IS THERE A SPIRIT IN THE HOUSE?
	This house is full of ghosts. When a house has been your home for four years, every nook 
and cranny is familiar. I have painted all the ceilings, all the woodwork and as much of 
the outside as I could reach. The rooms with reasonable wallpaper I have left intact but 
did the basement and the hallways with white silk vinyl. Ghostly images of myself 
painting away day after day are everywhere, on all four floors, inside and out.
	Most of the furniture in this house has been shipped to Australia, with a lesser amount 
to the local auctions. Very little remains - a couple of kitchen tables and chairs, an 
armchair or two, a bed, a washing machine, a refrigerator and a few personal effects.
	In this residence are thirty-two rooms excluding cellars and toilets. The house is at 
present enduring the tortuous process of being sold but every corner is a corner of my 
mind, every room arouses echoes, and the penumbrae of light and shadow harbour outlines 
in the air formerly occupied by departed furniture. Each room with its vibrations 
penetrates my feelings and memories. I can't help but love it. On the practical level, it 
has to go, but we cling to each other still, the house and I. It is even hurtful to 
wander in the rooms, not because of fear of ghosts, but because the memories crowd in, 
and they all softly whisper 'farewell'. Any house you have ever lived in, still pulls and 
draws you, sets your feelings aquiver. The house and I are trying to hold on to each 
other.
	Ghosts of social functions abound. Memories never to be erased while we live. Alan's 
cousins gathered here for junketings in September 1995. Alan's Dad had nine brothers and 
sisters - all dead now, only one brother's wife, Alan's Auntie Beryl, survives. We only 
achieved a roll-up of fifteen, including ourselves, out of a possible thirty-one. There 
are only fifteen cousins living; the extra number are spouses and surviving spouses. Four 
cousins are dead. The eldest two cousins and their wives are very old and frail, so they 
did have some sort of excuse not to come. Anne, Colin and Robert didn't have much of an 
excuse not to come, but Tony was very ill, and Doris in Spain had a sick husband. We put 
on nice dishes and salads, a great array of sweets plus a huge celebration cake and 
obligatory ode.
	Fun functions have abounded here. Musical evenings commemorating Alan's departures to 
Australia were frequent. We entertained our guests downstairs in the room adjacent to the 
barroom with lots of food, then had musical entertainment - singing, organ and guitar 
playing - in the large sitting room upstairs. There was much laughter, chatter and 
inebriation, not to mention mammoth washing-up. Besides these functions there have been 
dinner and luncheon parties to entertain guests or celebrate special occasions such as 
birthdays. Fine wine and food, the best silver, flowers and candles have graced these 
occasions.
	In the vast sitting-room was an organ and hi-fi. Alan orchestrated a lot of songs for me 
to sing to, and it was in the sitting-room that I would do my singing, so on social 
occasions I wasn't so shy as I was used to the experience of standing up and giving out.
	I used to play piano on the Roland upstairs, but Alan thought I was giving it too much 
of a bashing, so we got a Clavinova - a more robust instrument, and installed it in the 
basement. So there I did my piano practice, singing and organ in the sitting-room and 
guitar at the kitchen table.
	The most important and notable of the guests we had staying here were three members of 
our family. Maud played the Clavinova downstairs and I got her some pop music 
arrangements. She was very skinny at the time and fussy about her food, and her main 
source of nourishment came from alcohol. She would get stuck into the white wine or beer 
from the barroom, her pianistic dexterity decreasing as the alcoholic intake increased. 
If we had visitors she would need a few drinks to overcome her shyness before playing for 
them. The alcohol did more for her confidence than it did for her technical prowess.
	The little red room with the green curtains on the first floor still murmurs of her 
presence, as does the dressing-room nearby that she used for her clothes.
	The ground-floor study and second-floor music room whisper of various computer-generated 
wonders; noisy games, song arrangements and compositions in a dazzling array of 
orchestral colours, correspondence in a sparkling variety of wondrous fonts; there 
abounded high-tech toys, a colour printer, microphones, a scanner and modem.
	The library downstairs is now a misnomer, for it lacks even one book. Three tellys and 
two VCR's have been shipped out, but the video rooms are still redolent of hours spent 
with Alan, Maud and Mycroft enjoying videos and sentimentalising over old family 
reminiscences captured on camera.
