by Norman Lewis
Mrs Flint, who had been given an enthusiastic buildup 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 séance. 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 séance, 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 hypnotize 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 séance 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-à-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 séances 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 séance, 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 séances 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 generalized.
‘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 séance 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 realized that the almost inhuman sounds made by the medium in the film Rashomon, 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 séance 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 séances 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 t
he 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 lipservice 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 séances 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.