I don’t think it would have been so bad, only Archie Lock, who always had a terribly misplaced sense of humour (he paid for it, poor fellow, when his father disinherited him), saw his chance of scoring off us all, and proceeded to make it known that he had been to Griggs (whom he’d never met in his life), and had taken lessons; he added that Griggs had told him he had a strong natural gift for mind-reading. Then he used to go about, like a silly ass, starting with surprise when he passed some casual stranger in the street, and saying “How awful!” He met Georgina Grosheim before she had heard about this, and he greeted her with “Oh, Georgina, don’t think that!” upon which (he used to declare) she made a dash for the very fastest part of the moving platform and was whirled away down Bond Street. I met him at a dinner-party, or rather I sat about four places off him, and I noticed the fool caught my eye several times and smiled at me, but never realized what he was up to until he came to me afterwards and said, “Thanks so much, Opal, that was a ripping conversation we had at dinner, wasn’t it?” At which almost everybody present looked daggers at us, and the man who had been sitting next to me turned scarlet.

It was terribly awkward for me. I never saw the horrible little man again, and Angela didn’t know his address; nor did anyone. The more I swore I had never taken lessons, the more people thought I was trying to spare their feelings, and (probably) that I was saying the most dreadful things about them behind their backs. I remonstrated with Archie, but he was in one of his most idiotic moods, and wouldn’t talk to me at all—just made faces at me, as if I was understanding exactly what he meant. Then there began to be trouble, because somebody, Heaven knows who, repeated a piece of scandal about a woman I knew, which we all thought quite baseless, and she came to hear of it: upon which she marched straight off to me and said it was a monstrous breach of trust for me to have repeated what I saw her thinking about the other day, because she was thinking it strictly in confidence. Several things happened like that, which reduced me to despair, and besides, I began to get such a very bad opinion of my neighbours. Archie Lock swore that he had looked hard at a man in his club one day, and the man immediately left for South America.

If only people would have taken it the other way, and tested me, they could have seen at once that I had no unusual powers; but they were all too frightened, especially because Angela had repeated the idea that it was the thoughts you tried hardest to hide which became most obvious to the mind-reader. Then people began coming to me very quietly and asking me either to tell them Mr. Griggs’s address or to give them lessons myself. And when I explained that I couldn’t do either, they took it very badly: and one friend of mine, who was always very jealous about her husband, cut me dead ever after she failed to get the “secret” out of me. Of course my real friends believed in me, but it is surprising how few one’s real friends prove to be on such occasions! Porstock was away in America, and I was too proud to ask him to come back. What amazed me was the credulity of the most intelligent people about it. I was actually asked to a very important Foreign Office dinner, where I was put next to the American ambassador; and I was asked afterwards, very confidentially, what he had been thinking about!

Archie Lock got tired of the situation, and suddenly advertised that he would give lessons. He got as many as two hundred names straight away. He meant, I gather, to tell them all that they were fools and that the whole thing was a hoax. And then suddenly he had a bad helico-crash, and was in hospital for six weeks, during which I had to bear the brunt of it alone. Both my servants left me, and I found it impossible to get new ones, until, very good-naturedly, some nuns offered to come in and “do” for me. I cannot explain what a relief it was when at last news came from America that Holbeach Griggs had been arrested for obtaining money under false pretences. He denied the charge, but they turned the “inquisition-machine” on to him, and it registered him guilty. I think he may well have been the only person that machine did examine accurately, for it was always a fraud to my mind: anyhow, if anybody ever deserved such a condemnation, he did! Then he confessed, and I am glad to say that Society pardoned me. But even so, there were a dozen or so of my acquaintance who had given themselves away to me so badly that they would never meet me again.

