My father left behind a satchel of correspondence which starts when he was 8 years old and at boarding school. He would have known that the weekly letters to his parents would be read by his house master, and perhaps for that reason they mostly detail sporting events, something I never knew him to have the slightest interest in. I like to think I can read between the lines of his forced enthusiasm, knowing the more brutal and unhappy reality that was going on. The word jolly appears often, the portraits he paints straight out of an Enid Blyton picnic.

Thank you enormously for the sugar mice.

The letter writing sees him leave school, he goes travelling, encounters mishaps (see Episode 2 The Ghost story, Nightmares), and he starts to receive letters from friends and love interests that suggest a fair amount of acid was being taken on both sides:

Let us eat chocolate and fart?

Is a suggestion made by a friend or lover and I have no idea what it might refer to other than an intolerance to lactose.

The letters take him to London and his fist job as a porter at Phillips the Auctioneers, his first exhibition, the birth of my brother and I, our various sicknesses and small achievements, never the disappointments.

Eventually there is a house brick of cards sent to him after his terminal diagnosis was largely known about. He was fastidious about replying, each with tick and a date written on them along with, responded.

If I live to the same age my father did, I have 17 years left. When I look through the photographs saved on my phone, to see what I was up to 17 years ago, to try and get some handle on how brief or long a time that is, it shows me an image of an animal footprint in the snow. My mother had thought it was an otter print, my father – furious – thought this was both wishful thinking and plain stupid. A loud disagreement was had. My boyfriend who later became my husband was beardless and I was thin, and we laughed through the argument, even though it was uncomfortable and relentless, and we wondered if it had reached his brain.

Thin and beardless and two live dogs.

17 years ago my father had two years left. So at the time of the fight about the footprint, he already knew he was dying. He hadn’t perhaps informed us yet – that came quite a lot later. At the time that my parents were chased out of the haunted cottage in the south of France, my father had 39 years until the argument about the footprint, 41 until his death. 41 years ago I was 5 years old. It was the year I met my oldest friend – we were drawing bears and we shared some coloured pencils. She generously explained how to draw a five-pointed star without taking your pen off the paper. I remember starting to learn cursive and being annoyed that another student would gasp in excitement when each new letter was chalked up on the black board. I retain that irritation to this day. I remember, rather sanctimoniously, being forgotten at school, and eventually picked up by a friend of my parents who I didn’t recognise but went with all the same. It is strange to feel yourself so in reach of the beginning of your life as it might be in relation to the end of it.

There is a second house brick, letters and cards sent after his death, telling of a man who was nothing like the one we knew, leaving a hundred different ghosts behind, one for each person who knew him. These cards of course not responded to.

My father visits in fits and starts, at different stages of his life. I have gone several years without dreaming him, and suddenly this week he showed up again at about the age I am now. He still had some black hair then, he wore aviator sunglasses and had a rollup resting on his lip. We didn’t talk much, we were both in the middle of some kind of interminable admin, but I registered that it was nice to see him at that age, and that he looked well. He was, as usual, on the edge of losing his shit about whatever it was that we were doing, and so it was best not to speak too much. My mother had a visit too not long ago, and she said he was young and beautiful and lovely, and it’s nice to know that while my waking brain is losing its grip on the sound of his voice, my sleeping brain knows it just as well as it did when he was raging out loud.

In paid content I’ve recorded a reading of a short story I wrote called The Land. If you’d like to read it you can find it here

Thanks loves.

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Pic: A rare moment of contentment from the dog

I haven’t updated here since before Christmas – for those of you who are paid subscribers, thank you so much for hanging in there with me. I have a couple of excuses, the first is that I’ve been trying to finish a draft of something and it’s at that stage where it takes all my brainpower to get myself into that world. My other excuse is that since writing about what happened in our old flat in the last episode, ghosts have been difficult to write about. I won’t share here what’s been going on but I’ve made the decision to try as much as possible to leave those particular ghosts where I found them, and not to encourage them to come and visit any longer. If that sounds tantalisingly mysterious, all the better, but when sleep is compromised it feels like a signal to abandon the woken up dogs and let them go back to sleep.

Happily for my Substack, this past Christmas we met a new ghost in Cornwall who has not followed us home to Peckham. I want to talk about the trouble with doorways. They have become very present on book covers at the moment, doors part way open sometimes looking on to an empty room, or a suggested figure. Doorways were a big part of the problem in the flat that I don’t want to talk about anymore.

