Phil Rickman - The Chalice

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,