St Catherine’s Hill overlooks Winchester, and on top of the hill there is a ‘miz-maze’. There are two miz-mazes in Hampshire, one at Breamore and this one, next to Winchester. They aren’t hedged mazes, they are ridge and furrow patterns cut into the ground. These aren’t playgrounds where you can enjoy the sensation of being lost in a giant puzzle, they seem to represent some act of penance or self-flagellating worship – a place where people shuffle along on their knees; a task, certainly not a pleasure.
Winchester dog walkers tell of how, in the early morning, or at dusk, they can hear weeping from the miz-maze, and whilst they can see nothing, they can sense a boy shuffling around and around.
The story is that the ghost is a former pupil of Winchester College, the public school at the bottom of the hill, and that having committed some sort of misdemeanour, his punishment was not being allowed to go home for the Whitsun holidays. He spent the time up on the hill, re-digging the ancient miz-maze, of which little remained but marks on the ground. Obsessively he continued his task till his heart burst, and he died at the centre of the maze.
And that’s one of the saddest stories I know – the boy being trained to become one of the distorted administrators of this wondrous and benighted country, symbolising all of the powerful with his powerlessness; his continuous shuffling and circling of the hill.
Some motherly figure – please go up there and set him free!
14
DAVEY JONES’ LOCKER
I used to go once a week to a lovely school called St John’s Primary, in Gosport – a school switched on enough to take advantage of an arts partnership scheme. Sometimes at lunchtime I’d take a wander, in order to eat my sandwiches outside – I’d cross the road, walk through the park, and find myself on the edge of Gosport Creek.
Muddy, tidal, with a rotting wooden boat half sunk in the mud, one of those fascinating, unmanaged areas; and then across the narrow gap of Portsmouth Harbour there was Pompey, and the Spinnaker Tower, the masts of the Victory, and the roofs of the naval dockyard. One lunchtime I gazed across the creek after one of those cold, clammy mists had rolled in from the sea, and the top of the Spinnaker Tower hovered above the mist, whilst the seabirds cried mournfully as they flew in from the Solent.
Naturally enough Gosport Creek became part of many of the children’s inner landscape – and their stories expanded the creek into another world, a very maritime world peopled with pirates, smugglers, sea monsters and even mermaids, although I thought that a Gosport mermaid might well be one that sits on a rock, smoking a roll-up, and telling everyone to f*** off (not that I suggested that to the children, I hasten to add; their mermaids tended to be more like Ariel, from the Disney film).
But then, Gosport is full of ghost stories – and how could it be otherwise? Think of all those ships that have sailed out of Gosport; think of its position on the other side of the lagoon from old Pompey – which makes it in some ways an extension of Portsmouth, connected by the Gosport Ferry. And there’s the narrow gap, between Gosport Town and Portsmouth Dockyard, through which all those ships glide – and at one time the gibbeted remains of Jack the Painter dangled from Fort Blockhouse, which lies in the gap, as a warning to sailors not to indulge in mutinous or revolutionary behaviour.
Whose corpse by ponderous irons wrung
High up on Blockhouse Beach was hung,
And long to every tempest swung?
Why truly, Jack the Painter.
– Henry Slight, 1820
… but you’ll have to read Hampshire and the Isle of Wight Folk Tales for that story!
And the submarines – now that’s something to provide hauntings, especially in those days of diesel and shale, when the submarines sailed from Gosport. Cyril Tawney, folk singer and ex-submariner, sang about this:
On the 5th of November in ’53
The big man at Dolphin, he sent for me
‘We brought you here, sonny, ’cause we want you to know
We’ve booked you a berth in water below’.
With the diesel and shale, diesel and shale
We’ve booked you a berth with the diesel and shale.
But when I protested, ‘I’m no volunteer’
They said ‘we ain’t had one in many’s a year
But that’s a wee secret between you and me
There’s many a pressed man down under the sea’.
