News from Norfolk

Of course, when an ‘incomer’ arrives from London and moves into the big, old, rambling, tumbledown house sitting deep in its grounds on the landward edge of a Norfolk coastal village, the first thing that local people do is to make sure that she’s fully informed about all her neighbours — in particular, the resident ghosts.

‘Oh yes, Peggy’s round here all the time,’ said the lugubrious handyman who used to look after the house back before we made our offer for it, when the developer was seeking planning permission to turn it into a boutique hotel. ‘Often I’m in the kitchen here’ — to be fair, at the time it was one of the two dry rooms in the house — ‘and I see her looking in at me from across the way’. He gestured vaguely in the direction of an acrid-smelling room across the corridor, all peeling lurid wallpaper and abandoned plastic garden chairs, that used to be the old servants’ parlour. ‘Trouble is, ma’am’ — and here I could see where the conversation was going — ‘Peggy’s been lyin’ in the churchyard twenty-odd years now. But I know it were her, because I see’d her as good as I see you now.’

Perhaps I ought to have shivered, but instead I smiled politely, and turned the conversation back to the return of some keys, because even by then I had learned all there was to know — or so I thought — about the tales that local people tell just to frighten the incomers.

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