Staying where I am staying, in this crookedy-piggledy old house in the hills, I was not surprised to be woken by a pale blue light and a melancholy chanting.
GHOST: “… and that will be England gone…”
ME: I see. You have been made restless by the news that London and Birmingham are majority non-white.
GHOST: “The shadows, the meadows, the lanes…”
ME: This is clearly racist, and Larkin was talking about the environment, not immigration. Go back to sleep.
GHOST: “The guildhalls, the carved choirs…”
ME: Oh, for God’s sake.
GHOST: I am not racist, and what makes you think the issues are separate? In —land they are putting up housing estates at a rate of knots. Why do you think that is? Are you eating well?
ME: They are building houses because people need houses!
GHOST: Yes, and now they are putting in roundabouts and streetlights, and a country village is becoming a suburb. And once it is gone, nobody will even know that they have lost anything, and it will never, ever, ever come back. And it is being done to fulfil a Parish Plan, which is a load of democratic phooey to cover up a centralized diktat.
ME: You clearly are racist. Were racist.
GHOST: Oh, that is unkind! It is not racist to point out the facts. Besides, some of my best friends are Indian, and not all of them are ghosts yet.
ME: It is an absolute cliché that that does not stop you being racist, and anyway, how many friends of yours were black? When you saw those two guys on —minster High Street you let out a loud, deliberate squawk. And then there is the episode of the picture of Lenny Henry. I will spare your blushes. If you can blush.
GHOST: I never hid my feelings when I was alive, and I certainly shan’t start now I am dead. And what makes you so self-righteous? You weren’t so pleased when all those drug dealers down from London were having a gang fight on the front door of your newly-purchased house, were you? What went through your mind then, oh noble warrior of Pee Cee?
ME: It’s “woke” nowadays. I never pretended to be better than anyone else. The reason I don’t wander around clanking my chains and bewailing the brownskinnedness of the capital city is not because I’m frightened to offend the powerful. It’s because some of those brown-skinned people are my friends, and I do not want to make them feel like strangers in their own land.
GHOST: Ah, some of your best friends!
ME: Yes, and frankly some of them embody the values of Englishness rather better than the fat lazy unemployable halfwitted white smackheads who live around my neighbourhood.
GHOST: And that is another thing. I never fooled myself about the people living here. Do you remember the sisters who lived on the corner, with the telly always on and the house that was too hot and smelt of catshit? They were fat and unemployable if you like. But snobbish me went to their house, and talked to them, and cleaned up the cat litter while we talked. What have you done for the people round you, that you are so scornful of?
ME: I have a life to live. You are a ghost. Go back to sleep.
GHOST: Oh, it is unkind to say that! I am a ghost, but at least I did have a life. I had a family. What are you but a ghost yourself? Staying at friends’ houses, with your little dog to keep your feet warm, and paying visits to aged relatives which you pretend are a kindness to them and not to yourself. And your friends are pretty ghostly too, that one in a big empty house in the suburbs, this one, sitting in the hills and drinking himself to Dee Ee Ay Tee Aitch. You’re all a lot of ghosts.
ME: I am not a goddamn ghost —
GHOST: Don’t swear.
ME: — and I’ll tell you what else. All the old England you love — and I love it no less than you — the people who made it, who were they? Some of them were heroes and some of them were villains, and some were both, but not one of them was a bloody museum curator. And I am going to have a family. I will go off to Colombia and have a baby through the magic of modern technology, and more importantly through my money and my power.
GHOST: Don’t swear. Very well done! I’m very pleased for you, and if I had been alive, I would have been overjoyed. But I’m a ghost now. I’m beyond earthly things. That’s why I see so clearly. And tell me, this child of yours, who will he be? Will you go buy a house in France and raise a little Frenchman? Or go to the US for a big salary and he will be a little American? You are going to raise a stranger. What’s that to me, or you or anyone?
ME: He or she!
GHOST: I do not give a hoot.
ME: He won’t be a stranger to me. And what is there left for me here anyway? The country, that they are building over half and turning the rest into a Nature Trail? The church? If I wanted to hear Radio 4’s opinions every morning, I can get them on Radio 4 without getting out of bed. The nation? A bunch of oafs singing football chants? That’s not a nation, it’s a corpse. How’s Brexit going for you, by the way? I suppose you were pleased as punch about that.
GHOST: I certainly was. I told you so. At least I believe in democracy.
ME tiredly: Yeah, democracy….
GHOST: … and I believed in it really, to change things, not just “until they do something we don’t like”, like your poor ghost friends, and as a figleaf over the status quo.
Anyway, I’m tired now. I’m going to sleep. Good night, my love. I hope you have a lovely baby. Good night. God bless. Sleep well. See you in the morning.
At this the ghost faded out of sight and the room went dark and silent, and you would think, as the conventions have it, that I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. But in fact I lay there for a long while, thinking to myself restlessly. Oh, ghost. Oh, ghost. Oh, ghost. Oh ghost, oh ghost, oh ghost. Ohghost ohghost ohghost….
The Avon to the Severn runs / the Severn to the sea… If you enjoyed this article, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon as a paperback/hardback/ebook, and you can read more about it here.
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