And slowly it all began to make a kind of incredible sense.
As he read page after page of primitive typescript, Powys lost all contact with his surroundings. He was entering Pixhill's Avalon.
Here was the lost heart of the diaries. Insert the missing chapter, the missing parts of existing chapters and what you had was no longer the aimless ramblings of a man without a discernible purpose, but the record of a tense, thirty year defence campaign by the stoical old soldier and – whether she was aware of it or not – a little spinster who could not See.
First, there was the section of the introduction bridging the void between Pixhill's vision of the Tor in a stifling tank and his arrival in Glastonbury. It opened with the Colonel back home, in a military hospital, where…
… trying to pin down the image, I produced drawing after drawing of the conical hill I had seen and showed it to everyone who came through the ward. They looked at my rough efforts, to humour me, I suppose, and shook their heads. Until, one day, a dapper man in a good-quality brown suit came to visit me. He pulled a chair close to the bed and took from an inside pocket one of my drawings which he said one of the doctors had passed on to him. 'Glastonbury Tor,' he said. 'In Somerset. There is no mistaking it. It is a place we ourselves have been made aware of lately.' 'We?' I said suspiciously. At which he took out his wallet and produced his papers. Quite an eye-opener. My visitor, one Stanley Willett, turned out to be a highly placed civil servant in the War Ministry. Intelligence, I guessed, for these fellows will never say as much. 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.' Bringing me here? But surely… I told her of my assumption that I had somehow 'tuned in' to a signal broadcast, as it were, by the Watchers. 'Oh no, George,' she said. 'The signal was for you. Or for someone who turned out to be you. For a vital and specific task, I have need of an individual who is clever but uncomplicated, strong but sensitive. I therefore placed what you might call an advertisement via the Inner Planes.'
Powys said, 'Colonel Pixhill came to Glastonbury after answering an advert DF placed on, urn, the Inner Planes. Did you ever discuss this with him?'
'By the time I arrived,' Verity said, 'Mrs Evans was several years dead. No, he did not discuss her.'
The Inner Planes, Powys thought. The psychic Internet.
He sighed.
'The War will end,' DF said, 'It may take some time yet, but the Allies will win and Hitler will never land here. Our own small part in the defence of Britain will never be acknowledged, nor widely known, but that is as it should be. 'No, George, the reason I sent for you relates to a danger which far precedes the rise of Nazism and will be with us when Hitler is long gone It may not become fully apparent again until the end of the century. And while I – and a certain gentleman – remain alive, it will certainty he contained. However, I suspect my own time here is limited…' I protested; she was in formidable health. She held up a hand. 'Death is a mere station between trains, George, There's a spirit in Avalon which is far more important than the transition of individuals. I don't want that to die. Not again.'
'The Abbot. Abbot Whiting, Verity. This was the first death. The first death of the spirit of Avalon.'
'November the fifteenth was a very solemn day for the Colonel. We have… a dinner. The Abbot's Dinner.'
Powys thought about what Woolly had said.
Tis all gonner be washed up again…last time this happened…1539, the dissolution of the monasteries, when the State fitted up the Abbot…Can you imagine what it was like here after that?
'When they hanged Whiting, stripped the Abbey, it took centuries to recover, and when the spirit came back it was in different form. A recognition of the pagan element. But a kind of coming together.'
'This was the original message of The Cauldron,' Verity said. 'A convergence of goddess worship and the Marian tradition. I suppose this was what encouraged many of us to go to the lectures.'
'That and a chance to see inside Dame Wanda's house, perhaps.'
Verity smiled.
Right at the end of Avalon of the Heart, Powys thought, DF describes herself as an 'impenitent heathen' but she's got a soft spot for the Catholic Church, expresses the hope that Glastonbury will one day become the English Lourdes. This was over ten years before she summoned Pixhill.