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Pan Macmillan
October 2015 |
Where did you get the first flash of
inspiration for The House on Cold Hill?
The House On Cold Hill is very much
inspired by – and modelled on – an isolated historic house in Sussex that my
former wife and I bought in 1989 – and which turned out to be seriously
haunted.
It was a classically beautiful,
rather melancholic looking Georgian manor house on the edge of a Sussex hamlet,
with a long history. Before being a
manor house in the middle ages it had been a monastery, and prior to that there
had been a Roman villa on the site.
‘You'll like this house, with what
you write,’ the owner told me, mischievously, on our first viewing. 'We
have three ghosts.’
It turned out he was fibbing - the
house, we were to discover later, actually had four… The first one manifested while we were in the
process of moving in. I was standing in the front porch, on a beautiful
spring morning, with my mother-in-law, a very down-to-earth lady, who was a
senior magistrate. But she had a 'fey'
side to her - in that she was very open minded about the paranormal, and always
had a particular recurring, frightening dream whenever someone she knew was
about to die.
From the front door where we were
standing, there was a long, narrow corridor, which ran almost the width of the
house, through to an oak-panelled atrium, with four Doric columns, which led
through into the kitchen. This atrium
was all that remained of the monastery, which had originally been on the site,
and you could still see the arches where the altar had been.
As we stepped aside to let the
removals men leave the house to fetch another item, I suddenly saw a shadow,
like the flit of a bird across a fanlight, in the interior of the house.
'Did you see that?' She asked,
with a knowing look.
Despite the warmth of the sunlight,
I felt a sudden chill. I knew at that
moment she had seen something uncanny. But I did not want to spook my
wife on our very first day in this house. We were both townies, and this
was our first move into the countryside. She was already apprehensive
about the isolation of the property. The last thing I needed was for her
to be unnecessarily scared by a ghost! So I shook my head and told her I
had not seen anything. But in truth, I
was feeling a little spooked by this.
Our first night was uneventful, and
our Hungarian Puli dog had been very happy and calm. I’d been told that dogs would often pick up
on any supernatural occurrence way before their owners, so I took this a good
sign.
In the morning, my wife left for
work at 8am. After breakfast I went to
my study to resume work on my third supernatural novel, Sweet Heart. Around 10.30am I went downstairs to make a
cup of coffee. As I entered the atrium, on my way through to the kitchen,
I saw tiny pinpricks of white light floating in the air all around me – two or
three dozen in all. My immediate
reaction was that it was sunlight, coming through the window in the far wall,
reflecting off my glasses. I took them
off, put them back on, and the pinpricks of light had gone.
I returned to my study, but when I
went downstairs to make myself some lunch, the same thing happened. And again after removing my glasses and
putting them back on again, the pinpricks had gone. But I was left with a slightly uneasy
feeling. In the afternoon, when I went downstairs
to make a mug of tea, it happened again.
I said nothing to my wife when she
arrived home that evening, and she did not see anything.
The next day around mid morning,
when I was alone in the house, I saw the pinpricks again, and at
lunchtime. After lunch I took the dog
for a walk. We’d only gone a short
distance along the lane when an elderly man came up to me, introducing himself
as a neighbour in the hamlet. ‘You are
Mr James, aren’t you?’ He asked.
‘You've just moved into the Manor?’
‘How are you getting on with your
grey lady?’ He said, with a strange,
quizzical look that immediately unsettled me.
‘What grey lady?’ I asked.
He then really spooked me. ‘I was the house sitter for the previous
owners. In winter, they used the atrium
as a ‘snug’ because, adjoining the kitchen, it was always warm from the
Aga. Six years ago I was sitting in the
snug, watching television, when a sinister looking woman, her face grey, and
wearing a grey, silk crinoline dress, materialized out of the altar wall, swept
across the room, gave me a malevolent stare, gave my face a flick with her
dress, and vanished into the paneling behind me. I was out of there thirty seconds later, and
went back in the morning to collect my things.
Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back in there again!’
I was struck both by the sincerity
of the man, and his genuine fear, which I could see in his eyes as he told me
the story. It truly made the hairs on
the back of my neck rise.
I returned to the house after our
walk, feeling very uncomfortable. I even
wimped out of going through the atrium into the kitchen to make my afternoon
cuppa! But when my wife came home in the
evening, I said nothing – I suppose I did not want to believe it myself, and she
was still extremely nervous about living in such an isolated house.
