When Trevor Hall finished his work in debunking the Borley Legend, the supporters of Harry Price assumed he had disappeared off into an lonely and embittered old age. Not at all; he returned to his old hobby of bibliophile, specialising in murder stories. His special interest was in developing the art of 'higher Criticism' to the works of Conan Doyle, Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. He published several witty and amusing books, all cast in his dry deadpan Yorkshire humour. The 'Higher Criticism' treats what is oviously fiction as serious fact, that can be corroborated, and checked for internal consistency. Trevor would ernestly explore the question of how many wives Watson actually had, or whether Sherlock Holmes actually lost his sight. He would engage in mock-serious debate with other afficionardos of the art, and would be seen at literary conventions with his cronies, usually in gales of laughter.
Trevor would have been delighted by Louis Mayerling's book, which purports to be an eye-witness account of the hauntings of Borley Rectory. Louis paints himself into some of the more famous scenes, like a sort of literary 'Forrest Gump'. There he is, within the busom of Bull Family life, here he darts, attending Rev Guy Smith's last service; up he pops, the confidante of Marianne, and Lionel Foyster; In he bursts, leading Lawrence of Arabia and George Bernard Shaw into the building for seances. What first appears as a serious account is, in fact, a clever, witty and tongue-in-cheek novel written in the first person and blending historical characters into a slightly fantastic tapestry.
Louis gives little coded hints that all is not quite as it seems. On the back cover, he says that he was 'born at an unusually early age for a child. The book starts with Louis being taken in by the Bull family which, by description, must refer to the 1870s or early 1880s. It cannot be in the winter of 1919/1920, as he suggests, as there was no young family there at that time. This would make Louis out to be around 135 years old. Definitely an unusually early age for a child. In his account, he was tucked up into bed with another child, Elsie Bull, who he mistook for a boy. Later on he kicked her and made her cry. If Louis is correct in his dates, Elsie (Emily Poundrow Bull) would have been forty-three at the time. Harry Bull and his wife were not even living there in the rectory, and the house was lived in only by the three remaining unmarried sisters, who were to move to Chilton, the other side of Sudbury, that same year, to make way for Harry's return to the rectory. Little Louis, aged six, must have dazzled all around him with his precocity, as he succeeds in constructing several wireless sets made from plans in 'Practical Wireless', and gives one to a housemaid in return for the loan of a bicycle. He also stirs things up for the vicar by talking to 'one of the many Press men, always eager for more hauntings', nearly ten years before the story first reached the press in June 1929. Louis, like a time-traveller in a sci-fi novel, keeps losing track of chronology.
Louis's adventures in the early phases are all knock-about fun, complete with all the required props, such as automata, talking birds, a psychotic boy lurking in the attics, a mentally subnormal girl staring through the windows and radio sets saying 'Don't Charlie, Don't'. He ends up giving so many explanations for the hauntings, involving fishing rods, clips, grills, nails on string, and the like, that one ends up in a state of exhaustion saying 'No more explanations! enough! enough!'. One almost ends up straining for a good simple paranormal explanation.
He moves on to the Smith incumbency, where he again bursts onto the scene, sometime in early 1929. The Smiths take the sixteen-year-old in their stride, and their maid, the redoubtable Mary Pearson, is on hand too. He makes such an impression on them that they press a priceless violin on him and wave goodbye to him with tears in their eyes. He then returns to Eric Smith's last service (april 1930?), where he meets Harry Price and a girl called Anna, whom he marries at the age of 17.
He is soon back at Borley, however. He is there when the rectory is deserted and he then calls in on the Foysters in December 1931 (surely 1930) and again the following year. He then becomes a frequent visitor, and relays a spicy account of the Foyster incumbency with trasvestitism, fraud, homosexuality, and drug addiction. He was, he claims, passing material on to Price. He becomes such a regular resident that one wonders how it is that he has been previously unrecorded in any of the accounts of the haunting.
Eventually, he organises a seance in the cellar with Lawrence of Arabia, Bernard Spilsbury, George Bernard Shaw, and Sir Bertram Montague. It all goes horribly wrong, and ends in a paranormal experience that seems to have been pulled straight from the pages of a Dennis Wheatley novel. This leaves Louis almost blinded. The book ends with him passing his inside knowledge to Trevor Hall, and keeping on a secret correspondence with Marianne after the start of her 'new life' in the States.
Louis constructs an entertaining read around the material, and, later into the book, takes more care to avoid errors of fact. Occasionally he slips up. In yet another explanation for the hauntings, he has the Foysters buying an 'Ascot' hot-water heater. This is a gas appliance, and there was no gas supply then or now at Borley. He involves Mary Pearson in one episode, even though she left with the Smiths. Part of the fun of the book is in trying to catch the author out with his facts, and he, in turn, teases the reader with details that seem authentic on first reading but don't quite check out. Trevor Hall would have loved this book.
By no means is this the first fictional account of the hauntings. The Smiths were working on a novel they hoped to publish based on their experiences and called 'Murder at the Rectory'. Lionel Foyster was hoping to alleviate his financial problems with a fictional account of his life at the rectory. We have James Turner's novel. In fact, from 1929, when the story first broke in the newspapers, the waters have become so muddied that it is nearly impossible to disentangle truth from fiction in the whole affair.
Louis Mayerling has probably taken the best approach to the literature on Borley Rectory. It is certainly a fresh, and interesting read; better by far than the cheerless and fruitless attempts to make sense of the silly gibberish that came from the various seances given by the Glanvilles. Louis has, in his cheerful and pragmatic style, given all of us who are interested in the whole 'Borley Rectory' affair, new ideas and new perspectives on events for which, sadly, we are unlikely ever to find further undiscovered first-hand witnesses; well, in this world anyway!
Sunex Amures