With the diesel and shale, diesel and shale
Down under the sea with the diesel and shale.
In 1951 HM Submarine Affray was lost, mysteriously, after she’d dived in the Solent, and it is surely the Affray that is the shadowy, spectral submarine that is sometimes seen gliding up Gosport Creek, the captain standing on the conning tower, peering out from another world.
And then there are the pubs. Gosport has got more than its fair share of haunted boozers, as it has more than its fair share of pubs anyway – even in these desperate times of pub closures – and there was a time when the public house was a thriving centre of activity; and a frightening place for a simple country man. Which brings me to a story.
Once upon a time – a Napoleonic, Nelsonian sort of a time – an early nineteenth century sort of a time, there was a farmer who lived next to Sandy Lane, near remote and obscure Shedfield.
The navy had been blockading the Channel for some time, and when it came into Portsmouth there was a great call for beef – which could be salted for rations. Word had reached the farmer that he could take his cattle to Gosport, and they’d fetch a good price from the navy victuallers.
So he walked his cattle down through Shedfield, Wickham and Fareham, and indeed he did get a good price – the effects of what felt like perpetual war with the French weren’t good for agriculture – but at least here was an advantage.
With that money in his pocket he should have headed straight back to Shedfield and old Sandy Lane, but the bustle, the light, the drunken roarings and the screechings of the Gosport Nans – it was all too exotic to him, and he just had to take a look. Just a quick one.
It soon got round the tavern that he had money in his pocket – and didn’t he suddenly seem to have so many friends? He knew he should leave, tear himself away from this mayhem – but there was another arm around his shoulders, a female voice in his ear – and the world was becoming blurry.
Then there was a crashing, a banging, and a shouting, and the clientele of the pub scattered.
‘Here’s a fine one for you, my lovely boys,’ said the landlady – who not five minutes ago had been whispering in the farmer’s ear.
The bosun’s mate, who was leading the press gang, seized the farmer by the arm; so the farmer took a lumbering, ineffectual swing at the bosun’s mate – which resulted in him receiving a rain of blows and a crack on the back of the head from a cudgel.
He woke up, and wished he hadn’t, on board ship – and this wasn’t just any ship, this was the flagship of the fleet, under the command of Captain Hardy, and carrying Admiral Lord Nelson himself; this was HMS Victory.
Of course he had to ‘learn the ropes’, and he was more capable of doing this than many. He was a farmer, a landsman – but he was strong and used to hardship, and he could fight for the space to hang his hammock, or fight for his share of the rations as well as any bugger else. He survived. That is, up until the Battle of Trafalgar.
Nelson got word that the French and Spanish fleet were off Cape Trafalgar, and in the October of 1805 that is where the two fleets met. There have been lots of pictures made of that particular encounter; paintings, drawings, engravings. Some of them seem merely picturesque, whilst others give more of an impression of the horrors of war, but all of them are pictures of the battle on the surface of the sea.
But what about below the surface? Cannon balls, chains, blocks and tackles, masts, spars; shattered fragments all raining down to the bottom of the sea. And bodies. Bits of body, limbs and torsos, and whole spread-eagled corpses, arms outstretched like starfish – all raining down through the
silent water, after the eardrum-shattering blast and cannonade of the world above.
And one of those starfish corpses was the farmer – blown from the ship during the height of battle – never more to see the fields of Shedfield, or old Sandy Lane in June all lined with elderflower, bubbling like foam.
Well, Gosport and Portsmouth were in great spirits when news of the victory got back to England – and to be honest the death of Nelson didn’t lessen these high spirits; it just gave a perfect opportunity to indulge in drunken, maudlin lamenting – and that is something really pleasurable.
The sailors got back with their prize money – and there was Nelson’s body in a brandy cask – and everyone saw ‘Hearts of Oaks’ as heroes, and Britannia ruled the waves.
