by Norman Lewis
Mrs Head tackled me. ‘You are very gifted,’ she said.
‘I don’t see why.’
‘We go by the power you bring to a séance. When you join with us the manifestations are so much stronger. We are all helped by your new guide. He has great spiritual force.’
It had been explained to me that I had received a kind of spiritual promotion, following which my first guide, a Methodist minister in a Welsh coal-mining town in this life, who sounded a dull man in our sparse communication through my father, had been replaced by a Tibetan lama.
The lama was imbued with the authority and the incontrovertible wisdom of the East. The interest flattered me and I was gratified for the sake of my parents, because the upgrading advanced their standing among their friends just as if I’d done particularly well in my school examinations. The possibility was slowly emerging that my parents hoped that I would one day become a Spiritualist medium. The pressures and the constant suggestion to which I was submitted made it hard for me to oppose this ambition. Instead, remembering the years that lay ahead before adult decisions would have to be taken, I was content to be carried along by the tide.
Following my experiences in Wellfield Road, Carmarthen, I had adopted a posture of non-commitment like a personal camouflage. I never argued, seldom offered a point of view. Nothing was impossible, but I had no real faith in marvels. When a visiting clairvoyant told me the date on a penny I was carrying in my pocket I felt no special surprise, and my only internal comment was, what does it matter? The house was full of poltergeist sounds that might have excited anyone else’s curiosity, but they left me indifferent. Several times of an evening when we were sitting alone in the kitchen there would be a loud rap, seemingly on the face of the clock, which my mother and father, accepting the presence of a ‘spirit friend’, would cheerfully acknowledge with some welcoming phrase, and at first I was reprimanded for my breach of good manners in failing to do the same. Occasionally, when we went on a visit to friends, we exported the phenomenon with us, and my parents would allude to the sudden interruption from the beyond in a pleasant and proprietorial way, while I was inclined to say, ‘Rap, did you say? I didn’t hear one.’
It was probably in an attempt to kindle a livelier interest that I was taken to London to witness a demonstration given by a materialization medium, Miss Mildred Frogley, who had once come to our house, and who possessed the rare power, shared by only two other mediums in the country, of reinvesting the spirits of the dead with their human form of old.
Neither my mother, my father, nor any member of their circle had seen a ‘materialization’ before, and they promised the supreme experience of my life, as they assured me it would be of theirs. For a week before the trip my mother spent most of the time in deep meditation, hoping in this way to conduce to the success of the materialization, even, perhaps — as she admitted — to assist one of our own loved ones to take visible shape.
The small London hall was crowded, full of the soft murmurings of anticipation against a background of sacred music played by a white-haired pianist in tails on a grand piano, with the accompaniment of a lady harpist. After a brief address Miss Mildred Frogley was introduced.
I immediately remembered her, because she had been younger than most of our visitors, and almost pretty, with malformed teeth but a sweet smile, and a soft, kind voice, and above all devoid of the pretentiousness which seemed to affect many of the mediums we had dealings with. I became intensely interested in what was about to happen.
The back of the stage and the boards themselves were covered in a dark material, and apart from the grand piano the only article of furniture it contained was an armchair, to the back of which had been fixed a dim red light, spherical in shape and hardly bigger than an orange. Miss Frogley wore a plain navy blue dress, high at the neck, and with long sleeves. When she sat in the chair the light was two or three metres above her head. She closed her eyes, and her lips moved as if she were saying a prayer. In the ordinary way her teeth seemed to show, but now, with her mouth closed and her head thrown back, she seemed really pretty in a religious way, like the picture of a saint. The lights were switched off, and I could see nothing of her but her face, suspended under the lamp.
Nothing happened for a long time. A soft-voiced choir sang a lullaby, came to its end and began again. Presently, as my eyes got used to the darkness, I could see something moving in sort of stealthy undulation like the umbrella of a jellyfish down close to Miss Frogley’s ankles. Her head was rolling from side to side, and her mouth had opened. She was moving her hands about in a rhythmic way, like an oriental dancer, and the jellyfish stuff, which I took to be what the Spiritualists called ectoplasm, was gradually building up and taking shape as what could have been a veiled figure. Then somewhere in the darkness behind us, a torch flashed and Miss Frogley, the ectoplasm trailing from her hands, was illuminated by a sudden beam. She jumped up with a little scream, someone shouted, there were cries of protest and the lights came on. Men broke away from others trying to hold them back and rushed the stage, and the last I saw of Miss Frogley was as she was being half-dragged, half-carried away, dragging a collapsed parachute of ectoplasm which in the strong stage lighting looked remarkably like curtain material.
My father burned the Daily Mail next morning within minutes of its arrival, leaving its tell-tale ashes in the empty grate. The position he and my mother had taken up was that this was just another shocking instance of the malicious interference of an ill-wisher who had not only put a stop to the arduous and difficult processes of materialization, but had placed the medium’s life in jeopardy.
