by Hatch, Ben
‘Charlie, do NOT put that in your mouth. STRAP HIM INTO THE BUGGY, BEN. THIS IS RIDICULOUS!’
‘But you said I could have what I wanted because I’m not having a party, Daddy.’
Still looking for Phoebe’s present, we’re now in the Early Learning Centre and I’m trying to modify her wish list by suggesting an alternative to the medium-sized pink rabbit that can walk and talk and goes chut chut chut when it nibbles a carrot.
‘Yes, we did,’ says Dinah. ‘And we will have a look for your medium-sized pink rabbit, I promise you.’
‘But if we can’t find one, Phoebe…’ I say.
‘But you said.’
‘We will do our best, sweetheart,’ says Dinah.
‘But Daddy, you said.’
‘We’ll look in one more shop, OK?’
But we’ve done our best. We’ve been to the Build-A-Bear Workshop (rabbit too big), the Disney Store (rabbit too small), Mothercare (rabbit couldn’t talk) and finally the Early Learning Centre (rabbits didn’t go chut chut chut).
I draw Dinah to one side in Toys R Us.
‘Love, we’re not going to find one. This is the largest shopping centre in Europe and if we can’t find it here…’
But Dinah isn’t prepared to give up.
‘We promised her, Ben. Phoebe, come here. Tell me again, where did you see the rabbit?’ Dinah asks. ‘On the telly? On an advert? Can you help us? Did it have a name?’
‘Dinah. We’re not going to find one. I’ve got another…’
Dinah raises her hand like a white-gloved traffic cop.
‘Phoebe, what’s its name?’ she asks.
‘Fluffy,’ she says. Phoebe’s voice goes fey, as it does whenever she discusses teddy bears, mermaids and other mythological creatures. ‘She was called Fluffy because she’s sooo fluffy.’
‘OK, but was Fluffy its real name from the advert or the name you gave it because you thought it looked so fluffy?’
‘Dinah, why don’t we…’
The hand comes up again.
‘I call it Fluffy because it’s fluffy,’ Phoebe says, dreamily.
‘Phoebe, what would happen if we couldn’t get Fluffy?’ I ask.
She starts to blink, about to make herself cry.
‘You see, you could make a bear in the Build-A-Bear Workshop and we could wrap it up for you and you could call it Fluffy because it would be very, very fluffy,’ I say.
Phoebe shakes her head.
‘Building your own bear? You decide what it looks like! And what colour it is!’
She looks away, thinking.
‘Really, you don’t want to build a bear?’
‘Actually, I do want to build a bear.’
‘Are you sure?’
I look at Dinah.
Phoebe nods and we set off back to the Build-A-Bear Workshop until she stops in her tracks.
‘But I want Fluffy,’ she says, blinking again.
‘But we can’t find Fluffy, sweetheart,’ I say.
I can sense Dinah’s about to go insane. Phoebe raises her eyes to think for a second – we wait, holding our breath – before she pronounces: ‘Actually, no, build a bear.’
‘No more changing your mind. Build a bear?’
‘No. Yes. No. Yes, yes.’ She smiles, nodding.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. Because I can build it. AND I can make it fluffy.’
Behind Phoebe’s back I hold out a hand. Reluctantly Dinah slaps me five.
We’re staying in a castle owned by the Craster family back up the A1 in the village, famous for herring smokehouses, which bears their name. At the turn of the century Craster was the UK kipper capital, smoking over 25,000 a day. They were gutted by Scottish fishwives, who lived in ramshackle buildings called kip houses, suitable only for sleeping in (hence the saying: having a kip). Today, the herring are still smoked over traditional fires of oak sawdust and heading coast-wards off the main road we can smell the kippers as we enter the village.
The castle, which turns out to be more of a mansion with turrets, is set back from the road down a gravel drive. We’re met in the garden by Colonel Craster and his wife, who asks us to call her Fiona and shows us around our penthouse apartment. Craster Tower has been in the colonel’s family for more than 900 years. ‘Longer than the Percys at Alnwick,’ Fiona tells us proudly. The apartment, at the top of the castle with distant sea views, is set over two floors. There are four bedrooms, a kitchen-breakfast room and a playroom.