The sailor who put his arms around the landlady of a particular tavern in Gosport was somehow familiar to her, but she’d seen many a sailor pass through her establishment, and she’d sold a good few farmers and fools to the press gang. He had a livid scar across his face which seemed to have shifted his features around a bit, anyway. What he had that attracted her was, of course, money – and he had lots of it. He ordered food and drink, and drink and food, and he wanted her to join him in the feast – not with the rest of the carousing rabble, not even in the snug – but in a separate room she had upstairs. He had enough money to make that worthwhile, even if he was an ugly bastard.
Now I don’t know exactly what he ordered, but here, culled from James Cramer’s Book of Portsmouth, is an itemised bill that was presented to a couple of sailors at one of the public houses in Point – that is old Spice Island in Portsmouth – in 1807, and it tells you something about the appetites of sailors when they were in the money:
40 pots of beer – 20s
18½ pints of gin – 18s
8 glasses of gin – 2s
Oysters – 4s
Shrimps – 2s
20 pots of porter – 10s
7 noggins of gin and peppermint – 7s
1 quart of rum – 7s
6 noggins of rum – 3s
10 noggins of gin – 5s
Breakfast – 6s
Pears and apples – 2s 6d
Lodgings – 5s
7½ pints of gin – 7s
20 pots of beer – 10s
10 half-noggins of beer – 5s
Attendance – 2s 6d
Total £5 14s
After they’d gorged themselves, he took her by the arm and said, ‘Come with me’ and he opened a door in a wall that had never had a door, and she couldn’t resist, she felt compelled to follow him down a dank, dripping corridor. And hell wasn’t all fire and brimstone, though he’d seen something of that before the sea took his shattered body, it was dark and wet and cold, and Davey Jones was dancing a slow hornpipe in time to the movement of the sea.
And the landlady was never seen again.
As the farmer had done what he had returned to the land of the living to do, his ghost is presumably not one of Gosport’s more persistent haunters – but you still have to be careful if you’re out on the booze in Gosport. There’s always someone to take you by the hand and lead you straight to hell.
15
THE DESOLATION
OF FRANCHEVILLE
When visitors go to the Isle of Wight, they might go to Shanklin, or Alum Bay, or one of the theme parks – and why not? They’re great places to take the kids. Or they might want to go on a ghost walk and stand outside the gates of Knighton Gorges in the darkness. If they fancy going upmarket they might go to Cowes in order to float around in a yacht whilst wearing very expensive marine clothing.
But visitors don’t so often wander along the rural north coast outside of Cowes, the coast facing the mainland, and I think they’re missing something.
I’m particularly fond of the area around Newtown. Newtown is a hamlet that once upon a time was a thriving port called Francheville; a town hall stands in splendid and strange isolation, and down the road there is a building that was once a pub, and is always referred to as Noah’s Ark. To add to this air of strangeness Newtown has its own Pied Piper legend, one which W.H. Auden claimed was the original, which got pinched by Robert Browning and transposed to Hamelin! Francheville’s Pied Piper led the rats out to the mudflats in the old harbour, where they stuck fast whilst the tide came in and drowned them. I think those mudflats are wondrous, an inter-tidal area which has its own appearing and disappearing ecosystem – now you see it, now you don’t. Now it adapts to being submerged and to absorbing the richness of the sea, now it faces the air, the sun, and the sky.
There’s a ghost there as well, though some people call her a mermaid. She has long white hair, and she drifts the inter-tidal zone looking for her baby. When the tide is in, however, she holds her baby in her arms, and melts into the sunset. That is, of course, if the sunset and the high tide happen to coincide.
The area has seen horrors. It is possible that the Anglo-Saxon King of Wessex, Caedwalla, carried out a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against the Jutes – that must leave ghosts. Then, there is evidence that the Danes attacked Francheville in 1001; these small coastal ports were always vulnerable. Then later, the then prosperous town of Francheville with its oyster beds, and its Gold Street and Silver Street, was struck by the plague, and if this wasn’t enough, the French attacked in 1377 and destroyed the place. The Pied Piper legend claims that there were no young fighting men to take on the French, because the piper had lured them all away as children.
