VII April MCCMLXXXXCVII
ALL ABOUT ME
My Name is CECIL TEUCER VALANCE. Teucer was a Famous Soldier he was a Grate Archer and Cecil was a Famous Lord by the way. My Father is called Sir Edwin Valance (2nd Bt) and my grashious Mother is known to all as Lady Valance. She has a beautifull red dress which made Lady Adleen extreemly jelous to see it. My home is called Corley Court in Berkshire, if you don’t know it It is one of the Grate Houses of that county. Oh if you meet a small boy calling himself Dudley Valance it is probably my small brother. He can be trying I shoud probally tell you here and now. On Monday on the Farm I saw IX new carves – they are the Sweetest Things on theyre wobbly legs. To-day we were all stuned by the news Lord PORTSCATHO has been killed in a explosin he was only XXXX XLIIV. My poor Father was very nearly in Tears at the sad news. I have had quit a bad caugh but am considerably recovered. Today I have red ‘How Rain is Made’ in the Home ‘Cyclopaidea’ and quit a fair number of Poems for my age as Nanny likes to say, among them ‘The Brook’ by LORD TENNOSYN, I am Determined to learn all IX of its verses, it is one of the best know of all poems of course. I emitted to say I am something of A Poet, this year I have written no fure than VII Poems ‘humbly deadicated’ to my Mother (Lady Valance).
What that same Lady Valance took to be Cecil’s last communications were described by Dudley Valance in his autobiography Black Flowers (1944):
My mother, who never wasted time (except, of course, other people’s), was nonetheless much involved in attempts to converse with the spirit-world. Her belief that Cecil might be reached and spoken to preoccupied her with the mingled gloom and determination of some hopeless love affair. Though notably reserved, as a rule, in her personal feelings, she allowed her tender yearnings for contact with the ‘other side’ to be seen by her family and by one or two friends with surprising candour. She was not perhaps likely to be embarrassed by emotions founded in her duty and suffering as the mother of a fallen hero. It was in the library at Corley that she undertook many lengthy and bewildering ‘book-tests’, upon a system taught to her by a clergyman in Croydon, and through the agency of Mrs Leland Aubrey, a notorious medium of the time, who mined the pitiful hopes of well-connected mourners for twenty years after the War. Mrs Leland Aubrey was herself under the ‘control’ of a spirit called Lara, a Hindoo lady some three hundred years old, so it will be seen that the chain of communication was by no means direct. This remoteness, however, with its clear resemblance to a game of Chinese Whispers, was the very thing claimed in its favour by my mother, who had absorbed it as a point of doctrine from her medium and from the clergyman, a very high authority with her. It was precisely because Mrs Aubrey had never been to Corley, had had no contact with its occupants, possessed no knowledge of the library there or of the disposition of any of the rooms, that she was seen as least susceptible to any kind of improper suggestion, and least capable of any kind of fraud. Her very remoteness argued for her probity. It was a bold advancement of the confidence-trickster’s art, bold but also subtle: since when this point of doctrine was absorbed it gave licence to the wildest and most arcane forms of self-delusion. Any message of such impeccable provenance must of necessity be meaningful, and the random scraps thrown up by the tests were raked over by my mother for esoteric messages as keenly as the entrails of a fowl by some ancient divinator. That act of interpretation was a responsibility that fell solely to her, or to her occasional companions in these sessions, its further beauty, to a woman as private as my mother, being that the message itself was apparently quite unknown to the medium, who merely indicated to her where it was to be found. It was as if she had opened a letter from her dead son which Mrs Aubrey had chanced to deliver.
