by Neil Spring
When at last I was released from the hospital I decided that I would heed the doctors’ advice and take myself away from London for a short time to somewhere relaxing, preferably near the sea, where I could properly recuperate and clear my head of its brooding melancholy. Solitude is rarely desirable, and I did not relish the idea of spending such a long time alone, in a part of the country I didn’t know, but I needed to escape. So when Mother drew my attention to an advert in the classified column of the Sunday Dispatch, I decided that the ‘remote, peaceful cottage’ in West Wales sounded ideal.
‘How long will you be gone?’ she asked me. We were sitting in the drawing room at home. My cases were packed and waiting in the hall. ‘Not as long as the last time, I hope?’
I suddenly realised that she might have regretted urging me to get away, and perhaps that she was afraid I wouldn’t be coming back. I stood, went round to her chair and took her hand, squeezing into it some gentle reassurance. ‘No, not nearly as long. You’ll be all right without me?’
‘Yes, of course. You need this.’ The warmth and loyalty in her voice was touchingly sincere. Her face was lined and her hair grey, but she was still a striking woman. My eyes roamed from the faded curtains to the stained carpet and tarnished silver to settle again on Mother’s face. ‘You can tidy the house, perhaps? Brighten the place up a bit?’
‘Yes.’
As I entered the hallway to collect my coat and suitcase a chill air pressed past me, and I wondered if I was making a mistake: if leaving Mother alone was ill advised. It wasn’t just the occasional scratching in the walls that made me hesitate: the house itself was beginning to feel different to me; as if our home was sheltering something hidden just beyond the limits of normal sight.
‘Sarah dear, are you all right?’
She was standing behind me. I turned, and for the briefest moment I fancied I glimpsed something alien in my mother’s gaze, as though a dense cloud was drifting in, covering her thoughts.
I blinked, and saw nothing at all abnormal in her expression. Only the familiar loyalty and unquestioning love I had come to rely upon.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind me leaving you?’ I asked again, and she quickly responded with a decisive nod. ‘Don’t worry about me. You must get away and enjoy yourself.’
That was comforting, if I overlooked the fact that I had felt something oddly recognisable – I might almost say something menacing – in the chill movement of air that had pressed past me and brought gooseflesh to my arms.
‘No more ghostly nonsense either,’ I instructed her, making her promise to leave seances and books about the paranormal alone.
Then a depressing thought hit me: Your mother may socialise with Spiritualists, Sarah, but at least she has some friends.
This is what ghosts do, I thought as I wrapped my mother in my arms. They bleed us of life and potential and hope and happiness. They make us shadows of ourselves.
That afternoon I left London determined to begin again.
*
Overhurst Farm, the cottage that was to be my temporary residence, stood on a wide cliff above an expanse of deserted beach with an uninterrupted view of the sea. I discovered it at the end of a half-mile track that led down from the hamlet of Talbenny, just outside Broad Haven, and on first sight my heart leaped. All around me was the cool fresh air I had come for and I drank it in eagerly, quickly dispelling any misgivings entertained about this trip.
My hostess was an elderly spinster who introduced herself as Miss Golding. She was welcoming and kind and I warmed to her immediately. She was, I think, glad of my company and I was grateful for her support. We sat together each morning at breakfast, looking out over the beautiful bay, discussing our lives and the newspaper reports that interested us. Then, during the afternoons, I would take myself off alone for short walks along the isolated stretch of beach, watching the birds wheel in the brilliant blue sky above me, before sitting for a while and resting in the long grass at the foot of the hill which rose from the beach to the spot where the cottage stood. Even at night, when the sense of isolation was at its highest and thick mists rolled in off the sea and gathered about the house, I never felt vulnerable; I had spent too long in the company of shadows to find anything in this natural splendour that could upset me.
Nothing had ever felt so perfectly right. Which made what happened on the Sunday of my third week at the cottage especially disappointing.
I arrived at the breakfast table just as the clock over the mantelpiece chimed eight, poured myself a cup of tea and reached for the morning newspaper. The news at that time was full of stories about the escalating troubles in Europe, and with some family on my mother’s side residing in Germany I was keen to learn more about what was happening there since the Reichstag fire the week before. But where was the newspaper? I looked about but couldn’t find it. Then I noticed that Miss Golding was watching me worriedly. When I asked her about it she became evasive, muttering something unconvincing about a late delivery due to the worsening weather. I held her gaze until she flinched and looked away. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. It was only then that she sat me down and reluctantly told me the name she had seen in the paper.
Harry Price.
I felt sick. But when at last she handed me the morning edition of the Sunday Dispatch, I realised the situation was even worse than I had imagined.
The headline screamed at me: ‘Price Detects Fraud – Sensational Exposure of Spiritualist Medium Rudi Schneider’. And below this was the damning photograph I had first laid eyes on some fifteen months earlier, which showed that Schneider had freed his hand while the phenomena occurred.
