They Came From SW19 Read Free

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