They Came From SW19 Read Free Page B

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.
    I quite often burst into tears on my way there. On one occasion, when I was about seven, my mum had to untwist my hands from about every gatepost in Stranraer Gardens. ‘It’s not as if it’s the Spanish Inquisition,’ she used to snap.
    No, it was the First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon! That was what was worrying me. If it had been the Spanish Inquisition it would have been fine. I thought I knew where I stood with the Spanish Inquisition.
    Some people blamed Rose Fox for the decline of the First Spiritualist Church. She went too far, people said. There were all these poor bastards who had lost relatives in the First World War, trying to get in touch with them. But with Rose it was hard to hear anything through the table-rapping or the squelch of ectoplasm being flung about the room by men in black jerseys. She started to take photographs of the spirits too, and that is how she came to be accused of trickery.
    ‘Did I ever tell you’, my dad said to me once, when we were walking, as we often did, in the direction of the off-licence, ‘about how Rose Fox was photographed beneath the spirit reality of Franz Josef of Austria?’
    ‘I don’t believe you did,’ I replied.
    Whereupon, from his pocket he produced a black-and-white photograph of a plump woman in a loose white dress. It was hard to make out what was behind her – a chair, a table and what looked like a wardrobe of some kind. But what was directly above her head was easier to see. Hanging in the gloom, at a height of about five feet, was the gigantic face of an elderly man with mutton-chop whiskers and a helmet with a steel point on it. I happened to know, because we were doing it at school, that the face balancing on Rose’s bonce was that of the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    ‘My God,’ I said, ‘it looks just like him!’
    ‘It does, doesn’t it?’ said Dad.
    He wrinkled his lips appreciatively, as if he was already tasting the first drink of the day. ‘It also’, he went on, ‘looks amazingly like a photograph of the old boy that appeared in the
Illustrated London News
in June 1924!’
    That was typical of my dad. He always took great delight in any reports of trickery. And anything that reflected badly on Rose Fox, who was a great heroine of my mum’s, always went down particularly well.
    The worst thing Rose Fox did was not to organize spirit photographs of internationally famous dead people – it was to get married. She got hitched to a man called Stuart Quigley, in the year the Second World War broke out. Quigley died in 1950 and was so boring that no one could bear to speak to him much, even after he’d croaked. But, before he opened that last little door into the unknown, he managed to make Rose pregnant. And so it was that in 1948 Rose Fox gave birth to the man born to make my life a misery – Albert Roger Quigley, MA – part scout leader, part amateur opera singer, part Christian, part Spiritualist and one hundred per cent complete and utter arsehole.
    Quigley is an assistant bank manager. My mum once took me into his branch to show me his name, which is written up on a board. He is billed just below someone called Mervyn Snyde, who looks after International Securities. I think they are making a grave error of judgement in letting anyone know he’s there. Quigley, like quite a few other members of the First Church, is downright sinister. It was quite horrible to think that someone like him should be left alive when my dad was dead.
    I didn’t start crying