Freiburg

Not All Ghosts are of Dead People

Have you ever heard footsteps on the stairs in a house in which you thought you were alone? It is a very unnerving experience. Whenever it has happened to me, I have been in a terraced or semi-detached house, so there was always the possibility that the sound came from next door. The New Jersey thriller writer Harlan Coben tells how at a get-together of writers of page-turners, the question arose: what is the scariest noise in the world? Is it a man being tortured? Is it a woman screaming? Is it a baby crying? Then someone said, ‘No. The scariest noise in the world is: you’re all alone in a cabin in the woods; you know you’re all alone; no one else is out in the woods; you’re downstairs alone, and from upstairs you hear the toilet flush.’

From October 1981 to September 1982, I worked in the South Thames Cancer Registry, on the Royal Marsden Hospital’s Surrey site, in Sutton, far south London, right on the edge of Banstead Common, where Greater London ends and the countryside starts. I lived just across the road from the hospital, in a house which had been split into four bed-sitting rooms. This was very sleepy London commuter territory, where life was extremely quiet. Autumn leaves blew around neglected front gardens, and the street would only occasionally be cheered up by a ginger cat who sat on a garden wall two doors down from where I lived. A hundred yards away was the railway line, running from Victoria Station in Central London to Epsom Downs. On Derby day, the most peculiar old rolling stock would be called into service for the large numbers of racegoers. On the other side of the railway line was Belmont, which had clearly once been a pretty Surrey village before the urban sprawl reached it. Indeed in the week before Christmas 1981, we had seven inches of snow, and the main street of Belmont stopped looking like part of a nightmarish dormitory town and took on the aspect of a Christmas card.

But it wasn’t a particularly happy year for me. My work was tedious for the most part (I was young and hadn’t yet learned the technique of making any work fun by changing one’s attitude), I was lonely, I suffered considerably from unrequited love, and I found life at this far end of Sutton uneventful in the extreme. I once remarked to my pal Jim Cursiter that it would be a great place to live if one had had one’s legs amputated.

This was unfair. There was nothing wrong with the place. There was plenty wrong with me, mainly down to the absence of a girlfriend. I spent a lot of my spare time bashing out stories which would never be published on my Olympia portable typewriter, and pacing up and down the room, trying to devise plots which were not about a young man with not enough female company and too much to drink.

Anyway, to get to the point at last, two of my fellow-tenants in the last couple of months before I moved were Naz and her boyfriend Martin, a rumbustious criminal lawyer and a great raconteur, a bit like Rumpole of the Bailey, but one who spent most of his professional time prosecuting. Naz and Martin were great fun, and missing their company was my only regret when I got a better job at Northwick Park Hospital and moved to Wembley in far north-west London, where I was much happier. A few years later, I happened to meet Martin in Soho one afternoon and he remarked that the room which I inhabited was haunted.

‘The ghost is completely harmless,’ said Martin, ‘He just paces up and down when there’s no-one in the room. But we’ve all heard him, he’s definitely there.’

‘Martin, it’s me,’ I said, ‘I was miserable there and I paced up and down all the time. Even though I’m not dead, it must be the ghost of me.’

Despite what we’d said, neither Martin nor I really believed that there was a ghost there at all. The house was mid-terrace and the sound could easily have come from next door. But it was an interesting possibility that my ghost was pacing the room while I, still alive and full of piss and bad manners as an Australian acquaintance used to say, was living an independent life somewhere else.

Fast forward now to 2009. In the interim, the force of nature that is Hurricane Linda had roared into my life, and our two kids Bill and Tom were aged 15 and 13. We had a holiday in Germany, a few days in Berlin followed by a few days in Freiburg. It was a lovely holiday, and I particularly like Freiburg, a beautiful old university town on the edge of the Black Forest. Freiburg had an attractive medieval centre, stereotypically German, with churches, chiming clocks complete with life size figures, an ancient market square, alleyways with antique lamps attached to the walls and so on.

We stayed in a rather cuboid modern house in a suburban street, but on the way there from the centre of Freiburg, we would walk through more traditional areas, with three or four storey town houses dating from the early twentieth century. And these more old-fashioned streets seemed to be permanently empty and quiet. I was convinced that there was a story here, and started to write one longhand in a little notebook I had bought in a nearby supermarket. However, being convinced that there was a story is one thing, figuring out what that story was is another. It was not until around seven years later that it occurred to me. Star-crossed lovers separated from each other when the Berlin Wall went up. The female member of the couple dies in an attempt to get to West Berlin, and the broken-hearted male lives out the rest of his life alone in his family home in a provincial town, while the ghost of his younger self paces an upper room and plays heart-rending tunes on the musical instrument which he had abandoned forever on the death of his sweetheart.

Sounds like a barrel of laughs, doesn’t it? About as much undue levity as in the epistles of Saint Paul, you might think. Actually, there are moments of amusement in it, and it has an approximation to a happy ending. The story was published around Christmas 2020, at the height of the pandemic, in an anthology called ‘Coronamas’:

https://legironbooks.co.uk/books/underdog-anthologies/coronamas-ua13/

Excellent value at £4.55 from Amazon.

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So that’s about it. I am now drinking my last beer for a month. Starting on Wednesday I have four weeks of radiotherapy, during which I am not allowed fizzy drinks, pulses or anything which might give me wind. So really, I should not be allowed any food or drink at all, since everything gives me wind. Reminds me of the comedian John Sparkes as Siadwel, on being told that his grandfather had gone to a better place: ‘So he could be anywhere, I suppose.’