The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Other people may not think it beautiful, but it’s beautiful to me mainly because I always loved it. I loved my childhood in this house, and I loved it when I had to go abroad on military service, because it represented everything I was fighting for, and I loved it when I came back to Notwithstanding from Korea, and settled into the life I was born to. Here is the clump of bamboos behind which I used to conceal myself when playing hide and seek with my brothers and sister. Further up there on the left is a bird-table that I made when I was at school. It’s amazing that it hasn’t rotted away by now. The lawn isn’t very smooth, there’s too much couch grass, but we used to set up a putting green on it in the summer, and it ruined my father’s scores at the real golf course because he kept hitting the ball a long way past the hole. Here is the big apple tree that was so easy to climb, and produced great Bramleys that my mother made into pies. One year we tried to make cider, but it was very sharp. We had rabbits in the orchard, in a big wire enclosure that was movable. They kept the grass mown if you remembered to move the cage around. Of course they’d escape quite often by burrowing underneath, and they’d go and raid the vegetable patch, but they came when you called them anyway. The cage started life as a chicken run, but we found them too ill-natured. There used to be a modest fruit cage just here as well, and I often had to go into it to free the robins and blackbirds that got stuck inside. They would fly about in a silly panic, and didn’t know you were trying to be helpful. “Funny kind of fruit-cage,” my father used to say. “Keeps birds in instead of out.”

The house isn’t very old. It’s Edwardian, and it’s made of nice red brick with tiles coming half way down the walls, in the Surrey farmhouse style. I remember when the Virginia creeper and the wistaria were planted, and now they’re all over the walls. I don’t know who the architect was, but it’s a very conventional design. Most of the other family houses around here are quite similar. The first people to live here came down from the North. I think they were in textiles. Then it belonged to a writer who was quite famous in his time, but now no one’s even heard of him. Then it belonged to a retired naval officer and his wife, and then it was ours. I have so many happy memories. I don’t ever want to leave.

Inside there were about five bedrooms. My parents had the one at the back. Mine was above the kitchen. Every morning the smell of frying eggs and sausages would get me out of bed in a good mood. My room wasn’t big, but it was big enough for my model aeroplanes to hang from the ceiling on string, and for my toy soldiers to have decent-sized battles. I had a little cannon that worked on a spring, and you could put ball-bearings or matches into it, pull back the lever, release it, and mow down the troops. When I grew up I would find little ball-bearings all over the place.

My brother Michael shared a room with my other brother Sebastian. They were twins, but not identical. My sister Catherine had the room opposite my parents, and sometimes I would creep into her room at night with a sheet over my head, and give her a fright, or I’d listen for when she went to the loo, and I’d lie down at the corner of the corridor and grab her ankle as she went past in the dark. It worked every time. Then my mother told me to stop doing it, because it was unnerving being woken up by screaming in the middle of the night. Catherine used to get revenge by leaning over the banisters of the landing, and spitting on my head when I was underneath in the hallway. It’s hard to imagine that she grew up to be so beautiful and refined, and married a baronet.

On the top floor up the back stairs, under the roof, is a lovely big dusty attic. I think it had been fitted out for a servant to live in, because it had a proper little fireplace, and the rafters were all boarded in. I spent hours up there. I fixed a dartboard to the wall, and I threw darts at it, backhand, underarm, over my shoulder, every possible way. I got very good at it. It was one of my party tricks. I used to go up there when I was miserable as well, because no one would know I was weeping.