The English Ghost - Peter Ackroyd

I love a good ghost story. Especially what I would call “true” ghost stories as opposed to fictional ones. Now, there would be many people who would say all ghost stories are fiction but I’ve always liked to think of those monks, cavaliers, grey ladies & sad lovers drifting through the stately homes of England, reliving some dramatic moment of their lives for all eternity. Part of the attraction for me is the historical aspect & also the fact that often the most believable ghost sightings are, well, so believable. The person who sees the ghost is often not aware that they’ve seen one until after the fact. The ghost often takes a path that was there in its lifetime but has since gone & the witness doesn’t know this. There are often multiple sightings of the same ghost & the witness doesn’t know of the other sightings until afterwards. These are the stories that seem inexplicable to me unless there is something uncanny about certain places & some people are able to tune in to the atmosphere.

Peter Ackroyd’s new book, The English Ghost, is full of stories of ghosts, spirits, poltergeists & uncanny experiences. Ackroyd makes a very bold claim in his Introduction, that England is a haunted country. He believes that ghost sightings are so frequent in England because it’s a country bordered by Celtic countries & also has German & Nordic ancestry, all cultures steeped in ghostly lore,


The English are also in many respects obsessed with the past, with ruins, with ancient volumes. It is the country where archaeology is placed on national television, and where every town and village has its own local historian. Ghosts therefore may be seen as a bridge of light between the past and the present, or between the living and the dead. They represent continuity, albeit of a spectral kind.

                                                (The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall)

Ackroyd has collected stories of ghosts mostly from the 17th century to the present day. They range from the traditional monks & white ladies to spectral animals. One of the most touching stories is of the dachshund that accompanied a woman on her way to her husband’s surgery, looking at her with such an imploring expression, until it reached a certain house when it disappeared down the area steps. Not long after, another woman also saw the little dog, which she recognized as her own missing pet & she followed him to the same house. On investigation, the house was discovered to belong to a mysterious German doctor who specialized in vivisection... Both women were surprised to see that, although it was a very hot day, the little dog was dripping wet & muddy.

                      (The Tulip Staircase ghost at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)

Royal palaces are often the scene of ghostly goings-on. Hampton Court has several famous ghosts, including poor Catherine Howard, who is said to be heard screaming outside the Chapel Royal as she begs to be allowed to see Henry VIII after her affair with Thomas Culpeper has been discovered. In February 1907, a police officer on duty at the Palace saw a group of people returning, he thought, from a party, across the grounds. Imagine his surprise when the whole party, eight or nine people, vanished into thin air, only a few yards from where he stood. It was only then that he realised that they had made no sound at all.

Then there are the more modern stories of ghostly hitch hikers & people who throw themselves in front of cars. When the driver stops to investigate, there’s no one there. Some of the most uncanny stories are of the spirits of the recently dead who appear to their loved ones at the moment of their death, when the witness has no idea that they’re in any danger. These stories are often well-documented because the witness writes down what has happened in their diary or tells a friend & then, when the letter or telegram arrives with the sad news, they can verify their vision.

These are only a few of the dozens of stories in The English Ghost. Anyone interested in ghost stories - believer or sceptic - would enjoy this book, although you may not want to read it last thing at night!

Abby's Sunday morning

Hot today & hot tomorrow. Summer has arrived with a vengeance. It's predicted that Melbourne will get to 40 degrees today & tomorrow so Abby & I are prepared for a quiet Sunday staying as cool as possible. We were up early, watering the garden before breakfast, Abby keeping an eye on any birds that stopped for a rest & a drink.

We've been lucky this year as the weather has been pretty benign. A few hot days & a patch of humidity but also a fair bit of rain (too much for the flooded areas of northern Victoria, unfortunately) so the garden hasn't suffered much at all.

The catmint I planted especially for Abby is thriving. Of course, she hasn't even given it a sniff, she's completely uninterested. Maybe when it's big enough for her to sleep under...

We'll be spending the afternoon in the cool living room with books & iced tea at hand. I hope your Sunday is calm, peaceful & full of good reading.

Virago Reading Week - the pictures

I'm afraid my entry for the Virago photo competition can't compete with the delightful photos of Viragos with cat models at Rochester Reader or the delightful pinny-wearing dog with Viragos at Roses Over a Cottage Door. I'm afraid Abby isn't really amenable to posing on a pile of books. She's asleep in the shrubbery at the moment, anyway. So, I'm going to pinch a couple of photos from an earlier post I wrote about Virago Modern Classics back in November.

It was a post about my love for the original green Viragos & the gorgeous artwork they used. The photo at the top of the post shows the Viragos I still have on the tbr shelves. As I've read a couple of Viragos this week, thanks to Rachel & Carolyn, the pile has been lessened by two! I have no idea which Virago will be next. I love the look of Mary Lavelle by Kate O'Brien or one of the Daphne Du Mauriers or Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness.I want to read them all at once but, apart from being greedy - & impossible - it would leave me nothing to anticipate. I love knowing that I have a handy little cache of Viragos ready when I read an enthusiastic review or someone in my online book group says Have you read...? I can say, Yes, it's on the tbr & race over to find it. That's what my tbr shelves are for, after all.

The Squire - Enid Bagnold

After reading Vita Sackville-West’s No Signposts in the Sea, about a man at the end of his life, I turned to Enid Bagnold’s The Squire, which is about the beginning of life. The squire of the title is a woman about to give birth to her fifth child. It’s summer, she lives in an English country house (not too grand) with her other children, her husband is a Bombay merchant, away on a trip to India & it’s the late 1930s. This is a book about women & children, the relationships between them. The only men are the doctor & the butler, Pratt. Neither is important. The doctor is almost superfluous, popping in & out for the odd visit. Pratt is a surly, untidy man. He has a love/hate relationship with the squire & a combative attitude to the other staff.

The core of the book is the squire, her thoughts, feelings, memories & sensations. She’s almost completely self-absorbed in the first part of the book as she waits for the baby’s birth. She’s withdrawn from the running of the household as much as she can (although when the cook leaves abruptly, she has to phone agencies & employ a temporary cook who turns out to be a mistake). She’s a loving mother, aware of her other children but for this little space in time, her new baby & the sensations of her own body are paramount. She’s detached from events outside herself. Her friend, Caroline, with her love affairs & her emotional upheavals, seems very far away although she lives virtually next door.

The squire’s most intense relationship is with her midwife who is due to arrive at any time. The midwife has been there for the births of all the other children & she will stay for a month after the birth to give mother & child a good start together. The squire & the midwife have a comfortable, friendly relationship. They talk about other women the midwife has attended & about the nursing home the midwife would love to run where she could create the perfect conditions for childbirth, calm & peaceful. The midwife is in a privileged, all-powerful position, at this moment of birth when a mother looks for reassurance & calm,

There were long silences and the curious medieval picture remained posed. The woman about to go into labour lay, clothed, but her belly exposed, thrilled, and silent, holding in her silence the very centre of a lively stage. The other actor, with her centuries of tradition, on her knees, listening with her slender hands for the creak of the gates that would open to let out her charge.

The baby is safely born & the squire spends a precious week bonding with the baby, the other children allowed in to visit briefly. Gradually, her total absorption in her new son recedes as she enters daily life again. She emerges from her room & takes up the reins of her life & the baby settles into his place in the family,

The squire took up a book at the breast-feed for the first time and began to read over the baby’s head. He stared at the shadow, and when he was older he learnt to kick it down, but from now on the milk came mechanically and the squire’s mind could range separately as it chose. From habit, as the days went by, like a cottage woman she grew bolder at her breast-feeds, and would walk from room to room, or give orders to Pratt over the baby’s working head. She nursed him in the morning-room or in the garden, the children were allowed with her, the baby watched them out of one eye as he fed. He was unpacked now from his mystery and put into his family life.

Like No Signposts in the Sea, this is a book in which very little happens. It’s a very sensual book. The squire’s feelings & emotions are very close to the surface & the descriptions of labour & breast feeding are very intimate & immediate. The book was controversial for this reason when it was published in 1938. Maybe it was also controversial because the men are ineffectual or absent & the role of the mother is supreme. In some ways, it’s more a documentary or a slice of life than a novel. The squire & the midwife aren’t named & their relationship is the emotional centre of the book. Anne Sebba’s Introduction fills in the background of Enid Bagnold. I only knew her as the author of National Velvet although I’ve also read her Diary Without Dates about her experience of nursing in WWI & I have another of her novels, The Happy Foreigner (VMC) on the tbr shelves. Enid Bagnold worked on the book for over 15 years as she had four children of her own. She was determined to express in fiction this most important side to a woman’s life.

This is a book completely centred on a woman’s life & I can see why it was such a natural fit for Virago with their emphasis on the importance of women’s experience. I read The Squire as part of Virago Reading Week, kindly hosted by Rachel at BookSnob & Carolyn at A Few of my Favourite Books. I’ve loved being a part of VRW, it’s been a great chance to read Viragos & visit other blogs, reading reviews of other Viragos I want to read & reliving fond memories of favourite VMCs like South Riding & the Elizabeth Von Arnims, Elizabeth Taylors & all the fascinating stories of how fellow Virago lovers first discovered the imprint. Lives have been changed by these little green books. There are a lot of Virago lovers out there!

No Signposts in the Sea - Vita Sackville-West

It’s Virago Reading Week, hosted by BookSnob & A Few of my Favourite Books. It was a good opportunity to have a look at the Virago Modern Classics on the tbr shelves & I chose Vita Sackville-West’s last novel, No Signposts in the Sea. Sackville-West is probably best known as a writer for her beautifully elegiac novel, All Passion Spent (also a VMC), & as a woman, as the lover of Virginia Woolf & the inspiration for her novel, Orlando.

No Signposts in the Sea is the story of Edmund Carr, a political journalist, who is told that he only has a few months to live. Edmund has been quite a solitary man. He has worked his way up from humble beginnings to a position of some power & influence. He has never married & has had fleeting, almost impersonal affairs with women who were never allowed to get too close. At the time that he discovers he is ill, he realises that he is in love with Laura Drysdale, a widow in her late 30s. Edmund & Laura move in the same social circles but have never been close. When Edmund discovers that Laura is about to take a Pacific cruise, he decided to spend his last months on the same cruise, as close to Laura as possible.

Edmund & Laura’s relationship grows closer as they spend time together on the ship & on various excursions at the ports they visit. They discuss their different ideas of marriage. Edmund learns a lot about Laura’s marriage & her ideas about the perfect relationship, but gives little away himself. He becomes intensely jealous of another passenger, Colonel Dalrymple, who is interested in Laura. Edmund & Laura go to a native market & are nearly caught up in a riot. The highlight of the trip is their overnight stay in a villa loaned to them by a stranger they meet in a port city,

I suppose I anticipated a luxurious villa with a cocktail bar in the drawing-room and carved wooden figures of Negroes holding electric lights. It was, on the contrary, simple to the point of austerity, with white-washed walls, red-tiled floors, large arm-chairs of rattan, and plain serviceable furniture of a peasant type. From the entrance hall and up the staircase drifted the scent of burning joss-sticks and that was the Orient, but in the same hall a door stood open on to a purely Spanish patio with pots of camellias standing about, and a little fountain splashing into a basin.

Edmund’s thoughts & feelings swing from intense happiness & contentment in his love for Laura & equally intense misery & jealousy. Laura is more enigmatic and, of course, we don’t hear her thoughts as we do Edmund’s. The book is an interior monologue & the reader becomes quite as involved in Edmund’s feelings as he is himself.

The Introduction to this edition by Victoria Glendinning was very interesting. As usual, I read the Introduction after I’d read the book. Sackville-West was very ill herself when she wrote the book although her illness had not been diagnosed. She loved cruises & spent several months every year with her husband, Harold Nicolson, cruising the Mediterranean, the Pacific or the West Indies. The cruise in the novel is based on one Sackville-West took in 1959 to India, Ceylon, Singapore, Manila, Saigon & Yokohama. Glendinning sees the book as an expression of Vita’s opinions & thoughts about love, marriage & relationships. Vita & Harold had an open marriage, both had heterosexual & homosexual affairs. Through Edmund & Laura, Vita described her idea of an ideal relationship. Mutual respect, independence, separate bedrooms & the same sense of values. Fidelity is important but it’s more important to avoid hurting the other person. Anyone who knows about Vita’s life & her own marriage can see that these are very close to her own views.

When I started the book, I found it hard to work out when it was set. It felt like the 1920s, I suppose the cruise ship setting made it feel very Twenties, until I came across references to WWII. It was written in the early 60s. In a way, it’s quite timeless. It could just as easily take place in the 19th century or the Edwardian period because it’s a book about emotions & the interior life more than events & the outside world. No Signposts in the Sea is a book where very little happens but it’s an absorbing study of emotions sharpened by the knowledge that life is finite. Edmund has to decide in the end whether he should take the risk of telling Laura of his love.

