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, const.i.tuting 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 v.a.g.i.n.a, which had been operated on to permit the accommodation of so much material. Her unmasking had no effect whatever upon my att.i.tude 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 result 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 ent.i.tled "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. n.o.body in the village begrudged him these. It was a.s.sumed that the ruling cla.s.ses, compelled by custom to eat meat every day, suffered s.e.xual desires from which the peasantry were spared by a diet which included meat only once a week and limited s.e.xual activity to Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sured 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 n.o.body 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 G.o.d-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 dest.i.tution. 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-cla.s.s 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 a.s.sorted 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sociation 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-cla.s.s 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 coa.r.s.e 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.
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 G.o.ddess 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 n.o.body 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 seance 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sistant with a red spot painted on her forehead, and a portmanteau full of equipment. The medium and his a.s.sistant 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 c.h.i.n.k 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 a.s.sistant plucked the strings of what might have been an Indian zither for a few moments, before the lights were turned out, and the seance 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 m.u.f.fled 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 t.i.ttering, 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 s...o...b..r 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 circ.u.mstances which he listed, but he hoped that the apports would help to compensate for that. He was a.s.sured 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sistant, 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 seance 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 pa.s.senger"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, and 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 r.e.c.t.u.m, 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 t.i.tanic disaster - the fearful virago Lady Meux - once a Gaiety Girl - probably General French who had presided over the ma.s.sacres 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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sist, promising to put aside all his other duties to be present on the next Sunday evening seance.
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 seance 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 circ.u.mstances 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, G.o.d 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 cla.s.ses in his house.
Every boy in the village, without exception and including myself, attended these cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.ses 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 s.e.x. In this cla.s.s Mr Bowles discussed the facts of life with extreme frankness, and we had learned from boys attending the cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 for 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual.
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 b.u.t.terflies 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.
More stimulating still was Mr Bowles" museum, housed in part of the stable buildings, containing an elephant"s skull, innumerable fossils, and a wonderful collection of stuffed birds. Mr Bowles employed his own taxidermist, the possessor of remarkable imagination and taste, who did not simply stuff birds, but "set them up", in naturalistic and convincing att.i.tudes, furnishing the large cases in which they were displayed with objects such as stones and artfully counterfeited gra.s.ses, twigs and foliage in reproduction of the subject"s natural environment.
Mr Bowles, who himself did not care to shoot, had shown ingenuity and perseverance in establishing his collection. His method was to distribute coloured ill.u.s.trations of rare birds to all the gamekeepers in the area with a list of bounties payable, based on the bird"s scarcity. In this way he had secured, as he put it, great rarities, including a bittern, a hen harrier, and the only great spotted woodp.e.c.k.e.r recorded in this country, all of them shown in the sprightly postures of feeding, of courtship, or aggression. The taxidermist"s masterpiece was a family of long-eared owls, the last chick having actually been a.s.sisted to hatch out before inclusion in a still-life composition which the young all clamoured for their share of a vole in which the male bird, wings outstretched, was shown holding in its beak.
We were free to wander at will over the Bowles land, which shared a special kind of stagnant beauty with that of the great neighbouring estates. This had once been part of a royal chase, in the making of which so many homesteads and hamlets had disappeared. What remained was a vista of parkland spa.r.s.ely planted with oaks and elms, and a small wood here and there where once the red deer hunted by the King and his n.o.bles could take shelter and reproduce their species. The deer had been able to look after themselves, but the pheasants that replaced them could not, and their rearing for the gun demanded the elimination of half the native forms of wild life. Nowadays the woods were full of little gallows on which the gamekeepers displayed their ghastly trophies.
The sportsmen had got rid of the fauna, and Victorian planthunters had completed the gentle monotony of the scene. Mr Bowles could remember from his childhood the royal ferns, the orchids and the lilies of the valley that grew here before they had been uprooted to end their days in Victorian conservatories. Of these not a sign remained. This was a place, too, without a past. There must have been heroes, prophets, saints, here too as there had been in Wales, but if so no memory of them remained. In Forty Hill, Bull"s Cross and Whitewebbs, we faced the matter-of-fact nothingness of present times from which the imagination offered no escape. Here we were watched by no unseen presences. Who could have imagined Arthur or the enchanter Merlin walking amongst these trees, or Druids working their magic in these fields?
Mr Bowles was always available to us, always pleased to be called on. We were debarred entrance by the front door of Myddelton House, but he was usually to be found sitting at the window of his study at the back, or else on the seat of the adjoining lavatory, which displayed two-thirds of his body to the garden. A whistle would bring him to the back entrance to let the caller in.
