16
Journeying to Foreign Lands
actually giving the woman messages. He dismissed the reading as telepathy, in itself evidence of the use of psychic powers. When Gardner visited the Spiritualist Alliance headquarters in London, the medium he saw gave him evidence about his family that convinced him she was genuine A spirit spoke through the medium, claiming to be Gardner’s cousin, and he felt her as a tangible presence in the room. She told him that something nice would happen to him shortly, and that as a result his return to Malaya would be delayed. A few days later Gardner was introduced to a vicar’s daughter, Dorothea Frances Rosedale, known to everyone as Donna, who worked as a nursing sister at St. Thomas’ Hospital. Shortly afterwards they were married by the bishop of London, and Gardner was given permission to extend his leave for two months for a honeymoon in France and Spain. In 1936, at the age of fifty-two, Gerald Gardner took early retirement from the Customs Service and returned to England permanently. He and Donna took an apartment on the Charing Cross Road, a Central London street renowned for its many secondhand and antiquarian bookshops. Unfortunately, the cold British weather affected Gardner’s fragile health and he caught a cold that he could not get rid of. When he had been on leave in 1932, a doctor had recommended the healthy benefits of naturism, as it exposed the naked body to sunshine. Gardner inquired about the existence of naturist clubs, and in 1936 finally was able to find one in Finchley, North London. It was situated in a large house with a gymnasium, a ballroom, and a clubroom, and was run under the auspices of the Sub Bathing Society (Heselton 2000: 25). It was at this club that Gardner met people who “had a faint occult interest” in fortunetelling, astrology, palmistry, and Spiritualism, as well as naturism (Bracelin 1960: 142). In March 1939, Gardner applied to join the Folklore Society where he met the Egyptologist and anthropologist Dr. Margaret Murray (1863–1963). She was the author of two books on witchcraft, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931). In her ground-breaking books, Dr. Murray put forward the controversial theory that historical witchcraft was the survival of a prehistoric fertil-