A farmer grew potatoes and anemones at the far end of the Fieldings’ cliff plateau. His donkeys brought seaweed up from the beach to fertilise the crops, and then carried the harvest through the steep passes to the village. Les planted peach and apple trees on the rich green turf in front of the bungalow, and a vine at the entrance. He caught fish in the sea, raised rabbits and ducks, grew vegetables. For fuel, he bought Calor gas cylinders in the village and carted them through the cliff pass in a wheelbarrow purchased with John Player’s cigarette coupons. On winter nights the gas hissed softly in the mantle, and pork roasted in a miniature cast-iron oven. Les and Alma invited villagers over to parties at which they would drink home-made wine. From the front door they could see the dark sheet of the sea.
Alma occasionally held seances in their bungalow and in village houses. At one sitting, the table thumped excitedly and knives and forks leapt in the air. At another, pennies rained down from the ceiling. At a third, the son of one of the cliff farmers heard jingling and spirit voices, and felt a great heaviness in his legs and upon his shoulders. Afterwards he saw a small bell tumble out of Alma’s sleeve, its Woolworth’s label still attached. Despite the evidence of trickery, he was unsettled by the experience: his physical sensations had been real.
The daughter of another farmer remembered that there was ‘something funny’ about the Fieldings. Several villagers wondered what they were doing there, tucked away on the far side of the cliff. Were they on the run? Were they hiding from something? Were they spies? There was an air of mystery about them. Alma could still make others feel her disturbance and unease.
When Les suffered a heart attack in the 1960s, he and Alma moved to a tiny, rose-covered white cottage opposite the thirteenth-century church in the middle of Branscombe. Alma became ill, with inflammations and infections of her bowel, and after being diagnosed with diverticulitis had part of her intestine removed.
Don had remained close to both his parents, and after Les’s death in 1973 he invited Alma to live with him and his son Barry in Thornton Heath. Barry was working as a telephone engineer on the Croydon exchange. ‘I’m moving in with you, ducks,’ Alma told him. Barry was made uncomfortable by his grandmother – her smell, her colostomy bag, her sloppy cooking habits. She reminded him, he said, of Irene Handl, a comic actress known for playing forthright and sometimes crafty Cockney chars. Alma told unsavoury stories, some of which suggested an abiding anger. There was a man she used to know in London, she said, who when drunk would walk the streets with a cow’s udder pinned to his trousers so that it seemed that his ‘willy’ was hanging out of his flies; he would then ostentatiously produce a knife, slice off the appendage and fling it aside. This was a practical joke designed to shock, a sadistic jape, in which a teat was butchered in place of a penis. Barry had also heard tales of Alma’s spooky past, and he was frightened about what might happen when she was in the house.
Barry’s brother Leslie returned from Norway to England to go to university, and sometimes stayed at Haslemere Road. His grandmother Alma was ‘creative’, he recalled: he was never quite sure which of her stories were invented and which real. For years he didn’t believe a word of the poltergeist tale, but one day his father, who had never expressed a view on the supernatural, mentioned matter-of-factly that he had witnessed the poltergeist’s mischief. In the spring of 1938, Don claimed, a back-scrubbing brush from the bathroom in Beverstone Road had twice floated downstairs behind him.
Alma moved back to Devon in 1974. She died two years later, and was buried next to Les in Branscombe churchyard.
I met Barry Fielding in the house in Devon that he and his father had shared until Don’s death in 2003. Barry told me that Don, as a boy of five, had been frightened one day by the sound of Alma weeping in the front room of their house in Croydon. Afterwards, Don learnt that she had been sitting with the body of his baby brother, Laurie. I realised that this was one of the children that Alma had told Fodor about on 17 May 1938, the day that her belly ballooned. She had spoken of an unchristened girl, June, who died at three months, and a boy, Laurence.
Barry told me that he had not heard of the girl, who would have been his aunt, but he showed me a family photograph album that contained three pictures of the boy. The photos of Laurie Fielding seemed to have been taken on the same summer’s day in 1926. In two of them he is perched on a grass bank with Don and another child. In a third, he is in his mother’s lap, a dark-eyed one-year-old with flushed cheeks and soft black hair. Alma leans back on the grass, smiling. The baby, dressed in a white smock, frowns with concentration at something in his hands.
Back in London, I looked up the records of births and deaths in Croydon in the 1920s and 1930s, but could find no trace of a female Fielding baby. The yet-to-be-christened girl may have died before even her existence was registered, though this would be unusual if she lived as long as three months. Perhaps Fodor misunderstood, and Alma miscarried a female baby, or June was one of the stillborn twins that she delivered after seeing the dead rat. Perhaps, like other stories that Alma told, the fleeting existence of June was a mingling of the imagined and the real. But the birth and death of Laurence Peter were just as she reported. According to the public records, he was born on 7 June 1925. He would have turned thirteen on the day in 1938 that Alma’s eyes apparently began to fail.
Fodor’s notes show that after 17 May Alma returned several times to the subject of her lost son: she spoke of her compulsive, secret visits to Laurie’s grave; she identified the baby’s death as the event that might have caused her to attack Les in 1926 and to go blind in 1929. But in his account of Alma’s case, Fodor mentioned her second son only in passing. ‘At eighteen she had her first baby,’ he wrote; ‘at twenty-one, the next … At twenty-two her second baby died of tubercular meningitis.’ He did not seem to have considered that the boy’s death might be a source of enduring pain to Alma, or that Les’s reaction to it might have laid the charge for the poltergeist attack.
Fodor had noticed that many mediums were bereaved mothers, and that the convulsions of trance could resemble a woman’s labour throes. Lizzie Bullock, the transfiguration medium, took up clairvoyance after the deaths of two babies, and during her spirit possessions she behaved, said Fodor, ‘as if she actually were to give “birth” to the phantoms’. Fodor attributed her grimaces to orgasms, but she might also have been undergoing the spasms of labour, or of grief. Lizzie said that she had converted to spiritualism when she felt the weight of a spirit child in her arms. Eileen Garrett, too, became a medium after the deaths of her sons, and at her first seance with Fodor moaned and shook so much, he said, that he feared that she would deliver a baby. It was she who saw the aura of a baby around Alma, and suggested that she had lost a child.
Alma was twenty-two when Laurie contracted tubercular meningitis. He probably seemed merely tired and cranky in the early summer of 1926, as the bacteria in his lungs spread to the membranes around his brain and spinal cord. But in August he suddenly fell down. He collapsed into a stupor, then a coma. He died on 2 September 1926 in the Thornton Heath workhouse infirmary.
Laurie’s body was returned to the family home in Maplethorpe Road, where it lay for three days in a lined white coffin in the front room. It was then that Don heard his mother sobbing by the boy’s corpse.