Four drowned sisters: accident or sinister arrangement?

A uniquely high tide and severe gales caused the River Thames to burst its banks in the early hours of January 7th 1928. 

Some areas were flooded, and 14 people drowned in their beds. Four of these were the young Harding sisters, who were trapped in their basement bedroom in central London.

These and many other subsequent deaths caused the Thames Barrier to be proposed and eventually built to help prevent such disasters from happening again.

I am wondering whether the deaths of the sisters could have been prevented at the time.

I first heard about this sad incident years after the Thames Barrier opened, and I made some notes about it. Some floods in the Thames area earlier this year brought the memories back, and I decided to do some research online.

The second golden rule: be very careful what you dwell on

I have written about the possible link between Charlotte Brontë’s youthful obsession with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and her eventual marriage to a dark man called Arthur. I also mentioned the possible connection I noticed between Mr Rochester’s fall from his horse in Jane Eyre and Charlotte’s fall the first time she ever got up on a horse.

An incident in the life of the Spanish Surrealist artist Remedios Varo, whose strange and wonderful pictures deserve to be more widely known, provides another example of such possible connections. I found it in Unexpected Journeys, The Art and Life of Remedios Varo by Janet A. Kaplan. 

It happened in Paris in 1938, when she was with a group of other members of the inner circle of Surrealists. They had been drinking, when one man, Esteban Francés, made a remark criticising her personal life. 

An artist called Oscar Dominguez rose to defend Varo’s honour. An ugly fight broke out; people tried to separate the two men but Dominguez managed to free one arm and hurl a glass at Francés. Unfortunately, it completely missed and hit someone else, an artist called Victor Brauner. It tore one of his eyes out.

The strange coincidence here is that Brauner had painted many one-eyed creatures earlier, including a self-portrait of himself with one eye missing in 1931.  Another picture, painted in 1932, shows a man with his eye being punctured by a shaft with the letter D attached to it. 

Did Brauner have a premonition that this loss would happen? 

Did he subconsciously will it to happen? 

Did he get caught in his own psychic trap?


Could this be yet another example of something manifesting in the life of a creative person just because he had been dwelling on it? 

Watership Down: a sinister scenario

There is an episode in Richard Adams’s Watership Down that made me feel very uncomfortable when I first read the book and still affects me negatively many years later.

I see this book as much more than an entertaining story about the adventures of some fictional rabbits: it has many relevancies to humans and real life.

The episode in question can be interpreted in many ways: psychologically, metaphysically and politically. There are aspects that remind me of cults and conspiracy theories too.

It all begins when two very different groups of wild rabbits meet for the first time.

The nomads meet a settlement of eerie, unnatural rabbits
A band of wandering rabbits is seeking a new home because of a predicted disaster. They find a promising-looking field then discover that it is already inhabited by other rabbits. The existing occupants are large, sleek and healthy and seem very prosperous. They are not hostile: they are unexpectedly welcoming and invite the newcomers to join them, saying that there is plenty of spare room in the warren. 

Fiver, a member of the travelling band who is psychically gifted, advises his companions to have nothing to do with the place and its inhabitants. He says they should all leave at once. 

The rabbits are under the unofficial leadership of Fiver’s brother Hazel, who despite the warning decides to accept the strangers’ hospitality. He leads his band down into the warren. 

The others start to mingle and settle in but Fiver sits alone and apart, apparently ill or very much depressed. The new rabbits avoid him instinctively.

Nicholas Stuart Gray’s witch: Barbara

Barbara is the main character in The Stranger, a short story in Nicolas Stuart Gray’s book The Edge of Evening. She does not at all resemble the witch Huddle, who also appears in this book. She is described as being neither young nor old, neither ugly nor pretty. She has brown hair and violet eyes, and is slim and rather tall. 

Barbara has little in common with other witches I have written about. For example, she is not seeking some black magic book, magical artefact or other item as are Lucy M. Boston's Dr. Melanie Powers, Robin Jarvis's 'nasty piece of work' Rowena Cooper and Linwood Sleigh's‘horrid old lady’ Miss Heckatty; she is not power crazy nor planning to rule the world like Diana Wynne Jones's  Gwendolen Chant; she is not cruel and evil like Sheri S. Tepper's Madame Delubovoska, nor is she surly and unpleasant like Joan Aiken's Mrs Lubbage.

