Later, we were walking along the beach. I said to Margaret, “You know, I’ve just had a strange dream.” I started describing it to her; she grabbed by arm and said, ‘I’ve just had the same dream’ – the closing door had woken her up as well. I was very taken aback but, well…a co-incidence, and that’s all there was to it.
That evening we dined in the guest house, and we got talking to a man called Mark. He lived in Surrey, and he was the proud owner of a new Ducati motorbike, which he’d bought a few days before. He was on his way to test it out in Cornwall. He was a lovely bloke, and we spent most of the evening with him. The next morning we woke up a bit late. I was in the bathroom, and I heard the motorbike revving up. I leant out of the window, and waved down at Mark. He waved back, and went off.
We were out all day, and when we came back, the landlady came straight up to us, saying, “We’ve just had a call from the Cornish police. Mark’s been knocked off his motorbike and killed.” Apparently he’d had a receipt from the guest house in his pocket. When we’d met him at dinner, we didn’t connect him with the figure in the dream. Afterwards, though… it all seemed to link up.
I too think it links up. It doesn’t quite fit any of the normal ghost story templates, but makes sense in a ghostly way.
*
I do have a sixth clincher, but I reserve that for my conclusion…
CONCLUSION
Derek Acorah and the Re-enchantment of Ipswich or, British Ghostliness today (continued)
According to my friend David, ghosts are essentially a ‘transcendence of time’, and it seems to me that there is a particular market for that quality in our society. In modern Britain, time does not flow very smoothly. Every politician seems to have to promise a revolution. What was Tony Blair’s brain-dead slogan: ‘Let the change continue’? Ever since the Second World War we’ve been afflicted by neophilia in the public sphere. Youth is celebrated in our culture to the point where not only do the people the journalists write about have to be young and good looking, but so do the actual journalists.
In the sixties and seventies, out of a need to overcompensate for being so old-fashioned as to have recently possessed an empire, we ruined most of our towns and cities for the sake of the car. We razed, in short, the haunts of our ghosts, against which vandalism there is now a reaction. The planning mistakes of the past are regretted. We know our towns and cities have lost much of their charm; that we have lost a sense of place. At the time of writing the so-called Red Tories want to re-enchant Britain, and certainly Ipswich needs to be re-enchanted. Or something…
I am walking out of the railway station towards the centre of town. I pass a bland football stadium; a sort of Americanised pool hall-cum-bar; an underpass. I come to the heart of the town, where medieval buildings co-exist uneasily with buildings that from their style and character, or lack of it, proclaim themselves retail outlets rather than shops.
I walk past a church, which is closed. But then it is early evening on a weekday and all churches in Britain are closed at that time – and most others. Derek Acorah however, ‘without question the number one television psychic in the UK’, is open for business and performing tonight at the Regent Theatre.
It’s a warm evening, and I have gained the sense, while walking through Ipswich, that most of the population has gone elsewhere. I have this sense still more strongly when entering the theatre lobby. There is certainly no crush; just a few pockets of people: more women than men, a higher than average wearing all black. Derek Acorah himself only wears monotones, and there’s a big picture of him on every page of the glossy programme: Derek in a black and white striped ‘V’ neck jumper and no shirt on underneath; Derek in a white leather jacket; Derek in a pin-striped suit with a black ‘T’ shirt. The earring is constant. He can get away with all this (just about), by virtue of being a good-looking fifty-nine year old with a lot of apparently phosphorescent hair.
I quote from the beginning of the strangely spaced-out biography appearing in the programme: ‘Derek Acorah has been a familiar face on television for over twelve years now. In the days when Derek was conducting one-to-one sittings, initially from a small shop premises in the Wavertree area of Liverpool and then subsequently from his office in Liverpool City Centre, nobody dreamed that the cheerful Scouse medium would one day grace their television screens. Only Derek and one or two noted mediums on the Liverpool circuit knew that the Spirit “had something special” lined up for him. It was Lilian Star who first told him, “I can see your name in lights”…’
His first big break is then described: ‘It happened that one day a researcher for Granada Breeze, the satellite arm of Granada Television in Manchester, telephoned Derek. She explained that she worked on a programme called Livetime, a daily magazine programme presented by Becky Want. Being National Tea Week the following week, she had the idea that it would be different to invite a psychic on the programme to talk about the reading of tea leaves…’
It will already be apparent that nobody satirises Derek Acorah like Derek Acorah, even if it is done unconsciously in his case.
