Below is the transcript of a speech made by Stratford Caldecott, son of Moyra Caldecott, at the event to launch her book, Multi-dimensional Life, at Gothic Image in Glastonbury on June 9, 2007.

Strat’s speech at Moyra’s 80^th birthday party/ booklaunch at Gothic Image bookshop, Glastonbury on 9 June 2007

On behalf of Moyra, I want to thank Jamie George for his hospitality tonight, Martyn Folkes of Mushroom Publishing for his immense hard work to get the books out on time, and all of you for coming, many of you from so far away. She invited you, but I don’t think she actually expected you to come! I am Stratford, her eldest son, speaking to you because she is not able to speak as confidently as she once did. But over a lifetime she has been more coherent, more eloquent, than the rest of us. I really doubt if any of us will have heard of anyone else who could have a launch party for NINE books in their 81^st year of life. It is probably a record. I know that the Pope, who is the same age as Moyra, sells more copies of his, but even he doesn’t write so many!

Moyra has always been a poet, and was a leading figure in the London poetry groups of the 1960s as some of you may know, but her first big success as a novelist came late, with the mystically inspired trilogy, Guardians of the Tall Stones, now in print continuously with various publishers for 30 years. Another of her perennial best sellers is Women in Celtic Myth. She has published 30 different titles altogether, averaging no less than one a year, and many of them have been translated into other languages. One or two have even teetered on the brink of becoming a Hollywood movie. As you will read in her long-awaited autobiography, Multi-dimensional Life, available here, her own life has often resembled a movie too — a kind of cross between Brigit Jones and Indiana Jones, or Miss Marple meets the Scorpion King. She travelled up the Nile and into the Pyramids with rock star Tina Turner, in order to discover the present whereabouts of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, and the result is another of the books on sale tonight. Her adventures both in and out of the body are a phenomenon that I have lived with most of my life.

I really hope that if you love Moyra as I know you do, you will buy as many of her books as you can tonight, and make this event a success for everyone. Apart from the classic titles, and the new editions of several of them, she has several brand new books tonight. Multi-dimensional Life reveals the amazing experiences of a writer exploring other worlds and the deeper reaches of this one. (She writes: “I did not realize it at the time, but during the writing of my books I was on a Quest. By mapping it now I hope I might make others aware of the complexity of every given moment, and encourage them to look out for signs and wonders in their own lives.”) The Breathless Pause reveals the charm of her personality through a selection of her poems and wise meditations. Adventures by Leaf Light and other stories contains some children’s stories that have appeared before along with a series of new ones that were never previously published.

I think my late father, Oliver, would have been very proud of what Moyra has achieved as a writer in the last few years. She has produced a body of work that has inspired the devotion of thousands of fans around the world. These books have made the world a better place; they have opened doors on to other levels of reality; they will live on and inspire others in the future. I have personally witnessed the amount of scholarly research that went into each of the historical novels, as well as some of the psychic experiences that helped to make them more than they appear on the surface. I speak on behalf of the whole family when I say that Moyra’s intense appreciation of life and of the natural world has opened our eyes to the beauty of the cosmos, and her books can do the same for her readers.

Adapted from a Memoir by Moyra Caldecott

Moyra Caldecott and family warmly invite you to an exhibition to celebrate the life and art of Oliver Caldecott in the 20th year since his death.  It runs from 6-18 April 2009, and there will be a TEA PARTY to mark the last day of the exhibition on Saturday 18 April.  For details please write to the ART JERICHO Gallery at info@artjericho.com or visit www.artjericho.com.

My husband Oliver was one of the foremost publishing editors of his generation – for example as a chief editor of Penguin Books in the 1960s and as co-founder and director with Dieter Pevsner of Wildwood House in the 70s. He was also a prolific artist, producing hundreds of cartoons, sketches and paintings in a variety of media over several decades. In April 2009 the family is collaborating with a gallery in Oxford – Art Jericho – to mount a retrospective exhibition of his work, twenty years after his death. Many of the pictures will be exhibited for the first time.

