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 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 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.
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 attitudes, furnishing the large cases in which they were displayed with objects such as stones and artfully counterfeited grasses, 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 illustrations 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 woodpecker 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 assisted 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 sparsely planted with oaks and elms, and a small wood here and there where once the red deer hunted by the King and his nobles 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 lust, 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, lustful, 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 associated with a reasonable amount of pain. What, after all, would become of the quality of fortitude 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 glass 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 passed 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 Japanese 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 glass 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 glass held in his left hand, while he painted with the right, and remembered that back in the days of the confirmation class 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 class 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 canal 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 class, 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 passed. 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 God 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 glass 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.’