Pic: An omen

I have always found open doors unsettling, can’t sleep in a room whose wardrobes are not firmly closed, I can’t write unless the door to my office is closed. Prior to having our son I couldn’t sleep in a room with an open door on to the landing or a corridor – terrifying to lay there in the dark watching, waiting for something to pass by.

But when my son arrived he arrived with difficult sleep. Now he is eleven, he wanders around – up and down the stairs, climbs into bed with us and has no memory of it in the morning. Sometimes he’ll start talking when he’s halfway down the stairs to the basement and I’ll wake to hear him chattering away, sounding very reasonable, as though he is simply and politely trying to ascertain the logic of his dream world. It never makes sense what he says when he’s sleeping, he talks in what sound like full and correct sentences, but the words are jumbled or spoonerized.

When he was a toddler there was also another night mode, this was full on terror, screaming at the dark. I read that with night terrors you are not supposed to touch the person in destress. When it is your round faced three-year-old, standing in his cot with his legs bowed in horror you don’t have a choice. I would pick him up, carry him around, despite advice that said that this might enter you into his terror and make him fear you when he wakes. Better that I always thought than leaving him to face it alone, at least if there was anything to his terror, anything that could reach through, I was there with him to face it.

Once he pointed with such certainty out of the open door of his bedroom, that I followed his instruction, took him down the stairs into the basement where he pointed to the corner of the room and when I sat us down in that corner he finally stopped screaming. After a while I had thought him asleep but when I stood up to leave that corner – even just to sit in a more comfortable spot in the basement, he began to scream again, and so much of the night passed in that corner, wondering if sleep would ever again be possible.

So because of this, the wanderings and terrors of a small boy, we now sleep with our bedroom door open so he can access us and I can hear him on the stairs talking to whoever it is that gets him to go downstairs to join them in the early hours of the morning.

As I’m writing this and thinking about doors, I remember that when I was about 6 years old, we went to stay at my uncles’ house. He lived in a very grand rectory in the countryside, black wooden beams and sloping hallways, and I remember having the first of what would become a reoccurring nightmare about a spaniel with a hooked nose (for another time) and I remember running down the hallway in the dark to get to the room my parents were sleeping in. Their door was closed and had one of those thumb latches which I hadn’t yet mastered, and I recall vividly the feeling of being locked out while something dreadful approached behind me.

Pic: The dog having none of it A

Anyway, the doorway in Cornwall. At Christmas we stayed in an old fisherman’s cottage – it had a new bit added on with a conservatory and view of the sea. There are an awful lot of doorways to choose from in the cottage – something to do with the extension and keeping out drafts, I’m sure, but it’s an odd feeling design like the cottage has a core that you dance around, opening and closing doors as you go. Our bedroom was off the living room, with two single beds, and there was another room off the kitchen. Because we are all three difficult sleepers, and we didn’t want our son to go wandering and lock himself in some multi-doorway antechamber in his sleep, the plan was that my husband who is more of a night owl than the rest of us, would go to sleep in the room off the kitchen and our son and I would sleep in the two single beds off the living room. I woke a little irritated at about midnight when he instead came and got into the single bed I was hoping to shift our son into when he came to the part of slumber when he likes to put his elbow in my face. Instead our son woke and very sweetly said ‘Evelyn, you can go and sleep in the other bed, that way we’ll have more room.’

I happily left to go and scroll on my phone – maybe watch some clips of Sha’Carri Richardson running, set to rousing music which is the thing that makes me feel best at the moment when I can’t sleep. When I opened the door to the other bedroom I felt immediately that I wasn’t wanted in there. It was hard to step over the threshold. Then I noticed that my husband’s clothes were there, and the bed had been lain in.

I stood there a moment longer feeling very bad and not knowing why, and then I told myself off – it was because the door was open, once I closed the door and got into bed, I would feel cosy and could watch Sha’Carri, but maybe with the sound off because I felt suddenly conspicuous. Once in bed I felt my heart hammering at my chest, and I thought, it’s fine, look to Sha’Carri, or maybe even watch some dogs being rescued from the ice and reunited with their owners. But in the dark with the phone lighting up my face I understood that I could be seen, and I turned off my phone and held it tightly to my chest. Soon I would relax and fall asleep I told myself. No. Came my self’s reply, you won’t.

