Home life
Mother knows best
Alice Thomas Ellis
Afew weeks ago I dreamed that I was in a violently swaying house. I thought it might have been because there had just been an earthquake in LA and the fourth son is out there. He says he lives in a quake-proof house 'built on rubber bands or something', but I was not entirely reassured. Now I think it was yet .another case of precognition and I knew the hurri- cane was coming.
Patrice knew it too. Her son was due to sail on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry and she implored him to postpone the trip. 'Why, Mum?' he enquired. 'It blowing or some- thing? High waves anywhere?' She had to admit that at the moment all seemed calm, but she was deeply uneasy. In the end he was flung about at sea for eight hours instead of four, and the moral is 'Always listen to your mum'.
I was in Wales when the storms hit London and back in London when they hit Wales. I rather enjoyed listening to the weather forecasters having trouble with
their tenses — 'It may be rather windy', 'It is being very windy', 'It has been extremely windy' — but the damage was dishearten- ing to see. As we drove into London I felt like General Patton or somebody in a film approaching the devastation of a war-torn city when the enemy had been vanquished.
Our Tree of Heaven was a casualty not surprisingly since its roots do not go deep and we've lost previous ones in other, less violent storms — but the garden looks as though it has had a penitential haircut, like a prisoner, and we will have to plant yet another sumac (its proper name) and wait a month or two for it to leap up to its full height. They do grow fast, but then they keep falling over. On the other hand if they were immemorial elms or stately oaks they'd have flattened the dwelling place or the neighbour's Porsche, so I think I'll stay with the arboreal weeds.
Alfie had a different problem when he was in the country. He came back last week and telephoned the minute he got into his flat. Either we have a new ghost down there or the one we aleady had has changed his mode. Most of us have heard him banging, but usually by day. Alfie fell thankfully into bed one night after a day of pony-trekking and was just about to go off into a dreamless sleep when he heard the ghost go boing. He crept to the window and put his ear against the opening at the top. This, he claims, was very brave because by now the ghost was going boing-boing-boing at measured, regular intervals. Why, I asked, didn't Alfie go out and ask him what he was doing? Alfie uttered a hoarse, incredulous laugh down the line. He said the noise was coming from the barn and nothing on God's earth would have persuaded him to go anywhere near it. He had closed the window and leapt back into bed, too frightened even to go to the other room and wake his sister-in- law so she could hear it too.
I was rather cross with him, because nobody ever believes in the ghost and another witness (or do I mean auditor?) would have lent credibility to our claims. I think our house may be a sort of pull-up for ghosts, an inn for spectres, because they all do different things. One does the boinging, one does the breathing, and some talk by themselves in the house. One, Alfie main- tains, makes the end room in the other barn go very, very cold. I'm not in the least afraid of any of them, and Alfie's friend Jean says being in our bit of the country is like sitting in God's lap. There used to be a nunnery there and the saint who ran the place was granted the right of sanctuary in perpetuity by Brochwel Yogyltrog, Prince of Powys, so clearly evil spirits would not feel particularly at home there.
I think there must be something amiss with Alfie's conscience and I'm going to have a word with him about it. Or perhaps he was just dreaming.
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