Me, My Family and the Poltergeist: Me, My Family and the Poltergeist, #1

Introduction

My daughter Lucy was visiting with her partner when she asked the question.

Mum, can you tell Dave about the White Lady?

Me? I stared at her. Why me? You were the one who spoke to her.

Mum! Lucy retorted indignantly. I was four when we left Silverlands. I hardly remember anything about it.

Seriously?

I felt a strange mixture of surprise and sadness. Silly, really. I should have realised that, to a young woman, something that happened twenty years ago might as well have taken place in the Middle Ages. To her, it was a lifetime ago, but to me, those days still seemed as clear as yesterday.

And if Lucy had forgotten, perhaps Claire and Michael had forgotten too.

It was then that I decided to write an account of what had occurred as a permanent record for my daughters, Claire and Lucy, and for my nephew Michael.

After all, it is not every family that gets to share its home with a poltergeist.

CHAPTER 1

As a teenager, I didn’t believe in ghosts.

I loved reading ghost stories, of course, and watching horror films, but if anyone had tried to tell me that ghosts, ghouls and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night really existed, I would have laughed at them.

Everyone knew that ghosts were nothing more than superstitious nonsense, didn’t they?

Back then it had all seemed so simple.

* * * * *

But first, I had better explain about myself and my family.

As a child, I always knew that my parents were different. Not different in a bad way, but different. A little eccentric, perhaps. A little bit more creative than most. It didn’t bother me, though, because I loved them and I was proud of them.

Mum and Dad were older than any of my friends’ parents, as they had both been in their forties when I was born and had led full and unusual lives before coming to settle in England.

My father had been born in Sydney, a fourth-generation Australian, and had trained in the family business to become a tent-maker. Later, he and his brother had built a circus tent of their own and had taken to the road with their show, Silvers Circus.

Mum, on the other hand, had been born in London. Her family emigrated to Australia when she was eleven, so she grew up in Perth but returned to England, aged sixteen, determined to become a writer. She worked in Fleet Street during the Blitz. Then, when she was in her thirties, she went back to Australia to find material to use in her books.

While travelling through the Nullarbor Plain, her car had broken down and she had been rescued by my father who was crossing the country with his circus.

After a whirlwind romance, they married and, a year later, my brother, David, was born.

Mum told me once that the months after David’s birth were the happiest she ever knew. She had found the love of her life and a bright future lay ahead of them.

Sadly, her idyll was short-lived.

Out of the blue, Dad was struck down by a mystery illness. The doctors could not agree what the problem was, only that he had contracted a viral infection of the brain, probably a form of meningitis.

At first, it seemed he would not survive but when, with customary stubbornness, he refused to die, my mother was warned that he would be left with brain damage and would never be able to work again.

With a baby and an invalid husband to care for, Mum decided to return home to England. As a child, she had lived in the East End of London but, rather than return to the bustle of the capital, she felt the slower pace of life in Devon might help Dad’s recovery and so the family settled in Exeter.

Against all the doctors’ predictions, Dad’s health slowly returned and, as he grew stronger, he began to think of ways to earn a living.

There were few opportunities for circus owners in Devon at that time, so he decided instead to set up a business as a silk-screen printer. Neither he nor Mum knew much about printing, but Dad got a book from the local library and built the printing tables, screens and drying racks himself.

A couple of years later I was born and for the next twenty years the printing business supported our family.

Me, as a toddler, with (from the left) Dad, Mum and Granny. The photo was taken by my brother David with his brand new, Box Brownie camera.

––––––––

Although he always worked long hours, Dad never fully recovered from the effects of his illness. He suffered from headaches, sometimes lasting for days, which were so severe they left him partially paralysed and unable to speak. On more than one occasion, he collapsed over the printing table. Despite these setbacks, Dad would never give in and, as soon as his head cleared, and usually sooner than my mother wanted, he would return to work.

My father could never, in any way, be described as average. He was a big bear of a man with a warm heart and an infectious laugh who could find the humour in even the most difficult situations. Naturally quiet, he was one of life’s observers, which meant that few people realised he had an unusual ambition.

As a teenager he had spent his days training in his father’s tent-making factory, designing and making tents for the biggest circuses in Australia, but, in his spare time, he had built a tent of his own. It was a scale model, perfect in every detail, a miniature replica of a circus big top, and he brought it with him to England, locked away in a trunk, in the hope that one day he would be able to finish it.