Something I do sometimes if I feel a stirring in a room I have to sleep in, is I’ll have a little whispered chat with whoever is not there. I did this last year in a place near Exeter when the dog wouldn’t come inside, and stood legs plated at the threshold to our bedroom barking and growling and pointing at the empty room. While my husband was bringing the bags in, I did a quick circuit of the place, explaining who I was and who my family were – I said that my son wasn’t feeling too well, and he was easily spooked, so I’d really appreciate if they didn’t do anything that might frighten him. I promised we’d leave the place as we’d found it and be gone by the end of the week. And that did seem to work - for me or for them, who’s to say. The dog was still having none of it

Pic: The dog having none of it B

In the fisherman’s cottage though I couldn’t speak. I made some very half-hearted introductions in my head, tried to think them loudly, but then had a strong feeling that someone was sitting on the other bed leaning forward and looking at me in a way that had nothing to do with curiosity. Instead there was anger. A man – stocky, older.

I stuck it out for about 20 minutes, and I would have left earlier except I didn’t seem able to move. That feeling I used to get with sleep paralysis when I was a kid and didn’t know that sleep paralysis was a thing and I felt that I had convinced myself that I couldn’t move – it wasn’t real, I was being dramatic and the shadow in the corner of the room was also me being dramatic. I spent so much of my childhood not giving myself the benefit of the doubt.

I got up, closed the door behind me, closed the three doors that looked in on the living room and slept on the short sofa next to a white light Christmas tree whose off switch I couldn’t find. Unhelpfully two of the doors had windows in them so I put a pillow over my face – the grown up version of hiding under the covers. In the morning I went into our bedroom to get dressed. My husband poked his head up at me ‘Meet the ghost? How long did you last in there?’ Toerag.

There is a doorway in the haunted room of the fisherman’s cottage which goes into a closet with no door. There is a window in that space and a wardrobe that fits awkwardly in there. Something is off for sure –but it may just be the feng shui.

Pic: The bed no one could sleep in.

When we moved from our flat in Tulse Hill, for the reasons I made clear in my last post, we moved into the basement of the house I grew up in. After quite a lot of remodelling, it came about that the corner of the basement where my son made me sit in the middle of his terrors when he was three, is the same spot I used to see the shadow in my sleep paralysis when I was a kid. Funny sometimes how things line up like when you can see all the way to the end of a house through its open doors.

So, to conclude, I haven’t been writing about ghosts because of all the ghosts.

In the paid for content I’ve included a short video of the fisherman’s cottage bedroom - let me know if you see anything/anyone in there I missed!

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E: What was it exactly that made you leave that night?

C: It started to do the bangs on the roof – I mean it could have been angry villagers

E: it’s a very strange thing for villagers to do.

C: Yes. And it would start Bom. Bom. Bom. above us and then it would go BUBUBUBUBUBUB (she shouts this bit and worries the dog) and also the cupboard door in our room – there was a little bolt because there was a loo in there, and Andrew got up and put the bolt across to stop it banging and it quietened down and we were so relieved. We convinced ourselves it had just been the wind, and we drifted off to sleep. And then it went BANG - so loud - and it felt like the windows were going to break from the feeling in the place.

And whether or not we created it I don’t know.

I’ve thought about this often, how my parents felt about the events once they’d left. That they had created it – their past traumas spilling out and affecting the vibration of the place, or the interpretation of noises and smells and atmospheres as supernatural in some way. When my husband and I lived in Tulse Hill we were chased out by a ghost, something he now says is a ridiculous notion, but at the time I remember he was as scared as I was. The following is taken from a diary I kept around the time our son was 8 months old. This is not the most frightening thing that happened – that happened in fact to my husband – and what follows is essentially a story about nothing at all happening. But I remember it felt like the glass in the windows would break, like the air was thick and making the walls bulge.

He’s been sleeping so well, and that is probably why when he screamed in the middle of the night, the hairs on my arms stood up. In his bedroom, I turned on the turtle that projects stars on to the ceiling and saw him laying there looking like he did as a tiny baby, screaming for all he was worth. He was not hot, he was not cold, or wet. I gave him a drink of water and that calmed him enough that he shut his eyes again and was almost instantly asleep. Earache, perhaps then, or a bad dream. I stayed and watched a few minutes as the stars turned from green to blue to amber. His breath was steady. I left the room, quietly, leaving the turtle on for comfort. Outside his door, I lingered a few seconds.

