Read Online An English Ghost Story by Kim Newman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kim Newman
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wood-panelled corridor after dark, lit by a single candle. Four alarmed girls in straw hats and school blazers cowered away from a see-through knight in armour who was raising a solid-seeming battle-axe.
The book was yellow and dusty at the top edge, but good as new. If this was Louise Teazle’s own copy it had probably never been read. Having written it, she knew how the story came out. From the flap copy, Jordan learned it was the fifth of the Drearcliff Grange School books. A first edition, from 1944. Had either of her dead grandmothers read it then, during the War? Mum said girls still read Louise Teazle when she was at school.
On the first page, a girl called Gillian Gilchrist (‘Gill-Gil’) was up late at night on a dare, alone in a disused part of the school. To get into a secret club, the After Lights-Out Gang, she had to creep out of her dorm (what did that mean? a shared room? something like a hospital ward?) and spend a whole night in the West Wing. The rest of the gang – Angela the Boss, Catty Korner and Sarah-Suzanne Symmes – had told her the wing was haunted.
Knowing what to expect, Jordan read the rest of the chapter. Phantoms appeared, but Gillian was ready for them. ‘Stow the rot, fillies,’ she sneered. ‘Can’t fool I with a sheet dipped in chem-lab phosphor. That bloodstain is most unbecoming, Angela. And try to clank your chain with a little more
spirit
, Sarah-Suzanne.’ After several more or less alarming apparitions, Gillian was grabbed by a sinister shadow-figure. It turned out to be the new gym mistress, Miss Ilse Haller.
In the next chapter, it transpired that the After Lights-Out Gang had indeed intended to sneak into the West Wing and terrify Gillian, but were detained by a snap air-raid drill. With Gillian missing at head-count, a search was carried out for her. Now, the gang was in hot water with Miss Beeke, the fearsome headmistress. Also, Gill-Gil was worried that the spooks might have been real.
Jordan assumed that the ghosts would be spies or smugglers in disguise. Miss Haller, who was supposed to be a Czech refugee, was most likely a Nazi spy.
Still, she read on.
The old slang was stranger even than the Rat Pack hipster talk she loved and tried to affect, but it had its own appeal. An all-girls boarding school was as bizarre to Jordan as a nunnery, but she recognised character types among the staff and pupils from the schools she had been at. She wasn’t sure how many of the odd turns of phrase were deliberately comical, but got a sense that Louise Teazle sometimes slyly pulled her readers’ legs. Gillian, an evacuee from ‘reduced circumstances’, suffered the other girls’ snobbery, but showed courage (‘spunk’, not a word Jordan had heard with that meaning) and won acceptance. Sarah-Suzanne, surprisingly clearly a femme lesbian, nurtured a terrific crush on Gillian, which the heroine tried to deal with kindly.
Spies did appear, posing as members of a hockey team from a rival school, and plotted to kidnap Miss Haller, whose father was a scientist Hitler hadn’t been able to force to work on a poison-gas rocket. But the ghosts were real, the spirits of Englishmen who had died defending their country in foreign wars, called up by Gillian herself, unconsciously wishing on a potent magic stone (part of the wall in the West Wing), to defend Miss Haller from the Nazis.
In the final chapter, the ghosts saw off the spies and word came through that Miss Haller’s father had been smuggled out of Germany. Gillian said goodbye to the ghosts, who treated her with strange respect since it was subtly implied that she was destined to die for England in a future war when women would be front-line troops. She was finally initiated into the After Lights-Out Gang, with a midnight feast and a masked ritual.
The book didn’t take long to read. Jordan was left with a sense of having understood only the surface. It was a fast adventure, with a lot of comedy and broad social
The book was yellow and dusty at the top edge, but good as new. If this was Louise Teazle’s own copy it had probably never been read. Having written it, she knew how the story came out. From the flap copy, Jordan learned it was the fifth of the Drearcliff Grange School books. A first edition, from 1944. Had either of her dead grandmothers read it then, during the War? Mum said girls still read Louise Teazle when she was at school.
On the first page, a girl called Gillian Gilchrist (‘Gill-Gil’) was up late at night on a dare, alone in a disused part of the school. To get into a secret club, the After Lights-Out Gang, she had to creep out of her dorm (what did that mean? a shared room? something like a hospital ward?) and spend a whole night in the West Wing. The rest of the gang – Angela the Boss, Catty Korner and Sarah-Suzanne Symmes – had told her the wing was haunted.
Knowing what to expect, Jordan read the rest of the chapter. Phantoms appeared, but Gillian was ready for them. ‘Stow the rot, fillies,’ she sneered. ‘Can’t fool I with a sheet dipped in chem-lab phosphor. That bloodstain is most unbecoming, Angela. And try to clank your chain with a little more
spirit
, Sarah-Suzanne.’ After several more or less alarming apparitions, Gillian was grabbed by a sinister shadow-figure. It turned out to be the new gym mistress, Miss Ilse Haller.
In the next chapter, it transpired that the After Lights-Out Gang had indeed intended to sneak into the West Wing and terrify Gillian, but were detained by a snap air-raid drill. With Gillian missing at head-count, a search was carried out for her. Now, the gang was in hot water with Miss Beeke, the fearsome headmistress. Also, Gill-Gil was worried that the spooks might have been real.
Jordan assumed that the ghosts would be spies or smugglers in disguise. Miss Haller, who was supposed to be a Czech refugee, was most likely a Nazi spy.
Still, she read on.
The old slang was stranger even than the Rat Pack hipster talk she loved and tried to affect, but it had its own appeal. An all-girls boarding school was as bizarre to Jordan as a nunnery, but she recognised character types among the staff and pupils from the schools she had been at. She wasn’t sure how many of the odd turns of phrase were deliberately comical, but got a sense that Louise Teazle sometimes slyly pulled her readers’ legs. Gillian, an evacuee from ‘reduced circumstances’, suffered the other girls’ snobbery, but showed courage (‘spunk’, not a word Jordan had heard with that meaning) and won acceptance. Sarah-Suzanne, surprisingly clearly a femme lesbian, nurtured a terrific crush on Gillian, which the heroine tried to deal with kindly.
Spies did appear, posing as members of a hockey team from a rival school, and plotted to kidnap Miss Haller, whose father was a scientist Hitler hadn’t been able to force to work on a poison-gas rocket. But the ghosts were real, the spirits of Englishmen who had died defending their country in foreign wars, called up by Gillian herself, unconsciously wishing on a potent magic stone (part of the wall in the West Wing), to defend Miss Haller from the Nazis.
In the final chapter, the ghosts saw off the spies and word came through that Miss Haller’s father had been smuggled out of Germany. Gillian said goodbye to the ghosts, who treated her with strange respect since it was subtly implied that she was destined to die for England in a future war when women would be front-line troops. She was finally initiated into the After Lights-Out Gang, with a midnight feast and a masked ritual.
The book didn’t take long to read. Jordan was left with a sense of having understood only the surface. It was a fast adventure, with a lot of comedy and broad social