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.