Journeys 2: Time Travel and a Ghost Story

Dermot had insisted I stay the night, and he kindly let me sleep in till after ten (I imagine he was up since six or seven, like his father an early riser.

I made some toast and instant coffee, which was actually quite nice (ages since I drank the stuff) and we talked. I was interested in filming/recording two stories he'd told the previous evening after it became too dark to film: a little ghost story and a lovely whimsical journey he took me on, into the world in a photograph from 1904 he'd noticed hanging on a wall in a pub in Bristol. He'd imagined entering the photo and thinking that, as it was 1904, he could take a trip across the water to Belfast and visit his mother, who would have been 15 at the time.

Dermot had told me the ghost story just before I went to bed. He began by asking 'have you ever felt something that chilled you?', which did, indeed, do precisely that. The core of the story was an incident that happened when he was a 19-year old raw recruit in the Irish Army in 1940, stationed in a barracks in Mullingar that had been out of commission since civil-war days, deserted and boarded up for nearly 20 years.

He was sharing a room with one other man, Paddy Clarke. It was rather isolated, upstairs and above an archway that led to stables at the back of the barracks, and there was little electricity, so they had to take candles to bed.

Dermot had just gone to bed but couldn't sleep. Paddy had stayed downstairs to play cards in the mess. Dermot heard him come up and get into his bed (on the far side of the room, separated by a large table) and settle into sleep easily enough.

Later, after putting out the candle, he heard the sound of bare coming up the stairs and entering the room. Dermot thought it was peculiar that he knew they were bare feet, but he felt certain about this salient fact and it unnerved him for some reason.

The feet circled the room and returned to stop beside his bed. Dermot was facing the wall and did not turn round. At this point, he was so 'petrified' that he thought he might actually faint. In fact he wanted to faint, to fall out of consciousness as one does in certain nightmares.

Then he felt something, a hand tracing his body outline beneath the covers, slowly, from his neck right down to his ankles. Then... nothing. Dermot didn't call out or turn round. He didn't want to see who (or what) his visitor was. The hand was removed and Dermot heard the feet exit, then, almost immediately, return to circle the room again to pause near his bed, as before. A pause, then he heard them leave and descend the stairs.

A drunk soldier looking for a bit of slap and tickle, or something else? As Dermot declared, 'I don't believe in ghosts,' and what happened was most likely a perfectly carnal visitation with a peculiar approach to finding some body warmth. But still, a good story. As Graham Green demonstrated in his marvelous short story The End of the Party, supernatural dread doesn't require the supernatural.

When Dermot drove me into Salisbury to get my train I asked him to let me off at the book shop (Waterstones). I wanted to get him a gift to say thanks for such a wealth of hospitality (and stories!). He had told me he was interested in history, especially a book on the Irish Civil War. They didn't have one, not surprisingly, so I bought him Barrett's new History of Ireland and asked them to keep it for him to collect, and phoned to let him know. I hope he enjoys it.

The journey back to London was as uneventfully eventful as the previous one. I positioned my self at an arched window between carriages, which framed each scene like an unshaken snowglobe. I didn't see any 'hothouse flash uniquely' but plenty of other stuff, such as suddenly slicing through a cutting, a vast green sky dotted with cirrus-sheep and a very English-looking house in the distance, nestled near some old trees.