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It happened to meJun 30 '04 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line I did see something inexplicable...at least I thought I did.
The party My sister Margaret went away to college about three years after I had left home. Our parents were then released from responsibilities to children, and both generations were in the weightless state: we were now old enough for parents to stop worrying about us, and they were not old enough yet for us to start worrying about them. My parents responded to their freedom by buying a caravan, joining a caravan club, and after my father retired they spent their summers touring about England and Scotland, to meet with friends on caravan-rallies, and, it has to be admitted, they engaged in all the rituals of suburban life that they engaged in at home, only enacting them on muddy fields, in the mist and rain of British Summers. Mostly the rituals involved cocktail parties, dinner parties, visits to local sights, especially country houses, always referred to as 'stately homes', not my choice, but they enjoyed it. I married Janet, and shortly afterwards Margaret married Robert, and in due course she had four children two girls and two boys. Margaret is a fine-looking woman and when she was young she was a lovely English rose, big-boned and broad-shouldered, strong, a horsewoman and athlete, with thick, straight, blond hair, blue eyes, a beautiful face, and a rosy, outdoor-girl complexion. As sometimes happens one parent's genes completely overwhelm the other's, and all her children were beautiful, blond and blue-eyed, Emma 11, James 9, Victoria 7, and John 5. Margaret and Robert also owned a caravan: caravan holidays are ideal for families with young children. You can go from place to place, and there is no problem finding somewhere to stay, somewhere to play, somewhere new to visit, and Margaret did not seem to mind the fact that she didn't really get a holiday at all. She had to do all the things for the family that she had to do at home; but on holiday she didn't have to look after the ducks and geese, feed the hens, tend the horses, so I suppose that she had some sort of a break. I had married Janet, tall, slender, elegant, and quiet, about as different as possible from my extraverted, noisy sister. We had no children of our own and were regarded as the portable part of the family. At the time I am writing about we didn't even have a cat to look after, so if family reunions were organised we were expected to travel to wherever was most convenient for everybody else, and the location was usually a field somewhere in the middle of the English countryside where caravans could be parked. My parents were celebrating one of the special wedding anniversaries, the 35th I think it was, the ruby anniversary, and they were celebrating it with a caravan holiday. Fortunately they were married in July, so a weekend spent in a field did not seem too daunting, and Margaret and family would set up next door to my parents' caravan, and Janet and I would sleep on camp-beds in a canvas extension, an awning, attached to my parents' caravan. Not too daunting for me, extremely daunting for Janet who is more of a scented-boudoir person than a horsewoman, but 'for better or worse' means for better or worse, and so, as usual, we turned up together with a good grace. The party itself was held at lunchtime on a sunny---Yes really!---Saturday in July, in a beautiful green meadow. A successful barbecue, with no wind, no rain, no wasps, no ants, and Robert, skilled at barbecue cooking, danced the rope beautifully between undercooking and Salmonella, and overcooking and carcinogens. With plenty of red meat inside me and a token bit of salad, affirming my new man credentials, and plenty of red wine (provided by me, the kind that is made with grapes, that comes in bottles from France or Italy, not brewed up in the kitchen from dubious vegetable ingredients by Robert) I was zoned out and ready to spend the afternoon in good natured somnolence sitting in the Sun. The children had other ideas. They had decided that they would put a show on to entertain us. Cinderella, with Emma as every other female character, Victoria as Cinderella, James as Prince Charming, and John as Buttons. My father and Robert had gone away to look at something complicated and caravanny to do with stabilisers, and to talk about them knowledgeably and at inordinate length. I should have been helping the women clear up the debris, but having eaten up my salad I had nothing left to prove, so I sat down watching the children getting themselves ready. Something happened then that made my hair stand on end. A bright, sunny July afternoon is not when you expect to see the inexplicable. Something moved at the edge of my vision. I turned to see what it was and saw an ordinary plastic picnic chair move, on its own a distance of about 20 feet. On its own. On its own! There were no strings. It wasn't being moved by anybody, anything. It moved itself. In the bright sunny afternoon I felt a chill: paranormal events take place in the dark, by candle-light, or in the seance room, not in full daylight in the middle of a field, on a sunny July afternoon, and what I was seeing was inexplicable, and I was astonished, and very disconcerted even scared by what I couldn't understand. Then Victoria stood up: she could just see over the chair.  |
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