* * * * *

Yes, my parents were different and, in some ways, I think I was different too.

I found it hard to fit in at school because I never seemed to have anything in common with the other children. I wanted to be friends with them but I just didn’t know how to do it.

My classmates seemed to know instinctively how to start conversations or join in with games, but I never learned their secret and always ended up on my own watching everything from a distance.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the other children. It was just that I felt different from them. They enjoyed things that I didn’t understand, like music and sport.

Many of our lessons involved songs of some kind, and the other children seemed genuinely to enjoy them. They would shriek with delight whenever a teacher pulled open the instrument store, but the sight of a box of tambourines, triangles and bongo drums always made my heart sink.

I began to worry there must be something wrong with me and wondered if I was really the only person in the world who didn’t like music.

I can still remember how excited I felt on my first day at Stoke Hill Junior School. I was seven years old and was already a confident reader. My favourite subject was maths and Mum had helped me learn my multiplication tables by heart so I knew I was ready to start my formal education.

Stoke Hill was considered a progressive school. The newly completed buildings were bright and welcoming and stood high on a hill, surrounded by tarmac playgrounds and grass sports fields. The corridors and classrooms were painted in cheerful pastel colours, and huge windows allowed daylight to flood into every corner.

It was one of the first schools in Devon to try out a new form of child-led learning where pupils were allowed to work at their own rate instead of having all the class follow the same lesson. At the time, it was considered a radical approach to education, and we had regular visits from assessors to see how the new system was progressing.

Each morning our teacher handed out work cards to the class which were supposed to keep us busy until playtime. Some of the children became bored quite quickly and were allowed to change to activity-based tasks such as weighing sand with scales or making plasticine sculptures but I was perfectly happy sitting at a table completing my work as neatly as I could. As soon as I finished a card, I would return it to the teacher and ask for another one.

It wasn’t long before I finished all the cards in the box and the teacher told me I would have to wait for the others to catch up with me before we could all move on to a new set.

The next day I asked if I could start the new work cards yet, but my teacher told me I would have to wait. She suggested I read a book from the pile in the corner but I explained that I had already read them all.

I asked again the next day, and the next day, and the next, until, finally, my teacher suggested I bring a book from home to read. She seemed surprised when I arrived with a copy of Collins Guide to European Butterflies and a dictionary in case there were any words I didn’t understand.

I don’t think she expected me to enjoy the book but I loved it and read it from cover to cover several times, trying hard to memorise all the information.

By then, I had come to the conclusion that my classmates were not very bright. They didn’t seem interested in lessons at all and only wanted to run around the playground screaming.

For me, playtime was the worst part of the day. I disliked it intensely. It was noisy, disorganised and frightening. Worst of all, when I begged the teachers to let me stay inside and read, they told me that standing on my own, shivering, in the playground while they sat in a warm staff room drinking coffee, was good for me.

I began to think my teachers weren’t very bright either.

* * * * *

Me with my big brother, David.

My brother, David, is seven years older than me and we were always inseparable. When Dad was ill, and Mum was preoccupied with looking after him, it was David who kept me busy.

He would push me around the garden in his go-kart, make tents out of blankets, or teach me how to wage war with his toy soldiers.

On the weekend, David and his friends were allowed to go to Saturday Morning Picture Club at the local cinema where they enjoyed cartoons, children’s films and serials like The Perils of Pauline, where each episode ended with the heroine tied to a railway track or about to fall off a cliff.

Every Saturday, David begged to be allowed to take his little sister to the cinema with him, and I screamed at being left behind, until eventually, I became the youngest member of the club and was allowed to spend three hours a week staring at the screen with the big boys.

During the week, particularly during the holidays, David and I would act out our favourite scenes and, as I got older, we began to make up our own stories. We wanted to shoot films ourselves and dreamed of travelling the world and making movies in wonderful, exotic locations.

* * * * *

For a special treat, my parents took me to see Disney’s Snow White at the cinema. I hated it, mainly because the wicked stepmother reminded me of my grandmother.

Of course, Granny was not tall or beautiful or magical. but she was exceptionally vain and jealous and treated my mother in much the same way that the wicked stepmother treated Snow White.

When the wicked stepmother transformed herself into an old lady and set out with her poisoned apple, I screamed so much that my mother had to take me out of the cinema.

