Eva Ibbotson - Dial a Ghost

‘I told you,’ said Aunt Maud under her breath. ‘I told you she’d be old.’

Eric was speechless. He knew that if you love people you have to do it for always and perhaps he would have tried, but then Cynthia did the most awful thing. She snatched Trixie’s banana, peeled it — and threw the skin on to the neatly swept gravel path.

That finished it. No Boy Scout could ever bring himself to love a person who leaves litter lying about, and in that moment Eric’s passion for Cynthia Harbottle shrivelled and died.

Fortunately she was only passing, and after she went Eric was a new man. He whistled as he worked, he went for long tramps in the woods, and when Oliver’s friends came down from the Home for the holidays, he showed them all the clever things he had learnt to do when he was a Scout: how to make a noise like a corncrake, how to splice ropes, and which kinds of sticks are suitable for skewering sausages and which are not.

‘I expect Frederica Snodde-Brittle would be just as awful if she turned up now,’ he said, trying to cheer up the farmer, and Mr Jenkins had to agree.

It was just six months after the Rid A Spook people had been to Helton that Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering had a visitor who absolutely amazed them.

‘You cannot be serious,’ said Mrs Mannering when the ghost who stood before them told them what he wanted. ‘You want us to find you a home?’

The spook nodded. He had been an ugly man and he was a hideous ghost with his long, gloomy face and messy moustache and tombstone teeth. Not only that, but his forehead was peppered with gunshot wounds.

‘I’m a ghost, aren’t I?’ said Fulton Snodde-Brittle. ‘I’ve got my rights, same as everyone else.’

‘No, Mr Snodde-Brittle, you have not ,’ said Miss Pringle. She was a gentle woman but she was absolutely outraged. ‘You have lied and cheated and been a criminal spook-destroyer and you are not a person we would ever have on our books.’

‘Well, I don’t think that’s fair. My sister ratted on me — she’s gone all soft and I can’t go on living rough on my own.’

The ladies knew what had happened to Frieda Snodde-Brittle. She had been so terrified when she saw Oliver’s ghost that she had decided to stop being wicked and become a nun, and now she was down at Larchford with her head shaved doing humble things like mucking out the stables and scrubbing floors.

As for Fulton, when he found out that the EEB people had cheated him and that Oliver’s spooks were not only well and happy but making him rich, he went quite mad. He found an old gun that his father had used for shooting rabbits, and took off for Spain to find Fetlock and force him to give back the thirty thousand pounds.

Fetlock and Maisie were in a disco when Fulton stormed in and started letting off his gun, and when he had shot three strobe lights and a potted palm tree, he tripped over a bongo drum and the gun went off and shot him through the head.

‘I didn’t ask to be a ghost,’ said Fulton, who had been sent back from Spain in a body bag. ‘I hate the things. But here I am and I want somewhere to live.’

Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering turned to each other. Their eyes met. They smiled.

‘Well, Mr Snodde-Brittle,’ they said, ‘there is one place which might just suit you.’

So that’s where Fulton landed up — among the bikinis and the see-through nighties and the Footsies in the knicker shop.

Oliver goes to visit him sometimes when he and Matron’s sister go to London, but it’s a waste of time. Fulton just rants and raves among the underwear and tries to tear the Wonderbras to pieces with his teeth.

But for the Wilkinsons, his own family and the people who had made him so happy, Oliver, at the end of his first year at Helton, had a most wonderful surprise.

Aunt Maud had tried to share the Hall with the Shriekers, and not to worry when it was Addie’s turn to be with them. But though they behaved so much better, they were still very snooty and she had never felt really at home among the huge knobbly furniture and the brown pictures of things being shot and the heavy fire irons. Oliver had seen this, but it wasn’t till the farm turned in a profit and he’d done some accounts with his guardian that he saw what to do, and it was really very simple.

He rebuilt Resthaven in the gardens of Helton Hall. He built it exactly as it had been, with the bow windows and the stained glass in the bathroom and the pretty porch. He had the door painted blue and the bird table with the rustic roof put up beside it, and found a mat with Welcome on it just like the one that had been there before.

So just fifty years after they lost their beloved home, the Wilkinsons moved into it again. And this time no bombs fell from the sky and the country was at peace.