The Ghost of Aunty Doris's Hat

A Monologue.

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them”

Henry David Thoreau

For the avoidance of confusion. The narrator is me.

You could imagine, if you like, that I am waiting for my next therapy client, while looking out of the window.

I was reading an interview with the philosopher Pete Rollins. He says that each one of us is a “haunted house” … full of ghosts… imagine that!

Pete says that the ghosts are people and things. They are our grandparents; our favourite dog; the comfort blanket that mother put in the bin while we were at school; our dead husband’s wedding ring.

In my experience we either drown the ghosts in something before they cause havoc – which causes more havoc – or we make them sing.

And of course – if you think about it – our ghosts have ghosts of their own. The ghosts of our ghosts are further away but, God! You can still hear them, can’t you. Dear oh dear….

I like the idea that each generation has a rear-view mirror and that we can see all the way back through the mirrors to where we came from and see our ancestors drink those ghosts down.

I am a therapist. A priest. Sometimes I accidentally step through the shared portal of suffering that therapists call ‘transference’, and I see what people see, what haunts them, before the door slams shut.

The child, dead on the road. The feeling of being held down and violated…

My ghost is abandonment.

In my rear-view mirror is my father. Norman. He teaches chemistry at a university. He is an expert on rocket fuels. He can recite ‘The Lion and Albert’ from memory at dinner parties. I watch him in the mirror as he calibrates and titrates, writes down the correct chemical formula, washes his hands to avoid contamination. He whistles through his teeth ‘Sprach Zarathustra’. I hum it back. I don’t know if he can hear me.

 His ghost is fear.

Behind him, in his rear-view mirror is his mother, Mary Paley. Grandma Logan. She is all tinned salmon and gossip. My sister the unfortunate recipient of “Grandma Logan’s knees”. Mary buys ’Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ once it’s legal, but I can’t imagine that she reads it, as it’s quite a boring book. Old, and stuck on a dementia ward , she is forthright about her old friend Doris’s hat. Dad mistakenly raising the subject to cover an awkward silence – “Do you like Doris’s hat, Mother?” The reply doesn’t leave much room for optimism. When it comes, it’s damning.

 “No, I don’t. In fact, I don’t like any of her attire!”.

Her first child, stillborn in January of 1933, when Mary is 34, is buried in an unmarked baby grave, in Nab Wood Cemetery. In a little coffin that Grandad Logan makes himself. Her next child, my dad, grows and outgrows her. Never comes back.

Her ghost is loss

Behind her, strangely visible through their viscera, is her mother, Ann Elizabeth Skirrow. Annie. Born in 1864. Her hat has a women’s suffrage rosette on it and she lives for ninety years, right into the middle of the 20th Century; each decade the sole of a shoe worn down by sorrow. She is the mother of seven children, four of whom outlive her. Her own mother Hannah is dead at forty-one when Annie is five; “Postpartum haemorrhage 12 hours”. Her father George and brother James fall off the end of their sorrow at the loss of her. Both drown themselves in the Leeds-Liverpool canal.  Annie’s husband Oliver, and his brother, Ezra, drown themselves in the River Aire – at Dowley Gap – just next to the boat house. Both leave a neatly folded coat and cap on the riverbank. Two of Annie and Oliver’s three sons are machine gunned in the trenches and out of their three grandsons – one stillborn: one killed in a motorbike accident in World War 2. – my dad is the only one who dies in old age.

Her ghost is poverty.

My mother tells me a story about Annie.

She is knitting socks for the troops even though its 1951 and she is eighty-seven years old. Turning the heel on the sock with no pattern, and without looking, but there is only one ball of wool. Each finished sock is quietly dismantled by her daughters, and the wool returned to her. She doesn’t notice. She just keeps on knitting…

Something happens to me though when I think of her. As if she has thrown me the wool. It touches the hem of the garment of her youngest daughter, Mary. It lands where my father waits. He catches it and throws it to me. It has this feel to it, as if they are all leaning breathlessly against the portal until it opens and lets me out – and with me – a fragile tangled pile of objects that land softly at my feet. There is the hat, the one with the rosette. I try it on. It’s a bit small.  A pile of old yellowy test tubes… I hold one up to the light, trying to see if can find my dad reflected there. I reach down and touch the edge of my great-granddad Oliver’s cap, pressing it to my face. It smells of damp riverbank and his fear. And finally, as I am sifting around under a discarded half –heeled sock, I find an out-of-date tin of salmon. I eat it – and it nourishes my roots. Going all the way back. The ghosts are singing, only ever so slightly out of tune.