by Norman Lewis
Miss Tupperton gazed down at them with the deepest interest, and possibly amazement. She caressed my mother’s splayed-out fingertips with her own, which were as smooth and as delicately tapering as those of a porcelain Chinese goddess of mercy which had been recently brought from Hong Kong and added to my mother’s collection by a grateful patient she had cured of long-standing arthritis in the knees. ‘How wonderful it must be to have found such a mission,’ Miss Tupperton said, and my mother agreed in her rather flat, downright manner.
‘What do the people who come to you tend to suffer from?’
‘Well, headaches,’ my mother said. ‘Headaches they can’t get rid of.’
‘Only headaches?’
‘Backaches, too. Bad legs, varicose vein trouble. Fallen arches. A lot of people suffer with the kidneys these days. Half of it’s in the mind.’
‘Do you ever treat them for stomach troubles?’ Miss Tupperton asked.
‘Once in a while, but two pennyworth of castor oil usually does the trick. It’s the people who are out of tune with the psychic forces that I can help. I give them a fresh start along the right path. After that they manage for themselves.’
‘The healing process,’ Miss Tupperton said. ‘Is this something an outsider like me is allowed to see?’
‘There’s nothing secret or mysterious about it,’ my mother said. ‘It’s no different from first aid. I work without bandages and splints, that’s all. We hold a simple service on Sunday evenings, and anyone who cares to can join in. After that those who require healing stay on, and I do what I can for them.’ Something occurred to her. ‘Is there any way in which I can be of help to you?’
‘Not personally,’ Miss Tupperton said. She tinkled brief laughter. ‘Let’s say not at this moment, thank goodness. I’m terribly interested in what you do, but I wasn’t thinking of myself.’
‘It doesn’t matter who comes to me in search of help,’ my mother said. ‘All are welcome, irrespective of their beliefs, and no appointment is required. Some Sundays I may deal with a dozen requests for healing. Sometimes nobody comes. I’m always there if called upon, and you don’t have to sit in a waiting room. There’s nothing miraculous in what I do. I’m dealing with a body in a state of rebellion against the psyche, and I try to put a stop to that rebellion.’
Miss Tupperton shook her head in wonderment. What a great day it would be for me, I thought, if only my mother could make a Spiritualist of her.
‘Come along if you can,’ my mother told her. ‘I can’t promise you any great surprises, but I think you’ll find it a happy experience.’
Miss Tupperton said she would very much like to come, and thought she might be able to.
The séance preceding the service and the healing on this particular Sunday night was a very special one. It was to be conducted by a celebrated medium, brought at some cost from Sydenham, whose speciality was the employment of a trumpet through which the spirits made direct communication, speaking therefore quite independently of aid provided by the human vocal cords, and in voices recognizable to those who had known them before passing on.
There was a touch of hard-edged professionalism about these proceedings of which Mrs Carmen Flint would have heartily approved. The medium, a dark, stern-faced young man arrived with a middle-aged Indian lady assistant with a red spot painted on her forehead, and a portmanteau full of equipment. The medium and his assistant scampered through the downstairs rooms, checking them for their vibrations and astrological alignment, lighting incense cones and making sure that when the lights were turned off not a chink of daylight could be seen through the curtains. The use of my mother’s musical box and her gong were spurned, instead of which the lady assistant plucked the strings of what might have been an Indian zither for a few moments, before the lights were turned out, and the séance began.
Instantly the room was filled with the sounds of shuffling, bustling movement; there were soft winged bats in the darkness above us and a strong breeze as if from an electric fan stirred my hair. A muffled megaphone hooting began in the darkness several feet above my head, then, linked to a sound of the kind a balloon makes when suddenly deflated, blew itself away round the invisible cornices.
