On being haunted and havening by Sandra Horn

A confession: various inconveniences/impositions have caught up with me this month and I’ve run out of time. Rather than not blog, I’ve fished out an old ramble about being variously haunted. I apologise and hope to do better next time.

 Hauntings

All houses, all enclosed spaces which have been inhabited by people, no matter how transiently, are haunted. When a word is spoken inside a room, it sets up vibrations which become smaller and smaller but never really die away altogether. Every word said, every noise made, in every house everywhere, is still there. Trapped inside. It is the same with shapes and movements. They create patterns, disturbances in the air which attenuate but never quite go away. In a new house, there are the sounds of hammers and drills, builders chatting, laughing, swearing, all just under the threshold of hearing. The air is full of the unseen movements of people laying floorboards, shinning up ladders, painting walls, drinking tea. An old house also contains the essences of mealtimes, rows, lovemaking, birth, death - every confession, tear, lie, song. Every fart and avowal, every momentous utterance and commonplace triviality.

By accident or design, some people choose to live in new houses. They may like the echoey quality. After all, a few laughs and swearwords and hammer noises buzzing inaudibly round the rafters don't amount to much.

There are those, on the other hand, who prefer the comforting fug of old houses, where generations of subliminal sights and sounds crowd the rooms. We absorb them, of course. They fill up spaces in houses, and in us. A blink, a yawn, an unprotected earhole yielded up in the night, and we are impregnated. Deja vu, the powerful sense of familiarity we feel in a situation we have never been in before, is probably the microscopic trace of someone else's experience. We breathed or blinked or opened up in some way, and it drifted in. Those people who believe they have lived before, and can recapture something of those former lives under hypnosis, are not so much reincarnated as revisited. Egyptian queen, roman slave, vestal virgin - their shadows drift over the world in old urns and boxes, in museum exhibits, or clinging like lice to travellers in ancient lands. It is the same with irrelevant and peculiar thoughts, feelings, beliefs. Irrational passions and hates. Words which pop out when we did not know we were going to say them. I was at an office party once, when a pleasant, smiling colleague came to fill my glass. I watched her smile shrivel and fall off as a voice came out of my mouth, saying "I cannot understand why people persist in serving this awful sweet sherry with cheesy biscuits. It's bizarre." I am not the sort of person who is knowledgeable about what one ought to drink with what. I don't even care. Nor am I given to making rude remarks about food and drink, especially when someone else has prepared and served it for me. I was brought up to know better. These aberrations are nothing to do with the subconscious mind; they are evidence of possession on a minute scale.

We are, of course, variously porous. Those we call mad are so thin-skinned that their phantasms and the external realities are all of a piece with their inner lives. On the other hand, there are psychopaths, who are not permeable at all, and who shut out everything except their own need. As the mad get older, they quieten under the weight of years of trying to sort out which from what. Ultimately, they give in, and let it all wash over them. Psychopaths eventually cave in too, if they live long enough. Most of them don't. They crumple inwards under the constant battering of the infinitesimal trying to get in, to be heard, seen, felt. Those of us who are neither recognisably mad nor completely psychopathic hover between the extremes, sometimes drifting one way, sometimes the other. As we get older, though, we all become more porous. You can see it happening; skin becomes crumpled, fine, soft, receptive. In old age the effort of concentrating on external events becomes onerous, as well. Finally, dementia is a real liberation for the microbial influences. A second bite at the cherry, so to speak. There was a little old man in the post office the other day, queueing up to get his pension. He was slightly crumpled. He wore a flat cap and looked steadily at the floor. Suddenly, from under the peak of his cap, a clear, young voice said "Of course, I wank a lot." Then he shuffled to the counter and collected his money, silently, touching his cap to the lady clerk.

For a moment, the sly salacious grin of a seventeenth-century harlot smears the face of the bishop's wife. The nursing home resident with the vacant expression, lovely man, never any trouble, gets up from his chair, undoes the fearsomely complicated lock, and strides out of the door. He is found three days later in Gateshead, vacant as ever. The incubi are potent but ephemeral.

 I was once driving behind another car, and the man at the wheel kept squirming about and looking down and waving one arm, as if trying to swat something. He managed to keep the car more or less straight, but every time he stopped at a junction he thrashed about even more. It was as if the car was full of something bothersome. Scorpions, perhaps. Scuttling about. He did not pull into the side and stop to sort out whatever it was, though; he kept on driving and writhing. Well, you would. If you intend to drive from A to B and someone wants to be sick or the car fills up with scorpions at B minus X miles, it is perfectly maddening. Breaking the preplanned programme acknowledges the reality of the scorpions; then they must be dealt with. It is safer not to stop.

