Part Two
THE GHOST HUNT
‘Whenever she stopped, the outdoor silence pressed as close as suspense: you had the sensation of a great instrument out there in London, unstruck’
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘No. 16’ (1939)
Alma and Les, 1920
Don, Alma and Les, 1929
Alma, Don and George in the Sunday Pictorial, February 1938
SIX
Fear! We swim in it
The cold snap was over. It was mild and wet when Fodor visited Beverstone Road in the evening of Monday 28 February to interview Alma at more length.
The house was full of visitors again. The Reverend Nicolle had been there all afternoon with George and Alma, as had Dr Wills and his friend Mr Faraday. Don’s former headmaster, Mr Tomkins, had called by, along with George’s sister Adelaide, his sister-in-law Rose, and several children. A crowd had been hanging around outside over the weekend. ‘People have been unkind,’ said Alma. ‘They do not try to be helpful at all. It is bad enough without people throwing stones at the windows.’
Fodor and Alma went upstairs to her bedroom, so that they could speak in private, and Fodor asked her about her past.
Alma was born on 17 August 1903 to Charles Smith, a plumber and gas fitter, and his wife Alice. Her sister Doris was born in 1900, and her brother Charles in 1915. At first the family lived near Alice’s parents in Pimlico, on the north bank of the Thames. By the time war broke out they had moved south to Croydon, but Alma and Dorrie were staying with their grandparents when Pimlico was heavily bombed by German aircraft in 1917. Alma suffered a series of childhood illnesses (measles, chicken pox, scarlatina, whooping cough, tonsillitis) and at the age of sixteen, while on holiday with her father, she careered into a wall on a hired bicycle. It took her months to recover from her injuries.
At about this time Alma met Les, who had settled in Croydon when he returned, wounded, from the Western Front. The illegitimate child of a housemaid, Les had been raised in Hertfordshire as the son of his grandparents, a coffin maker and his wife. In Thornton Heath, where he lived with an ‘aunt’ (actually his sister), he established himself as a builder and decorator. He took on anything from plumbing to paperhanging, and for a few years also received a disability pension from the army.
Les and Alma were married at the Croydon register office in March 1921 when he was twenty-one and she seventeen. Alma described it as a runaway marriage, contracted against her father’s wishes, but it was also a shotgun wedding: she was three months pregnant with Don when she signed the register.
Since then, the family had lived in several rented properties in Thornton Heath, a working-class district built when the railway was laid to Victoria in the late nineteenth century. The suburb was served by a parade of shops, a library, a train station, and buses and trams that ran to the cinemas and department stores of central Croydon. A baker’s van made daily deliveries to houses in the neighbourhood, as did a horse-drawn milk float and a coal cart.
Thanks to a house-building boom in southern England, Les’s business continued to prosper even during the Depression – or Great Slump – of the early 1930s. When Don left school to work with his father in 1937, Alma tried to find employment herself. She briefly ran a snack bar in Thornton Heath, serving hot pies, Oxo beef stock, tea and coffee, but failed to cover her costs. She said that her café was frequented by too many tramps asking for free cups of hot water.
Alma was often in pain, she told Fodor. Ever since her bicycle crash in 1919, she had suffered from kidney abscesses, which had been drained seven times. In 1930, just before the Fieldings moved to Beverstone Road, an otherworldly experience alerted her to a different illness. She was playing cards with Les and some friends when she felt sleepy and lay down on a sofa. Les thought that she had fainted – her left arm was hanging limply to her side – and he and one of their friends tried to rouse her. As she lay there, half-conscious, she saw her father, who had died of tuberculosis four years earlier, tugging at one of her hands while Les pulled the other. ‘My father leant across,’ she recalled, ‘and drew a cross with his fingers on my left breast.’ When she came round she saw a mark on her breast in the shape of a cross, as if blood had been sucked through the skin. The next morning, she found a white scar where the cross had been, and beneath the scar a lump. She made an appointment with a specialist, who found a cancerous growth and removed the breast. Some time later another tumour was found, and treated with radium.
Fodor noticed that Alma’s bodily failings seemed to trigger a special capacity, as if she were trading physical for psychic power. When she fell ill she entered a borderland, a zone in which she was susceptible to transcendent experience. It was unclear whether Alma’s father – tussling with her husband over her body, inscribing her breast with blood – had been warning her of the cancer, or cursing her with it.
Then Alma recounted a weirder medical crisis: nine years ago, in 1929, she had suddenly lost her sight.
‘I told nobody, because I could walk about, ride my bicycle and could carry on. I never had an accident.’
Fodor asked how she had managed to get about if she could not see.
‘I cannot explain. It seemed to me as if a sense was given to me. I knew everything that was coming near me. I knew by the sound of the tram whether it was from London or from Thornton Heath, and I could get on the right one.’
Fodor wondered how she knew at which stop to alight.
‘I had a picture in my mind,’ she said, adding, ‘I could play cards by the feel of the cards.’
For a while, Alma said, she managed to hide her blindness from Les, but at the cinema one day he noticed that she was not looking at the screen. ‘He said nothing until we got home. He picked up a cup and saucer and handed them to me. I did not take them. Then he put his hand across my face. I did not flinch. He said, “You cannot see.” I burst out crying. We went to a place in Croydon to have my eyes tested. The optician said there was no sight at all. It was a case for the hospital.’
The specialist eye hospital, Moorfields in east London, gave Les drops to put in her eyes. ‘The following morning I went into the garden and ran into the lavatory edgeways. My sight came back like a shutter which opened.’
Fodor and Alma went downstairs to find that Les had come home from work. Les confirmed the details of Alma’s cancer diagnosis, and asked Fodor whether the poltergeist disturbances might have been caused by the radium needles implanted in her chest. Similar upheavals, he said, had taken place in the home of a friend whose tumour had been treated in the same way.
Fodor asked Les about Alma’s episode of blindness. ‘Oh yes,’ said Les. ‘She was blind for about three weeks. It was either before she had the cut on her breast or after. She could ride her bicycle, do all her work and everything. I did not believe it.’ It was a difficult idea to take in: Alma told her husband both that she was blind and that she could, while blind, somehow see.
Fodor had come across people who claimed sightless vision before. There were some who said that they could see while their eyes were covered, like his Chiswick neighbour Theodore Kolb, a plump Viennese cloth merchant who was paid £30 by the Sunday Chronicle to drive through the streets of London with his eyes blindfolded and filled with dough. When Kolb visited the Institute, Fodor and his colleagues realised that he was flexing his facial muscles to break the seal of the dough and peer through the chinks. Others claimed to be completely blind. In 1936 the Institute had hosted a talk by Captain Gerald Lowry, an osteopath who said that he could box, play golf and sail a yacht even though his optical nerve had been severed by a bullet in the war. Captain Lowry believed that he could see with his skin, and argued that a blind man in a kilt – that is, naked from the waist down – would detect a red pillar box much sooner than a blind man in underpants.