He painted wild flowers for reproduction in his books, often taking several days over a single crocus. He would freely, as if talking to another artist, discuss his work, but apart from that the talk was usually on mending the fences of character. His theory was that all of us boys suffered from a "besetting sin", and having established what it was, he would hammer away at it continually. Although most of us felt that there was nothing much wrong with us as we were, a wickedness had to be concocted to satisfy Mr Bowles. From the way the conversation went it was clear that he was on the look-out for admissions of l.u.s.t, but failing all else he was ready to settle for gluttony or sloth. We played our part in a straight-faced way in this charade, but it struck us, nevertheless, as absurd that a boy who had to get up at five every morning to do a paper round for which he was paid one shilling and six pence a week should be obliged to accuse himself of being lazy, and that others who suffered the ignominy of being fed "on the parish" at the soup kitchen in Lavender Road School should confess to being gluttons. We would have agreed in a respectful and uncritical manner that the rich as we saw them were slothful, l.u.s.tful, wrathful, covetous and gluttonous, but the sins Mr Bowles warned us against were in the main beyond our reach.
Mr Bowles was convinced that religion of almost any brand - including even Spiritualism - was good for the poor, but was not at all sure that spiritual healing, as practised by my mother, could provide any real benefit. He saw it as tending to short-circuit the reformatory process of sickness when a.s.sociated with a reasonable amount of pain. What, after all, would become of the quality of fort.i.tude if pain did not exist? Nevertheless, he was much intrigued by the story, which had gone the rounds, of Miss Tupperton and her dog, and asked for whatever further details of the case I could get. These I promised to provide.
It turned out that, confronted in the end with Miss Tupperton"s tearful beseechings to heal the animal of its diarrhoea by a discharge of her spiritual currents, my mother had stalled by telling her that she would have to consult with members of her circle, now twelve in number, before reaching a decision. Thus Spiritualists had never been able to define the territories of their belief, nor make up their minds on a number of fundamental principles. In this case a dispute immediately arose as to whether or not animals had souls, and it was argued that if they had not, spiritual healing was neither appropriate nor would be beneficial. For decades now innumerable seekers after the truth had plied the spirits with their questions, yet the beyond remained seen as through a gla.s.s darkly. Did the birds sing there? Did the flowers bloom in spring? Should there be no more cakes and ale? Was love still thwarted? Could it be, according to a large body of Spiritualist opinion, that those who pa.s.sed on were not even freed from the processes of ageing - however benign - and if youthful skin was wrinkled in the end, and hairs turned white, did not a second death await them on the other side?
Those who were attached to animals were in the majority in Forty Hill, and they could not imagine a future life in which they would be separated from their horses, their dogs, their cats. But all the voices of the other world speaking through such as my father seemed unable to decide - or even to have failed to notice - whether they were present or not. The arguments that went on through the movement were reflected in the conflicting opinions of my mother"s circle. My mother believed that domestic animals, "put into the world to serve men", were immortal, but that all the rest lived and died and that was the end of them. She was opposed by Mrs Thresher and several supporters who argued that you had to draw the line somewhere. If dogs, why not rats? Why not jellyfish? Why not tapeworms? Why not the most primitive of all forms of life, manifesting itself in a single cell? Long and earnest discussions took place, but in the end my mother was victorious, agreement was reached and pets were confirmed in their possession of souls. Miss Tupperton was invited to bring her dog back for treatment, which was successful, for in due course the diarrhoea cleared up.
Two years later I visited Myddelton House for what proved to be the last time. I found an enormous green Bentley standing outside the front entrance. It belonged to a nephew Mr Bowles did not particularly like, and I had reason to suspect that as soon as he had heard the bellow of its exhaust in the drive he would have slipped away to hide, either in the museum or the garden. In the end I found him in his summer house painting a fritillaria dug up on some Greek island. The summer house - his favourite place of refuge - was built over a little lake upon which floated the great enamelled shapes of water lilies of many colours. The banks had been planted with j.a.panese irises and a Chinese thicket of bamboo and thorns, to provide cover for the birds which flashed their wings and sung among them continually. Once in a while, Mr Bowles said, some rarity - and he had mentioned a Cetti"s warbler - would be attracted to this seductive environment and encouraged to nest there. When this happened, he would send for a marksman to secure the bird or birds, and his taxidermist would create another masterpiece, in the case of the Cetti"s warbler perched on a reed, a dragonfly in its bill, over the nest: an aquatic tableau completed with feathery rushes, waxen flowers, and green painted gla.s.s that never quite counterfeited water.
He looked up from his work, and for a moment I thought he hadn"t recognized me, but then he waved. I noticed that he was using a magnifying gla.s.s held in his left hand, while he painted with the right, and remembered that back in the days of the confirmation cla.s.s his sight had seemed to me to be weak.