His parents were both well-known artists in South Africa – Strat Caldecott and Florence Zerffi. At Cape Town University Oliver plunged into student politics as an opponent of apartheid. He was associated with the National Union of Students (NUSAS) from 1943, and became its President in 1948. Several of Oliver’s friends were arrested, and he knew he would either have to keep quiet or be arrested too. In 1950 there was a massive protest attended by 10,000 people in Johannesburg’s Market Square during the “Defend Free Speech” Convention. Protest marchers were fired upon. Many died; many more were wounded. Many intellectuals, both white and black, left South Africa at this time, or were put away for years, like Nelson Mandela. The headquarters of the ANC were set up abroad and only returned openly to South Africa in 1994 when Mandela, an ANC member, became the first black president of the Republic of South Africa.

Oliver and I settled in London in 1951, where Oliver continued to give passionate talks about the injustices of apartheid – helping to rouse the indignation that would eventually overturn the system in South Africa. At the time we never thought it would take so long!  We also went on protest marches against the Atom Bomb from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. Shortly after the birth of our first child in 1953, Oliver became editor of the Readers’ Union Book Club, and subsequently several associated book clubs – Jazz, and Science Fiction.

At one point, Oliver was very ill with glandular fever. After a few weeks, he began to recover, but the doctor advised him not to go back to work yet. He was very frustrated and irritated not to be active, but he wasn’t feeling well enough to get up and do anything. I was at my wit’s end keeping him occupied. Noticing he was sketching on scraps of paper, I asked a friend of his to give him a pile of offcuts from the office. Reams of very large paper arrived, and Oliver started to draw all day and every day with pen and ink. He produced brilliant, witty, satirical studies of human nature – sometimes savage, always shrewd. Like his father, Oliver turned out to have a very quick hand and an accurate visual memory. Gradually he began to use colour in his drawings. Within a few years I believe he was as good as either of his parents. In June and July 1958, he and his mother Florence both had pictures in the South London Art Group Exhibition in the South London Art Gallery. By the 1960s Oliver was having regular exhibitions of his work.

In 1965 Oliver was invited by Tony Godwin to join Penguin Books as Fiction Editor. He was always interested in “books of ideas”, and gradually he introduced books that might be called “new age” – including the Carlos Castaneda series, which was first published in California. It was our “swinging sixties” with endless parties, a kaleidoscope of relationships, and stimulating friendships among the most interesting writers of the age. We also kept our old friends from South Africa, who were all doing well in Britain. I remember meeting Mervyn Peake at a party given by the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. Oliver was responsible for getting three of his out-of-print books published as Penguin Modern Classics (the Gormengast series). In June 1971 we went to a party given by J.P. Donleavy in Ireland. We arrived late in the middle of a storm, having got lost on the way, and were greeted by two sinister wolfhounds illuminated by lightning at the top of the stairs.

During 1972, Oliver and his friend Dieter left Penguin to start Wildwood House. Oliver was to say later that the years at Wildwood were the happiest of his life. Some very good and influential books were published that might never have seen the light of day if he had stayed at Penguins – including Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Another popular book from Wildwood was the Tao Te Ching translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English.

In 1976 Oliver was with me when I was healed of very severe angina by a spirit healer in Bristol. He subsequently found he also had healing abilities, and was called on frequently to cure his friends’ headaches or backaches. He was letting go of his old scepticism. Increasingly he published books at Wildwood on alternative or complementary healing, on animal ESP, and on many spiritual subjects. Of course, he never lost his reason and he was never gullible. But ideas fascinated and intrigued him, and he liked to play with them. If an author would make a good case for some idea, he was interested. But he once said to me, “I don’t see why a person should jump from an experience they don’t understand to an explanation that defies reason.”

Because the 1970s saw the full-on rampage of the New Age, he was inundated with “channelled” manuscripts. His comment was: “One can’t really comment. If it’s so, it’s so. But how can we know? We go on with our lives as best we can, following that elusive cosmic light – and trust that the meaning and purpose of it will be as we hope.” He took to wearing a badge a friend gave him which said, “Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I’m smart.”

In these years, Oliver also had many exhibitions. Every time the publisher launched a book by Shirley Toulson that he had illustrated, for example, we organized an exhibition to stir up local interest. They cost a lot in framing and in time, but were invariably fun.

