Extended Rental

I’ve always preferred to take my holidays at strange times of year. Maybe it’s something to do with having been raised in a busy seaside town. I’ll take a holiday (in both senses of the word) in February or November over one in the high season any time. Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering about winter holidays, winter holidays are fine, but (though I’m honestly not some latter-day Scrooge) heaven preserve me from Turkey and Tinsel breaks, and as for skiing, well, breaking my leg on the nursery slopes when I was thirteen and had persuaded my parents to part with money they could barely afford to send me skiing with the school made me decide it wasn’t for me.

     Anyway, it was as well I had decided to take a late January break . I tend to alternate between hotels and self-catering, and this time had plumped for the latter. I suppose it was a bit of a working holiday, though I didn’t intend over-exerting myself. I worked mainly from home anyway, as an editor’s assistant – which sounds terribly grandiose but broadly speaking means I had some of the responsibility for whatever the online equivalent of the slush pile is – for a small publishing company that specialised in joint venture publishing. Let me stress it wasn’t vanity publishing – the head honcho Marilyn was very keen to point that out, and she was right. They’d never fleece someone with the literary talent of a mollusc out of their money. They tended to specialise in local history, in a fairly broad sense, though not exclusively. 

     I won’t deny that an element of if you can’t beat them, join them occurred to me. I decided to knuckle down to a bit of my own writing while I was at Wisteria Cottage. The name, by the way, wasn’t just fanciful. As photos on their website (and I was oddly pleased to discover there was also a good old-fashioned brochure) proved there was, indeed, Wisteria, though at the moment there were only snowdrops and the conifer hedge in sight. I say only. They were very pretty and I’ve always thought that green and white can be every bit as lovely as a rampage of colour. 

     It was a sweet little cottage, though it wasn’t an old-fashioned thatched one, and, so the owner Jette (whose voice I could listen to for hours, she was originally from Denmark, conformed to the stereotype of speaking English better than most English people, but had a gorgeous combination of Scandinavian undertones mixed with a decided Norfolk burr from her adopted home) only dated from the 1930s. Mind you, that was almost 100 years ago now – something surreal about that when it seemed like only yesterday I’d known people for whom that was within living memory.

     Still, it wasn’t Wisteria Cottage, approaching its centenary, that suffered when freak storms swept over the East Coast. It was my (relatively) new build little house that I was renting in town that had the roof ripped off. Apparently the close it was on created some kind of wind tunnel effect. Though I was on the point of deciding this was time I bought my own home or at least thought about it, this was one occasion when I was glad I was renting. Hereward Housing (never did quite work out why they were named after a hero from Kent when they hung out in Yorkshire with some properties, like mine, in Lincolnshire) were good landlords to have, though I was cynical enough to think that they might also be worried about adverse comments on the building standards of their properties, and assured us all more or less the hour it happened that for the worst affected all the repairs would be done entirely at their expense and they would also foot the bill for alternative accommodation. 

     As I came to terms with the shock – realising to my relief that none of my more precious possessions were in the room most affected by the elements – I decided that if it were possible, it made perfect sense to stay in Wisteria Cottage rather than look for – well, alternative alternative accommodation. I rang Jette, and she said at once, in that fascinating voice, “Oh, Lisa, how awful. Nature sometimes reminds us who is in charge!” I wondered if that were a Danish proverb, and would normally have asked, but had more things on my mind. She went on to say that, “And as for the cottage, my dear, well, I have no more bookings until the middle of March,” absurdly, I thought of the George Eliot novel Middlemarch – yes, weird thoughts can be our salvation. “I am more than happy for you to stay until then, and will reduce the rent a little, as it is long-term. I will see to fresh linen for you, too.”

     What a nice person she is, I thought, after we had said goodbye. I supposed I should contact Hereward to make sure they were OK about these arrangements – and they were, without hesitation. 

