An English Ghost Story (11 page)

‘Yes, Tim… Mum’s right. This is a
charmed
house, a happy house. Good things have happened here and they linger like warmth. It’s in the air, like that silence after a concert, just before the applause starts.’

Kirsty drank her coffee. The grind brought here with other half-used jars and tins tasted different. That could be the water, of course. At the Hollow, they didn’t need to filter. She had stopped taking sugar in tea and coffee.

‘Do we want to talk about the magic,’ she began, hesitantly, ‘or are we afraid that if we do, it’ll go away?’

‘Magic?’ queried Steven.

‘Yes,
magic
,’ Jordan was eager to confirm it. ‘Things moving, things appearing. Presences.’

‘Are they what’s behind the mystery collection?’ asked Steven. ‘Ghosts?’

‘Not exactly, or not just,’ said Jordan.

‘The IP are friendlies,’ said Tim. ‘They extend full cooperation.’

‘You’ve
seen
them, Tim?’

‘You don’t see them, Dad. If you saw them, they wouldn’t be them.’

Kirsty thought about it.

‘I haven’t seen anything either, but I’ve been given things. In a way I can’t explain.’ She was wearing a bracelet from the bottom drawer. ‘And I’ve felt it. We’ve all felt it. Even you, Steven.’

Her husband took her hand and squeezed her fingers. He did not think she was mad. Another miracle.

‘I’ve seen something like a ghost,’ said Jordan.

Kirsty was surprised. She had never suspected.

Tim raised his arms and went ‘woooo-wooooo’. Everyone laughed, including Jordan.

‘Yes, that sort of ghost. A floating white thing. The shawl on the sofa, moving by itself. Dancing.’

‘I haven’t seen anything like that,’ said Steven. ‘I must have angered the spirits or something.’

‘I don’t think so, Dad,’ said Jordan. ‘It’s different for each of us, but it’s different again for all of us together.’

‘So who is it?’ Steven asked. ‘Louise?’

‘More like Weezie,’ said Kirsty.

‘Didn’t Miss Teazle die only last year?’ asked Jordan. ‘It’s older than that. I think the Hollow has been this way for a long, long time. It’s in the ground as well as the house, in the trees and the streams.’

‘Maybe we’re on top of an Arthurian burial ground?’

‘I’m not sure it’s to do with the dead.’

Steven was puzzled by Jordan’s statement. ‘Ghosts are the dead, surely? Spirits left behind, business left undone. They avenge their murders or haunt their heirs.’

‘Those would be unhappy ghosts, Dad.’

Kirsty had a thought. ‘In the Weezie books, the little girl is friends with ghosts. There’s a grisly ghost in the first one – no, a
gloomy
ghost – which is like your idea of a ghost, the “woooo woooo” misery and chain-rattling ghost. But she meets it, makes friends with it, and it changes. I think Louise turned her own experience into a story.’

‘Cashing in?’ laughed Steven. ‘Maybe we should too? Have haunted holidays.’

‘No, dear,’ Kirsty said, serious. ‘Louise wasn’t like that. I think she was like the house. She wanted to share.’

‘Well, thank you, Weezie,’ said Steven, raising his coffee cup. ‘And thank you too, whoever or whatever you are. Thank you, ah, for having us.’

Kirsty lifted her cup too. And Jordan, and Tim.

A delicious shiver ran through her, and she knew her family shared it. It wasn’t like a wind. The window-panes didn’t rattle and magazine pages didn’t riffle. It was warm and cool at once, like a caress.

‘That was, um, enlightening,’ said Steven.

The red glow of sunset was splashed across every pane of the picture windows, bathing the Summer Room in petal-pink light. The windows formed a giant screen. Images swirled in the panes, turning the wall into living stained glass. Kirsty recognised the colours of the watercolours which illustrated the Weezie books.

The orchard and the moor were still there, but strings of phantom light wound between the trees. Shapes danced a midsummer gavotte. Faces formed in the interplay of the trees and the flowers and the light. It was as if music were playing, setting her inner ear a-throb, rhythms syncing with the tides of her body. But there was no sound, just a burst of clarity.

‘We should go out there,’ she said.

The French windows opened by themselves. A shimmering curtain hung above the crazy paving. Tim ran out first, dragging Jordan by her hand. They plunged through the curtain as if it were a waterfall, and joined the others in the orchard, the others who were indistinct but definite.