We went to a lot of jazz concerts in smoky pubs and halls, Oliver sketching all the time. Some names I recall: Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Dollar Brand (a South African jazz pianist who later changed his name to Abdullah Ibrahim), Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Thelonius Monk, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Johnny Hodges, Miriam Makeba, Jack Teagarden and Earl Hines. Later I organised many exhibitions of his jazz pictures, but I was always embarrassed when people asked me the name of the musician depicted. I just couldn’t remember – only that I had enjoyed the music. Oliver would have known, but by that time he was dead. He never labelled his drawings: he was more concerned with catching the spirit of the music than specifically with who was playing. Maybe he thought it obvious who it was, or that he would always be around to answer the query.

In 1980 Wildwood House was bought by East-West Publications, but Oliver stayed on for a few more years. Eventually, in 1984, he left to become the editor of the Rider imprint at Hutchinsons, until 1989 when he moved out of London. He had been diagnosed with cancer of the colon in 1987, and was operated on during the great hurricane of that year. In November 1988 we found he had developed secondary lung and liver cancer: the prognosis was that he had one year to live. He could either have chemo therapy to prolong his life for a few more weeks, or walk out and enjoy the time he had left. Oliver decided against the therapy. We put our London house on the market and, after a few false starts, moved to Bath in February 1989. In March we went for a month to Cape Town. Oliver felt well, and it was a beautiful, intense time. He swam and sketched and saw old friends. We could not believe he would soon be dying. When we returned to England he began to work part-time as an editor for Gothic Image Publishing in Glastonbury, and as an adviser to ICOREC (the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture). We tried every kind of alternative or complementary medicine to cure his cancer, but to no avail.

Oliver died on 14 November 1989. He had substantial obituaries in the Telegraph (13 Dec.), The Times (22 Nov.), the Independent (18 Nov.), the Guardian (18 Nov.), The Bookseller (1 Dec. and 5 Jan), Publisher’s Weekly (8 Dec.), and even Prediction (March 1990). Giles Gordon wrote in the Independent: “Also a passionate painter with a violent and sensuous black line, Caldecott was always intrigued by the counter-culture. Counter-culturalists, like himself usually bearded and from Abroad, were regularly to be encountered at his and his novelist wife Moyra’s happy Dulwich family house. Ideas and art were discussed; the future of the planet rather than the politics of publishing.”

The printed version of this Memoir, heavily illustrated with examples of Oliver’s black and white drawings, as well as biographies of Oliver on CD and cards – as well as the paintings themselves – will be on sale at he exhibition in April.

“Living memories that inspire the mythical writer”, an article by Susie Weldon from the Western Daily Press, 16th February 1998 (reprinted with permission).

Moyra Caldecott is fascinated by myth and religion, archaeology and history.

But whereas other authors rely only on research and imagination to recreate a period, Moyra calls upon actual memories to do so.

Bizarre as it may sound, Moyra, who was born in South Africa and moved to Britain in 1951, says she actually experiences much of what she uses in her novels.

“Most of my books come from very strong feelings of having been there before,” says the softly spoken 70-year-old author.

“I write in my experiences and my far memories, as well as research the period.”

Moyra can’t explain what occurs. She “sort of believes in reincarnation; it seems to fit so neatly” but accepts that there may be other explanations.

Perhaps memories can be put down in genes or maybe places become imprinted with strong impressions, which she then picks up. It is even possible, she concedes, that she just has a particularly strong imagination.

But Moyra clearly doesn’t believe that; her experiences are so vivid she can’t help but accept them as real.

“Things start to happen that seem to prove my experiences,” she says. “For instance, in one book I wrote about a priest who had lots of sea urchin shells in his little hut. I thought I must have imagined it but later I learned that sea urchins were often used in burials at that time.”

In any case, who knows what science will discover in the future, she points out. After all, if people had talked about television or radio 200 years ago, “it would have been, well, magic”.

Whatever the explanation, Moyra’s novels brilliantly convey the feel of a particular period. Much of this is due to her impeccable research but also to the masterful storytelling.

Her acclaimed Guardians Of The Tall Stones trilogy. which arose out of her fascination for Britain’s stone circles, earned for her a considerable cult following.

And her novels on Egypt, especially her biography of the Pharaoh Hatshepsut, led to a friendship with a world celebrity, Tina Turner. Tina became interested in Egypt after a psychic told her she was the reincarnation of Hatshepsut.

