10/4/1991
Dear Stephan,
You wanted to know who the Green Girl was in that one painting you described. Well, you’re in luck.
Apart from art, the other thing Una loved was giving herself the heebie jeebies. Every other Wednesday, a man called Henry drove the mobile library down Loom Street and Una checked out as many ghost stories as her ticket allowed. Spooks floating down corridors, The Thing in the Cellar, those mad Victorian photos of ectoplasm coming out of the gypsy woman’s eyes – Una ate it up.
Her favourite stories, though, were about being buried alive. You would not believe how often hospital patients used to wake up six feet under after some sackless doctor declared them dead, their long-buried coffins finally exhumed to show scratch marks on the inside of the lids. Or renovators turning an old castle into a swanky hotel knock through a wall and the mouldy bones of some bricked-up so-and-so rattle out. Or explorers going into an ‘uncharted’ South American cave system, only to find in the most inaccessible antechamber two human skeletons curled together like quotation marks.
Una’s absolute favourite was about the luxury cruise liner that made a mysterious clanging below decks. Engineers combed the whole ship top to bottom but couldn’t find the source. Years passed and the clanging got worse, got into the pipes, started echoing through the entire ship to wake up First Class, which was the last straw because once posh people got the hump, you knew about it. Unexplained fires began breaking out. Food supplies went rotten. A cabin boy was washed overboard by a freak wave on an otherwise calm sea. Word got around about the cursed cruise liner, and people stopped booking passage. Eventually the ship was scrapped.
Una had told me the story a dozen times, but still gripped my arm for the last part: ‘and it’s only when they prise the hull open that they find the riveter who went missing all those years before, during the ship’s construction. Still in his overalls, mallet still in his bony hand. He’d been working in the hull when it was sealed up and nobody heard his cries for help. That’s what the clanging was! His ghost hammering let me out! Let me out!’
Una was fascinated by what might have gone through the head of that doomed riveter during the days it must have taken him to die.
‘He must have realised things,’ she said to me once.
‘Like what things?’
Una was serious. She leaned close so her lips brushed my ear. ‘Like…BOO!’
Books aside, Nana was best for giving us the creeps. Whenever me and Una got too rambunctious for our own good, or didn’t come back for tea on time, or ran our gobs during Hancock’s Half Hour, she’d say, ‘If you don’t mind yourselves, Peg Powler will get you.’
Peg Powler, as Nana never tired of telling us, was a witch who lived in the river Tees and drowned boys and girls who didn’t listen to their elders and betters.
‘But we don’t live on the river,’ we’d say.
Nana was ready for that. ‘Peg’s in the pipes,’ she’d say. ‘She’ll drag you down the netty (toilet to you, Stephan) by your bum.’
Usually, that was as far as the Peg stories went, but one day, when we must hav
