2
HEADS, BODIES AND LEGS
If ever there was an organisation that suffers from being stereotyped, it’s the Women’s Institute. There was always the jam and cake making stereotype and then, to upset that, along came the naked calendar stereotype, assisted by Calendar Girls, a film which rather unfairly portrayed the WI as being originally, rather stuffily, opposed to the calendar; whereas the organisation was, in fact, supportive. Both stereotypes contain truth, of course, but – as stereotypes tend to be – they are more than a little condescending: a condescension that is somewhat metropolitan. Of course the WI is made up from a wide variety of women, women with all sorts of attitudes and political viewpoints, and, as Tony Blair discovered when he tried to use them to deliver a party political speech in 2000, they will not be used or patronised.
One of the things that I have discovered about the WI, no doubt due to the commitment to community that lies at its heart, is that many of its members have a lot of knowledge of, and interest in, their own localities, and often carry stories that might otherwise be forgotten. I love being hired as a speaker – storyteller – by WI groups, because I always get stories back. I finish, and someone tells me a local story, and my story-stealing antennae goes into overdrive.
When I have researched Hampshire stories I often find that the latest book, or web page, simply regurgitates the information culled from the book that went before, the book before having done the same thing, and so on; the written transmission of these stories being nothing more than a lazy plagiarism of books and websites; with no flesh and blood word of mouth, and no real knowledge of the localities. At the root of this plagiarism, however, lies a truly original book, a book which is often not given any attribution, and that wondrous book is called It Happened in Hampshire. It was compiled and arranged by Winifred G. Beddington and Elsa B. Christy, and it was published by the Hampshire Federation of Women’s Institutes in 1936.
In the foreword, Beddington and Christy write: ‘We have […] tried, when possible, to retain the wording in which they [the information] reached us.’ In other words, many of their sources are from the spoken word. In the chapter titled ‘Legends, Stories and Sayings’, they relate a story about a haunted cottage, which they got from a member of the WI who lived in the village of Braishfield.
Many years ago it appears that a lady of some means was in fear of her accumulated wealth being forcibly taken from her. She therefore decided to conceal it where prying eyes could not find it, and she selected a spot near an isolated cottage in the village. Soon after she became ill, was taken to the infirmary and died. It is now believed that she still wanders round the place of her hidden wealth, jealous that someone else should find and enjoy it. She is continually seen, and more frequently heard, knocking at the door of the cottage and making other weird noises …
… One man, now living, said he saw her ‘a sittin’ on the wicket and me ’air fair pushed me ’at off me ’ead’.
The thing with stories though is that they don’t remain safely on the printed page – that’s just an interlude in the progression of the story – the printed word freezes it, but only temporarily.
You see, I heard more about this story, but from a completely different source. I’ll tell you about that source later, when it becomes relevant, but first I’ll tell you about that cottage several decades after it got a mention in It Happened in Hampshire.
We need to travel backward in time to the 1960s. The process of suburbanisation, a change in the nature of the countryside that was more than physical, was well underway, and, as social and technological processes tend to do, it was accelerating.
That cottage in Braishfield had gone to rack and ruin – no one wanted to live in it because of the ghost of that terrible old woman; forever banging on the door, blowing out the fire, moaning and complaining, tut-tutting, and stamping on the creakiest of the floorboards. The last owner had died during the war, and given that his only beneficiary was a relative who had emigrated to Canada long ago, the cottage stood empty, slowly disintegrating.
In the 1960s, however, someone got hold of it (don’t ask me about how legal matters of ownership take place) and given that Braishfield was well into the process of becoming a dormitory village for Southampton and Winchester, they were having it ‘done up’. The ghost story was just silly, of course, and what important ‘money man’ was ever going to come across something as inconsequential as a book by the WI.
