Looking back now, it seems to me that the whole of my childhood was pursued by one phantom or another. The smell of the woods through the open nursery window on a hot summer’s night turned me sick with an unspeakable apprehension. Believers in reincarnation would attribute this peculiarity to some sylvan tragedy in a previous existence. No doubt there must have been a physical explanation. I have come to the conclusion that most things in life are capable of a double interpretation; which is the same thing as saying that there are two aspects to every question!
Is it usual for children, I wonder, to see such marvellous colours, shapes, and appearances in the dark as both I and a sister did, between the ages of five and eight? Kaleidoscopic colours running one into the other, and an odd, very frequently recurrent vision of a cushion covered with gold pieces which poured down on the bed.
My husband, as a small child, would behold complete scenes in the corner of his nursery, and would pull his nurse on one side impatiently when she impeded his view. And let me here note a curious incident connected with his juvenile imaginings. All his life, as far back as he could remember, he had a recurrent dream of terror—at fairly rare intervals—of an immense wave rising up before him like a mountain and curling over at the top, about to overwhelm the land. He told me of this dream after we were married, adding that though it was so distinct that he could draw it, he knew it for a purely fantastic nightmare; knew that no such tall and steep wave as he beheld in his sleep could exist in nature. A few years ago—we were at Brighton, I remember—he brought up to me from the hotel room an illustrated paper, and, laying it on the table before me, said: “Look—there is my dream!”
I looked. It was an illustration that held the whole page. I saw a huge wall of water, rising sheer black, with a toppling crest of white—an awful, threatening vision! I read underneath: “Photograph of the recent tidal wave in Japan.”
Who can explain the mystery? He had had that dream first as a baby boy in Paris, some forty-five years before. No such sight, no such picture had ever come across his waking consciousness.
A tidal wave in Japan ... so far has my discursive mind led me from garden ghosts!
We know a haunted garden belonging to an old Manor House in Dorsetshire which was our abode one summer, five or six years ago. The house had once been Catherine Parr’s. It was full of ghosts too, but I am none too sure that they were mellow sixteenth-century spectres; rather I believe were they the objectionable offspring of a table-rapping spiritualistic owner.
THE FORGOTTEN NUN