The ghost hunter Harry Price published two books about Borley Rectory in the 1940s, as well as an anthology – Poltergeist Over England – in which he likened the Blitz to a supernatural attack. A Manchester Guardian article of 1941 described both poltergeists and Nazis as products of ‘a subconscious uprush of desire for power’; ‘both suck, like vampires, the energies of adolescents; both issue in noise, destruction and terror’. Another Manchester Guardian piece observed that the bombs were outdoing the ghosts of the 1930s. ‘Those of us who survive this war,’ predicted the paper, ‘are not going to be greatly alarmed by a waltzing wardrobe.’ The mediums of the last decade had been discredited by their false promises of peace. Perhaps the spiritualist spell cast by the First World War would be broken by the unparalleled horrors of the Second.
In 1941, the navy launched an inquiry into the Scottish medium Helen Duncan – who had once refused Fodor’s request to film her by infrared light – after reports that she had psychically intercepted a state secret about the sinking of a warship. The investigation uncovered deceit rather than ethereal espionage, and in 1944 Duncan became one of the last people to be convicted of fraud under the Witchcraft Act.
The International Institute for Psychic Investigation pressed on, with a reduced programme. In 1945 it renamed itself for a second time, becoming the Institute for Experimental Metaphysics, and in 1947 it stopped operating altogether.
Countess Nora Wydenbruck and Alfons Purtscher saw out the war in Holland Park. As Civil Defence volunteers, they patrolled the streets of west London by night, putting out fires with hand-held water pumps. They twice had to extinguish blazes set off by incendiary bombs on the roof of their own house. After the war the Countess made friends with the poet T. S. Eliot, and became the German translator of his Four Quartets and The Cocktail Party. In the first of these, Eliot listed some of the supernatural and psychological fashions that had flourished in the previous decade, from horoscopes to clairvoyance to dream analysis, describing them as ‘pastimes and drugs’ that always became popular ‘When there is distress of nations and perplexity/Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.’
The Countess published several further books – novels, biographies, translations and memoirs – before her death in London in 1959. Alfons died four years later. Gerald and Hilda Wills remained in Putney, where the doctor died in 1969.
Sigmund Freud died in Maresfield Gardens on 23 September 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of war. Elizabeth Severn moved that year to New York, where she worked as a psychoanalyst. Sándor Ferenczi’s paper on the effects of sexual abuse on children was published in English in 1949, and thirty-five years later the publication of his clinical diaries revealed how his theory of trauma had emerged from his psychoanalysis of ‘RN’. Elizabeth Severn’s identity as RN was uncovered in 1993, twenty-four years after her death.
Eileen Garrett moved to New York in 1940 and set up a parapsychological institute and a publishing company. She became a grande dame of psychical research, giving employment to Fodor and many others. She died in 1970, leaving her daughter and granddaughter to run her small empire.
Ronnie Cockersell pursued a career as a psychic, but in 1958 was caught burgling a house in London and sentenced to two years in prison. He was found dead in his flat in Fulham in 1968, having taken an overdose of barbiturates. He left a note explaining that he was ‘tired of this planet’.
Voirrey Irving moved from the Isle of Man to the mainland after the war; when interviewed in 1970, she insisted on the truth of the tale of the talking mongoose. ‘Gef even kept me from getting married,’ she told the reporter. ‘How could I ever tell a man’s family about what happened?’
Hylda Lewis, the flower medium, left London after being exposed as a fraud. In Old Southcote Lodge in Berkshire, she befriended Florence Hodgkin, an Irishwoman whose grandson Howard later became a well-known abstract artist. Florence wrote to Light in 1940 to describe how a psychic friend – probably Hylda – had noticed a group of fairies and a gnome entering the lodge. ‘The Fairies are still with me,’ said Mrs Hodgkin.
They are seen in railway carriages – an astonished passenger once described the antics of my Gnome, who was climbing out of the window, running along the foot-board to the engine and back over the roof. In a London drawing-room an unknown woman made her way to me to say she had been watching my Fairies. I asked what she had seen. ‘There are six in your lap at this moment and one sitting on your shoulder.’ The correct number: there are six and a Queen.
Laurie Evans and Barbara Waring married in 1939 and had a son. During the war Laurie’s friend Laurence Olivier – whom he had met at Twickenham Studios in 1930 – hired him as production manager on the film Henry V, and then as general manager at the Old Vic theatre. Laurie and Barbara subsequently divorced, and in 1960 he married for a fourth time. By then he was the most influential theatrical agent of his generation, representing Olivier and many other actors, among them Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Alec Guinness, Rex Harrison, Wendy Hiller, John Mills, Celia Johnson, James Mason, Maggie Smith, Ronald Reagan and Vivien Leigh. Laurie was a well-loved figure in the theatre world: clever, inquisitive, witty and rich. He turned up to first nights in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. At his grand house in Surrey he introduced visitors to his white cockatoo Max, a birthday present from John Gielgud.
After the war Alma’s sister Dorrie and her brother Charlie both moved out to Branscombe. Alma sometimes went back to Croydon to stay with friends. For months at a time in the late 1940s and early 1950s she lived with Frank Martin, a car salesman, above a junk shop just south of Thornton Heath. George was living about five minutes’ walk away with his new wife, Kathleen, and still working as a cobbler. By alternating between Devon and Croydon, Alma was able to escape her marriage without breaking it altogether. Les, as Uvani had advised, let her go her own way.
Frank Martin and his brother Dick had lived round the corner from the Fieldings in the 1930s, in a house stuffed with curious old objects. Perhaps the Martin brothers had been a source for some of Alma’s more outlandish apports. And perhaps her brother Charlie had provided others – one of his many sidelines in the 1930s was to breed mice to feed the snakes at London Zoo.
When Don was demobilised he moved to his grandmother and aunt’s old home in Haslemere Road. He married a farmer’s daughter named Rigmor, whom he had met while serving in Norway, and found a job as a plumber. Rigmor gave birth to two sons, Barry and Leslie, in 1946 and 1954. She became unhappy. Having been brought up in wild, open country on the edge of a fjord, she hated the narrow terraced streets of Thornton Heath. When Don was at work her older son, Barry, would hear her throwing pans and smashing crockery in the kitchen, like Alma’s poltergeist. Rigmor began to sew and sell blouses to fund a trip to her homeland. By 1972 she had raised enough money to travel to Norway with her younger son. She never returned to England, and Barry did not see his mother for thirty-two years.
Apart from her long visits to Croydon, Alma stayed with Les on the cliff in Devon. Les described these as the happiest years of his life. He and Alma lived simply, with no telephone, plumbing or electricity. They used a hand pump to draw water from a spring. Les sometimes worked on local farms and Alma occasionally made flowers from crêpe paper and wire, which she sent by train to a shop in south London. The bills were low – rent and rates were less than £5 a year – and the housework minimal.