A group of men were working on it – brickies, chippies, plasterers, electricians, plumbers. It so happened that they’d all come up from Southampton, except for one. He’d got the train from Portsmouth to Southampton, from where they’d given him a lift. In Hampshire, Portsmouth is popularly known, for a variety of reasons, as Pompey. If you’re not familiar with the nuances of Hampshire, Pompey people are well known for their erudition, their love of a good, vigorous debate, and their attention to the finer aspects of detail whilst making debating points.
These men had finished work for the day, and repaired to the local hostelry for a pint or three. A debate had arisen over some detail of theology or politics, possibly relating to the relative fortunes of Portsmouth and Southampton FC, and the vigour and passion of the debate was such that chairs flew around the pub, and the gentleman from Pompey found himself being pitched over the bar. The Southampton contingent then drove off pissed as newts (why are newts considered to be exemplars of intoxication?), leaving the Pompey man bruised, boozed-up, and stranded in Braishfield. As the locals emerged from hiding, he staggered off down the street and, wondering what to do, concluded that he might as well spend the night in the cottage.
He was too drunk to light a fire, so he wrapped himself in a dustsheet and lay on the floor in front of the fireplace.
It is hard to wake someone when they’ve had too much to drink, so it took quite a noise to wake him up. The noise was provided by a terrible shriek that emanated from the chimney, a clattering and banging, followed by a great shower of damp, congealed soot, and the descent down the chimney of a spindly, veiny, blotchy pair of legs; both of which proceeded to leap and caper round the room – one leg around another – because that’s all there was – two separate legs – no body being present at all, let alone a head.
The Pompey man gazed blearily at the legs, but a brain after a skinful isn’t given to considering a situation and deciding that fear induced by the supernatural is the appropriate response.
‘What the f*** is this?’ said the Pompey man.
‘Wash your dirty mouth out, young man,’ screamed a voice from the chimney, ‘and have a bit of decency; don’t go looking at my lovely legs.’
‘Lllegs,’ mumbled the Pompey man, who could see a lot more than two legs capering around the room, ‘f*** off, legs.’
‘Filthy man, filthy man,’ screeched the voice from the chimney, and there was more crashing and banging, before down the chimney tumbled a torso, most decently attired in a long, black dress. The torso dragged itself across the floor by its hands and lifted itself onto the legs, which were now decently covered by the dress.
The Pompey man thought that this was all a bit much, so lowered his head again and recommenced snoring.
‘Thief, thief! You’re after my treasure, I know you are,’ screamed the voice from the chimney, and the word ‘treasure’ connected with something in the Pompey man’s brain.
‘Treasure?’ he mumbled, lifting his head.
‘Get away from my treasure you thief,’ screamed the spectre’s head as it came tumbling down the chimney to be picked up by the hands and stuck roughly onto the neck, ‘get away from my treasure!’ This was all beyond the Pompey man’s comprehension, so he started snoring again.
Then the dawn sunshine was shining through a broken window, and the Pompey man lifted his head and opened a bleary eye. The old woman was sitting on a pile of cement sacks by the door.
‘You’ve broken the spell; you’ve set me free,’ she said with a sudden smile that chan
ged the look of her face altogether.
He stared at her uncomprehendingly.
‘When I was young, I was in love,’ she said, ‘but he upped and left me for a loose woman who came by with the fair.’
‘Bastard,’ said the Pompey man, who now more fully comprehended the strangeness of the situation and thought that an expression of disapproval might be appropriate.
‘From then on,’ continued the woman, ‘I turned mean. I hoarded and hoarded my money; and I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone getting their hands on it.’
‘Money …’ thought the Pompey man.
‘After I died, I was tied to this cottage by my money – that is, unless someone could stay the night without fear. It wasn’t going to be a handsome prince, but you’ll do – you’ve set me free.’
‘Money?’ muttered the Pompey man. ‘Where’s the money?’
