News from Norfolk

Category: Ghost story

31/10/2025

Smugglers’ Rest

Katy was more or less the last person I’d have expected to run into while queuing for the ATM tucked away behind the drinks section in our tiny village shop. As she mimed exaggerated amazement, rushing to kiss me loudly on both cheeks — and, in doing so shoved poor old Mrs Wigglesworth out of the way, so that she had to brace herself against cases of cut-price lager —I reflected that I probably hadn’t seen Katy in real life since someone else’s half-forgotten wedding back in the mid 1990s, if not before. 

Seeing Katy in the media was, of course, something else altogether. As a sort of comms person and all-around fixer for one of our better known and, at least in electoral terms and until relatively recently, one of our more successful political parties, there had been times over recent years when Katy could be glimpsed almost daily in the background of prime ministerial walkabouts, press conferences and, not infrequently, resignation announcements. 

Toby and I, recalling her all too well from university days, used to laugh about this. Governments rose and fell — Katy, with her undentable enthusiasm and utter lack of shame, endured. 

And now here she was, standing in the Coop, tall and thin and antic, laughing gaily at me as I helped Mrs Wigglesworth pick up her far-scattered shopping, filling the air around her with wafts of some expensive modern scent resembling no flower that ever bloomed on earth, taking the opportunity to push ahead of me and take a great fist-full of notes out of the ATM before we resumed our conversation outside on the little lane.

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29/10/2025

The Gargoyle

“What — what is it, exactly?” asked Pamela, her voice suddenly hoarse. Having glimpsed the thing on the floor, she recoiled from it. Yet at the same time, she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” replied Liam, slightly crouched, hands on his thighs, still struggling to catch his breath. “It’s fu —” 

And then there was a pause, although whether this was because Liam was still gasping — or, possibly, because he suddenly remembered that he was standing in the sacristy of the church, hence rapidly self-censored — remains unclear. 

“It’s — it’s flipping, flipping heavy!”

“It’s also quite remarkably dusty.” This was Magnus. Magnus, at any rate, was his name, although everyone in the village called him the Colonel behind his back. 

On that particular October morning, Magnus happened to be wearing a pinafore, and carrying a dusting-cloth. It was this, perhaps, rather than his habit of taking charge of problematic situations, that caused him to bend down. Using the cloth, carefully and methodically, he cleared away thick cobwebs from the item at their feet. 

From the door to the steps leading up to the room over the chancel, there came a draught of cold, damp air, and with it a musty smell, redolent of unused places, darkness and very great age. 

Pamela shivered. With bony hands she drew her mauve cardigan more tightly around her, and pushed an errant strand of grey hair back into her untidy bun. Turning, she closed the door perhaps more emphatically than she had intended. “That’s better,” she said to no one in particular, as if to justify the loud noise, although in truth her action had made very little difference, at least as far as the musty smell was concerned.

The men, meanwhile, were still regarding the object on the ground. Now that Magnus had scraped away the largest and most insistently sticky of the cobwebs, the large block of stone was, at least, a little easier to examine. 

“Is it a sort of water-spout?” hazarded Liam. “Look, you can see it has a mouth, there. Well, a sort of a mouth. But what’s that?”

“It’s a horrid old thing!” pronounced Pamela, fastidiously. She grimaced. “Why did you bring it all the way down from the tower? You’ll only have to take it back up again.”

Magnus, in contrast, was transparently delighted at the discovery. The history of his parish church was almost his favourite thing about it. Ignoring Pamela, as he so often did, he thumped Liam on the back, causing the much younger man to catch his breath. “By Jove, you’re right, you know. It’s a gargoyle! Well done for spotting it up there, Liam. Good lad!” 

Liam, though, was still face-to-face with the thing on the floor, his strangely innocent-looking eyes exploring every inch of its surface, trying to figure it all out. “What is it, though? I mean, what’s it supposed to be?”

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04/10/2025

An Old House in the Fens

“A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes” — Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

“I suppose what I mean,” said Edmund, rather slowly — he was selecting his words carefully, conscious of the need, even with Silvia, to avoid blatant discourtesy — “is that the Fens don’t seem like your sort of place. There isn’t anything very enchanted about the Fens, is there? 

“Maybe it’s to do with the flatness, or the straight lines, or all that industrialised, obviously hugely useful, but also totally charmless agriculture?  

