The Chalice (69 page)

         
He then began to question me closely
about my apparent obsession with Glastonbury Tor. He started to throw names at
me, one in particular. Had I had any contact, he demanded,
with a certain Violet Mary Firth, known to her readers as Dion Fortune?

         
Well, of course, the name meant
nothing at the time and it seemed to me that whatever line of research he was
pursuing, I could be of no great assistance. But this was wartime. No
time for secrets between fellows on the same side. I therefore, feeling
somewhat embarrassed, related to Willett the circumstances of my vision in the
desert.

         
To my surprise, he neither laughed at
me nor attempted to belittle the experience. My life, I suppose, would have
been happier if he had.

         
'Do you think the doctors would mind
if I were to smoke?' he asked.

         
'Hardly,' I said. 'All the doctors
smoke. Keeps this place going, tobacco.'

         
We both smoked in silence for some
time and then he sat back and observed me shrewdly through his rimless
spectacles.

         
'We've been studying your record,
Pixhill. You're a man of intellect rather than action who nevertheless adapted
to his circumstances with courage and resourcefulness. We could
send you back to the front when you 're fit to leave here.'

         
'As I fully expect you will,' I said.

         
'Or we could send you to Glastonbury.'
He held up my drawing. 'To the Hill of Visions. A very significant spot. Did
you know that? Think carefully before you answer.'

         
My immediate notion was that the Tor
concealed some clandestine bomb-proof HQ. It would explain the Secret Service's
concern, if some shell shocked patient at a military hospital was turning out
crude drawings of a secret subterranean refuge for Mr Churchill's War Cabinet.

         
But it was nothing so orthodox. For Mr
Stanley Willett was to be my first introduction to Miss Dion Fortune and The
Watchers of Avalon.

Powys sat up. So Fortune
had
been Pixhill's 'teacher'. How had
Diane known? Pure guess? Wishful thinking?

      
He'd read about the Watchers of Avalon but, apart from DF, he
didn't know who they were or precisely what they'd got up to.

      
He went outside to check on Arnold, let him out to relieve
himself. Arnold did this on a rear wheel of the Mini and then immediately
hopped back into the car.

      
It was nearly dark now and the snow was as fluffy as a sheepskin
on the roof of the Mini. Against the snow, Meadwell looked even darker,

Violet
Firth/Dion Fortune, said Willett, was an unqualified Freudian psychologist who
had been drawn into the occult and had become a member of a rather fashionable
magical society of the period known as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
among whose better-known adherents had been : poet WB Yeats and that sinister
shyster Aleister Crowley. Miss Firth (or Mrs Evans, as she was then, though
parted from her husband) went on to form her own occult fraternity called the
Society of the Inner light, which drew together her interest in both Christian
and pagan mysticism. It was this loose organisation which interested Willett
and his colleagues.

         
For Dion Fortune, it seemed, had
joined the War.
         
We all knew of Hitler's
obsession with the occult and Himmler's Aryan fantasies centred on his medieval
Schloss. Dion Fortune, it seemed, was convinced the Nazis were using black magic
against the Allies and that a suitable defence should be fashioned to harness
the 'group mind' of the nation and shield our islands from this alleged psychic
onslaught.

         
Members of the Society of the Inner
Light throughout Britain were therefore recruited into the Watchers of Avalon
and given their instructions in a series of monthly bulletins from DF herself,
working both from London and from her home on the very flank of Glastonbury
Tor. As Willett understood it, they were all to meditate at a prearranged time,
simultaneously visualising the same powerful cabalistic symbols and forming a
kind of psychic wall around these islands.

         
They
were
taught to visualise, as the mystical beating heart of the British psyche, a
place referred to as the Cavern Under the Hill of Vision. Each week, the minds,
the souls, the inner consciousness of the members of the Society of the Inner
Light would 'gather' here. Glastonbury Tor, of course. I saw my own drawing with
new eyes.

         
'Seemed harmless enough to us,'
Willett said, 'last thing we'd want to do is discourage this biddy. If all the
hare-brained mystics in the country are turning their minds to Hitler, it can't
harm anyone's morale. But we would
to keep an eye on them. That's where you come in, Pixhill. You've had a rough
time. Spot of convalescence in order, I think. Nice place. Somerset.'
         
'Oh dear,' I said. I felt an
excitement tinged with a very definite trepidation. I remember wondering what
the Cricketer had let me in for now.

         
'Perhaps, in a week or so, you could
drift along to Glastonbury,' Willett suggested. 'Tell a few people about your, ah,
vision. See who you encounter. If these people trust you, we'd like you to stay
there. Keeping us informed from time to time about what exactly is going on.'

         
My eyes widened. 'You mean as a sort
of secret agent? A spy? Me? I was never a master of subterfuge. Not much of an actor,
you know.'

         
Willett chuckled. 'Precisely. You have
an honest ingenuous face, Pixhill. And I really don't think we should use words
like spy, do you? Thing is - what we really want to know - is all this mumbo jumbo
having any actual effect? The fact you, yourself, stuck in a tank in Libya were
getting pretty
 
unmistakable pictures of
their so-called Hill of Vision may well suggest that something is being…
transmitted.'

         
I was staggered. Had I, in my weakened
state, passed to a higher plane of consciousness and become the unwitting recipient
of a psychic broadcast by the self-styled Watchers of Avalon?

