A True Ghost (?) Story for Christmas.

I always sleep on the right side of our heavy, four-posted bed. At my left hand is a pine bedside cabinet upon which is a table lamp and a small clock, and beyond the cabinet is the old oak door leading onto the landing. Another small oak door facing the foot of the bed leads to the shower room.

I had been aware for some time that a short while after I put out the light there would come a rather odd little noise from the direction of the door, something between a metallic click and a sigh.  I told myself that there was probably a draft blowing somewhere which was rattling the latch of the door, but at the same time, it did make me feel just a little disturbed.  

We had an electrician in to do some work one morning and after he had gone, I was surprised to find a small, cone-shaped pile of what looked like ash, about an inch across, sitting on my bedside table. Rather crossly,  (sorry, lovely Mr Electrician) I wondered if by some chance he had been smoking in the bedroom whilst working up there during the morning and forgotten to clear away the evidence. When I brushed it away, it left a blackish stain which took some removing. There was no sign of any of the substance anywhere else in the room.

When I went to bed that night, I found on the floor at my side of the bed another neat conical pile, a little bigger this time.  We scanned the ceiling but it was smooth and (reasonably!)  white as usual, so presumably the ash or whatever it was hadn’t fallen from the attic. The carpet around was unmarked, and there was no sign of anybody having been walked something in.  Once again the stain left by the substance was difficult to remove and left a faint grey patch on the carpet even after my best efforts.

Over the next three or four weeks, these small, neat, conical heaps, some the size of a ten pence coin, some smaller, some rather bigger, appeared quite frequently and always either on my bedside cabinet or on the floor at my side of the bed and nowhere else in the room. They left a greyish-black stain on the carpet, as soot might. We searched but could find no cause for them.

The strange little noise at the door when the light was put out continued. I am not an ‘It’s a ghost!’ sort of person, but I must confess that I began to feel as if there was someone in the room and quite spooked and uneasy about opening the bedroom door in case another mysterious little heap had  appeared.

Then, early one evening, we were getting ready to go and visit some friends.  As had become my wont. I peered nervously and carefully round the door before entering the bedroom, but the cabinet and carpet were quite clear. It didn’t take us long to change. My husband left the room and I went briefly into the shower room, emerging again a moment later, only to pull up short.  A nice, neat new conical pile had appeared on the carpet at my side of the bed.

I called my husband back to show him, and said to him, perhaps only half-jokingly, ‘If They are going to bring me little presents, I wish they would bring me something nice like sweeties instead of little piles of ash!”

We had a pleasant evening, returning quite early as I rarely go out in the evening, not having much stamina left by then, and were in bed by ten. There were no heaps of  ash this time.

I don’t sleep well as my rheumatoid arthritis makes me very achy and I woke early. My heroic  knight in shining armour got up and went downstairs to make me a cup of tea. When I heard him creaking back up the stairs I put on my bedside light and sat up, blinking around, as he entered the room.  On the floor at my side I noticed something colourful and shiny.   I pointed it out to my husband, and he picked it up. It was a Roses chocolate wrapper, one end carefully pulled out and pleated into a pretty fan shape.

I have never heard the sighing click at the door again.

No more little piles of ash have ever appeared.

I don’t have that odd feeling that there is someone else in the bedroom any more.

Rational explanation, anybody? 

Christmas past

I used to say the same bedtime prayer every evening when I was a little girl:-

“Dear Lord, thank you for looking after me through the day; please look after me through the night and look after Mummy and Daddy and Nanna and Grandpa and Aunty Mar and Peter(my dog) and Wilhelmina and  Henrietta and Augusta and Charlotte and Jemima (my hens).  Keep us safe and well and ever in thy service. And don’t let me have any bad dreams.  Amen.”

Then, around early December, at some point, when I was five or six or seven, I started adding another bit before the ‘Amen’:-

“And please don’t let me die before Christmas.”

It’s impossible to forget the wonder and excitement of Christmas to a small child and of Father Christmas in particular. Even though it’s a lie that we tell our children and even though I shall not forget the deep disappointment when I found out that he didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have been without the magic of sending off my Christmas list up the chimney, carefully setting out the mince pies and sherry in the hearth for his refreshment, (not forgetting the carrots for the reindeer) and the mystery and excitement of seeing that they had gone, which was also, to me, hard proof that he existed. Listening for his sleigh bells, wondering how far across the world he might have travelled from hour to hour, wriggling my toes to see if the anticipated heaviness and crinkliness of a filled stocking had been laid across them – it was wonderful.

