Diary of a Ghostwriter

There was a darkness about that house that the sunniest childhood day could not dispel, and I still find myself feeling my way through it in troubled sleep, all these years later.

That's the thing about the wrong things that are done to children - either by humans or buildings - it can take years for the child to understand that certain situations are not necessarily part of everyone else's upbringing, and the effort to understand how they came about can result in the repetition of them, or at least the revisiting of them - either in dreams or brick-built reality.

Don't get me wrong though, my parents did their absolute best to make sure that they provided me with the best childhood they could manage. It was the house which I came to distrust.

There was something deeply troubling about that house - maybe it was the shot Italian gardener? - and I really don't think that I will be rid of it. The other day, I realised that I had not dreamed of it for several months, and started to believe that it was finally out of my system. That same night, I found myself again wandering down the dark corridor which links the east wing to the west - the corridor which leads to nowhere because it was bricked off at the end when the builder installed his estranged wife in the west rooms. Maybe because she could not bear to look at him any more after his little rabbit-hunt. Maybe he could not bear to be looked at either. As a child, I often heard footsteps going down that corridor when I knew there was nobody in the house but me.

The house, being indiscriminately malevolent, also played it's mindless tricks on everyone else to found themselves trapped in it, but I, being a child and - like all children - thinking the whole world revolved around me, was only dimly aware that all was not right with the rest of my family - or at least, I was only dimly aware of the reasons why all was not right. The whole thing just was not logical, and it took me about 40 years to realise that, and stop looking for logic.

Being the youngest child by ten years, I soon found myself alone in the huge place with only my parents; my brother and sisters having moved out to start their adult lives. That's when the real trouble started.

I knew (or guessed) that things were - temporarily, thank goodness - not right between my parents, but it did not occur to me that it was all my fault until one afternoon during the school holidays when my father was at work and I was alone with my mother in the kitchen.

She had been unusually quiet as I ate breakfast, and then she quite unexpectedly went into the cloakroom and put on the old, green coat and hat she had worn for many years. I wondered where we were going, but she soon put me right about that. I was not going anywhere. She was.

I started to panic, and begged her not to go. She began screaming at me, telling me that I was an ungrateful little boy; that I never did anything to help her; that she was sick of looking after me; that she had sacrificed her life for me; etc. etc. All the while, I was begging her not to leave, with tears streaming down my panic-stricken face.

Something must have got through to her from my hysterical pleading, because she stopped shouting and just stood there, staring at me for about a minute, until she finally made me promise - several times - that I would behave myself in future.

Although I had no real idea of how I had misbehaved in the past so badly as to cause this situation, I would have promised anything at that moment - I would have sworn my soul to Satan, and possibly did.

Only when she began to remove the green coat and hat could I be sure that she was not going to run out of my life altogether, and when she did, I didn't so much relax as get my breath back.

In fact, it took me many years to relax, only managing it when I teamed up with H.I., about 50 years later. Whenever I lived with a girlfriend (and I lived with quite a few), they never understood why I kept a packed suitcase right next to the front door. If anyone was going to run off, it was damn well going to be me.

You have to be very careful what you say to children - very mindful of what your words can do.