Their relationship was entirely based on Egyptology, “we never talked about her music” and eventually it led to them both visiting the pyramids together.

Moyra has stayed much closer to home for her latest novel. The Waters of Sul, the latest of her 24 books, is set in Roman Bath which is now her home.

Bath’s reputation as a centre of healing and religion go back to the days of the legendary King Bladud. She says: “Bath has never been a fort as far as we know, it’s always been a religious centre.”

The Waters Of Sul was originally entitled Aquae Sulis. But Moyra was forced to change it after a claim that it had been patented.

“It is ridiculous because Aquae Sulis is the old Roman name for Bath,” she says. “But I just can’t face the hassle of arguing about it in court.”

The novel transports the reader to Roman Bath, when pilgrims came from miles around to visit the hot waters gushing out of the earth at the Temple of Sulis Minerva.

It is set in 70 AD, a time of high tension and divided loyalties. The Celtic inhabitants are still coming to terms with their Roman overlords who began occupying Britain about 30 years beforehand.

Equally wrought are the tensions between different religions.

There is the Celtic goddess Sul, who reigned supreme in Bath before the Romans introduced their goddess Minerva; the Greek religion based around Orpheus; and the fledgling new religion, Christianity, which was just being introduced into Britain.

Then there are the emotional entanglements, the troubled romances, family conflicts, jealousies and hopes.

“I try to make history come alive for people but I’m not writing a straight history so I don’t have to stick absolutely to the facts,” she says.

Instead. she uses facts wherever they are appropriate to the story. For instance, one character in the novel throws a lead curse into a river. Examples of lead curses can still be seen at the Roman Baths.

Moyra is passionate about Bath. She moved there from London with her husband, Oliver, in 1989, shortly before he died. He was a talented artist and his stunning pastel drawings cover the walls of her Bath home.

Their children, Rachel, Stratford and julian, appear to have inherited their parents’ creativity and drive. Rachel is an artist and lives nearby with her glassblower husband Chris Thornton, whose workshop is off Walcot Street in Bath.

Stratford runs a centre for faith and culture in Oxford, while Julian is a conservationist fighting to save the world’s rainforests.

Moyra shares her son-in-law’s delight in glass: she creates beautiful leaded lamps and vases. But writing remains her chief love.

Writing, she says, is “a total drive. It’s the way I live my life, I live through my books.”

Published in the Western Daily Press on 16th February 1998, and copyright © Western Daily Press.

Written in the mid-nineties by Moyra…

• Born in 1927 in Pretoria, South Africa.
• Started academic career by obtaining degrees in English Literature and Philosophy.
• Briefly lectured in English Literature at university level.
• Married in 1951.
• Raised three children and had a most interesting and stimulating life as the wife of Oliver Caldecott in London from 1951 to 1989. (Oliver was an editor at Penguin, Readers Union, and Hutchinson and founded his own publishing firm Wildwood House with his partner Dieter Pevsner. His last editorial post was at Rider, for Century Hutchinson. He was also a very good artist.)
• Took evening classes in palaeontology (geology always a favourite subject), religious studies and mythology.
• Was secretary of the Dulwich Group in the ‘sixties, a most successful poetry reading group. Read a lot. Wrote books. Met many interesting people and had many interesting discussions. Travelled a lot.
• Moved to Bath in 1989.
• Her life has also been enriched by the interests of her children: Religion – Conservation – Art.
• She has had various experiences she considers to be ‘paranormal’, including a dramatic healing from angina. She gives talks to various personal growth and consciousness raising groups, and groups interested in the ancient sacred sites of Britain.
• Her most successful book so far, Guardians Of The Tall Stones, is set in ancient Bronze Age Britain, and is required reading for some groups visiting the sacred sites of Britain from America. It has been in print continuously since 1977.
• Myths and legends are a particular passion and she follows Jung and Joseph Campbell in believing that they are not ‘just’ stories but actually deep and meaningful expressions of the universal and eternal in the human psyche.