There was a sound like someone gently flicking a wine glass, soft and sharp at the same time, and his scream again, this time even louder. I went back in and picked him up and he struggled upright, looking around the room like there was something to see, not comforted by my arms. We sat on the sofa, I sang him the song I sing to calm him down, and he did quieten, eventually, pushed his face into the crook of my arm. I was reminded of my old dog, how she’d tuck her snout under my arm when she wanted nothing to do with the world.

I’d slept in there, on that sofa, often, in the days of trying to get him used to his room. I leant back and wondered if tonight would be one of those nights, which was when I had the impression of a figure standing in the corner of the room. I say impression because I couldn’t see anything. There was nothing there. Written down this looks ridiculous. I felt ridiculous, as I do now, and I remained seated, blinked, stared hard into the corner, the empty corner – I have said that from the beginning – I could see that there was nothing there.

But there remained an image in my head of something I don’t like to reimagine now.

Imagination is a stupid force. At the time, holding my sleeping child, I said to myself ‘I am an adult. I am an atheist. I am the mother of this child.’ And I succeeded in blinking away the thoughts, shrugging the image off and at least feeling the pretense of control coming over me. He was breathing hotly and regular into the crook of my arm. All was quiet, my heart calm. Then the noise, the soft ping from the corner of the room. A beetle flying into a metal fan. The feeling at 36 years old, of waking your husband with your child in your arms because you both have to sleep in the same bed as him, and your only explanation is that both of you are afraid of something next door that doesn’t exist. It’s not a good one.

There was also a swarm of bees. ‘Ghostbees’ is something my husband now holds over me. The bees came as I got home from dropping our son at the child minder – we had the estate agent coming over with someone to view the flat – by this time I had fallen deeply out of love with the flat, our son slept only in bed with us, and there was very little sleep going on. I would mostly be out all day so that I wouldn’t have to be there alone, but I came back to make sure it was tidy enough to show people, and when I opened the bathroom door, bees were flying out from a crack underneath the sink. There was the steady hum of them in the room, I don’t know how many but enough for me to think, swarm. The small window was open a crack, and I shut the door and rang the estate agent in a panic. She seemed non plussed and so I rang my husband who sounded very worried and told me to leave immediately, which I did.

The estate agent rang me after their viewing and said she’d found two dead bees in the hallway but that was it. My husband still thinks I imagined it or at least likes to tease me that I imagined it. The thing about it is it is a natural occurrence, nothing supernatural about it. Bees swarm – it’s what they do, how they get about. And they found a way in from outside, and they exited via the window, left open a crack. That’s all fine. But when bees swarm in your home at a time you find yourself sitting up at night in the dark and peering into the corners of the room, that you wake up from vivid and threatening nightmares and your baby waves and chatters at things he sees which you cannot see, it all feels like it is feeding into the same melting pot of haunt.

Now when I look back on that time – nearly nine years ago – I think, well, I was sleep deprived and anxious. But I also every now and again go through the photographs I have from that flat, looking for something that shouldn’t be there. Once we sold the place and had taken most of our belongings out, I went back and took pictures, convinced something would show up in the photographs.

E: Do you remember how you decided to leave, having not talked about it?

C: It was the really heavy banging on the roof and we were both awake and I don’t know who said let’s go, anyway we just decided to go. And we had to cross this field of long grass in the dark to get to the car. That bit was really frightening; you could feel the house behind us watching. (the dog is ripping up grass and eating dirt again) This dog, it’s the third time today.

E: Do you remember the conversation you had in the car?

C: I just remember that I accidentally directed us to an old church because I mistook the cross on the map for an airplane.

Thanks for reading - if you’re interested, I’ve put some photographs of the flat we were haunted out of in the paid content. Let me know if you see the ghost - I’m still looking.

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C: And so when Herbert and the girlfriend went it started up again – the noises and the bangs – they were louder than they were before, the nightmares were worse.

