Light

It has since been realised that the source of the eerie, resonant sound on the night before we embarked for a hospital one hundred miles away was me. Upon our return we noticed that the inside of a central panel of nine identical stained glass panels had cracked from corner to corner with lots of fractures. The damage was occasioned from the inside. My spiritual energy was leaking due to increasing stress; coupled, of course, with Sarah's anxiety, over the invasive surgery I was about to undertake on my left groin to remove some lymph nodes. That was on Lord Byron's birthday last month. Since then I have had an MRI at New Hall, Salisbury, and an MRCP at the Royal, Dorset. Next I shall be returning to St George's, London, where I shall undergo the same lymph node removal operation on my right groin. This will take place on the morning of the day betwixt the feast of St Joseph of Arimathea, and St Joseph, the husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By a curious coincidence, Sarah has restored an antique church statue of the latter, and, of course, the former is of major significance because of my episcopal See at Glastonbury at which place Arimathean Joseph visited two millennia ago. I wrote about this in my book The Grail Church. I feel comforted by the pending uncomfortable time falling, as it does, on the day between these two saints. I shall have the pre-operation preparation at St George's on March 17th, the feast of St Joseph of Arimathea, the day prior to the operation itself. My recovery will take place on the feast of the Blessed Virgin's husband.

It has been decided that the damaged central panel of the large stained glass unit facing north will not replicate what was contained prior, but instead will feature a freshly designed "healing" panel in three colours that will have a direct association with Arimathean Joseph post-Crucifixion. The early light will then pour through the finished panel, and all those surrounding it. And its light shall hopefully heal ...

Peace

Perhaps not obvious to most people, I would have nevertheless liked to have been by my former foe's bedside eleven months ago when he breathed his last breath and fell into that sleep which awaits us all, but that was never going to be allowed in any circumstance because of our half century history. 

As I said in my obituary, absurdly described by the left-wing journalist Francisco Garcia as a "magnanimous self-penned eulogy," which it was not, I expressed my sadness over him shuffling off this mortal coil without knowing that in his last moment of supreme finality he had my forgiveness.

He remained in my thoughts, softly fading over the months, but not disappearing. Was he at peace?

Then, in the early hours of February 27th, between 4.00 and 5.00am, I had a strange dream that moved me to tears. Everything took place at night where I found myself watching the deceased arrive at a tall, sombre Victorian house. I stood and watched for a while until he left. Then I walked toward the old house and entered it. At this point, I should clarify that the place was unrecognisable to me, and quite unlike any other I have been familiar with. Darkness pervaded the interior which was drab with an overwhelming sense of desolateness. I walked down some stairs into a rambling basement area. A young woman appeared with dark hair. It was not someone I can say I recognised. She had a curious expression. If we spoke, I cannot recall her utterances. She was not friendly, nor unfriendly. She was just present. Then she slowly removed herself to a large area at the rear of the property.

Eventually, though I cannot say for how long, I heard the sound of someone quietly entering the house and descending the stairs. It was the deceased, the man with whom a fifty year feud had been fought. He seemed as I remembered him from all those years ago, plus much older and much paler.

This anomalous figure was illumined in the half-light where colour is a stranger; so his appearance could have been caused by the shadows out of which he emerged. I naturally recognised him straight away. For a moment neither of us did anything save stare across the void at the spectre before us.

I took a step forward, as did he. Then I hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. He reciprocated in like manner and evinced warmth. I can only remember my words. He might have spoken, but I cannot remember what he said, or possibly it was communicated without sound emitting from his lips. Something empathetic and reconciliatory. I continued to hug the ghostly apparition before me, whispering: "I forgive you .... I love you."  The dream now began to fade. We were at peace. Finally.

Awakening

Most everyone has a story to tell, and mine, up to that point, became public on 27 February 1970 when, albeit reluctantly, I revealed some of that story in a front page feature article. From that moment, I ceased to have a private life, especially following the Reuters News Agency getting hold of it, and my being interviewed by a television programme, transmitted on Friday 13 March 1970, a short time later. I quite literally woke up and found myself famous. Yet it was a wholly unwanted celebrity.

