Numbers

I was up at twelve: Dad came home at two-thirty, Mum at four. . . .

Lee rang to say he’d got my coat from the bus station which is the best news I’ve had all week! I half expected Claire to ring and was vaguely disappointed when she didn’t. . . .

No work attempted. Lee comes back to Easterby on the last coach tonight. Head full all day of Spielgelgasse 1, Zurich (Cabaret Voltaire open nightly here, Feb-Aug 1916), Spiegelgasse 6 (where Lenin lived), and Bahnhofstrasse 19, on Zurich’s main shopping thoroughfare (Dada Gallery where many important artists showed).

Hissing of summer dark

I caught the 1055 bus to Alverhouse where I met Rob and Carol; they'd just seen Carol’s sister Lynne and niece Melissa onto the bus back to Brynmor.

It was another red hot day, hotter than it was in Watermouth. Both Carol and Mum are learning to drive and Carol drove the car back to Dearnelow, nervous because I was there. She trundled along at a steady 35-40 mph and stalled it just once.

A quiet day passed reading, C. washing in the kitchen, the cats—three years old now—came and went. Robert has enrolled for an M.Ed. course in the teaching of English which begins in October and so he read one of his course books, English As a Discipline of Thought by F. R. Leavis, while I read of Ball, Tzara, Heulsenbeck and co., Zurich 1916.

In the evening we played cribbage and I played Robert the cassettes we’d made at Borley. He told me about the inexplicable uneasiness both he and C. felt on some nights during their fortnight in Calverdale. Neither of them liked to admit their fears to the other. Carol described a sensation of overwhelming sadness and R. recounted how, on some nights as the sun set, they both felt the darkness pressing in on them from all sides. Yet on other nights they felt perfectly at ease . . . The hiss of the tapes brought back to me that awful pregnant silence lurking beyond that heavy wooden door, as if something was there, just beyond the level of human hearing . . .

I feel uneasy. . . .

Haunted audio

I put pen to paper today in an attempt to work which, after countless stops and starts, saw me manage three sides of notes. It was slow progress.

Today was another hot day, a Bank Holiday, and the weather has been like this since I went back to Watermouth. The drought is worse up here. Mum tells me that Mr. Metcalfe who owns the Calverdale caravan told Robert and Carol that he’ll be ruined if the hot weather continues. In Scotland Mum and Dad were told there’s been just three days of rain since March.

I’ve been reading Manuel Grossman’s Dada, Mystification, Paradox and Ambiguity in European Literature. The Dadaists seem without equal for doing as they did in such a way and at such an early date. Lee and I were very keen on researching the life of Arthur Cravan, Dada acolyte and “Poet, Boxer and Deserter of Five Nations” who disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico in 1918. He fought one round with world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnstone in 1917 and in the same year scandalised Manhattan by stripping off at a public lecture, causing Duchamp to beam “What a lecture!”

We feel the paucity of written information on this interesting character demands further attention, but as I’ve come across the other actors in this particular saga I realise that to focus on one individual is to miss out on the wealth of humor, interest and total perverse INSANITY of Dada.

Lee called round last night at about nine, bringing with him his dog, a cassette, Borley photos and a book featuring several hauntings in Watermouth. Mum, Nanna P. and Dad listened to the tape on a portable cassette player L. had brought along and seemed fascinated by it all. On side one was audio from haunted squash courts in East Anglia that are built on the site of a WW1 airfield. On the tape you can hear piston engine aircraft and the bustle of a busy wartime hangar, plus footsteps and voices.

Side two is devoted to Borley: the sighs, grunts and squeaks of non-existent doors chilled us all “to the marrow,” as the narrator of the tape put it. Fairly predictably I felt spooked by all of this, especially as the conversation afterwards was about ghosts—the ‘something’ at the window on Poplar Rise the night Mum’s sister Mary was killed in 1946, our collective ‘experience’ at Marston Moor battlefield years ago, on a hot still summer’s day like today, when Mum and Dad and I simultaneously heard the tumult of a great crowd all around us in the air.

Poor Lee was quite rattled by all this and did his best to try and persuade me to go with him back to his house (as his Ma is away for a few days and he’s all alone in the house), but it was too far and I held firm. I felt a bit bad about it later. With all the distractions he forgot all about the reason for his visit in the first place—to borrow a book on WW1 for his essay on Paul Nash.

It’s a warm night, silent and hot apart from the shrill whine of newly hatched insects in the amphibian tanks in my room and the sound of distant traffic.