The bats flapped back, there was a sound — reverently received by the sitters, no doubt — of an artificially prolonged fart, a gush of gibberish, some insane tittering, a catcall, the drone of a preacher in an unknown language, then a few lucid sentences on some insignificant topic. Just before the lights went on, something like slobber splashed copiously across my cheek and lips, and a moment later the other sitters gathered to congratulate me as a recipient of materialized spittle from the beyond.
The supreme moment of surprise and delight followed when one of the sitters, putting his hand into his jacket pocket, discovered something unexpected and brought it out, holding a small spherical object, in appearance like a badly-made marble, upon which mystic signs had been painted. This was an ‘apport’, also from the other world, and a moment later there were cries of astonished pleasure as more apports turned up in pockets and handbags. Communication with the other side had been less than satisfactory, the medium explained, through various adverse circumstances which he listed, but he hoped that the apports would help to compensate for that. He was assured that they would.
For me this was a wretched performance, and I was immensely grateful that my mother had held back from persuading Miss Tupperton to be present.
The laying-on of hands took place, as it often did on a fine summer’s evening, in the garden. A number of chairs had been grouped in a cleared space in front of a greenhouse full of pot plants on which my father was endeavouring to grow mistletoe, and here the patients awaited my mother’s ministrations.
There were seven of them, all women, and Dr Distin had given them up. They were all imprisoned in the long humdrum years called middle age, which here occupied the half of a lifetime. Their bodies had lost shape, were over-fat or distorted into crippled angularities. They suffered from stiffness of the joints, swollen knees, pains that rejected diagnosis, skin ulcers, bed-wetting and bad dreams, and, although they often wore expressions of shallow satisfaction, despair masquerading under as many forms as the death which waited so many years ahead cast its long shadow upon them.
My mother had learned that in some of the more stubborn cases the purely spiritual processes of the laying-on of hands could be bolstered by at least a pretence of manipulation, about which at this stage she knew nothing, although she had begun to study this also by correspondence. The illustration to the first lesson, to deal with fibrositis of the neck, had shown something like a simple ju-jitsu hold to be followed by a sharp tug, and on this occasion the method was used for the first time. Other bodily parts that had resisted the power of thought were kneaded and pounded in accordance with instructions, and in all cases my mother was rewarded by claims of instant relief.
The medium and his assistant, who had packed away their gear, stood looking on with supercilious smiles until the time came to leave to catch their bus. They had been asked by the excited members of the séance for an explanation of the mystic signs on their apports, but this they were unable to give, saying only that they were of unusual interest as materializations from the third astral level.
It was a fitting end to a successful evening, although with all the members of the congregation going off home, the musical box at last silenced and the last incense cone burned to a tiny crater of ash, my mother was a little perturbed and disappointed that Miss Tupperton should not have put in the promised appearance.
Then, with a squeaking of brakes, a rattle and a cough, Sir Henry’s Lanchester limousine drew up. The chauffeur jumped down to open the passenger’s door, and Miss Tupperton stepped down just as the last of the departing patients hobbled past. She came into the garden, full of apologies. The car, she said, had absolutely refused to start. My mother had hoped and even expected that she would have been accompanied by a friend in need of treatment, a
nd later explained to me that she had held in reserve part of her spiritual resources to deal with this possibility. But Miss Tupperton was alone, apart from the chauffeur carrying a receptacle like a large hamper basket. This he put down and opened to disclose a French poodle lying on a soiled and malodorous cloth. ‘The most terrible diarrhoea,’ Miss Tupperton explained. ‘The poor pet’s been like this now for more than a week. I’m utterly shattered and the vet’s quite useless. I felt sure you’d help me if you could.’
