Abbey Ghosts And Other Monsters
I went to St Mary's Abbey Convent Grammar School on The Ridgeway in Mill Hill, London NW7 between 1970 and 1975. For most of my scholastic life I was a day girl. But I noticed that the weekly boarders and term boarders liked to preserve an air of mystery of what happened in the school after most of us had gone home. Whispers were heard about ghostly soundings and other manifestations. Since parts of the school buildings, like The Red Passage, formerly part of the old mill house, that had given the village its name, were over 300 years old, whilst Holcombe House next door was an Adams house dating from the 18th century, there was certainly scope for ghostly activity. The majority of the school buildings, including the lovely neo-Gothic chapel had been built in the 1860s. In the chapel, behind the curtained shrine lay a saint's relic, the body of a teenage Christian British girl, who had been tortured and martyred for her faith by the Romans in the second century. To most of the girls, she was a hidden figure, but even as an 11-year old first former I was tall enough to see her pale effigy just poking above the green curtained screen. This only increased the potential for ghosts and added to the school's pervading air of mystery which both struck me with awe and a fascinated curiosity.
Apart from that the school complex was a warren of dark passages and staircases disappearing in all directions and leading to a plethora of tiny rooms above the stone gate house and in other wings. The huge ogive arched entrance made us feel like we were entering a castle courtyard with former stable block on the left and an almost secretive postern gate to the park next door. The fact that many of these rooms were out of bounds to most of the girls only increased my curiosity. Furthermore, the beautiful school grounds which contained such exotic trees as Cedars of Lebanon and giant Red Woods, dropped dramatically down the hill to St Lawrence St and amongst its wild woods were not only our two netball/tennis courts but ruined chapels and the grave yard of the good sisters, which was definitely out of bounds to the girls. I loved every red brick and cream stone lintel of this school, with its streaky bacon style which made it a smaller twin of Hampton Court. It also was formed in a cloister style with court yards and neat gardens containing great Yew hedges that seemed to have grown there since pagan times and hid two half-timbered wonky 17th century cottages, blackened with age and minimal maintenance. They could have passed for the witch's forest gingerbread house in Grimm's story of Hansel and Gretel.
All that was needed were some gingerbreads stuck to the walls. In one of these cottages, hard by the entrance to the neo-gothic convent complex, with its armorial device showing strong arms barring entrance to any man, lived the most ancient and crusty caretaker any school could wish for with his 'hounds of the Baskervilles' at his side. He was so hostile to the girls, that he would have made the caretaker in the Harry Potter films look like Mr Congeniality. He even argued with the strictest Irish Sister in the school, of whom we all walked in dread - Sister Margaret Theresa, tiny but fiery as Hell. He called her 'Little Hitler'. I suspect that one of the reasons he disliked the girls so much, apart from having to keep his distance, was because we kept trying to make friends with his Baskerville hounds, with treats like biscuits and back rubs. I was the chief sinner in this regard and whenever the dogs and we girls were loose in the park I'd try my temptations and usually suborned the dogs to docile pets wanting their ears rubbed. When he called them to heel, they were loath to go and went with a whimper of regret.
After several such temptations, 'Mr Crusty' drew me aside and with a crooked smile revealing fangs as yellow as his hounds', with which he tried in vain to allay my rising feelings of alarm, he said "I can tell that you love dogs, which is a wonderful character trait. But I have to tell you that I am training these Alsations to be fierce guard dogs. By being kind and soppy with them you make them weak. They have to be ready to bite and maul any intruder, especially in the school, or wherever they wind up guarding. Now I'm telling you, as kindly as I know how, stop trying to make friends with my dogs. It just destroys their training and it could be dangerous if one of them were to bite you! Then the poor dog would have to be destroyed!" I gulped! "If I find you or any other girl paying my dogs any attention, I'll have to tell Sr Campion and worse, I'll have to stop using this park for the dogs' exercise. So tell your friends what I have said! he concluded as he marched smartly away. For all his ancient looks, he was very fit. Sr Campion was our kindly old head mistress. Had he said he'd tell Sr Margaret Theresa, that really would have worried me. So I spread the word and we stopped trying to befriend the poor dogs.
