We Lived With A Ghost

I have often been asked (understandably, given the nature of what I write) if I believe in ghosts. I answer, ‘yes’. The next question is invariably. ‘Have you ever seen one?’ Again, ‘yes’ is my response. People want details. I tell them, but, of course such phenomena can be explained away by the sceptical. ‘A trick of the light’, ‘Your imagination playing tricks on you,’ or the incredulous look behind which lurks, ‘you’re weird’. All, of course, are quite possibly true (especially the latter), but I have seen and heard a lot of things I couldn’t quite so easily explain but, of course, in order to believe as I do, you simply had to be there.

A few years ago, we divided our time between a flat in north Wales and a house in Liverpool. The house in Liverpool contained nothing particularly ghostly – although I did once see the apparition of the cat I grew up with who, at that time, had been deceased for around four years. This was a happy experience which stayed with me for days, weeks even.

The flat in north Wales on the other hand… We lived with a ghost. There is no getting away from it. In fact the building itself continues to be haunted by more than one restless spirit – and one of them was caught on camera!

The building dates from the mid eighteenth century and has gone through many different configurations – as shops, dwelling places, a combination thereof and is now a club beneath with a two floor flat above. This was unoccupied for many years until we moved in following extensive renovations. Almost immediately things started to happen. And they were mostly homely, welcoming things, as if our invisible ‘visitor’ wanted to make us feel comfortable.

We would sometimes arrive to find the TV switched on, lights on and, before you say we had carelessly left them on before we left, we hadn’t. In fact, we had checked that everything was switched off just a few minutes before we left. And no, sorry, no-one else could have sneaked in and done it either!

Meanwhile, in another part of the building, used by the Club, other things were happening. In the Snooker Room, chalk was regularly moved, as were beer mats, and then, at around six one morning, my husband came down to our kitchen, whereupon he heard the distinctive sound of the gents’ toilet flushing. This is next to the Snooker Room and on the other side of our wall. He logged the time precisely, thinking that maybe the cleaners had arrived unusually early. 

When, mid-morning, he heard the sound of the Barman arriving to start his shift, my husband, who was Treasurer, went downstairs to the Club and asked to check the CCTV. Evidently the Cleaners had arrived later, at their usual time, so who had been in the Gents? Fortunately CCTV was trained on the area immediately outside. As he watched and, at precisely the same time as he had logged the flushing of the toilet, there was a distinctive, if fast-moving, waft of white smoke across the camera. He continued to watch. Nothing else happened. Other staff watched it. I watched it.

No one has yet been able to explain it. There was no one there or we would have seen them. The cameras were installed to ensure no hiding place for anyone entering or leaving the building and are motion activated. Yes, they were all in perfect working order when the incident happened.

Things continued to move from time to time in the Snooker Room and a couple of the bar staff were so unnerved by the goings-on there that they refused to go up there. One of the staff was certain he heard his name called one night when he was locking up after everyone had gone home. So certain in fact that he answered. There was no one there.

 

 A psychic-medium was shoved violently when she entered the room (with no prior knowledge of its reputation). I was pushed violently backwards and forwards before being thrown off the stair. The injuries I sustained were so severe, the doctors at the hospital couldn’t believe only one step was involved. I didn’t go into all the detail of being shoved and pushed this way and that before the fall occurred. I had no witnesses and who would believe me? My arm was badly broken and I had a bone scan, as they wondered whether my bones were brittle. The tests showed np sign of this. I never retuned to that room.

Thankfully, the ghost in our flat was always friendly. My husband was often aware of her moving around when he was there alone, and there was the curious incident of the washing machine – the detergent drawer was mysteriously and impossibly pushed out when it was operating one day. For all the years we lived there though, neither of us ever felt threatened in that flat.

I was sorry to leave, and wished our ghostly flatmate well. Is she still there looking after whoever has moved in? Sadly, to the best of my knowledge, no one lives in that flat now. She’s all alone up there…

In Landane, ghosts mingle with the living, and the circle of stones guards its secrets well.

‘Fear her now, fear the queen,

As in her stone she reigns supreme…’

When Jonathan agrees to accompany his girlfriend, Nadia, on a trip to Landane, he imagines a short relaxing break in the countryside.  But he quickly discovers that Nadia isn’t just drawn to the ancient Neolithic stone circle, she is obsessed by the megaliths. One in particular. Within hours, her personality begins to change and it isn’t long before Jonathan starts to fear for her sanity.