‘Come down and see us when you’ve settled the children?’ says Mrs Craster. ‘We’ll have some wine. We’ve got a few questions we’d like to ask you.’
An hour later, we’re led into the Crasters’ drawing room on the ground floor. Fiona, who looks a little like Christine Hamilton, is sat opposite a burning fire. Colonel Craster fetches crystal glasses and seems unfazed that the wine we’ve brought down is a Chenin blanc from an Asda promotion. Fiona grills us about the book – what its sales will be, how our review might affect their business, whether we think Wi-Fi would help their occupancy rates – but soon the conversation flows more naturally. Colonel Craster, or Michael as he asks that we call him, is a former grenadier, who served in Eden with the Argyles and is now a military historian. Fiona mentions their daughter. She also has a historical bent and studied the Holocaust at university and this somehow segues into a story about how they all had dinner with the former SS officer Reinhard Spitzy, von Ribbentrop’s one-time adjutant, and the last man alive who personally knew Adolf Hitler.
‘He’s a military historian too,’ explains Michael.
‘I bet that was interesting,’ I say.
‘He was a very civilised man,’ says Fiona. ‘Excellent manners. The Nazis – the high ranking ones – people forget, they came from some of the great German families.’
Michael chips in, as I steal a glance at Dinah, ‘But our daughter, she’d studied the Holocaust.’ He holds his hands up as if to say, what can you expect from someone who has done this?
‘She asked him, sat right next to him, “Why didn’t they hang you at Nuremberg, Spitzy?”’ says Fiona.
‘That’s brave.’
‘He hid in a monastery and then in Argentina,’ says Michael.
‘But she wouldn’t let him off the hook,’ Fiona says. ‘She asked him what he thought of Hitler.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he was inspirational. He charmed everyone he met.’
‘But that wasn’t the worst bit,’ says Michael.
I catch Dinah looking at me nervously.
‘We were leaving,’ says Fiona. ‘At the door. Can you imagine? No more questions, he’d already said. But my daughter wanted to ask another. We tried to usher her out. She asked him: “Is Hitler dead?”’
Fiona pauses and, for a moment, I feel we’re on the verge of entering a Dan Brown thriller and are about to discover that Adolf Hitler is actually alive and well, maybe living down the road in Craster, smoking herring for a living.
‘What did he say?’ I almost whisper.
Fiona leans forward. ‘He said yes, you can believe it. We went to leave again, but she had one more question. And you can imagine what we were thinking. We were scared now. We wanted to go.’
She closes her eyes.
‘But she wasn’t scared. “What would you do if he came back now, Spitzy?” she asked. You could see him thinking about it. It was a question he’d obviously never been asked before. He said he’d say, “Mein führer, what have you done? There is a chalet in the woods. You will be safe there.”’
‘To be in the same room,’ I say, looking at Dinah, ‘with the last man alive who knew the man responsible for the greatest evil ever perpetrated.’
‘We drove somewhere quiet afterwards and parked the car and just sat there in silence, decompressing,’ says Michael.
It sets the tone for the rest of the night and the spooky conversation drifts somehow onto the ghosts that live in Craster Tower. ‘Although none in yo
ur rooms, of course,’ laughs Michael.
Fiona tells us they often talk to the ghosts.
‘You talk to them?’ I ask.
‘We say hello. Sometimes they make a bit of a racket.’
‘They’re friendly though,’ says Michael, who reminds Fiona of the rule they have: no talking about the ghosts in the house.
‘You can talk to them but not about them?’
‘We don’t like to talk about them in front of people,’ says Michael.
‘Some people are funny about ghosts,’ says Fiona.
I have to stop myself from looking at Dinah, who is not just scared of tortoises. She’s also frightened of, among other things, cats, dogs, spiders, disembodied voices, bees, horror films, woodlice, sudden loud noises, burglars, zombies, plastic ketchup containers with dribbled relish down their sides (pocky, she calls such things). And ghosts. More than anything, ghosts.
‘They move furniture around,’ says Fiona. ‘They get up to all sorts of tricks.’