“Oh, you’re going to tell me, I expect, that there were all sorts of fascinating and extraordinary things that once happened here. And if there’s anyone who can take those long-ago things and weave them into something magical, it’s obviously you, not me. That’s why you’re the novelist, and I’m just a barrister! 

“But even you have to admit, surely, that if there was ever anything magical about the Fens, all of that has totally gone now? It’s all just so — well, so ordinary. You know what I mean — everything that I saw on the drive up from London — that ugly new spill-over housing — ghastly Peterborough — the dead-straight roads — those huge boring fields, the flat horizon, the ditches —” 

Realising, not before time, that his oratory was working itself free from grammatical coherence, Edmund wisely returned to his basic point. 

“The Fens just don’t seem like your sort of place, somehow. You’re all about the romantic things — dreams, magic, poetry. You always have been! But if there were ever a landscape written in hopeless, charmless, utterly lumpen prose, surely that’s the Fens?” 

Outside — and, to a lesser extent, inside too, because the old house was still very much a neglected, mistreated, rotting wreck — the rain streamed down, pouring off the huge, sagging Collyweston roof in erratic eddies, sending sharp shudders through the leaves of the beech trees beyond the tall crooked windows, pooling in what had once been the low part of the long, tangled garden, until it made for itself the start of a sodden little lake. It was dark out, too. Although the clock at the Abbey down the road had only just struck noon, the leaden sky made it seem far later. 

Or was the house always like that? Was it always so dark in here?

“You’re very quiet at the moment,” prompted Edmund, after an interval. “Sorry, I hope you didn’t take that the wrong way. You know me — you can see right through me, you always could, so there’s no point not being honest with you. And I know you’ll make something amazing of this place, too. 

“I just don’t understand what you see in the Fens! Heaven knows, there are plenty of other old houses in all sorts of places — the nice parts of Cornwall, the Sussex Downs, even the North Norfolk coast, as far as that goes — with plenty of history and character and all the rest. Surely you could have found something there instead? 

“Yet here you are, in a dying market town surrounded by acres of ugly new-built sprawl, set out in the middle of nowhere, without so much as a hill or a coast within an hour’s drive. And what have you got by way of compensation? Piles of sugar-beet. Potatoes. Sewage works, and the odd light industrial unit. So many straight, weed-filled, probably foetid-smelling, mosquito-infested ditches!

“Oh, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. You always do. I just don’t see it yet. Help me. Help me, Silvia! What do you see in this place? Why, Silvia, are you here?”

Silvia, however, far from being offended, simply fixed her old friend with an apparently furious glare — which dissolved, after a few moments, into a warm smile, then a giggle, then a tinkling, tolerant, wholly affectionate laugh. 

Silvia had known Edmund for more than four decades — since they were both children, in fact. He had always been like this. So had she. This was why they both found, so many years later, a kind of obscure and necessary comfort in these admittedly very occasional, still very welcome meetings. 

No, there was no point in being cross at Edmund. Silvia uncurled herself from the rather battered plastic garden chair in which she was sitting, rose and, scooping up a cafetière from an inverted milk carton functioning as a table, shared out between Edmund and herself the last of the coffee. And then, at least, she spoke.

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10/09/2025

The Scarecrow

The Scarecrow? Well, therein lies a tale! Perhaps it’s best that I simply tell you all the facts, such as they are, and let you draw your own conclusions.  

Jeremy and the twins invited themselves to stay up at Pagets for a few weeks. Had I told you they’d moved back to Pimlico? After Jenny died, I was hardly using the London place — maybe two or three times a year at absolute most — so when Jeremy was offered the new job, he and Mai decided that the time had come to bid sayonara to old Tokyo. 

The twins had just celebrated their fourth birthdays, so it wasn’t too late to swap school systems. Also, young children are hugely resilient, aren’t they? They thrive on change. They aren’t set in their ways like the rest of us miserable old reactionaries. 

All that was left to do, anyway, was for Mai to tidy up a few loose ends in Japan, while Jeremy made a start on sorting out the Pimlico digs with the twins in tow. 

Late-summer London, however, was hot and airless — especially so, one assumes, for little ones accustomed to ultra-modern, high-rise flats. I suspect they’d lived their whole lives amid artificial air conditioning — a noisy, charmless, soul-destroying abomination, if you ask me! — not that you did. Meanwhile the Pimlico flat had been taken over by a local firm of builders, along with their power tools, radios and nonstop cheeky-chappie banter. It was all too much. 

