The Man Who Died at Sea (1967)
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sutcliff_spaceA curious anecdote of 2000 words from the youth of Sutcliff's mother, Elizabeth Lawton. It was written for the anthology The House of the Nightmare and Other Eerie Tales, edited by Kathleen Lines, which you can read here at Internet Archive.
You may already know this one from the Short Stories collection put together byisis. Technically, though, it's non-fiction, and since I'm posting all of Sutcliff's essays that I've found, here it is again for completeness's sake. What is new here is that this time I've included part of Lines's preface, giving a little more context for the story. If you want to know more about the redoubtable Elizabeth and her brothers, they of course figure largely in Sutcliff's memoir Blue Remembered Hills.
THE MAN WHO DIED AT SEA
The short section at the end of the book ["From Life"] contains a few true and unexplained experiences. Many people believe in ghosts and many quite ordinary people have seen apparitions or have experienced some lively manifestations of the supernatural, but it is extraordinarily difficult (unless one is a member of an occult society) to trace even the most modest tales of "hauntings" to their original sources. It is so often a case of "Oh, yes, it is true," but it turns out to have happened to the friend of a cousin's husband's aunt, or to somebody else equally remote. The incidents here are all connected personally with the writers. Only two have been published before, and, except for The Limping Man of Makin-Meang, which comes from an interesting and entertaining book, they have been told very simply, the bare facts stated without any elaboration. Because they are so straight-forward and because most of them are not frightening, they are in a dramatic sense a "let down" when compared to the stories. But think for a moment: would not the sudden appearance of an extra person in the room beside one, the sight of an apparently solid man walking through a definitely solid wall, or of a man in fancy dress who wasn’t really there, be just a bit unnerving? And how many of us would like to walk alone on remote Dartmoor, or be willing to spend the night in a desolate and reputedly haunted house?
– Excerpt from the Foreword by Kathleen Lines
My mother was not quite like most people's mothers. She came, as far as anybody knew, of good hard-headed North Country stock on both sides, but she should by rights have been Irish or Highland Scots. She had what people call the "Celtic temperament", up one instant and down the next, and making sure that my father and I were up and down with her. When she was down, it was though a brown fog hung over the whole house, and when she started going up again, it was as though the sun came out and the birds started singing. Living with her had never a dull moment, but it could be rather unnerving, for she had, unquestionably, a touch of the Second Sight, another thing which one expects of a Celt more than a Saxon.
She saw our beloved old dog lying in his accustomed place before the hall fire, six weeks or so after he died; and she heard things — the same old dog padding around the house, even years later; footsteps and voices that weren't there for other people; and occasionally she knew that certain things were going to happen. They didn't always happen, but they happened often enough for my father and I not to like it very much when she predicted something bad. (It generally seems to be future trouble and not rejoicings, that shows itself to the person with the Second Sight.)
The first time that she became aware of this uncanny gift it frightened her so badly and made such a deep impression on her that when she told me about it, thirty years later, she told it as freshly and in as much detail as though it had happened only the day before. It was indeed an unnerving experience for a young girl.
My mother was seventeen at the time, and she was going out to India to stay with an elder brother in the Indian Civil. It was her first trip away from home, and by herself, and at the beginning she felt a little strange and lonely, but she soon got to know a few people and settled to life on board ship. Among the other passengers was a middle-aged man — I shall call him Mr X. One can't be a month or more in the same ship without coming to know the faces of all the other passengers, so she came to know this man by sight, and she heard other people speak to him by name. But he remained simply a face with a name to it, among all the crowd of passengers she didn't know.
The weeks went by, and she had a mild flirtation with one of the ship's officers; they were through the Suez Canal, and the punkahs (fans) came into use, and the nights as well as the days began to be very hot. And one night in the Indian Ocean, she woke from an uncomfortably vivid dream to find herself in the gangway outside her cabin on her way to fetch the ship's Doctor because Mr X was dying.
She had never walked in her sleep before, and she was bewildered and startled, but she pulled herself together and crept back into her bunk without waking her cabin mate, telling herself it was probably the heat.
The next night exactly the same thing happened again. Only this time she was more than half way to the Doctor's cabin when she came to herself, and had quite a long walk back, hoping desperately that she wouldn't meet anybody on the way.
She told herself it was the heat; but she began to be very worried in case it should happen a third time and that she actually got all the way to the Doctor's cabin: and finally she decided that the best thing would be to go and tell him the whole story.
So next morning, that was what she did. "If you wake up in the night and find me flapping around your cabin in my nightie, it's because I've come to tell you that Mr X is dying. I've never walked in my sleep before, but last night and the night before, I woke up on my way here. I think it must be the heat."
The Doctor said, "Well I hope to God nobody does die this trip, because I've done the stupidest thing — I've forgotten to bring any death certificate forms with me."
And it was when he said that, that my mother realized for the first time, the full, very frightening implication of this sleep-walking to fetch the Doctor. Whenever she caught sight of Mr X that day, she looked at him rather anxiously, but as far as she could judge, never having really looked at him before, he seemed just as usual.
That night she slept beautifully, no dreams, no sleep-walking: and when she woke in the morning it all seemed so comfortably in the past that she decided she had been rather silly and had made a fuss about nothing. Then, while she was still dressing, the stewardess came in with a message from the Doctor. She was to go to him in the Sick Bay at once, and not to speak to anyone on the way.