What seems first to have happened was this: my mother received a letter (a real one, with a penny-halfpenny stamp on it) from the clergyman in Croydon, who had himself lost a son in the War, claiming that during a sitting with Mrs Leland Aubrey, at which he had received book-tests from his dead boy, Lara had also transmitted a message which was evidently from Cecil, and intended for his mother, Lady Valance. Might he have her permission to forward the test to her? A request can rarely have fallen on readier ears; and doubtless the impression of a longed-for miracle was just what the medium and the parson had calculated. My mother had already shown some interest in spiritualism, and in the year after Cecil’s death had even attended a number of séances at the house of Lady Adeline Strange-Paget, mother of my great friend Arthur, whose younger brother had been drowned at Gallipoli; these had left her with clear misgivings, but also perhaps with a sense of avenues still unexplored. The medium on that occasion was an associate of Mrs Aubrey’s and was later indicted on several charges of blackmail. But it turned out too that the parson’s son had been in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, and had been drafted into Cecil’s company in the weeks before the Somme offensive; he had outlived Cecil by a mere three days. In letters home the boy had written of his love and admiration for my brother. In many cases soldiers who had served with Cecil had written to my parents after his death, or the soldiers’ own parents had sent letters of condolence containing tributes from the letters of their sons, themselves now dead, to the officer they had admired. The parson from Croydon, however, stored up his tribute, until a time when he could use it to greater profit.
This first test my parents performed alone, but I can speak from direct experience of their later repetitions. The general form of a book-test was that Mrs Aubrey would go into a trance, in which Lara would communicate with Cecil, the result being taken down on the spot by the clergyman, since a trance very naturally impeded the medium’s capacity to write for herself. The message would then be sent to my mother, who would at once act upon its instructions. She kept all these messages, in the same place as she kept Cecil’s letters, regarding them as merely a further phase of their correspondence. This is a sample, and one at which my wife and I happened also to be present.
Lara speaking. ‘This is a message for Cecil’s mother. It is in the library. When you go in it is on a short shelf on the left, before the corner, the third shelf up from the floor, the seventh book. Cecil says it is a green book, it has green on it or in it. Page 32 or 34, a page with very little printed on it, but what there is makes a particular message for her. He wants to tell her that he loves her and is always with her.’
This final sentence, which appeared with minor variations at the end of most of the messages, was clearly added by the medium as a kind of insurance. The rest of the message, just as typically, created the impression of something exact while containing various ambiguities. There were, for instance, three doors into the library, the principal one from the hall, and two smaller ones, leading into the drawing-room on one side and the morning-room on the other. The instructions therefore might have led to three quite different locations. The morning-room was my mother’s own sanctum, and she had little doubt that Cecil envisaged her entering the library from that side. My father, who often in the evenings came into the library from the drawing-room, would naturally have taken the diametrically opposite view; but in this, as in so many things, he tended to give precedence to my mother. On the present occasion, I recall there was some uncertainty, none the less. The directions to the short shelf on the left and before the corner were very generous, since the first corner was at the far end of the room. On each slip my mother wrote the name of the book and its author, and the quotation itself. Here she has put: ‘Short shelf. The 7th book, Wingfield’s “Charity” – has no green. On trying on far side (enter from Dr-Room) “History of Lancashire” by Bunning, no green on it. On entering from Hall, 7th book, counting from the right, “The Silver Charger” by E. Manning GREENE, page 34 has only, “it could be said that the knight was returned, and all well about him, save that his heart went out in the night to his dear ones left behind.” A true message from Cecil.’ In this careful record her natural honesty is shown as clearly as her credulity; the phrase ‘counting from the right’ shows her awareness that books are normally counted from the left, but her conviction at the outcome is undimmed. Even her square, rather unformed, hand seems eloquent to me now of her stubbornness and innocence. Beneath this she has written, as always, ‘Present:’ and each witness has put his signature, as if subscribing to the larger truth of the proceedings. ‘Louisa Valance. Edwin Valance. Dudley Valance. Daphne Valance. 23rd March 1918.’ (On the matter of my father’s participation, it was notable that Lara’s messages never referred to him – until, once this fact had been commented on in a telephone conversation, the following week brought one expressly for him.)