The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  Sometimes Una got waspish. She asked how she could be expected to take sensible notes with Feda grabbing on to her arm so hard. She was less than respectful when Feda’s writhings caused Mrs Leonard’s hairpiece to singe on the electric fire. And she admitted to ‘an unpleasant little shock’ when Feda’s vocabulary reflected Mrs Leonard’s social position not Mabel’s. The ethereal Ladye now said ‘of-ten’ pronouncing the t. In her Kensington days Ladye, of course, said ‘orphan’. Feda referred to corsets where Ladye wore stays and to ‘back premises’, a term unknown to her class. ‘Twonnie’ irritated Una, too. ‘Feda I must tell you it’s Johnnie, not Twonnie’, she said. ‘Ladye wants you to call her by the right name.’ But Mrs Leonard’s psychic tolerance had its limits: ‘Johnnie is a boy’s name. Twonnie is very much nicer’, she replied.

  The sessions were for John not Una. She paid to fabricate life. It was as if Ladye had sneaked off on a world cruise and now John had tracked her down. ‘I expect you’re much happier on your side than we are here’, John said. She feared Ladye could not understand her own ‘awful earth grief’, her agitation and sleepless nights. Why had she left in a way that was such an awful shock to her? ‘Doesn’t she know I want to join her?’ she asked Feda. Did she receive her prayers? Didn’t she know that she loved her more intensely than was bearable? ‘Does she love me more than anyone else?’ she enquired.

  ‘Silly question’, Feda replied. ‘There is more in our love than has ever been between two women before.’ Ladye would rejoice were Twonnie to join her. Meanwhile she suggested she go to a friend of Mrs Leonard’s, a Mr Humely, for relaxation and breathing exercises. His charges were reasonable. She gratefully received Twonnie’s prayers, which went first to the seventh plane then came down to her. She had ‘passed over’ both because ‘the sands had run out’ and for the sake of Twonnie’s evolution and spiritual development. She had left ‘the core of herself’ with her. She did not want Twonnie to go over that fateful stroke again and again. She should live for the present and have a good time with Una.

  This became a recurring theme. Mrs Leonard knew her trade. Ladye, it seemed, now more than commended John’s relationship with Una. She thought the three of them made a ‘wonderful combination’. Una must carry the torch and look after Twonnie. Ladye was more than occupied on plane three, what with horseriding, gardening and day trips to Jesus. She told John and Una to go off on holiday together, that it gave her a fillip if they had a good time.

  It had not been quite like that in the Vernon Court Hotel. ‘Lunched and dined alone and slept badly’, was Ladye’s lament then. Nor was it quite what John wanted to hear. Did Ladye not realize that she was living the rest of her life in memory of her, that life had no meaning without her? Yes, Ladye knew that. Ladye knew everything.

  Una wanted to know if Ladye was glad that she too was ‘so fond of Twonnie’? Yes, Feda replied, but she must not show her fondness slavishly. And when someone whose name perhaps began with T was around, she should try to conceal fond feelings.

  Una: Tell my Ladye she’s got to help me to take care of Twonnie.

  Feda: She says yes she wants that. She puts her in your charge.

  Una: Tell her I am honoured and will do my best.

  Feda: She says she’s afraid you hardly appreciate the magnitude of your task. It will be perfectly awful sometimes. Terrible.

  Una: Tell her I’ll stick to it all right.

  Ladye thought Troubridge’s absence was ‘the best thing all round’. She was more conformist these days and wanted appearances upheld. When Una had her hair cut short and the nape of her neck shaved, Ladye fingered it and gave an ethereal shudder. She preferred Una’s ‘medieval fashion’ of plaited knobs over the ears. She again warned John never to cut hers. She would not speak to her if she did.

  Behind the idiocy of it all was the terror of an abandoned child. Like a child, Radclyffe Hall turned shadows into substance, imagined a fantasy mother who would always love her and a fantasy world that was always safe. A wafer could become the flesh of Christ and Gladys Leonard, Ladye.

  Radclyffe Hall could, as she chose, recreate the world. Death was life, she was a man and reality was in her control. Events could not ‘render it intolerable’. Her perfect woman was always there, mother, lover, friend, ‘the woman one would long to protect while coming to in turn for protection’.