Mum and Granny

One of my earliest memories is of hiding under a sofa while my grandmother screamed and shouted. I can remember burying my face into the carpet and shaking. I was absolutely terrified of her and, as I grew older, my fear turned into a deep loathing.

As a child, I didn’t understand why Granny was so horrible to everyone. Even when she was trying to be nice there was a coldness about her that drained the happiness from a room the moment she walked into it.

As an adult, I came to understand that she was a deeply unhappy woman who had been shaped by her life experiences. Intelligent and talented, she had been born into extreme poverty in the East End of London. Her mother had refused to let her go to school and had kept her at home to help with the housework and to look after her younger siblings.

When the school inspector arrived on the doorstep, Granny had been made to hide in a cupboard while her mother pretended that she had been taken ill with scarlet fever and had been sent to live with relatives in Brighton.

As she grew up, Granny had rebelled and found herself married with two young children while still in her teens.

She was clever and articulate but, barely able to read or write and with a young family to support, Granny spent her life scrubbing other people’s floors or washing up in pubs and became bitter and resentful.

She took pride in the fact that she never made friends but had a long list of enemies.

I think she was jealous of my mother because she saw in her a vision of how her life could have been, if only she had had the same opportunities. As she grew older, Granny became manipulative, violent and increasingly insensitive to other people’s feelings.

I didn’t know until many years later, but when my mother was six months pregnant with me, my grandmother tried to push her down a flight of stairs. Fortunately, Mum had managed to catch hold of the bannister, and neither she nor I were hurt.

Granny insisted it had been an accident but my mother didn’t believe her and, after that, my father had to make sure the two women were never left alone in the house together.

Dad told me once that he had begged Mum to walk out but she had refused to leave, fearing that if she went, Granny would have been unable to cope on her own and would have ended up getting herself arrested.

It was probably the stress of living with Granny that led to my mother having a nervous breakdown when I was born.

My brother often teased me that I was so ugly that Mum took one look at me and collapsed.

Dad simply told me that Mummy had been very tired when I arrived and the doctors had put us into special rooms so that she could have plenty of rest.

When I grew up, Mum explained that, as she had recently arrived from Australia, her doctors had assumed that she had some strange tropical disease and, immediately after my birth, both she and I had been put into separate rooms in the isolation unit. For the first week of my life she had not been allowed to touch me as I lay in a sterile box tended only by nurses wearing masks and thick rubber gloves.

Perhaps that was where I first learned to like being on my own.

* * * * *

My brother is dyslexic. Or rather, he is dyslexic now. When he was a child, he was just stupid and lazy, at least, that was what his teachers called him.

Back then, no one had heard of dyslexia but Mum was convinced there must be a reason for David’s inability to read or write.

For years, she wrote to every educational expert she could find and sent letters to newspapers and universities. Eventually, she discovered a professor who was researching wordblindness and, as a result, David was the first child in Devon to be officially diagnosed as dyslexic.

By then he was fifteen and his teachers refused to believe that such a condition existed.

He left school with no formal qualifications having endured years of being told he was retarded when, in reality, he was intelligent, talented and creative.

My mother never believed there was anything wrong with David. She knew he had gifts and abilities and devoted her life to helping him learn.

Every afternoon, as soon as he returned from school, she would make him go through the same list of spellings day after day after day, in the hope that they would finally stick in his memory.

I always enjoyed lessons and one day, when I was about six and David was thirteen, I asked if I could join in.

Mum gave me a piece of paper and, as she read out the words, I wrote them down in large, round letters.

Then, as Mum corrected David’s work I carefully ticked the words off my list.

Look, I squealed, I got them all right!

I had expected them to be pleased.

Instead, David leaped to his feet and tore his paper to shreds.

I’m not doing this anymore! he shouted. It’s useless. I’m rubbish, aren’t I? I’m never going to be any good at anything!

He slammed the door behind him as he ran out of the room and I realised, for the first time, that doing well in tests doesn’t make you popular.

* * * * *

In the sixties, eating disorders had not been invented.

The memories of wartime rationing were still fresh in people’s memories and it was generally considered a sin to waste food.

Milk was delivered to your doorstep each day in glass milk bottles. The tops were sealed by shiny foil tops that glistened in the morning sunlight and proved irresistible to the blue tits in our garden.