So maybe the time when the fisherman lived in a rickety-rackety hut on the Francheville shore was in the time of the Jutes, or the time of the French raid, or a once upon a time – I wouldn’t know. But what I do know is that he was all alone.
He’d trail his nets in the Solent and he’d see beautiful sights. Sometimes, in those days, he’d see the tail fin of a whale as it dived down into the world beneath the sea, sometimes he’d see flocks of birds fly in shifting shapes from the shore and perform their own aerial dance between the two coasts, sometimes he’d see the sun setting over the water and everything would turn red; the sky would be red, the sea would be red, the clouds would be red.
But he had no one to share this with. He’d return to shore, sell some fish, trade some fish, eat some fish – but there was no one with whom to share his experiences.
One day he’d just had enough, so he hauled in his nets and threw them into the bottom of the boat, he lowered the sail, and threw it into the bottom of the boat – and then he just sat there. Like a big turnip.
For three days he floated and drifted – and at the end of that time a great moon rose out of the sea, and out of the shimmering moonlight came the Queen from under the Sea, with her comb, her mirror and her eyes of aquamarine.
‘What are you doing, just floating on my waters?’ she demanded.
‘I just don’t care anymore,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no one to share anything with, and I don’t care.’
‘Well,’ said she, ‘for three days and three nights you’ve left my fish alone, and so I feel sorry for you. Hoist your sail, sail for home, and see what awaits you.’
And so, without reflecting on whether mermaids with eyes of precious stones have the capacity for sympathy, he sailed for home.
When he got back to his rickety-rackety wooden hut, on the muddy old shore of Francheville, there was a young woman. She was a bit scruffy, and a bit scrawny, she wasn’t very clean, her hair stuck out in all directions, and her clothes were raggedy.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘My mother and father have died,’ she replied, ‘and I’m all alone in the world, so I’ve come to share my life with you, and you to share your life with me.’
And the fisherman, instead of being grateful for no longer being alone, thought to himself, ‘If the Queen from under the Sea was going to send me a wife, you’d think she’d send me a princess, all dressed in fine clothes, and with fine jewellery – but not this – this scruffy girl.’
But they were married,
because strange things happen in stories, just as they do in life, and they had a baby son.
Every day the fisherman would go out fishing, and when he returned his wife would tell him stories. They were always stories of the sea – stories of shoals of fish swimming in the bottle green waters off Spithead and Hurst, tales of ancient, drowned churches and villages, stories of the magic islands beyond the horizon, and stories of the world of the Queen from under the Sea. He loved those stories, and one day he said to her, ‘I want you to take me there.’
‘Where?’
‘To the world of the Queen from under the Sea of course; I want you to take me there.’
‘Don’t be silly, that’s only a story.’
‘No it isn’t, it’s real – and you were sent to me by the Queen from under the Sea – so you should be a princess, and I should be a prince. I want you to take me to the world under the sea.’
‘I can’t,’ she cried, ‘I can’t.’
‘Then get out of here – GET OUT AND DON’T COME BACK, not until you’re ready to take me to the world under the sea.’
And so – before he regretted his hasty words – she left, and she walked all the way to Alum Bay, and that night she lay down by the sea, with her baby in her arms, and fell asleep.
And when she awoke, the baby was gone.
‘Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby?’ she cried, and she ran up and down the shoreline calling for the baby, but the baby was gone.
And her hair, which had been black, turned white with grief.
And they said that the baby had gone to the world of the Queen from under the Sea, and surely she could have gone back there too. But the story is that a white-haired woman, returned from Alum Bay, can be seen floating up and down the mudflats beyond Newtown, that once was Francheville, and she’s calling for her baby. Maybe the haunting is some sort of an imprint; a recalling of a past event.
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Ghost Tales Page 9