  Boundaries blurred between now and then and between herself and Una. The drama of psychic possession in Maida Vale had a parallel in Chelsea. John merged eternally with Ladye and Una merged into John. John’s psychical research notes were all about Ladye. Una’s diary was for and about John. If John left her supper, went to the dentist, had a cold, bought a sweater, Una noted it down.

  It became unclear which of them was hearing Ladye rapping on the wardrobe and why Una should want to know about it quite as much as John. They wrote up notes together, instructed the typist and read books on other worlds. They planted roses and rhododendrons by the Highgate mausoleum. Only John’s temper tantrums drew a temporary sharp divide. ‘J very depressed & in vile temper. Not a nice evening and I cried much after I was left alone’, was an aggrieved diary entry of Una’s in February 1917. When Una mis-set the alarm clock, John’s fury was ‘almost too miserable to bear’. When she left their notes at Mrs Leonard’s, John ‘raged with fury and distress’. But mostly Una did what was wanted and John’s dependency grew. After the storms she was sweet, ‘& I just love her anyway’, Una wrote. And John, who had a dependent heart, felt gratitude. ‘Where would I be without my Squiggie’, she said and meant.

  Living in separate quarters was inconvenient for their work. But sharing a house might seem to exclude Ladye and there was Troubridge’s leave to consider. When they worked late at Una’s house, John stayed the night. If it was Swan Walk, Una slept on a couch. And then John caught measles and Dolly Clarke feared for her baby. John stayed with Una, who nursed her. In gratitude, John gave her a sapphire and diamond ring and then a feather eiderdown and ‘a lovely model gown’ from Sheba’s of Sloane Street. And she added a codicil to her will bequeathing all clothes and personal things to her. ‘It meant so much to me’, Una wrote.

  It meant even more to her that they should share a home. On 15 February 1917 her landlady, Mrs Gregory, told her to be out of the house in Royal Hospital Road by noon. She objected to lesbian goings-on. Una found 42 St Leonard’s Terrace nearby. John helped her settle in but left at ten p.m. ‘Very much depressed at new start in another squalid little lonely abode, but one must just do one’s best and go on. I am very, very tired’, Una wrote in her diary.

  In spring John braved the flat at Cadogan Court, leased for herself and Ladye. She needed Una’s constant presence and support. They transcribed their notes, took meals together, walked the dogs. Una again moved to be close by. She signed a lease on an unfurnished house at 6 Cheltenham Terrace. John bought two Cromwellian oak chairs and an oak refectory table for it. When there was an air raid in July, Una ran into the street to look for John, who that night told her she loved her very much.

  Una wanted to stay with her for all eternity. She knew the strength that lay in seeming weak, the power her acquiescence held. John always worried when Una was ill. Knowing John read her diary, Una teased for sympathy: ‘I often wonder how one can go on living feeling as ill & done in as I do. And I sometimes wonder if anything really bad is the matter. I never seem to be out of pain of some kind.’

  If Ladye found eternal devotion by dying, then so would Una. She too saw floating caterpillars as well as sparks of light. ‘Heart attacks’, colitis, cystitis, headaches, were all recorded along with the gusts of wind, the bumps and bangs that were communications from Ladye. Looniness cocooned their lives. Una felt ‘so dematerialised’ she could neither speak nor eat her lunch. She was five foot five but weighed seven stone. The ‘puffs of air’ she felt on her hands called for appraisal by Crichton-Miller. She complained of feeling ‘odd & restless & uneasy as if someone were trying to get at me’.
/>   She and John began to communicate telepathically, had identical thoughts about the canary, stoked the fire when the other was about to do it. Una hummed the tune that was in John’s mind. Andrea, on a rare visit from boarding school and foster care, caught their mood. She told her mother she ‘had seen Our Lord Our God sitting on her pillow in the night’. John chain-smoked Dunhill cigarettes and in the drawing-room at Cadogan Court saw Ladye sitting on the sofa in a petticoat doing up a shell-pink blouse. In April 1917 she said that psychical research was the only thing that mattered to her and that her life’s work was to become a medium.

