19 June 2008
g is for ghost
(Or Playmobil does Hauntology)
It is clear that the real ghosts haunt the city, not the countryside. Walking around London - the Greenwich Peninsula, the Docklands, the pre-Olympics East - the spectres of all the other Londons, the poor London, the plague-ridden London, the revolutionary London of Wat Tyler massing troops on the Heath - hang in the air, poisoning attempts to make the whole city resemble the yuppie flats and commercial plazas of the regenerators' dreams.
The city is haunted, not only by the poverty that just won't tuck itself nicely away and the resistance that rears its head in protests and strikes, but by more mundane, yet more painful ghosts - the memories of shared walks, illuminated flashes of past conversations with people who have now disappeared for good, in death or in life. Getting off the bus or a tube in a infrequently visited locale, one is consumed by the ambient recall of a person and that place for a few seconds, a kind of socio-geography of the heart, a curious spasm of memory-pain.
The house in the countryside I grew up in was built in the 1600s, and bought by my parents for £7000 at the end of the 1970s. Cheap because it was ruined (my parents spent 13 years fixing it up), its previous tenant was an elderly blind women who lived solely in the kitchen. The house always scared me, even when my spirit medium great-grandmother and my exorcist great-uncle (I promise I'm not making them up) both declared that all the spirits there were friendly. As a child, interested in the macabre history of the British Isles, I would write letters to this great-uncle, who spent most of his time when not chasing spirits being a priest. One response I remember particularly well, written in red ink and lots of capital letters, he warned me not to meddle in the SPIRIT WORLD for fear of UNIMAGINABLE HORROR. That frightened me far more than the ghosts that I never, in fact, managed to see. My brother later claimed to have seem lots, but I'm sure he would have told me at the time, were that true.
We found lots of things in the house - a political document from the time of King James I that later disappeared, a perfectly kept Victorian child's shoe that Ma hung over the spiral staircase, the dessicated corpses of mice and once, even a bat, trapped behind a heater with all its fur intact. I kept it in a box and have it still. Early on, my parents found a circular slab of marble buried in the garden which they used as a cheeseboard, and some of my most enjoyable Sunday afternoons were spent trawling nearby fields for pieces of old blue china, which I would then bury in the copse for self-keeping, only never to find them again. There was a kind of desire for ghosts (of a containable kind), if only because the world itself couldn't be as boring as it seemed.
It is not perhaps, then, a question of believing in ghosts so much as constructing them. The airbrushed city of the future will need a whole army of them...