‘Let us face facts,’ Price was quoted. ‘Life after death has not been proved. The report has upset a great number of people, including some of our own Council who suggest that Rudi’s free arm had only been a trance movement. That is only a theory and I prefer to believe that the boy deliberately took advantage of the fact that I was ill that night and evaded my control.’1
Why had Price kept the fact of Rudi’s fraud a secret for so long? To shelter me from the humiliation of the truth? That hardly seem likely. Only when I cast my mind back to the night of the experiment did I remember the crucial information I had overheard in conversation between Price and Schneider, and the truth became apparent: ‘If it’s war they want then war they shall have.’
My old employer had played a long game, set a trap, spited his enemies, thrown Schneider and me to the wolves. I realised now that he must have suspected from the beginning that Schneider was performing separate seances for his rival researchers, the Society for Psychical Research, whom he loathed and resented; and to an ego the size of his, the idea was intolerable. So he had waited, insidiously courting the Society for Psychical Research in the process, all the time cultivating the necessary information to cause them maximum damage. When he had learned they were convinced of Schneider’s veracity he had waited until they had announced as much to the world’s media. And then, when he was certain he could refute their conclusions and embarrass them beyond measure, he had exacted his revenge.
By the spring of 1933, this was my assessment of his behaviour. And time has shown I was mostly correct. But what I could not have known then was that a deeper, more insidious kind of wickedness was also at work.
* * *
Note
1 Sunday Dispatch, 5 March 1933.
– 28 –
THE LONDON TERROR
I resume my account at a point six years after the last. If you were to ask me why I chose to skip such a period, I would reply that these were the years of my greatest contentment and the longest time that elapsed without my having any direct association with Harry Price.
I had returned from Wales determined to find new and fulfilling employment among other people of my age, and I soon did so when the Jupiter Film Locos Publishing Company, at 186 Wardour Street, London W1, accepted my application for the permanent position of secretary. I was delighted, and a w
onderfully active social life soon followed. Though I knew little about the industry, it was an exciting one in which to work – the public was going wild for the ‘talkies’ and the new modern colour stereoscopic flicks were simply marvellous! By 1934 I had become a sort of general manager with a secretary of my own. The fact that I had not married did not concern me because married women were at that time prevented from enjoying the privilege of work.
My new job brought freedom to enjoy myself. Though I was still living at home, I could now afford to treat Mother to some luxury, whether it was our visit to the seaside that summer or our many shopping trips in the following year to Dickins and Jones. Although for most of the time she seemed content, there were enough signs in her behaviour to make me suspicious. Like the afternoon in October 1935 when, over tea at Lyons Corner House, I glimpsed a glassiness in her eyes, as though she was listening not to me but to a different voice coming from somewhere else.
I preferred to spend as much time as possible away from our home. Although we had improved the decor, bought new furniture, even bought ourselves a pet – a small black cat we named Charlie – something about our house, particularly the landing outside Mother’s room, no longer felt ‘right’ to me, and all the idiosyncrasies about the place – the faint and intermittent tap, tap, scratching in the walls, the unexplained cold spots and chilly wisps of air – began taunting me. I didn’t want to believe there was anything wrong; I valued my new life too highly to permit the intrusion of such thoughts. Instead I sought comfort in alternative explanations. Perhaps Price was correct when he had hypothesised that houses like Borley Rectory somehow ‘kept’ human memories. Perhaps that was happening to us.
I see now what I was doing: using elaborate hypotheses to keep the past at bay. But for how long? Every so often someone would ask me about the time I had spent with Price all those years ago, and when that happened I would laugh off the question, giving him an excellent character and carefully omitting the juicy bits.
In this way I became very good at ignoring the lingering sense that there was unfinished business from my past. I learnt to resist the dreams of Borley Rectory and its dark nun. For a time the distance I had imposed between the past and myself enabled me to blow them quite easily away.
Until one night in 1937, when I arrived home from a late work supper in Soho to find Mother crouching in darkness at the top of the stairs.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, feeling at once intrigued and alarmed. But she didn’t answer me. She didn’t flinch. Even as I reached the stop of the stairs and knelt beside her, raising my hand to take the wet sponge from her grasp. The wallpaper was damp and smudged.
I asked again, ‘What are you doing? It’s approaching midnight.’
My voice was strained, and I could see now that Mother’s eyes were wide and empty and shining like glass.
Then she did flinch. Blinked once. ‘Sarah, dear … there you are.’
I could hear the uncertainty and confusion in her voice, could see it in her eyes as they dropped from my face to the wet sponge in my hand. The mystery took hold of me as I helped her to her feet and led her downstairs, remembering that years ago she had done this before.
‘The wall needed to be washed,’ she said quietly from her chair next to the fire. ‘The damp is getting in again. It’s rising.’
Somewhere in my heart I felt a knot loosen as Charlie advanced into the room and paced restlessly around the coffee table. ‘There is no damp,’ I said patiently.
Mother’s gaze faltered. Charlie leapt into her lap and hissed at me.
‘Tell me how I can help you,’ I said, feeling my stomach tighten. Mother was my best friend. No thought was more distressing, more alarming to me, than the possibility that she might be losing her faculties.