These are answers to some interview questions posed in 1997 by Venue, the local listings magazine, based in Bath and Bristol, UK. The magazine later carried a feature on Moyra Caldecott and her new book Aquae Sulis (later republished as The Waters of Sul)

The novel Aquae Sulis uses the name of the town of Bath in Roman times because it is a story about the town, the people who lived there in c.72 AD – the loves, hates, the conflicts and reconciliations – all set against the back-drop of an ancient sacred place in the process of change. The Celts and the Romans, the conquered and the conquerors are trying to adjust to each other.

My husband and I left South Africa in 1951 at a time when the country was an efficient police state, and any protest against the very unjust system of apartheid was punished instantly and severely. Several of our friends were already in prison. We left hoping we could do something to alert the rest of the world to what was going on there. It was world opinion that finally forced a resolution and a change. We lived in London until 1989 when my husband was found to have cancer and given a year to live.

We came to Bath, seeking, and finding, a less stressful environment. It seemed the perfect human-sized town after London, and yet it had all the culture – theatre, bookshops, art galleries – and a fast train to London. A city beautiful architecturally, and rich in history. As an author of novels set in ancient times I was particularly interested in the Roman and pre-Roman era. I wrote one novel about King Bladud, the flying king, entitled The Winged Man (pub.Headline) set centuries before the Romans came, and then Aquae Sulis (just published by Bladud Books in Bath) about Roman Bath. At the time of writing I was visiting my daughter in Rome frequently and so the research I did was not only in books and museums, but also ‘on site’.

The novels I write are woven from many threads:

1. Academic research into the place and time in books and museums and ‘on site’.
2. My interest in the myths and legends of the people I describe. Stories handed down through generations carry not only certain profound truths about the general human condition, but are flavoured with the culture from which they come. We can understand a lot about the Celts and the Romans by taking account of their myths and legends.
3. Certain experiences of my own. Some are from my travels e.g. in Rome itself, in Petra in Jordan, and in Pompeii in Italy. Some are from more esoteric experiences. I do a sort of ‘time travelling’. I cannot make it happen, but sometimes in some places I seem to slip out of my present persona and experience being someone else in another time. Whether this is reincarnational memory or just a very vivid imagination I don’t know, but the strange thing is that when I come to write the story of that experience I find out, often years later and after publication, confirmation that what I have written is accurate, though there was no evidence for it at the time. In Aquae Sulis the Greek priest of Orpheus slips in and out of time in the same way, experiencing the past, present and the future.
   I know this can happen, because it has happened to me. The first time I used it to write a book was in Guardians Of The Tall Stones (pub. Celestial Arts, USA). I was in a stone circle in Scotland when I experienced that slip in time – this time to the Bronze Age. I wrote the trilogy during a series of heart attacks. There is nothing like believing you are about to die to concentrate the mind on important matters! The priesthood used a form of spirit-travel to cross the world. I had not yet heard about astral-travel, though I myself had experienced it as a child not knowing what it was. In Crete I ‘experienced’ a house that had not yet been excavated — but later was, and corresponded exactly to my vision of it. From this I wrote The Lily And The Bull set in Minoan Crete. My Egyptian novel about Akhenaten, The Son Of The Sun, sprang from an experience under hypnosis. The week it was published, without even knowing that I had written a book about Akhenaten, a medium saw Akhenaten standing behind me in my living room.

I have been asked if I am a religious person. I believe I am. I certainly believe in realities other than the physical. People have always tried to make sense of the mystery of life and death. They make up stories to explain it and give names to the mysterious forces and energies they feel around them influencing their lives. In Aquae Sulis in Roman times these names were Jupiter, Apollo, Isis, Orpheus, Sul, etc. In the Middle Ages they were called angels and archangels, saints etc. When I write about a period I go into the belief systems of that period and find, just as we do today, that some pay lip-service and some are deeply, mystically committed. Many of my characters are priests — for in the priesthood the responsibility for good and evil is powerfully concentrated. Corruption of those who lead, whether it be in the Church, or in the police, or in the State, is always devastating.

You ask if I write poems. Yes, I do. In my novels I am describing people outside myself yet familiar to me from people I have met, either in ‘real life’ or in ‘flash back’. In my poems I write from my own heart. I am currently gathering a volume together.

You ask if I fancy a dip in the Roman baths. Yes, I do. It would be a fitting celebration for the publication of Aquae Sulis. It may even be possible if I last out to the millennium!