Haunted Houses and the Wooden Leg

When you're a young writer you want to leave home behind, to explore the real world and write about what you find. It never occurred to me to write about anyone in my family: they were either too ordinary, or too strange.

Take, for example, my paternal grandparents.

Pop was an officer in the Royal Navy, and the family lived in different places. As they moved from one home to another, it turned out that my grandmother could see ghosts: 'This house,' Granny would announce calmly, 'is haunted.' She wasn't worried. If the spirits were nasty, then Granny simply walked through the house opening all the windows and saying, 'Go away. Get out.' Which they always, obediently, did. And if they were benign then she invited them to stay, and enjoyed their company.

When my sisters and I were children, our grandparents had retired and lived in a very old house in Warwick, full of dark corridors and creaking floorboards. We pretended to be perfectly relaxed as Granny told us how her supernatural friends were keeping. And she reminded them who we were, so that they wouldn't be upset by the sudden appearance of excitable children in their domain. I think Granny regarded her ghosts as ordinary people, but a bit older and frailer now than when they were living.

Pop was away at sea for months at a time. His son, our father, told us that the first thing Pop did when he came home on leave was to thrash his children for their inevitable misdemeanours while he'd been away: he knew Granny would have spoiled them. Pop was tough. As a young gunnery lieutenant in the First World War he took part in the Battle of Jutland, and the ship he was aboard suffered a German torpedo attack, and was sunk.

Pop survived, fortunately: a month later he married Granny. I imagined him swimming home heroically, and straight up the Thames to the church.

After that war Pop was based in the West Indies, but he travelled more than anyone I know today in our jet age. He toured around South America, and escorted the Prince of Wales on a Royal visit to Argentina. He and Granny were a glamorous couple, who tried not to let children interrupt their social life. They liked gambling and cocktails, dancing and flirting and laughter. I’ve seen photographs — now lost - of them and their Jazz Age friends strolling in the harsh sun of the Riviera in the 1920s, far from the ghosts of England, and I've studied the photos with a magnifying glass in the hope of spotting Scott or Zelda Fitzgerald in the distance.

This life was rudely interrupted when Pop suffered an injury playing polo in Bermuda. He returned to England for treatment - on a slow boat. The ulcer on his foot turned gangrenous on the long voyage. Pop bore the mounting pain with bottles of whisky, and when he got to Portsmouth his leg had to be amputated. He was invalided out of the Navy and worked as a rather incompetent and impoverished door to door salesman of kitchen utensils. The family moved even more than usual, enabling Granny to make friends with ghosts of different social classes, in ever smaller houses.

The pendulum of fate swung back the other way in 1939, with the outbreak of a new war. The Navy asked Pop to come back, and he limped up through the ranks as if he'd never been away, becoming a CBE and also the first one-legged Admiral since Benbow.

Anyway, the thing was that Granny never mentioned the leg.  The one that was missing. Or its replacement, the wooden leg as our father called it, even though we knew it must be plastic of some kind. It was the taboo subject in our grandparents' house, which was absurd, since Pop walked with a prominent limp. He insisted on doing everything a two-legged person did: like playing table-tennis. He became unbeatable at this game as he grew older, because every time Pop hit the ball he lost his one-legged balance, and had then to recover it by slapping both hands on the table. This had the effect of making his opponent's end of the table swing up in the air, rendering any sort of reply impossible. But of course no-one was disrespectful enough to say anything, and I never did beat Pop at ping-pong.

No, we couldn't mention the leg. We'd sit there while Granny dished out sweets for us and pills for herself, explaining how someone who'd died in the plague was living in the attic, and all we could do was steal glances at Pop. He drank his rum and milk, and his trousers rode gradually up his false limb. Perhaps the sock would slip down today, and we'd be rewarded with a glimpse of pink rubber. Or maybe it really was wood, a seafarer's tradition. But he outfoxed us, with extra long black socks that were held up with garters.

My sisters wanted to see the stump of Pop's thigh, but I was squeamish. I just wanted to see the fake leg. To know if it was hollow. Oh, how I longed to rap that strange object. To lean over towards my grandfather and give his wooden leg a good whack! Just to see how it sounded.

Granny never listened to the news or read a newspaper, but this didn't stop her holding strong political views she saw no need to justify. She judged strangers by the most unfair, superficial criteria, like their hairstyle or a faint resemblance to someone she'd once known. She also visited relatives without warning, after having a dream about them; and then be disappointed that they weren't expecting her.

Pop, who was pretty clever, made sarcastic jokes at Granny's expense that sailed over her head. I loved my grandmother when I was young, but I didn't take her seriously. It seemed strange to us children how these two old people could have lived so long together. We figured they came from an age before people were taught how to divorce, and were too old to learn now.

The narrator's grandmother in my first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, is, I realised after I'd written it, inspired by my grandmother. She has lots of Granny's prejudices, and she says silly things, telling her grandchildren things like, 'God's asleep, that's the trouble these days,' and 'like I always said, they should never have replaced horses with cars.'

The odd thing is, after the book was finished I understood that I agreed with her.