Time passed in a whirl of new learning, friends, exams, and drama activities. It seems that before I knew it, I was already a third former. Third formers were in a strange position, leaving childhood behind and on the cusp of becoming 'young ladies'. We were allowed extra privileges like choosing between wearing knee high grey woollen socks or far more grown up flesh toned tights. I hated the pesky things, always going into ladders and holes. Here was the irony of my character, though the tallest and most well-built girl in my class, I was determined to remain a 'child' for as long as I possibly could. Kids had more fun. Grown ups had to conform to more rules. Their lives had less mystery and magic. They had to curb their enthusiasm and be lady-like. The virtue and renown of our school rested not on academic achievement but on turning out well mannered, well bred young ladies aged 16. So to keep my childhood trappings one year longer, I had plumbed for extra long grey football socks that just about reached the knees of my long legs. In summer, I wore white ankle socks, which was part of the uniform. I also avoided wearing a blazer as an indoor jacket and never tried to shorten my skirt to a tiny mini at home-time as many of the other girls did to catch the eye of the boys at Mill Hill public school. My skirt was always the full pleated variety reaching to well below my knees, since Alleluja, the Midi was in fashion.
At that age, I had 0 interest in boys and viewed them with a healthy suspicion, which delayed many errors until my 20s, by which time I was living independently in Vienna, in Austria. Most of my maternal family were born in Germany, or Poland and some had scattered to Italy on the eve of WWII. Uncle Mor, my Mum's favourite uncle died in 1973 and despite it being spring term my parents were determined to go to his funeral in Milan. This meant, I had to join the boarders for three weeks. I was not sorry to have to stay behind. We were about to hold a drama festival. My challenge, to write a script with a part for every girl in the class, 17. Those that did not want to speak had to bark like a dog off stage or were in crowd scenes. I chose the famous Sherlock Holmes story "The Speckled Band" a murder mystery in locked room, wonderful! For hours at night and into the wee hours, I joined the seniors cramming for exams, writing my script. This also allowed me to infiltrate the boarders inner circle and get the info on all the ghostly apparitions at the school. I think the seniors enjoyed my wide eyed expression as they regaled me every night with another school ghost story.
There was the mystery pianist in one of the secret rooms that had a piano. Not even the dormitory sisters could solve that one. It delighted me when we held a midnight feast in that very room but no pale shade of a pianist appeared to provide musical entertainment. Then there was the story about the girl who had died at school about seven years before. She had died of an epileptic fit. Her patents lived abroad. We had many girls from overseas homes. The shameful part was that in order to prevent the other boarders being spooked by a corpse of a child in the school, they were all taken on a long ramble on the Sunday afternoon, whilst the undertakers removed the poor girl's body with unseemly haste. Compare this to the 'lying-in-state' of the old nuns when they died and their bodies were kept in an open coffin in the chapel for three days to allow mourners to pay their last respects. Then they were buried with great ceremony in the convent grave yard at the bottom of the hill. Even the weather came out in sympathy providing snaking mists that followed the funeral procession down the school path through the wild woods to the grave yard. We school girls, though expected to attend the funeral mass and join the procession, were turned off before it entered the wild wood. Hammer Horror films would have paid good money to film those scenes with the chapel bell tolling mournfully for the dead. So this poor girl's ghost had been seen in the chapel, in the evenings where her grieving father had had a stained glass window installed in her memory.
Last but not least, was the terribly sad haunting of Holcombe House, which had been commissioned by a lord mayor of London in the 1780s and built by the Adams brothers in white neo-classical style with pillared portico and a fan light above the front door. It was a comfortable three storey doubled fronted gentleman's residence at the end if a circular drive. The old low 17th century mill house had been kept to provide kitchens. When ever I had had occasion to enter Holcombe House I had noticed how the wrought iron in the stairs sometimes vibrated and there was often a feeling of just having missed a giggling little girl who was hiding upstairs. I asked Sr Bonaventure, a nun so old that she still wore the great box shaped black and white whimple over her grey Franciscan habit, which had been standard headwear for nuns from the start of the century to the 1970s When I asked if someone was staying with a child on the upper floors, for sometimes there were 'parlour boarders' who stayed there, she would smile and say no children had been allowed above the ground floor of Holcombe House since the 1800s.
From the seniors, I discovered why. The former lord mayor of London had been a recusant, a secret Roman Catholic, back in the century when anyone of that faith was barred from holding public office. I can see why he had kept his faith secret. In old age, he and his much younger wife been blessed with a young daughter, whom he cherished even more because of his advanced age. The little girl was lively but at the age of seven she caught typhoid fever and had been quarantined in her nursery on the top floor. Only her nanny was allowed to take care of her. At some point, her nanny had left her alone to get something such as a warm drink. The little girl, delirious from fever, had risen, left the room and walked to the wrought iron balustrade of the circular stair case that rose through the centre of the house and fallen over it, crashing to her death on the granite floor three stories below. The seniors had also seen the vibrating wrought iron of the winding staircase and had also experienced that feeling of just having missed a giggling little girl who was hiding somewhere. None of these ghosts ever filled one with dread. But I did! The rules governing boarders' access to portable radios were very strict, restricting access to your own personal radio to just a few hours on Saturday afternoons.
