“Overhead, there would sound a curious wailing from Father Bernard’s room. When I first heard this sharp cry break out on Monday morning, I had supposed that Father Bernard was either having a fit or whipping himself. [Eric] Gill, however, had quickly reassured me. It appeared that Father Bernard’s vocal cords were not all they might be and that he was studying a new method of voice-production, invented by a man called White, in which the vocal cords were dispensed with altogether and the notes produced by expansion and contraction of the sinuses. This did not seem to me possible.”

Rayner Heppenstall, Four Absentees (1960)