Drawing on a childhood steeped in the supernatural

Oct 1 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

IS IT any surprise that novelist Susan Hill, whose ghost story, The Woman in Black, has enjoyed stupendous worldwide stage success, is attracted to supernatural tales?

While staying with her maternal grandmother Bailey and assorted ageing female family members in Southport, an eerie phenomenon used to occur when she was five or six years old.

“Sitting in the large bay window of their great big chunk of a late Victorian villa on the corner of Belmont Street, in Birkdale, you’d hear the front door close, followed by footsteps going up the stairs – but nothing else,” says Susan.

“My grandmother or great- aunt would say to one another, ‘Oh, there’s Fred’. The house was detached and it couldn’t have been anyone else. They just accepted this was a ghost and so did I. But I can remember thinking, yes, but what next? Fred seemed a pretty pointless sort of ghost.”

In contrast, her latest book, The Man in the Picture, features a very pointedly malign phenomenon, namely a painting of a Venetian carnival that apparently bewitches those in close contact with it. The hapless victims are fully conscious of their plight, but are unable to stave off their premature demise and being sucked into the picture, to suffer a living death as additional figures in the painted crowd.

“I read Dickens at an early age and so you get ghosts. But I was brought up at the end of the great age of women believing in spiritualism. I remember the reading of tea cups, table-tapping, Ouija boards and having seances,” says Susan, 65.

“It’s what women did then, except for my mother who was rather scathing and would say, ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that’. I used to wonder what was going on and they didn’t quite tell me. There was always a moment when I was told to go to bed, because it was too grown up. The one thing that I am convinced about is that the Southport house was undoubtedly haunted because of those footsteps.

“It was part of the world I was in, so I believed it. I wasn’t frightened because they weren’t. Children catch atmospheres from adults. I wasn’t frightened of going upstairs, except that the house had those energy-saving lights which switched themselves off, so you had to run upstairs before it went out. There was always the moment when you dreaded not reaching the top before being plunged into terrifying darkness.”

For a young susceptible girl, it was all fantastic raw material for her writing career and she admits that it’s all still there. Since then, her supernatural experiences have been confined to only meeting people who claim they’ve seen a ghost. She’s still looking, but suspects that ghosts only appear when least expected.

Her present home is an 18th-century Cotswold farmhouse restored from semi-dereliction. She says: “It’s not remotely spooky. It creaks, but only in a benign way. When you walk in, it’s full of light and it’s got a very good vibe. Occasionally, I’m here at night alone and I’ve never felt worried about it, which is a good thing as it’s where I write.”

Currently penning her fourth crime novel, The Man in the Picture emerged as she had long hankered to write another ghost story. This novella has a classic ghost story opening (like The Women in Black), redolent of the genre’s Edwardian master, MR James, at the fireside in the rooms of a Cambridge don.

“The fireside chat is a real ghost story cliché, but a wonderful way in. When I wrote The Woman in Black in 1983, few people did ghost stories, as opposed to horror. The point of a ghost story is revenge. I love writing about places and atmospheres, so I’ve put in an isolated mansion in the North – another classic ghost story ingredient.”

The story is also an elegy to a vaguely lost time, with only two cars and one train signalling the modern world. “Oh, yes, my publisher says ‘we’re back in Hill-time here’!”

THE Man in the Picture, by Susan Hill, Profile, £9.99.

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk