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Authors: Nigel Williams

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BOOK: They Came From SW19
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‘It gave me the soup which turned out to be oxtail. And while I was getting my change he had a second coronary thrombosis.’

This would in any normal person’s hands have been the end of the story. But not for my mum.

‘I was weeping profusely, of course. And hurling myself at Daddy and attempting to take him in my arms.’

This was not something she had done much of when he was alive. Or going through what passes for life at 24 Stranraer Gardens. But, clearly, Norman Britton was a lot more of an attractive proposition now he was no longer with us. Dead people can’t answer back, can they? Dead people do just what they’re told.

‘And de Lotbinniere returned at this point and approached me from behind.’

I had known that she would have to return to de Lotbinniere. There is a weird logic to my mother’s tales. The small parts always run away with the main narrative, although they themselves are often upstaged by the things that really obsess her – like brands of instant coffee or the design of furniture covers.

‘Paul de Lotbinniere is a graduate chemist from Leeds and is only doing nursing as a temporary thing. He hopes to have his own gardening business, although it’s proving immensely difficult at the moment. Apparently people have lost interest in gardening.’

Paul
de Lotbinniere, eh? Come on, Mum, tell me more, do! Approached you from behind! De Lotbinniere! My man!

I had gone back to looking at the floor. It seemed the safest place to look. Just behind the desk, my dad had stencilled a large thing that looked a bit like a rhubarb leaf with bits chopped out of it. In the middle he had written my name and my date of birth.

SIMON BRITTON

MAY 1ST

1976

He had left spaces for all the brothers and sisters who were supposed to come pattering along after me. Who, mercifully, failed to appear. As I began to look at it, I began to think that this was how my dad’s gravestone would look. A name and a date or two and a bit of the old fruit-salad carving.

I didn’t cry or anything but decided to move my eyes away. There was a feeling in the room, although I couldn’t have said precisely where. I couldn’t have said what it was either, but I did know that that was the only good thing about it.

‘. . . a cup of tea with de Lotbinniere while he wrote out the certificate and they took Norman away. Oh darling, darling, darling!’

I couldn’t work out whether this referred to me or Dad or de Lotbinniere. So I said nothing.

She was on the move again for the next remark. She went over to the black bookshelf in the corner. She put one hand on it and peered in my direction. She seemed to be having trouble getting me in focus. I could see her quite clearly. She has a chapped look, does my mum. She’s been cured, like a herring, in the tiny kitchen that my dad could never afford to replace, and round her eyes is a web of small lines etched into her skin. They’re marks of worry and of ageing, I know, but sometimes I imagine they’re long-healed cuts from a razor and that it’s my dad and I who made them.

‘He always wanted to be buried at sea.’

This was news to me. I somehow couldn’t see Mum and Dad ever having the kind of conversation in which they would get round to talking about such things. But I still said
nothing.
I have to live here. You know?

Mum continued: ‘I said, “Why?” He said because he loved the sea. I said, “I like John Lewis’s, but that doesn’t mean I want to be buried there.” He loved John Lewis’s. We must remember to be positive about this.’

With this remark she shuffled across the bare, polished floorboards, arms out. At first I thought she was going to try for a clinch, but at the last moment she decided against it. She stood about a yard away, looking suddenly bleak and small and miserable. And then she remembered to be positive. It wasn’t that big a deal. Her husband had
died
, that was all! I could see her worried little eyes looking for the pluses, and eventually she found one of them.

‘He will be in actual, direct contact with Derek and Stella Meenhuis! And he will actually be able to see and touch and experience fully the Lord Jesus Christ!’

Fond as I was of Derek and Stella Meenhuis, I couldn’t see that it was worth dying in order to get in touch with them again. Neither am I one of those people who think it will necessarily be a big deal to look God in the face. But my mum had got on course now and she came closer to me, anxious to apologize in case she had mistakenly given the impression of being disconcerted by watching someone die of a heart attack.

‘We are going to
talk
to him!’ she said, in the sort of eager way she used to recommend one of our cheap holiday breaks in a caravan park on the South Coast. ‘We are going to talk as we have never, ever talked before, Simon. This isn’t bad, darling! It’s just . . .’

She struggled for the inappropriate word and, in the end, found it: ‘. . . just . . .
different
!’

2

I have a very bad attitude towards death. I’m terrified of it.

I know this is wrong. I know that there’ll be bright lights and that Jesus will lift me up in his arms and that I will find myself in a large and harmonious choir – something that is never likely to happen to me while I am alive – but I don’t
look forward
to stiffing.

I couldn’t even work up much enthusiasm on my dad’s behalf. While my mum started on one of her favourite topics – the precise geographical layout of heaven – I found myself looking round the room to remind myself of the few small things that had been his, before the loving hands of the Almighty cradled him in bliss eternal. It’s pathetic, I know, but looking at furniture he’d sat on, or pictures he’d looked at, seemed to help.

As she droned on about the wonderful quality of the light Over There (she always makes it sound like one of my dad’s brochures for his holiday cottages in Connemara) I looked down at the old man’s desk. Below me, just to my right, was a pair of his glasses. He left them there, beside the Anglepoise lamp, because he only used them for reading. Next to the glasses was a letter that he must have been looking at before he got up to walk to wherever he had his first heart attack. At the bottom of the page the guy had written, rather optimistically, ‘See you Thursday.’

You should never say things like that. You never know if you’re going to see anyone on Thursday. When you kiss goodbye to your wife (or whoever) in the morning, don’t say, ‘See you tonight.’ That’s tempting providence. Say, ‘
Might
see you tonight.’ And if she gives you a hard time about it, you just tell her. There is no guarantee.

I saw those glasses horribly clearly. As if they were correcting my sight, from where they lay, on the shabby wooden desk. I could hear everything very precisely too. In the street outside, someone was playing a radio. The song on the radio was the Pet Shop Boys singing ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ I could hear the Maltese plumber’s water pipes singing along with them and, above my mum’s head, see the shelf that my dad had put up in the spring of 1986. It took him the whole spring to do it, but it still slopes, dangerously, towards the floor.

My mum shook her lank, grey hair and blinked like something from the small-mammal house. She’d moved on from the nature of Heavenly Light and had got on to how we would all float around like
spacemen
when we reached the Halls of Jesus and how we would not need to eat
as such
but would always be sort of
three-quarters of the way through a most delicious meal.
Something about my expression must have told her that even this was not going to get me to look on the bright side of this issue. She looked at me rather plaintively and said, ‘Auntie Diana will be so pleased to see him!’

I didn’t agree or disagree with this.

‘They always had so much in common,’ she went on. Then she folded her hands together, lowered her head and, without asking anyone’s permission, went straight into public prayer.

My mum is a leading member of the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist, South Wimbledon. Why didn’t I mention that? What do you take me for? It isn’t something I advertise. Only a few people at school know. It is, for reasons that will become clear, impossible to keep it from the neighbours, but whenever I am out with First Spiritualists I try to make it clear from my posture and expression that I am absolutely nothing to do with them.

I don’t know whether there was ever a Second Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon, but, if there was, I guess the First Church soon ran it out of town. The First Church has some very heavy characters in it
indeed.
In spite of a Youth Drive and the Suffer Little Children campaign, not many of them are under forty-five. But even the wrinkliest members can still act funky.

Four years ago, for example, my mum and I were on the Used Handbag Stand at the twice-yearly Bring and Buy Sale, when Rita Selfridge offered to buy my mum’s trousers. The ones she was wearing. She offered her five pounds for them and asked her if they qualified as Used or Nearly New. My mum didn’t do anything – she never does if people are rude to her – but my mum’s friend, Mabel, who is seventy-five, threw herself at Rita Selfridge and bit her, quite badly, on the neck.

The First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon was founded early this century, by a woman named Ella Walsh. They don’t actually use the word ‘founded’. What she did was to ‘renew’ a body known as the Sisters of Harmony and Obedience, a church which had been in her family for over a hundred years. Ella Walsh was the great-granddaughter of Old Mother Walsh of Ealing, of whom you may have heard. Old Mother Walsh was a prophetess who lived in a hut very close to what is now the North Circular Road. She had a dream in which she saw a huge snake wind itself around the planet. Fire came out of its mouth, and it bore the inscription
TWO THOUSAND YEARS GO BY
. It talked as well. It said that a woman was coming who would save the world and make it whole. She would be announced by a boy prophet ‘of pure heart and mind’ and, when she came into her ministry, ‘all mannere of thynge would be welle’. If she didn’t, it was going to gobble up the world. Some snake!

After Old Mother Walsh died, her memory was kept alive by her daughters and granddaughters. The Walshes bred like rabbits. Eliza Walsh, for example, had no fewer than six phantom pregnancies as well as the twelve that produced babies. Finally, around 1890, just after the Walsh family moved to Wimbledon, Ella Walsh, the Mother and Renewer of the Sisters of Harmony, was born.

Ella took the Sisters in a new and exciting direction. She kept some of the rules and regulations and printed a limited edition of
The Sayings of Old Mother Walsh
, and added her own angle. She brought in spiritualism, and soon there just wasn’t room for much of Old Mother Walsh’s doctrine, even though scraps of it survived and were still about when I was young. ‘Evacuate the noise of the bowel in your own place!’ for example. Members of the First Church still rush out of the room if they suspect they are about to fart.

Like all churches, the first thing it did was to set about getting some money in the bank. Ella Walsh met a guy called Fox, and, more importantly, got in touch with his brother, who had died four years earlier in a boating accident near Chichester.

Fox was
loaded.

Ella Walsh and Fox spent many a happy hour talking to Fox’s brother. He was, it turned out, feeling pretty good about being dead. Apparently being dead was a lot more fun than being alive. They had snooker and whisky and quite good boating facilities over on the Other Side. And, after they’d contacted Fox’s brother, they called up all sorts of other people – including Robespierre and William Thackeray. It was all such fun that Ella married Fox and Fox gave her thousands of pounds to build the First Spiritualist Church.

She must have creamed off most of the money, because the First Spiritualist Church makes your average scout hut look like the Taj Mahal. It is a kind of tin and concrete shack, somewhere at the back of South Wimbledon station, and I’m always hoping some enterprising businessman will see that it has restaurant potential and offer us money for it.

It has no restaurant potential.

On the back wall there is a letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, thanking the First Spiritualist Church for all their help and saying how great it was to talk to them. The letter is signed, in his absence, by one Rebecca Furlong, and it’s only when you look at the date that you realize it was written fifteen years after Sir Arthur snuffed it. He sounds pretty chirpy, and gives no indication, in the text, that he has croaked. He doesn’t really mention much about himself at all. But maybe after you’ve been on the Other Side for a certain length of time it all gets pretty samey. Certainly, dead people seem pretty keen to get on down to the First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon, so there can’t be a lot happening over there.

If I ever die they won’t see me for dust.

Pike and Hannah Dooley won’t have the chance to ask me how am I doing, and do they have skateboards in the afterlife. Marjorie can use every single one of her internationally renowned psychic tricks on me and I will guarantee not to respond. And Quigley, oh Mr Quigley – he can rap the table for as long as he likes but I will not be answering!

They did great business, apparently, after the First World War. In the early 1920s you couldn’t get in. Just before the war, Ella and Fox had had a daughter called Rose and – guess what! – she turned out to be a Psychical Prodigy. Rose, as far as I can gather, was a real all-rounder. She wasn’t as hot on Jesus as her mum had been, but when it came to automatic writing, Ouija board, ectoplasm and something rather dodgy-sounding called cabinet work, there was no one to touch her in South London. About the only thing Rose Fox didn’t do was levitate, but, as she was nearly sixteen stone, that is hardly surprising.

I saw her when she was in her mid-seventies. She rolled into Sunday service supported by Mr and Mrs Quigley and gave us this big speech about how the spirits never talked to her any more. The last time anyone from the Great Beyond had given her their valuable time was, apparently, during something called the Suez Crisis, when she had had a short conversation with the late Admiral Nelson. ‘They want me to join them,’ she said. ‘Their silence beckons me!’ And then, as people frequently do down at the First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon, she burst into tears.

BOOK: They Came From SW19
4.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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