Up until the end of the last century, notwithstanding one or two attempts to treat me in a lighthearted manner, I was received with impartiality and respect by film production companies, television and radio programmes, quality glossy magazines, including an appearance on the cover of The Sunday Times magazine, and others besides. As we entered the new century it became abundantly clear that people's beliefs, particularly belief in the supernatural, had fast begun to erode and become eclipsed by an aggressive form of atheism, often dressed up as something else, eg humanism etc. Interest in me did not lessen, however, but suddenly I was now, according to a new generation, see RationalWiki, and others of that ilk, "an unhinged British author." I was being painted as "unhinged" for one reason only: I was continuing to tell my story, but it no longer chimed with the atheistic, anti-everything considered supernatural, clique who dismiss all such things as fairy tales. My story now earned their opprobrium on a grand scale, and they were not slow to make their displeasure known.

“Ever since I became aware that Highgate Cemetery was the reputed haunt of a vampire, the investigations and activities of Seán Manchester commanded my attention. I became convinced that, more than anyone else, he knew the full story of the Highgate Vampire.”

~ Peter Underwood, ghost hunter & author, The Ghost Club Society, London, England

“I am very impressed by the body of scholarship you have created. Seán Manchester is undoubtedly the father of modern vampirological research.”

~ John Godl, paranormal researcher and writer, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

“Seán Manchester is to be congratulated on this fine piece of research work which I confess to enjoying to the extreme.”

~ Professor Devendra P Varma, vampirologist & author, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

“Fascinating in its subject matter and magnificent in the quality of its prose. Seán Manchester’s literary style is refreshingly reminiscent of the Gothic genre.”

~ Paul Spencer Vickers, Dept of English Literature, University College, London, England

“Seán Manchester is the most celebrated vampirologist of the twentieth century.”

~ Shaun Marin, reviewer and sub-editor, Uri Geller’s Encounters magazine, England

“A most interesting and useful addition to the literature of the subject.”

~ Reverend Basil Youdell, Literary Editor, Orthodox News, Christ the Saviour, Woolwich, England

“This book will certainly be read in a hundred years time, two hundred years time, three hundred years time ~ in short, for as long as mankind is interested in the supernatural. It has the most genuine power to grip. Once you have started to read it, it is virtually impossible to put it down.”

~ Lyndall Mack, Udolpho magazine, Chislehurst, England

Memories

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Islington

I was so slender in years, indeed a mere infant, that I saw it only for what it was - a bright light.

In the darkness.

The bedroom where I slept had me facing the window, but only night peered in through the panes of glass with glows of gas lamps in the street below. Glows, almost impotent. Dull.

Increasing brightness arose from within the room. Just slightly to my right. It enlarged.

With intensity.

Then I heard the soft voice. Kind. Beautiful. It was close to my ear, but I saw nobody. 

I was five-years-old, living in the Islington of street gas lamps and silent fog. 

And of enduring magical enchantment in the remembrance thereof.

Already, I loved the past.

On the 21st July 1990, the much loved Jones Brothers of Holloway closed its doors for the last time.

When we arrived in London from Canada via Ireland, having settled in a house in Islington, my father ordered a rosewood piano to be delivered. It remained with my parents to the end. On this instrument my mother would play the music of Chopin in those early days. When we removed to the Mansions, where Fred the porter and Alice the cleaner were part of the fixtures and fittings, the piano followed. Its final destination was the house my parents purchased within a short walking distance.

The children at Hungerford School loved my mother. They called her “flower face” because of the curls around her constantly smiling face. She was at her most beautiful during this period and attracted many admiring glances — yet she remained ever childlike and innocent, charming everyone along the way, to the end of her life. Despite the transparent naîvety that never left her, my mother led the way and made things happen. She wanted a child. My father was less convinced. When we returned to England from overseas, my mother would be the one to discover and organise each  of our homes. It became apparent to me in later life that she wanted me to find romantic fulfillment. I did. Eventually.

