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Kindred Spirit

KINDRED SPIRITS by Lucy McCarraher

Shortly after moving from London to a 17th century farmhouse in a rural South Norfolk village, we were visited by a psychic friend. Mike has communicated with those on "the other side" since he was a child; he doesn't go looking for them, but it seems they seek him out with messages for those they've left behind. He sometimes feels he has to go and ask a stranger in a pub whether they know who "X" is, and whether some information about "Y" means anything to them. Inevitably it does and, even if initially sceptical, people are always amazed and grateful, in the end, for the communication.

I've always been fascinated by ghosts and the supernatural, but nothing like this had ever happened for me. This hot summer evening, though after a sudden storm had lit up the fields behind us with wild forks of lightening and crashes of thunder, Mike gave a slight shudder and said, “Lucy, there’s someone here and he wants to talk to you… “

Over the next forty minutes, Mike relayed what he was hearing from a man who claimed he had lived in our village, had been accused of a crime he hadn’t committed and had to leave under a cloud around the year 1945. He was pleased and “tickled” that I had come to live in this house – which was not a place he had ever lived, though he had possibly worked here – because he knew I was a writer and researcher. He wanted me to tell his story and “right the wrong”; clear his name of the false accusation. In fact he gave his name quite clearly, and the nickname he was often known by, and told (though some of the information came in pictures and feelings as well as words) Mike where he could be found in the churchyard. But he was much less clear about the incident that had caused him the trouble. In response to my questions, Mike was told there were still people around who would remember him, that people from the church were involved, there was a definite World War Two feel to his story, but not much other useful detail.

However, this man had wise words for someone who had moved to the country with the hope of becoming a fiction writer. He told me I should move my study from the attic down to a room with a wide bay window overlooking fields and the church, because this would be my “window on the world” at which I should write. He told me his story was a gift to me. I wasn’t too sure what to make of all this – at the time I only had three abandoned chapters of a London-based novel in a drawer somewhere and an idea about writing a factual book on moving to the country. The next day, though, I took the dog for a walk past the village church and decided to take a look in the graveyard. To my amazement, there was a small plaque, exactly where he had described it, with the name of my ghost and dates that showed he would have been a young man in the Second World War. Despite this somewhat shocking confirmation, finding out any more about him wasn’t straightforward. I couldn’t find any older residents of the village who remembered him, but eventually found a record of his daughter attending the village school (where my daughters go) during the early 1940s, their address and date of departure “moving to London” in 1946. I tried to find the daughter, but with no result. Eventually, having forgotten that he said people connected to the church would help, I put my ghost story and a request for information in our parish newsletter – and within a week his son (who lives abroad and was on a very rare visit home) and nephew had both rung me, and prompted by her brother, his daughter wrote to me.

They had all been children in the 1940s, and not aware of any crime or indiscretion that their father or uncle had committed. But from their different accounts I pieced together that my man had been a frequent visitor to the village before the war, staying with his uncle and aunt at their farm. During these visits he had met the daughter of one of the village’s most prosperous families (they owned a shop, the mill and much surrounding farmland), they had fallen in love and eventually married. She already had a son and then they had a daughter themselves. When he was called up to fight, she and the children went to live with her mother and helped run the shop. He moved in with them when the war ended. His son and daughter remembered my ghost as a great father, loving and committed husband, but a “failed businessman” – someone who always had lots of ideas for making money but never managed to bring any to fruition. His death certificate (which I sent up for), says that his last occupation was as a driving instructor. They couldn’t think of anything he had been accused of, though told me that a milestone in their lives was when their grandfather (his father-in-law) had unexpectedly died in 1944, leaving no will. A family row meant they had had to leave their house and go to live in London. This had been very upsetting to the two children who had been happy at their schools and their environment.

The nephew recalled his uncle in slightly different terms: “a wheeler dealer” and “a spiv”; someone who liked the ladies was how he described him. He remembered that when his grandfather had died – intestate – the estate had been much smaller than expected, money and goods apparently missing. His own father had been a strange, reclusive man who been in the RAF, lived apart from his wife and child and didn’t think much of his sister’s choice of husband. That was it – the information trail stopped there. The son and daughter, polite though they had been to someone claiming to have been called on by their father’s spirit, suggested I should leave well alone. Mike received no return visit from our man and doesn’t “call up” his visitors. In a last ditch attempt to find out the facts, I went to a friend who is also a professional psychic and asked her if she could contact my man. I gave her his name and the wartime date, but she wanted no more information. At first there was no response to her efforts to tap into the spirit world, but then a charming gentleman in a demob suit and trilby appeared to her - “I want to call him a spiv,” she said - but he said nothing. As she was about to give up, another man “came through”. This gentleman was in RAF uniform, a very upright, establishment figure who had taken part in WW2. The session was taped and this is what she said, verbatim:

“This gentleman has some regrets. This gentleman… there is a lot of emotion with this gentleman. He said he upset some people. He said it was never his intention to upset. He was, in his words, he was “rather a selfish person”. He said also he realises now he was harsher than he should have been. He realises now that he was difficult. He thinks that people might have misunderstood him sometimes. He was blunt. He said what he thought, and often without thinking about others around. But he was very stubborn and although he knew he had said things wrong, he would not give in. That was not good. He would like to apologise but it is so late. I feel this person has, that he did mellow somewhat in his later years, but it was like he was two people. He says he is sorry, he would like all that to be gone, but he knows it’s not, because he never realised there would be repercussions and there were so many repercussions.” Shortly after this quite long drawn out set of events I got my first novel was published – “Blood and Water” was set, in London’s Crystal Palace district; the present day heroine had a psychic gift that took the reader back into the history of the palace and the place. I knew where my second plot would come from. “Kindred Spirits” combines my experience of moving to the country with that of a Land Girl who comes to the same farmhouse in 1939. She works for the Jackson family, whose eldest daughter, Emma, falls for a charming wheeler dealer called Henry Tinker. Both Londoners find kindred spirits in their new rural environments – and spirits of the supernatural kind. As it says on the back cover: “Mo Mozart, with her GP husband Jack and two young children, moves from Crystal Palace to rural Norfolk in pursuit of the perfectly balanced lifestyle. Their idyllic farmhouse, though, holds dark family secrets that date back decades – to when Dottie Hammond moved from London to become a World War Two Land Girl on a farm surrounded by Norfolk’s RAF/USA Airbases.

Mo’s happy country life starts to unravel when Jack is accused of abusing a young patient, she starts having flashbacks to the 1940s and her daughter, Lily, develops an imaginary friend from the same era. With help from both town and country friends, experiences of past and present, Dottie’s wartime diary and a community production of Hamlet, Mo uncovers the unresolved events that have haunted the village of Great Haddeston for seventy years. In the process she sorts out her own complex family issues that revolve around Jack’s adoption and his glamorous birth mother.” I can only hope that, while the story of “Kindred Spirits” is entirely a work of fiction based around some historical events, the character of Henry Tinker captures some of my ghost’s spirit – his personality and charm, and that the unravelling of the plot I have woven around him goes some way to vindicating him from what he may have been accused of all those years ago.

“Kindred Spirits” and “Blood and Water” by Lucy McCarraher are on sale through www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.com and can be ordered through any bookshop (for “Kindred Spirits” quote ISBN: 1849231729). For more information, go to www.lucymccarraher.com .