The Ghost House (Chapter 4)

We were into late January now, and it was still cold, although the snow had gone and had turned to slush.

I remember when I was six, I trudged to school from our house, with the snow so deep it went down inside my Welly boots and wet my socks, but this year it was warmer, which was good. 

I walked down the road from Cubs which was held in a church hall at the top of the Kings North scheme, I was feeling brave, so I walked very quickly down the Dachshund Hill in the dark, down past the Ghost House, which looked like a beacon shining in the night, maybe someone, or thing was inside. There was something lighting the place up. I didn’t stay to find out, I began to run down the hill, passing the rhododendron bushes we called ‘The Bushies’, beside the school gates. I heard a rustling sound, and was sure I saw a figure emerging from ‘The Bushies'.

 'Hello , who's there?, I shouted, but it was really dark, so it could have been a shadow, a dog or fox or something. I hoped that was what it was.

A while ago, Dad had corrected my pronounciation of ‘Roddy Dendron’ bushes, saying it was ‘Rhodo- dendron’, not my version, which sounded like the name of a person, like a new boy at school, 'Roderick Dendron'. 

 I was often told that I  had inherited Dad’s ‘way with words’, I looked up the dictionary a lot, and liked to find out the meaning of words, and use big words to impress in class. Miss Lang, my teacher  had said I had 'an enquiring mind' , at Parent's Night.. My parents had encouraged me to read and had taken me to the library when I was seven, as I loved books and reading. All my teachers had said that the stories I wrote in school were very good, and how gifted I was,  and often gave me ten out of ten and a gold star for them . I had secretly started to write ghost stories , in a school jotter , so I could read them out in the Ghost House to Alan and others in my potential audience, they were usually set in the olden days, and were about haunted churches , or empty houses, a lot of them were really like the ones in the Fontana Ghost Books , the teachers had said that I was good at ‘evoking the smell of old places’, the mould and mildew of an empty house’ or ‘the  musty damp smell of an old church hall’ . I wasn’t bothered, I was getting ‘one up’ on Alan. I could write stories, and he couldn’t, so that would put ‘his nose out of joint’ as Dad would say. Apart from his always being the first to latch onto the latest craze, whether toys,  horror movies , or sport, Alan was always the first to get the coolest gear: platform boots -which I  ‘wasn’t allowed’,  ‘George Best’ ski jackets which were ‘too expensive’, flared Levi’s- which I didn’t like,  not forgetting Slade records- I had some 45s, but no LPs.

I hurried round the corner, past Mrs. McKay’s house, and I was home.

‘Did you have a nice time at Cubs?’, said Mum, as I popped my head round the door.

‘Yep’, I said, seeing that ‘The Goodies’ was just coming on the TV, on BBC2. I liked the Goodies, as did Alan and heaps of the folk in our class. Alan did a great imitation of Tim Brooke-Taylor, and of Bill Oddie, but he hadn’t yet mastered Graeme Garden’s voice or mannerisms. I was rubbish at imitating voices, almost as bad as Ally Harrison was at doing Frank Spencer’s ‘mmm, Betty ‘ routine.

I wondered, in the back of my mind, if Ally Harrison had been in the ‘Bushies ' tonight, maybe trying to scare me in his usual way, but decided to leave that until tomorrow, as a huge kitten was terrorizing London, and the Goodies had been called in to save the day, this would be a laugh.