Mrs Brown, a somewhat severe-looking “governess” figure prior to my starting school at the age of five, was in truth a warm and kind person who taught me that “don’t cares are made to care!” Something I would remember for the rest of my life. Though austere, these were lovely, enchanting times — and London was a wonderful city in which to enjoy them. I was blessed to be alive in a time of common courtesy, considerate behaviour, and gentle folk. Qualities that have now become a rarity.

I recall my father taking me on trips to where much of London remained a wasteland of bomb craters and semi-ruins, particularly the city and docklands areas. The three of us would enjoy summer picnics on Hampstead Heath, watching the model boats on Highgate Pond. In the winters there would be coal fires and snow, which the horse-drawn milk cart would have to negotiate most carefully. Lamp-lighters would arrive every evening to kindle the gas lamps that still abounded. Christmas was very special. It meant visits to the huge Gamages store, near Holborn Circus, and Santa Claus arriving on Christmas Eve in the snow via a Gamages van stuffed full of toys and games. First on my list was always a Rupert annual. Few of these childhood gifts have survived, save the much treasured Rupert annuals. Moreover, there existed then a quite palpable and almost Dickensian Christmas spirit amongst folk. These were the last days of what I remember as a recognisable and beautiful England.

Nicholas Mosley, whose father I would eventually meet, reflected the age soon to eclipse the one into which I was born: “This is the age of untruthfulness, or double-think, or loss of integrity and a profound lack of courage. It is not nowadays that we are deliberately wicked: we are simply mad. … What the world has now denied is the importance of truthfulness and integrity and honour. We are in a moral vacuum with no values, and idols of publicity in the place of God. … I think that because the present abuses are those of dissolution and moral chaos then our remedies must be in this sphere also — in a concentration not on political and social lobbying, but on demonstrating personally and in groups what the godly life of integrity should be.” 

                                               ’Twas down a little country lane

                                                Leaf-strewn, in coloured hue,

                                                That to my memory will remain

                                                The joy I found in you.

                                                Sweet whispering from a brook nearby,

                                                Sad notes of birds’ late song,

                                                Filled my heart with an ecstasy.

                                                Dear Peace, for you I long.

                                                When back amid the noise and pain

                                                Of daily toil and strife,

                                                Locked in my heart that country lane,

                                                Brings reality to life.

Notwithstanding the influence my mother had on these three verses, Newstead Abbey Park had provided for me the brook and nearby country lane. My mother had much older memories. When she was very young and her parents had moved from Derbyshire to an idyllic setting at Wollaton, a brook ran along the bottom of the country lane where their house was situated. She often spoke about her first home. Newstead, in many ways, would magnify its joys and aspects ― adding acres of woodland and more besides. After the Newstead property and its acreage were sold in the early 1960s, my grandparents lived out their remaining days in a house built for them on land purchased at Wollaton Park. The haunting of their home by a cold presence that apparently manifested as a spectre, allegedly causing my grandmother to fall down the rockery one evening, precipitated this final move. She lay undiscovered for some hours before her husband returned. Presentiments of doom and disaster seemed to intrude her everyday existence thereafter and she never properly recovered.

Newstead was to become for me a symbol of all that belonged to the old world that was irrevocably, moment by moment, slipping away. More than anything my mother wanted me to find the fulfilment that had been denied to her. This is reflected in the lines I would write in a novel published some eight years after her death.

“The world we once inhabited has gone. … This is your time and your world. Find happiness in it, if you can.” So tells Mina Harker to her son, Quincey, in Carmel, my sequel to Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece Dracula. Yet it could have been my own mother speaking. Her world was fast disappearing as two catastrophic wars heralded the quick demise of our culture and spiritual destiny.

Both became more detached from the emerging new world, reminding each other of an older and more familiar England which both they and I preferred. Happiness seemed to lay beyond their grasp.