The rest of the time they were kept locked up on a store room. They had to be checked out with special radio passes, for which you had to apply by Friday afternoon. You could pick them up from 2 pm on Saturday but had to return them by 5 pm on Saturday too. So no chance to even listen to the latest changes in the pop music charts, which were broadcast on Sunday afternoons/evening. Not that boarders even had time to listen to any radio programmes because Sunday, late afternoon was spent in the chapel at benediction, then tea and study prep until supper. Access to your personal radio was deemed a privilege and not a right. Any transgressions could see such privileges limited for anywhere between a week end to a term. To say that is was galling was the understatement of the year. Boarders were even more angry if day girls brought in the tiny transistor radios, which were totally banned on the school premises and anyone found with one faced total confiscation. The good sisters stipulated the size of permissable radios used by the boarders. Tiny trannies that could be hidden in pockets were banned. So even knowing these rules, I still brought in my portable radio, willing to resign it to the store room.
I don't know if my sensible dress sense, wearing my hair tied back from my face, sticking to regulation flat shoes and regulation skirt lengths made me popular with the sisters as a sensible and dependable girl but when I asked the sister in front of the dormitory what the rules were she laughed and in her Irish brogue said that there were hundreds of them but I shouldn't worry about them because I would only be there for three weeks, whilst my parents were travelling. So I kept quiet about my portable radio. Our dormitories were not open spaces with lines of narrow iron beds with rusty squeaky springs. They had been divided into tiny wooden cubicles, painted pale green, consisting of a double wardrobe with drawers and shelves and a dressing table with mirror on one side, a tiny bedside table next to the single iron bed which covered the opposite wall of the cubicle. The wooden walls did not run the full height up to the 4 m high ceilings and they were curtained off from a central corridor, so the privacy provided was visual and not aural. You could still hear your dorm mates snoring and even whispering.
Apparently, I was a great snorer! My script finished, and with rehearsals in full swing, I was no longer haunting the banks of toilets with long corridors to the 'thrones' where the seniors were still burning the midnight oil seated on their pillows cramming for exams. Lights Out were always at 10 pm but often I was not sleepy at this time. So one evening, I got my radio out and with the volume just above silent and buried under my bed covers I turned on the Radio One programme, "Sounds Of The 70s". They often played weird music. That evening, it was weird electric guitar music. Boarders have hearing like bats. After a couple of minutes, comments were coming in hushed staccato whispers. "What's that?" "What?" I listened and started playing with the volume button causing more panic and smothering my giggles. "Mary, are you playing your guitar?" "Certainly not!" Came Mary's indignant reply. "There it is again." "Mary. Please check it?" I joined the conversation. "What, you don't believe in ghosts do you?" I stated in a flat voice pretending a matter of fact nonchalance. "You don't know what goes on here!" Came the quivering voice of another girl "Well tell me then?" I demanded "Don't!" Came another order. "She's not one of us!" "Yes. You are only here for a short while!" Came another dismissive comment. This lot were really cliquey, so I was enjoying myself making scaring them. That piece of music had ended but was followed by an even weirder tune. Volume up, down, silence. "There it is again!" "Mary, please check your guitar?" Another voice pleaded. "What d'you expect to find? "Little green men playing 'Little Green Apples' on Mary's guitar?" I scoffed. "No way!" Said Mary. "My guitar is an acoustic not an electric guitar. Those sounds are coming from an electric guitar." "Could it be coming from the music room, again?" Came another fearful question. I repeated the operation, sudden flash of volume, trailing off and then silence. "Oh my God! Did you hear that?" "So what's the story about the music room?" I asked Then they told me about the phantom pianist. The music room was one of those myriad tiny rooms at the end of a dark corridor. "Oh you mean the tiny room next to the infirmary?" I asked. "Bet some girls died in there over the years! Maybe one of them could play the piano!" I said in my best Boris Karloff voice! I was having a whale of a time. "Stop it!" Came the protest whispered in horror. "This is serious!" Even the dormitory sister who sleeps on that floor said she had heard it. When she checked the room it was empty and the piano music had only stopped just as she got to the door." Came the spookily interesting comment. "So if the music room is haunted? Why did we have our very nice midnight feast there, last week?" I asked 'incredulously'. "A little piano music would have been great!" I added barely suppressing the giggle in my throat. "What's all this noise?" Came Sr Margaret Theresa's angry voice. "Do you know, it's nearly midnight?" "The witching hour approaches!" I whispered in my sepulchral voice. Having already safely stowed the radio in my case, under my bed. "Suzy O'Shea! Is that you? Stop leading them on!" Sr Margaret Theresa commanded. Emboldened by her presence some of the boarders had left their cubicles and proceeded to tell her about the weird spooky guitar sounds they had heard. "Did you all hear these sounds?" Sr Margaret Theresa asked "Yes!" Came the chorus "Where was it coming from?" "We don't know!" Came the chorus more frantically I kept silent. 'I meant" she said with exaggerated patience "Did it come from this end of the dormitory or that end?" "The sounds were very brief." Said Philippa Nichols, a girl who had always treated me with a venomous spite. "So we didn't hear them long enough to judge where they were coming from." "Right! Everyone get up and stand by your beds!" Sr Margaret Theresa ordered as she swept aside the curtain to every cubicle. "Now! Open your wardrobe doors!" She then searched every wardrobe, looking for a radio, I guessed. Before she came to my cubicle, I had kicked a cover under the bed trying to hide my small case. Like everyone else I had my large case on top of the wardrobe. I was starting to worry, but I acted innocently, complying with all her commands. Having found no radio in the wardrobes, she then told us to take down and open our suitcases. Still no radio was found. "Right! As I come to every cubicle you will open the three drawers of your dressing tables. She searched diligently. The witching hour had passed and we were heading to 1 am. The boarders were starting to try and stifle yawns.