Their story failed to impress me. On my way to school I used a penny, constituting one-third of my weekly pocket money, to buy a paper where the headline ‘Medium’s Hoax Exposed’ was spread across an inside page. Miss Frogley, said the paper, denied the allegation that twelve yards of chiffon found on the stage had been concealed in her vagina, which had been operated on to permit the accommodation of so much material. Her unmasking had no effect whatever upon my attitude towards Spiritualism, and I imagine that went for most Spiritualists too, who could take such setbacks in their stride.
I was sorry that my parents should have wasted their money and had a disappointing evening out, but I knew their faith had only been strengthened, if that were possible, by the paper’s opprobrium and scorn. Most of all I was sorry for Miss Frogley, whom I still enormously preferred to the unshakeable Mrs Flint; sorry too, that we should not see her again.
Forty Hill had a strangely unfinished look, fostered perhaps by its haphazard sandpits, and could quite well have been a settlement in rural Turkey where building materials were precious. Its landmarks were the Urban District Council’s rubbish dump smouldering incessantly like a pigmy Etna at one end of the village, and the large, but never quite completed parish church at the other.
The Vicar in those days was Canon Carr-Smith who, with his glowing pink cheeks and white beard, looked like an embittered Father Christmas. The Canon had only just taken over the living, which must from his point of view have been a discouraging one. The church, a cut-price Victorian Gothic structure, stood in an untidy thicket all too convenient for the villagers as a public lavatory, and few pews were occupied for a service. In the autocratic days of the present squire’s father, farm workers were checked off against his factor’s list at the church door, and failure to attend entailed the deduction of two shillings from the week’s wages, averaging sixteen shillings a week at the time. As soon as compulsion was removed, the farm workers stayed away and joined the proletarian abstainers of Goat Lane, none of whom had ever set foot inside the church.
A full complement of thirty or so shopkeepers, retired persons and impoverished gentry turned up in force for the Canon’s first service, where he was to be judged by a single yardstick; whether or not, as he entered the church, he bowed to the altar. The Canon bowed, and instantly lost half of his small flock. What little popularity he retained ebbed swiftly as a re
sult of his authoritarian manner and the emphatic expression of his dislikes. For example, he detested small boys like myself, whom he described as filthy animals, sometimes waylaying one to bellow in his ear, ‘Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.’ When the Canon found his Sunday evening congregation reduced to five elderly ladies and the permanent staff of a churchwarden, the bell-ringer and the organist, he was ready to blame the Spiritualist opposition and preached a sermon entitled ‘Oh Ye of Little Faith’, then went to Colonel Sir Henry Ferryman Bowles of Forty Hall, the lord of the manor, to discuss what if anything could be done to uproot the dangerous heresy that had taken root in his parish.
The Colonel was a phenomenon of English rural life hardly changed since the invention of the open-field system of agriculture. He had represented Enfield as a Tory MP longer than anyone could remember — although he had never made a speech in Parliament — he wielded huge and uncontested power, paid the lowest wages in the county, and was understood to possess a harem of three young, gracious and well-bred girls. Nobody in the village begrudged him these. It was assumed that the ruling classes, compelled by custom to eat meat every day, suffered sexual desires from which the peasantry were spared by a diet which included meat only once a week and limited sexual activity to Saturday nights. The poor applied different moral standards in their judgement of the rich. They knew only too well from the accounts of those who served them what went on in the big houses, but they had a sneaking admiration for their casual adulteries and their calmly supported cuckoldries. In Goat Lane spouses remained on the whole faithful because they had not the time or the energy to do anything else. Also they had hardly more privacy than goldfish in their bowls.
About two years before this I had actually met the Colonel, when I rang the front door bell of the Hall and asked his permission through the butler to go birdnesting on his estate. The Colonel came on the scene and permission was instantly granted. He glanced down at his watch and said regretfully that he would have come with me but for the fact that he had to chair a meeting of the Primrose League, an association of toilers for the Conservative cause. He seemed delighted to talk to me, relaxed perhaps, as a painful stammerer, in the company of someone who could hardly formulate his words at all. Before he let me go he insisted on taking me to see workmen engaged in digging a trench across his splendid lawn leading to the lake. Down this channel, he assured me, the electricity would flow harmlessly into the water should his house ever be struck by lightning again, as had just happened. It was his own idea, he said, and he could not imagine why nobody seemed to have thought of it before.
Sir Henry was our British village version of a Mafia chieftain, although by comparison Giuseppe Genco Russo, a much larger-scale landowner and head of the Sicilian Mafia whose character and doings I had occasion to study at a later date, was a progressive and socially responsible man, and I cannot imagine that Giuseppe would have recommended — as Sir Henry did, speaking on the bench — the re-introduction of man-traps to put an end to poaching. Both men rewarded their friends and dealt with their enemies after their own manner. The main difference between them in their respective feudal environments was that Giuseppe was companionable and relatively democratic. If a peasant came up to him in the dejected square of his home town, Mussomeli, and bent to kiss his ring, Giuseppe would embrace the man over whom he exercised power of life and death, and invite him to have a drink. Sir Henry — although not for me — remained aloof and God-like, isolated from such contacts by his underlings. Sir Henry owned the houses his workers lived in, and they were entirely dependent upon him for work. If any of them quarrelled they would go up to the Hall together and, just as Giuseppe did, Sir Henry would settle the dispute on the spot, in the way, short-circuiting the lawyers, that such disputes had been dealt with since the Norman Conquest. If a man displeased him — as for example in the case of a tenant who put up an election poster for the Liberal candidate — Sir Henry’s factor paid him a visit, not armed in Sicilian style with a sawn-off shotgun but in the English fashion of the period with the no less deadly threat of destitution. Ninety-five per cent of the electors of Forty Hill, few of them believing in the true secrecy of the ballot, cast their votes for Sir Henry, and his supporters were invited annually to a lavish entertainment at the Hall, with swings, roundabouts and coconut shies for their children in the grounds. Liberal and Labour voters, besides being certain of defeat, were debarred from these pleasures and other small inducements, such as sick-bed visits from the charitable ladies of Sir Henry’s Primrose League, with which loyalty was rewarded.
