The Silence of Ghosts Read online

  The furniture was, of course, ruined beyond measure. Mould and fungus had wrought a terrible vengeance on the soft furnishings. What had been cushions on the sofas, and sheets and blankets and pillows on the beds, had been reduced to what was little more than slush. Nothing here could be retrieved.

  I snapped shut the notebook in which I had planned to write a rough inventory, like an archaeologist making his initial survey of an ancient and once-splendid site. But there was almost nothing to inventorize. I doubted there was treasure here. I put the notebook in my pocket and started to leave, eager to get back outside again, where there would be birdsong and green light. But when I reached the landing, I saw standing at the foot of the stairs a girl of about ten dressed in what appeared to be homemade clothes. The clothes seemed a little out of date: a knitted pink cardigan over a blue skirt that reached to well below her knees, and red shoes with a strap across the top. She had long black hair. As I drew close, I saw that she had the most piercing, intense eyes I had ever seen. She gave me quite a start, I must admit, but I recovered quickly and continued down the stairs, smiling. I realized she must have stepped inside, seeing the front door more than half open.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘where on earth have you come from?’

  She did not answer, but waited impassively until I reached the bottom of the stairs. When I did so and was standing only feet away from her, she flashed a warm, friendly smile.

  ‘I’m Octavia,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’ve heard of me.’

  I shook my head and smiled.

  ‘Afraid not,’ I said. ‘I’m not from these parts. But I’m sure we can be friends.’

  I reached out a hand as if to shake hers, but she drew back a little, and I decided she must be shy.

  ‘You must come from London,’ she said. ‘That’s where I used to live. When I was deaf.’

  I guessed she must have cochlear implants; there was no trace of any infirmity now. I knew a little about such matters. My grandfather had established a small school for the deaf in Bloomsbury. That was before my day. Was this pure coincidence? I wondered. Had she attended the same school?

  ‘Were you at the Lancaster school when you were in London?’ I asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘No school,’ she said. ‘Not there.’

  I shrugged. It hadn’t seemed very likely anyway.

  She smiled and then said, ‘I have something to show you. Why don’t you follow me?’

  She must have been exploring the house, I thought, and maybe she had found something that might seem to a child’s mind to be of some significance. Bemused, and happy to humour her, I nodded and let her go ahead of me up the stairs and on to the upper floor.

  She stopped on the main landing, and I noticed that someone had taken trouble to board up a short expanse of wall, using long wooden planks that had been nailed down across what I guessed might be a doorway. I had no tools with which to make a breach in the wall. If I came back to the house at all, I vowed to tear the planks away and see what lay behind.

  I followed her back to the hallway and, as I was about to ask her more about herself, she turned to me and gestured, inviting me to bend down with my ear to her mouth.

  ‘Dominic is with Rose now. With his wife and his ancestors. With your ancestors.’

  She smiled and took sudden flight, dashing for the open door. I hurried after her, but when I burst into the open and looked round in both directions, I couldn’t see her anywhere. I had found my ghost, or so I reckoned. She hadn’t seemed frightening in the least. I still had a lot to understand.

  I had decided not to stay in the hotel after all, in fact I could not bear to remain in the Lakes another day. I retrieved my luggage and paid what I owed them, then went down to the landing stage and waited for the next steamer from Glenridding. I boarded the Lady of the Lake, the oldest passenger vessel in the world, or so they say, and sat on deck in an attempt to throw off the stifling atmosphere of the old house.

  I returned to London later that day. Exhausted and not a little spooked, I said nothing to my wife and children, but went to bed and slept.

  Next morning, a thick package was waiting for me on the kitchen table. I recognized the name and address of the family solicitors, Abercrombie, Lund and Humble, who kept offices in Lincoln’s Inn.

  My wife Jess watched closely as I cut the packet open and reached inside to fish out the contents. These consisted of a letter and several hardback notebooks. I opened the first one. It appeared to consist of handwritten notes, but at the top of the first page someone had written in red ink: ‘The Ullswater Diary of Dominic Lancaster RN’. My grandfather. Tucked in between the page and the cover was a medal and a ribbon, Dominic’s 1939–1945 Star, awarded him for services at the Battle of Dakar. I put the medal in my pocket. Later that evening, alone in my study, I started reading.

