To set things straight, the characters Jed, Will and Rick are heterosexual carp anglers who dress in drag to put other anglers off fishing the night at Spigworth Pond, in this chapter they meet their true adversary.
CHAPTER
4
THE
LUMINESCENT LADY
Every lake or pond has its
resident ghost, and Spigworth Pond is no exception. Some ghosts are folklore, and some are
fabricated stories designed to ward off unwanted young anglers from fishing at
night, so other serious anglers may fish in peace. Some have gone to great
lengths to reinforce the myths they have created by playing the part of a ghost
and dressing in the traditional white bed sheet to frighten the unwanted
anglers, often times scaring themselves as they woo and groan in the darkness. But these fake ghosts often get rumbled,
resulting in ‘darn you meddling kids, if my ghostly plan had worked I could
have had the hole 12 acres of lake to myself’, a la Scooby Doo!
As previously mentioned in chapter 2, by dressing in drag, Will Spring,
Jed Cleminson and Rick Western have their own method of warding off unwanted
anglers from fishing Spigworth.
It was a Wednesday early evening in mid August, and Will Spring,
Jed Cleminson and Rick Western had already set up their gear and baited up to
catch carp, their favourite species. Will
and Rick felt the need to go home earlier and change their clothes after they
had both arrived in the same silky blouses that they had purchased from British Home Stores the previous weekend.
Mind you, at a sale price of £1.95 the blouses were an absolute bargain and
totally irresistible! Will, Jed and Rick
both agreed that they would phone and check with each other what they’d all be wearing
so that this embarrassing situation would never occur again. Meanwhile, as Will and Rick were sorting out
their sartorial elegance, Jed had to hide when his wife Winnie turned up at the
pond in a vicious temper after discovering that he had borrowed her gold Lamé jacket that she wanted to wear on
her night out with the girls to the Legs
Inferno nightclub. It would be hard for anyone to believe that on Sunday
mornings during the football season, these same glam anglers would be playing
in a football match for Spinfield Wanderers, unshaven in manly soccer strip and
without a single trace of Max Factor.
About 7:45pm, the figure of an unidentified angler on the far bank caught
the attention of Will, Jed and Rick.
“Oh for goodness sake darlings, just when you think you’ve got the pond
to yourself, someone else turns up to poop the party!” pouted Rick.
“Go over, chat him up and show a bit of leg off Rick?” Will suggested.
“No don’t worry, I’ll pop round and give him a bit of the Marlene,
that’ll get rid of him.” said Jed.
“Probably will, knowing how bad your singing voice is poppet, woo hoo
hoo!” Rick teased Jed.
Jed minced his way around the hard, sun-baked bank, risking a twisted
ankle in his red stiletto shoes. By the
time winter came, the bank’s earth would be soft and stodgy and the high heels
would have to be retired until the following summer. However, ever inventive,
all three would be wearing bespoke thermal platform wellington boots made by the
cobblers Whoops Sweetie! of Camden High Street.
Jed approached the unidentified angler to try to put him off staying the
night.
“Hello love, you staying the night?” said Jed in a fey tone.
“Ooh! ‘allo you! I like your shoes, your hairs nice too!” said the
unidentified angler.
“My name’s Cheryl by night and Charlie by day! What’s yours hun?” asked
Cheryl.
Jed’s stance become more masculine and his voice became lower in pitch
“My name’s Jed, innit mate.”
“Nice to meet you Jed, who are your other friends then?” Cheryl enquired.
“Um, that’s Will and Rick and they’re quite manly.” asserted Jed
Taking his stilettos off, Jed ran back to Will and Rick and gasped
“Flippin’ eck it’s a real tranny!”
“OH IS SHE!” said Will and Rick simultaneously in baritone tones,
following that up with talking about football, very loudly in a blokey kind of
way, and belching.
It’s strange really, you’d think Jed would have cottoned on that the
unidentified angler wasn’t your ordinary blokey type of angler by the whiff of Chanel No5 that could be detected three
swims away. However, this was a dilemma
for Will, Jed and Rick; a genuine transvestite had beaten them at their own
game. She had to go!
Some days later the three flustered camp carpers got together over four
or five pints in The Shepherd and Crook and
tried to work out a strategy to scare Cheryl off from the banks of Spigworth
Pond.
“A ghost! A ghost, that’s it, we’ll fake a ghost!” Will said loudly as he
leaned back on his stool and fell over backwards, forgetting it wasn’t a chair.
They mail ordered some water based phosphorescent paint from a specialist
paint company called Spooky Glow Juice, and
set about painting a wedding dress and veil borrowed from Jed’s old auntie
Celia. After charging up with daylight
or a powerful torch, the painted garment would glow for a couple of hours.
The plan was to take the flat bottomed punt from the angling club’s boatshed
and hide it in the reeds at the edge of the East bank woods. Pushing away from
the reeds, Rick would punt the punt with a pole slowly as Jed stood upright in
the vessel, like a glowing Boadicea in her chariot.
The nights could be Dylan Thomas’s Bible
Black on Spigworth Pond in those times, and with a waned moon, some nights were
so dark you couldn’t see your hands in front of your face. Light pollution wasn’t often talked about and
on a clear night the stars that were hundreds of light years away seemed so
bright, it almost made them feel closer. How strange it is to be able to see the
image of something that is most likely not there anymore! All this was to change twenty years later when
Spinfield council installed streetlights along Long Farthing Road, the main
road that connected Spigworth to the London
Road junction at Randon roundabout. No Spigworth nights would ever be truly dark
again.