On 21 July 1991, they came to lunch together at my house for what prived to be the first time and last time. My journal records: “Lunch with all the trimmings. It is the first time my father has visited and certainly the only time my parents have visited as a couple. It went well ― but they now seem so old and feeble, frequently forgetting things. It is to be expected. I am nevertheless pleased they both came to visit ― at last!”

They did not visit as a couple again, and a photographic record of the occasion was to be the last picture of them together. The final photograph of my mother was taken almost three months later as she received the Host at a Mass I celebrated. It is reproduced in the book I dedicate to her memory, The Grail Church. Twelve months after that picture, almost to the day, she sadly died.

I felt exceptionally close to my mother who I tried to visit at least once a week throughout my life, until she passed from this world on the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels. If she could have possibly contacted me from beyond the veil, she would have certainly done so. I did experience an angelic presence soon after her death, which I discussed on a television programme at the time, but my mother was at peace and did not communicate. Matters such as life after death held a real fascination for her, and her familiarity with the lives of her favourite saints ― St Teresa of Avila and St Thérèse of Liseux ― made for some extremely interesting conversations. Fortuitously, the feast of St Thérèse of Liseux fell on the day before my mother died, and the feast of St Teresa of Avila was the day of her funeral. When I saw in the little gothic chapel, isolated from the funeral director’s office, in a place where the flowers for wreaths are grown, to place items of devotion in her coffin, I was struck on each occasion how she remained without any trace of corruption. There was something saintly about her as she lay in her coffin, absent of death’s all too familiar hand. It was difficult to believe she had really gone, as I returned in the evenings to lift the lid and view her. My father could not bring himself to see her in such sombre surroundings. I nonetheless drew enormous comfort from these evening visits to the chapel. There was a smile of such peace on her face. She looked radiant.

Newstead

Once the habitat of the celebrated poet and his ancestors, Newstead would become a symbol of all that is Gothic and Romantic, which now, irrevocably, has slipped into the reservoir of fragmented memory. This is where I played as a child in the avenues of sombre forest trees in Lord Byron’s gloomy abode where the fading twilight coupled with the moan in leafy woods to herald the filmy disc of the moon.

In the year of my first pilgrimage to Lord Byron’s tomb in the company of The Byron Society whose honorary director, Mrs Elma Dangerfield, suspected a personal connection with the poet, I was still yet to hear from Professor Leslie A Marchand himself whose later correspondence in private about the“records of births and deaths of the lower (servant) class in those days” helped establish facts about the poet and Lucy, my great, great, great grandmother. Byron was seldom without consolation of the female kind and of the various servant maids who slipped between his sheets to keep him company at Newstead, Lucy was far and away his favourite. He called her Lucinda, but in a poem she appears as Lucietta.

A letter, 17 January 1809, to John Hanson confirms that “the youngest is pregnant (I need not tell you by whom) and I cannot have the girl on the parish.” On 4 February 1809, Byron wrote to Hanson:“Lucy’s annuity may be reduced to fifty pounds, and the other fifty go to the Bastard.” He had originally provided her with an annuity of one hundred pounds. Three years after making Lucy pregnant he put her in charge as revealed in a letter to Francis Hodgson, written from Newstead on 25 September 1811: “Lucy is extracted from Warwickshire [where his and her son had been weaned]; some very bad faces have been warned off the premises, and more promising substituted in their stead … Lucinda to be commander of all the makers and unmakers of beds in the household.”

Byron’s letters might suggest a callousness in his relationships that is perhaps unwarranted. When his illegitimate child by Lucy was born, he wrote a poem in which he hailed his “dearest child of love.” He had always wanted a son and Lucy provided him with his first and last. Surviving progeny that followed were all female. He composed To My Son when Lucy’s child was born:

Those flaxen locks, those eyes of blue

Bright as thy mother's in their hue;

Those rosy lips, whose dimples play

And smile to steal the heart away,

Recall a scene of former joy,

And touch thy father's heart, my Boy!

And thou canst lisp a father's name--

Ah, William, were thine own the same,--

No self-reproach--but, let me cease--

My care for thee shall purchase peace;

Thy mother's shade shall smile in joy,

And pardon all the past, my Boy!

