Stray Ghosts
©
Seán Manchester, 2003
“Some
peculiar circumstances in his private
history
had rendered him to me an object of
attention,
of interest, and even regard, neither
the
reserve of his manners, nor occasional
indication
of an inquietude at times approach-
ing
to alienation of mind, could extinguish.”
~ Lord Byron
W
Nothing remains save the stray ghosts
that haunt portraits hanging in the gallery of life. Some who flitted into this
fragment of a memoir are made flesh in the recollection thereof, which almost
affords a corporeal form despite them being presented here as no more than
pictures and words, albeit, for me at least, breathing subjects, refusing to
fade — even though their actual reflection has long dissolved.
It occurred, as this haunted gallery was
revisited, that I, too, am destined to join these wandering phantoms who cry
out on metaphorical, if not metaphysical, moors for their unlived days and
uneaten bread. A fate, perhaps, that awaits us
all in the consciousness of those who remain behind — glimpsing us through the
prism of time.
There is the fourth dimension — by no
means divorced from the more familiar three related to space — which we
now know to be time. It is every bit as real as the visible
now in which we are seemingly constrained. Spirit, of course, is not
governed by time. Hence certain key moments of my life, in effect, are living
in the intimate portraits and recollections selected for this memoir. The
reader is invited to view these fragments — chosen from a vast array —
comprising some of my earthly existence.
What follows is only part, albeit an
important part, of the puzzle. I do not lay claim to this modest effort being
anything more than an arbitrary wander along the long corridor of years wherein
memory stirs. The reality once experienced no longer exists in the space I now
occupy. Yet it still exists — somewhere in time — as a stray ghost.
X
Seán Manchester
The
author’s parents at the Café Royal in June 1953.
The key turned in its already decomposing lock. The door would not
yield. Bolted from the inside — it would not open. Then a sinking feeling.
There was no movement beyond the discoloured curtains on either side of the
house. No sense of movement.
Eventually I managed to prise open the
door within the garden at the rear of the property, and entered the small
kitchen. Each step now almost in slow motion, as I peered gingerly through a sombre
portal into the dining room I had known so intimately for thirty-three years;
where I had sat, sipping cups of tea; where I had discussed, nay argued, every
topic. Now strangely frozen in time. Motionless. Dust had accumulated on every
surface; much of it over a period of eight years. And the smell. Indescribably
unpleasant, the odour would remain with me for three years.
Then I noticed it. A familiar hand.
Extended in the attitude of clutching air; seizing that final moment on Earth.
Fingers discoloured and stiff. Supine in its rigor mortis, the body lay exactly
as it had fallen in that fatal moment a week earlier when the heart attack
struck. This would be the first and last time I saw my father in the new
century.
Upstairs, awaiting discovery, my
mother’s bedroom remained in a state of perfect preservation. She had died of
cancer eight years prior. Now my father had also taken his leave. I was all
that remained of the family bloodline. This would be the last adieu.
* *
*
Much of England resembled a vast
wasteland of bombed sites and rubble, and I was the product of a disintegrating
world. Hitler was still alive and the allied invasion of Europe had barely
commenced. Yet I became strangely protected amidst it all, living in Nottinghamshire
where my grandparents’ forest retreat would provide sanctuary when we were not
ensconced at the somewhat more modest dwelling in St Anns Well Road, a terrace
house where my parents would reside until the war was over.
Neither our first home, nor much else on
the St Anns Well Road, has managed to survive, having long since been replaced
by the grotesque architecture of that later era where design was to be
sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Sadly, the general area has, like so
many, sharply declined. When I returned to the place of my early childhood for
the first time, in the spring of 2001, I was shocked to find none of the
original buildings remaining, but I managed to find my aunt’s old house atop a
hill within a short distance. It was smaller than I remembered, as things often
tend to be when revisited across the span of so many years. I knocked in
anticipation of her genial expression. There was no answer. Then I called at
the neighbouring property, only to be greeted by a late-riser in his dressing-gown
on that Saturday morning, who gruffly acquainted me with the fact that the
occupant of “Windyridge” was no more. She had died two years earlier. The sun
shone that morning. I inspected the garden, and witnessed how it had been
allowed to deteriorate. She loved her garden, and tended it all her life,
cultivating roses in particular. Now only thorns remain. If the St Anns’
district is a microcosm, it is a metaphor for the mediocre macrocosm of England
now. I retreated to my vehicle, starting the long journey from whence I came.
So it was hereabouts that my parents had
struggled in the last months of the Second World War. Thank heaven for that
other place in Newstead Abbey Park, which stood in the shadow an old monastery,
and now still older mansion, of a rich and rare mixed Gothic. Here I would
spend time encapsulated in a world that remained somehow in its own history,
set in the midst of forest trees, which very semblance stood petrified in
yestercentury — not swaying, nor even fluttering in the night winds of war.
Yet here, too, I would become acquainted
with the mysterious effect of the supernatural, which would, many years later,
oblige my grandparents to quit their forest home following an unearthly
spectral haunting. A malevolent ghost-like figure was believed to be
responsible for my maternal grandmother’s early death. [A full
account is given in Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, Gothic
Press, 1992, pages 17-19.]
