Where the Wyld's Things are, Episode 1

A place for the scary stuff, shapeless things and unsettling ephemera that come up while I’m writing a new novel. May contain ghosts.

Illustration by Gwen Burns _gwenburns_

Hi,

This is my Substack. Eventually, I hope this will be a home for all sorts of things, but to begin with I’m going to be telling one longish ghost story, which I’ll update regularly. It’s a story I have been trying and failing to tell since I was a child.

In the paid for content I’m going to leave some supporting material – photographs or audio stuff, short stories or deleted scenes that I’ve written along the way and which, just like this story, have never found the right home or have disappeared into the past. This ghost story is present but invisible in most things that I write.

Thanks so much for reading

Evie

The Ghost Story

Episode 1

I can never quite reach this story on the page. The times I have tried to write it down, I find myself setting off in the wrong direction, telling other stories over the top of it, like it is trying to hide from me, or like there’s so much to it that I can’t get all the words out quick enough or in the right order for them to make sense.

The story is not my own – it belongs to my parents. It’s a ghost story, a poltergeist story if you want to be specific. Every time my mother tells it, and she has been telling it to me since I was about six years old, I learn something new – about my parents, about myself, or about the way that it happened.

My mother, Christie, is 80 and that adds an urgency to getting this story down in a physical form, and to have her retell it incase I have missed something. It still holds the thrill and horror it gave me when I was a child. Partly it’s in her matter of fact performance - she tells it like she is giving complicated directions to an idiot (me).

This is one version she has told me amongst hundreds, we are walking in the park in early January with the dog. It has new parts to it, things she never shared with me before, it’s also missing things which I will do my best to fill in as we go. The story takes place in the South of France, not far from Cannes, around 1970.

The Ghost Story transcribed in January 2025

Arrival

C: It was a holiday. I don’t know if it was before we were married or after we were married.

E: There are pictures of Dad there, but I don’t see any of you.

C: No I was probably taking the pictures. It was before we were married, I should think.

E: When did you get married?

C: Oh. I can’t remember. We were together I think about five years before we got married. And I think the gallery was still at home, and I used to work for Benny and we were friends with his brother David - I’ve told you about him he was a muscle man, and some people came and took photographs of him in the gym and then he found his body on the back of a muscle man magazine with someone else’s head on it and he was very upset. (To the dog) Come on, get your ball.

The dog tears grass up and eats dirt. She has started to do this more and more on walks, is letting us know she is bored of this park.

C: (To the dog) Anyone would think you’re having a breakdown. (To me) Anyway he was friends with Bob – you know - it was all that mad gang, and Bob and Annie and David and Charlotte, his girlfriend, had been to stay in this house in the South of France.

E: The dog’s rolling in goose shit. And the place is called Auribeau, right?

C: Just below Auribeau.

The dog barks manically, I get the ball for her and throw it, we both laugh watching her catch it.

C: And they knew the people that owned it (the dog pants - I throw the ball again) we took it for two weeks - I think we probably had it after they’d been there. And they told us after we’d been there that they’d had some funny experiences.

E: I didn’t know that. Bob and Annie?

C: And David and Charlotte. And we drove there, and we drove by Herbert and stayed with him for a bit.

E: I thought Herbert owned it?

Herbert Wolfertz was a painter my father managed at the time – here is a review of an exhibition he had in 1971:

Herbert Wolfertz, Clytie Jessop

Gallery, 271 King’s Road. Lon-

don S.W.3, to Oct. 2. 1971

There are, thank heaven, art-

ists who don’t take themselves

or their art too seriously; who

paint pictures to amuse and

entertain themselves and their

friends. Wolfertz is one of them.

He is a German living and work-

ing in the South of France, and

making what amounts to a series

of send-up self-portraits, based

on seemingly endless numbers of

black and white photographs.

Each titled "Composition No.—."

they present a jovial, jokey and

bacchic personage. They cannot

be considered great art: but they

are extremely good fun.

This is Herbert. His portrait has always hung in my parent’s house. I have always loved Herbert.

C: No – he didn’t own it - he lived in this beautiful deserted village – he bought half of it and Jilly Cooper bought the other half, and he was restoring this beautiful house. Sad we only found him again after he died.

