by Norman Lewis
The fit, when it took place in the afternoon as I suspected it would, was the shortest on record. Polly got up quietly, went off to the kitchen for her own personal battle, and was back in a matter of minutes. She bore no sign of damage, walked quite steadily, took up her work again, and, after a half-hour or so, was able to speak. She had bought cakes for tea. It may have been the most relaxed day I spent at Wellfield Road.
I was awakened that night by a series of tremendous crashes, the sound of splintering wood, of shouts and of running feet. I got up, fumbled my way down the dark back stairs into the kitchen where a light was on, then slipped through into the hallway to reach the bottom of the front staircase. The bathroom door at the top of the stairs had been smashed open with an axe, left standing against the wall, and pandemonium was going on in the bathroom. I went up the stairs, and Aunt Li in her nightgown, her hair in curlers standing up like a golliwog’s, rushed out of the bathroom to push me away, then dodged back inside again. Following her I saw Aunt Polly, also in her nightgown, who seemed to be standing, very straight and stiff against the wall, held by Grandfather who was struggling with something attached to her neck, while Annie in the background waved her arms up and down like a frantic bird about to take off. A moment passed before I realized that Polly was attached by the neck to a lamp bracket that had bent double under her weight, so that now she stood on tiptoe. It was a frozen instant in a scene overbrimming with activity, with flying shapes and shadows, and faces frenzied in the candlelight; Annie flapping up and down the bathroom; Grandfather’s pyjama trousers falling over his ankles, his deep baying cries and bass sobs; Polly’s thin falsetto breaking through with a psalm as soon as the cord was loosened from her throat; the smell of Jockey Club and urine.
Grandfather and Aunt Annie hauled Polly away to her bed and stood guard over her while Li went for the doctor, who at long length arrived and bustled up the stairs carrying a contraption of buckles and straps.
Two days later my mother arrived. During our separation she had changed slowly in my memory, becoming saint-like, calm, aloof and sedate. Now suddenly confronted with her in the flesh, she was a stranger, earthy and vigorous, but almost unrecognizable, and I was disappointed to find that I was less excited and pleased to see her again than I had expected to be, and unhappy with the self-sufficiency that I had developed.
Polly, released from constraint, had dressed and prepared herself most carefully for her reunion with her dearest friend and ally, and I could see that she was her old self once more, ready in her stoical and indomitable fashion, in the way of the hero of Pilgrim’s Progress, to stand up to the many blows that life would continue to shower upon her. I find it hard to believe that Polly could have written the poison-pen letters. It was not compatible with her character, as I understood it. Nevertheless, even the strain of being under suspicion would have been enough to drive her to her attempted suicide.
Li had sad news for me. It was decided that I should go home with my mother, and we went on our last walk together to the top of Pen-lan. Although I was never able to remember anything else she told me, this I did. ‘They’re sending me away on holiday,’ she said. She clenched her lips until they disappeared, and this, although she had ceased to cry while we were together, showed me that she was unhappy.
‘I’m going to another house,’ she said.’ A place with a garden. They don’t keep cocks.’ She brightened up at a thought that had occurred to her. ‘They give you tea in the morning before you get up,’ she said.
‘That will be nice, Auntie,’ I told her.
We walked back down the steep and narrow lane together, hand in hand. I was sorry for her. I didn’t want either aunt to be sent away, but it seemed unfair that it had to be her, and not Polly.
Part Two
The Other Side
Chapter Three
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 recognizable, 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 shop-window 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 hi
s 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 séances, 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’s sincere belief that eventually, through my father, he would achieve the only thing he asked for in 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 séance 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 séance when my father entered into a state of trance, so this séance was conducted by a visiting clairvoyant, a Mrs Carmen Flint, who proved to be business-like 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 séance 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 séance 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 séance, 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 recognizable as ‘oui’. 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 m
oved 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 séance 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.