Reaching far back into the past and up to the present day, those same stones have demonstrated powers beyond reason and, as Jonathan’s girlfriend becomes increasingly distant from reality, some of the ghosts of the past begin to reappear. Now it isn’t only Nadia who is in danger.

What is the secret of the prehistoric standing stones of Landane? What lies within them? And why does an ancient piece of folklore ring so true?

 Publishing on January 14th, 2025

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 Book Launch!

Waterstones, Liverpool One 

Tuesday January 21st at 6.30p.m.

Join me in conversation with James Lefebure (author of The Books of Sarah)

Full details: 

An Evening with Catherine Cavendish

 

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Secrets of Avebury's Stone Circles

 

Unlike the far more compact Stonehenge, Avebury is huge. It’s also quite difficult to imagine its structure at ground level -  much easier looking down on it from the air. Then you can see the larger outer circle and twin inner circles, the ditch, bank and avenues running off, in serpentine fashion. 

These avenues were surely followed by countless generations of our prehistoric ancestors as they processed to the centre, but for what purpose we can only speculate. The seasons would have been critical to them, the changing weather patterns, passage of the sun, even the earth’s magnetic forces would surely have resonated more strongly with them than with us. I venture to suggest that we need our sophisticated technology to capture and interpret signals from the world around us that our ancestors would have been capable of receiving naturally. In our incessant progress we have probably lost much of our innate power; the fine-tuned senses that enable animals to correctly predict the advent of severe weather or catastrophe long before we have an inkling.

 Whatever the reason for their creation, stone circles and lone standing stones are a fact. We can see and touch them and, in the U.K. we are fortunate to be blessed with so many, the length and breadth of the land and on the furthest islands off our coasts. In fact, recent archeology up in Orkney (Ness of Brodgar) is throwing up evidence that the culture that built the stone circles originated from far up north, spreading downwards as people travelled and brought their beliefs and practices with them.

 

These beliefs must have been hugely important to them and included a ritual of the dead, judging by the burials that have been discovered. So when Christianity came along, it as inevitable that a clash would occur between the two opposing sets of belief. And that, as the victor, the powerful hierarchy in the established Christian church, where schisms had already occurred, should go all out to destroy anything that didn’t chime with the exact tenets of its belief. Anything that wasn’t deemed Christian was automatically a threat. It was inevitable that it wouldn’t be too long before attention was turned to the stone circles. And soon it was Avebury’s turn.

Legends and myths had grown up around these megaliths. Ghosts. Strange lights. Sounds. The stones were deemed evil. They must be destroyed. And in the 14^th century, the villagers set about trying to obliterate them from their landscape. They couldn’t shift them manually. Besides, surely it had taken the devil and his minions to plant them there in the first place so if they couldn’t do that, they could burn them. Or bury them. Or both. And that is what they set out to do, digging pits, toppling the stones into them and covering them over. It was dangerous work. At least one man died – the most famous being a Barber Surgeon, so named because of the tools that were found with him, although he may simply have died and been buried under that stone. He was found during excavations by marmalade heir Alexander Keiller in 1938, still interred under the stone that now bears his name.

For some reason, the villagers stopped felling and burying the stones, leaving the job only partly done. Maybe there were more fatalities. It was just too dangerous. The spirits were angry and likely to bring their wrath down to bear on the entire village. Best leave them well alone.

Or maybe… What if the stones were incorporated into the fabric of the church? Wouldn’t that help to somehow cleanse the evil? Certainly, in the seventeenth century, some of the stones was chipped away for use in the building of the chapel but greater use of the stones came a century later. An infamous builder by the name of Tom Robinson decided he would build some houses, using the sarsen stone from the felled stone circles. He employed a workforce to burn and smash the stones for building material. He complained at the cost of this operation, reckoning it at £4 per stone owing to the manpower needed to lever the stones into the burning pits, the costly equipment which often failed or caught fire and needed to be replaced and all before the cottages were even constructed.

