In the drawing room of a large Victorian house in Maidstone Road, Chatham, some 60-odd years ago, six young people had the fright of their lives.
Who were they? Well, the house was rented by an elegant, greying lady, the wife of a wealthy tea-planter in Ootacumund, India. She had come over to England to re-visit some of the places of her childhood and she had brought with her two beautiful daughters, Doris (21) and Dilys (19), her son Henry (17) and her other daughter, schoolgirl Mary. None of the children had ever been out of India before.
When I say ‘wealthy’ tea-planter, I meant it. For instance, when Mama and the kids went shopping, the custom was to hire a taxi and retain it, clock ticking happily away, all through the actual shopping, all through an unhurried lunch, all through a visit to, say, Rochester Castle, and all through afternoon tea in a cosy restaurant. Then back home to the great big house on the hill, the driver finally being sent joyfully back to depot with a fat tip in his wallet.
The other two people in the aforementioned party were a couple of impoverished newspaper hacks, Jack Armitage, who covered the Medway Towns for the Kent Messenger, and My Friend Hairy, a dogsbody on the Chatham Observer.
How did a couple of scruffs like them get to hob-nob with loaded tea-planters in a big house? Jack had heard a whisper that a rich family from India were over on a visit and thought there might be a feature in it. So, the pair of them, having made contact with Mama on the phone, turned up on the doorstep. One glimpse of Doris and Dilys and both were knocked cold.
The family, having had no across-the-threshold visitors up to then, found them as fascinating as they found the family, for, to their naive eyes, Jack and Harry ranked as exotica. Right away, they all got on famously and in no time were spending evenings in the drawing room playing cards and even ludo and snakes and ladders.
Came one evening, though, when even the heady excitements of Rummy, Pit and draughts began to pall. Then it was that Mama, no less, suddenly said: “Why don’t we do some table-tapping?”
Squeals of glee from all except the exotic newspapermen, who had no idea what the old girl was on about. But right away, all were seated around a side-table, fingers spread on the surface, little fingers touching neighbours’.
“This is how we used to do it in Ooty,” explained Mama. "Now we just have to sit quietly and wait.” With Doris and Dilys batting their considerable eyelashes at them across the table, Jack and Harry were happy to wait until the cows came home.
Up spake Mama. “Is there anyone there?" she asked at large. “Give one knock for yes.”
Silence.
Then, to non-family amazement, the table rocked once.
“Excellent," said Mama. “Welcome to our little group. Have you a message for anyone here? Please give one knock for yes or two for no."
One rock.
“Is it I?" asked Mama.
Two knocks.
"Is it Doris?”
One knock.
“Please pass your message. One rock for A, two for B and so on."
Over came the message: “BCI_AD". Bclad?
“I’m afraid we don’t understand,” said Mama regretfully. “Would you please try again?”
This brought a frenzy of rockings as if Red Cloud, or whoever was at the other end of the Great Divide, was a little short-tempered.
More patient waiting. Then more gobbledegook. And more ill-temper and more gobbledegook until Red Cloud went off in a huff and that was that for the night.
Jack and Harry were open-mouthed with all this, but Mama smiled a little condescendingly. “It is all quite simple,” she explained. “Anyone can do it. We did it all the time in Ooty for after-dinner fun. It rarely makes sense, but you never know what’s going to happen next.”
That sounded far too simplistic to two exotic newspapermen. Already churning in their heads were headlines such as ‘Spirit Warns of Cataclysm’ or ‘Long Dead Author Writing New Book’. Stuff like that.
As it happened, Mama never sat in again on the many sessions the young people conducted thereafter and, in time, even Jack and Harry began to think of it as all a bit of a giggle.
Until the night when Old Nick took over.
Well, they weren’t absolutely sure it was Old Nick, but it was certainly somebody or something rather more emphatic than the usual run of gobbledegook purveyors.
They sat down as usual and asked if anyone was there. At once the table rocked.
“Have you a message for anyone here?” asked Doris, who had taken over the hot seat from Mama. “Please give one knock for yes or two for no.”
Two knocks.
“Then have you a message for us all?"
One knock.
“Please pass your message. “One knock for A, two for B and so on."
Old Nick passed the message all right.
The table astoundingly flung itself into the air, veered over and crashed into a display cabinet. And as the shattered glass and ornaments cascaded around the room, six panic-stricken youngsters bolted for the door, Jack and Harry in the van, and to hell with women and children first.
Never again did table-tappjng take place in the big house on the hill while the Ooty family were in residence. Enough was enough.
MANY years later, My Friend Harry related the incident to the eminent psychic, Dr Guidot Hallam, in the surroundings of Austen Chamberlain’s former mansion in Surrey. The monocled doctor looked Harry in the eye. “Count yourselves lucky," he said.
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