     Almost inevitably, after the initial relief that things had been sorted practically, at least until “Middlemarch” (and I wanted to block out any thoughts of it taking longer than that) the shock hit me – not the initial “hearing bad news” shock, which had sent me onto a kind of autopilot, but the thought that my little house, which I DID like very much, even if I was thinking of moving on – had been ripped and scathed by the elements. I had a little weep, and had a glass or three of wine, and decided to turn in early and get that day over with. In that odd half and half between sleep and wakefulness I underwent some kind of shift in my thoughts about Wisteria Cottage. For a while, at least, it wasn’t my holiday cottage, but my home. That thought was both comforting and odd. 

     I’m not a person who needs 8 hours a night, not generally, and an inevitable consequence of going to sleep early is waking up early. I knew when I woke at 4.30 it would be futile to try to get to sleep again, even though, in January, it would not be light for more than 3 hours. I would go to the bathroom and then downstairs for a coffee and a bit of comfort eating of digestive biscuits and then (so I told myself) getting on with my own literary efforts that hadn’t proved that fertile so far. I put the corridor light on and pushed open the door to the bathroom, reaching out my arm to put on the light in there. It remained determinedly unlit. Had I seen a telltale flicker of the light the night before? I honestly didn’t know – my mind was elsewhere. One thing on top of another, I thought. I remembered that ever-thoughtful, Jette had left a supply of lightbulbs in the kitchen drawer, but knowing I was clumsy anyway, decided not to risk a repeat of the consequences of my skiing holiday and leave the standing on a chair and replacing the bulb until it was light. I could manage to relieve myself without accidents in the light coming in from the corridor. But somehow this did not feel like the bathroom. There was not the faint after-tang of shower gel, and it was narrower and more cluttered. Using a mixture of touch and the light from the corridor, I realised my mistake and had to give a rueful laugh. This wasn’t the bathroom at all. It was what Jette called the Supply Cupboard where she kept cleaning materials and spare loo rolls and the vacuum cleaner and the like. It was really more of a small room – in the literal and not euphemistic sense of the word! 

     When I heard a voice my first thought was that I had left the radio on in my bedroom, and it was nothing more than that. But it was – well, not a radio voice. And not the kind of thing you’d hear on the radio unless you were listening to a play – which I knew I wasn’t. It had been a news programme. “When are you coming home, Daddy? When are you coming home? I’ve been a good girl!”

     Other people may react differently, but mine in the sense of the weird – or my imagination running riot, I hurriedly told myself – was to do something practical. I picked up one of the old fashioned yard brushes stored there and cautiously poked toward the back of the cupboard. I froze only a couple of seconds later. What was I thinking of, scaring this poor little girl who was scared enough already – except OF COURSE it was only my imagination. But the second, or concurrent thought, was that even though this was a very big cupboard, the broom shouldn’t reach quite so far back. I went back to my bedroom and retrieved my torch. This was the first time I could remember actually needing one when I was on holiday, or a strange, extended holiday. There’s something contradictory about a halogen beam. It makes everything as clear as day, at least within its ambit, but there’s still a surreal, almost too bright quality that can distort as much as it illuminates. What I could see was that it wasn’t reaching a dead end, so to speak, but shining further down, ever further down a passage.

     Well, Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe might have boldly gone where no evacuee child had gone before into the world beyond the wardrobe, but I had no intention of following in her footsteps and letting the halogen beam guide me further on. 

     “When are you coming home, Daddy? When are you coming home? I’ve been a good girl!”

     And yes, there was a certain instinct to try to find her, to comfort her but – well, how was I to know when her Daddy would come home? And anyway, it was all my imagination, wasn’t it? And I was also, to be frank, scared! 

     When full daylight came and I shone the beam into the cupboard on the belt and braces principle, a wall was exactly where it should be, and all the cleaning equipment and loo rolls and the rest of it were exactly where they should be.

     The fact that there was a light bulb, although one that wasn’t working now, in the cupboard, made me wonder whether or not to replace the dead bulb. I decided against it.

