In the summing up, on 3 March, Justice Singleton questioned whether Fodor had much reputation to lose. He could understand that the Psychic News articles might have ‘narked’ him, he said, but the jury should remember that it was dealing with a man who had gone to the Isle of Man to meet a talking mongoose.
After deliberating for fifty minutes, the special jury nonetheless found for Fodor on two of the four libel charges, and awarded him a total of a hundred guineas (£104) in damages.
Alma had not been called to give evidence, but she spoke to Fodor in the courtroom. ‘You will never publish that book,’ she told him. It was the last time that they met.
Chamberlain’s appeasement policy had done nothing to curb Hitler’s persecution of Jews and other minorities, nor his hunger for more territory. In January, the Führer had warned that the coming war would eliminate all Jews in Europe. On 15 March, he invaded Czechoslovakia, breaking the promise that he had made in Munich.
Two days after that, on 17 March 1939, Fodor sailed for New York with his wife and daughter.
Fodor had found a radical way of explaining Alma’s fraudulent phenomena, as the products of damage rather than conscious deceit. Alma was sick, he insisted, and many of her actions involuntary. His argument was generous, in that it relieved Alma of blame and allowed that her violence and lies might be the fruits of abuse, but it was also partial. By casting Alma as a victim of her past, Fodor minimised the danger in which his investigation had put her, and he belittled her creative achievement.
Alma’s haunting had, at least in part, been a deliberate, inventive and outrageous hoax. She had enacted a wild, months-long magic-realist extravaganza at the International Institute for Psychical Research, a piece of performance art in which she was both the lady-sawn-in-half and the magician who cuts a slice through her. In a stream of phenomena rich in symbolism and silliness, she had scripted a drama that revealed as much about her audience as herself. She used her investigators’ beliefs – mystical and psychological – to give shape to her chaotic inner life. She depicted suffering in the scratches, punctures, cuts and burns on her skin; sexual craving and dread in the incubus and vampire visits. She laid claim to a crazy fertility, in which her belly could instantly swell, and her hands and feet could give birth to living creatures, ancient relics and Woolworth’s merchandise. Through the episodes of projection and possession, she acted out her sense that she did not exist securely on one plane, in one self, in one moment. Through Jimmy the poltergeist, she unleashed aggression, mischief and spite. Through Bremba, she demanded respect. Through Mevanwe and the spirit child, she voiced helplessness and fear.
The reporter from the Croydon Advertiser bumped into Alma in Thornton Heath in May. She looked well, Jack said plumper, less worn. She told him that the poltergeist was still with her. Jimmy threw crockery around from time to time, but he also brought her brooches, old coins and lumps of gold quartz. Alma said that she hesitated to wear the jewellery outside the house, in case it was recognised – after all, she didn’t know where it came from.
TWENTY
A lane to the land of the dead
When Britain finally declared war on Germany in September 1939, the Fieldings decided to leave Croydon and set up home on the coast.
Les leased a flat piece of land halfway down the cliff at Branscombe, east Devon, a spot that the family had visited for a camping holiday that summer. He bought a self-assembly bungalow in London, and arranged for the sections to be delivered to the clifftop by train and lorry, then lowered to the plot on ropes. He and Don laid the foundations in the spring of 1940. The building had casement windows, a panelled front door and a pitched roof, which was camouflaged with paint as protection against enemy bombers. George helped the family to move in.
The village of Branscombe ran along a lane in the valley behind the cliff: a few dozen houses, a meeting hall, a general store, a post office, a bakery, a forge, a cobbler, a butcher, a school, three pubs, a Methodist chapel and an Anglican church. The blacksmith acted as postman, delivering letters and parcels to the 500 or so residents, including those in the scattered cliff dwellings. A coastguard station and searchlight sat on the red mudstone above the bungalow, a clutch of holiday chalets and a tea room on the shingle beach below.
Les and Don joined the Home Guard; though Don was eligible for conscription, having turned eighteen in September, he had not yet been called up. Les took charge of the nightly patrol along the clifftop and of the machine-gun emplacement above the beach. He and Don were issued with rifles. Don bought a Lewis gun, which he kept under his bed, and a second-hand New Imperial motorcycle, which he rode to work. Both men did twelve-hour shifts at a secret munitions works in the back of a hair-lotion factory in the village square. The BBC’s radio programme Music While You Work was piped into the workshop each day to offset the grunt and bang of the lathes. All the machines were quickly turned off one night when a German pilot was shot down nearby – if the enemy learnt that shells and torpedo parts were being made in Branscombe, the village might have become a target for bombers.
Alma volunteered as a nurse with the St John Ambulance brigade, tending convalescent soldiers in the nearby town of Sidmouth. Don enlisted with the army in 1943, when he was twenty-one, and served as a dispatch rider in France and Norway. Les became a constable with the Royal Marine Police.
Croydon was bombed heavily from August 1940 onwards, in part because its aerodrome had been adopted as a Royal Air Force fighter base. Five thousand residents of the borough were killed, and 60,000 buildings damaged. Alma’s mother Alice suffered a fatal heart attack at 42 Haslemere Road in 1942; she left all her belongings to her favourite daughter, Doris, who moved in to the property. On 1 July 1944 the street was hit by a V-1 ‘doodlebug’, which destroyed ten houses and killed three people. The flying bomb blew out all the windows of Dorrie’s house and hurled the front door halfway up the stairs.
London was strewn with such scenes. A bed sat in the street. A double-decker bus reared out of a crater. Store mannequins lay broken on the pavement. Papered bedroom walls stood open to the rain. The photographer Lee Miller took pictures of these fractured, once-familiar objects. They were surrogates for the mangled bodies that could not be shown and metaphors for the dislocation of the people left behind. The bombing had transformed the imaginary mash-ups of the surrealists into real urban landscapes.
The ghost stories that the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote in London in the war years came to her like ‘huge and inchoate particles’, she said. ‘I do not feel I “invented” anything. Sometimes I hardly knew where I stopped and somebody else began.’ Even in her pre-war stories, Bowen had ascribed life to objects, as if they had become vehicles for human feelings. Now, she observed, ‘People whose houses had been blown up went to infinite lengths to assemble themselves – broken ornaments, odd shoes, torn scraps of the curtains that had hung in a room – from the wreckage.’ The domestic items left by a bombing, like the items thrown around Alma’s home, seemed scattered parts of the self. Bowen barely felt that she was writing fiction at all any more, she said, but simply channelling the spirits of the living. ‘It seems to me that during the war the overcharged subconsciousness of everybody overflowed and merged. We all lived in a state of lucid abnormality.’ The ghosts of the last war haunted the new conflict. In Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’, a married woman catches a taxi from a shut-up London square, and realises that her driver is her first fiancé, who was killed on the Western Front. She screams in terror when she sees his face, and is screaming still as she is driven away, beating her gloved hands at the closed windows of the black cab.