Dial a Ghost

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The Wilkinson family became ghosts quite suddenly during the Second World War when a bomb fell on their house.

The house was called Resthaven after the hotel where Mr and Mrs Wilkinson had spent their honeymoon, and you couldn’t have found a nicer place to live. It had bow windows and a blue front door and stained glass in the bathroom, and a garden with a bird table and a lily pond. Mrs Wilkinson kept everything spotless and her husband, Mr Wilkinson, was a dentist who went to town every day to fill people’s teeth, and they had a son called Eric who was thirteen when the bomb fell. He was a Boy Scout and had just started having spots and falling in love with girls who sneered at him.

Also living in the house were Mrs Wilkinson’s mother, who was a fierce old lady with a dangerous umbrella, and Mrs Wilkinson’s sister Trixie, a pale, fluttery person to whom bad things were always happening.

The family had been getting ready to go to the air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden and they were collecting the things they needed. Grandma took her umbrella and her gas mask case which did not hold her gas mask but a bottle labelled poison which she meant to drink if there was an invasion rather than fall into enemy hands. Mrs Wilkinson gathered up her knitting and unhooked the budgie’s cage, and Eric took a book called Scouting for Boys and the letter he was writing to a girl called Cynthia Harbottle.

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