The Highland Lady in Ireland - Eliza Grant

The Highland Lady in Ireland takes up the story of Eliza Grant’s life ten years after the end of her Memoirs. At the end of the Memoirs, Eliza & her husband, Colonel Smith (Hal) have left India, where they met & married, & have sailed for Ireland. Col Smith had inherited a family estate, Baltiboys, near Dublin, after the death of his brother, and Ireland will be Eliza’s home for the rest of her long life. The Diary was written during the 1840s & the dominating theme is the dreadful potato famine that devastated Ireland during this decade.

The Smiths had spent the past ten years building up the estate, helping their tenants to improve their farms, building a school & doing all they could to create a happy, prosperous estate. In all this work, Eliza’s hand is evident. Growing up at Rothiemurchus in Scotland she had seen how important it was to have the owner living on the estate. Absentee landlords were a problem everywhere & in Ireland during the famine, it was the estates where the owners lived & took an interest in their property & their tenants that fared best.

Eliza’s world is a very patriarchal one. She treats her tenants & employees somewhere between recalcitrant children & rational beings but her motives are good. The Smiths were not rich. They often borrow from their land agent to tide them over until the next rents are due. Eliza often writes that only the Colonel’s army pension & her own literary efforts are keeping them afloat. During the hard years, the family retrenched, doing without many little luxuries that other landowners would take for granted,

Wretched land, what sufferings the most meritorious of its inhabitants are undergoing, all more or less stricken and no prudence on the part of the wiser able to secure them against the pressure of the evils resulting from the want of principle of the improvident... I often pray that my senses may be preserved to me, and that my health of mind and body may stand this struggle, and aid me to preserve an invalid husband and our dear children from much of the real poverty round them – they miss their luxuries – necessaries they still have and will have... but the want of enough to help to relieve others is a painful part of these unhappy times. To keep our own people from starving absorbs all there is to spare.

Eliza’s marriage was very happy. She mentions her invalid husband above, and Hal was quite a bit older than Eliza, but asthma is his main complaint & generally he lived a very active, outdoor life. I love this comment she makes about Jane Austen’s Emma,

John (Robinson, Agent for the estate) sent me Emma which delights me more than ever. Mr Knightley is more charming than I even used to think him for he is exactly Hal – and I was alas! always reckoned like Emma.

Eliza & Hal’s three children, Annie, Janie & Jack, are the much loved focus of her life. The girls are 10 and 8 at the beginning of the Diary & by the end of it Eliza is worrying about the intentions of a young Mr King who is paying Annie conspicuous attention. She has become a complete Irishwoman through her marriage & her love & pride in Baltiboys & she takes Ireland’s part in all the political discussions of the day about the famine & what Britain should do to help. She has very strong opinions about politicians & a pretty poor opinion of young Queen Victoria.

Her Scottish family cause her a lot of anxiety nevertheless. Her father & brothers, William & John, are ruined by the collapse of the Union Bank of Calcutta. They had invested in it heavily (William was a Director) but, even worse, had speculated with other people’s money & when the bank collapsed, their careless if not fraudulent activities were revealed. Eliza’s father is on his way back to England from India to live out the rest of his life dodging creditors when his health gives way & he dies at sea. Eliza is staying with her mother in Edinburgh when the news arrives,

Who was to tell my mother, Jane (sister) was totally unfit, even James (brother-in-law) shirked it. I came in and kneeling down beside her took her hands. ‘Mother’ said I very sorrowfully, ‘Jane and James have come.’ ‘Who have come’ said she quickly. ‘Jane and James’ I said again clasping her hands and kissing her, ‘and no one with them, and the Hardwicke has come.’ She looked at me for one moment, such a look, paused. ‘My child’, she said very low and very slowly, ‘I never expected him.’ Old highland days came back upon her and she wept for the first time abundantly.

By the end of the 1840s, Eliza hopes that the worst of the famine is over and that she and her family can look forward to some years of less worry & more prosperity. The Diary, like the Memoirs, was written for her children but Eliza is a natural writer & can’t help putting her life down on paper. Her sense of duty, her humour & her trenchant opinions make this a fascinating look at life in Ireland in the mid 19th century.

So I Have Thought Of You - the letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

After reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Bookshop, last weekend, I picked up this volume of her letters that had been sitting on the tbr shelves since it was published over two years ago. I’ve spent the last week equally fascinated & frustrated by it. Fascinated because I enjoyed listening to Penelope Fitzgerald’s voice. Her dry humour & wit, so much a part of her voice as a novelist, is no less evident in these letters. Frustrated because of the way the letters have been edited.