My mother was a sweet and innocent soul
who sought beauty and goodness where it seldom seemed to dwell. She sang, wrote
poetry, and played the piano a little (especially her favourite composer,
Chopin) when she was young, but the ultimate prize of happiness, as envisaged
in her heart, seemed to elude her. So she stopped doing these, as life itself
grew tiresome as the inevitability of compromise dawned. Yet a sparkle in her
blue eyes remained from a time when dreams had not flown.
Dorothy Woodward was born at a time when
the previous world conflict had practically wiped out an entire generation, and
was growing tired by the spring of 1918. Her paternal grandparents, both quiet
by nature, had a farm in Derbyshire. The abode of her maternal grandparents,
also located in Derbyshire, was the destination for Christmas holidays. These
would be spent with her parents who themselves resided in close proximity to
Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood Forest.
Newstead:
a semi-ruined priory ~ home to the Byron family for three centuries.
Once the habitat of the celebrated poet and his ancestors, Newstead would become a symbol of all that is Gothic and Romantic, which now, irrevocably, has slipped into the reservoir of fragmented memory. This is where I played as a child in the avenues of sombre forest trees in Lord Byron’s gloomy abode where the fading twilight coupled with the moan in leafy woods to herald the filmy disc of the moon.
Dorothy had been the second-born of five
children, and easily her father’s favourite. Her mother, however, not only
favoured the first-born (the aunt I sought in 2001), but eschewed Dorothy for
some reason not understood and certainly not explained. Attempts were made to
reconcile the schism, but to no avail. It would remain a mystery; especially as
Dorothy was so palpably honourable and kind. My father described her as “the
most endearing and the prettiest of the three daughters.” The two remaining
children were boys. The cold treatment from her mother induced a terrible
sadness into her life that never quite departed, which would not be resolved by
marriage to the man she met on an outing to the seaside when she was nineteen.
In the summer of 1937, Arthur Allen
stood on a swaying, overcrowded train heading for Skegness, a seaside resort on
England’s east coast, when a young lady, seeing he had been on his feet for
some duration, offered him her own seat. They chatted briefly and the
nineteen-year-old presented her card. This permitted chaperoned outings over
the following months, culminating in a registrar office wedding on 30 October
1942.
The
author’s mother at nineteen years.
Arthur Allen Manchester, a
musician, as the Second World War loomed, turned his hand to clerical work,
then became an accountant and, much later, a company secretary and director.
Dorothy, despite her artistic nature and romantic heart, was restrained in many
ways. Her husband leaned more toward the radical fringes. His left-wing
politics earned him few Brownie points with Dorothy’s arch-conservative family.
Ostracism, albeit slow, was inevitable as the years went by. Dorothy sought
solutions, and always led the way to make things possible. The aloofness
experienced from her mother, however, continued and indeed increased throughout
married life.
Most of all, Dorothy wanted a child. Arthur Allen was less enthusiastic. Nonetheless, I was conceived during October 1943, as the war in Europe prepared to reach its climax. Thus, nine months later, came into the world “the great, great, great grandson of the famous poet, through an illicit liaison between his lordship and a maid at Newstead Abbey.” [The Highgate Vampire, British Occult Society, 1985, page 123.] Many years later, I would thank leading Byron scholar Professor Leslie A Marchand “for his help and comments in private correspondence about the ‘records of births and deaths of the lower (servant) class in those days’ when trying to establish facts about the poet and Lucy, my great, great, great grandmother.” [Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, Gothic Press, 1992, page 13.]
The
Lord Byron (1788–1824).
Owning this blood connection would lead
to certain expectations, as reflected in the following observation: “He was
invited to appear on Central Television’s Saturday Night Live, but only on
condition that he ‘dressed like Lord Byron’.” [“The Byronic Man” by Tim
Baggaley, Velvet Vampyre, 1992, page 14.]
Detail
of portrait with shield from coat-of-arms.
(Oil
on canvas: 61cm x 76cm; 24 x 30 inches.)
Byron was seldom without consolation of the female kind and of the various servant maids who slipped between his sheets to keep him company at Newstead, Lucy was far and away his favourite. He called her Lucinda, but in the following lines she appears as Lucietta:
Lucietta my dear,
That fairest of faces!
Is made up of kisses …
A letter, 17 January 1809, to John
Hanson confirms that “the youngest is pregnant (I need not tell you by whom)
and I cannot have the girl on the parish.” On 4 February 1809, Byron wrote to
Hanson: “Lucy’s annuity may be reduced to fifty pounds, and the other fifty go
to the Bastard.” He had originally provided her with an annuity of one hundred
pounds. Three years after making Lucy pregnant he put her in charge as revealed
in a letter to Francis Hodgson, written from Newstead on 25 September 1811:
“Lucy is extracted from Warwickshire [where his and her son had been weaned];
some very bad faces have been warned off the premises, and more promising
substituted in their stead … Lucinda to be commander of all the makers and
unmakers of beds in the household.”
Byron
(date unknown).
Byron’s letters might suggest a callousness in his relationships
that is perhaps unwarranted, but when his illegitimate child by Lucy was born,
he wrote a poem in which he hailed his “dearest child of love.” He had always
wanted a son and Lucy provided him with his first and last.
The
author (date unknown).
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and pictures from Stray Ghosts by Seán Manchester
(unpublished memoir) are copyright protected and cannot be reproduced without
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