The ghost of a story

Where do stories come from? It's something people often ask writers, and mostly our answer is that we don't know - which is probably rather frustrating to the questioner.


I've been writing a ghost story over the last couple of weeks. I used to be terribly afraid of ghosts when I was a child, and though I would read any book, every book, I learnt to avoid ghost stories. I still do - even the thought of re-reading The Turn of the Screw makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

I'm not sure, then, why I wanted to write one. But I think it simply seemed the best way to tell the story which had been preoccupying me. I've a life-long fascination with floods. My father was the river engineer when I was a child, and one of my earliest clear memories is of driving through the 1968 flood as it swept through Tonbridge. For years I lived near rivers, and being cut off by floodwater was part of the rhythm of my life. But I always lived above the river, up hill, beyond the hundred year flood line. I've never been flooded or in danger. (Though I have been cut off, and the Medway did swill around the rusty floor pan of my car most winters for years - it's most unpleasant when water swooshes from the rear footwell to the front and up your legs because you've driven through a flood, and the water hasn't had time to drain back out through the rust holes before you go down hill. Just saying.)

This new story is about the 1287 flood which wiped out much of the coastline of eastern England. It was caused by a storm surge - opposing winds drove down the North Sea from Scotland, and up from the Channel, pushing its shallow waters before them. The water had nowhere to go but the low-lying land of East Anglia and north Kent.

That flood moved the coastline inland. That's a dry statement for something so dramatic. There were people living on the land that vanished.

I wondered what happened to those people, and I couldn't find any mention of them. So I wrote a story. I don't know why I wanted to tell it, but it's been itching at me for ages and I'm glad it's out there on the page now.

I'll be reading my story at the Whitstable Oyster Festival on 25 July, more or less where it's set so if you're in the area, come along and say hello. I'm part of the ReAuthoring Project so we'll be a whole bunch of writers bringing you Whitstable-flavoured treats.

Oh, and if you look closely at the map above, you'll see a place where the sea and the estuary meet marked 'The Spit'. It's neither sea nor land, and is, I think, now only visible at the lowest tide. That 'I think' is crucial  - I'm not sure because I've only been to Whitstable once, and I don't know its sea or tides. The story I've told is fiction. I made it up.  (But here's a rather nice video by Henrietta Williams of people fishing on the Spit - it's a magical place, where I'm pretty sure there's a ghost or two when the light and the tides are right.)