It was time for Will, Jed and Rick to put their plan into action. Dusk on Friday August 22nd saw Jed
dressing up in his auntie’s luminescent wedding dress, undercover, in the woods
that lined the East bank of Spigworth Pond. The wedding dress coated with phosphorescent
paint, fully charged with daylight and topped up with a powerful torch, was
stored in a lightproof sack to hide its luminosity until it was time to use it. Jed draped a black cloak around him to cover
the wedding dress and veil, and quietly stepped into the punt. Rick
sat in the punt behind Jed, there they would wait in the darkness until
haunting time.
In the meantime, Will was having a bit of a chat about the fishing on
Spigworth Pond to Cheryl who was already set up for the night, dressed in a fur
hat and coat to keep him warm. Cheryl
was there to catch the big roach that were more likely to make a mistake when
darkness fell. Although no real
competition, Will, Jed and Rick would still prefer that Cheryl wasn’t there. In conversation, Will casually dropped in a
comment about a spectral visitor called The
Luminescent Lady of Spigworth, said to manifest herself at 10:30pm on
August 22nd every year.
Cheryl didn’t seem too phased, but the fear of uncertainty lurked inside
him.
Will returned to his swim after wishing Cheryl ‘good luck and tight lines’,
not completely sure whether he’d done a good job of spooking him or not.
It was 10:25pm, and a fox shrieked, baying for bunny blood in the dark
distance. Jed stood up in the punt and took
off the black cloak that had been concealing the glowing wedding dress, throwing
the cloak onto the bank behind the reeds. Rick gently pushed the punt away through the
reeds with a decisive but slow movement of the pole. Although with a bit of a
wobbly start as Jed tried to balance himself, he looked extremely convincing. He saw his ghostly reflection in the water as
Rick punted him close to the bank opposite to Cheryl; almost scared by his own
reflection. To reinforce his hoax, Jed
started to moan in a way similar to how Donna Summer would do a few months
later with her hit song Love to Love You
Baby.
Across the pond, Cheryl noticed this apparent apparition and lit up a
long dark More cigarette calmly, and
without a trace of fear. Cheryl
immediately guessed that the three boys were trying to frighten him off the
pond, and so he decided to enjoy the show.
What Jed and Rick didn’t take into account was that Rick should have blackened
his face and hands, his face illuminated by the glowing wedding dress made him
very visible. Your average ghost was
unlikely to need a punt or someone to punt to aid its haunting patrol!
It was difficult for Jed and Rick to know just how the performance was
going for Cheryl, the little orange dot of Cheryl’s smouldering cigarette end suggested
that not an awful lot of fear was going on. Jed decided that they should turn the punt
towards Cheryl and make it appear that the ghost was approaching him. This had
to work, surely. Well, apparently not, in
fact Cheryl started giggling, which progressed into hysterical laughter. Cheryl’s laughter reverberating around the
pond became an eerie heckling that was unsettling for both Jed and Rick. The cackling began to soften a bit as Cheryl’s
sides were splitting from much laughter. Suddenly, all present became aware of
the sound the sound of galloping horse hooves in the near distance.
The noise of the galloping became louder and slowed to a canter as the
sound got nearer, the apparition of a bright white human head rose from the
depths to hover above the water in the centre of the pond.
The head travelled towards the punt slowly rising to Jed’s eyelevel, moving
in as though to take a good look at him. With eyeless sockets and wide-open mouth, the
head explored every inch of Jed’s body as he stood there numb, unable to
breath, speak or move.
With all the strength left inside, Jed managed to croak “Punt Rick,
Punt?”
There was no response from Rick, he’d passed out
as soon as he saw the spectre.
The head rotated 180 degrees and moved towards
Cheryl who was also stricken with fear.
All Jed’s muted senses came rushing back to him
with such force that he fell out of the punt, thrashing about in the water. The surface of the pond glowed as the
phosphorescent paint flooded out of the wedding dress.
Cheryl fled in a flap of fur coat and panic, leaving
all his fishing tackle behind. The glowing head sunk back into the dark water
of Spigworth Pond.
Will, who had dropped off to sleep after a hard
day’s work and a couple of bottles of Babycham,
missed the whole spectacle.
The apparition which manifested itself to the
night anglers was the Horseless Headman that was rumoured to haunt Spigworth
Pond and the nearby woodland called Frapham
Forest. Spigworth village Headman of the hunt, Richard
Cartington, who had been having an affair with the then landlady of The Shepherd and Crook Daphne
Billingshurst, met his maker in a grisly way on 22nd August 1908. Daphne’s husband Wilbur was a suspect to have been
responsible for stretching a snare wire between two trees in Frapham Forest
with intent to decapitate Richard Cartington as he led the Spigworth foxhunt. There was no real proof as to who stretched
the snare wire with intent to harm, but Wilbur received an unfair trial and was
sentenced to the gallows to be hung until dead (I’m not certain that anyone has
ever been hung until just before death, in law that is at least!)
Folklore has it that Richard’s horse Wilhelmina
bolted off after he’d been decapitated with his bum still in the saddle,
disappearing forever, his head apparently catapulted into the pond as it was
severed. It would seem that Richard Cartington has been trying to find his body
and horse ever since he was murdered.
It goes without saying, that Jed, Rick Will, and
indeed Cheryl, didn’t fish Spigworth Pond at night for quite a while after that…the
big wooses!