My mother is very sensible and matter of fact. She rolls her eyes at superstition and sentiment (though she is not immune to the temptations of using divining rods to find an old well or rubbing half a potato on warts at midnight under a full moon and burying that half in a hole dug in the earth with her bare hands – stories for another time). She tells this story of a poltergeist in Auribeau with a sense that it is a throwaway anecdote – a bit like she’s recounting a time she had to dispute a parking fine.

I am working from the transcript I first recorded in January this year, my mother is working in her studio and I go to check a fact with her – I have a distant memory of a story of her hearing music that wasn’t there – how does this fit into the story? In asking about that, she volunteers that she had been experiencing ghosts of one kind and another since she was a child.

My mother grew up in a suburb of Sydney, called Paramatta. Her parents owned Strange’s Corner, a meat pie shop in an old council chamber which they lived above, my grandparents, my mum and her brother.

On a visit to Sydney I went to the corner it was on, a small section of green now on a busy crossroads, with a bus stop and gumtrees, which have germinated and matured in the time since my mother and her family left Strange’s Corner. I went and stood on that neat green under the tree with the sound of traffic drowning out the magpies and waited for something to come over me. Eventually I got self-conscious and a sunburn and left having not communed with the spirits of my grandparents or my mum and uncle as children. I sent a photograph of the spot to my mother, which shows The Family Inn opposite, she wrote back, ‘we used to watch the Friday night fights at closing time xx’

In her infuriatingly reasonable way, my mother tells me another story of ghosts, and also horses and old men and here it is:

When she was 11 or 12 an older man, Mr Proudfoot who taught horse riding to kids offered my mother the use of his horse, Peggy, a biting horse who hated everyone other than my mother. Her parents would drive her the 40 minutes from Paramatta to Windsor on the weekend and she would stay over the night with Mr Proudfoot, ride the horse all day, sleep in the dormitory on his property.

‘Why did this man give you a horse?’ I ask - I am deeply suspicious of Mr Proudfoot.

‘I have no idea. I suppose you wouldn’t allow a man to give a child a horse now.’

‘You almost certainly would not drop your kid off to stay the weekend with a man and a horse.’ I am leaning hard on the idea that Mr Proudfoot had an ulterior motive but my mother is having none of it. ‘He wasn’t creepy and was a terrific man.’ She puts an end to my prodding.

‘Mr Proudfoot had a terrible dermatitis problem and he took these drugs for it, which made him bang about the place, and that noise used to wake me up and night and I remember it being very frightening. But it was only Mr Proudfoot on his pills.’

‘Right.’

‘But also, I’d wake up in the dark and there’d be this grey mist hanging above me in the bed.’

The potential for reading into all of this is almost too much and I’m not going to do it. But it is fascinating to me that this story lay tucked away inside my mother and she had never thought to tell me, even as we spoke about the banging happening above her bed in Auribeau, the horror in the night of terrible dreams. It makes me frantic about what else might be hidden away inside the folds of her brain.

‘How long did you have Peggy for?’

‘Oh I’d say about four years. I was at art school when she died.’

‘What happened?’

‘Mr Proudfoot rang and said he’d gone out into the field one morning and she was just laying there dead. Snake bit her.’

This was not the story I came to my mother to confirm, but it’s just like this ghost story to branch off and take me somewhere else. The sound of Mr Proudfoot wheeling about and crashing into things on his medication and the banging on the ceiling above my parents’ bed, and the grey mist floating above my mother’s bed. Memories holding hands with memories.

Back to Auribeau

C: and one night as well as the banging above our bed, the door connecting the old cottage to the new building started banging –like there was a wind going through the house. Your father got up and bolted the door and all the noise stopped. We thought maybe that had been it – a draft was somehow setting all these things off. And we went to sleep. And then in the middle of the night the door crashed open, and the pots and pans all rattled down in the kitchen and the banging above our bed came back, so loud, we packed up our things without talking and walked the quarter mile though the field to our car. That was when it was most frightening, when we were walking through that field in the dark.

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Taken from h day by Renée French

Nightmares

(This is continuation from the last episode, Arrival.)

E: What were the nightmares about?

C: I can’t remember what they were about but they were no good. They had terrible smells in them. And Dad used to have nightmares anyway because of his accident and everything and so between the both of us we had a bad time trying to sleep.