  11

  A very grave slander

  Communicating with Ladye had its dull side. She was fixed up in the ultimate Grand Hotel, was well and loved John more than ever, but the relationship lacked life. Sessions with Gladys Leonard took a different tack.

  Radclyffe Hall hoped to publish her research in the journal of the Society for Psychical Research. The Society required ‘evidential proof’ of the existence of the dead. Its members needed to show that they had subjected their hypotheses to empirical tests.

  For Radclyffe Hall, the emphasis shifted from grief about Ladye to documenting what she was up to. Daily life revealed her. Her ubiquity took her onto the bookshelves and the ceiling, up the drainpipe, into the tea leaves and the shifting glass. As an earthling, Ladye had loved idleness – hours in bed with milky drinks, hot water bottles and a book. Now she was everywhere. Sortilege evoked her. Una saw her in a large, luminous patch in the shape of a Zulu shield hovering over John’s bed. Both heard her scrabbling in the cupboard. She moved cushions in the night. John talked of the ‘three of them’, a trinity of paranormal interaction.

  Their curiosity about Ladye tested Mrs Leonard’s ingenuity. In session after session they scrutinized the significance of places beginning with P or people beginning with S, jewellery of a certain colour, random words or phrases, any of which might indicate past or present familiarity with some person or place known to Ladye. The quest was on a par with George Batten’s obsession with acrostics which Ladye had so deplored. It was not, historically speaking, the way she had liked to pass her time.

  Feda engaged them in ‘book tests’ to show Ladye’s all-pervading powers. Near the top of page 152 of the nineteenth book on the left on a shelf at the height of Una’s skirt pocket John would find a message from Ladye. She was led to Orval, given to Mabel Batten by its author Owen Meredith. ‘Almost though not quite at the top of the page’ were the words ‘today, tomorrow, yesterday, forever’. Equally successful, supernaturally speaking, was Feda’s directive to two-thirds down page 108 of the sixth book from the window on the shelf at the height of John’s knee. It was The Old Curiosity Shop and John found ‘talked of their meeting in another world as if he were dead but yesterday’.

  Most of it was hopeless. In Una’s flat the twenty-eighth page of the twelfth book from the left, on the shelf level with the window ledge, in the room with the longest shelves, was Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson volume 2, Navy Records Society, 1902. All its pages were uncut and the text too tedious to pursue. And the assurance that they would find a message to do with golf on page thirty-six of The Science of Peace, which dealt entirely with the sins of Germany in provoking the First War, was perhaps more the fault of Troubridge’s reading matter than Mrs Leonard’s clairvoyant skills.

  In page after page of John’s recorded notes, twenty-four archive volumes, she struggled to make correlations that taxed her intelligence and hopes. It was a relief when she was led to Spirit Intercourse by H. MacKenzie and there on the title page were the words, ‘There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.’ A relief too when on page thirteen of First Steps to Nursing: A Manual for Would Be Probationers she found the lines: ‘Even without training this woman is a boon and blessing to her suffering friends in an emergency’ – evidence that she had saved Ladye’s life in that Oxford car crash.

  This quest for Ladye was a full-time occupation. It meant that Una was always with John. She did not claim the central place in her affections; it was enough to have all her time. Once she was foolish enough to be scathing about Ladye’s appearance in a photograph on John’s desk. Wrath followed and her tears. She did not do it again.

  Sir Oliver Lodge invited them in January 1917 to stay at his house in Birmingham. In the evening they sat round an oval table with linked hands. The spirits rapped, the table tilted and the wine glass swirled. John had a nosebleed and went to bed. Lady Lodge grew tired. Alone with Una, Sir Oliver dazzled her with psychical phenomena until one in the morning. ‘So very interesting & a great & adorable man.’

  These psychical pursuits clashed with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Radclyffe Hall became a bane to priests. Convinced of her own closeness to God, she tested them with Feda, plane three and lesbian love. The Father Confessor at Brompton Oratory was a ‘veritable torment’ to her. The ‘prospect of a break with the church preyed on her mind’. Father Warwick refused to allow a memorial tablet to Mabel Batten on the wall of his church at Malvern Wells. Una went from priest to priest, hoping to find a sympathetic confessor. She called it ‘an errand of mercy rewarded by complete failure’. Then Father Thurston, recommended by Oliver Lodge, told Radclyffe Hall that if she kept an open mind about alleged phenomena she was doing no evil. She replied that ‘as an educated woman and serious investigator’ she would not ‘submit herself any longer to tirades on the subject in the confessional’.

