They Came From SW19 Read Free Page A

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