Alas poor ghost, by Dennis Hamley

          Someone once said that the invention of electric light spelt the end of the ghost story.  And I see what she or he meant.  After all, the invention of the mobile phone has led to a significant increase in the number of fictional locations where you can't get a signal.  Progress seems inimical to fiction.

           I used to write a lot of ghost stories.  People actually used to refer to me as 'Ah, Dennis Hamley, the ghost story writer.' It's the genre which taught me how to write short stories.  The light was definitely switched on as I wrote them but then there were no mobiles to make what was a 'present day' story when I wrote it, credible for today's readers.  Even so, I'm making an ebook selection of those of mine which I think may be worth resurrecting. They appeared in a variety of books, starting with a collection The Shirt off a Hanged Man's Back, published in 1984, for which I still have a great affection.  It was about then that I began to be asked by editors for stories for their own collections.  I did lots, several of them for the OUP collections edited by Dennis Pepper, and mainly of a ghosty type.  Then I put some of them in my own collection, Coded Signals, published in 1990.  And there have been several since for various editors.

The very first

          What's the attraction?  When I was a kid there were lots of 'ghost' stories around in annuals and comics.  They had a common formula.  There was a 'ghost' which  scared the locals away. ' Oo no, I dursn't go down there of a night.' The 'ghosts' were invariably a cover for some evil criminal project.  The investigators, usually two very resourceful boys, sussed out what was happening, whether the 'ghost' was a horse painted luminous white, a translucent monk projected by a hidden film projector, once even an insect trapped inside a headlight casting terrifying shadows on the chalky side of a cutting.  The boys sized up the situation, phoned the police and the baddies were all arrested.  But the locals still 'dursn't go down there of a night.'  Scooby-doo carries on this noble tradition.  I liked those stories then and, in an odd sort of way, still do.

          But I had no idea when I was very young that the ghost story is a genre with a long history.  It is as old as storytelling itself and satisfies a deep-seated longing, even instinct.  There are particular structures which keep recurring.  

          One I especially like is where a person comes to warn against some terrible danger and afterwards it's found that it was a revenant who died at the same moment as the warning.  When I first read a story like that I was disappointed.  It had been done now and that meant I couldn't do it myself.   But then I found the story again, in a different guise by a different author.  And again.  I kept finding it in odd places. It's in medieval ballads. I think Homer and Virgil use it.  So I did write it after all.  And again.  And again.  Shamelessly.

          Why should this particular form keep recurring?  I think because it satisfies something very deep down in us. It has a ghostly frisson sure enough but it's also comforting that there are those now dead who are still looking out for us.  And that's what we would all like to think.

          So I came to look at the ghost story less as a scary manifestation, though it always should be, and more as an important literary metaphor - and, if you like, a convention to cut out an interminable amount of research  by the human characters to discover something buried deep in the past.  The ghost is, if you like, a messenger.

          When I've done Authors in School visits, kids often ask me whether I believe in ghosts.  I usually say 'Not really' in an apologetic way (though veteran readers of this blogspot may remember that once I said it was otherwise.  Yes, I did hear a Bronte sister crying).   But I do tell them that there's one ghost I really do believe in, have seen many times and who still makes me feel a bit scared.  The ghost of Hamlet's father.  He is the perfect ghost.  He appears from nowhere, magnificent and frightening, lays bare a secret from the past and then goes.  When he appears again it may be just a guilty hallucination.  But he's definitely there the first time.

         Guilty hallucination?  In Macbeth, that's how Banquo is usually presented. Only Macbeth sees him.  But I remember the Old Vic production with John Neville in the 60s, in which Banquo's ghost actually appeared, blood-boltered and threatening, moving slowly up onto the stage towards his allotted chair at the feast.  I really felt physically frightened - no, worse, the living crap was being scared out of me. I felt I  really was in the presence of the supernatural.  Magnificent.  Shakespeare can do this to you.  Modern producers who just have an empty chair are, to my mind, wimps.

          So that's how most of my ghosts work.  They aren't on general display: they have a target audience and lay bare an old secret, the ghost's unfinished business,  which the people in the present are charged to complete.  These stories appear in many time periods, locations and guises.  They are, I hope, all very different.  But that's their regular deep structure.

          For me, though, there's one big exception and it's the best example I have of writing as therapy.  Some of you know that in 1983 I was taken suddenly and completely unexpectedly ill and bundled off to Harefield Hospital for an emergency heart by-pass.  Its odd that my memories of that time are really rather pleasant - in fact, just as the moment of truth arrived, funny - because the actuality was that at the time I didn't think I was going to come out alive.

          But the operation was good and thirty years later I'm still here and going nowhere.  However, when I came out of Harefield I was in a strange emotional state, completely unable to understand what had happened to me and not able to come to terms with it.

          And it's odd what scale of values we have at such times.  A few days before I was ill I'd been asked to write a story for an anthology with the general title Outsiders.  When I came out, I remembered this and was seized by a sort of panic.  I had to write this story because if I didn't I'd be regarded throughout the book world as unprofessional and nobody would ever ask me again.  But I was in no state to write a story because the only subject I could think of was my operation and the only place was Harefield Hospital.  Who'd want to hear about them?

          But something odd happened.  Into my mind flashed a picture of a boy, about 14, lying in a bed waiting for a heart operation.  I'd seen him already, flat on a trolley, unconscious, with an oxygen mask over his face, and the image stuck.  But I took him off the trolley, brought him back to consciousness and put him back in his hospital bed.  Then he finds there's another boy in the next bed.  And there's something rather strange about him.  What is it?

          I took the plunge and started writing, very quickly, expecting any moment to give up, crying 'I can't do this.'  But the story grew. Although I say it myself, it's quite scary. And it wasn't until I was half way through that I realised I was retelling my own experience - but distantly, detached, dramatised.  When I finished I read it through - and felt more than the usual satisfaction on completing a story or novel.  The Bed by the Door. I was happy.  I was through the experience.  I'd distanced it, come to terms with it, understood it, expressed it.  I could now recover.

          Wonderful. I owe it to the writing process. And, of course, the ghost.

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