Under a Watchful Eye(64)

‘But the SPR was set up mainly for his own enrichment. When he was in prison he’d re-established contact with some of his old clients. A couple of his patients in Mayfair were still smitten with him, and he corresponded with them while doing his time. Maybe they thought his treatments were effective. One very gullible woman was called Prudence Carey. She’d lost her husband in the war on a submarine. But Prudence was loaded. Old money. She owned Hunter’s Tor Hall, in Devon, and that’s where Hazzard went after he came out of Belmarsh. And, as far as I know, he lived there until he died.’

‘Dear God.’

‘Oh, it gets much better. Prudence became a kind of patron, so that Hazzard could write his masterpieces and develop his treatments and ideas. She’d had out-of-body experiences all her life, which he must have helped her develop in Mayfair. The disassociation of the consciousness and projection of the astral body towards Summerland, as they called it in the SPR, was central to the Mayfair operation. This is all in the court records. And that’s how he must have reeled Prudence in. She wasn’t alone, either. Hazzard became a kind of a guru.’

‘A cross-dressing guru of the afterlife. And people fell for this shit.’

‘I think he was basically promising people an assurance of life after death, yes. Or his version of the afterlife for a tenner a session in Mayfair, but at a much higher price when ensconced in Devon, and in very prestigious surroundings. Apparently, there were peacocks wandering the grounds. They also had a chef at one point.’

‘Good God.’

‘Of course, his residencies were sold as a cure-all for the earthly troubles and illnesses and to some very malleable and naive people. All operated on word of mouth amongst the wealthy. And with Hazzard as the gatekeeper of paradise, everything else in life often became irrelevant to his followers.’

‘To the desperate. And he actually got away with it?’

‘For a good long while. Nice earner too. But when my contact, Liza, was there in the early seventies, it was all going to hell. That’s when the second Hazzard book came out. It’s bloody dark too. I reckon he was writing the second book as things turned against him at the Tor, and he must have tried to cash in on the horror boom. His stuff was always too plotless, though, for any but a tiny number of readers.’

‘But this projection, and the astral body stuff, he started that in Mayfair?’

‘No, he’d been at it for years. He had his first out-of-body experience in the army, in the war. He was suffering from dysentery and claimed to have detached from his body in an infirmary. This is described in his story, “Looking at Myself from Nothing”. He claimed that while he stood beside his bed, he’d watched a medical officer inject his body with saline. And he had another episode in a dentist’s chair after the war. An even more powerful one too, after a motorcycle accident in London in the fifties. That’s all in his first collection. You know he always claimed the stories were true and not fictitious.’

‘I’m getting a gist of that. What did you make of his claim?’

‘I think Hazzard was convinced that a soul could leave its body after a shock, or if the soul thought that the body was dying, or had died. Most of his early experiences are in the story, “Sinking in the Dark Room. Rising in White Light”. Of course he claimed he could go much further over time, and that he’d learned to harness and control his “gift”, as he referred to it. But he kept all of that for the SPR. Its unique selling point. This was something he claimed he could teach, this gift.

‘Prudence even helped him get funding for SPR research, with her connections. But, of course, no one but Prudence knew about his past, because he was M. L. Hazzard at that point. The bogus aristocrat and fake doctor had been buried, but I don’t think she was troubled by his past.

‘He and Prudence Carey started retreats at the Hall, correspondence courses too, in the early sixties. He’d developed some technique that involved fasting and hypnosis, while using some psychedelics that he’d tried in London and then medicalized into his “formula”. There was meditation too, with the cultivation of an image and mantra that could, apparently, induce the experience and get his customers closer to the paradise belt. All of this I learned from Liza.’

‘How much of this syllabus do you have?’

‘Bits and pieces from hearsay and the short stories. Most of my book is based on assumptions, to be honest, but they’re as informed as I could manage.’

‘Hazzard never wrote a manifesto, anything like that?’

‘I don’t know. What I’ve pieced together of his ideas mostly came from his stories. I think they are a formalization of his theory, or as close to it as you can get to one. Liza’s interview pretty much attests to what Hazzard wrote about his cultivation. In fact, Liza’s interview reminded me of Hazzard’s stories. They’re cut from the same cloth. And remember, Hazzard refused to even call them stories. To him they were strange experiences.

‘But Hazzard also built all kinds of stuff into his spiel. Ideas ranging from the Hindu soft body to the vital body of the Rosicrucians. He used Greek and Roman mythology, Elysium, Hades, and stuff that was popular in the sixties, from the East, to give himself a zeitgeist and some gravitas. His adepts did most of the teaching on the retreats. There were two women in the early seventies who called themselves Alice and Fay, and they were the equivalent of enforcers at the Tor.