Several of my pieces here have involved ghosts. There was ‘The Strange Tale of the Grammar School Boy’, ‘Christmas Reunion’ and ‘Last Letter to Lorna’. What follows is a true story that may or may not be about ghosts – although the experience was definitely ghostly and, which is unusual with ghostly things, distinctly erotic.
In 1976 the Diggle family moved to Italy. This was a sort of much delayed Gap Year for my wife and me, as no-one had thought of gap years when we were of student age. We rented an ancient house near Greve-in-Chianti in Tuscany. It was part of a tiny hamlet called Canonica; it was almost too small to qualify for the title of hamlet. There was a tiny church (now decommissioned), the gamekeeper’s cottage, our house which was Number 2, and around the corner two or three small, apparently unoccupied, houses. As far as we could tell we four and the gamekeeper, Signor Lelli, his wife and children constituted the only permanent residents of Canonica.
We arrived in April. The house was stone built with immensely thick walls and terra-cotta tiles and, in the manner of local building, the living accommodation was one floor up with a cellar, a cantina, below. Access was by stone steps rising up against the wall. The house had no garden as such, nothing delineated by a fence or wall, just grass, that was very long when we arrived, and some cedar trees.
We had been there for about a week and were beginning to get the place shipshape. It was one evening about then when a strange occurrence took place. I’ll give you the account that I put in my book, Not Heavy Enough To Win A Prize?
A few days later Signor Lelli cut the grass outside our house so that we would have have a play area for our two boys and a place for open-air eating. It was evening, the light just beginning to fall, and the atmosphere sultry, hot and damp, with rain in the air. I was looking through the small window that faced the front of the house and overlooked the recently cut grass when three young women walked around the corner of the road from the direction of the unoccupied houses and came over to the recently mowed grassy area. They were in their early twenties and they wore long dresses made from a thin material, cotton or muslin, of a kind I had never seen before. They were chattering to each other animatedly, although I could not hear them, and it seemed that they had come out of one of the houses to take the air while taking an undemanding stroll. One of them stooped and took up a handful of recently cut grass and threw it at the others.
At this point Heather, my wife, came over to see what I was looking at and we stood side by side. The game started. Grass was thrown back and soon the three were screaming with laughter as grass cuttings flew. Then the weather broke and large drops of rain began to fall. The atmosphere had become heavier and warmer and the rain was clearly welcomed by the girls who then linked hands and danced around as it drenched them. The dresses became completely transparent and it became apparent that the dresses were all they wore as they laughed and gambolled, the grass cuttings now sticking to their bodies, their faces and hair.
For a few minutes the scene created before our eyes had an unreal quality as though an event from a different century was being replayed before our eyes. Were the girls aware that the house that had been empty for a few months was now occupied? Were they doing what they were doing in the belief that they would be unobserved because there was no-one in Numero due? - but there was plenty of evidence of occupation on the piece of land in front of the house; the car, a children’s swing, various boxes and so on. Was it a rather unusual and impromptu welcoming ceremony?
I don’t remember seeing them end their high jinks. Maybe it was because Heather and I looked at each other in amazement for a few seconds and they disappeared in that time. Back to the houses around the corner? Possibly. Into thin air? Equally possible.
Strangely we never saw the young women again; never semi-naked outside our house but also never fully clad, going to work or college, or anywhere else. Perhaps they were weekend visitors of the people who rented one of the houses around the corner – or perhaps not.
Pic by Botticelli. Thanks
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