As mentioned I have looked into this story a lot over the years, Herbert is hard to locate but I found a death notice for him. There weren’t, that I can find, many exhibitions, but I see his place mentioned in other German painters’ biographies as somewhere artists would go to eat and drink and have a nice time. I like to think he was friends with Jilly Cooper.

C: Anyway we stayed with him and his beautiful girlfriend and then we drove down to Auribeau and we went and saw Evie then and we definitely weren’t married because she asked us if we were married and I said that we weren’t.

I am named for Evie Wyld, my father’s aunt who designed and made textiles. My grandmother described her as ‘a homosexual or at any rate she wore trousers.’

TAPIS, 1927 by Evelyn Wyld

C: and this creepy guy that was there… (my mother laughs loudly - a short dog has taken an interest in our tall dog and his tailing her.) Get on, go away, because she’ll eat you up.

E: What creepy man?

C: What? Oh. I don’t know. (To the dog’s owner) he doesn’t know he’s playing with death. (To me) Anyway we got to aunt Evie and then we went back to our house and it was beautiful. Auribeau is up a hill and has a river going by.

At this point, the dog sits down in the middle of the field and refuses to get up. My mother says ‘come here you silly dog’ her voice getting quieter as she walks away. Then just the sound of me breathing. I will never know about the creepy man at great aunt Evie’s. I know better than to push my mother on it, it will have evaporated by now.

I need to tell you all the things my mother has left out of this particular retelling so far. I didn’t warn her I was going to be recording, I wanted her to be natural, but she has a way of summarising if she thinks I’m listening too closely, as if she doesn’t want to bore me with a fulsome retelling. And honestly, most times I have heard her tell it has been in the evening sat around a table, several bottles of wine in. A cold park in the morning is perhaps too brisk a place for a ghost story. What I remember from other tellings is that when they arrived, there was a dead hare lain across the threshold of the cottage.

The other thing that feels relevant is that my father was an art dealer specialising in early English Watercolour, Herbert one of two artists who were living at the time of their exhibitions with my father. He preferred to work with long dead artists. In my time his gallery moved around the West End – you can still find details of his last one, WS Fine Art on Dover Street which closed shortly after his death in 2011. Last time I checked the bell at the front door still had the name of the gallery on it. The cover of his final catalogue, (pictured at the top of this letter) a Cozens, painted in muted colours, at dawn perhaps. Lonely. But before his galleries he hung exhibitions in his house, printed up invitations himself, held private views at home. As I look around my basement flat, home to me, my husband and ten year old son, I can’t imagine a worse thing than inviting people over to inspect the beauty of your interior. There has been a garlic skin on the floor for a full week – it gets stuck on the sole of someone’s foot and moved about the place but never swept up.

My mother restores watercolours, she looks closely at the details, looks for acids rising in the paper, shadows and stains caused by cheap mounts, sunlight, damp. A Turner, folded. She knocks back or brings out the ghosts of older intentions on the paper.

Both my mother and father are and were visual people, the look of something as important as the resolve behind it. They could bare most things if there was something beautiful to look at. My parents’ first impression of the cottage was of a place that was a little dark, but lovely for being away from everyone. They had to park their car across a field of long grass and walk their belongings and shopping across to it, a distance of about 200 yards.

C: And it was an old house that had been added on to – you walked through the wardrobe when you were upstairs to get into the other part of the house.

These two sides of the cottage have played larger parts in the story previously. The very old side, joined via a bathroom to the newer part. In a retelling from long ago, in this bathroom hung a portrait of a man with a moustache holding a sword and on the door that the man faced which led into the newer part of the cottage, there were marks in the wood like someone had stabbed at it. This detail has not appeared in the story in the last 20 years or so of retelling, but it is one I liked a lot as a child, because it made a kind of sense of what happened next.

I’ve stalked the cottage on Google Earth and Google Maps. Years ago I am almost sure I found it, could hold up my photograph of the cottage and see it was the same – with new extensions added on to it, at the foot of Auribeau the ancient town, down by the river. I felt sure that having found it I would be able to find it always, but this hasn’t proven to be the case and as much as I drag the little yellow man along the winding footpaths on Google maps, I can’t find it. I’ve trawled through Airbnb hoping to find it available to rent, to read people’s reviews. The idea that I could go there rears up occasionally but for now I keep it at arm’s length, peering through my fingers.

C: And it was fine. And then you know it started up. We found it very difficult to sleep and when we did sleep we had the worst nightmares of our lives.

.

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