‘It’s out in the garden,’ she called in a fading voice, ‘buried under the apple tree – I don’t need it anymore – I’m free …’ after which she turned into what seemed like a whirlwind of soot, and disappeared up the chimney with a roar like the ten thousand flapping wings of a murmuration of starlings.
The Pompey man dug the treasure up with a shovel used for slinging sand and cement into the mixer – only a Pompey man could dig a hole with a shovel – and he found the treasure chest. When he levered it open his eyes glittered as much as the old gold coins in the morning sunlight.
Well, the long and the short of it is, he hid the box, he retrieved it later, and he brought it back to Pompey.
In a folk story, that would be the end of things. It would be Jack, the youngest of three sons, who finds the treasure, he would be rich, he’d use the treasure well, and that would be the end of the story. But, in all practicality, what do you do with a chest full of old gold coins? Gold coins that shouldn’t be in your possession. You can’t just take them to a bank and say, ‘Give me some money please’, and claim entitlement on the say-so of a ghost.
The Pompey man had to find someone who would give him some money for something acquired in a less than legal manner, and this meant finding a ‘fence’.
This really brought him into some rather bad company, but it seemed to be a milieu in which he could carve out quite a place for himself. As the money disappeared – and it didn’t take long for it to run between his fingers – he needed more, and his place in the company in which he found himself seemed to require the use of sawn-off shotguns and (this being the ’60s) stockings over the head.
If one averages out the earnings of a life of crime into a weekly wage, it really never can be much, particularly because of long and frequent periods of incarceration; though these periods do provide free board and lodging.
It is in prison, by the way, that I met the Pompey man, and completed the story begun in a book produced by two members of the WI. I’d better explain.
I used to tell stories in various HM prisons – sometimes I was storytelling for the children of prisoners during visiting times, and sometimes I was working with prisoners who were making recordings of stories they could send to their children. It was during a visit to Wormwood Scrubs that I met the gentleman in question. I asked his permission to relate the story, though he didn’t want me to give his name because he was never prosecuted for the removal of that chest of gold coins from the cottage in Braishfield.
I am, however, very serious about the ethical transmission of folklore and stories, and I would never dream of using sources that were less than honest and trustworthy. I have never met the two ladies of the WI, who wrote that wonderful book back in 1936, but I’m absolutely certain that they were honest and trustworthy, and would never dream of making anything up.
3
THE APPLE TREE MAN
First thing in the morning we used to ‘switch the greens’. This was in 1977 when I was a greenkeeper. The greens would be covered in a blanket of dew, and this could incubate fusarium disease and fairy rings. The word ‘disease’ makes it sound very sinister, but it’s only called a disease because it’s something not wanted by golfers – an innocuous fungus – and fairy rings, as the name implies, are surely beautiful.
But golfers want the greens to be green – an unblemished, regular, livid green desert – so we’d be there at seven thirty in the morning with our long fibreglass rods, swishing semicircles on the grass, which would transform from dewy silver to bright green as we swished the long, flexible rods over the surface. It was very therapeutic. Then at nine o'clock – time for a tea break – the van would arrive, honking furiously, from Stainer’s bakery in Bishops Waltham, and the smell of freshly baked lardy cake would drift across the greens and fairways, and we’d be ready for a brew up.
Jim Privett thought the sight of us switching the greens was hilarious. The land had only recently become a golf course, indeed when I first went to work there it was still under construction, and it used to be a farm. Jim, who was ninety-six years old, had worked on that land all his life; though it didn’t seem to trouble him seeing it being turned into a golf course. It troubled me – and I was part of the process – but I suppose a job is a job.