As my family owned their own house in a tiny enclave of independence called The Freehold, a call from Sir Henry’s factor to investigate the facts of Spiritualism would have been unsuitable. Instead my mother received a visit from a Miss Phoebe Tupperton, a young relation of Sir Henry’s whose branch of the family had fallen upon hard times, and who had come to live with her mother in one of his houses.
Miss Tupperton was one of the three young ladies forming, as it was supposed in the village, Sir Henry’s harem and who, by gossip conveyed through servants at the Hall, shared his company with each other on a one-month-in-three system. She was tall, willowy and beautiful, with the famous English upper-class clear complexion, based on plain but nutritious food, plenty of exercise and a damp climate. She appeared a member of a different race from the village girls who lived on suet puddings and chips, thus clogging their cells with starch, and in consequence had murky skins and heavy, brooding expressions like young feminine versions of Beethoven. This ethereal presence in the village caused some excitement among the village youth, who formed a club to exchange gossip and personal fantasies about her, and thus stimulate each other to acts of indecency.
The visit to my mother took place without warning, and therefore at an unpropitious moment. My mother dared not risk damage to the favourable vibrations gradually built up in the front room set aside for meditation, and the middle room was piled with Spiritualist paraphernalia of all descriptions, so Miss Tupperton was seated, gracious and smiling, at the end of the kitchen table, as far as possible from the work area, and slowly the inevitable odour of cooking vegetables was suppressed by that of Coty.
I was just home from school when this encounter took place. For the first time I was within a matter of feet of the woman I suspected of being the most beautiful in the world, and I was intoxicated, almost faint, after inhaling the assorted fragrances of her body spreading through the atmosphere of our kitchen, whether negative or polluted. I longed for her to become a Spiritualist.
What must it be like, I wondered, for this splendid and delicate creature, accustomed as she was to the palatial settings of the Hall, to find herself in a room with steamed-up windows, decorated by a framed advertisement for Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, a stuffed rat in a case having a fifth paw growing from the side of a thigh, and a plaster angel on the mantelpiece clasping a tiny box which I knew to contain the cured thumb of one of the crew of the Zeppelin shot down in flames in the year 1916 at Cuffley, two miles away.
I scuttled about, pushing out of sight such unappetizing sights as the dog’s bowl with the turkey’s feet it had not been able to finish. There was nothing to be done about the mouse-nibbled chair, which was sacrosanct since a visiting medium had reported seeing the ghost of James IV of Scotland seated on it the year before. Miss Tupperton appeared not to notice these things. Small silver bells chimed in her voice as she asked my mother if it was true that she was a spiritual healer, and my mother readily agreed that she was.
She had read some criticism of her activities by a local medical man in the Gazette and Observer, Miss Tupperton said, who had even suggested that what she was doing might be illegal. My mother told her that she had seen the letter too, but that according to advice she had received from the association to which she belonged she was doing nothing wrong. She laid no claim to medical knowledge, gave no medical advice, and charged nothing for her services, which were wholly concerned with the
treatment of the psyche, or if Miss Tupperton preferred the word, the mind.
In making her point my mother’s tone was conciliatory and affable. She told me later that she found Miss Tupperton exceedingly charming, and quite devoid of upper-class affectation of a kind that seemed often to produce an asphyxiating effect on people struggling for a foothold on the lower rungs of society.
‘Could you explain just how this is done?’ Miss Tupperton asked winningly, and my mother explained that by communing with the infinite she was able to switch on something that felt like a current coursing through her, which then, as a healing force, flowed out on contact with a human body through her hands.
‘And you place your hands on the affected bodily part?’ Miss Tupperton asked.
‘Where possible,’ my mother said. ‘Or in the case of the internal organs, as near as I can get to them. Healers who have reached a higher degree of development than myself are able to heal at a distance. Even by post.’
Miss Tupperton shook her head in sweet wonder, scattering soft lights through her hair. ‘Would you show me your hands?’ she asked.
My mother wiped her hands, which were permanently damp from the sink. They were almost as large as a man’s, with stubby fingers, reddened and coarse from work. The lines which interest students of palmistry had become grooves in the soggy flesh of the palms; there were roughnesses left by ancient chilblains over the knuckles; and the fingernails were broad and flat, slightly corrugated, cracked in places, and flaked with archipelagos of white spots of a kind said to derive from a calcium deficiency.