THE RATTLE IN THE LETTERBOX

I have just looked out and re-written a couple stories for the BBC’s My Story competition and realised afterwards that they were both about paranormal experiences for which there appeared to no provision in the table of categories.

Now I am not normally someone that has much to do with the paranormal. I can’t make tables levitate (as, allegedly, could my great aunt); nor, so far as I know, do I have a ‘follower’ like my daughter who found herself shackled to a ghostly presence while doing charity work in Africa. She even sought help from someone who dealt in these sort of occult matters who diagnosed a young family member who couldn’t ‘rest’ properly.

And, yes, it was true. A Roman Catholic illegitimacy in a distant part of the family and an unbaptised child who had died and been refused burial on consecrated ground. No wonder the child felt aggrieved, it wasn’t her fault after all. But this was an untold and hushed up story, which my daughter knew nothing about.

Nor again do I have the ability to sense ‘presences,’ which my old father used to do regularly, especially when egged on by his third wife, Ella, who could practically relate the history of a building from sensing the cosmic vibrations coming through the walls and ceiling.

In fact you could say they made a rather spooky pair. She died shortly after him and at short notice. Her death, and the way in which she announced it in a telephone call to me quite out of the blue one morning in a voice still strong, bright and optimistic: ‘I’m sorry to be troubling you at work but I just thought I ought to tell you that I probably won’t be here much beyond next week,’ seemed to parallel exactly that of Laura in Saki’s eponymous story:

“I have the doctor’s permission to live till Tuesday,” said Laura.

“But today is Saturday; this is serious!” gasps her friend Amanda.

“I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,” Laura replies.

Laura tells her friend that she can be optimistic because she is not actually going to die, just presumably leave off being Laura; and this is indeed what happens, Laura resurfaces as a succession of verminous beasts that play havoc in the poultry pens of family members she had detested in this life.

In Ella’s case the optimism came from the prospect of being released from her current state of inconvenient separation from my father and so she embraced her ending with almost indecent haste.

The funeral took place in a little village church in Gloucestershire for reasons that I never fully understood, their religious persuasions being questionable to say the least. The Vicar was a jolly fellow, well briefed on their psychic history, and so was not in the least fazed when during his eulogy the heavy oak door of the church creaked open and no-one, visible at least to the rational eye, came in.

Someone shut the door and sat down. The vicar resumed and the door creaked opened again. That this was my father descended to collect Ella and to have a spot of mischievous fun seemed obvious to anyone that knew them. Again the door was closed and this time, bolted. Ghosts are so bad about shutting doors after them.

But this Christmas-tide I did experience a psychic phenomenon of my own and I suppose it was that that pushed me into submitting my paranormal tales to the BBC. (If ever they are published I shall no doubt not hesitate to tell you about them. If they are not published then I may recycle them and inflict them upon you anyway).

Our last Newfoundland dog, Sampson, died in the house where we live now about ten years ago. He used to lie beside the front door, curled up on the wide doormat and when he got up he stood so tall that his big head would rattle the interior flap of the letter box.

We still hear the letter box rattling from time to time. Usually just a single rattle - the flap lifting and falling shut. You'd swear the post had arrived but when you run to look - nothing. And it isn't the wind or a door being opened; we’ve checked that. It doesn’t happen very often and we think nothing of it.

But early the other morning about 5 am, in fact, I was going downstairs to the kitchen. I had reached the bottom of the stairs when the letterbox gave a tremendous and multiple rattle - flap, flap, flap - as though a postman with a parcel had found the doorbell inoperative and wanted to attract our attention. Exactly, in fact as though I had disturbed the sleeping dog and he had jumped up smartly and so rattled the flap.

But of course there was nothing or no-one there and the air was otherwise quite still. I suppose I felt slightly scared. What might be coming next? This is after all the season of clanking chains.

Nothing further happened. Friends said it must have been the presence of the dog. But why at that time? Why such insistence? Was this an omen?

We found then that we had to cancel a proposed trip to France for New Year. Was it this? And then a blogging friend, someone who had, last year, been due to visit us, died tragically and unexpectedly in hospital, just when we had had all expected an excellent recovery. Was it that?
Or is it something yet to come?

Or is it absolutely not an omen at all - just a random event, signifying nothing?

In the words of Thomas Crown watching the supposed fake Rembrandt burning on the fire: “we shall never know, shall we?” But of one thing I am quite sure, this was a real event even if one without an obvious cause.

Another case of there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.