Tom Robinson was not a popular man. He was reported by contemporary historian, William Stukeley who called him the Herostratus of Avebury for his destructive habits and his apparent glorying in the destruction. Apparently the man was not morally sound in his eyes either as he had ‘got his wife (an old woman above 50) with child.’ Robinson’s cottages were built but it appears the spirits of the stones avenged themselves for soon after they were completed, they were mysteriously destroyed n a fire and had to be demolished – at an even greater cost to Robinson. No doubt Mr Stukeley celebrated when he heard the news.

The use – or abuse – of the stones continued into the nineteenth century but not without incident. One man, a cobbler, who had been working on one of the stones, moved away and almost instantly the stone toppled and would have crushed him to death had he still been sitting there. Another tried to haul away a heavy stone he had earmarked for a millstone only to discover he couldn’t move it, even with his best team of twenty oxen. It ‘broke all his tackle to pieces’. It refused to be shifted by any means and he had to leave it where it lay. Other though were more successful and bits of sarsen can be found incorporated into buildings of the period all over the area

And as for religion. It seems the spirits and forces of nature combine on occasion. A parish clerk sheltered from the worst of a terrific thunderstorm, by standing close up to one of the stones. As he moved away, a bolt of lightning struck that very stone, cleaving it. The parish clerk, much chastened, hurried away convinced he had come within an inch of being killed by forces he could only guess at.

Today, life seems less fraught for the stones. Many have been re-erected, largely thanks to Alexander Keiller’s mammoth efforts back in the 1930s. The ghosts continue to be reported from time to time. Spirit dancers, voices singing when there is no one there. Mysterious lights, anomalous magnetic readings, strange sensations experience by people who touch the surface of the stones and, of course the mists. It is a landscape prone to such mists – especially early morning when the conditions are right. Yet, however explicable those white, swirling fogs are, it takes but a tiny glimmer of imagination to see figures dancing, swaying, undulating to some long forgotten chant.

The stones at Avebury hold many secrets and they don’t intend to give them up any time soon.

My latest novel is inspired by these magical stones:

 ‘Fear her now, fear the queen,

As in her stone she reigns supreme…’

When Jonathan agrees to accompany his girlfriend, Nadia, on a trip to Landane, he imagines a short relaxing break in the countryside.  But he quickly discovers that Nadia isn’t just drawn to the ancient Neolithic stone circle, she is obsessed by the megaliths. One in particular. Within hours, her personality begins to change and it isn’t long before Jonathan starts to fear for her sanity.

Reaching far back into the past and up to the present day, those same stones have demonstrated powers beyond reason and, as Jonathan’s girlfriend becomes increasingly distant from reality, some of the ghosts of the past begin to reappear. Now it isn’t only Nadia who is in danger.

What is the secret of the prehistoric standing stones of Landane? What lies within them? And why does an ancient piece of folklore ring so true?

 

Publishing on January 14th, 2025

 (available for pre-order now (ebook, paperback, hardback)

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Flame Tree Press

 Barnes and Noble

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 Bookshop.org

 and/or wherever you shop for books

 Images:

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Abe Books

 

 

The Haunted Pub in Avebury's Stone Circle

It is no secret that my new novel – The Stones of Landane – is inspired by the prehistoric landscape of Avebury in Wiltshire, with its impressive stone circles dating back thousands of years. Legends abound in the small village and the place is so full of ghosts, they almost crowd out the many thousands of tourists who arrive curious and leave shaking their heads in wonder.

 

Avebury has been a place of habitation for millennia so it is no surprise that one of the most haunted locations is the village pub - The Red Lion - which used to be residential but, sadly, is no more. These days it is very much a place to meet, drink and eat in its cosy surroundings and has become much busier than I remember from my first acquaintance some forty or more years ago. There are always gains and losses when a traditional pub undergoes radical renovation in order to accommodate the changing preferences of its target market and I do wonder what its plethora of ghosts make of it all. It would appear that, by and large, they have emerged unscathed and unruffled and continue to go about their daily business.

So who are they, this merry (or not so merry) band of haunters?

First off, there’s a transient visitor that passes near the 17^th century building– a ghostly carriage and horses that is the harbinger of bad fortune. Thankfully, its appearances are rare as it signals the death of a close relative.