  Nor could Ladye’s daughter Cara accept her mother’s posthumous preoccupation with John. Mabel was not tapping on her wardrobe, sitting on her sofa or comforting her in the night. Jealous, she went to see Mrs Leonard. She said that she and her mother had been like sisters whom Radclyffe Hall was now doing all in her power to divide. She asked for sittings with Feda.

  Her request was a problem. Gladys Leonard profited from Radclyffe Hall at a guinea a go, plus extras of jewellery, clothes, accommodation expenses and paid holidays. She did not want to lose her most lucrative client. She gave Cara a single session. Deaf and with an ear trumpet, Cara shouted questions about her mother at Feda. Feda writhed and in a tortured voice complained she could make no contact with Ladye. She got through to George Batten instead, who told his daughter to go to a different medium.

  Cara felt insulted and fobbed off. Her son Peter had been wounded in France and she was sure her mother would want to console her. She wrote to Una, asking her to use ‘tact and good help’ against the monopolizing by John of her mother’s ghostly time. When that failed she wrote ‘disagreeable’ letters. She was ‘outrageously rude’ and there were ‘painful scenes’. She made swipes about Crichton-Miller’s patients being lunatics, said she had taken a ‘spirit photograph’ of her mother which she would not let them see and was disparaging about their research endeavours. An attack on Mrs Leonard’s ‘necromantic practices’ appeared in the Daily Mail. Someone had tipped the editor off and he sent journalists for a sitting at Maida Vale.

  There was gossip and acrimony. Dolly Clarke sided with Cara. She disliked the way Una monopolized John and chased everyone else away. Una called Dolly crude, her hands coarse and her baby immensely fat. And she encouraged John to stop her allowance. Phoebe Hoare sided with Dolly and when Una and John called on her in May 1917, would not see them. She sent an ‘insolent’ letter, went on holiday with Dolly and spread it about that Una neglected Andrea.

  And there was Troubridge. On his summer leave John and Una told him about their commitment to each other through their shared work of psychical research. Afterwards Una felt tired and sick, ‘now it was all over’. They had arranged to meet him for lunch at the Savoy next day but he did not show up. They took Andrea to Southbourne for a seaside holiday while he stayed in London. John again told Una she loved her very much.

  Troubridge left for Greece on 26 August 1917 with few residual hopes for his marriage. He had disliked Una’s interest in singing and scu
lpture because it took her attention from himself and his children. Now she was in a lesbian relationship with a woman she called John and spent all her time communicating with her dead cousin who had been this woman’s lover. It was an outrage and he thought she had gone mad.

  Radclyffe Hall’s money made it possible for Una to leave him. Troubridge acknowledged that her ‘means were very much larger than his own’. In November Una rented a furnished house, Grimston, in Datchet near Windsor. It was in her name though John paid most of the expenses. She told Troubridge it was away from London air raids and safe for Andrea. She did not explain that she lived there with John, that Andrea was fostered out to Ida Temple, a local dog breeder, and that Mrs Leonard had a bungalow nearby.

  ‘Unpleasant letter from T as usual’, Una noted in her diary in January 1918. ‘Owing to this interest, you have completely dropped your relations and mine’, he wrote. ‘This interest’ was more Radclyffe Hall than psychical research. He knew from his sisters and from Viola and Minna that Una’s true passion was not for Mabel Batten’s bumps and gusts. He thought Radclyffe Hall was immoral and had lured Una from him and Andrea.

  Una did not care what any of them thought. ‘Their offence to me was destructive’, she wrote of them all. ‘They did their utmost to diminish my beloved.’ Shared life with John became increasingly hermetic. Socially Ladye had been easy and reparative, Una was sharp and divisive. Nor did Grimston suit John. It was small and she was disturbed by noise. Una had to make the breakfast. There was no space for servants or a live-in cook. And John disliked Andrea staying and the untidiness of her toys. Sometimes she made generous gestures – she bought her a bicycle – but she had no affection for her.