‘My dear, you’ve already helped. I hope you know I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for us,’ she said, directing a wistful glance at my father’s old piano. ‘I don’t want to be a burden on you, not on anyone.’
Any irritation I had harboured down the years at knowing she had once secretly accepted money from Price dissolved. She could never be a burden on me, and the idea that she thought of herself in this way was too horrific, too sad.
‘You and I,’ I said softly, ‘we’re a team. And I have a good job now, one that will keep us secure.’
‘I do want to work,’ she said with a trace of sadness, and I nodded my encouragement. She was one of the bravest, proudest women I had ever known. ‘But Sarah …’ She paused, struggling to release the words. ‘I worry that there is something the matter with me. Sometimes I feel … different, not myself. Like tonight. I wake and find myself downstairs, collecting the mail, moving things.’
‘Sleep-walking?’ I smiled, wanting to feel relieved. ‘That’s common enough. And you’ve always been the first to collect the mail.’
‘No.’ Her voice was stern, her eyes wide and uncertain. ‘Not always. It’s worse now. I find myself … doing things, dreaming things. Things I can’t remember. Do you understand? I washed the wall on the landing, and another in my bedroom, without any memory. I don’t even know how long I was sitting there doing it! I did it in my sleep.’ She held up one hand. ‘I know how this sounds, but sometimes I feel as though something is taking me over, taking control.’
As I registered the shakiness in her voice, my worst fear took hold: her mind was deteriorating. All of her wisdom and intelligence and companionship, everything that made her mine, was suddenly in jeopardy. I wanted to reassure her with an explanation, but an explanation resolutely refused to come. So instead I said in an unsteady voice, ‘Perhaps you need some rest.’
‘Rest? How can I rest with those terrible noises in the house?’
‘Noises?’
‘A very faint tapping, scratching sound,’ Mother explained. ‘Coming from the walls. Every month or so. It’s driving me mad!’
And now my heart was pounding. Our cat’s eyes tracked me as I stood up abruptly and approached Mother’s chair. ‘Then you’ve heard it too?’ I ventured.
‘I thought it was in my head. Sarah, why did you never say?’
‘I did, remember?’ Her blank expression told me she didn’t. I took her hand and knelt beside her. ‘After that I didn’t mention it again. I didn’t want to scare you. I thought it might be mice, or—’
She stared at me silently until eventually, in a cracked voice, she whispered, ‘There’s something wrong with this house, isn’t there?’
I deflected the question with another of my own. ‘How long have you been feeling not yourself?’
‘A long time – years. But never as odd as I feel now.’
I gazed hard into her fearful eyes. ‘Please try to remember. It might be important.’
After a long moment’s consideration she nodded and said, ‘Since you went to that place with Harry Price. That house on the Suffolk border … What was it called?’
I froze, and watched her lips with mounting horror, as Mother mouthed the two words I had hoped never to hear again.
*
Harry Price was the last person I wanted to ask for help.
What little I saw of him in the newspapers made me glad to be separated from him. The only time I felt any real envy was when I heard that he had become the first Chair of the British Film Institute. His ‘experiments’ were becoming increasingly outlandish, with newspaper articles recounting his bizarre escapades in Europe, where he had investigated the case of a talking mongoose that could apparently read people’s thoughts and sing hymns. Next came his inquiries into fire-walking and the Indian rope trick and his examination of the bite marks of a ‘devil girl’ from Romania.1
Knowing his beginnings, it made me sad to see that my old employer had been reduced to such cheap popularisation. But, as I was to discover shortly, any sympathy I had was grossly misplaced. For just when it seemed he could stoop no lower, Price was preparing news that would awe a generation and secure his name in history forever. At a terrible c
ost to us both.
*
Perhaps it was denial that made me close my eyes to the problems at home – a reluctance to reassociate myself with phenomena that defined a life I had left behind. I told myself we didn’t yet need outside help, that Mother and I were all right on our own. And there were many distractions at work which helped me convince myself of this lie. The months flicked by in a blur of late nights at the office, film premieres and parties. At the Silver Slipper in Regent Street, with its polished glass dance floor and walls painted with lush Italian scenes, I danced away troubles I hoped would never catch up with me.
Until one evening in late November.
It was close to 8.30 when I locked the office and stepped out into the cobbled alleyway that cut through to Old Compton Street. Soho was dead. This in itself wasn’t unusual for a Thursday evening, but I was keen to reach the bright lights of Leicester Square as quickly as possible. After an absence that had lasted far, far too long, I had arranged to meet Amy for a trip to the cinema to see Modern Times, the new Charlie Chaplin film, and I didn’t want to be late. We had a lot to catch up on. Afterwards, if there was time, we would go for cocktails together in one of the bars opposite the new Windmill Theatre, and laugh together at the married men who were enticed there by the nude shows. They were hilarious to observe, like guilty schoolboys.
Walking on, I spotted up ahead a broad-shouldered uniformed police officer who was standing watch by the side of a gated townhouse. Stamping his feet and looking about him, the poor man looked rigid with cold. And something about his general demeanour hinted to me that all was not well. My curiosity led me right to him.