Then there’s Florrie. Oh, she’s a tragic lady. Back in the days of the English Civil War, her husband returned home unexpectedly from the fighting to discover her in the arms of another man. Angered beyond reason, he killed her lover, slit Florrie’s throat and dragged her body off to the well. This well, by the way is still there, now illuminated, covered by glass and serving as a fascinating drinks table in the restaurant.

Meanwhile, poor Florrie haunts the pub, searching for her lover or her husband (versions differ) but whoever it was had a beard. Men with such facial hair can expect to find themselves targeted. She has been known to make her presence felt by causing a chandelier to twirl…over the head of a bearded customer.

In one of the bedrooms, two ghost children cower in the corner while a woman sits writing at a table busy with her task and appearing unconcerned by their distress. Maybe they are hauntings existing on two distinct plains and are unaware of each other. Certainly their origins are unclear.

Add to these the many orbs, moving shadows with no known origins, cold spots and host of other phenomena and it is without a doubt that The Red Lion at Avebury can lay claim to be, if not the oldest, then certainly one of the most haunted pubs – and the only one to exist wholly within a circle of prehistoric standing stones.

Want to visit? Here’s the Website

Meanwhile…

‘Fear her now, fear the queen,

As in her stone she reigns supreme…’

When Jonathan agrees to accompany his girlfriend, Nadia, on a trip to Landane, he imagines a short relaxing break in the countryside.  But he quickly discovers that Nadia isn’t just drawn to the ancient Neolithic stone circle, she is obsessed by the megaliths. One in particular. Within hours, her personality begins to change and it isn’t long before Jonathan starts to fear for her sanity.

Reaching far back into the past and up to the present day, those same stones have demonstrated powers beyond reason and, as Jonathan’s girlfriend becomes increasingly distant from reality, some of the ghosts of the past begin to reappear. Now it isn’t only Nadia who is in danger.

What is the secret of the prehistoric standing stones of Landane? What lies within them? And why does an ancient piece of folklore ring so true?

Publishing on January 14th, 2025

(available for pre-order now (ebook, paperback, hardback)

Amazon

Flame Tree Press

Barnes and Noble

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

and/or wherever you shop for books

 Images:

Flame Tree Press

Shutterstock

The Stones of Landane -

 ‘Fear her now, fear the queen,

As in her stone she reigns supreme…’

When Jonathan agrees to accompany his girlfriend, Nadia, on a trip to Landane, he imagines a short relaxing break in the countryside. But he quickly discovers that Nadia isn’t just drawn to the ancient Neolithic stone circle, she is obsessed by the megaliths. One in particular holds a fascination for her. Within hours, her personality begins to change, and it isn’t long before Jonathan starts to fear for her sanity.

Reaching far back into the past and up to the present day, those same stones have demonstrated powers beyond reason and, as Jonathan’s girlfriend becomes increasingly distant from reality, some of the ghosts of the past begin to reappear.

Now it isn’t only Nadia who is in danger.

Publishing on January 14th, 2025

available for pre-order now (ebook, paperback, hardback)

Amazon

Flame Tree Press

Barnes and Noble

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

and/or wherever you shop for books

and to get you in the mood...

Newgrange - Clannad

If You Go Down To The (Screaming) Woods Today...

 

..You had better be prepared to experience more than you bargained for. Especially if the woods in question are in the vicinity of the Kent village of Pluckley. Properly known as Dering Woods, this forest is more commonly known as the Screaming Woods – and for very good reason.

The area itself is situated just south of England’s (arguably) most haunted village – Pluckley – where it seems almost every building and piece of land has its own ghost story to tell. Pinnock Bridge has its Gypsy or Watercress Woman who is supposed to have set herself on fire from a combination of the pipe she was smoking and the gin she was drinking at the same time. She wafts around as a misty figure.

The Elvey Farm has a haunted dairy where an 18^th century farmer – Edward Brett – fatally shot himself. He is still heard, muttering ‘I will do it.’

A black silhouette of a miller haunts the site of an old windmill, while a red lady walks her small white dog around the churchyard and a white lady wanders around inside the same church. The locals at the time of her death must have really feared her. She was buried inside not one, but seven coffins AND an oak sarcophagus. She’s still pacing around there though!

