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.

More positive paranoia and reverse sabotage

It sometimes happens that after I have pulled some incidents out of my mind and got them down on paper, more memories emerge from the depths and rise to the surface.

I have just remembered another occasion when I had a big attack of positive paranoia, a feeling that the universe was arranging things for my personal benefit. 

It all started when I unearthed and re-read an Edwardian guide to a small seaside town where I had spent some time as a child. Memories of these days by the sea were deeply buried; I had not talked or even thought about them since my family left the town many years earlier.  The book made me decide to go back there for the first time and try to find the house where we had lived and the school, the children’s playground and other places that I vaguely remembered. I decided to wait until summer to make my pilgrimage to the past.

I slowly adjusted to the idea during the following months, then one week decided that the coming Saturday would definitely be the big day. Unfortunately, when the time came the weather was very bad: the rain was pouring down. 

Diana Wynne Jones’s witch Aunt Maria: part III

A brief summary of Diana Wynne Jones’s Black Maria makes it seem like a complete fantasy, a children’s story that is interesting and entertaining but has little relevance to real life. I have actually found much of it familiar, informative and very useful - not so much the purely supernatural parts but the scenes involving mind control and manipulative behaviour. 

It is ironic that this little book is considered suitable reading for eight-year-olds yet it has caused me to produce so much material that I decided to break my article first into two then into three parts.

Telepathy, spying and psychic attacks
One member of Aunt Maria’s circle gives Mig a book of pictures, the kind a little girl will love. Some of them are indeed of flittery little fairies, but others are frightening and sinister: the worst one is titled ‘A naughty little girl is punished’ and makes Mig feel ill. This seems like a message, a warning, and reminds me of one of the disturbing pictures sent to Marianne in Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper.

Jane Austen and J. M. Barrie: intriguing deaths of two future in-laws

There are many different types of unseen influences to be investigated. Of particular interest to me are cases of creative people who have a bad effect on those around them. 

I have listed some ‘sacrificed sons’ in one article; I have highlighted the early deaths of Louisa M. Alcott’s brother-in-law and younger sister and the convenient death of Jane Austen’s future brother-in-law in another. 

From the latter article:

“…Cassandra became engaged to a military chaplain who was sent overseas and died of yellow fever somewhere in the Caribbean. His patron said that he would never have taken the young man out there if he had known that he was an engaged man. Why didn’t he ask, and why did no one tell him? The end result was that Jane Austen kept her chosen companion: Cassandra never considered marrying anyone else...”

I have just read something about J. M. Barrie that has brought the Jane and Cassandra Austen case very much back to mind.