In the 1960s my father was in Greece with some friends – he was 19 and on a mountain road had a head on collision with another car. The man driving the other car was a Greek General and he was killed. My father, the driver, was thrown in jail with no medical attention, with a head injury. His hair fell out. He wrote daily to his parents, a letter to send them after ‘the matter’ as he seemed to want to keep calling it, had been resolved. Here, the matter was that he had been accused of murder and needed to prove the accident was not his fault. Things happened to him in prison that I don’t know about and he didn’t want me to know about, all I have is the letter, a deeply sanitised version of events, but not without evidence of head injury. He was after two weeks found not guilty- the General had been drunk and on the wrong side of the road - and he was allowed to leave. His hair never grew back.

C: Then Herbert and his girlfriend came. God she was beautiful. Herbert caught some fish in the river and she’d get them alive and poke their eyes out for fun.

I suppose this is the part of the story which always feels most like a bad horror movie or a good nightmare. Just plonked in there, a beautiful woman being cruel to fish - you can see it can’t you. But as always, something has been left out – other times when the story has been told, I have heard of how Herbert was having what my parents both liked to call ‘a love affair’ with his maid, but on meeting her daughter - the beautiful and cruel to fish - he switched over to her and the mother continued to work for him. How old the daughter was is something that I’ve never managed to ascertain. Once my father added that the maid also had a son that Herbert had a relationship with, but I can’t remember how reliable he was being at the time.

C: When Herbert was there everything stopped and he wanted us to come down to Italy and join him there – he had a place there – but Dad didn’t want to go – he was so tired. I wanted to go, I thought it would be fun –we weren’t really having a great time in the house.

This ‘everything’ that my mother describes stopping here, was really the heart of the story when I was small. Sometimes, if she was telling it to a group of people, I’d excuse myself for this part because it bothered me so much. My mother has never been much of a performer, she likes to blend into the background and slip out the door. Quite a common thing I think when you’re married to someone who is a performer. In fact it’s strange to me that my father allowed my mother to be the teller of this story. So often if she tried to speak on other matters he would interrupt and explain how it really was, take over the story and add his own little flourishes. But very rarely did he want to talk about this one. Maybe it happened in a moment in his life when he was struggling. Maybe the nightmares were still with him.

When my mother told the story and she got to the part where the noises started, she would slap the table. She would say - ‘and at night we would lie in bed and on the ceiling just above our heads it would go, boom, boom boom boom boom,’ slapping the table in time with her booms, ‘and it would get faster and faster and louder and louder.’ and her slaps would intensify so that she could not be heard over them, so that wine glasses toppled over and the dog stood up, concerned. As a small child I would struggle not to put my hands over my ears, it seemed to me like that was where the ghost was - in my mother’s hands- like she had conjured it in to the room with us.

For a long time when I was small, I thought something possessed me. It came for my brother too, in much more violent ways. Both of us would get a feeling like our hands were not our own, like our bodies had become huge things and we were hunkered down inside of them, tiny versions of ourselves inside a giant shell. Our words came out wrong, our own hands touched like someone else’s. Time sped up, we slowed down, cumbersome in our bodies. There was a feeling of walking on fishbones, a feeling like hair rolled into plasticine and then pulled apart. If those descriptions don’t mean anything to you, that’s fine. We called it The Thingies. My brother, five years older than me, my hero, would come and lay on the floor of my room and say ‘Talk to me, I’ve got The Thingies,’ and I’d yap away. For him that was what helped - he could focus on someone else’s words. I would talk, mostly about sharks I think, which was the only subject I truly knew anything about or had any interest in. When I had The Thingies I didn’t want to be acknowledged by anyone else, I wanted to lay down in a dark small space and wait until it passed over. The pressure would build and build and eventually it would feel like it passed out of the inner corner of my eye, like I’d been punctured there. The feeling was so like the sound of my mother’s slaps on the table.

C: and me and your father never said anything to each other - we didn’t want to be the one complaining I suppose. And it felt like if we spoke about it it might get worse. So we stayed wide awake all night in the dark and dozed during the say and had bad dreams. We were pretty exhausted.

E: Why didn’t you leave?

The dog barks shrilly. She’s done another poo and my mother picks it up. My mother is suffering from what she’s calling ‘a poisoned finger’ so is slow with the poo bag. The dog barks more. The ball is tossed.

My father’s letter to his parents, written while in prison, sent when he was out.