An unfortunate love affair led to the suicide (by poisoning) of the Lady of Rose Court, and a poor man who fell into a clay pit still screams in agony. A schoolmaster who hanged himself is still apparently trapped at the site of his demise.

Now, after experiencing all that, you could well be forgiven for deciding to retire to the local hostelry (the Black Horse Inn). Surely here you could kick back and relax over a pint of foaming ale or a glass of comforting wine? Not a bit of it! After the phantom coach and horses have thundered by outside, expect things to start flying around you as the resident poltergeist gets to work.

But I digress. Back to the woods.

In the 18^th century, a highwayman called Robert du Bois was tracked down and run through with a sword while he hid in a tree in these very woods. Another version states that he was dragged to the woods before being lynched. Either way, his are the screams which give the woods their name - along with a couple of other unfortunates, such as the army colonel who hanged himself and still can be seen dangling from his tree, and the ghostly soldier who wanders the woodland paths. Others who have simply lost their way - and never found it again - add their desperate voices to the cacophony from beyond the grave.

Sceptics might say it’s just foxes. Everyone knows foxes can make a terrible racket. As if hell itself had opened and let the screams of the damned escape.

But those of us who know about such things, don’t need any such explanations.

Do we?

Evil runs deep at Mordenhyrst Hall…

When Grace first sets eyes on the imposing Gothic Mordenhyrst Hall, she is struck with an overwhelming sense that something doesn’t want her there. Her fiancé’s sister heads a coterie of Bright Young Things whose frivolous lives hide a sinister intent. Simon, Grace’s fiancé, is not the man she fell in love with, and the local villagers eye her with suspicion that borders on malevolence. 

Her friend, Coralie, possesses the ability to communicate with powerful spirits. She convinces Grace of her own paranormal gifts – gifts Grace will need to draw deeply on as the secrets of Mordenhyrst Hall begin to unravel.

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Witch Bottles - No Home Should Be Without One

In my collection, The Crow Witch and Other Conjurings, you will meet a selection of sorcerers and wise women and in one story in particular - The Malan Witch - the witches are a powerful, evil force to be reckoned with. If you had been living anywhere near them, you would have been glad you had walled up a dead cat, hidden away a written charm or two, a horse’s skull and some (preferably children’s) shoes. As a cat lover of major proportions, I was relieved to discover that the walled up cats I had read about were, in almost every case, already dead when they were inserted into a cavity in the wall. They were certainly a common enough occurrence. Many medieval houses in need of restoration have revealed a little feline mummified carcass among the wattle and daub.

Even with all this protection, you might not be completely safe If you fell ill inexplicably and suddenly, your crops failed, or your animals got sick and died. You would know that somehow or another you had upset a witch and he – or more likely she – had put a curse on you. Then, most assuredly, you would need your own witch’s bottle.

Witches’ bottles have been found in both the U.K. and the United States, indicating that the practice travelled across the Atlantic with the earliest British settlers.

Although they have most certainly been around since Elizabethan times - if not earlier - one of the first mentions of such a bottle occurs in 1681 in Saducismus Triumphatus, or Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, written by Joseph Glanvill. The author gives a description of how such a bottle would be created. A man whose wife is sorely afflicted is told to, “Take your Wive’s Urine… and Cork it in a Bottle with Nails, Pins and Needles, and bury it in the Earth; and that will do the feat.” We are told, “The Man did accordingly. And his Wife began to mend sensibly and in a competent time was finely well recovered.”

The ‘cure’ worked well for her – but had another effect, for across town, a wife complained that someone had killed her husband. It transpired that he was a known “Wizard” and must have put a curse on the woman whose husband was wise enough to equip himself with a witch’s bottle. So, these bottles not only had the power to counteract the magic, but were able to turn it back on the perpetrator.

So, what did they look like? Usually they were constructed of brown or grey salt-glazed stoneware. Some – known as Greybeards or Bellarmines – were embossed with a bearded face. Bellarmines also had the dubious distinction of being named after a particularly obsessive Catholic Inquisitor. Some weren’t buried, but deliberately destroyed as part of their function. Some people believed that you should throw the witch’s bottle on the fire and when it exploded, it would break the spell and kill the witch.