Her lowly grave the turf has prest,

And thou hast known a stranger's breast;

Derision sneers upon thy birth,

And yields thee scarce a name on earth;

Yet shall not these one hope destroy,--

A Father's heart is thine, my Boy!

Why, let the world unfeeling frown,

Must I fond Nature's claims disown?

Ah, no--though moralists reprove,

I hail thee, dearest child of Love,

Fair cherub, pledge of youth and joy--

A Father guards thy birth, my Boy!

Oh,'twill be sweet in thee to trace,

Ere Age has wrinkled o'er my face,

Ere half my glass of life is run,

At once a brother and a son;

And all my wane of years employ

In justice done to thee, my Boy!

Although so young thy heedless sire,

Youth will not damp parental fire;

And, wert thou still less dear to me,

While Helen's form revives in thee,

The breast, which beat to former joy,

Will ne'er desert its pledge, my Boy!

To My Son, incorrectly dated 1807 by Thomas Moore, was first published six years after Byron’s death. Lucy’s pregnancy, of course, did not take place until early 1809. Moore misread the date. Furthermore, the housemaid did not die the early death of the young mother eulogised by the poet whose “lowly grave the turf has prest.” According to the housekeeper, Nanny Smith, Lucy overcame the “high and mighty airs she gave herself as Byron’s favourite,” married a local lad, and ran a public house in Warwick. The fate of the child enters the forlorn and forgotten realm of so many illegitimate offspring of servants, and does not resurface again until a century later when my Derbyshire maternal grandparents returned the bloodline to Newstead Abbey Park where they purchased twenty or so acres and had a comfortable lodge built almost within the shadow of Byron’s ancestral home. In the poem, Byron changed the scenario of Lucy’s end to conform to the sentimental moralising of the period, which required that the fallen woman must pay with her life: “The mother’s shade shall smile in joy, / And pardon all the past, my Boy!”

The poem addresses Byron’s natural child, challenging the convention that would withhold from his“little illegitmate” a father’s loving concern, along with any claim to social position. Byron’s pride, along with his sense of honour, was offended by the common practice of turning out pregnant maidservants. He knew the fate of country girls who bore illegitimate children, surviving on the pittance provided by parish poor rates, the workhouse, or making their way to the nearest city and entering a life of prostitution. Along with keeping Lucy employed, Lord Byron made provision — exceptionally generous by the standards of the day — for her and their child in his will. Lucy was to have an annuity of £100 (later reduced to £50); the other £50 was to go to the child.

To walk the ancient corridors of the Abbey again was an unearthly experience which filled me with a mixture of strange emotions. There was the haunting drawing of Lady Caroline Lamb and many more pictures of Lord Byron. Childhood memories were stirred and I reflected on the kindred experiences of Countess Guiccioli when she saw the poet’s home for the first time — eight years after his death. Her sad journey would include a lone visit to the poet’s tomb at Hucknall Torkard. From the door, even before there was time for it to close, she prostrated herself on the flagstone that is situated above the remains of Lord Byron. There she remained for over an hour. It was evening when, in the footsteps of the Countess, I arrived at the church wherein the Byron Family Vault dwells beneath the chancel. It simply bears the name BYRON and, underneath, the date of his birth and death. I laid a wreath.

Photograph of a very young Seán Manchester.

Illustration of a very young George Byron.

Below is a copy of the altered (with crossings out) parish register of Linby (the parish closest to Newstead) that has been forensically examined. The missing text reveals: "George illegitimate Son of Lucy Monk; illegitimate Son of Baron Byron of Newstead, Nottingham, Newstead Abbey."

When interviewed informally by Mark Knight in 2013, who openly admitted to being "happy but intimidated" to have an opportunity to put questions to me, reflecting on Byron's own edict, I revealed: 

"I have written a memoir which I doubt I shall ever offer for publication. My current instruction is to have it burned to ashes upon my demise."