EIGHT
The face in the mirror
Hitler violated the terms of the Versailles peace accord on Friday 11 March by marching his troops into Austria. ‘The continent thunders with the tramp of armed men,’ reported the Pictorial, acknowledging that its readers must be worried to death about what lay ahead. There were already wars between the republicans and the fascists in Spain, noted the paper, and between the ‘Little Yellow Men’ (Japanese and Chinese) in the Far East. The prime minister called an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the international crisis.
Many in Britain, especially on the Left, believed that Hitler and Mussolini must be stopped by force. Others, like Chamberlain, hoped to avert or delay a conflict by acceding to some of their demands. Others still, including Mosley and his confederates, held that Communist Russia and ‘international Jewry’ posed more of a threat than the fascist dictators. As audiences poured out of the West End theatres on Saturday 19 March, 600 young men clambered onto the running boards of taxis and motor-cars in Piccadilly Circus, shouting, ‘Down with the Jewish warmongers!’, ‘British cars for British people!’ and ‘Britain for the Britons!’ Beneath the giant shining signs for Guinness and Gordon’s, Bovril and Schweppes, the rioters singled out foreign vehicles for attack. The police tried to restore order, throwing a protective cordon around the delicate figure of Eros at the heart of the roundabout.
The mediums in Britain’s seance rooms, meanwhile, were channelling the elders of other races: Abyssinian tribesmen, Egyptian pharaohs, Persian warriors, Chinese sages and, especially, Indian chiefs. In Queen’s Hall, off Oxford Street, more than 2,000 people gathered in March to hear the prophecies of White Hawk, the spirit guide of the well-known medium Stella Hughes. ‘There will be no war,’ the chieftain assured his anxious audience.
About a dozen members of the Institute attended Alma’s next two seances at Walton House. She was strip-searched before each session, and monitored throughout. Female supervisors accompanied her to the ladies’ room in the tea break, keeping an eye on her even when she was in the lavatory cubicle. In the seance room she produced a silver charm in the shape of a hawk, a silver disc inscribed with the signs of the zodiac, a sweet-scented nut, a polished stone, a locket, a penny. When the apports were slow to arrive, Fodor would chivvy the poltergeist in cheerful impatience – ‘Come on, Jimmy!’ Some of the sitters shook as Alma materialised her treasures. Helen Russell Scott’s head spun. The Countess’s face tickled. Fodor’s friend Wilfred Becker, who had been reluctant to join the investigation, smelt something rotten, sweet, funereal in the room. The Irish writer Shaw Desmond reacted the most strongly of all: he felt sick, his heart raced, his face poured with sweat. Shaw Desmond was a well-known journalist, the author of a weekly column for the Sunday Graphic and of spiritualist tracts such as We Do Not Die (later to be outdone by Nobody Has Ever Died!). Like many members of the Institute, he had suffered a great loss – his ten-year-old son had died in the 1920s.
Fodor was struggling to make sense of Alma’s phenomena. At a tea party at the Countess’s house in west Kensington, he asked the advice of Elizabeth Severn, an American psychoanalyst who had been a member of the Institute since 1934. Alma was horrified to overhear part of this conversation, and informed Fodor afterwards that she and Les had taken a violent dislike to ‘that woman’ and did not want her to play any part in the inquiry. Fodor assured her that he would not invite Mrs Severn to the sittings. Freudian ideas were in any case not popular with his colleagues. Shaw Desmond described psychoanalysis as ‘a sex-ridden science’, ‘a gross instrument for gross minds’.
Privately, Fodor continued to discuss Alma’s case with Elizabeth Severn, whom he greatly admired. In the 1920s Mrs Severn had been treated in Budapest by the pioneering psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, and she was one of the few members of the Institute open to the idea that supernatural phenomena were products of mental disturbance. She believed that people emanated ‘etheric waves’, like radium, with which they could unconsciously disrupt the world around them, and she agreed with Fodor that Alma’s poltergeist might be a projection of her submerged emotions. ‘We are all constant receiving-and-sending stations,’ said Elizabeth Severn, ‘and under the influence of intense feelings the dynamism is greatly increased; so that if the emanations are accelerated and of a violent nature, they may do much harm.’
Fodor learnt in March of a poltergeist attack in east London with resemblances to the Thornton Heath case. Mr Gilmore, a twenty-five-year-old tobacconist, reported that he and his lodgers – Mr and Mrs Bradley, who had been married for twenty-seven years – had been troubled for a fortnight in February by flying crockery, wandering bedclothes, lights turning on and off, stopped clocks. Mr Gilmore said that he did not believe in spirits, but when Mr and Mrs Bradley moved in he had started to faint and to fall into trances. The poltergeist attacks took place, he said, only when he and Mrs Bradley were alone together. At the end of February, Mrs Bradley fled the house and Mr Bradley took to barricading himself in the dining room in case his landlord, under the influence of the poltergeist, tried to attack him. Finally he too moved out.
Having spoken to both men, Fodor concluded that Mr Gilmore’s manifestations sprang from his obsession with Mrs Bradley. Under pressure of his inner torment, the young man fell into amnesic, dissociated states, in which one part of him acted without the knowledge of the other. The protagonist of Patrick Hamilton’s novel Hangover Square switches between personalities in a similar way: he is helplessly besotted with a woman who spurns him, and at a ‘click!’ in his head (‘or would the word “snap” or “crack” describe it better?’ he wonders), his yearning, humiliated self is replaced with a numb, implacable avenger. In a poltergeist case, thought Fodor, a suppressed personality might act independently even of the body.
Fodor knew that Alma had a history of episodes in which she was half-there, present and absent, inside and outside herself, like the time that she collapsed on the couch and saw her father’s hand mark her breast, or the time that she attacked Les with a knife. Her blanks and lapses seemed intrinsic to her strange experiences, and keys to their cause. Perhaps Alma, like Mr Gilmore, had a psyche that had split under pressure of a forbidden desire. Fodor wondered if her estranged alter ego was now escaping her body altogether, snapping and cracking itself into being. Ping!
To discourage more attention from her neighbours, Alma told the Croydon Advertiser that all was quiet in her house. But to Fodor she confided that it seemed still to be haunted. Les and George confirmed that there had been further incidents.
One night in March, Les heard shouting from George’s bedroom. ‘Don’t touch me!’ yelled George. ‘Don’t come near me! Get away!’
In the morning Les asked: ‘What was wrong with you last night?’
George said that he had woken to his own shouts, and as he sat up in bed had seen Alma enter the room and switch on the light. ‘She asked what was wrong with me, grinning in a horrible way. She was wearing a red dressing gown.’ He yelled at her to leave him alone.
Les told George that he must have dreamt it, as he had seen Alma asleep beside him when he heard his cries. But George insisted that it wasn’t a dream: he had found the light still on when he woke in the morning.