Ghosts

I love Scarborough. It has a faded grandeur, an elegant tackiness about it. But there is nothing faded or tacky about Woodend, a light, and relaxed space, converted into offices/studios for businesses and creatives, with an Arts and Craft Gallery. The Sitwell family bought the house in 1870, and it was where Edith was born in 1887. It was sold to Scarborough Council in 1934, and became the Wood End Museum of Natural History until 2006, when it was adopted for the creative workplace development.

Sheryl Butner, the Finance and Gallery Manager showed me around. In my head I began re-inventing myself- 'perhaps, I could move to Scarborough and become a jeweller, hire the lovely attic room currently vacant and just hang out here all day... that would be easier then trying to write a one woman show about Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth the First and myself! And Woodend feels friendly and peaceful, and a perfect place to be creative. However, Sheryl informs me it is 'allegedly' full of ghosts. This seems to be a theme with Sitwell houses, Renishaw too apparently has ghosts, even to this day. And in Edith's day, Helen Rootham (Edith's Governess and companion) once performed an exorcism at Renishaw to remove an elemental that inhabited an unused wing of the hall.

The theme of ghosts also filtered into Edith's work. In her first attempt at a memoir she states, ‘I have always been a little outside of life, and the things one could touch comforted me; for I am like a ghost’. She never finished this version of her memoirs (her autobiography, 'Taken Care of' was written and published much later on in her life), but some of the materiel generated was used in her poems:

‘For I was like one dead, like a small ghost,

A little cold air, wandering and lost’

('Colonel Fantock', 1924)

And Virginia Wolf once said about Edith herself, ‘There is something ghostlike and angular about her.’

Sheryl confessed she had never seen a ghost at Woodend, even when she was there late at night with others who at the same time swore they could see the ghost of Lady Ida, and a spectral family dog, (I don't think anyone's seen Edith but I doubt she'd be hanging out there in ethereal form if her mother was also floating about!)

Like Sheryl, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do know that wherever I go, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, or back home to Brighton, I now no longer travel alone- Edith and Elizabeth are never far away.

(Find out more about Woodend at www.woodendcreative.co.uk.

Also a special nod to Richard Greene- Edith's latest biographer- I'm reading 'Edith Sitwell. Avant Garde Poet, English Genius,' again, and know that many of my references, quotations etc come from him.)