  Charles Lancaster

  21 March 2012

  The Diaries

  Saturday, 16 November 1940

  Bedford Square

  Bloomsbury

  I used to go to the Lakes as a child. My parents would sweep me up at the start of summer and drive me all the way from London in our Hispano-Suiza H6 and, from the early thirties, the J12. We had a chauffeur, of course, first a man called Higgins, an elderly chap (or so he seemed to me), then Morris, a much younger man. In town, only my mother drove, getting, I think, a measure of pleasure and independence from doing so. And they were very beautiful cars, which added greatly to her enjoyment, for she was something of a snob and an aficionada of fine things like Japanese netsuke and, of course, the best Portuguese azulejo tilework, which she used in our Oporto home to such great effect. Not that many people had cars back then, and no one of our acquaintance fielded a Hispano-Suiza. For that matter, not many people had a house in the country either, to which they could repair for summer holidays. We went to the Lakes because we Lancasters always went there, apart from our stays in Portugal, which were mainly for business. The Lakes’ house was old and went back in the family to the early eighteenth century. Growing up, I felt rather special trundling down country roads almost free of traffic, cocooned in the protected space my mother and father created. I would spend the summer playing with the Howtown children or setting out with my friends Peter and Maurice for trips on the lake, to play pirates or swim out to Cherry Holm Island. I tried to contact them when I arrived here in London last week, only to be told that Peter has already been called up and Maurice has followed in my footsteps and joined the Navy. I wish him better luck afloat than I have known.

  I was one of the first casualties of the war. I worked in a non-reserved occupation, in the small advertising department of the family firm. I was twenty-three when hostilities began, and when conscription was brought in that November, I signed up for the Navy in the old church hall where I’d gone once a week as a child to our Cub Scout meetings. There were old friends with me, old Cub Scouts, winking and smiling at each other, walking to our fates. When I was ten years old, I’d hastened to join the local branch of the Sea Cadets, where I learned to climb without flinching the rigging on a tall sailing ship in the heart of a storm. I fancied myself a sailor, and spent more and more of my holidays on Ullswater, sailing on board our little yacht, the Firefly, and swimming in the lake’s calm waters. The outbreak of war seemed to me such an opportunity, a chance to show I was more than just a businessman being groomed to run the family enterprise, but a real man, perhaps a hero in disguise. My father, who had always thought me a sad disappointment to the family because I loved music more than business and had talked more than once about going to music college, grudgingly accepted my newfound status as a fighting man. He had served in the last war, and I think he believed that this onset of manliness might bring me round to his idea that I should commit to taking over the Lancaster Port House when the time came. At twenty-three, I had never found a girl to walk out with. Some thought me a sissy, others seemed to have their own reasons for turning down my invitations to a dance
or the pictures. But now, I thought, a sailor in uniform might catch some glances from the fair sex.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t sent to sail on a lake, but on the Norwegian Sea, heading into Vestfjorden bound for Narvik on board the HMS Hotspur. The Hotspur was an H-class destroyer, and I was a barely-trained gunner stationed at one of her four Mark IX guns. It was when we reached Narvik that things heated up. The Germans had invaded Norway at the start of April, and there was naval fighting outside Narvik on the 8th and 9th. The next day we reached Narvik in the early morning, under cover of a snowstorm. The rest is history, as they say. We sank some German ships, but Jerry returned in force with larger destroyers. The Hunter was sent to the bottom by torpedoes, the Hardy was badly damaged, and we were hit quite badly, but not enough to finish us off. It might have been better for me if we had been holed below the waterline.