Her problem is that she is miserable; she is a stranger in a strange land; she hates her life in a world where kindness is dreadfully lacking and wants to get away from it. She is tired of people telling her to pull herself together. 

She has learned magic and sorcery just to obtain the power to find a world of her own, a place that is right for her, somewhere with people who speak her language, somewhere she can meet her own kind and be happy at last. She is so desperate for help that she performs a summoning ritual and conjures up a demon – whose name is Balbarith – and orders him to obey her. She commands him to show her other worlds and how to enter them.

Compelled to obedience by the power of Barbara’s spells, Balbarith shows her a few worlds, none of which is suitable. He then finds a fairly reasonable sort of place, simple and happy looking. It is full of flowers, fields and sweet, friendly animals and birds. Barbara likes it very much.

Defence Against the Dark Arts Part VI: Two amusing anecdotes

I have many painful memories of incidents in shops and on buses. I have one or two positive memories to offset the bad ones, memories that give good feelings whenever I return to them.

The honest electronic equipment salesman
Some years ago, I was very dejected after realising that I had been cheated by a laptop repair company. They lied to me when they told me that they had returned my laptop to the manufacturer: the latter said they had never seen it. I was without my laptop for weeks, and I paid a lot of money for repairs that did not last very long. 

I found another repair shop nearby; they told me that they got a lot of business from people like me, people who had been given bad service by the other place. 

I was waiting in this shop when some people came in and asked if they sold video cameras. 

One of the men behind the counter said, “We only have one model, and I wouldn’t buy it if I were you: it’s rubbish!” 

When I told him that I admired his honesty he said, “It’s always best to be honest. The only person I ever lie to is my wife:  I would never get any peace if I didn’t.” 

I thought that this was very amusing. It lifted my mood and things did not seem quite so black.  

I was much more selective when choosing the second repair company than I was with the first one, which by coincidence went bankrupt not long afterwards.

Angela Brazil, her brother, and the child prodigy pianist

Reading about J. M. Barrie and his infiltration of the Llewelyn Davies family has reminded me of a chilling little story that I read in The Schoolgirl Ethic: Life and Work of Angela Brazil by Gillian Freeman. 

The victim in the case was a boy called Gilbert Morris; the villains were the schoolgirls’ fiction writer Angela Brazil and her brother Walter.  Angela appears to have been the main driving force, decision maker and giver of orders in this affair; it is likely that Walter just followed her lead and went along with her wishes.

Gilbert Allan Morris was a child prodigy, a professional pianist who made his first public appearance at the age of six. He was born in 1901 and came to the attention of the Brazils when he was 12 years old; Angela was in her 45th year at the time and Walter in his 52nd.

The Brazils took Gilbert up, railroaded him towards a career that they believed would bathe them in reflected glory, raised his hopes then pulled the rug out from under him. They gave with one hand and took with the other; they made plans and arrangements on his behalf without informing him. He became enmeshed in the tentacles of their household and was driven by their pressure to the edge of destruction.

Ouida and the death of her Italian nobleman: curse or coincidence?

Deaths, illnesses and misfortunes that seem to be natural, accidental, unavoidable or just coincidences – after all, stuff happens and such things are part of life – may seem less innocent when other, similar incidents are taken into account and patterns start to emerge. 

Reading about the convenient (for J. M. Barrie) death of the Llewelyn Davies boys’ father has reminded me of another death, which I learned about from biographies of the Victorian novelist Ouida. 

Thinking about the curse that Biddy Iremonger put on the man she hoped to marry when he chose someone else and the Kathleen Raine/Gavin Maxwell affair, not to mention the Brontë family’s misfortunes and the jilted woman in Patrick Brontë’s past, makes me wonder whether Ouida could have been indirectly responsible for the death of an Italian nobleman, someone she was infatuated with and hoped to marry.