can be written down, and the art of magic, rather than just an explanation of it, cannot be taught but must be learnt, by example and crushing hours of practice. Even a full written explanation, quite apart from breaking the Magician’s Code, would be like showing someone the cockpit of a plane and expecting them to fly. But occasionally the letters would preserve a record of well-honed stage patter:
Today I’d like to show you one of the most fantastic stunts you are ever likely to see. Behind this curtain we have a very odd looking telephone booth. There is nothing strange about the inside. Open it and show. Except that there are small holes bored thru the top and base. Honey [Miss Honey Duprez] goes inside the cabinet and we thread the ropes thru these holes to the outside. Music whilst you do this. Put mike back on stand. After threading is done take up the mike again. We are going to try a sequence of completely impossible effects. You’ll notice a festive air about this place today . . . It’s the manager’s birthday. He’s just turned 25 . . . he was 52 before he turned it.
A tricky judgment: The Magic Circle intervenes in 1966.
Metal blades and an 18-inch square wooden tube are passed through the centre of the phone booth and, ostensibly, Honey Duprez. ‘Pull out the tube and blades in the reverse order, crashing them to the back. Turn cabinet once to give girl time to collect knots and conceal them. Then with deliberate moves knock off the three catches and pull open box. Girl steps out. Let her come down front and bow. Then take her place and bow off after her.’
But the tricks were old and almost unperformable now; they belonged in a museum in Vegas. The descriptions reminded me of an old song Clive James wrote with Pete Atkin called ‘The Master of the Revels’, in which a showman has blueprints in his office of ‘the first exploding handshake’ and ‘the charted trajectories of custard pies’. Where is Honey today? Where is that phone booth?
When it wasn’t mourning the former careers and lost illusions of others, the bulk of Walker’s correspondence was concerned with defending his own. Looking back at the end of a life, he had begun to worry about his reputation, and about how his cabinet tricks would be remembered after he was gone. Walker had heard that a young magician had begun performing a deep cabinet trick that sounded very like the Radium Girl, and that the trick had been supplied by another magician. Walker became convinced, without seeing the act in question, that the patent for his illusion – which he had registered in 1934 – was being infringed.
This became quite a battle; letters went back and forth for almost a year. ‘I fear,’ wrote John Salisse, secretary of the Magic Circle, ‘that the thing may blow up into a holocaust.’ As the letter trail advanced, so the secrets of the trick emerged. One expert witness claimed Walker’s case was futile, ‘unless you claim that the whole idea of the penetration of a living person originated with you.’ I felt a sadness as I read about the subtleties of the art, and about the great care invested in each illusion. I felt that great magicians shouldn’t be allowed to vanish just like that.
In the autumn of 1968, Val Walker briefly re-emerged into the spotlight. He attended a magic convention in Weymouth, where he watched a man called Jeff Atkins perform his Radium Girl for the final time. ‘I can never be sure whether it was 1921 or 22 when I built the original in Maskelyne’s workshop under the stage,’ he wrote. ‘PT Selbit watched it in rehearsal and sometime later asked if I minded him using the basic idea for a different effect, which I certainly did not. It was his Sawing Through A Woman that emerged, using the identical cabinet dimensions. I have been both saddened and amused at the plethora of variations on the theme which the public has had to swallow during the intervening 40-odd years. I do not think my version of a penetration has been bettered in this long time.’
Walker informed the weekly magic magazine Abracadabra that now he had returned to the fold he was already looking forward to the next convention in Scarborough in a year. But he didn’t make it. His letters show a progressive illness: ‘I’m not sure I can attend . . .’, ‘I may not be able to meet you, try as I might.’
A few days before he died, he sent his last letters from a hospital on the south coast. In one of them, at the close, he said he could be ‘reached at the address above’. He didn’t actually write the word ‘at’. Instead, in February 1969, more than two years before what is widely acknowledged to be the first standard email between two computers, he used an old but generally unfamiliar symbol in its place. The symbol was @.
* It’s difficult not to mention Wilde’s idiosyncratic postal system without also mentioning the exalted letter he could not send. De Profundis, written on 20 sheets of paper in Reading Gaol in the last months before his release in May 1897, is a study of sorrow, beauty and the position of the outcast, and it begins with plaintive regret: ‘Dear Bosie, After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you . . .’
What follows is an unapologetic account of an aesthete’s life – his search for the exquisite in all things, his extravagances, his questing passions with Lord Alfred Douglas – and an account of the artistic consolations of a life devoted to Christ. Unable to send the letter from jail, he gave it to his friend Robbie Ross on his release, with instructions for it to be typed twice, whereupon certain passages were misread and excised. The original manuscript is held at the British Museum, where we may marvel at the succulent depths of his language and the calm certainty of his convictions.
‘I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,’ Wilde writes. ‘There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a “month or twain to feed on honeycomb,” but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.’
* A married couple from Australia famed for their ‘telepathy’.
Chapter Two
From Vindolanda, Greetings
You set off on a clear March morning from the Lake District. You take the road north from Penrith, go east at Carlisle towards Brampton, and then head high into the Pennine Hills. The road undulates and the roads are empty, and a driver will wonder whether this isn’t the stretch where car adverts are filmed. You keep going. There’s a B road south, and when you pass a village called Twice Brewed you’re tempted to stop the car to tweet a photo of the signpost. The road twists down to Winshields Farm and a guest house called Vellum Lodge, and then there you are, two coachloads of children ahead of you, at the historic site called Vindolanda, where the evidence of letters begins.
Here, between AD 85 and 130, a series of five forts made from timber and turf were built to defend the Stanegate, a wide belt of dirt road over the narrow neck of Britain, vital for the transport of men and supplies in the region. Londinium was a week away in the south, and it was perhaps a month to the heart of the empire in Rome. Vindolanda (its name is thought to mean ‘white lawns’) was one garrison among many: some 50,000 men were stationed around these ramparts, the unofficial northern frontier until Hadrian’s Wall started going up about a mile above it in AD 122. The forts were a vital communication centre too, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when, in the autumn of 1972, the archaeologist Robin Birley cut a trench to drain off excess water from the southwest corner of the Vindolanda
