The next call was at the smithy. Four of the bald men were forging simple tools and wrought iron. I looked more closely at them and saw that they were tonsured. Then we came to a carpenter’s shop with a primitive lathe worked by pedals. There, two colonists were also tonsured, and still another was the young gardener who had received me on arrival, making seven in all.

Last was a sailmaker’s loft where three women were stitching away. I was not able to judge their mastery of the craft, but I couldn’t help remarking that the Severn seemed the last place for a carefree yachting holiday.

‘Man sets out upon great waters, Mr Colet,’ Marrin said in priestly tone.

‘But all these things you could buy well under the cost of home production.’

‘It is of course a waste of labour which should be employed on the land; but to be self-supporting is not the only object of my colony.’

My colony. Not our colony. Well, that was what I suspected. He financed Broom Lodge and almost certainly owned it.

‘And the other object?’ I asked.

‘A certain continuity. I feel that as a researcher into the past of mankind you may possibly understand our planning for the future.’

That sounded as if Broom Lodge was more concerned with bodies than souls, and I was prepared to listen. A future in which small communities feed themselves while the silicon chip does the rest is at least worth analysis for fun.

‘Do you, I wonder, agree with us that our civilisation is doomed?’

‘Not in the near future.’

‘Near or far does not matter, for after death there is no more time. And reincarnation, do you believe in that?’

‘I put it among the more improbable possibilities.’

‘But not impossible?’

I replied that nothing was impossible, that our ignorance was complete and had to be.

‘Not complete. All of us here remember something of past lives.’

An ancient and venerated faith. It seemed reasonable cement for holding together a community of believers.

‘Past lives – they always seem to me so suspiciously romantic.’

‘We are aware of that, Mr Colet. The human mind must be allowed its little vanities. What matters is the memory of service, conscious or unconscious. I will give you a hypothetical example from yourself. Let us say that you were a quantity surveyor – as we should now call it – at Tyre. You were able to tell the merchants what it would cost to build the causeway joining the island to the mainland and on your estimate they could base their decision. You remember nothing of it, but your interest in the economy of ancient harbours remains.’

Right up my street! But I doubt if the trade figures for Tyre can even be conjectured. However, it would be an amusing exercise for a wet Sunday afternoon.

It was a brilliant example of what he meant, and I told him so. As intimacy was growing, I ventured to ask him what service he himself remembered.

‘It may have been I who discovered that the gold which oozed from nuggets in the fire could be made to take any shape that the craftsman wished. Or it may be that the liquid gold, easiest of metals, led me to try the smelting of copper and tin. I cannot be sure and it is not important. Our first belief is in reincarnation. Our second is that service to man is what is remembered. Our third is that we must prepare for such service.’

I objected that if, say, an expert in genetic engineering were to be reincarnated with his memory of service, it would be only a nightmare when the technology to use his science didn’t exist.

‘That is why we stick to the most primitive crafts – the wheel, the lathe, the sail and the working of gold.’

That was a craft I had not been shown. I took him to be quite sincere. I now know that he is not only sincere but fanatically possessed. Murder for the sake of religion has never been a problem for the fanatic. Look at Hindu and Mohammedan in India or the bloodthirsty sects of the Middle East or, nearer to our own cultural aberrations, that fellow Jones who fascinated his entire colony in Guyana into committing suicide.

‘You envisage that sooner or later we are bound to return to a neolithic era?’

‘Exactly. As Einstein said, the fourth world war will be fought with stones and clubs. Then it is time for the teachers of agriculture and worship who later are remembered as gods. We are training to be those gods.’

A shattering conception! But given the highly dubious premises, the conclusion follows. I wanted to ask him about the worship, but before I could do so he said very cordially, ‘Stay with us as long as you like. My niece and I will be delighted.’

I thanked him and replied that I would indeed like to see more of their commune.

Both of them had a disturbing charm, disturbing because it defied analysis. Elsa, I found, always wore the black robe when on her many duties in the house. The sweater and slacks in which I had first seen her were for farm and garden.

That afternoon and evening, helping to turn the hay and mixing with the colonists afterwards, I encouraged them to consider me as a possible convert and to talk freely. All the details of their bizarre faith are irrelevant to my narrative. Mostly they seemed fairly orthodox theosophists, speaking of the body as a temporary illusion. Meanwhile, the illusion worked nobly at filling wheelbarrows with unsuitable clay for making bricks.

This core of solid Englishmen and a few women greatly respected Simeon Marrin. The Freedom of the Forest meant to them something more than the ancient rights of free miners and of shepherds who owned flocks but no land. It was as if this outpost of the oaks between the Severn and the Welsh Marches formed for them a spiritual island where the inexorable Wheel – a pleasanter name than the rat-race – forgot to turn, and left body and soul at peace with each other. One of the busy haymakers put it very well. ‘I love the Forest,’ he said. ‘I would like to become a tree.’ I don’t know whether adepts of theosophy consider a tree as a possible stopping place on the way up or down, but now that the trees share my bed in silence and, without eyes, see from their topmost branches moonlight on the shoals of the Severn, I appreciate what he meant.

Besides these honest colonists who found a spiritual peace among the oaks without worrying overmuch about past and future lives, there was this inner circle of tonsured mystics. They had a courteous habit of inclining their heads whenever they met Marrin, and he acknowledged their bows gravely as a high priest among his people. Nobody commented on this, accepting that they had an arcane reason of their own for such respect. I was told that they followed a tradition which descended from the Druids, who also believed in the transmigration of souls. I wish that Roman historians could have told us how the doctrine travelled from the east to the mists of the Atlantic.

After dinner Marrin took me to his own quarters at the back of the western wing, where he had a formal estate office on the ground floor and above it a workshop which was far from formal, approached by open stairs from the office. It was a circular room, contained in a squat but imposing tower, with windows high up in the wall. In the centre was an electric furnace and a long laboratory table with a number of crucibles and all the usual equipment. Cabinets held a range of cream-coloured ceramic pots, each marked with its chemical symbol. I noticed mercury, lead and sulphur. There were skeletons of a large salmon and a small Severn-caught dolphin. A third skeleton, standing on its own pedestal, was of some four-footed long-tailed beast, covered with a carapace. I guessed that it was a species of turtle. The whole display was slightly theatrical. I mentioned that his laboratory resembled an alchemist’s den.

‘I know it does,’ he replied, ‘but that is inevitable when I am experimenting with gold and its alloys. Also, I am studying the development of life in the water and all its implications. The tideway of the Severn has much to offer the mystic, from the lamprey, most primitive of fish, to the leaping, splendid salmon and the muscles of its tail.’