Every morning, as soon as she came downstairs, Mum would hurry to the front door and carry the milk bottles through to the kitchen. Usually the foil bottle tops would have dents where the blue tits had been pecking at them with their sharp black beaks and occasionally there would be a tear where a bird had succeeded in breaking through to the creamy milk beneath.

Often, the bottles would be smeared with bird droppings and Mum would always rinse them carefully under the tap before putting them in the fridge.

As I watched her, I became increasingly worried that some of the bird droppings might have got into the milk. What if the birds had poo on their beaks as they drank the milk? What if their claws had dirt on them which dropped off as they hopped around on the foil?

Soon my mind associated milk with bird droppings. I didn’t want to upset Mum by trying to explain, so I just stopped drinking milk. Every time she put a glass in front of me, I would sit silently staring at it, sometimes for hours, as my mother encouraged or scolded me.

I thought that if I waited for long enough, my mother would give in and take the milk away but she never did.

Day after day, she would plonk a full glass in front of me and the battle of wills would begin. Sometimes I cried, sometimes I begged her to take it away, but mainly I just sat silently staring at the glass trying to spot traces of bird poo floating in the whiteness.

It was not long before I began to suspect that food might contain unpleasant substances too. I studied the Weetabix that was waiting for me each morning and decided that some of the smooth flakes of wheat looked suspiciously like insect wings. I told my mother that I didn’t feel hungry and I wouldn’t need any breakfast in future.

I stopped drinking tea because, in the days before teabags, the tea leaves looked like drowned flies.

Fruit juice was rejected because it had bits in it and soon I would only drink water.

I refused to eat brown bread and became suspicious of anything that might have dirt hidden in it. I even began to spread mashed potato across my plate to check that it was untainted before I ate it.

I sensed that my behaviour was upsetting my mother. She sat by me for hours at mealtimes insisting that I couldn’t leave the table until I had eaten something but she never lost her temper or shouted at me.

Granny wasn’t so patient. One night, when Dad was ill and Mum was upstairs looking after him, I can remember her plopping a bowl of rice pudding down in front of me and insisting that I eat it.

When I refused, she took a spoon and tried to force the rice pudding into my mouth. I spat it out but she simply scraped the rice up from the tablecloth and shovelled it back into my mouth.

I tried to protest but she stood behind me, the spoon clamped in her right hand, while her left arm wrapped across my chest, pinning my arms to my sides.

I wriggled and squirmed and choked as she forced the sweet, creamy pudding into my mouth and felt myself retching as some of it slid down my throat.

Each time I swallowed, I tried to call out but my protests were choked by another spoonful of rice.

Tears of indignation filled my eyes and frustration churned my stomach until, finally, with a horrible rasping sound, I vomited with such force that the returning rice pudding hit the bowl and splattered up all over Granny.

She gasped in shock and I seized the chance to wriggle free and race upstairs to the sanctuary of my bedroom.

I can remember lying on my bed crying as my grandmother’s voice echoed up from downstairs.

After that, mealtimes became a misery.

I didn’t want to upset my mother because she was always kind and patient with me but I had absolutely no appetite. I never felt hungry and the thought of eating tied my stomach in knots.

Dad tried to help by challenging me to races. Who could eat the most peas? Or finish their potato first? It didn’t work.

At school, I was made to sit at the table, staring at an untouched plate of food, long after the other children had left. When the dinner ladies wanted to clean the dining hall, I would be made to sit in the corridor outside the headmaster’s office until the bell rang for afternoon lessons. This didn’t worry me too much as it meant I avoided playtime, but I just wished everyone would leave me alone.

It was only when my mother took me to see the doctor that I realised things were getting out of hand.

The doctor weighed and measured me then made me strip down to my knickers before poking my stomach and tutting at my protruding ribs and hipbones.

Why won’t you eat the meals your Mummy cooks for you? he asked.

I knew he wouldn’t understand so I just sat silently staring down at my shoes.

He repeated the question but I didn’t have an answer for him.

There is nothing wrong with you, is there? he said at last. You’re just being silly.

I looked up at him but he was frowning and I let my eyes drop back to my shoes.

Your mummy and daddy are very worried about you. You don’t weigh nearly as much as you should do at your age.

I pressed my back against the chair and began to fidget nervously.

There is only one answer. The doctor’s voice was loud and resolute. "If you don’t start eating properly, I will have to send some nurses to your