Chapter Four
MY FATHER NEVER CEASED to be stunned by the credulity of others, although he lacked self-criticism in this matter. Suddenly there was a fad for yeast and people were spending up to a quarter of their incomes on the yeast tablets they crammed themselves with. It was the epoch of Dr Simpson’s Iodine Locket, worn openly or in secret by millions of English men and women. More extraordinary even was the addiction to the use of the Wonder Worker. This was a small spade-shaped Bakelite contraption designed for insertion in the rectum, intended originally as a cure for haemorrhoids but later accepted for its talismanic properties in the treatment of all human ills. Innumerable intelligent people, including the cream of local society such as the Bowleses, Orr-Lewis — who had survived the Titanic disaster — the fearful virago Lady Meux — once a Gaiety Girl — probably General French who had presided over the massacres of Ypres, possibly even Miss Tupperton herself, were walking the streets and the country lanes of England with these things stuck up their bottoms. Their gullibility, my father said, passed all comprehension. Yet he himself seemed to me avid for belief, and went to endless lengths in support of the Spiritualist position in his search for occurrences that might be presented as contravening the accepted laws of nature.
Photography appeared to him to offer scope in this direction, and he argued that the silver emulsion of a film or plate was sensitive not only to visible light but to allied radiations undetected by the human eye. He bought a postcard-size Kodak camera, and went round the house clicking the shutter endlessly, particularly in the meditation room in the vicinity of the Chinese figurine, the prayer flag, the lingam and a small Indian dancing idol with ten arms. All of this was to no purpose, and nothing ever came out.
Someone gave him a photographic text-book, from which he learned about stops and exposures. He changed to a Zeiss with a big lens and loaded it with high-speed Illingworth plates. Using a stand and making time-exposures, he got reasonable pictures of the furniture and of those of his friends who could hold themselves still for fifteen seconds, but nothing appeared in the pictures other than what the eyes saw. This he put down to lack of technical skill. The Spiritualist press published photographs full of misty apparitions and ectoplasmic messes coalescing into human form. He corresponded with the photographers and set to work again, fortified with new theories. The problem was, he learned from the experts, that spirits were as much on the move in the ordinary way as the inhabitants of our world. Therefore flashlight shots offered the best hope of success. It was also valuable to make contact with a spirit in advance, explain what was required and fix a time and place for the photography, thus ensuring the co-operation of the spirit friends. This seemed to him and the other members of the circle perfectly reasonable.
Several circle members had Red Indian guides, and these had a reputation for dependability. The senior Red Indian was attached to Mrs Head: a shaman of the Blackfoot tribe named Thunder Star, who in a feat of intense mental concentration had caused a small tributary of the Missouri River to run backwards, before passing on in about 1830. When Mrs Head, using my father as intermediary, had put this problem to him, explaining the photographic processes involved, he had readily agreed to assist, promising to put aside all his other duties to be present on the next Sunday evening séance.
When the time came, the mouse-bitten chair in which Thunder Star would pose was carried into the middle room, my father set up his camera, opened the lens and exploded a small heap of magnesium powder on a tray. The flash was like looking into a cold sun. Membranes of layered smoke lifted gently to the ceiling. Mr Thresher thanked Thunder Star on behalf of the members of the circle for his co-operation and, since this chair was deemed to have been vacated, it was removed and the séance proceeded as usual.
Later that evening, the dishes and chemicals came out and we developed the plate, and as soon as it was dry next day, a print was made. Examining it, my father’s excitement was immense. It was starkly lit, as it was bound to be, with all the faces crowded into it whitewashed by the flash, and familiar objects surfacing from onyx seas of shadow. But the derelict chair was not quite empty, for at the level of the head a tight nebulae of stars shafted rays in all directions. This my father pronounced to be a halo, although of the head that should have supported it there was no sign. The picture produced a sensation among circle members and persuaded two or three waverers to join the movement. A print, accompanied by a full description of all the circumstances in which the photograph was taken and a sentence or two about the terrestrial existence of the shaman Thunder Star, was sent to The Two Worlds, who returned a letter worded with guarded enthusiasm.