Hence the improvised sojourn with Grandpa amid the quieter charms of the twins’ ancestral rural Norfolk. 

It had been a while. When I’d last seen the twins — Jeremy, as you’ll recall, had offered them up as a sort of peace-offering to a dying if still alertly aware, acid-tongued Jenny — they were hardly more than two interchangeable bundles of life, sporting wild crests of raven-black glossy hair, mostly distinguishable by the differently-coloured dummies, one pink and one blue, permanently lodged within their chubby little faces. Jenny disapproved of dummies — just as she disapproved of Mai, Japan, Jeremy’s career changes and quite a lot else that came her way — but, for once, said nothing. Perhaps she had finally realised that there was, at that point, very little more to be said. 

That, though, is bye-the-bye. I had better get on with the story — in particular, how the Scarecrow got mixed up with it all. 

August was almost at an end. The three of them rolled up, after various delays, mid-afternoon, in Jeremy’s little car — Jeremy, Ren and a reluctant, sleepy Kitty who had to be prised out of the car like a clam from its enveloping shell. 

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13/12/2024

The Excavation

“’Tis the solitude of the Country that creates these Whimsies; there was never such a thing as a Ghost heard of at London, except in the Play-house.” Joseph Addison, The Drummer (1716)

“I hope you will consider it no impertinence, my dear sir, that I should ask such a thing, but in truth I can no longer restrain myself. Sir, have you never felt an inclination to investigate what lies beneath that raised bank of yours, over there on the lawn?” 

The Rev Mr Calthorpe paused, regarded his cousin briefly, then with infinite care and exactitude placed a slip of paper to mark the passage that he’d been reading, closed the book so gently that the gesture elicited no sound, and laid the little volume on the table next to him, where it joined the familiar company of candle, pipe, jug of claret and half-empty glass. 

Mr Calthorpe did these things slowly and deliberately, not because he was old or infirm — for he was, in fact, a good decade or two younger than you would probably think him to be, were you to meet him in the high street, and in excellent health, too, thanks be to God — but because doing so gave him time to reflect, not for the first time, on why it was that the young were so full of zeal to do things. 

Why not leave the raised bank behind the parsonage just as it was, and had presumably always been? Why innovate?

But because Mr Calthorpe was a very kind man, and sometimes even a politic one, he sighed, gently, and said none of this to his cousin. 

The young Rev Mr Chambers, meanwhile, wondered whether he had gone too far. For all his apparent self-assurance — coaxed into being at Wykham’s two great foundations, successively if not definitively — he nevertheless remained sensible, when visiting Mr Calthorpe at his Norfolk parsonage house, that he was very much the poor relation. 

For while Mr Calthorpe might appear, dozing quietly before the fire in his ancient Norfolk rectory, the simple sort of country parson whose quotidian predicaments and catastrophes might bulk out a Covent Garden farce, he was indeed, as all the world knew, younger brother and heir to Lord Calthorpe of Calthorpe Hall, Calthorpe, in the county of Suffolk — this latter personage recently promoted from Gentleman Usher Quarterly Waiter in Ordinary, to the infinitely preferable role of Yeoman of the Removing Wardrobe, no less, to His Majesty King George II. 

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16/10/2024

A Doubtful Attribution

On that afternoon when I first learned of Lucinda’s death, it was as if some sort of filter had fallen between me and the rest of the world.

The bright September sunlight was suddenly dim, irresolute. The shadows lost their crisp autumn rigour. They became almost apologetic. When, on a whim, I went to the edge of our garden, from which one could just about glimpse the distant chimneys of the large house in which Lucinda had lived (“and, indeed, in which she had died — where she’s probably lying dead even now” the unhelpful voice inside my head stipulated), the battered corn-stubble, which at lunchtime had look as if it were picked out in purest old gold, was dun-coloured, dull — devoid even of its habitual population of gleaning rooks and wood-pigeons. 

One lumpy little cloud hung pointlessly in the sky. I found myself disliking it, because it added nothing to the scene and looked wrong there. How ridiculous to dislike a cloud! Almost as ridiculous, in its way, as disliking death, although most of us do that all the same.

 It’s not as if, I should perhaps add right away, I had known Lucinda terribly well — not as if we were the closest of friends. We were certainly not. 

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