More about this story next time. In the paid content this week I’ve recorded a rather long short story. The setting is the one I’ve been writing about in these letters - it’s as close as I’ve come to using this place in fiction.

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A place for the scary stuff, shapeless things and unsettling ephemera that come up while I’m writing a new novel. May contain ghosts.

Illustration by Gwen Burns _gwenburns_

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Hi,

This is my Substack. Eventually, I hope this will be a home for all sorts of things, but to begin with I’m going to be telling one longish ghost story, which I’ll update regularly. It’s a story I have been trying and failing to tell since I was a child.

In the paid for content I’m going to leave some supporting material – photographs or audio stuff, short stories or deleted scenes that I’ve written along the way and which, just like this story, have never found the right home or have disappeared into the past. This ghost story is present but invisible in most things that I write.

Thanks so much for reading

Evie

The Ghost Story

Episode 1

I can never quite reach this story on the page. The times I have tried to write it down, I find myself setting off in the wrong direction, telling other stories over the top of it, like it is trying to hide from me, or like there’s so much to it that I can’t get all the words out quick enough or in the right order for them to make sense.

The story is not my own – it belongs to my parents. It’s a ghost story, a poltergeist story if you want to be specific. Every time my mother tells it, and she has been telling it to me since I was about six years old, I learn something new – about my parents, about myself, or about the way that it happened.

My mother, Christie, is 80 and that adds an urgency to getting this story down in a physical form, and to have her retell it incase I have missed something. It still holds the thrill and horror it gave me when I was a child. Partly it’s in her matter of fact performance - she tells it like she is giving complicated directions to an idiot (me).

This is one version she has told me amongst hundreds, we are walking in the park in early January with the dog. It has new parts to it, things she never shared with me before, it’s also missing things which I will do my best to fill in as we go. The story takes place in the South of France, not far from Cannes, around 1970.

The Ghost Story transcribed in January 2025

Arrival

C: It was a holiday. I don’t know if it was before we were married or after we were married.

E: There are pictures of Dad there, but I don’t see any of you.

C: No I was probably taking the pictures. It was before we were married, I should think.

E: When did you get married?

C: Oh. I can’t remember. We were together I think about five years before we got married. And I think the gallery was still at home, and I used to work for Benny and we were friends with his brother David - I’ve told you about him he was a muscle man, and some people came and took photographs of him in the gym and then he found his body on the back of a muscle man magazine with someone else’s head on it and he was very upset. (To the dog) Come on, get your ball.

The dog tears grass up and eats dirt. She has started to do this more and more on walks, is letting us know she is bored of this park.

C: (To the dog) Anyone would think you’re having a breakdown. (To me) Anyway he was friends with Bob – you know - it was all that mad gang, and Bob and Annie and David and Charlotte, his girlfriend, had been to stay in this house in the South of France.

E: The dog’s rolling in goose shit. And the place is called Auribeau, right?

C: Just below Auribeau.

The dog barks manically, I get the ball for her and throw it, we both laugh watching her catch it.

C: And they knew the people that owned it (the dog pants - I throw the ball again) we took it for two weeks - I think we probably had it after they’d been there. And they told us after we’d been there that they’d had some funny experiences.

E: I didn’t know that. Bob and Annie?

C: And David and Charlotte. And we drove there, and we drove by Herbert and stayed with him for a bit.

E: I thought Herbert owned it?

Herbert Wolfertz was a painter my father managed at the time – here is a review of an exhibition he had in 1971:

Herbert Wolfertz, Clytie Jessop

Gallery, 271 King’s Road. Lon-

don S.W.3, to Oct. 2. 1971

There are, thank heaven, art-

ists who don’t take themselves

or their art too seriously; who

paint pictures to amuse and

entertain themselves and their

friends. Wolfertz is one of them.

He is a German living and work-

ing in the South of France, and

making what amounts to a series

of send-up self-portraits, based

on seemingly endless numbers of

black and white photographs.

Each titled "Composition No.—."

they present a jovial, jokey and

bacchic personage. They cannot

be considered great art: but they

are extremely good fun.

C: No – he didn’t own it - he lived in this beautiful deserted village – he bought half of it and Jilly Cooper bought the other half, and he was restoring this beautiful house. Sad we only found him again after he died.

