Five-Year Diary: Breakfast in the Refectory.
Paint the cattle grid.
Dad is out until Friday after 4:00pm.
Place my sister’s jumps. She’s twelve. She rides the Shetland ponies.
Clean the park bench by the tennis court.
Sweep out the Tennis court
Shoot rooks with a .22 rifle as required.
Play Tennis with my kid sister. We’re both equally rubbish.
See two of the owls, one around Lady Anne’s bee house, the other by the windows of the Round Tower.
T.V. & supper.
Out again.
Our brother heads off to Brough on the motorbike he keeps hidden in the stable block. He’ll not be back.
Shoot more rooks in the evening light, see a tawny owl by the Chapel window.
Watch T.V. in our sitting room im the other side of the Great Hall.
Top of the Pops: Abba, Hot Chocolate, Brotherhood of Man, and The Bay City Rollers.
Then an old black-and-white film with Alex Guinness.
We realise it’s just the two of us, my sister and I, in the castle. A 12-year-old and a 14-year-old. I dwell on the executions that used to take place in the courtyard. Where’s there’s now a swimming pool.
With telly over for the evening, we decide to go on a ghost hunt. We light a candle for this. We take a torch just in case.
We’ve only just crossed the Great Hall when we sense something has changed. We look up at the huge Great Picture, which is supposed to feature the 15-year-old Lady Anne Clifford in the left-hand frame, her parents and brothers in the centre, and the elderly Lady Anne, fifty years later, in the far frame. Had all the figures vanished, I might have freaked out – one is missing, Anne has gone.
The frame that ought to feature the 15-year-old Lady Anne in formal early Elizabethan court attire is empty, as if she were a mannequin in a shop window, and had been removed from the display.
I sense it first. A person at my side. It’s Anne. She’s a slight figure. 5ft 2. Sesimilar in size to my 12-year-old sister who is hding behind me, fearful of the sector, itching to use the torch on her.
Lady Anne points, and we follow.
She enters the Chapel, which is immediately the other side of the Great Hall, behind the Great Picture.
She goes to a nook in the wall, kneels down and prays. Is she as freaked out as we are? She appears to be taking this in her stride. I guess that makes it all right.
My sister and I wonder whether to join in with the praying thing, or to leave her to it.
We just watch. We’ve got what we came looking for. A ghost.
– He says it’s all right for me to be here. Anne says.
– Who does? I ask.
– Who do you think?
I don’t think. Or say anything more. I’m talking to a ghost.
Who does she think she is speaking to? Are we as out of pace in this setting as she is to us?
I touch her. She thinks I’m being rude.
Then she touches us. I guess she’s as confused as we are.
She likes my sweatshirt and my sister’s jeans.
We all try to speak at once, with no great success.
Time for tea. We go through to the kitchen.
Everything is a wonder to her. Of course, it must be: electric light, the kettle, and why a KitKat is wrapped in tinfoil and paper.
She asks what we are we doing here?
We explain that we live here. We introduce yourselves: Jono and Jojo.
We’re not going to call her Lady Anne. We decide on Annie.
We show her around. For her it’s a case of spot the difference: radiators and light switches, the electric lights and the TV set.
She struggled on the stairs in her heavy court gowns. So with our help, Annie changes. She liked the idea of trousers.
Dressing up is the order of the day. Our older sister, late teens, hippy girl of the Woodstock era, is away at finishing school in Switzerland for a year – she has a walk-in wardrobe crammed with clothes of hippiness.
We dress Annie in bell-bottoms with flash patches, platforms, and a brightly coloured knitted tank top over a cotton grandpa shirt.
Then, having located the needle for our older sister’s record player, we play music: ‘White Rabbit’ Jefferson Aeroplane sets the theme, then Jethro Tull ‘Songs from the Wood’ and ‘Mood for the day’ by Yes.
As dawn approached over the distance fell, ls we wondered if Annie ought to be making her way back.
She was standing there, back in the Great Hall, in dungarees with her dress over her arm when the Housekeeper made an appearance, greeted us, made no comment, and got on with whatever it was she did.
We all looked up at the Great picture. Would anyone notice if Annie didn’t return?
We decided against trying to paint in a replacement. We hoped no one would notice.
Jojo and I made it our responsibility to give Abbie a day to remember.
Later that day, Dad got in from London. He’s no fool. He saw that something had been done to the picture.
– Where’s Lady Anne gone? It vexed him.
She was standing next to him.
Dad wondered if Lady Anne had ever been painted into this version of the Triptych? But this was the original, not the copy. It troubled him, as it should. He went off to his study to complete his research.
Annie fancied a bath. We gave her a fancy bath. We called it the roundie. It was a four-poster bed with showers and a jacuzzi setting. Jojo helped Annie with the settings and the bubble bath.
Then we left her to it.
– Do ghosts melt in hot water?
Jojo was sure she’d be fine. She’d survived a pub lunch at the Royal Oak.
Once the bath had drained, we expected Annie to call, but she’d gone. There was a tangle of black hair in the plug hole. She never did return to the Great Picture.
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