Jacket potato with cheese and beans

Happy Halloween!

This time of year always gets me reflecting on some of the weirder aspects of my childhood, many of which were the result of mum’s membership of a church with, shall we say, traditional views.

Well into the 1990s, the highest position available to a woman was church secretary, and I don’t mean that in the sense of a company secretary: her role was to listen and take notes while the men talked. I well remember the celebrations when, after much prayer, the church leaders (all men, of course), decided to appoint the first female elder, although she was only permitted to provide spiritual guidance to other women.

At one point, when I was around 10 or 11, I was grounded when mum found me playing with cards – not tarot cards, which were EVIL, but normal playing cards. These were apparently also evil (albeit in lower case) because they could be used for gambling; the fact I was too young to really know what gambling was didn’t excuse my actions.

My confusion can be explained by the fact that raffles, tombolas and lotteries were also considered to be gambling, unless they were raising money for church funds, in which case they were totally permissable.

Homosexuality was a sin against God, and not to be even mentioned in polite company. The first time mum (knowingly) met a gay man, she was bewildered: he was just like everyone else. I think that was one of the things that led her to seek out a more permissive church when she and dad moved to the Isle of Wight. I sometimes wonder what the mum of my childhood would have thought of the mum of today, whose favourite tv personalities are nearly all out and proud gay men (Layton Williams, Rylan Clark, and Rob Rinder (“such a lovely couple”, she gushes about the latter two)), and who is enthusiastically cheering on La Voix in the current series of Strictly.

Halloween was considered one of the biggest evils of all, and my sister and I were allowed to have nothing to do with it. Recently mum read out a social media post about how celebrating Halloween allowed evil spirits into your home, chuckling “what a silly thing to believe!”, as if that wasn’t exactly what she told me when I was a child. (If you believe this, that’s fine – you do you. Obviously, I don’t.)

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Mum spent much of the day in her endless (and endlessly frustrating) spiral of ‘my head hurts, my stomach hurts, I’m so miserable, now my head hurts even more’. No matter what I said it was the wrong thing, and eventually I lost my patience and said “fine, suit yourself, I’m going back to what I was doing” (and am now cringing at the realisation that that’s what mum used to say to me and my sister when we wanted more than she could give).

After a bit of crying and laying on of maternal guilt (“I’m sorry, I always mess everything up”, “I just don’t want you to go”, “at some point could you find time to help me?”), I went and sat in the living room with mum and things smoothed out.

I think part of the problem is that, with an unreliable memory, mum has no context for her pain: it’s always the first time she’s felt like this, and it’s always the worst she’s ever felt. I try to provide context – “you felt like this yesterday, and it wore off by lunchtime” – but she either doesn’t listen or doesn’t believe me.

After that, I felt I had to provide a meal mum would like, and I went for jacket potatoes as those always get an “ooh, I like those!” Mum had hers with salad, I had mine with beans, and both disappeared as quickly as was consistent with steaming hot potatoes.

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I will end with a brief, real-life ghost story (maybe).

Years ago, when my dad was still around, I was visiting and arranged to meet him in his favourite pub when he had finished putting the horses away in their stables for the night.

It was a Friday evening nit long before Christmas, so it was dark outside and festively lit inside. I wasn’t in the mood for conversations with strangers, so took my drink (the first one of day, I should state) through into a quieter side room.

This particular pub was (is) old, with varying floor and ceiling heights where multiple buildings had been knocked through into one rambling structure, and is known for being haunted, although I had never seen anything spooky personally. The table I sat at was next to an archway that had once been someone’s front door but now simply connected different parts of the pub, in front of an external window.

I sat, staring out of the window, half looking out for dad’s arrival and half trying to decide if the wet stuff falling from the sky was sleet or could be considered snow. In the reflection of the room behind me, I saw an older gentleman wearing a hat step through the archway into my room, heard the creak of the loose floorboard by the arch, and felt that sensation of someone being near (the one all humans have, that tells you if you’ve come home to an empty house or if someone is already home).

I turned to nod a greeting and make some banal comment about the weather, but there was no-one there, and nowhere they could have gone without me seeing them.

I picked up my drink and hurried back to the main bar, having abruptly decided that the company of strange living humans was better than the company of strange former ones.