It didn’t really matter what was in the stocking. There were never very many things.  I most certainly didn’t get many, if any, of the items wishfully listed and[FL1]   sent up the chimney, but I didn’t really expect to do so; it was sufficiently exciting if I got just one.  I do recall my delight in a baby doll with a hard, shiny head, ‘real’ eyelashes and painted on hair that I received one year; I called her Rosebud and she was my pride and joy. There was once a miniature china tea set. That year on my list I had itemized the plates, bowls etc needed for a full dolls’ dinner service for twelve, but part of me had known that was never going to arrive and I wouldn’t have had enough toys to dine at such a table anyway.

 On another occasion there was a soft pixie toy I called ‘Puck’.  I only got rid of him a few years ago; he held too many memories to be easily discarded. Once there was a small box containing tiny little metal school desks and miniature boys and girls. Once there was a wooden monkey which swung between two sticks and which did a somersault if you twisted them correctly, once a plastic woodpecker which was supposed to climb up walls, though he never did; he invariably fell off. Once – and my only deep disappointment this, because I had been hoping for a doll’s house – a detailed wooden tram. It was a fair size but too small to carry Rosebud.  I tried to stuff Puck inside so that he could be the conductor, but he wouldn’t fit either. It was difficult to know what you could do with a tram too small for my dolls apart from push it up and down, and I very soon got bored with that.  I found out many years later that my uncle had handmade it for me in secret. I’m not sure why he didn’t go for the dolls’ house. I really would have preferred that.

 Then there would always be a book or two – one of them always an Annual and the other probably something by Enid Blyton or else something more educational, like an Atlas.  Maybe, as well, a tube of bubble mixture, and some pages of stick-on pictures of flowers or kittens and things and a little plaything like a yoyo or a handful of marbles or a slim book of paper dolls. Some plasticine, perhaps, or some glossy crayons, a colouring book or a dot-to-dot… And in the toe, yes – an apple and an orange and a handful of hard, brown nuts - even, you never knew, perhaps, a shiny new shilling!

Oh, such joy!

---

 [FL1]

I am a dinosaur

I mentioned on my website that I forgot to charge up my camera before the book signing at the Winchester Discovery centre and that I use a camera because I don’t carry a mobile.

I don’t usually carry a mobile, I should say. As I explained, we have one between us, a small, bricklike object which usually lives in the car and which has only one use: sending and receiving telephone calls.  It has no other attribute. No camera; no apps. It is certainly not in any sense ‘smart’.

Just occasionally, one of us will take it out with us, most likely me ringing home to say that the bus didn’t turn up for some reason and please can I have a lift… We also have to remember now to take it out once a month or so and  make a call in order to avoid our number being removed and given to somebody else (It gave us a nasty surprise when that happened unexpectedly; cost us a whole £10 that we had just put onto it when doing the weekly shop. It is, of course, Pay-As-You-Go). We are usually stumped for someone to bother with an otherwise pointless call, so we ring our home number and stare idly for a moment at the house phone ringing all to itself before switching the mobile off.

Why ever don’t we have proper, all singing, all dancing modern mobiles, did I hear you ask? This is 2014. What are we – dinosaurs?

Okay, let me think.

There are moments – as at the book signing – when something just a bit ‘smarter’ would have been handy, but in the main, if something doesn’t improve the quality of your life, you don’t need it and what would not improve my life would be to be instantly contactable wherever I may be. If I think I need someone to contact me on a very important matter, then I will of course, carry the mobile  and I will even try to remember to switch the thing on.

 Then there are clearly thousands of people who are just burning with things they simply have to chatter to other people about – and hundreds of friends just longing to know where the mobile user is, if he or she has just gone through a tunnel, what she said to him last night or he to her, or what they are planning to have for their tea.  Very few of my friends – indeed, none that I can bring to mind – would be the slightest bit interested and in fact, might be a bit narked if I broke into whatever they were doing to tell them what I’ve just bought in the sales. In any case, they usually keep theirs in their car, too, if they have a mobile at all.

Then, I am getting old and so, sadly, there aren’t that many of them to ring. Probably for much the same reason, my age, I can’t understand why people are happy to share their private conversations with others, or happy to wander the streets apparently talking to themselves.

If I want to know about something, I can wait till I get home and look it up then – and I don’t need a camera in the run of things. We gave up taking photos years ago, when we stopped liking what we saw when we looked at ourselves and when the big old storage chest got full.

Anyway, back to the Discovery Centre. Thank you to the staff and  to the lovely people who stopped for a chat about my books – I was especially delighted by those who told me how much they had enjoyed the first one, ‘Someday, Maybe’ and, of course, those who were kind enough to buy a copy of the new one, ‘Moving On’! 

