way as she went through the house with a fine tooth comb. No one dared to be late
when the evening meal was placed on the table at 6pm on the dot. She gave birth
to her first child at the age of seventeen, and later worked in the local launderette for
several years.
38 Kings Road felt the right place to be as I had always spent the yearly summer
holidays at the house for as long as I could remember. It was a semi-detached house
within along road of like houses on both sides. It was the road where I had learnt to
ride my bicycle. Granddad had promised not to let go of the bike as he pushed me
along the never ending Kings Road. I had turned my head to see him and I was
shocked to find I was on my own with granddad shouting how well I was doing in the
distance. I have many happy childhood memories of this place and along with the fine
smells of cooking from the scullery, the roast dinners, the Yorkshire puddings and
home-made cakes and the long, long garden with trees to climb, places to hide, made
this a desirable environment unlike that of the depressed situation in London.
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Nan and I had a special bond as we always liked to talk about ‘odd happenings ‘
mainly poltergeist and how these apparitions‘ appeared to plague areas where young
teenagers were going through puberty and seemingly attract these impish creatures.
Nan was a large lady of short stature, she smoked heavily, full strength Woodbines
that browned her finger tips, like tattoos that would never wash out. She had a broad
Newcastle accent and had some bad habits, like spitting into the fire grate even while
having our tea. She owned the rights to the television schedule, especially the news
and I can still hear her now, a word from anyone, she would respond with “Shhhh”!
She had worked in factories on the production lines for most of her working life.
Nan had lost her husband when he was just forty six, she was three years younger. He
was a person who liked to make items of furniture out of wood and sometimes metal.
There were several pieces of his work all around the house, some unfinished. A huge
grey metal cabinet about the size of a dresser, housed in the scullery, contained his
precious tools. Nan believed she could hear him working on his creations in the
evenings when she had retired to bed.
During 1969 Nan became ill, she was sixty years of age and was diagnosed with
terminal cancer. The time we had left together was spent talking late into the early
hours of the morning. We spoke about trying to communicate after she had passed
and we had promised each other we would both try hard to make it happen. Finally
the cancer took a firm grip within her body and she found that she had no choice but
to go into hospital. She did not want to be there and she made it clear that she wanted
to come home to die in familiar surroundings with the family that she loved.
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When Nan had been in hospital for about a week, it was decided she could come
home, as there was nothing more the doctors could do for her. My sister declared that
we needed to change things around a bit. It was decided that Nan’s room would be in
the down stairs dining room, so a bed was setup for her as she had become too weak
to tackle the stairs. While the rooms were being changed around, it was decided that a
large wardrobe belonging to Nan was no longer needed and now that Nan was
downstairs, it would be too big anyway. It was dark brown with a large drawer at the
base, which was not attached to the main unit and it had a large mirror on it’s only
door. Nan had told me, that when my mum was born she used to sleep in the drawer
as a baby. I was excited as I was allocated the small box room and would no longer
need to share with my two small nieces. The box room was about six and a half feet
by eight feet with some of the floor space taken up by the strange shaped stairwell.
My bed was especially adapted to fit over the stairwell, resulting in the bed being
shorter than my already small five foot height. The room had a large metal framed,
small paned window, looking out over the small front garden and to the houses on the
other side of the road.
To make some storage within my new room, my sister had the idea of retaining the
bottom half of Nan’s old wardrobe and the mirror door. The rest of the wardrobe was
moved to the back of the garden by my brother-in-law and would be dismantled later
at the weekend. It was an over powering piece of heavy, clumsy furniture which Nan
and Granddad had purchased as a matching bedroom set when they first got married.
Very few items belonging to my grandparents remained as they had been swapped out
with more modern items as they were afforded.
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I was happy with my new room, with my own things, nobody else’s. It was about
eleven when I decided I would go up to bed. Closing the door of the box room, I was
quite pleased with what had been achieved. I found myself gazing at the base of the
old, almost antique wardrobe unit, the drawer was looking at me, showing itself in
the form of a ’coffin’ waiting for its passenger. It had gone full circle from cradle to
grave. The mirror had not been mounted on the wall but lent against it instead. I just
did not want to look into it for fear of what I might have seen. I turned off the light
and got into bed, covering my head with the sheet. Suddenly I was aware that the
atmosphere within the room had changed, so dark, quiet and …. empty. I could hear
the sound of my heartbeat as I quivered in the dead quiet of the still countryside. As
I settled I heard my sister and her husband going to bed and into their adjacent
bedroom. The crack of light from under my bedroom door was extinguished when the
hall light was turned off and their bedroom door closed. Silence.
An hour later, I was still lying wide awake, not daring to move, almost stiff with fear.
I heard a light tap on my door and my sisters voice “Salli… are you alright?“.
Suddenly every cell in my body turned to ice. She opened the door and asked “are you
feeling okay Sal?“ I jumped out of bed and grabbed my sister. Almost unbelievably
together, we both started screaming. Her husband came in to calm us down and asked
what was going on, we looked at each other and again together spoke the words ’it’s
the wardrobe!’. By now it was around 1 a.m. in the morning and all three of us were
involved in getting the wardrobe base and mirror door out into the garden. We
returned to bed stunned and exhausted from the ’happening’.
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At the hospital, a couple of weeks before Nan was due to return home, we explained
to her the events of that night of the ’happening’. We felt we had to get her agreement
to dispose of the wardrobe, to smash and burn it in the back garden. When Nan
arrived home she watched over the destruction and ceremonial burning of the
wardrobe. She did not appear to care, although she never really showed emotion, so it
was hard to judge. She was very ill, maybe too ill to care?
I cannot remember the ‘burning’ too well as I could not bring myself to watch it
go. It was a memory that I did not want lodged in my mind… but the smell of the
burning wardrobe… the old damp wood, crackling and drowning from the dampness
escaping from its graininess…stays with me.
Nan died during the summer months that year. We never discussed the ’happening’
again, not even as we grew older. Having Nan’s permission to dispose of the
wardrobe that weekend was necessary as we felt that it was Granddad telling us he
was upset with the reorganisation and planned destruction of their possessions. So
strong was our guilt that night… that awful night of the ’happening’, that we just had
to get Nan’s permission to continue what we had started.
The events that took place over the two weeks of the ‘happening’ have never left my
thoughts. Although we have never ever spoken of the ’happening’ I shall never
forget the joint, almost hysterical feelings of that night in 1969. I no longer feel
scared and maybe if it was to happen to me now, I may act with more logic and see
that in the world of the paranormal, coincidence may have led us astray.
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But oh! what a coincidence that both myself and my sister were feeling the same, the
same thoughts and at the same time. Just like in London on the day that I left. I
believe people within the same family have special connections, a feeling that in this
instance, that we were tied to each other. Maybe the guilt we were feeling that day
had played within our minds, ridding ourselves of part of Nan during a time when she
herself would be gone forever.
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