He walks on stage to the sound of ethereal New Age music, and a portentous American voiceover (we’re in Ipswich, Derek, not Texas) intones ‘Welcome to the psychic world of Derek Acorah…As he astounds you with his knowledge of the esoteric.’ The only ‘set’ is a small table with a glass of water on it.
He begins by explaining his credo: ‘The most important thing for me is that there is no death, only transference to a place of beauty.’ His spirit guide, his ‘control’ to use the Victorian term, is one Sam, ‘My best mate in the spirit world’. He warns us that he will occasionally break off to talk to invisible Sam, and when he does so he bows his head, frowns and perhaps touches his ear. He looks like a man listening to an earpiece, and people with earpieces have high status in modern Britain. TV presenters wear them, and they too must occasionally commune with some invisible higher force, namely their producer. So these moments of intensive communication with Sam, for which he must beg our indulgence, remind us all that Derek is a big star.
‘Right,’ he says, emerging from one of these conflabs, ‘the first lovely spirit to step forward here is a lovely lady, seventy-three, seventy-four, five foot four inches tops, rather a talkative spirit…she’s talking now…It wasn’t Alzheimers that took her over, it was…unconsciousness…. She’s talking of her love for John.’
And so it begins. Derek is heading out into the stalls looking for the audience member for whose sake this spirit has descended into the ‘atmosphere’. Meanwhile I’m thinking ‘Can you die of unconsciousness?’ and ‘John is a very common name.’ As he prowls the stalls, calling ‘I’m getting a name for this lovely lady…I’m getting an Anne. Is there someone here who knows an Anne?’ I begin to feel my first twinge of admiration for Acorah. He is completely unembarrassable. Eventually a woman puts up her hand. She ‘might’ know who he means. ‘She’s talking about a job that hasn’t been done,’ reports Derek, and the woman smiles in recognition. ‘Is there a job about the house that hasn’t been done?’ asks Derek. ‘Oh yes,’ says the woman, laughing. She must be a plant, I decide.
The question of whether or not the audience members who respond to the spirits (which ‘step forward’ into the atmosphere at the rate of about one every ten minutes) are plants dominates my thinking throughout the first half of the show. If they are plants then they’re very good actors, a cut above Acorah as performers. They laugh ruefully at the little insights into their lives; they genuinely go red, and one woman seems to shed a real tear when Acorah says, ‘I’m seeing a little baby…oh, very happy, very well cared for…Was a baby lost?’ Yes, the woman had had a miscarriage some years before. He says to another woman: ‘Is there something…are there lawyers involved?’ She pulls a face and nods. But it’s all right, since the spirit has had a look at the papers and everything’s going to be fine. Derek never gives bad news to anyone; that’s not what his gift is for.
He lurches betwee
n what seem accurate insights and preposterous generalisations. One spirit, we are informed with an air of great revelation, was so bold in life that he ‘moved away from his place of birth.’
Acorah sometimes alludes to poltergeist activity – of a benign sort – in the homes of the people who recognise the spirits. ‘This gentleman…when he’s come into the atmosphere…He’s caused a lot of what we call audible noises.’
Aren’t most noises audible – if not all? But his mention of ‘knocking sounds near the tv’ provokes furious nodding from the audience member.
Was that audience member a stooge though? I take the issue up with some of the punters during the interval. ‘Nah,’ says one middle-aged man. ‘He’d need…what? A dozen every show and they’d have to be different in each theatre. It’d cost him a fortune.’ I ask a young woman whether she finds Derek convincing. ‘Well, I’ve had readings done. I do have my own spirit guide, so…yeah.’ Most people gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Returning to London on the oddly silent and empty last train to Liverpool Street, I decide I can’t quite dismiss Acorah completely. Perhaps he just knows what’s likely to be going on in a person’s life by their appearance or demographic profile, which is a sort of talent. But then again, I believe that he believes he has psychic ability. And he is certainly significant as an index, and possibly a promoter, of supernatural belief.
Before coming to Ipswich I’d spoken by phone to Caroline Watt, senior lecturer in psychology at Edinburgh University, which has the only endowed, and probably the leading, parapsychology unit in Britain. She told me that ‘ghost hunting groups are booming’ in Britain at the moment, and when I asked why, she cited Derek Acorah’s haunted house investigation series, ‘Most Haunted’. Not that she was endorsing Acorah. (Another more recent factor, she felt, might be the recession: ‘There is evidence that people suffering a lack of control over their environment are more prone to supernatural belief.’)
My problem with Acorah, I reflect, as I walk the length of the train in what would prove a futile search for a buffet car, is the problem Anthony Trollope had with the more numerous mediums of his day. He reported in a letter of 1868 that he found the evidences presented at séances, to be ‘unworthy of the grand ceremony of death’.
Acorah hadn’t frightened me; in fact he’d bored me to the extent that I’d left his show before the end.
Returning to my seat, I decide there can’t be more than twenty people on the entire train – and most of them are asleep. According to the research mentioned in my introduction, eight of these would believe in ghosts. Of these eight, possibly one would have seen a ghost. (Ten per cent of Britons, we are regularly told, have seen a ghost, but I can’t find a source for this).
I suppose it is time for me to admit that I myself have never seen a ghost, and that I must rely on others to do it for me…
One of my very favourite ghost stories is called ‘Dead Men Walk’ by Alex Hamilton, which I read in a collection called Scottish Ghost Stories (2005). In that beautifully droll story a journalist called Smithson is sent to Orkney by his features editor. At first Smithson objects:
‘Why not send Flett? He was born there.’
‘That’s why.’
‘And when I get there?’ challenged Smithson.
‘Mill about in the stuff. Under the skin a bit. Drag in some history if you want.’
After a series of charming encounters with Orcadians, Smithson meets a girl with red hair. He tells her that his story is not panning out. ‘Perhaps you’ve been looking too hard,’ she says, and she points down to towards the plain, and the Standing Stones of Stenness: ‘indecipherably ancient…a wide circle of dolmens, on a slightly raised turf between two tarns.’ She tells him that this is the night when those stones are said to move. Smithson says, ‘They won’t move if I’m looking.’ She replies, ‘Would you be content if I saw them move?’ So he stands with his back to the stones while looking at the girl: ‘In her eyes I saw the stones move.’ (When, a couple of days later he files his article, the features editor says, ‘Most of it’s padding.’)
The person nearest to me who has had a supernatural experience – or what I consider to be one – is my father. As a teenager he was plagued by a recurring nightmare: ‘I would hear the sounds of a mass of people moving past the head of my bed – a constant succession, streaming past with urgent voices I couldn’t make out, and… echoing noises, and a whole sort of atmosphere of illness and crisis. I would know when it was coming on, and I would think, “Not again”, but I couldn’t stop it, and it would carry on even after I woke up: these people moving, always behind my head. I would have to get up and make a cup of tea, and then it would gradually fade away.’
When he was about sixteen, he made a connection with an earlier event. He recalled that, aged five or six, he had once been taken out of his normal bedroom and put to bed in a downstairs room in the family home in Cameron Grove, York. In that room, the bed head was close to the door and beyond that door was the entrance hall to the house. His mother was pregnant at the time with either his younger brother or his younger sister, he now can’t recall which. As far as he was concerned at the time, he slept through the night, only to find out in the morning that a complication had occurred in the pregnancy, life-threatening to his mother – to whom he was particularly attached. There had been a crisis. An ambulance and doctors had come, and they had taken his mother to hospital to induce the birth. When he made this connection, the nightmare went away.