Jim had been exempted from military service during the First World War, because agriculture was a vital industry. I have a feeling that not everyone was really so eager to rush off and do their patriotic duty – and that was the one event that might have taken him away from Hampshire. His world was – geographically – a small one. To him, Bishops Waltham was ‘sin city’ where all sorts of stuff went on – and probably it did – and as for Southampton and Portsmouth, well, they were far away metropolises. The centre of his world was Sandy Lane, that sunken lane that snaked from the Botley Road to Waltham Chase. I don’t mean to infer that Jim’s world was small in every way, because we all have approximately the same size brain, so surely we interpret our physical surroundings and experience according to our own consciousness and perception. In days when aeroplanes can whisk us off to other countries and allow us to gaze voyeuristically at other people’s lives, I would question the cliché that travel broadens the horizons. What horizons?
Jim and his dog were always up and down Sandy Lane, which skirted the edge of the golf course. We’d often see him when we drove our mowers and tractors up and down the lane, in between the old barn that was our machine shed and the various entrances to the golf course. Jim had somehow trained his dog to hunt out golf balls, and he made a few bob selling them back to golfers. He was amused by golfers. He considered them to be ‘townies’, and if some of them lived in the country, well, what was the country becoming anyway but an extended suburb of the town? Jim’s amusement never seemed to contain resentment. Whatever life chucked at you, that’s the way it was. Always had been.
Anyway, Jim knew that my surname was O’Leary, and to him this meant that I was Irish. Oh, should I witter on here about stereotypes? I don’t think so. That I should be knocking the dew off the grass in the morning caused him to go into paroxysms of wheezing laughter about leprechauns and the like. But the area had its own folklore, and now, I think, Jim is part of that folklore.
Jim never got used to the new ways. Agriculture changed dramatically during his lifetime as a farm worker, and insecticides and herbicides became a regular part of farming. When Jim had been out spraying, with his backpack and no protective gear (which, even if it had been used by the average farm worker in those days, he would have looked down on as being a bit namby-pamby) and the nozzles had become blocked, he would put the nozzle in his mouth and blow on it, in order to clear the blockage. This was a very bad idea – the insecticide and herbicide got into his lower lip and rotted it away. Jim had to go to the hospital in Winchester, which was an epic journey for him, and have the remains of his lower lip cut off, the skin then being pulled up over the gums (he didn’t have any lower teeth) to make a substitute lip.
Jim used to wear a big hat, he had big, bushy eyebrows and he always had a pipe clasped between his upper lip and his lower non-lip, through
which he smoked a very strong tobacco. You could tell when Jim was coming down the lane, because you could smell his baccy smoke. My mate Victor, who still lives near Sandy Lane, says that sometimes he can smell Jim’s baccy smoke even now, when he’s taking the dog out in the evening. He’s probably pulling my leg, but I can still feel Jim’s presence in old Sandy Lane.
Anyway, one night in the early 1970s, Jim and I went for a few pints down the Wheatsheath.
It was nearly midnight when we wandered up Sandy Lane and stopped by the gate to the old orchard. I always used to climb over this gate to get back to the caravan where I lived – I’d then thread my way through the orchard, go round Basil Gamblin’s pond (a dreary old place all surrounded by elder bushes), across a couple of fields, and back to the caravan.
Anyway, I piddled on the left-hand gatepost, whilst Jim piddled on the right-hand gatepost, then we leaned on the gate and carried on talking. I loved listening to Jim talk about how things used to be in the Hampshire countryside, and it certainly wasn’t all rosy, romantic stuff; he’d had a hard life. I’d think about all the changes that had taken place during the twentieth century, and Jim’s life throughout this; one that was at the same time insular, and intensely adaptive.
‘Have you heard tell of wassailing the orchard?’ asked Jim. I hadn’t. I remembered the carol, ‘Here we come a wassailing’, but that was about it.
‘Years ago,’ said Jim, ‘on twelfth night – that’s twelve nights after Christmas, the old New Year – we used to get in the orchard and make a big noise. We’d fire our shotguns up in the air, we’d ring bells, we’d bang pots and pans together, and we’d sing special wassail songs, and shout wassail shouts.’
I was interested in this. In my experience people didn’t talk so much about old traditions; it was more something that you read about in books.
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales Page 2