But my father was remarkably judgemental. I remember him claiming that a clip from The Muppet Show of Miss Piggy singing a duet with Kris Kristofferson on 'Help me make it through the night' was promoting bestiality, how Alvin Stardust was a communist (I never did get that one), and how Mott the Hoople's 'Roll Away the Stone' was somehow mocking the resurrection of Our Lord, when the stone was rolled away from his tomb on the first Easter Sunday. Stuff like that sounds ridiculous to modem ears, but I am sure that some of the things that I say in front of my young relatives sound just as irritatingly archaic to their ears.
However, despite being a judgemental old sod, my father was at hear a decent and a Godly man. Every Christmas, when I was a boy in Hong Kong, he would open our doors to a motley collection of people who wee the dispossessed of the Colonial Service, and always contacted the Captain of any American or British warships then currently moored in Hong Kong harbour and invited a couple of their most junior ratings to spend Christmas Day with us, always specifying that it should be the ones who had left home most recently, and were therefore bound to be homesick, and most likely to appreciate someone else's home and hearth for the day.
We cordially disliked each other for much of our lives, but became friends during the last eight months of his life, and when he died I was sitting by his bedside holding his hand. I know that he came to terms with much of what I do, and how I have elected to spend my life during those last months, but I am equally sure that he would have strongly disapproved of much of what I do these days. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that despite having been a devout churchman all his life, he would probably have approved of my burgeoning relationship with Panne.
For over the next few weeks, Panne seemed to have taken up residence in the aquarium supplies cupboard in the corner of my office. A few days after her arrival I beckoned her out into the garden, and carried out a little ceremony which I first learned about in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. It took place right at the beginning of the book when Dan and Una, two Edwardian children first met Puck the hedge goblin. Puck carried out a little piece of ancient magick called seizin...
'It's an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren't lawfully seized of your land—it didn't really belong to you—till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it—like this.' He held out the turves, and continued...
'Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England,' began Puck, in a sing-song voice. 'By right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; and you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give you.'
When Corinna first moved into my house in North Devon nearly eight years ago, we had a few problems with the less tangible inhabitants of the property. We had a few problems with some of the tangible ones as well, but that is another story entirely. There has been a house where we live since the original grant of the manor about fifteen hundred years ago, and historians have told me how the cottages along Back Street (which marked the back line of the Manor grounds) were built to house the workmen who built the Manor, the pub and the church (not necessarily in that order), and so we are one of the oldest inhabited locations in the area. Whatever you believe about the nature of ghosts, I am convinced that they exist. One cannot live in Myrtle Cottage for too long without encountering them.
However, my mother had died in 2002, and it was five years before the next Mrs Downes arrived, and I made the unforgivable error of not introducing Corinna to the ghosts, so one night at Christmas, about eighteen months after she had first moved in, by which time the poltergeist activity in the house and various other bits of bad shit that I won't go into here had become almost unbearable.
So, I took Corinna and the broadsword that I bought her for her fiftieth birthday out into the garden and performed a rite of seizin with her, granting her the right to come and go anywhere she wanted upon my property without let or hindrance, and essentially telling the ghosts who already lived here that she was now the co-owner of a third of an acre of damp rural England, containing a lot if trees and a tumbledown cottage. It must have worked, because she has had no problem since, and the other shit that was bedevilling us has largely got better.
So I did something similar with Panne. As my Mother would have said, I felt "in my water" that (s)he was a creature whose intentions were good (if I may paraphrase Eric Burdon) and I felt mildly guilty that she seemed to have confined herself voluntarily to one small cupboard in the corner of my office. So I formally gave her permission to come and go as she wished, and to wander over my little estate and do what she wanted there as long as she caused no damage or hurt to anyone or anything living here. She, not the be smiled at me shyly, and then slunk away into the trees at the other side of the circular lawn, which is the only one of the formal lawns which has survived the transition between my Father's tenure here and my own.
There have always been ghosts in my house. There is a tall lady wearing a long grey dress who has occasionally been seen walking along the path which runs from my office door to the back door. the nomenclature here causes a fair amount of confusion because we don't actually have a proper front door. My mother believed for some reason that having a front door which opened out onto the street was vulgar, and so my father blocked it up. The Grey Lady, as both my Father and I have dubbed her, seems oblivious to our existence, as does the man in the tall hat who is seen in the landing and the little boy who sometimes sits in the doorway between the sitting room (I refuse to follow in my mother's footsteps and call it a Drawing Room) and what used to be a Dining Room, and hopefully will be once again once I have finally raised the money to build Corinna a Garden Office.
Less benign is the poltergeist who sometimes does his percussive stuff on the stairs, but these days he is no more annoying than Graham when he is very drunk and listening to Hawkwind bootlegs, and the two ghost cats that scamper about on occasion startling visitors in the corridor which leads to what I refuse to call the East Wing, though I suppose it is. the most unsettling of the resident spectres in the house is something that Corinna and I have dubbed The Shapeshifter, which walks along the same path as the Grey Lady, but assumes the form of one of the people or animals living in or visiting the house. I first noticed this particular apparition during my father's final months when I was sitting by the window in what is now Corinna's and my room, when I saw what looked like my dog Tessie walking along the path. As she was very old and was nearly blind she was not allowed out at night, so I shouted angrily down the intercom at Graham, telling him to close the back door, just as Tessie ambled into my Dad's bedroom looking fir her evening digestive biscuit.
Over the years several if us, but mostly Corinna and me have encountered The Shape Shifter, and it has impersonated various family members including my eldest stepdaughter. So I am reasonably used to living with spirits, and so was far less worried about allowing Panne the run of the place than you might otherwise have thought.