Mentioning the phenomenon to the man from whom he had bought the camera, and whom he hoped to convert, my father found himself brushed aside. The man looked at the print without any evidence of surprise. His opinion was that the unusual effect, as he termed it, had been produced by nothing more mysterious than the reflection of the flash striking the surface of the lens. That, although my father indignantly refuted the explanation, was the end of the photography.
Enfield’s most interesting native, and its only celebrity, was Sir Henry’s younger brother, Augustus Bowles, who happened to live quite nearby at Myddelton House, Bull’s Cross. The Bowleses were descended from Sir Hugh Myddelton, a man of protean achievement, jeweller, banker, engineer, poet, interloper on the Spanish Main, begetter on his first wife alone of a total of sixteen children, and deviser of the herculean enterprise by which water was brought from the artesian wells of Hertfordshire to relieve the plague-stricken London of the seventeenth century. By my time, whatever the spirit or impulse had been that had raised this family to wealth and prominence, it was fast fading, although Augustus Bowles may have retained a particle of his ancestor’s genius, for he was a good painter and one of the most famous of English gardeners, who had had many plants named after him and had written standard works on botanical subjects. Unlike his rather foolish brother, he was a deeply thinking man, philosophically committed to the existing order of things, and he had once persuaded Stanley Baldwin, with whom he was on terms of intimate friendship, to come along and address selected villagers on some national occasion. Mr Baldwin had quoted to us (as if we needed to be reminded), ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them great or humble, and ordered their estate’. In the village Mr Bowles fulfilled the perfect image of the squire, doing good works, holding the church as well as he could together, but above all interesting himself in the religious education of the boys for whom he conducted weekly confirmation classes in his house.
Every boy in the village, without exception and including myself, attended these classes, purely because of the irresistible benefits they entailed, although I cannot remember a single one who after confirmation bothered any more with the Church. A series of ten classes were held and, as we saw it, it was worth putting up with the boredom of nine of them for the top-rate entertainment offered by the tenth, on the subject of sex. In this class Mr Bowles discussed the facts of life with extreme frankness, and we had learned from boys attending the classes of previous years of an interesting demonstration he could be encouraged to give if faced by what he believed to be total incomprehension. For this purpose he kept ready two antique French dolls, and when at our last class there were cries from us of, ‘He doesn’t understand, sir. Show him your jig-a-jig,’ Mr Bowles unlocked and opened a drawer under his birds’ egg cabinet and took these out. In the rather solemn and awestruck tone he normally used fo
r reading the lesson in church, he drew our attention to the manner in which they were joined together. After that, a match was put to the combustion chamber of a tiny steam engine fuelled by cotton wool soaked in methylated spirits, to which the dolls were connected, and soon the tiny hips started to bounce, first slowly, then frantically as the engine warmed up, till finally with an ecstatic squeak of steam through a valve it was all over. A brief prayer in which we all joined followed, and our preparation for life was at an end. None of us realized at this time that Mr Bowles was a dedicated homosexual.
He was also a man who saw deep into the minds of boys, offering in return for their companionship the run of his magnificent garden, fishing in the section of the New River running through it, a game of billiards at any time in his sports pavilion, and a Bank Holiday entertainment three times a year, with organized games, more fishing with rods and tackle provided, and a lavish tea. In accordance with some ancient feudal custom the servants were sent away for this occasion and we were served by smiling members of the aristocracy themselves, who interested themselves for an hour in our lives and pressed us to stuff ourselves with cake.
Mr Bowles was happy on these occasions to show us, in person, the grand collections by which he expressed the typical countryman’s love of nature. He had beautifully arranged and labelled cabinets filled with many thousands of birds’ eggs which, in the case of particularly rare species, he still collected. In other cabinets were displayed some five thousand British butterflies and moths, sometimes including a hundred or so specimens of the same kind, showing slight colour variations. These included the even then celebrated Large Blue, and Mr Bowles told us, excited by the reminiscence, that he had gone to a place near Royston, where the last of them were, and helped in this extreme rarity’s extinction.