The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [165]
3
CECIL VALANCE’S EARLIEST KNOWN WRITING was a short composition produced for his mother when he was six years old. It was faithfully reproduced in the Memoir by Sebastian Stokes that prefaced the 1926 Collected Poems:
VII April MCCMLXXXXCVII
ALL ABOUT ME
My Name is CECIL TEUCER VALANCE. Teucer was a Famous Soldier he was a Grate Archer and Cecil was a Famous Lord by the way. My Father is called Sir Edwin Valance (2nd Bt) and my grashious Mother is known to all as Lady Valance. She has a beautifull red dress which made Lady Adleen extreemly jelous to see it. My home is called Corley Court in Berkshire, if you don’t know it It is one of the Grate Houses of that county. Oh if you meet a small boy calling himself Dudley Valance it is probably my small brother. He can be trying I shoud probally tell you here and now. On Monday on the Farm I saw IX new carves—they are the Sweetest Things on theyre wobbly legs. To-day we were all stuned by the news Lord PORTSCATHO has been killed in a explosin he was only XXXX XLIIV. My poor Father was very nearly in Tears at the sad news. I have had quit a bad caugh but am considerably recovered. Today I have red “How Rain is Made” in the Home “Cyclopaidea” and quit a fair number of Poems for my age as Nanny likes to say, among them “The Brook” by LORD TENNOSYN, I am Determined to learn all IX of its verses, it is one of the best know of all poems of course. I emitted to say I am something of A Poet, this year I have written no fure than VII Poems “humbly deadicated” to my Mother (Lady Valance).
What that same Lady Valance took to be Cecil’s last communications were described by Dudley Valance in his autobiography Black Flowers (1944):
My mother, who never wasted time (except, of course, other people’s), was nonetheless much involved in attempts to converse with the spirit-world. Her belief that Cecil might be reached and spoken to preoccupied her with the mingled gloom and determination of some hopeless love affair. Though notably reserved, as a rule, in her personal feelings, she allowed her tender yearnings for contact with the “other side” to be seen by her family and by one or two friends with surprising candour. She was not perhaps likely to be embarrassed by emotions founded in her duty and suffering as the mother of a fallen hero. It was in the library at Corley that she undertook many lengthy and bewildering “book-tests,” upon a system taught to her by a clergyman in Croydon, and through the agency of Mrs. Leland Aubrey, a notorious medium of the time, who mined the pitiful hopes of well-connected mourners for twenty years after the War. Mrs. Leland Aubrey was herself under the “control” of a spirit called Lara, a Hindoo lady some three hundred years old, so it will be seen that the chain of communication was by no means direct. This remoteness, however, with its clear resemblance to a game of Chinese Whispers, was the very thing claimed in its favour by my mother, who had absorbed it as a point of doctrine from her medium and from the clergyman, a very high authority with her. It was precisely because Mrs. Aubrey had never been to Corley, had had no contact with its occupants, possessed no knowledge of the library there or of the disposition of any of the rooms, that she was seen as least susceptible to any kind of improper suggestion, and least capable of any kind of fraud. Her very remoteness argued for her probity. It was a bold advancement of the confidence-trickster’s art, bold but also subtle: since when this point of doctrine was absorbed it gave licence to the wildest and most arcane forms of self-delusion. Any message of such impeccable provenance must of necessity be meaningful, and the random scraps thrown up by the tests