The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Author:  Jane Gardam (1928—) was born Jean Mary Pearson in Coatham, North Yorkshire, read English at Bedford College and worked for a travelling library before serving in editorial positions on the Weldon Ladies Journal and the literary weekly, Time and Tide. Her early fiction consisted of short stories which won several literary prizes before her first adult novel, God on the Rocks (1978), a coming-of-age story set in the thirties, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, won the Prix Baudelaire in France and was adapted for television in 1992. Her interest in the supernatural has been evident in several of her subsequent collections of short stories, in particular Going into a Dark House (1994) and Missing the Midnight: Hauntings and Grotesques (1997) and her novel, The Queen of the Tambourine (1991), the haunting story of a woman’s fascination with a mysterious stranger, that won the Whitbread Novel Award. “A Spot of Gothic” is, in essence, a tribute to all those who have written gothic fiction, and describes the eerie encounter of a “ghost feeler”, Mrs Bainbridge, in a remote corner of the country, that is so contemporary it could have happened last night . . . or might just happen this evening.

I was whizzing along the road out of Wensleydale through Low Thwaite beyond Naresby when I suddenly saw a woman at her cottage gate, waving at me gently like an old friend. In a lonely dale this is not very surprising, as I had found out. Several times I have met someone at a lane end flapping a letter that has missed the post in Kirby Thore or Hawes. “It’s me sister’s birthday tomorrow. I near forgot” or “It’s the bill fort telephone. We’ll be cut off next thing.” The curious thing about this figure, so still and watchful, was that it was standing there waving to me in the middle of the night.

It was full moon. I had been out to dinner at Mealbeck. I had only been living in the North for two months and for one month alone. I had joined my husband near Catterick camp the minute he had found us a house, which was only a few days before he found that the regiment was being posted to Hong Kong. The house he had found was beautiful, old and tall in an old garden, on the edge of a village on the edge of the fell. It was comfortable and dark with a flagged floor and old furniture. Roses and honeysuckle were nearly strangling black hedges of neglected yew. There was nice work to be done.

It was the best army house we had ever found. The posting to Hong Kong promised to be a short one. I had been there before and hated it – I hate crowded places – and I decided to stay behind alone.

He said, “But you will be alone, mind. The camp is a good way off and most people will have gone with us. It’s the North. You’ll make no friends. They take ten years to do more than wag their heads at you in the street up here. Now, are you sure?”

I said I was and I stayed and found that he was quite wrong. Within days, almost within hours of my miserable drive home from Darlington Station to see him off, I found that I was behaving as if I’d always known the people here and they were doing the same to me. I got home from the station and stopped the car outside my beautiful front door and sat still, thinking, “He has gone again. Again he has gone. What a marriage. Always alone. Shall I forget his face again? Like last time? Shall I begin to brood? Over-eat? Drink by myself in the evenings – rather more every evening? Shall I start tramping about the lanes pretending I like long walks?” I sat there thinking and a great truculent female head with glaring eyes stuck itself through the car window.

“D’you want some beans?”

“Oh!”

“Some beans? Stick beans?”

“Oh I don’t—? Can you spare—?”

“Beans, beans. Masses of beans. They’re growin’ out of me ears. Grand beans. Up to you.”

“I’d love some beans.”

A sheaf of them was dumped on the seat beside me. “There’s plenty more. You’ve just to say. So ’e’s off then? The Captain?”

“Yes.”

“Well, yer not to fret. There’s always a cup of tea at our place. Come rount back but wear yer wellies or you’ll get in a slather int yard.”

In the post office they asked kindly for news. Of how I was settling, of where I had come from. The vicar called. A man in a land-rover with a kind face – the doctor – waved his hat. A woman in the ironmonger’s buying paraffin in gloves and a hat invited me to tea in a farmhouse the size of a mill with a ha-ha and a terrace at the back, gravel a foot thick and a thousand dahlias staked like artillerymen and luminous with autumn. The tea cups must have been two hundred years old.

I was asked to small places too – a farm so isolated that the sheep and cows looked up aghast when I found my way to it, and the sheepdogs nearly garrotted themselves on the end of hairy ropes.