I may have been the only one of his pupils who displayed interest in his garden, and he was eager to show me his latest example of the triumph of ingenuity over environment. This was a small orange tree, imported from Spain, its roots still embedded in a hundredweight of Spanish soil, which after much experimentation with mulching, fertilizers and liquid feeds, but without the aid of artificial heat, had produced a single, small greenish fruit. Although, like so many rich men, Mr Bowles believed himself to be poor and wore his brother"s cast-off clothes, he had spent a considerable sum to build a walled enclosure round this tree, fitted on the inside with adjustable mirrors which had to be constantly varied in their angle to the sun to reflect its maximum light. It was a bad time for the visit, for on entering the enclosure, the first thing we saw was the single orange lying on the ground, where some small boy had thrown it in disgust after biting into its bitter flesh. Mr Bowles showed stoicism over this reverse, the latest of many acts of vandalism from which he had suffered. In the last week alone, the cloth on the billiard table had been ripped, and the display case with a tableau of Long Eared Owls smashed and their stuffed newly-hatched chicks scattered about the floor. It was a small price to pay, he seemed to think, for the satisfaction it gave him to watch over the young and guide them into the right paths at the time when they were most open to influence.
We walked on. One of the members of this year"s confirmation cla.s.s was cutting his initials in the trunk of a tree from Patagonia, and others chased each other across beds in which rare plants grew that had to be fussed over by the gardeners like sickly children. Mr Bowles followed them with his failing eyes, intoxicated with the aroma of early adolescence - so soon to fade. His one sorrow was that none of them could be relied upon to become regular church-goers, and would almost certainly desert the faith as I had done. His theory was that boring sermons lay at the bottom of the trouble. Mr Bowles" father, who had been patron of the living, had refused to allow sermons to be preached at all, and in his days every pew had been full. I knew only too well why, but it had nothing to do with sermons.
He asked how many people attended my mother"s church - managing to infuse the word with a civilized tolerance that concealed his contempt - and I told him up to two hundred in fine weather.
"And do you really think she cured that wretched dog of diarrhoea?" he asked, and I said I thought it would have got better in any case.
"She"s reputed to be very successful with her treatment, however unorthodox it may seem."
"Half the people who go to her only imagine they"re ill, sir."
"So it"s faith, then. A case of pick up thy bed, thy faith hath made thee whole."
"That"s all she claims for it," I told him.
"Did you know your father makes up wonderful medicines?" he asked, and I told him I helped with the bottling at weekends.
"Interesting to know what they contain."
"Nothing very much," I said. "Water and flavouring mostly."
"A case of faith again."
"Yes, sir."
"I wish you hadn"t told me that," Mr Bowles said. "I"ve been taking that elixir of his for years."
Our path led us to the bank of the New River, the great ca.n.a.l cut by Mr Bowles" ancestor, Sir Hugh Myddelton, to bring well-water to London, upon which the family"s fortunes had been established. Several boys were fishing. One of them, at a distance from the rest, was dressed in a grotesque fashion. Mr Bowles explained that this scare-crow result followed a campaign by the Mothers" Union to persuade necessitous mothers to attempt, at least, to make their boys clothing in addition to dresses they normally made for their daughters. This boy, like several other members of the cla.s.s, had been sent to mix with his friends wearing a cap and jacket produced in the home, and they had turned their backs on him. All the Mothers" Union had succeeded in doing was to create social pariahs.
While this sad business was under discussion we suddenly heard the sound of ringing, jubilant voices, recognized with alarm by Mr Bowles as those of his nephew and the girl he had brought with him, who were clearly coming in our direction. He hastily grabbed me and we ducked into some bushes remaining hidden until the couple pa.s.sed. From the glimpse I caught of them he was as handsome and dashing as I knew he would be, and she as beautiful, the pair of them differing not so much from natives of Enfield in their beauty and their dignity, but by the way in which they spoke, and for all who might be listening to their intimacies to hear. The fact was that Mr Bowles" village boys had no existence for them. They probably did not even register their presence. They were so splendid, but why had G.o.d given them the Earth?
When they were out of sight - although the gay lilting voices went on and on - Mr Bowles and I came out from behind the bushes and began our walk back, and soon the summer house was in sight. Around us the birds kept up their chorus. A shower came and went, bringing down a little sodden blossom and pelting the surface of the lake with the heavy summer raindrops the dragonflies so effortlessly avoided. The smoke of burning sap from the gardener"s fire tickled the membranes of my nose, a dog barked, a fish splashed, the swifts dived on us with their thin, delirious screeching. Even the rich could possess no finer moment than this.
Mr Bowles took up his brush and his magnifying gla.s.s again. "My eyes are going fast," he said.
"Can"t the doctors do anything for you, sir?"
"I"ve seen the man at Moorfields and he"s given me up." He laughed. "Your mother"s my only hope now. Perhaps I should see her."
I nodded, showing apparently slight enthusiasm.
"You seem so sceptical," he said. "Why don"t you say something encouraging?"
"I know she"d be happy to see you," I said, "and there"s nothing to be lost in seeing her, but if it"s the faith that counts, I suppose it depends more on you than upon her."