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As Related by Mark Holloway
from
Secker & Warburg, 1976. (pages 462-463)
Air raids on London had been renewed and were now regular and intense; but [Norman] Douglas, who had often said that he had "no nerves to speak of", seems to have proved this true. "As to that raid," he replied to Archie's enquiry about a particularly heavy one, "—it made a noise, and I turned round in bed. Quite fatalistic! . . . I had a ceiling tile on my head the other evening, not here, and all the windows were smashed or blown in. No great fun." He would stay in London, he told Nancy Cunard, until towards the end of April, and might then go for a tour of the south-west looking for a place to spend several months in. He was determined to be quite comfortable: "I want a bath, breakfast in bed, etc., my reason being that I am going to do myself as well as possible, death being so near."
The raids got even livelier with the arrival of the first of Hitler's secret weapons—the doodle-bug, buzz-bomb, or V1. In June 1944 these began falling all over London and around it through all the twenty-four hours of the day. "One gets damned little sleep nowadays," wrote Douglas towards the end of June; but his preparations for a two- or three-month holiday from London had been made, and on the last day of the month he went down to Oxford, where he stayed for a month—with Oscar Levy and his daughter—and then moved to Chester on 3rd August.
By the 11th, the whole of Florence was in Allied hands, and he was concerned to get in touch with anyone there who could give him information about Emilio, and his flat. Through Nancy Cunard he sent a letter with the RAF in Italy and had offered to make enquiries on Douglas' behalf. Douglas' own plans were uncertain after the end of the month; he did not know what he would do, except that he would not go to London if he could help it:
Nancy Cunard, to whom the letter was written, replied that she was there to see Crowley, that he told her he was working against Hitler on the astral plane, that he was most interesting to talk to, and that he had left his "hoolie-goolie period" a long way behind. She had first met him in 1933: Douglas, when? Meanwhile, Douglas wrote that he'd had "one or two nice letters from Crowley who seems to be as wizardish as ever", and he assured Nancy Cunard that Crowley was nothing to what he had been: "He was hot stuff, and no mistake, my dear. They can stand a good deal in Italy, but in the end he was too much for them, and he had to go!" It seems unlikely that we shall ever know what kind of friendship existed between these two expatriate Scotsmen who had a little, but not too much, in common. Douglas' thin vein of superstition, his love of the macabre and of sexual experiment, must have enabled him to find common ground with Crowley, and he would have been robust enough to not be afraid of him, but perhaps to find him a rich source of interest and amusement.
Instead of going to "Crowley's village", Aston Clinton, Douglas went from Chester to Somerset. . . . |