By the early 19^th century, witch bottles were constructed from glass bottles, vials and other containers. Traditionally – and perhaps ironically – it took a witch to prepare a really effective bottle. As described above, into the bottle went the victim’s urine, hair or nail clippings, and some red thread taken from a ‘sprite trap’ (a device used to trap troublesome spirits). Other ingredients historically included blood, glass, wood and bone. Witch bottles are still with us and more recently, these unsavoury ingredients have largely been replaced by rosemary, needles, pins and red wine.

Once prepared, the bottle is then buried in the house, under the hearth, at the furthest point of the house, or some inconspicuous other place. It is believed that the bottle will capture the evil, and impale it on the pins and needles before drowning it in red wine and sending it on its way, using the rosemary. As long as the bottle remains hidden and unbroken, so its power will endure.

These days, there are a range of alternative ingredients for making up a witch bottle. These include: sea water, earth, sand, stones, salt, knotted threads, vinegar, ashes, coins, oil, feathers, shells, herbs and flowers.

Two witches, burned for their evil centuries earlier, now hell-bent on revenge.

A woman who seems to step out of an old Hollywood movie, and a castle with a murderous past.

A seer whose deadly prediction was hidden away for a future generation.

A mysterious portrait that is far more sinister than mere paint and canvas.

An old woman only the foolish would ridicule, for she knows the secrets of the land and how to harness its power.

All these and more conjurings abound, and you would do well to remember, my dear reader…

When the seeds of revenge are sown, beware the harvest!

Available from:

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Weird House Press

Life Before Computers Gave us Anchovy and Claptrap. Part Two

A Play Shakespeare Never Knew He’d Written

 

I went through three generations of manual typewriters before the glorious day when I bought an electronic one that would store a line of type and let me preview it before I let it actually print on the page. Wow! What a breakthrough. However, not long after that I got my first computer. Well, word processor really.

I opened my heart to an Amstrad PCW9512 and my world changed. But, as I’ll explain, some things remained the same for a long, long time and cost a small fortune because, while the age of computers had arrived agents and publishers preferred the old methods…

But for now, here I was with this wonderful bit of kit on my dining room table. It came with a monitor, daisy wheel printer (you’ll still need that older friend/relative you borrowed in order to understand the finer points of part one of this saga) and something called a floppy disk. This was always confusing because it was a square-shaped piece of hard plastic. Not floppy at all. Some years later, I saw that in fact the disk split apart and inside was this floppy disc-shaped thing. The scales fell from my eyes.

Anyway, without too much ado, I inserted the floppy disk into its designated slot on the monitor and, lo and behold, it loaded up the most basic of programs. Of course, being all-new, this seemed wonderfully sophisticated and incredibly technical. Before long I was ready to create my first file in a way not dissimilar to what we do now. Well, up to a point. I couldn’t select whether I wanted 10 point, 12 point or whatever.

That was all down to which daisy wheel I decided to put in my printer. The pack came with one and you could buy others in different styles. Oh. The wonder of it!  I couldn’t choose Garamond, Georgia or anything else for that matter as that too was all dependent on which daisy wheels I had bought – and there wasn’t a lot of choice. I seem to remember Courier was one everyone used - the Times New Roman of its day. But never mind. At least if I made a mistake I could correct it without a load of hassle and wasted paper. Right?

Yes. Right. Absolutely. The Amstrad 9512 did indeed have a dictionary built into its limited brain. Now, I don’t know who had helped write that dictionary but I am betting at least one person with a medical degree was involved as the Amstrad would offer perfect renderings of the most complex medical terminology when asked to check spelling. But I am equally convinced that no one with an English degree had come anywhere near it. And the thing was that once you had accepted its proffered alternative to a spelling it had queried, it would automatically proceed to alter every repeated instance of your apparent mistake. This led to some hilarious (and not so hilarious) bloopers. 

One has always stuck in my mind and, funnily enough, it wasn’t one that happened to me although plenty did. I read an article in what was then Writer’s Monthly magazine. The author had been writing an article relating to that well-known play by William Shakespeare called, Anthony and Cleopatra. The only snag was that every Anthony had been rendered ‘Anchovy’ and every Cleopatra ‘Claptrap’. He had inadvertently accepted the proffered correction. This was all too easy to do as the Amstrad seemed to believe it was infallible and that if it didn’t recognise a word, it couldn’t be correct. Only words in its dictionary were possible, or so it believed. An early instance of the arrogance of artificial intelligence perhaps? Whatever the reason, unless you stopped it from doing so, it would correct every word it didn’t like by inserting one it preferred unless you stopped it from doing so.