As mentioned I have looked into this story a lot over the years, Herbert is hard to locate but I found a death notice for him. There weren’t, that I can find, many exhibitions, but I see his place mentioned in other German painters’ biographies as somewhere artists would go to eat and drink and have a nice time. I like to think he was friends with Jilly Cooper.

C: Anyway we stayed with him and his beautiful girlfriend and then we drove down to Auribeau and we went and saw Evie then and we definitely weren’t married because she asked us if we were married and I said that we weren’t.

I am named for Evie Wyld, my father’s aunt who designed and made textiles. My grandmother described her as ‘a homosexual or at any rate she wore trousers.’

C: and this creepy guy that was there… (my mother laughs loudly - a short dog has taken an interest in our tall dog and his tailing her.) Get on, go away, because she’ll eat you up.

E: What creepy man?

C: What? Oh. I don’t know. (To the dog’s owner) he doesn’t know he’s playing with death. (To me) Anyway we got to aunt Evie and then we went back to our house and it was beautiful. Auribeau is up a hill and has a river going by.

At this point, the dog sits down in the middle of the field and refuses to get up. My mother says ‘come here you silly dog’ her voice getting quieter as she walks away. Then just the sound of me breathing. I will never know about the creepy man at great aunt Evie’s. I know better than to push my mother on it, it will have evaporated by now.

I need to tell you all the things my mother has left out of this particular retelling so far. I didn’t warn her I was going to be recording, I wanted her to be natural, but she has a way of summarising if she thinks I’m listening too closely, as if she doesn’t want to bore me with a fulsome retelling. And honestly, most times I have heard her tell it has been in the evening sat around a table, several bottles of wine in. A cold park in the morning is perhaps too brisk a place for a ghost story. What I remember from other tellings is that when they arrived, there was a dead hare lain across the threshold of the cottage.

The other thing that feels relevant is that my father was an art dealer specialising in early English Watercolour, Herbert one of two artists who were living at the time of their exhibitions with my father. He preferred to work with long dead artists. In my time his gallery moved around the West End – you can still find details of his last one, WS Fine Art on Dover Street which closed shortly after his death in 2011. Last time I checked the bell at the front door still had the name of the gallery on it. The cover of his final catalogue, (pictured at the top of this letter) a Cozens, painted in muted colours, at dawn perhaps. Lonely. But before his galleries he hung exhibitions in his house, printed up invitations himself, held private views at home. As I look around my basement flat, home to me, my husband and ten year old son, I can’t imagine a worse thing than inviting people over to inspect the beauty of your interior. There has been a garlic skin on the floor for a full week – it gets stuck on the sole of someone’s foot and moved about the place but never swept up.

My mother restores watercolours, she looks closely at the details, looks for acids rising in the paper, shadows and stains caused by cheap mounts, sunlight, damp. A Turner, folded. She knocks back or brings out the ghosts of older intentions on the paper.

Both my mother and father are and were visual people, the look of something as important as the resolve behind it. They could bare most things if there was something beautiful to look at. My parents’ first impression of the cottage was of a place that was a little dark, but lovely for being away from everyone. They had to park their car across a field of long grass and walk their belongings and shopping across to it, a distance of about 200 yards.

C: And it was an old house that had been added on to – you walked through the wardrobe when you were upstairs to get into the other part of the house.

These two sides of the cottage have played larger parts in the story previously. The very old side, joined via a bathroom to the newer part. In a retelling from long ago, in this bathroom hung a portrait of a man with a moustache holding a sword and on the door that the man faced which led into the newer part of the cottage, there were marks in the wood like someone had stabbed at it. This detail has not appeared in the story in the last 20 years or so of retelling, but it is one I liked a lot as a child, because it made a kind of sense of what happened next.

I’ve stalked the cottage on Google Earth and Google Maps. Years ago I am almost sure I found it, could hold up my photograph of the cottage and see it was the same – with new extensions added on to it, at the foot of Auribeau the ancient town, down by the river. I felt sure that having found it I would be able to find it always, but this hasn’t proven to be the case and as much as I drag the little yellow man along the winding footpaths on Google maps, I can’t find it. I’ve trawled through Airbnb hoping to find it available to rent, to read people’s reviews. The idea that I could go there rears up occasionally but for now I keep it at arm’s length, peering through my fingers.

C: And it was fine. And then you know it started up. We found it very difficult to sleep and when we did sleep we had the worst nightmares of our lives.

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