Doarlish Cashen stood high on the hill above Dalby, on the west coast, a long walk from the nearest road. In September 1931 they began to hear scratching and rustling behind the double wooden panelling that lined the house, then animal noises, and then a voice. It said its name was Gef. It told them it was "an extra extra clever mongoose", born in New Delhi in 1852.
Over the next few years Gef became famous. By the family's account it chatted, sang, swore, gave them news of the neighbours that it could only have got by spying, and killed rabbits for the pot. Voirrey, who was about thirteen when it started, described it as the size of a small rat with yellowish fur and a big bushy tail. Almost nobody else ever saw it. Visitors heard things, or said they did, but the voice usually came from somewhere they could not see.
In July 1935 the psychical researcher Harry Price and Richard Lambert, editor of The Listener, went to Cashen's Gap. They heard nothing. Price noted that the panelled walls, with an air gap behind them, made the house into what he called one great speaking tube, so a voice could seem to come from anywhere. Fur that the family sent as Gef's was matched to their sheepdog. Nandor Fodor stayed a week without result and suggested the answer lay in James Irving's mind. Lambert's involvement led to a slander action in 1937, after Sir Cecil Levita said he was off his head for taking it seriously; Lambert won £7,600 in damages and the press called it the Mongoose Case.
James Irving died in 1945 and Margaret and Voirrey sold the farm, at a loss because of its reputation. In 1946 the new owner, Leslie Graham, said he had shot Gef, but the carcass he showed was black and white and far larger than the family's description, and Voirrey said it was not Gef. She died in 2005, still denying that she had made it up. The most common view is that she did, with ventriloquism and a lonely childhood, and that credulous visitors and a hungry press did the rest.
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