The following Sunday, we had invited
her parents to lunch. Whilst she was
occupied putting the finishing touches to the meal, I took her mother aside and
asked her what exactly she had seen that day we were moving in.
She described a woman, with a grey
face, dressed in grey silk crinoline, moving across the atrium – exactly what
the old man had described to me.
I was stunned – and very
spooked. Later, after her parents had
left, I decided I had to tell my wife.
She took it in the pragmatic way she had of dealing with most difficult
issues in life. ‘You’ve met several
mediums in your research – why don’t you ask one of them to come in and see
what they find?’
A few days later, a medium who had
helped me a lot during my writing of Possession came to the house, and I took
her into the atrium, and left her on her own, as she had requested.
An hour later she came up to my
study, and yet again, described exactly this woman in grey silk crinoline. She explained the pinpricks of light I kept
seeing by telling me I was slightly psychic, so while I was not actually seeing
the entire apparition, I was picking up some of its energy – hence the
pinpricks of light.
I asked her if there was anything I
could do about this, and she told me that the apparition was of a deeply
disturbed former resident of the house, and that it needed a clergyman to deal
with it.
I felt a tad cynical about her
response – but at the same time, I was now feeling deeply uncomfortable in what
should have been the sanctuary of my own home.
But there was a vicar I knew who I thought would be able to help, and
with whom I had become good friends.
At the time he was officially the
Vicar of Brighton – but with another hat, he was also officially, the Chief
Exorcist of the Church Of England. That
wasn’t his actual title, which was the less flaky-sounding Minister Of
Deliverance. A former monk, the son of
two medics, a university double first in Psychology, he was as far from Max Von
Sydow’s Father Merrin in The Exorcist as you could get. He is delightful human being, with whom I had
become good friends, and still am to this day.
He is a modern thinker, a clergyman who has a problem with the biblical
concepts of God, yet still retains an infectious faith. His views, for instance, on the Ouija board
are that far from putting its participants in touch with the spiritual world,
it actually opens up a Pandora’s Box of their own inner demons.
Even so, I was a little surprised
when he cheerfully entered the atrium, stood still for a couple of minutes, and
then loudly and very firmly enunciated, into thin air, ‘You may go now!’
He turned to me and said, ‘You
should be fine now.’
Well, we were, until a mid June day
in 1994. My novel, Host, which had been
published the previous year, by Penguin, in hardback, had just been published
both on two floppy discs, billed as, The World’s First Electronic Novel, and in
paperback. The thick paperback lay on a
beautiful antique wooden chest, which we kept in the atrium. I always put my latest book there, for
visitors to see. On this particular
sunny morning, I was having breakfast, around 7.45 am, while my wife was upstairs
getting ready for work. Suddenly she
called down, ‘I can smell burning!’
I suddenly realized that I could,
too. I turned around, and to my
amazement, the copy of Host, on top of the wooden chest, was on fire!
I rushed over, grabbed the book, ran
to the kitchen sink and threw it in, then turned the taps on, to extinguish the
flames.
There was, of course, a perfectly
prosaic explanation: Close to the book,
on the chest, was a round glass paperweight.
The hot June morning sun rays had been refracted through it, much the
same way that as kids, we used to set fire to things by letting the sun’s rays
refract though a magnifying glass.
But… the fact this had happened
in this room which had had the apparition in added a very sinister dimension.
The
above story was only one of the spooky occurrences we had in this otherwise
glorious house.
Without revealing too much, can you
tell us anything about the story?
Following
on from the last answer you’ll not be surprised to read that it is about a
couple of townies who move from the heart of the city of Brighton and Hove to
the Sussex countryside! The couple in the story, Caro and Ollie, have a
twelve-year old daughter, Jade, who is stroppy and unhappy about leaving
Brighton where all her friends are. But Caro and Ollie both love the idea of
living in a grand country pile, and despite the huge financial strain, and a
number of warnings in the surveyors report, they buy Cold Hill House - a huge,
dilapidated, Georgian mansion. Within
days of moving in with, it soon becomes apparent that the Harcourt family
aren't the only residents in the house….. The first thing that happens is that
jade is up in her room a couple of days later, on Facetime, to her best friend
in Brighton, when her friend suddenly says, ‘Jade, who is that lady standing
behind you?’