The editor is Fitzgerald’s son-in-law, Terence Dooley. The letters have been arranged by correspondent, rather than chronologically. So, all the letters to her eldest daughter, Tina, are followed by all the letters to her daughter, Maria. The reader jumps from the 1960s to the 1990s, with stories retold in slightly different ways, according to the correspondent, every 50 pages. There is no timeline to get a grip on where we are in Fitzgerald’s life or what was happening or even which book she was working on. A timeline might not have mattered if there had been adequate footnotes.

This is my main problem with the book. The footnotes are scarce, erratic & completely arbitrary. A footnote at the beginning of each chapter identifies the correspondent & their relationship to Fitzgerald. Then, you’re on your own. I suppose you wouldn’t be reading this book if you weren’t already a fan of Fitzgerald’s work. But, sometimes the only clues to the novel referred to is the mention of the setting – Italy (Innocence), Russia (The Beginning of Spring) etc. Many events & people are passed over in silence but some people always rate a footnote. Colin Haycraft, Penelope’s publisher at Duckworths, always rates a footnote, even though, after the first few mentions, we could probably have worked it out for ourselves. However, the lack of footnotes, while irritating, didn’t stop me reading the letters.

There are several significant gaps. All Fitzgerald’s papers, including letters to & from her husband, Desmond, were lost when the houseboat the family lived on sank in 1963. There are no letters to her son, Valpy. Still, there are enough family letters to get a sense of her love of family life & the sometimes desperate poverty she struggled with.

I especially loved the letters written to publishers & editors. Fitzgerald spent years working on the research for a biography of the novelist L P Hartley, best known for The Go Between. She knew Hartley & wanted to write the biography before everyone who knew him was gone. However, the more she talked to people, especially Hartley’s sister, Norah, the more she realised that she could never write the book in Norah’s lifetime. The things she found out about him would have hurt his sister too much. She was also politely obstructed by other friends, including Lord David Cecil, who didn’t want Hartley’s passion for him to be exposed,

And then Lord D insists that Leslie’s life was completely happy. He added that his life was completely happy, and that he can’t remember ever being unhappy. I asked him whether LPH wasn’t heartbroken when he got married and he said, well he did seem upset, but I asked him to be best man – as though that made up for it! But he’d never seen Leslie unhappy, he repeated. I said, has it struck you that Leslie was happy when you were there, and not when you weren’t, like sunshine and shadow? Lord D looked rather taken aback. (To Francis King 29 October 1979)

Fitzgerald eventually gave up on the idea of the biography. She also had to give up on the idea of writing about Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop, because no publisher was interested. The Bookshop encouraged & published the work of several early 20th century poets. It was a minor but important part of the literary scene of the period. Fitzgerald was persistent in her approaches to any publisher she knew but to no avail. She didn’t waste the research as she wrote a wonderful biography of one of the poets, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. Charlotte Mew was a minor poet, a lesbian who had some very tortured relationships & whose career spanned the late 19th century until the 1920s,

...worse still, I’ve just sent you another letter about Charlotte Mew – I can’t help it, it keeps coming over me as they say, I still feel her life is interesting in its way – and she did write at least one good poem, how many of us can say that? (To Richard Ollard 16 July 1982)

Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore & she was also a judge on several occasions. I can’t resist quoting this as I have the same feeling about so much modern fiction,

I certainly wish I hadn’t taken on the Booker judging this year. I thought it would be a nice sedentary occupation, and after all I have done it before, but I’ve definitely gone downhill since then and I think books have got longer – I’ve only done 35 so far (I keep counting them) so 100 more to come, and already there’s hardly any floor space left in my little room. Also, I drop off to sleep almost immediately when I start to read them – it’s becoming an automatic reaction. (To Maryllis Conder 7 May 1998)

Listening to Fitzgerald’s voice as I read the letters sent me back to the collected essays & reviews, A House of Air, published in 2003. This is my favourite of all her books, which probably isn’t the best thing to say about a novelist. Like Virginia Woolf, I prefer the essays & letters to the fiction. Fitzgerald reviewed widely & she wrote introductions to many novels, including J L Carr’s A Month in the Country & the Virago reprints of Margaret Oliphant’s novels. Looking through the index of A House of Air, there are also chapters on Barbara Pym, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edward Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, Charlotte Mew, William Morris, Rose Macaulay & M R James. I’m looking forward to Hermione Lee’s biography even more after reading the letters.