She tells us how five guys stayed once. The Crasters heard a terrible fight in the penthouse but when they went to investigate no one was there. The next morning they found out the lads had all been at dinner.
‘So what was the noise?’ I ask.
Fiona shrugs.
‘The ghosts?’
She shrugs again.
I ask if they have names.
‘There’s the one we call the old lady ghost. She likes to settle children,’ says Fiona.
‘What do you mean, settle them?’
Dinah’s now twiddling her hair, staring into the fireplace with her hand on her chin in a stare.
‘When children become untucked she wraps them back up. It happened to our nephew once in the strawberry room.’
One of our four bedrooms upstairs has strawberry coloured bedclothes and strawberry themed wallpaper.
A few minutes later we thank the Crasters and leave.
‘It’s fucking haunted!’ says Dinah, the other side of their door. ‘Great!’
‘Dinah, please!’
‘They live here, Ben. They ought to know. Why would they say that otherwise? And it’s a nine-hundred-year-old castle. Of course it’s bloody haunted.’
‘Stop being so dramatic. You’ll scare yourself.’
‘I’m scared already.’
She grabs my hand, insists on holding it as we walk up the stairs to our apartment.
‘Ah, that’s so sweet of you, love.’
‘Don’t laugh at me. I’m not going to sleep a wink now. And you can go and check the kids when we’re upstairs. I can’t believe there’s a settling ghost. Actually, on second thoughts, we’ll both go.’
‘Worried about the old lady ghost?’
‘Shut up.’
Dinah follows me to the kids’ room, where they’re fast asleep, their covers the way they were when we left. Dinah follows me back to the bedroom. She then tails me to the bathroom where I do my teeth.
‘And thanks for asking all those questions. I tiptoe round you when you get ridiculous things into your head. You know about me and ghosts.’
‘You tiptoe around me, do you? When do you do that?’
‘When you get all hypochondriac.’
‘You laugh at me for that. That’s what I’m doing now. If I took it seriously, imagine how scared you’d get. It would make you worse. I’m more scared about that Nazi.’
Dinah then makes me come with her to unload the washing machine in the downstairs utility room and afterwards even follows me to the toilet.
‘Can I have a little privacy? At least stand back from the door a bit. I can hear your panicky little breathing.’
She leans on the door and says: ‘No. This is your fault for going on about it. Do you think we should move the kids into our room? Put a mattress on the floor.’
‘No, I don’t. You’re being ridiculous.’
I have to check on the kids again, Dinah again holding my hand on the way there, and finally we get into bed. Only now, the slightest noise – a radiator filling up, a water tank emptying or a seagull on the roof – and Dinah suddenly grips my arm. Twice she hauls me back from the edge of sleep.
‘Please, love!’
‘I’m scared. I think we should move them in here.’
‘I am not waking them up and moving them. None of us will sleep.’
The trouble is it’s impossible to be in the same room as someone as jumpy as Dinah without absorbing some of their trepidation and in the end, I start to feel a little anxious myself. To cure myself of this I utilise the same tactic I employ to stop myself worrying about money back at home. What I do when I’m really worried about our financial situation is panic Dinah even more about the problem so that I can then legitimately step back in and be my customary reassuring self. I do the same now about the ghosts.
‘Do you remember that film, the Nicole Kidman one, The Others?’ I ask her.
‘Was it a horror film?’ says Dinah from the other side of the bed.
‘No, it was more of a psychological thriller. They lived in a castle like this one.’
‘Ben?’ She opens her eyes.
‘What?’
‘Are you trying to scare me?’
‘I’m telling you about the film because the castle reminds me of the one in the film. She lived in a castle, the Nicole Kidman character, with her two kids. The first twist was that her three servants were all ghosts who’d died of TB.’
‘Why are you doing this? I’ll switch the light on and then we both won’t be able to sleep.’
‘The Kidman character discovers their graves in the grounds. That’s how she knows they’re ghosts. Imagine if tomorrow in that little courtyard garden we found two graves inscribed with the names Colonel Michael and Fiona Craster.’
Dinah turns away from me, dragging the covers with her.