Well, I hope we learn from our follies. Certainly, if we do, London in those days was an admirable school. It must not be supposed that, because I have filled up a space of eight years in my life with such a recital as the foregoing, I was spending all my time in vanities. For the most part of my time I was at Greylands, learning to love and respect my husband more every day, and busying myself about the training of my two boys. But it was, so far as real work or real achievement goes, a sort of doldrums in my busy life; and I will leave it to a fresh chapter to explain how in 1953 my life became once more a life of activity, and of more important activity than hitherto, because my unassuming personality had to come before the public eye.

CHAPTER X
MY PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION

The Party System has its critics; it will always have its critics. But you will not abolish it; you can do so only by being false to your own principles, and forming an anti-Party Party.—Lord Hopedale.

I had not, up to this time, taken much part in public affairs even on a small scale. I was indeed a member of the Licensing, Aviation, Game-preserving, and Afforestation Committees of the Hertfordshire County Council, and had lent the support of my name, rather than (I am afraid) of my personal endeavours to such unconnected objects as the Life-plane Society, the Nervous Hospitals, the Humane Cattle-killing Association, the I.F.L., and the Criminals’ Protection Society. It was in 1952 that circumstances, rather than any choice of my own, forced me to the front in connexion with the crisis that then occurred in the policy of the I.F.L. The whole thing is a matter of history, and there is no need to go into it in any detail here: it is enough to say that I felt at the time (and subsequent history has, I think, justified my view) that the whole existence of the League was at stake, and that it could only justify its existence by extending its activities on the lines which are now familiar to every one. There was considerable opposition, and many local secretaries resigned, but the party organized by Juliet Savage and myself was upheld by the central body, and the subsequent newspaper agitation only succeeded in making its promoters ridiculous.

In all this I had no intention of thrusting myself into prominence; I acted from a plain sense of public duty. But the proceeding had aroused a considerable amount of interest; and at this precise moment the Democratic Committee were looking about for promising young candidates, known to be in general sympathy with their programme, who would be likely to carry weight at the polls in the general election that was then recognized to be impending. It was a surprise, both to Porstock and to myself, when I got a confidential letter from the Chief Mechanic of the Democratic Party urging me to contest Manchester N.W. (3) in the Democratic interest in the event of an election. He pointed out to me that if I accepted the offer at once I should only have to pay the ordinary premium of £3,000, whereas if I waited till the dissolution actually took place the premium would have risen to £5,000, even if the outgoing Government had not by that time hurried a measure through to increase the rate.[[8]] The financial consideration, it will easily be understood, was not very important to us, but the urgency of Sir Hubert Gunter’s tone (he was a personal friend of ours) left me little choice but to accept. I was accordingly nominated Democratic candidate for the constituency in March, 1953, seven months before Lord Hopedale went to the country.

It is necessary for me, I am afraid, at the risk of going over some ground which will be familiar to my more well informed readers, to go back a page or two in political history, in order to explain the complicated and critical position that had arisen at the moment of which I type. Up to 1931 political history is very fully documented, owing to the decision of the then Labour Government to publish all the secret documents which it inherited both from its Tory and from its Cabal[[9]] predecessors. This publication has thrown a flood of light on the internal politics of the country, especially during the latter part of the Five Years’ War and the few years immediately following the outbreak of peace. Opinions will no doubt differ as to the propriety of the Labour Government’s action: there is a certain feeling of eaves-dropping when you read, as you may read nowadays, set out in the cold print of a history book, the confidential S.O.S. calls of a sorely harassed minister, with a vast number of conflicting claims to meet. The result, in any case, is that half-an-hour spent with Murdock’s Twenty Years of Diplomacy or Hammond’s George and his Critics will put the modern reader au fait with all that preceded the accession to power of Rosenstein’s Labour Government in ’31. Over its own private difficulties the Labour Administration did not show a similar frankness, nor did its successors, whether Tory, Independent, or Democratic, see fit to avenge themselves in kind. The full history, then, of all this period remains to be written: I can only resume the facts as they are generally known for the benefit of readers to whom (as so often happens) the events to the Boer War are far more familiar than the movements of their own times.