The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

they never touched my soul or penetrated into my mind’. Una knew the details of this surface interest. There was a complicity between them, a share of guilt and they ‘frayed each other’s nerves’ when they met.

But John could not bear ever to be alone. A night in the unlived-in flat at Cadogan Court was an intolerable reminder. ‘The confusion there is past all belief’, she wrote to Cara. She stayed with Dolly Clarke and her baby daughter at Swan Walk and at a country house in Purton, Wiltshire.

Una wanted to be with her, even if that meant no more than misery shared. She rented a house at 13 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, because it was near Swan Walk. Her ‘heart affection’ and the threat of its untreated consequences alarmed John, who took her for a week to the Royal Victoria Hotel at Llanberis in Wales. ‘It was lonely and beautiful,’ Una wrote, ‘and we went to the top of Snowdon and trailed round Caernarvon Castle … but it was not a success.’

John’s thoughts were all of Ladye. She kept her clothes and possessions and did not accept that her death meant extinction. ‘She is so very much alive. The idea that such a personality could cease to exist is too absurd.’ She spoke of killing herself to be with her, but feared that might confound their chances in heaven. She wanted to reassure her, resume ordinary communication, justify her relationship with Una and be forgiven if she had transgressed.

Wherever Ladye now was John determined to find her. And wherever John now went Una was going to follow. The Church was too philosophical with its ideas of heaven deferred, its exhortations to prayer, piety, submission to the will of the Lord and a long wait before all was revealed. John wanted to get in touch right away.

She paid for the help of a medium, a kind of warden of an extraterrestrial missing persons bureau. The first they went to, Mrs Scales, was unsatisfactory. She had two lots of triplets and three lots of twins, was unwell, hard up and distracted. She went into a sweaty trance, failed to evoke anyone or thing in the least like Ladye, said ‘horrible things’, had an attack of ‘neurotic mania’ and was in both their views ‘hysterical with erotic tendencies’.

Una then contacted Sir Oliver Lodge, former President of the Society for Psychical Research. He had a credibility Mrs Scales lacked. He was Principal of the University of Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society and author of various works on lightning conductors, electrons and the universe. His book, Raymond or Life and Death with Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection After Death, was selling fast. It went into six editions in 1916. Hundreds of soldiers were being killed each day and it was bought by the bereaved.

Raymond was Sir Oliver’s youngest son. He qualified as an engineer but volunteered in September 1914. He became a second lieutenant in the South Lancashire regiment and was sent to Ypres. He was the kind of young man Radclyffe Hall encouraged to enlist with her recruitment speeches and leaflets. His was the active service she said she wanted for herself.

In letters home, Raymond wrote of the ‘unending vista’ of war, enteric dysentery, dead horses and dead men ‘once smelt never forgotten’. He was he said ‘pigging it’ in the trenches, shot at and shelled. He saw his friends killed by sniper fire; his servant had his leg blown off and his best friend, Fletcher, was hospitalized because his ‘nerves were all wrong’. His captain acquired a German helmet and had it cleaned out because ‘part of the owner was still inside it’. The German prisoners included an officer aged sixteen ‘and student types with spectacles, poor devils I do feel sorry for them’.

‘I should think that never in this world before have there been so many men so fed up’, he wrote. He asked his father to send morphia tablets because when men got hit in the morning, they had to wait until dark to be moved. He asked for a book about the stars and for some cocoa and he complained of rats and mice. He said he valued his primus stove and stone water jar and that at the war’s end he would like a simple room with the view of a garden.

By 6 September 1915 he was sleeping in wet clothes in a dugout swimming with water. ‘Great happenings are expected here shortly and we are going to have a share’, he wrote. And then his captain sprained an ankle falling from his horse and Raymond was put in temporary command of C Company. ‘Hope not for long. Too responsible at the present time of crisis.’ A week later he wrote, ‘You will understand that I have the Company to look after and we are going into the front line trenches this evening at 5 pm.’

Sir Oliver received the familiar telegram:

The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the army have sustained by the death of your son in the service of your country. Their Majesties truly sympathise with you in your sorrow.

Raymond had been hit about midday on 14 September. Telephone wires were cut and no one could get a doctor. He died the next day. Lord Kitchener expressed sympathy too.

Nothing in Raymond’s letters sought consolation in the sky. Rather, he inferred that people might behave better on earth. But irrationality was fashionable. War had made life awful. Sir Oliver, like Radclyffe Hall, consoled himself with a notion of paradise where Raymond now resided. To communicate with his son he paid for sessions with mediums. He documented his findings and submitted these to the Society for Psychical Research in Hanover Square.

The Society prided itself on its standards of investigation and research and the status of its members. Among its former presidents were Bishop Boyd Carpenter, Canon of Westminster and Chaplain to the Forces; Professor Gilbert Murray, author and