Once inside, she removed her jacket and shoes, and padded on stockinged feet into the living room. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Robert walked up and down one side of the room, pipe smoke trailing behind him, the little old lady had taken over Kay’s armchair and was busy knitting, while the […]
Category: Prose
Next Door’s Ghosts Episode 4
Instead of Robert’s ghostly whistling she heard loud builders’ voices, and instead of Robert’s pipe, she smelled the builders’ roll-ups whenever they had a cigarette break. She prayed for a quick finish and cursed when it went on past Christmas and into the New Year. Maurice the ghost cat stayed with her throughout the noisy […]
Next Door’s Ghosts Episode 3
Kay wasn’t surprised when she discovered the husband, Robert, in a corner of Edith’s garden, another friendly ghost. He never spoke, just lifted his cap in greeting. She started to listen out for his faint whistle and quite liked the smell of pipe smoke that drifted over the fence. Besides Kay, the only visitors to […]
Next Door’s Ghosts Episode 2
Of course, she told her neighbour, and Edith was not surprised. “That’s my cat, Maurice.” She smiled. “He was run over before he was six months old, and we buried him in the garden. But he preferred your garden, it always was a bit of a jungle.” The little old lady in the corner grinned, […]
Giant
I’m trapped between mature queen beeches, beneath the litter of their crunchy mast. Their silver trunks are adorned with stag-horn lichen and bracket fungus, a tiny fairyland. Me, I’m a giant, one of a circle of stones haunting the landscape, a left-over from a long time ago. Sometimes the great bones of my life feel […]
Next Door’s Ghosts Episode 1
It strolled through the back door one sunny morning, a small, grey wisp of a cat like a cloud, and stayed. Kay had heard it mewing and thought it was her own cat, Muffin, so she opened a pouch of his favourite fish in jelly, forked it into a clean bowl, and placed it on […]
The Kind Ghost
‘I knew we had a ghost,’ the writer said from her armchair piled with cushions, feet warming by the fire. ‘How’s that?’ ‘When we moved in, neighbours told me about a soldier who was killed in the Great War but returned to watch over his daughter, to whom he told stories. She became a writer, […]
Ogden’s Extraordinary Observatory
Posters were plastered all over town, filling us with expectation: ‘OGDEN’S EXTRAORDINARY OBSERVATORY – ONE NIGHT ONLY’. We had to go. It’s in an abandoned factory that was closed when we were children, the year my best friend Rachel discovered astronomy. I’m glad I remembered to bring a torch. Ogden is a creepy man, clown-like […]
After the Smog Came
Nobody listened to the warnings, so when it came, it was a shock. The atmosphere was so badly poisoned by toxic smog from burning forests, exhaust fumes and waste, it leaked into space and discoloured the face of the moon. It just disappeared. After a number of years, older children had forgotten about it and […]
A Pocketful of Time
Their childhood pockets were always full of stuff: fluff-covered sweets, stubs of pencils, rubber bands, and tiny plastic figures from breakfast cereal, their currency to trade and play with on a rainy afternoon. That afternoon, when it is over, said and done, it was a time – and there was never enough of it […]
writing in north norfolk 