How is it possible to ignore the whispers and shadows with which we are inhabited and surrounded? To keep on going more or less straight while the uninvited and unexpected demand attention? Those who pause to listen and look are considered mad. Those who stop and sort out their scorpions are in danger, and therefore potentially dangerous.

 Havening

"I have some bad news," said my uncle. "Gran's gone." My mother made a strange little noise, something between a yelp and a whimper, and put her hand up to her head as if a very sharp pain had gone through it. I was making a mosaic by putting coloured balls into round holes. It was a mindless kind of game, but the results could be pleasing. The balls had a metallic sheen, and were magneta, green and gold. A certain amount of concentration was needed to complete a pattern. I carried on picking up the balls and dropping them carefully into the holes. It was important to go on to the end. Not to break the rhythm, not to disrupt the plan. My Great-gran had gone into the dark. There was no pulling over to sort that one out. Keep going. Gran's comfortable bulk and sharp-edged voice was part of me, and I was her Sugar and her Sunshine, and Sander, because she never could get her tongue round my heathenish name. Gran raged if someone brought May blossom into the house, put shoes on a table or gave a knife as a gift (it had to be paid for by the recipient, or it would cut friendship). Gran yelled at everyone to unplug everything electric, turn off the lights, cover mirrors and hide all metal objects in a thunderstorm. She was angry with me only once, because I said "Blimey." It meant 'God blind me', and I would be struck blind if I kept on saying it. She knew a man who said it all the time, and in the end, he went blind. She worried about my nerves, because I was highly strung. You could frighten people into fits and make them a nervous wreck if they were highly strung like me. Gran knew a woman once who was, and she was scared of ferrets. Her husband would keep them, although she begged and pleaded with him to get rid of them, especially when she fell pregnant. He wouldn't part with them, though, and when her baby was born it had a face like a ferret, and it cried like a ferret kit mewing. One day it had a fit, and a thing like a worm came out of its brain and down its nose, and it died. Gran had varicose ulcers which had to be dressed with pungent pink ointment. She could not get about much. The world had to come to her. She made nettle tea for rheumatism and spotty skin, and home-made wine from potatoes, oranges, turnips, dandelions, cherries. I used to pick dandelions for her until my hands were black and stinking, and it seemed that I had picked all of them; every one in the known world. "Is that all?" she would say, "There's only enough for a teacupful. I need lots more than that."

In the late summer, Great-gran took us all hop-picking. Everyone except the working men of the family had to go. It was no hardship for me - I loved the early morning rising and arriving at the field as the dew was coming off the ground, loved all of us being together all day, picking my quota in Grandad's upturned trilby, and later progressing to an upside-down umbrella shared with my young Aunts and Uncles. When we had picked it full, we were free to hunt for brown hairy caterpillars, plunder hedgerows for inedible sloes and green hazelnuts, watch the hops being measured into bushel baskets and the quota recorded by the tallyman, and picnic on strong tea brewed in the open on a primus stove, tomato sandwiches and fruit cake. Great-gran sat on her stool by the sacking bin, scolding us for dropping leaves in or breaking the hops, and commenting on the poor quality of other people's pickings not quite under her breath. 

 

 My Great-grandad, her sweet smiley husband, died when I was five. He had always shared his dinner with me. A saucer was put by his plate every day, and he would take a selection of dainty bits from his meal and set them on the saucer for me. I was his treasure. When he died, I was lifted up to kiss him goodbye. "He's not dead!" I said (God knows what it meant anyway - some sort of grownup stuff I could not grasp). "He's only joking. I saw his foot move." I gazed hard at him in his best clothes, boots shining like water, sure I would see a smile break out under his moustache. I called him. "Look, look!" I said. "He's smiling!" "No, my duck," said Gran. "He won't smile no more." I remember that incident, but I do not remember that he was there before it, and gone afterwards. It stands in a time of its own. Seven years later, when I was twelve, came the visit from my Uncle to tell us that Gran had gone too. I was not ready for Gran to leave, and so I carried on as if she had not. Day after day for years I looked to the chair she always sat in, every time I walked into that room. I expected to see her there, where she had always been. I was surprised when she was not. I carried on, more or less straight, flailing about from time to time, but not stopping or pulling over to deal with the interruption. So it happened slowly, inch by inch, year by year; fading almost imperceptibly, she became, eventually, a shadowy presence rather than a solid one. More inside me than out. Absorbed along with Grandad, tucked into a corner. Safely gathered, as I once saw on a tombstone. It is opposite of giving birth; taking the dead back in and havening them, letting them join all the other invisible, unheard spirits we live with.