         
'You see, if it turns out that this
woman is having an impact, said Willett, 'we want to know about it. Because if
it actually works to some extent, I think you'll agree, it could hardly be left
in the hands of a collection of eccentric women and fuddled old occultists,
however well-intentioned they might be. Get my drift?'

         
Ah, the arrogance of the man to
imagine that a bunch of War Office boffins could take over a mystical tradition
over two thousand years old as a psychological weapon.

         
But, of course, I was intrigued.
Whatever the source of that vision of the Tor, I was convinced it had saved my
life. Perhaps this was why. Perhaps this was the part I was destined to play in
the liberation of the world from fascism.

         
And so, ten days later, upon my discharge
from hospital, I journeyed for the first time to Glastonbury.

At this point, the story
was picked up by the text of the published diaries. Pixhill's arrival in
Glastonbury, his impressions of the town and its people, their wartime spirit.
      
But in the published diaries, he
was hazy about individuals. Especially one.

      
Powys felt a small thrill of unease. Pixhill's first
description of her corresponded so closely to his own impression, formed out of
Avalon of the Heart, that he couldn't believe he hadn't read it before.

She
was waiting for me in the garden, a hefty, jovial woman, comfortably middle-aged.
She wore a thick, blue woollen dress with several rows of beads on her
mantelpiece bosom. A chairwoman-of-the-Women's-Institute sort of person. Certainly
not my idea of a High Priestess of Isis.
         
'So,' she said. 'You are the
young man who has come to our town in pursuit of a vision.'
         
I nodded, feeling duplicitous in
the extreme.
         
I had been summoned - no better
word for it - into the Presence. The previous evening I had spoken of my desert
experience to a curious collection of misfits lodging at the house in which I
had found accommodation, in the Bovetown are. Now I had been approached by a
small boy in a schoolcap who informed me that Mrs Evans would be expecting me
for tea at four-thirty.

         
Her bungalow, among the trees at
Chalice Orchard, was a much more primitive structure than it is today. Someone,
it appeared, had donated to her an old army shed or Nissen hut. I had approached
it as you would a shrine, with my head down. DF, of course, knew at once why I
was almost afraid to raise my eyes.

         
'Wait,' she commanded. 'Don't look
yet. Come this way.'
         
She guided me through a well-tended
garden fragrant with the perfume of herbs and on to a small paved area.

         
'Now,' she said, 'Look up.'

         
I could feel the blood literally
draining from my face as I raised my eyes to the emerald majesty of that all
too familiar sacred hill, its church tower rushing away from us into the clear
spring sky. I do not know if I actually fell to my knees. I know I wanted to.

         
'Yes,' DF said, as I recovered my
faculties That is all I need to know. You are the one.'

         
I must have blinked. It was one of
those moments when the world stands still and you know that your life is about
to change forever. How was I to know then that those moments are all too
commonplace in the rarefied air of Avalon? It doesn't matter, that was THE
moment.

         
'Well, George,' said DF. 'Don't just
stand there like a complete nincompoop. Follow me.'

I
suppose that is what I did, from that day until she died a few all too short
years later. She was the most remarkable person I have ever met. She taught me who
I am. And that what we are is seldom what the world sees.

         
I cannot imagine how many hours I
spent in the bungalow at Chalice Orchard, sitting on hand-made wooden chairs
and surrounded by roughly hewn local pottery, homespun mats and linens,
drinking tea from a pot which, as she told me proudly, it would have taken a
sledge-hammer to crack. DF, born in North Wales of Yorkshire stock, liked
things to be sturdy, honest and without compromise. It was hard to imagine her
as a robe-and-pentacle person, although, when I saw her thus attired, I
believed in her just as completely,
         
You are the one. As if she knew
that I would come. But what would a woman like this want with an invalid
soldier whose metaphysical experience was limited to the Cricketer and a
fevered dream in a disabled tank? If the Watchers of Avalon needed advice on
military tactics, there were surely better-informed sources than myself to tap.
         
'Ah. the Watchers,' she said
when I let slip a reference. As I had tried to explain to Willett, I have a
limited capacity for subterfuge. 'I won't embarrass you by asking how you knew
about that. But yes, we use the idea of Gwyn's cavern as a focus, a gathering
point. The energy here, as you obviously
realise, is hugely powerful'

         
DF and Willett, there was no contest
as to who was more formidable. 'I was approached by one of our chaps', I
confessed at our second meeting, 'to find out if you were having any effect on
the Enemy.'

         
'So.' DF slapped her thigh. 'But how
wonderful. They are taking us SERIOUSLY? A breakthrough indeed.'
         
'They do not like to dismiss the
idea of a secret weapon,' I said.

         
At that she grew serious. 'George, you
must not let them think of us engaged in any kind of psychic warfare. Our role
is one of protection. To ensure that no jackboot ever steps foot on this sacred
soil. We are all too aware of the laws of karma to attempt to invoke forces of
an offensive nature. No matter how justified we may feel, to launch a psychic
attack is to walk the Left Hand Path. The first step along this path is an easy
one. To go back requires ten times the strength.'
         
At this point she produced a
copy of a book she had published some years earlier entitled
Psychic Self Defence.

         
'Let this be your bible, George. You
are a trained soldier in a just cause. But to invoke negative forces even for a
positive purpose can get you into a lot of trouble. As I know from personal
experience. And incidentally this experience has a bearing on my reason for
bringing you here.'