This kind of stroppy behaviour led me to abandon the spellchecker for many years, up to and including my early ventures into working with a ‘proper’ computer. I simply didn’t trust it, you see.

Aside from that minor inconvenience, my little Amstrad was a godsend. I could now copy my precious story onto floppy disks (you needed something like half a dozen for a novel) and I could keep these in various locations as I was always wary of the house burning down and taking with it the only copy of my novel. 

A tip from author Judith Krantz had led me to wrapping my top copy of any manuscript and putting it in the freezer on the basis that it was usually the last bit of equipment to succumb to the flames. Now I could carry it round me with me if I wished to. And I did until I realised this was a silly idea. What if I was mugged? The robber would have my manuscript and could sell it as his/hers. You can see a state of paranoia underlining this, can’t you?

Anyway, onto the printing itself. The daisy wheel printer was a noisy thing that vibrated a lot and was programmed to print off a line when it detected it was coming to the end of a sheet of paper. (Don't ask me why it did that, but it did. I think it was purely for aesthetic reasons, although as this practice inevitably devoured a fair amount of printer ribbon, there may have been other, ulterior, motives. Who knows?) It would then repeat this exercise at the top of the new page. The noise of the same key repeatedly hitting the ribbon resembled rapid machine gun fire (imagine spending a night in an active war zone) but at least I could set it printing and only have to return when, either it had finished that chapter, run out of paper or run out of ribbon. Printing a 400-page novel was, as a result, noisy and expensive (those ribbon cartridges weren’t cheap) but so much less hassle than my now-abandoned typewriter.

Then it was time to try and get someone interested. In my case, at that time, I concentrated heavily on finding a suitable agent. The targeting process wasn’t unlike today’s except that there was no internet so you referred to a physical copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.

I would send out half a dozen query letters at a time. Each carefully targetted and personalised (some things don't change) and all utilising what we now call 'snail mail' – we then called it ‘the mail’ because there was no other. You had to include a stamped, self-addressed envelope and obey the individual agent's instructions which might mean you also sent out a sample chapter or two. Postage had to cover the return of whatever you had sent. This could prove expensive but at least you could fit everything into an envelope – usually an A4-sized one. 

The process meant a trip down to the Post Office, armed with your letters, sample chapters and envelopes. The assistant would weigh each one and hand it back to you, along with stamps. You moved away from the counter, stuck them on appropriately, sealed your envelopes, with the return, stamped, addressed envelope safely inside each one, prayed to your deity of choice, and mailed them.

Then you waited. 

If you were really lucky, one agent out of four or five might request chapters or the entire manuscript. In the latter case, you cheered and groaned in equal proportion, printed out a new copy of the manuscript or looked for the least creased one, and then marched down to the Post Office once again. This time, you were equipped with brown wrapping paper, paperclips to attach the required postage to the letter, adhesive tape, scissors… 

You waited in line. The assistant weighed everything, multiplied it by two for the return postage, added on the required extra for Recorded Delivery in case the parcel got lost, handed everything back to you, and off you went to find some quiet corner to assemble your precious package.

Once safely sealed, you once again joined the back of the line because, of course the package was too large to go through the mailbox. I have spent many Saturday mornings thus engaged.

Then it was back home to wait.

And wait…

And wait…

Then one day, weeks later you returned home from work to find the mailman had attempted to deliver a parcel. Your heart sank and you asked yourself if it was worth all the effort and considerable expense.

You wept bitter tears. 

On Saturday you went and collected the slightly battered parcel containing the dog-eared, expensively produced manuscript that would never be able to be sent anywhere else (who wants to receive a manuscript that looks like a golden retriever tussled for it with a somewhat over-excited poodle?) You found the agent's letter or, worse, the scribbled note on the front page of the submission.

“Sorry, not for us.”

You sighed, poured yourself a drink, picked up the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, and started your search for an agent all over again.

Because that’s what we did, back in the days before the internet made it all so easy…

 (In case you missed it, you can find Part One of this article here)

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