This was a very busy time for me. My beloved younger stepdaughter Olivia, now living in Norfolk, was just about to make me a Grandfather, and there were lots of arrangements to be made and plans to formulate. So, whilst I occasionally saw a brief glimpse of a little goatfooted forest Godling out of the corner of my eye - sometimes peeking out of the bushes, sometimes entering or leaving the cupboard in my office that she seemed to have adopted as a home base, and sometimes even playing with the dogs in a crazy joyous game of catch as catch can over by the lower aviary, I paid her little attention, and I forgot about Danny Miles entirely.
This was probably, as it turned out, not the best move I could have made.
For over the next few weeks, Panne seemed to have taken up residence in the aquarium supplies cupboard in the corner of my office. A few days after her arrival I beckoned her out into the garden, and carried out a little ceremony which I first learned about in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. It took place right at the beginning of the book when Dan and Una, two Edwardian children first met Puck the hedge goblin. Puck carried out a little piece of ancient magick called seizin...
'It's an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren't lawfully seized of your land—it didn't really belong to you—till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it—like this.' He held out the turves, and continued...
'Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England,' began Puck, in a sing-song voice. 'By right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; and you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give you.'
When Corinna first moved into my house in North Devon nearly eight years ago, we had a few problems with the less tangible inhabitants of the property. We had a few problems with some of the tangible ones as well, but that is another story entirely. There has been a house where we live since the original grant of the manor about fifteen hundred years ago, and historians have told me how the cottages along Back Street (which marked the back line of the Manor grounds) were built to house the workmen who built the Manor, the pub and the church (not necessarily in that order), and so we are one of the oldest inhabited locations in the area. Whatever you believe about the nature of ghosts, I am convinced that they exist. One cannot live in Myrtle Cottage for too long without encountering them.
However, my mother had died in 2002, and it was five years before the next Mrs Downes arrived, and I made the unforgivable error of not introducing Corinna to the ghosts, so one night at Christmas, about eighteen months after she had first moved in, by which time the poltergeist activity in the house and various other bits of bad shit that I won't go into here had become almost unbearable.
So, I took Corinna and the broadsword that I bought her for her fiftieth birthday out into the garden and performed a rite of seizin with her, granting her the right to come and go anywhere she wanted upon my property without let or hindrance, and essentially telling the ghosts who already lived here that she was now the co-owner of a third of an acre of damp rural England, containing a lot if trees and a tumbledown cottage. It must have worked, because she has had no problem since, and the other shit that was bedevilling us has largely got better.
So I did something similar with Panne. As my Mother would have said, I felt "in my water" that (s)he was a creature whose intentions were good (if I may paraphrase Eric Burdon) and I felt mildly guilty that she seemed to have confined herself voluntarily to one small cupboard in the corner of my office. So I formally gave her permission to come and go as she wished, and to wander over my little estate and do what she wanted there as long as she caused no damage or hurt to anyone or anything living here. She, not the be smiled at me shyly, and then slunk away into the trees at the other side of the circular lawn, which is the only one of the formal lawns which has survived the transition between my Father's tenure here and my own.
There have always been ghosts in my house. There is a tall lady wearing a long grey dress who has occasionally been seen walking along the path which runs from my office door to the back door. the nomenclature here causes a fair amount of confusion because we don't actually have a proper front door. My mother believed for some reason that having a front door which opened out onto the street was vulgar, and so my father blocked it up. The Grey Lady, as both my Father and I have dubbed her, seems oblivious to our existence, as does the man in the tall hat who is seen in the landing and the little boy who sometimes sits in the doorway between the sitting room (I refuse to follow in my mother's footsteps and call it a Drawing Room) and what used to be a Dining Room, and hopefully will be once again once I have finally raised the money to build Corinna a Garden Office.
Less benign is the poltergeist who sometimes does his percussive stuff on the stairs, but these days he is no more annoying than Graham when he is very drunk and listening to Hawkwind bootlegs, and the two ghost cats that scamper about on occasion startling visitors in the corridor which leads to what I refuse to call the East Wing, though I suppose it is. the most unsettling of the resident spectres in the house is something that Corinna and I have dubbed The Shapeshifter, which walks along the same path as the Grey Lady, but assumes the form of one of the people or animals living in or visiting the house. I first noticed this particular apparition during my father's final months when I was sitting by the window in what is now Corinna's and my room, when I saw what looked like my dog Tessie walking along the path. As she was very old and was nearly blind she was not allowed out at night, so I shouted angrily down the intercom at Graham, telling him to close the back door, just as Tessie ambled into my Dad's bedroom looking fir her evening digestive biscuit.
Over the years several if us, but mostly Corinna and me have encountered The Shape Shifter, and it has impersonated various family members including my eldest stepdaughter. So I am reasonably used to living with spirits, and so was far less worried about allowing Panne the run of the place than you might otherwise have thought.
This was a very busy time for me. My beloved younger stepdaughter Olivia, now living in Norfolk, was just about to make me a Grandfather, and there were lots of arrangements to be made and plans to formulate. So, whilst I occasionally saw a brief glimpse of a little goatfooted forest Godling out of the corner of my eye - sometimes peeking out of the bushes, sometimes entering or leaving the cupboard in my office that she seemed to have adopted as a home base, and sometimes even playing with the dogs in a crazy joyous game of catch as catch can over by the lower aviary, I paid her little attention, and I forgot about Danny Miles entirely.
This was probably, as it turned out, not the best move I could have made.
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