  The Hotspur was towed off for repairs with a skeleton crew. Along with some others, I was transferred to the HMS Resolution, which had also suffered bomb damage. I stayed with her through to June, when we joined Force H at Gibraltar, and then on to Mers-el-Kebir in July. That was my greatest moment. Our fleet destroyed the Vichy French fleet in Algeria, to stop their ships falling into the hands of the Germans. I’m sorry about the French sailors who were killed, for in a way they were our allies; but this was war and we could not afford to go soft when we were fighting a ruthless enemy.

  We sailed down the coast of West Africa and reached Dakar on the 24th September. This time our fleet met more severe opposition than we had anticipated. The day after the main battle, my ship was hit by a torpedo from a French submarine and I felt a shock of pain. I remember nothing of what followed. I must have passed out and stayed unconscious for days.

  When I came to my senses I found myself in bed on board a hospital ship. I had a raging thirst and a strange feeling of mugginess. On top of that I was thoroughly confused, having no idea how long had passed since the battle or what had happened to me that had led my hospitalization. Only the rolling of the ship and the sight of white beds on either side of me brought home where I was, on an anonymous ship heading in God knew what direction.

  I was just thinking about where I was when a pretty young woman in the uniform of a Queen Alexandra Naval Nurse arrived at my bedside. She smiled at me, and I felt better at once.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’ve come round, I see.’ She had a lovely Scottish accent, and I thought for a moment I’d been taken to one of the Highland Casualty Clearing Stations or a hospital in Inverness or Aberdeen, though I was aware that it was a long way from West Africa to Aberdeen.

  ‘Where am I?’ was my first question. Not ‘How am I?’ or ‘How did I get here?’ I guessed something must be wrong for me to have been invalided out from the Resolution. Had the ship been sunk after all? Was I just one of the survivors, suffering from exposure in Dakar’s shark-infested waters?

  ‘You’re on board the SS Aba,’ she said. Her freshly starched uniform and friendly manner reassured me after the shambles at Mers-el-Kebir. ‘The Aba’s a hospital ship, Lieutenant, the best in the fleet. Lucky we were nearby when your ships got beaten up. You’re in safe hands now. But if you’ll excuse me, I have to report to Matron that you’re back in the land of the living.’

  ‘Before you go,’ I said, ‘won’t you tell me why I’m here? What’s wrong with me? Was I hurt in the attack? Apart from being knocked out.’

  Her manner changed at once. The banter went out of her voice.

  ‘That’s not for me to say, Lieutenant. A doctor will be along soon. He can tell you in a lot more detail.’

  With which she trotted off. She hadn’t even told me her name. She seemed very young, and it chilled me to think of her in this place, among so many injured, so many dead or dying, so many crying out for help, as I might cry out once I came fully to my senses.

  A naval orderly brought me some water to drink and a plate of light food. As I started to eat, I noticed that the man in the bed to my right was in distress. I called for the orderly. He closed the curtain round the bed and went off to fetch help. I felt helpless, not knowing if there was anything I could do. Moments later, three nurses arrived with a doctor in tow. They went behind the curtain and remained there for about half an hour, all the time talking in whispers. When they came out at last, their faces were grave. The nurse who had welcomed me did not even look in my direction. The curtains remained shut. I left my supper untouched: my appetite had gone.

  My nurse returned a little later. I knew better than to ask her about what had happened, but I did say I was lost without my watch, a Soway Prima my father had given me before I set off for Norway (though none of us knew where we were headed at the time).

  ‘It’s a quarter past ten, dear,’ she said. ‘We’ll be putting the lights out soon. Matron’s very strict about the lights. She’s on loan from the RAMC, and she’s a terribly strict woman. She has no sympathy for nurses, patients and, least of all, doctors. They’re all afraid of her, especially the doctors, even the chief surgeon, Sir Ian McKenzie; but they all respect her. They say we should get the War Office to send her to Germany as a secret weapon. Before lights out, you need to have a word with Dr O’Neill. He’s Irish, but we’ve trained him to behave properly to his patients.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’ I asked, feeling very bold.

  ‘Nurse MacDonald to you, sir. But if a wee cadet like you has a big brother, he can call me Alice. Now, I’ll fetch Dr O’Neill.’