In the Sick Bay she found the Doctor looking rather white. He said, "I didn't want you to hear it from anyone else and get a shock — Mr X had a heart attack and died in the night."
You may already know this one from the Short Stories collection put together by
isis. Technically, though, it's non-fiction, and since I'm posting all of Sutcliff's essays that I've found, here it is again for completeness's sake. What is new here is that this time I've included part of Lines's preface, giving a little more context for the story. If you want to know more about the redoubtable Elizabeth and her brothers, they of course figure largely in Sutcliff's memoir Blue Remembered Hills.THE MAN WHO DIED AT SEA
The short section at the end of the book ["From Life"] contains a few true and unexplained experiences. Many people believe in ghosts and many quite ordinary people have seen apparitions or have experienced some lively manifestations of the supernatural, but it is extraordinarily difficult (unless one is a member of an occult society) to trace even the most modest tales of "hauntings" to their original sources. It is so often a case of "Oh, yes, it is true," but it turns out to have happened to the friend of a cousin's husband's aunt, or to somebody else equally remote. The incidents here are all connected personally with the writers. Only two have been published before, and, except for The Limping Man of Makin-Meang, which comes from an interesting and entertaining book, they have been told very simply, the bare facts stated without any elaboration. Because they are so straight-forward and because most of them are not frightening, they are in a dramatic sense a "let down" when compared to the stories. But think for a moment: would not the sudden appearance of an extra person in the room beside one, the sight of an apparently solid man walking through a definitely solid wall, or of a man in fancy dress who wasn’t really there, be just a bit unnerving? And how many of us would like to walk alone on remote Dartmoor, or be willing to spend the night in a desolate and reputedly haunted house?
– Excerpt from the Foreword by Kathleen Lines
My mother was not quite like most people's mothers. She came, as far as anybody knew, of good hard-headed North Country stock on both sides, but she should by rights have been Irish or Highland Scots. She had what people call the "Celtic temperament", up one instant and down the next, and making sure that my father and I were up and down with her. When she was down, it was though a brown fog hung over the whole house, and when she started going up again, it was as though the sun came out and the birds started singing. Living with her had never a dull moment, but it could be rather unnerving, for she had, unquestionably, a touch of the Second Sight, another thing which one expects of a Celt more than a Saxon.
She saw our beloved old dog lying in his accustomed place before the hall fire, six weeks or so after he died; and she heard things — the same old dog padding around the house, even years later; footsteps and voices that weren't there for other people; and occasionally she knew that certain things were going to happen. They didn't always happen, but they happened often enough for my father and I not to like it very much when she predicted something bad. (It generally seems to be future trouble and not rejoicings, that shows itself to the person with the Second Sight.)
The first time that she became aware of this uncanny gift it frightened her so badly and made such a deep impression on her that when she told me about it, thirty years later, she told it as freshly and in as much detail as though it had happened only the day before. It was indeed an unnerving experience for a young girl.
My mother was seventeen at the time, and she was going out to India to stay with an elder brother in the Indian Civil. It was her first trip away from home, and by herself, and at the beginning she felt a little strange and lonely, but she soon got to know a few people and settled to life on board ship. Among the other passengers was a middle-aged man — I shall call him Mr X. One can't be a month or more in the same ship without coming to know the faces of all the other passengers, so she came to know this man by sight, and she heard other people speak to him by name. But he remained simply a face with a name to it, among all the crowd of passengers she didn't know.
The weeks went by, and she had a mild flirtation with one of the ship's officers; they were through the Suez Canal, and the punkahs (fans) came into use, and the nights as well as the days began to be very hot. And one night in the Indian Ocean, she woke from an uncomfortably vivid dream to find herself in the gangway outside her cabin on her way to fetch the ship's Doctor because Mr X was dying.
She had never walked in her sleep before, and she was bewildered and startled, but she pulled herself together and crept back into her bunk without waking her cabin mate, telling herself it was probably the heat.
The next night exactly the same thing happened again. Only this time she was more than half way to the Doctor's cabin when she came to herself, and had quite a long walk back, hoping desperately that she wouldn't meet anybody on the way.
She told herself it was the heat; but she began to be very worried in case it should happen a third time and that she actually got all the way to the Doctor's cabin: and finally she decided that the best thing would be to go and tell him the whole story.
So next morning, that was what she did. "If you wake up in the night and find me flapping around your cabin in my nightie, it's because I've come to tell you that Mr X is dying. I've never walked in my sleep before, but last night and the night before, I woke up on my way here. I think it must be the heat."
The Doctor said, "Well I hope to God nobody does die this trip, because I've done the stupidest thing — I've forgotten to bring any death certificate forms with me."
And it was when he said that, that my mother realized for the first time, the full, very frightening implication of this sleep-walking to fetch the Doctor. Whenever she caught sight of Mr X that day, she looked at him rather anxiously, but as far as she could judge, never having really looked at him before, he seemed just as usual.
That night she slept beautifully, no dreams, no sleep-walking: and when she woke in the morning it all seemed so comfortably in the past that she decided she had been rather silly and had made a fuss about nothing. Then, while she was still dressing, the stewardess came in with a message from the Doctor. She was to go to him in the Sick Bay at once, and not to speak to anyone on the way.
In the Sick Bay she found the Doctor looking rather white. He said, "I didn't want you to hear it from anyone else and get a shock — Mr X had a heart attack and died in the night."
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