The mystery of the excitement of another musical ghost had turned to tedium. Even I was starting to regret my practical joke. But, it was too late to confess and hope for a lesser punishment. I steadied my breathing as Sr Margaret Theresa came finally to my cell or cubicle and searched my drawers. Then she noticed the cover under my bed. "Suzy O'Shea. You are so untidy. Get that cover off the floor now!" I complied with speed mumbling an apology that it must have fallen there in the excitement. Sr Margaret Theresa fixed me with a beady eye. I was nearly 6 inches taller than her by now, but she still filled me with awe. "See me in the morning for your punishment about being so untidy!" She said with an air of finality that brooked no opposition. If that was all she would punish me for, I had just had a lucky escape. "Now! Back to bed and no more talking! And don't close your cubicle curtains." Then lamp in hand, she marched away turning out the bright dormitory lights as she left. Silently and sleepily we returned to bed. The next morning, I waited outside the staff room for Sr Margaret Theresa. She appeared "Come with me!" We went to another of the myriad tiny rooms at the end of a dark corridor, that the good sister used as her study. "I know that the musical 'ghost' of last night came from a radio. Now all the boarders know the rules about where and when they can use their radios but you don't." She waited. I said "Yes, Sister Margaret Theresa" giving nothing away "Do you have a radio with you?" She asked searchingly. I couldn't get caught in lie to her and said "Yes, Sister Margaret Theresa." "Were you listening to it last night?" "No, because I kept it in my desk in class." I had taken it there early that morning. "My friends and I take it to the park at lunchtime to listen to the music charts." This was still breaking the rules but not as badly as the furore my practical joke had caused the night before. "Well.
It's a mystery then. Easter holidays start in a week. Don't use your radio outside or get caught with it in the dormitory. And if this musical 'ghost' appears again, you'll feel the might of my wrath" she declared without a hint of irony as she looked up at me. "Yes, Sister Margaret Theresa." I acquiesced quietly. "For your punishment for being untidy, you will spend this lunch break picking up waste paper from the stretch of the Ridgeway from the Tuck shop to the school. Fetch gloves and a rubbish bag from the caretaker." She concluded. "Yes, Sister Margaret Theresa." "You can go now." She concluded. Once outside her study. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had got off lightly. What was a lost lunch hour compared to a lost radio. The practical joke alone had been worth it. My play, 'The Speckled Band' was a total success with yours truly playing Sherlock Holmes and directing the play. Sr Campion, our head mistress, presented our class, 3 Alpha, with the first prize. I was sent up to fetch the cup for the class. "So you wrote the script all by yourself?" She queried. "Well done!" I nodded beaming "I hadn't expected the line 'We're waiting for a sign!' To have such dramatic results." The painted prop of the house, pinned to a couple of long benches stood on end was suddenly ripped apart as the benches crashed to the floor, leaving happless Susan exposed and waving a torch. After the laughter that had followed the initial shock died down, I had suddenly been inspired to ad lib. "The sign! Are we in 'The Fall of The House of Usher' or 'The Speckled Band'?" Even greater laughter, especially from the teachers, allowed us to stalk across the stage and disappear before the next scene change. "Very well quipped and saved!" Sr Campion had laughed. Sr Margaret Theresa came up to me laughing and shook my hand. "I see you have added a useful poltergeist to the phantom guitar player amongst your ‘friends’. As for the acting! I know you are a natural! It would be a loss to the stage if you didn’t pursue it professionally. She smiled really warmly before passing on. The idea of starving in a garret whilst making your name never did appeal to me.
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