Haunted audio

I put pen to paper today in an attempt to work which, after countless stops and starts, saw me manage three sides of notes. It was slow progress.

Today was another hot day, a Bank Holiday, and the weather has been like this since I went back to Watermouth. The drought is worse up here. Mum tells me that Mr. Metcalfe who owns the Calverdale caravan told Robert and Carol that he’ll be ruined if the hot weather continues. In Scotland Mum and Dad were told there’s been just three days of rain since March.

I’ve been reading Manuel Grossman’s Dada, Mystification, Paradox and Ambiguity in European Literature. The Dadaists seem without equal for doing as they did in such a way and at such an early date. Lee and I were very keen on researching the life of Arthur Cravan, Dada acolyte and “Poet, Boxer and Deserter of Five Nations” who disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico in 1918. He fought one round with world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnstone in 1917 and in the same year scandalised Manhattan by stripping off at a public lecture, causing Duchamp to beam “What a lecture!”

We feel the paucity of written information on this interesting character demands further attention, but as I’ve come across the other actors in this particular saga I realise that to focus on one individual is to miss out on the wealth of humor, interest and total perverse INSANITY of Dada.

Lee called round last night at about nine, bringing with him his dog, a cassette, Borley photos and a book featuring several hauntings in Watermouth. Mum, Nanna P. and Dad listened to the tape on a portable cassette player L. had brought along and seemed fascinated by it all. On side one was audio from haunted squash courts in East Anglia that are built on the site of a WW1 airfield. On the tape you can hear piston engine aircraft and the bustle of a busy wartime hangar, plus footsteps and voices.

Side two is devoted to Borley: the sighs, grunts and squeaks of non-existent doors chilled us all “to the marrow,” as the narrator of the tape put it. Fairly predictably I felt spooked by all of this, especially as the conversation afterwards was about ghosts—the ‘something’ at the window on Poplar Rise the night Mum’s sister Mary was killed in 1946, our collective ‘experience’ at Marston Moor battlefield years ago, on a hot still summer’s day like today, when Mum and Dad and I simultaneously heard the tumult of a great crowd all around us in the air.

Poor Lee was quite rattled by all this and did his best to try and persuade me to go with him back to his house (as his Ma is away for a few days and he’s all alone in the house), but it was too far and I held firm. I felt a bit bad about it later. With all the distractions he forgot all about the reason for his visit in the first place—to borrow a book on WW1 for his essay on Paul Nash.

It’s a warm night, silent and hot apart from the shrill whine of newly hatched insects in the amphibian tanks in my room and the sound of distant traffic.