     I also, without any hesitation at all, decided that I wouldn’t mention it to Jette, not even in one of those studiedly casual questions about wondering if she knew about any local ghost stories. She was a lovely person, and we got on well, but – well, I wanted something normal and unproblematic in my life, and was too much of a coward to rock that particular boat. 

     I decided (not even deluding myself!) that temporarily joining the local library would be handy when it came to research for my own putative novel, which I had now decided to set in that area. Well, it was true enough, but I also, and knew it was contradictory, wanted to get out of the cottage for a while – and also to see if I could find out about that nebulous “any” local stories. I didn’t know what I wanted the answer to be. 

     I took along my driving license and a receipt for rent I had already paid for Wisteria Cottage, hoping that would suffice for ID. I needn’t have worried. Sheila the librarian was a good friend of Jette’s, and knew about me. “That’s fine, Lisa,” she said, issuing the card. “And I’m so sorry about your house. I had some flood damage in mine a while back, and it’s always a horrible feeling.”

     I explained that I was also taking the chance to work on my own story (and fair enough, I may have, without telling any lies, let her think that my previous literary career was more established than it actually was!) and asked my rehearsed question about “any” local stories. I realised even before I had finished that Sheila was giving me a strange look – not in any way hostile, just the opposite if anything, but making it plain she wasn’t taken in by my bland generic question. “You’ve heard Julia, haven’t you?” she asked.

     I decided it was best for me to be direct, too. “I didn’t know her name, but – yes, I heard the little girl. I didn’t know if Jette knew about her.”

     Sheila smiled, “I won’t hear a word against Jette – one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. But if I were to criticise her, well, I’d say she’s just a bit too rational! She might be a Dane but she doesn’t seem to agree with what Hamlet said about more things on heaven and earth. She knows the story, and she says she believes people believe it – but that’s just her polite way of saying she thinks it’s baloney. Well, I’m not so sure.” Her smile faded, as she sighed, “It’s a sad story. Julia was a little girl here in the war – lived with her Mum and Dad in Wisteria Cottage, only it wasn’t called Wisteria Cottage then. They were a really happy family. Julia was an only child, though I believe they wanted her to have a little brother and sister. I gather that though they were all devoted to each other she was a bit of a Daddy’s girl. And her Daddy - Sergeant Anthony, Walter Anthony -was killed at El Alamein. They hadn’t told her yet, but she knew, and I fancy not just because she could see how upset her mother was though she did the best she could to hide it. She took to hiding away, something she hadn’t done before, and she managed to get locked in what they called the broom cupboard.”

     “Oh, dear God,” I muttered.

     She put a steadying hand on my arm. “It’s not as bad as you think – well, maybe it is, I don’t know. Her Mum heard her screaming and rescued her within a couple of hours. She didn’t suffer any physical harm. But between that and her dad – they had to tell her not much long after, of course – the poor mite was never the same again. She went back to school, even passed her 11 plus when the time came – she was very bright. But she had nightmare after nightmare, and in her early teens had some kind of complete breakdown. Her Mum didn’t make old bones, and Julia ended up in an institution. I gather it was a benevolent one – they weren’t all horrible. She could wash and feed herself but just seemed to be an empty shell, and still had the nightmares. She died in her 40s herself.” She paused, then said, “I’m not a medium or anything like that, but – I have my ideas about what might help her.”

     “I’m listening,” I said, quietly.

     That afternoon I bought a bunch of flowers – I’d have liked a poppy wreath, but it was the wrong time of year for them – and said, “Julia, sweetheart, I’m taking these to the war memorial. Would you like to come with me?”

     I reached the village war memorial. Yes, his name was there. Walter Brewer. “You can go to your Daddy now, Julia. Give him these flowers, and he’ll know you’re coming.”

     No, “I” didn’t reach the war memorial. We did. I felt a little squeeze in my hand. And I knew little arms were stretching out, to take the flowers from me and to lay them down on the war memorial. 

     I was not in the least worried about hearing things when I heard the plaintive notes of the Last Post and then they transformed into the joyous sound of the Reveille.