‘Then we googled the Crasters and found out they committed suicide years ago. In the strawberry room. After their daughter was murdered in the war by Reinhard Spitzy.’
‘I can’t hear you. I’m chanting something in my head.’
‘The second twist was that Kidman and her two kids turned out to be ghosts as well. Do you remember that?’
Dinah puts her fingers in her ears.
I touch her shoulder.
‘I have to tell you something,’ I say.
‘La la la,’ she chants.
‘I think you’ve guessed already.’
‘La la la!’
‘Dinah, the reason we’ve not talked with friends for such a long time on this trip…’
She whacks me on the arm.
‘The reason we alone can talk to the Crasters…’
Dinah puts the pillow over her head.
I yank it off her head and whisper in her ear. I feel real evil in me as I say it. ‘Dinah, we died in that car accident in Wales. In the air ambulance we all died on the way to hospital. Don’t you remember, Dinah? Dinah, we’re ghosts, Dinah.’
She yanks herself away and jumps out of bed. ‘You fucking bastard.’
I climb out too. She looks terrified.
‘Get away from me. You fucking bastard.’
She belts me over the head with the pillow.
‘You’re horrible. Get away from me.’
My own black heart is going ten to the dozen now. In frightening her I’ve frightened myself. And that’s when we hear the noise. Dinah wheels round to face the door. ‘Whatwasthat?’ Her eyes are on stalks.
‘Dinah! Calm down. It’s nothing.’
But the hairs on the back of my neck have risen too. It’s almost like my own fear has conjured up something terrible. Dinah climbs back into bed. I follow her.
‘It’s OK. It’s an old castle. There are bound to be…’
Then we hear it again.
‘Footsteps,’ whispers Dinah. ‘Coming from the…’ She gulps, unable to say the words: strawberry room.
We remain stock-still, listening. Heading for the kitchen the footsteps stop. Then the
y change direction. There’s white all the way round Dinah’s eyes now. I put my finger to my lips. The knuckles on her hand gripping my forearm are white. Dinah begins to physically cower, slowly raising a hand up to her face, shielding her eyes from who or whatever is about to enter the room. The footsteps move closer and closer until at last a white face appears from the gloom and I hear a little voice.
‘I need a wee, Mummy.’
Dinah bangs her head angrily down on the pillow.
‘Phoebe! You frightened the life out of me!’
‘Why doesn’t Mummy want to speak to you, Daddy?’ asks Phoebe.
‘Mummy and Daddy have fallen out,’ I say. ‘Like you and Charlie fall out sometimes.’
After we’d said goodbye to the Crasters (‘I hope we didn’t talk about the ghosts too much?’… ‘No. We slept like logs’) in the car I’d apologised to Dinah.
‘I know you’re not going to believe me, but I was scared as well. I was too embarrassed to admit it so I made you more scared.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said.
After visiting the cathedral and castle in Durham we’d driven on to Hartlepool. The Tees Valley provided Ridley Scott’s inspiration for the apocalyptic backdrop to the sci-fi movie, Blade Runner. Coming in from Port Clarence it was all belching cooling towers, flaring oil chimneys and pipe-work. Even the roundabouts weren’t decorated with flowers but with metal pipes or steel hoods fashioned into artwork. Lorries carried girders and widgets about and the town smelt so strongly of the fumes from the Lion brewery just walking from the car park to the Hartlepool Maritime Museum made me feel slightly drunk. The museum was on an industrial estate surrounded by barbed wire fences snagged with shopping bags. Shell-suited locals walked about with pit bulls on fist-clenched short macho leads, the atmosphere perfectly reflecting the mood between Dinah and me.
‘Why have you fallen out?’ asks Phoebe.
We’ve just walked around HMS Trincomalee and now we’re in a recreated nineteenth-century harbour-side store, Eustace Pinchbeck’s Gunmates, and I’m reading about how the ideal coming-of-age present for a young boy has changed. Nowadays it’s a hip flask or maybe the spare keys to your mum’s Ford Escort, while in the eighteenth century it would have been a burnished wooden box containing your first pistol and powder horn.