Next book signing

If you are going to be in or near Winchester on Saturday 25th October, do come along for a chat at the Winchester Discovery Centre on Jury Street.

  

Signing 'Moving On' for a lovely lady at Alresford Library

One of my favourite poems

Vinegar

sometimes

I feel like a priest

in a fish&chip queue

quietly thinking

as the vinegar runs through

how nice it would be

to buy supper for two.

Roger McGough

Love it!! 

How I write

As I have said, I have been asked several times how one goes about writing a novel. Well, the internet is full of people with far better credentials than I all offering advice. There is no one simple recipe which, if it is rigorously followed through, will turn out a coherent and satisfying 375 page novel at the end,  so I will just talk about  how I approach it.
 To start, I have to have an idea, something that gives me a buzz of excitement and I hold onto that. I believe that if I have a good beginning and a firm grasp of the characters, the story will tell itself as I work on. When I start writing a book I know the beginning and what probably happens in the end, but I have only a vague picture of something going on in the middle,  unless my story is based on a detailed real-life event. By not planning it, I allow for things happening that I never would have thought of, just because the story wants them to happen. The danger, of course, is rambling. Having a ready-prepared plan might make you feel safe, like having a really good map when you are going cross-country. The problem is that characters have an impish way of doing their own thing and changing direction half way through the writing of a story or a book so that you could find yourself – metaphorically speaking - in a clanging, clamouring, built-up inner city area instead of in the scenic country road you had planned to be driving along! Actually, those people who plan in advance like this are rather thin on the ground.  I’m told that even the writers of detective stories often only have jotted notes about the order in which they need to reveal the clues.
 I type quite fast using my two middle fingers, but I hand-write much faster. The downside of this – and the reason I don’t do it all the time – is that I seem to go into a sort of elated trance when scribbling away, thinking as I do it that this is so good; this is going really well – then I am brought down to earth with a bump when I read through it. It usually seems that I just got carried away and that much of what I wrote is going to be of absolutely no use at all. It is really profitable to keep a notebook handy for jotting down odd notes, which often seem to pop into my mind whilst doing mundane tasks like  cooking or ironing and which pop out again very quickly if they don’t get written down. I can be mowing the lawn or peeling the potatoes or waiting for the bus when just the right phrase pops into my mind or I have a ‘Eureka’ moment about how to solve a tricky plotting problem, or suddenly I know exactly what x said to y when previously it wouldn’t come to me. Some people write down phrases or paragraphs in their notebook, or even write whole chapters and file them away until they find a use for them or until they have a need for inspiration. Sometimes, of course, there never is a use for them – it’s reported that Joyce Carey had a whole chest of drawers filled with chapters out of books that he never got round to using!
 

I accumulated a lot of facts in my notebook, but discarded a great deal of them. The reader needs to be involved with and driven along by the pace of the story, so one can’t allow detailed description to weigh too heavily or to slow things down. Having worked on it, I have developed a great admiration for writers like the wonderful Hilary Mantell, Philippa Gregory, and Alison Weir who produce historical novels packed with period detail and atmosphere. Often but not always, I tend to write and then research and check the detail afterwards.  Having a general familiarity with the decades covered in ‘Someday, Maybe’, I was confident to start with, but realized as I went on that my long-term memory is very far from faultless! Mistakes were inevitable and quite a few details had to be checked. What music was popular at just that moment in time? What was being broadcast on the radio at such and such a time on such and such a day? What kind of radio might it have been? What film might Cathy and Fred have gone to see? Was the treatment of Mary and the medical information correct? The writer of a historical novel wants the reader to be wholly ‘in’ the period that he or she is writing about. That period detail must be accurate. There was a long list of details that needed to be checked, homework to be done; experts, the library, Google and internet pages must be consulted. Visits had to be made.

Then, if one wants to write, on must – well, write! I try to do at least a few paragraphs every day, even if I discard them the next. As time has passed, I have accumulated a wobbly array of shoe boxes on my office shelf, each one containing a screenplay or a novel, finished or unfinished, as the case might be. Sometimes, of course, they don’t go anywhere. Sometimes they end up in one of several half-empty boxes. I don’t want you to think that each time I sit at my desk I confidently set down another thousand or three words with a flourish. I don’t. It’s amazing how many things suddenly acquire importance when you are faced with some writing to be done: those clothes that just won’t wash themselves; the roses crying out for pruning; that letter that simply must get to the post… Now the children are long gone, but the husband needs attention. Time passes.