	In a cute pink-carpeted room on the second floor, which has a neat little sliding door 
to a wardrobe, slept our youngest daughter Eleanor for only about a week last summer. She 
left clothes and possessions here which have now been shipped back to Australia. Her 
young slender presence lingers up there. She helped in the garden, preparing a flower bed 
a planting pansies, primulas and red hot pokers therein. She was here at the same time as 
Maud and we used to listen to CD's of various descriptions in the barroom while partaking 
of a few drinks. She brought CDs of her own techno music too - the barroom-door would be 
left open and the girls would sunbathe to the music in those few decent summer days we 
had in 1998. Eleanor was very sunny disposition-wise, but as far as Maud was concerned, 
whether it was the fact that she was drinking too much or eating too little, I am not 
sure, but she would often apparently take offence at something we said and storm off. We 
spent quite a bit of time debating what could have triggered off the outbreak of anger. 
Sometimes she wouldn't speak to us for twenty-four hours, but would go down to the 
'greasy takeaway' emporia in town rather than eat the healthy food we provided.
	In a large attic bedroom is a green carpet with curtains and washbasin to match. It was 
there that our son stayed for six weeks after Maud had returned to Australia. While he 
was here he bought a fancy bike from a local shop and rode around some of the local 
villages when the weather permitted. We went here and there as I had done with his 
sister, visiting stately homes, cathedral cities and Gay Paree. He used to do substantial 
practice on the Clavinova which would be expected of someone who normally likes to do 
several hours' practice as a matter of course.
	'O for the touch of a vanished hand
	And the sound of a voice that is still!'
	The hands and voices are now overseas, but the ghosts of friends and family still haunt 
this house. Columns of air in their shape walk around, and in each room are ghostly 
furniture forms that tease my eyes. Now I see them, now I don't.
	Before we bought this house, it was vacant and boarded-up for a year or so. Prior to 
that, Neelah Smith, a trained nurse, had run it as a residential nursing home for the 
aged since the early eighties. Neelah was jailed for a long time for taxation 
misdemeanours. She still owes the bank over a quarter of a million. At the end of their 
sojourn here they were obliged to stay downstairs in the basement. Bolts were put on the 
doors leading up to the ground floor. Another professional couple continued to run the 
place for the old people.
	Neelah and her husband were round here a couple of times and had a few drinks with us. I 
also visited her when she lived in Southend Road and the Victoria Road. She was full of 
ghost stories about this house, which I thought Maud would enjoy, too, so took her round 
to hear Neelah relate them.
	I have not had any supernatural revelations here (if I had I could perhaps ask more for 
the house!) Alan's cousin Norah, who is a churchgoer, assured us that the place had a 
very good atmosphere, better in fact than that of our previous mansion at Park Road. Such 
a pronouncement is almost as reassuring as an official exorcism!
	Neelah is a small, slim woman with an expressive face and voice. While telling these 
tales (or true experiences, according to her), she clasps her hands, stares wanly or 
rolls her eyes dramatically, gesticulates and speaks in a quavering and deeply convinced 
(if not convincing) manner. During these accounts, her husband Richard raised his eyes to 
heaven in an equally expressive way.
	One tale concerned a loudly crying baby that she heard intermittently in the night. She 
alleged that members of her staff heard the plaintive wailing too. Neelah did lose a baby 
in the early eighties, but the ghostly (and ghastly) crying was heard at a later date.
	Another of her stories concerns a horrible old woman who is seen in several rooms in 
Number Thirty (the house consists of two old houses made into one by opening up four 
doors, one on each floor). She sits and glowers at people. She would have a job to do 
that now, because there aren't any chairs left to sit on.
	At some time or other, during some mysterious interregnum between the time when old 
people were still resident in this house and when they were all settled elsewhere, a 
security guard stayed in the very small bedroom on the second floor in Number Thirty. 
Neelah said that 'the area around the landing and the top rooms in Number Thirty were bad 
areas. My bedroom is up there, so that's bad luck for me! Apparently the bloke got a 
serious attack of the creeps and belted downstairs hollering in fright. Naturally I 
pressed for more details on all these phenomena, but could glean nothing more specific 
although she had a lot to say about bad vibes and creepy atmosphere.
	I occasionally have bad dreams owing no doubt to cheese and pickle suppers, creepy 
murder books which are my favourite, or crime series on TV. I do believe I should keep 
away from spirits - but solely because I prefer beer or wine!