Where do you get your inspiration
for a story from – are you inspired by people, places or do you draw purely
from your imagination?
Aside from
my imagination and own experiences, I regularly spend time out with the police
and gain a huge amount of inspiration from things I see over and hear over that
time. But I also think one of the best
resources is in shops all over every town and city in the land, and refreshed
daily – newspapers! They contain so much
of human life, and so many true crime stories.
In particular, I often think that local provincial papers contain more
in-depth coverage and lurid details than the nationals.
Your writing is very atmospheric –
how do you ‘set the scene’ in your novels and how much research did you do in
order to bring The House on Cold Hill to life?
I began my career by making low
budget horror movies, and I think I’ve seen just about every scary movie ever
made and read every significantly scary book. I was the radio presenter on and
off for two years on a late night radio phone-in show about the paranormal in
Sussex and Hampshire, and I got more than a few stories then! In 1994 the BBC gave me carte blanche to make
a documentary on ghosts in Scotland.
I’ve lived in two haunted houses and lived with a medium for thirteen
years. I’m also the only fiction author
who’s been invited to lecture at the Society of Psychical Research, so I guess
you could say I’d done over thirty years of research for this book!
Whilst researching the novel, did
you discover anything which surprised you?
Yes!
There is a chilling postscript to my writing THE HOUSE ON COLD HILL: A
key element of the story is a mysterious window in the mansion that my couple
buy. A window that, they one day
realize, is for a room that does not appear to exist. A room that has no door… In addition to my home in Sussex, I have
an apartment on two floors in Notting Hill.
A month after finishing the book my wife, Lara and I were walking along
the street beneath, looking up, and talking about his particular part of the
book. Suddenly Lara asked, pointing up,
‘Which room is that window in?’
We
stood there frozen for some moments, as it began to dawn on us that the window
did not make sense. We could not work
out which room it was. We ran in, raced
up the six flights of stairs and into each of the two rooms which the “mystery”
window seem to straddle. But there was
no window!
We
finally did solve the mystery – the builders who had put a fitted wardrobe in
the master bedroom had, for whatever reason, decided to lose the window in the
process and, leaving the glass on the outside, had timbered over the inside.
Who
says truth is not stranger than fiction???!
When do you find the time to write,
and do you have a favourite place to do your writing?
I try to ensure that whatever I’m
doing I leave myself time to write 1000 words 6 days a week. I have offices in my Sussex and Notting Hill homes,
but I can write anywhere. Thanks to laptops, my office has long ceased to be a
concrete space and I can write on the move.
I actually write really well on airplanes, in the back of a car and in
hotel rooms! But my favourite writing
time is 6 - 9:30 in the evening. I got used to that when I was working full
time in film and TV, and made this my ‘me’ time. I have a stiff drink – often a
vodka martini, with four olives, put on music and get in a zone. I really love
this time of the day.
Can you tell us if you have another
novel planned?
I am
currently writing my 12th Roy Grace Novel called “Love You Dead’
which will be published May 2016. I’ve
also started work on another standalone novel – on the theme of what might
happen if someone claimed to have absolute proof of the existence of God. It is a subject that has long intrigued me,
and I have been working on the research planning of this book for nearly two
decades.
Peter was educated at
Charterhouse then at film school. Before
becoming a full time novelist he has produced numerous films, including The
Merchant Of Venice, starring Al Pacino. Both a film and a TV adaptation of the
Roy Grace series is currently in development, with Peter overseeing all
aspects. He has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Brighton in
recognition of his services to literature and the community, An Honorary
Mastership of the Open University, is Patron of Neighbourhood Watch nationwide,
Patron of Crimestoppers in Sussex, Patron of Brighton & Hove Samaritans,
and Patron of Relate in Sussex, among many other charities he is involved
with. Peter has been two-times Chair of
the Crime Writers’ Association and has won many literary awards, including the
publicly voted ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards People’s Bestseller Dagger and he was
shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize.
As popular internationally as in the UK, he won the US Barry Award, for
Best British Crime Novel in 2012. In 2015 in a poll run by WH Smith, Peter was
publicly voted, The Best Crime Author Of All Time.
Follow on Twitter @peterjamesuk
Huge thanks to Peter for giving his time so generously and for sharing his thoughts about
My thanks also to Julia at Midas PR for her help with this interview and to Pan Macmillan for my review copy of this book.
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