This to me is a clincher, as previously defined. It is mysterious; it repays thought, and its ghostliness touches on birth rather than death, creating the disturbing sense that there is little distinction between them.
As I type this, the clock on my laptop shows midnight and my train is drawing into Liverpool Street; I am ready for bed, and I wish my readers goodnight, and sweet dreams.
A GHOST STORY
Little Jack’s, or The Secret Trust
His full name was George Meredith Arthur Blundy but being his clerk I never called him anything except Mr Blundy. Bob Grafton, the Junior Partner, called Mr Blundy Bill, and I never got to the bottom of that one – couldn’t see him as a Bill at all, but Bob Grafton had been at Cambridge University with him, so be obviously knew something I didn’t.
As someone said of someone, Mr Blundy ‘ran on rails’. Into the office at eight, out of it by six; then two whiskies at The Grapes before driving home. (And him one of York’s leading solicitors! But I can assure you it was normal behaviour for the seventies). On Wednesdays he went to The Grapes an hour later because he’d go to the Minster beforehand. Evensong. On Friday he’d go an hour earlier because he’d drive off to his place in the country. Also on Friday, he had tea in Betty’s Tea Rooms with York’s only barrister: Richard Clarke QC – that’s if Clarke wasn’t in court. If lunch with a client was on the cards, then Mr Blundy would take them to Ristorante Bari, the Italian place in The Shambles, which was just about the best – and in fact the only – restaurant in York at the time.
Mr Blundy was a little chap, wiry like a jockey. He was red-faced, with very blue eyes and wavy grey hair of the sort you don’t seem to see these days. As for the redness, I would tell Nelly Drew – the office junior – that was down to the drink, and she would say, ‘No, he was in the desert in the war…it’s wind burn.’ Well, Nelly was a bit in love with him, so that’s what was going on there, but if Mr Blundy knew of her feelings, he never took advantage. I remember her telling me, in the Olde Starre Inn, while sipping one of the hundreds of lunchtime rum and blacks I must have bought her in ’75 and ’76 (because I was trying to take advantage of Nelly Drew), ‘He’s a gentleman of the old school. He never opens his umbrella, you know.’
‘What? Not even in the rain?’
‘Well,’ said Nelly, ‘He’s hardly going to open it when it’s not raining, is he? He was an officer in the Guards, and they always keep their umbrellas rolled up.’
‘Okay,’ I said, rolling a f
ag. ‘Why?’
‘Style, I suppose.’
‘What do they use their umbrellas for then?’
And she’d obviously done her homework, because she came back straight away: ‘Hailing taxis.’
I liked hearing that from Nelly Drew – it was the kind of thing I might have told her. It comes under the heading of arcania, for which I have a taste.
But nobody hailed a taxi in York. You booked a taxi and waited about half an hour for it to come, which Mr Blundy had no need to do. He had a blue Jaguar XJ6 with shift. Old school, you see. Beautiful interior of course, like all Jaguars, but absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke. Mr Blundy smoked Player’s Navy Cut – a very strong fag indeed – and when, after knowing him a few months, I plucked up the courage to ask him why, he gave that sudden smile of his that always came as a surprise, and said, ‘You know Geoff, I think it may be nothing more than the nautical design of the packet.’ Well, everyone smoked in those days. I seem to recall that clients would be offered cigarettes when they came into the office, not that very many did come in. We all worked mainly by telephone, and Mr Blundy wouldn’t do much criminal law, which tends to fill a solicitor’s office with all the aggrieved relatives and hangers-on of the accused. I once asked him outright why he hardly touched crime, and he said, ‘I don’t like criminals, Geoff. Do you?’ I said, ‘But they deserve representation, Mr Blundy.’ ‘Do you think so?’ he said.
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