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

classics scholar; Lord Rayleigh, Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge and Mr Gerald Balfour MP, brother of A. J. Balfour, the Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905.

Sir Oliver’s favoured medium was Gladys Leonard of Maida Vale. Through her he met again with Raymond. Sir Oliver ascertained that Raymond was happy, lived in a house ‘made from emanations from the earth’ and had a girlfriend with long gold hair and a lily in her hand. Raymond regularly visited his parents at the family home, Mariemont, at Edgbaston outside Birmingham. He came at night when they were in bed. ‘The air is so quiet then.’

Sir Oliver advised Radclyffe Hall to join the Society and go to Mrs Leonard. He offered a solution to her problem, a way for her to bring guilt, grief and loss into her control. She set about communicating with Ladye with obsessive application. ‘The idle apprentice,’ Una said, ‘was metamorphosed by sorrow into someone who would work from morning to night and from night till morning, or travel half across England and back to verify the most trifling detail.’

Writing was forgotten. Here was her work, the channel for ‘superfluous energy’, her full-time occupation. Between 1916 and 1920 evidence of Mrs Leonard’s ‘possession’ by Ladye was her overwhelming interest. She and Una went each week, sometimes five times a week. Every session was minuted, typed and analysed. They amassed an archive of paperwork and employed a full-time secretary. Una read aloud about discarnate spirits, mediumistic trances, Ostensible Communicators and Ostensible Possession. John hired a private detective in case Mrs Leonard cheated by unpsychical visits to the Public Record Office. Their findings were collated, analysed and sent for scrutiny to Sir Oliver.

John wanted to get close again to Ladye. Una wanted to usurp Ladye and get close again to John. She went along as recorder, witness, whatever John asked. She was needed at the sessions. It was the eternal triangle. The arrangement assuaged John’s conscience. She and Una were together not for pleasure, desire, or themselves, but only to serve Ladye. Una concurred. All she cared about was not to be parted for a morning or a night. Seances with Mrs Leonard had a parallel with hypnosis with Crichton-Miller. Both were a relinquishing of responsibility, a pseudo-submission to a higher power.

Gladys Leonard lived in a three-room basement flat at 41 Clifton Avenue, Maida Vale, west London. She kept her seance room hot and a red light glowed in the window. Mediums, she said, are extremely sensitive, highly strung individuals. Before going into a trance she got pins and needles and felt herself to be swelling to an enormous size. Clear, dry weather was important for ‘psychical manifestations’. On foggy days communication from the dead was difficult.

She wrote an autobiography, My Life in Two Worlds. In it she posed the question, ‘Are Our Loved Ones to be thought of only as Yesterday’s Sunbeams?’ Her answer was ‘a resounding No!’ She acquired special powers at the age of eight. A member of the local church died and Gladys had recurring visions of ‘radiantly happy people’ in green valleys. Happy Valleys, she called them, and was surprised others could not see them too.

In her teens Gladys went to spiritualist meetings where ‘discarnate spirits from the other side’ manifested themselves through mediums. A fat man with protruding eyes talked in the voice of a girl of seven. A middle-aged woman inhabited by a North American Indian kept giving bloodcurdling howls. On her twenty-seventh sitting Gladys was inhabited by Feda, a thirteen-year-old Indian girl who had apparently married Gladys’s great-great-grandfather then died in childbirth in 1800. Feda told Gladys that together they could do great things.

For money, Gladys worked as a repertory singer and actress. Throat troubles and the extraction of all her teeth impeded her career. She married Mr Leonard who was also an actor with throat troubles and profound deafness in his right ear. Money was short and they made do in a succession of nasty lodgings. In spring 1914 in a spiritualist paper, she advertised private sittings. Three people turned up for the first session. In a trance Gladys saw the murdered King of Serbia holding a bloody cannon ball. Six weeks later war started: ‘I understood then the purpose for which I was needed. I was to be used to prove to those whose dear ones had been killed that they were not lost to them and the dead had never died.’

The bereaved, the grief-stricken and the deranged came to her. She had an undoubted facility for saying what they liked to hear. She preferred them relatively sane and well-heeled. Oliver Lodge became a client in 1915 and sent other sitters via the Society for Psychical Research. ‘Where would my work have been without Sir Oliver Lodge’s help?’ Gladys Leonard asked.

In August 1916, John and Una made their way to Maida Vale, determined to meet again with Ladye. Gladys Leonard was wearing a blonde, wavy hairpiece and had applied a lot of face powder. Una had her notebook ready. Mrs Leonard made a noise like the air coming out of an inflatable cushion. She stared and seemed catatonic, then sweated, writhed, clutched Una’s shoulder and joggled her arm so that she had difficulty writing. Ladye was possessing Feda and Feda was possessing Mrs Leonard.

Feda talked through Mrs Leonard in a squeaky foreign voice. She said ‘pletending’ and ‘tly’ instead of pretending and try. She described Ladye’s hair, eyes and dimpled skin. Ladye, it was ascertained, was velly well. Feda explained the topography of the brave new world she was now in. The dead go to a plane, one to seven, that fits their earthly interests. There are ‘houses, gardens, meadows, woods, lakes’. Artists paint and singers sing. Ladye was on plane three. Jesus Christ was on plane seven. She had been up to visit him a few times – in a group, or gloop. She lived by herself though her visitors were numerous and she saw George often. He was very