugget of ancient lore. ‘. . . spirits in their own nature,’ he writes in Witchcraft and Black Magic, ‘have no sex’. He goes on to quote a Dominican theologian: ‘The same evil spirit may appear as a succuba to a man, and as an incubus to a woman.’ Damnation!
It is odd that if the visualisation of the thing is generated purely from the imagination that the visitant is perennially bony, lank-haired and ageing, though not necessarily ancient: her hair seems dark. I get the impression, though am never quite sure, that she is naked. The face I never see, but perhaps this is just as well. In a vivid image in his comic masterpiece Keep the Aspidistra Flying George Orwell refers to ‘succubi with pimply backsides’. Whether this description has a
ny basis in myth or fact I know not, and don’t wish to test the theory.
One particularly uncanny aspect of this odd bedtime relationship was that after I reread The Devil Rides Out a couple of years ago, after a gap of more than thirty years, I had a variation on the experience, directly inspired by Dennis Wheatley’s book. Rather than the beldame, it seemed that an amorphous lump was squatting on my chest, just like the foul, sluglike elemental from the abyss that scuttles across the floor and chuckles evilly in the thrilling chapter where our heroes are confined in the pentacle. In the Hammer film the thing was altered to a giant spider: clearly the budget couldn’t stretch to a genuine elemental. But as an occult sage might say: ‘Ah, don’t fret, that lumpish elemental was just your imagination playing tricks. But the Night Hag: she’s real!’
After all, there are those cases of Electronic Voice Phenomena where recordings appear to exhibit sounds made by discarnate entities. Who can state categorically that such creatures do not exist? As Aldous Huxley noted in The Devils of Loudun: ‘I can see nothing intrinsically absurd or self-contradictory in the notion that there may be non-human spirits, good, bad and indifferent. Nothing compels us to believe that the only intelligences in the universe are those connected with the bodies of human beings and the lower animals.’
There are, for example, myriad life-forms that we cannot observe with the naked eye. Man shared the planet with microbes and bacteria for millennia before he realised their existence. Apparently marine biologists discover two or three different species of sea-life every week. The inhabitants of the Middle Ages believed in demons because they accepted the teachings of the Church; and, ignorant of sleep disorders and pavor nocturnus (night terrors), they seemingly had visceral proof that such fiends existed. We don’t believe in demonic fiends, but on what basis do we reject belief? Because scientists can’t dissect them in laboratories. Highly convincing! Yet who are scientists to lay down the law on such matters? These wise, infallible folk who introduced mobile-phone masts and genetically-modified crops to our environment, assuring us there are no grounds for concern. Let’s leave aside the benefits of nuclear and biological warfare. There may be no conclusive proof that good and evil spirits exist¾though perhaps there is slightly more evidence in their favour than for weapons of mass destruction held by a certain foreign power¾but who has ever succeeded in disproving such things? Perhaps scientists can explain magnetism and the aura, revealed by Kirlian photography, surrounding organic life before dismissing such possibilities as spirit. Many scientists after all scoff at telepathy, but countless cases, not to mention plain commonsense, suggest it exists. Science still can’t tell us how homing pigeons, not to mention cats and dogs, manage to find their way across vast distances in order to return home.