The Boy Who Saw True

 INTRODUCTIONDURING THE COURSE of my twofold career as a musical composer and a writer on occult and other matters, I have from time to time received manuscripts from various persons (mostly women) who were optimistic enough to imagine that a preface from my pen would give added weight to their literary efforts! Some of them have even asked me to give out that they (the authors) were reincarnations of various eminent personages! This of course I declined to do, for the nature of their scripts was in itself enough to prove that such assertions were simply the outcome of vanity. As to scripts dealing with communications with the disembodied and clairvoyance in general, these may be interesting to those persons who still want to be convinced as regards personal survival, but there is a sameness about them which is apt to become tedious to the already convinced.The Boy Who Saw True, however, comes into a totally different category, and differs materially from all the hundreds of books I have read on Spiritualism and kindred subjects. In fact not one of them displayed the characteristics of this highly diverting human document, with its naive candours, its drolleries, its unconscious humour, its oscillations between the ridiculous and the exalted, and perhaps I may venture to add, its power to convince for the very reason that the young diarist never set out with the intention of carrying conviction. Here was a precocious young boy who was born with a talent for clairvoyance (as some children are born with a talent for music) and who could see auras and spirits, yet failed to realise that other people were not similarly gifted. In consequence he was misunderstood and had to suffer many indignities. But apart from all this, the document is of interest in that it reveals the thoughts, emotions and perplexities of a Victorian youngster brought up a little prior to the “naughty nineties”: though for my own part I think it a pity that he insisted on deleting so much of the diary and only retaining those parts which he thought would be amusing or instructive to the public. This has even given rise to the suggestion that I had been hoaxed over the manuscript; though the many friends to whom I lent the typescript violently repudiated such an idea. In view of such conflicting opinions, I can only say this; namely that during the course of my life I have known at least thirty people—some of them intimately—who possessed to varying degrees that extension of vision manifested by the young diarist. Further, I believe that the day is not far hence when many children will be born with the same faculties that he possessed and may be equally misunderstood. Besides which “fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind,” and I remember my own childhood and its perplexities and emotions. Incidentally it is of astrological interest to note that we both had the same sun-sign, Sun in Libra at birth which may account for certain characteristics we possessed in common, though obviously he had a different rising sign to account for his remarkable psychic faculties.The following details supplied by the diarist’s widow should now be stated. Before his death his wife persuaded him to let the diary be published. But he made certain stipulations. It was not to be printed till several years after his death, and some of the names were to be altered, as he did not wish to cause any embarrassment to surviving relatives and acquaintances. (It says much for his sense of humour that where any of the real names had a somewhat comic ring, he amused himself by substituting others of a similar comicality.) Further, he insisted on improving the punctuation in Part I, and “doctoring” a number of passages where the bad spelling and grammar would merely irritate rather than amuse the reader. However, in other cases he allowed bad spellings to remain, and where these occur no unjust aspersions should be cast on printers and proof readers. As to the title, he refused to let any more high-sounding one be used than the name this book now bears; nor was the author’s identity to be mentioned. His wife suggested that someone who had written books on occult subjects should be induced to write an introduction. To this he had no objection, but modestly imagined that no such writer would be found!With regard to the diarist himself: he was born in the North of England, his father being a business man, but with a taste for reading. His son seems to have inherited this taste, and already when quite young had literary aspirations, which account for some of the comicalities to be found in the script. He would steal into his father’s library and read books which, as his mother remarked when taking them away from him, were “not at all suitable for little boys.” And doubtless she was quite right; though as it so happens the results of the precocious lad’s “naughtiness” have proved highly diverting in the end . . . at least so I have found.At the conclusion of the diary I have added more extensive details about the diarist’s life.CYRIL SCOTTEastbourne, December, 1952.