  He was close by and came to me in under a minute. I recognized him from the drama earlier. He brought a chair and set it by my bed. I thought he looked tired. Very tired.

  ‘Lieutenant Lancaster. May I sit down?’

  I nodded. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties, middle class, well-meaning. I smiled at him in the expectation of some of that prattle well-meaning doctors use. Instead, he was very formal.

  ‘Lieutenant, the good news is that you’re alive and generally sound. Your ship was hit by a torpedo from a French submarine called the Bévézier, and some of your colleagues were killed. Your gun fell on top of you, but a friend pulled you out and got you into the drink with him. You were in a lifeboat in seconds, which is why you haven’t suffered the effects of prolonged immersion in the sea and haven’t been eaten by a shark. That’s the good news. Tomorrow, you can write to your parents saying you’re well and you’ll soon be on your way home.’

  ‘If it’s that simple, why was I brought here in the first place?’

  In a soft Irish burr that I was shortly to hate, he explained.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll call you Dominic. The thing is, you’ve been here for three days. Until today, you’ve been sedated, and you still have a heavy dose of morphia in your veins. I’d like to taper that off, but you’ll need some to deal with the pain.’

  ‘But if I’m not badly wounded . . .’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Dominic. I’ll be quite honest with you. The only way we could save your life when we took you on board was to amputate your left leg below the knee. I’m sorry for your bad luck. It’s a very serious thing to happen to a man, a fit young man your age. But the worst is over, and now we must concentrate on getting you back to health and learning what you can do on one leg, which, as it happens, will be much more than you can guess.’

  He took leave of me with his good wishes. Moments later, the lights were extinguished. The morphia helped me sleep, but when I woke up the next morning I wanted to scream when I remembered what Dr O’Neill had told me.

  Sunday, 17 November

  I was explaining how I came to be here, at home, in London. We tied up at the King George V Dock in Glasgow, and most of us were transferred to Mearnskirk Hospital, a sanatorium that had been altered to enable it to take soldiers, sailors and airmen injured in the war. The lucky others, men with light injuries, were sent off home or told to rejoin their regiment or find a new ship. By the time we got to Blighty, heavy air raids were hitting the larger cities, and not just London. I almo
st wished a bomb might end my misery. I had started to devour myself with grief for my leg, a leg that would no longer let me walk or run or jump.

  They started to reduce my dose of morphia, and at times the pain would hit me like a racing car slamming against a careless bystander. The stump was dressed in a huge swaddling of cloths and bandages. Part of me wanted to see the leg itself, to take in the reality I would now be faced with, and part of me wanted nothing to do with it. I feared the pain removing the bandage would cause. Nurse MacDonald had been ordered to stay in order to work with her patients from the Aba. Every few days she would inject me with morphia, remove my sheets, set up a screen, and unroll my bandages and packing. She cleaned my wound – or that is what she said she did – and bandaged me again. It was uncomfortable. My leg was regaining some feeling. All that kept me together was the knowledge that so many others in the ward where I lived had suffered much greater injuries. Then Alice MacDonald came to see me one day and kissed my forehead and sailed away on another boat. A succession of new nurses took over, none as pretty and none as kind. I regretted her going very much.

  I stayed about a fortnight, to the second week in October, and then one of the doctors said I was fit enough to go home, where a district nurse would see to me. I felt suddenly fearful of going back to our house in Bloomsbury, afraid to let my parents and sister see what the war had done to me. I was not, surprisingly, much afraid of the air raids. I had left London amidst such expectations, such promises of medals and fanfares and a job well done, and I would pass again through our front door a miserable failure, someone who would spend his life in a state of dependence on others. I might never find a job, never earn my crust, never find a girl to marry, never have children, never kick a football again, or run on the rugger field. My father’s opinion of me would have been proved right after all. It would be crutches or a wheelchair for me from now on. I was twenty-four years old. I had my life ahead of me. Of course, I know our boys had a pounding in France and that this Blitz is killing hundreds, maybe thousands. But if I can’t get out and take some revenge on the Germans, then I don’t know what is the point of me.