PLEASURES OF LIFE

Driving out of London to the east through the beautiful rolling countryside of Essex, you may come across Dedham, a medieval village on the banks of the River Stour. There are a few shops, a handsome church, and a prominent black and white building, the Marlborough Head Hotel. Built in 1495 for a wool merchant, it was first an apothecary and then, in 1704, converted to an inn. The Duke of Marlborough (a forebear of Winston Churchill) was the hero of the day after a number of successful battles in Europe, so it was fitting that the inn should bear his name.

In November 1970, the phone rang at the inn, and a caller with an American accent booked two single rooms. The guests, a man and a woman, arrived at the Marlborough in the early evening and, after settling in, came down to the bar for a drink. Nothing unusual so far. My father, who owned the inn, was filling in behind the bar because Flip, the barmaid, was late.

The man told Dad he was a journalist, sent by Esquire magazine to write an article on English ghosts. He introduced his companion as a medium from the College for Psychical Research in London. They had heard about a ghost sighting in the village and asked my father what he knew about it.

Over the 500-plus years, thousands of stories must have been told in Marlborough’s bar; certainly the inn’s creaking, uneven floorboards, centuries-old beams, huge fireplaces and hidden passages made it the perfect setting for a ghost story.

Dad told them that the previous Saturday night, Halloween, a regular named Phil was walking home in the dark after several pints, and the last thing he remembered before collapsing to the ground was a ghost appearing in front of him. Passersby saw him lying in the road, dead to the world, and carried him back to the inn, where Dad ministered brandy. When he revived, Phil described seeing a white apparition, arms outstretched, screeching.

There was major skepticism in the village about the story, given the alcoholic intake of the storyteller, but it made regional news anyway, and somehow word reached the wider world. The man from Esquire — as luck would have it, already in London — hightailed it out with his medium in tow to investigate. It was, after all, a hot lead.

As Dad told the story, the lady took off her jacket, saying she was getting very warm and was “probably going into a trance.”

The London medium started telling Dad his life story — eerily accurate in its detail — including, among other things, that he had two sons, Bill and Tony. But, she said, she was sensing a third name. Charlie.

My elder brother, Bill, got the nickname Charlie when he went away to boarding school, and when I, Tony, followed him to the same school four years later, the nickname transferred to me. There was one other thing: There would be a marriage in the family which would involve someone from Beckenham. As I was the only unmarried person in the family at that point, I took particular interest when Dad passed this bit of information on to me!

Soon the ghost-sighting story started to lose steam. It came out that some village lads had been responsible for the whole thing. They knew Phil always walked home on a Saturday evening around 11 o’clock — following the announcement of “Time gentlemen please!” — and the village, having no streetlights, would be perfect for a big, white-sheeted apparition rising out of the dark. That their prank would go “viral,” or what passed for it in those days, was strictly a bonus.

A year or so later, when I was working in London for a hotel company, I began falling for a very pretty girl, Camilla. We started going out and occasionally went down to her parents’ house in Sussex for the weekend, about 50 miles south of the city. One evening we set out on our usual route but the rush-hour traffic was solid, so Camilla suggested a different way. As we drove through this unknown-to-me territory, I asked where we were. Camilla replied, “Beckenham. We used to live here.” The car swerved a little.

“Did you say Beckenham?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered, “I’ll show you the house where I grew up.”

I kept the medium’s prediction — now a bit of family lore divined across the bar in the Marlborough Head Hotel — to myself until after we were engaged, now some 52 wedding anniversaries ago. And all because Flip the barmaid was late for work.

Neither the barmaid nor the medium was invited to the wedding — but the story certainly made it.