Eva Ibbotson - Dial a Ghost

‘Please, dear, no more strays,’ begged Aunt Maud. ‘After all, you have the budgie and your dear fish.’

But though she wouldn’t have hurt Aunt Maud for the world, Addie couldn’t help feeling that a bird who said nothing but ‘Open wide’ and ‘My name is Billie’ wasn’t very interesting. Nor was her fish much fun. He stayed in the sponge bag and did absolutely nothing, and though Adopta didn’t blame him, she longed for an exciting pet. Something unusual.

So she began to haunt London Zoo, and it was on the way back from there one winter’s night that she saw something that was to change all their lives.

She had had her eye on a duck-billed platypus which had not looked at all well the day before. Its brown fur looked limp and dull, its eyes were filmed over and its big flat beak seemed to be covered in some kind of mould. Of course she knew that even if it died the duck-bill would not necessarily become a ghost — animals are the same as people: some become ghosts and some don’t. Even so, as she glided towards its cage, Adopta was full of hope. She imagined taking it to bed with her, holding it in her arms. No one had such an unusual pet, and though Aunt Maud would make a fuss at the beginning, she was far too kind to turn it out into the street.

But a great disappointment awaited her. The silly keeper must have given the duck-bill some medicine because it looked much better. In fact it looked fine; it was lumbering round the cage like a two-year-old and eating a worm.

Perhaps it was because she was so sad about her lost pet that she took a wrong turning on the way home to the knicker shop. The street she was gliding down was not the one she went down usually. She was just about to turn back when she saw a sign above a tall grey house. It was picked out in blue electric light bulbs and what it said was:

ADOPTA GHOST

Addie braked hard and stared at it. She was utterly amazed. ‘But that is extraordinary,’ she said. ‘That is my name. I’m called Adopta and I’m a ghost.’

She floated up to the roof and stared at the letters. ‘Is it my house?’ she wondered. ‘Is it a house for me?’

But that didn’t seem very likely. Could there be two Adopta Ghosts in the world? Was this the home of a very grand spook with a green skin and hollow eyes; a queenly spook with trailing dresses ordering everyone about? But when she peered through the windows she saw that the rooms looked rather dull — offices with files and a desk and a telephone. A queenly spook with green ectoplasm would never live in a place like that.

Very much excited, Addie hurried home.

‘Aunt Maud, you must come at once ,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen the most amazing thing!’

‘Addie, it’s your bedtime; it’s nearly eight in the morning. They’ll be opening the shop in half an hour.’

‘Please,’ begged Adopta. ‘I just know this is important!’

So Maud came and landed on the ledge beneath the notice, and when she had done so she was quite as excited as the child had been.

‘My dear, it doesn’t say “Adopta Ghost”. Look carefully and you’ll see a space between the middle letters. It says “Adopt a Ghost”. And I really believe it’s an agency to find homes for people like us. Look, there’s a notice: Ghosts wanting to be re-housed should register between midnight and three a.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Saturdays .’

She turned to the child and hugged her. ‘Oh, Addie, I do believe our troubles are over. There is someone who cares about us — someone who really and truly cares!’

Aunt Maud was right. There was someone who cared about ghosts and who cared about them very much. Two people to be exact: Miss Pringle, who was small and twittery with round blue eyes, and Mrs Mannering, who was big and bossy and wore jackets with huge shoulder pads and had a booming voice.

The two ladies had met at an evening class for witches. They were interested in unusual ways of living and thought they might have had Special Powers, which would have been nice. But they hadn’t enjoyed the classes at all. They were held in a basement near Paddington Station and the other people there had wanted to do things that Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering could not possibly approve of, like doing anticlockwise dances dressed in nothing but their underclothes and sticking pins into puppets which had taken some poor person a long time to make.

All the same, the classes must have done some good because afterwards both the ladies found that they were much better than they had been before at seeing ghosts.

They had always been able to see ghosts in a vague and shimmery way but now they saw them as clearly as if they had been ordinary people — and they did not like what they saw.

There were ghosts eating their hearts out in cinemas and bottle factories; there were headless warriors in all-night garages, and bloodstained brides who rode round and round the Underground because they had nowhere to sleep.

And it was then they got the idea for the agency. For after all if people can adopt whales and trees in rain forests — if schoolchildren can adopt London buses and crocodiles in the zoo — why not ghosts? Only they would have to be proper adoptions, not just sending money. Ghosts after all are not whales or crocodiles; they can fit perfectly well into the right sort of house.

‘There might be people who would be only too happy to have a ghost or two in their stately home to attract tourists,’ said Miss Pringle.

‘And they’d be splendid for keeping off burglars,’ said Mrs Mannering.

So they decided to start an agency and call it Dial A Ghost . Miss Pringle had some money and was glad to spend it in such a useful way. She was a very kind person but a little vague, and it was Mrs Mannering who knew what to do about furnishing the office and getting filing cabinets and putting out leaflets. It was she too who arranged for separate doors, one saying Ghosts and one saying People , and printed the notice explaining that they would see ghosts on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and people who wanted to adopt them on the other days.

But it was kind, dithery Miss Pringle who engaged the office boy. He was called Ted and she gave him the job because he looked hungry and his parents were out of work. He was a nice boy, but there was something he hadn’t told the ladies — and this ‘something’ turned out to be important.

After the agency had been going for a few months Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering began to specialize. Miss Pringle dealt with the gentle, peaceful ghosts — the sad ladies who had been left at the altar on their wedding days and jumped off cliffs, and the cold, white little children who had fallen off roofs in their boarding schools, and so on. And Mrs Mannering coped with the fierce ones — the ones that were livid and revolting and rattled their chains.

And every evening when they had finished work, the two ladies went to the Dirty Duck and ordered a port and lemon and told each other how their day had gone.

‘I had such a delightful family in just now,’ said Miss Pringle. ‘The Wilkinsons. I just must fix them up with somewhere to go, and quickly.’

‘I think I saw them. Not bloodstained at all, as I recall?’ said Mrs Mannering.

‘No, not at all. You could say ordinary, but in the best sense of the word. They told me such interesting things about the war. Mrs Wilkinson used to queue for three hours just for one banana, and the old lady once held down an enemy parachutist with her umbrella till the police came to take him away. And there is such a dear little girl — she wasn’t born a Wilkinson, they found her lost and abandoned. She could be anyone — a princess even.’