Every song Kirsty had ever loved ran through her head, from ‘Right Said Fred’ through ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ to ‘Common People’ to ‘Becoming More Like Alfie’. Her husband got up, and pulled back her chair as she stood.

‘I think we should join the children, darling,’ he said, offering his arm.

‘I love,’ she said, beginning the sentence she had clung to for so long it had lost all meaning, then tripping as her tongue ran up against a barrier in her mind.

‘No,’ she said, concentrating to make the barrier go away. ‘I do, Steven. It’s back again. It was here, at the Hollow, waiting.’

He brushed her face with whisper kisses.

‘I love you,’ she said, and her heart was free.

He scooped her up like a bride in a cartoon, and carried her through the shimmer into the orchard.

* * *

J
ordan woke up in the orchard with the dawn, face glazed with dew, her brother curled up against her tummy. She blinked in the light, expecting the hammer of a hangover headache to strike, but there was nothing. She could think and breathe and see clearly.

Tim mumbled and rolled up into a ball.

She stood. Sparkling cobwebs hung between the rushes. She had wound up making her bed by the stream, in a natural depression. Dawn-warmth smoothed away her momentary goose-flesh.

Mum and Dad were here too, somewhere. She wasn’t worried about them.

It was like the first healthy day after a bad cold.

The morning after the best-ever love.

Everything was fresh. Her mouth tasted different, cleaner, sweeter. She ran her hands through her hair and found it finer, untangled, heavier.

She was comfortable in herself. She didn’t feel fat or scrawny.

If only Rick were here.

The longing was a worm in the apple. Soon, he would share this with her, with the family.

Last night, she had danced.

Now, she wanted breakfast. When was the last time she had eaten anything before midday?

The smell of fresh bread emanated from the kitchen, and the soft whistle of an old-fashioned kettle.

Tim snapped awake.

‘Come on, soldier,’ she said. ‘Reveille.’

Mum leaned out of the kitchen window, beaming and beckoning.

‘How many eggs?’ she shouted.

‘Infinite eggs,’ Jordan shouted back.

‘I’ll try my best.’

Jordan and her brother entered the house by the kitchen door.

* * *

W
ith the morning post was a package, addressed to ‘The Naremore Family’. Recognising the tiny hand script, Kirsty claimed and opened it. Why was Vron’s first communiqué since the Weezie book addressed to the family rather than her? Did that mean anything? Should it worry her? She didn’t think anything could worry her any more.

Jordan ate like a soldier and amused Tim with her chatter. Steven watched the kids, not realising his wife was watching him. She saw his laughter lines crinkle, recognised those same lines in Jordan, even in Tim (who took after her). The magic was all around. She was safe.

Inside Vron’s packet was another book. A battered paperback with a fiery spectre on the cover.
Ghost Stories of the West Country
, by Catriona Kaye. Volume 46 in The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult. A peek inside showed a charity-shop stamp and a column of crossed-out prices which began with an optimistic £2.50 and sank to a despairing 45p – which was exactly the original recommended retail price listed on the back cover. This 1976 edition, with an introduction by Wheatley, was a reprint of a book first published in 1962.

Though she’d never heard of Catriona Kaye, Kirsty remembered Dennis Wheatley. His black-magic books were still liable to be confiscated by tutting teachers when she was at school. She’d tried to read one, but found it stodgy and annoying – she’d skipped to the quivering black mass the other girls had gone on about, then given up on it. She skimmed Wheatley’s introduction. A full third of the wordage described the menu served at the society dinner where he’d met the authoress for the only time (the consommé was excellent, apparently). Then, he dismissed Miss Kaye as ‘an impertinent, though not unintelligent flapper’ and copied out the original back jacket copy (‘a fascinating pot-pourri of spine-chilling tales’) to pad his piece to two pages.
Ghost Stories of the West Country
wasn’t an anthology of made-up stories – at least, not in the sense that any writer invented them – but a collection of accounts of ‘true hauntings’ in Somerset, Devon, Dorset and Cornwall.

A woven bookmark – one of Vron’s unique creations, her own black hair with a carefully maintained white streak – stuck out, about halfway through. Kirsty opened to that point and read a few sentences.

‘What have you got?’ Steven asked.

‘Essential information,’ she said, holding the book up to show the title. ‘Apparently, we live in “the most haunted spot in England”.’

‘Tell us something we don’t know, Mum,’ said Jordan.

‘Let me read this, and maybe I will.’

* * *

T
hat morning, the family all read the chapter. First Kirsty, then Jordan, then Steven, then – with serious concentration, and many questions – Tim. When they had all taken aboard what the book had to say about their home, they reconvened their meeting of the night before, under the midday sun with the heat lying heavy all around.

‘So,’ said Kirsty, ‘what do we think?’

From

by

P
lenty of nominations stand for the title of ‘most haunted house in England’. ‘Ghost-hunter’ Harry Price staked a claim for Borley Rectory in Essex, while Lord Halifax advocated Haverholme Priory in Lincolnshire. In my experience, the most haunted
spot
in England is an apple orchard in Somerset.

Currently the home of Louise Magellan Teazle, most-loved of our children’s authors, Hollow Farm has been the site of supernatural manifestations for at least a thousand years. A mile or so outside the hamlet of Sutton Mallet, the property has been cultivated ground since well before the Domesday Book. Once an island in the marshes, it became part of the Somerset Levels after the construction of the King’s Sedgemoor Drain in 1798.

I first visited the orchard in 1923, when Miss Teazle was little older than her famous heroine Weezie. She already showed the pluck that makes her books enduringly popular with children and adults alike. A surge in poltergeist activity disturbed the young Louise’s elderly parents but affected the cheerful, open girl not a whit. She confided in me that she considered night-time rearrangements of the furniture little more than conjuring shows staged for her entertainment. I have returned in recent years to find the ghosts tamed if not dispelled, a circumstance I ascribe to the geniality of their present landlady, who has – as generations of children understand – an ability to get along with anyone, and confesses to be more than happy to share her home with phantoms.

That it is the
ground
and not any particular building upon it which sustains the haunting is demonstrated by the phenomenon of
ghost trees
which, in certain circumstances, appear to grow
inside
structures (a farmhouse and a barn) built where they once stood. These trees seem more solid than any walls that fail to confine them, and their branches spread through obstacles as if they were mere impertinences. I cannot bear witness to these spectral growths and Miss Teazle admits they’ve been little-seen since she was a girl. However, an anonymous 1824
Blackwood’s Magazine
article (signed by ‘a Gentleman’) and a series of journal entries penned in 1879 by Timothy Bannerman (parson of the nearby village of Alder) describe the ghost trees at some length. These, incidentally, are the major nineteenth-century accounts of the haunting of Hollow Farm. The
Blackwood’s
contributor claims to have collected a piece of ghost-tree bark for examination. He reports that it dwindled to ‘a smear of black stuff’ (presumably, the matter we would now call ectoplasm) while wrapped in a kerchief.

A local story connected with the ghost trees is extant in many forms. The folk song ‘Apple Annie’s Fancy’ (familiar in the arrangement by Percy Grainger) is best known, though the most elaborate is the dialect tale R. H. Barham collected as ‘Nancy of Thick Green: A Legend of Wessex’ in
The Ingoldsby Legends
. This has it that in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the daughter of the farmer who then owned the orchard, named variously Anne or Nan or Nancy, plucked an apple from a ghost tree and ate it. This inculcated in the lass a powerful addiction to ghost fruit which led to a condition of self-neglect that continued until her premature death. She has since been numbered among the spectres of the Hollow, heard singing among the trees, creating a sense of melancholy and lassitude in unwary auditors. A recent tradition is that the spirit is heard to sing ‘Apple Annie’s Fancy’, though that ditty must of course post-date the tragic death described in its penultimate verse. If Annie can sing her own theme song, she must have learned it after her death, suggesting a capacity for scholarship seldom ascribed to shades of the departed.

The
Blackwood’s
Gentleman and the Reverend Mr Bannerman note that during the moments when phantom figures were visible and voices audible, the ‘ceiling of the farmhouse became itself ghostly’ or ‘grew transparent as thick, ill-blown glass’ and that stars were clearly discernible in the sky above. Bannerman, a keen astronomer, wrote ‘the constellations were not in their familiar places but awry, as if we saw not the night sky of today but the heavens of some distant, remote past or futurity when the stars were in different positions’. To the clergyman, this was the most alarming of the phenomena he was witness to at Hollow Farm. Miss Teazle sets little store by either of these accounts, pointing out that neither the amateur man of letters nor the professional man of the cloth actually lived on the site. ‘The old place likes to put on a show for visitors, my dear,’ she said to me, when I called upon her to discuss this chapter, ‘as you well remember.’