Weekend break in Cornwall
Stayed in a varnished and charming old listed cottage owned by one of those couples who were born to own B&Bs, he reminiscent of a vicar and she looking the type to have her own recipe for strawberry scones. The first night of my stay I ate an entire battered wing of skate and chips while looking out over the molten mercurochrome sunset, and properly unwound. By complete chance, I’d booked the weekend right in the middle of a local fishing festival, so on the Friday night the entire village descended on the one pub there and drank terrifying amounts of alcohol, while singing raucous songs and waxing lyrical on lost comrades. Sat at my table was Harald (always Harald, not Harold - he even insisted you pronounce it that way - otherwise his Danish father would have a fit), who as fate would have it was staying in the B&B even though he lived in the village, because his son and daughter-in-law had come to stay and he’d leant them his house for the week. Five hours of rum and shrubs and Harald’s exhaustive history of the village later, we retired to the B&B and I retired to bed. Harald was still in fine form and I could hear him singing and clattering around in the unusually modern kitchen for a while; he probably did this every year and had known the owners for forty years so it must have been like having your brother come to stay.

The next morning at breakfast I gently tilted my head to prevent my brain sloshing around too much inside it, and exchanged amused glances with the owners as we discussed last night’s festivities. There was no sign of Harald, nor did any of us see him for the rest of that day.

The wind was rough and salty that day and it was a perfect day for walking, so I set off across the dunes with my compass, cane and Ordnance Survey map. After a decent climb I picnicked on a granite block a hundred or so metres above sea level and looking out over the windswept grasses. One photography session later, I was back at the B&B and tucked into a frayed armchair with a mug of tea and a National Geographic. There was a small iron bushel of logs next to the fireplace and with the owners’ permission I got a fire going, feeling the cold unfurl and collapse out of my bones.

A couple of hours later I was feeling so tired that I felt in imminent danger of nodding off head-first into the flames, so I went up to my room and lay down on my bed for a while. Inevitably, I fell asleep, and woke again just after midnight, jolted by something going on downstairs. After getting my bearings I listened and could hear banging and scraping coming from the kitchen. Oh ho, I thought: Harald has returned. I wondered if he’d been out all day drinking with some fisherman mates of his who’d returned from a catch; in any event I felt thirsty after the heat of the fire so I decided to go down to get a drink of water. Too bad if he realised his drunken logic of not singing to as to convince everyone he wasn’t there had failed. The clattering and fumbling kept up unabated as I creaked down the stairs, and I pushed open the door to the kitchen with a wry half-smile on my face.

There was a child in a loose dress standing by the kitchen table. On the table were a cup, a carton of milk, a bowl of sugar and what looked like a packet of biscuits. Everything was knocked over and torn; the milk had spilled all over the tabletop, the cup was on its side and the biscuits had been broken open, showering crumbs everywhere. The child’s long hair went most of the way down her back and tumbled over her face, and she was running her fingers mindlessly over the surface of the table as though navigating by touch. Carefully I tiptoed towards her, wondering if the owners had forgotten to mention their sleepwalking granddaughter with a penchant for midnight snacks. If her grandparents woke up in the morning and found the kitchen in this state, she’d have her pocket money cut off for a month. By the time I reached the table I could hear her breathing, a ragged, asthmatic wheeze that never stopped as she fumbled. It was a very disturbing sound. Gently I righted the leaking milk and the cup in front of her and moved round the table to rescue the sugar bowl before it fell off and smashed outright. As I moved between the kitchen table and the window, the girl twitched her head back to free herself from her hair and at that moment her face came into the full moonlight. The whole of her face was twisted and burned into a livid mess of scars. Her eyes, swollen and white, weeped as she wheezed into the semi-darkness. I stood transfixed by a mixture of pity and horror. Her hands still grasped blindly for the treat in front of her and even if she were sleepwalking, I wanted to make sure that she at least returned to bed with the object of her quest in her hands. I picked up a biscuit and reached out to take her wrist, and as I did so I felt the touch of her skin against mine. She felt cold, and slightly damp, as though the night sweats were an accompanying condition of her sleepwalking. I pressed the biscuit between her fingers and returned to my room.

The next morning I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and struck up a quarter-hour’s idle banter with Harald, who had surfaced the previous afternoon and taken his boat and fishing rod out as a tried and tested hangover cure, as the owner went up to change the bed. Not wanting to poke my nose where it wasn’t warranted, I said something neutral about the B&B being a very traditional and Olde Worlde place, but I supposed they had to move with the times and fit a more up-to-date kitchen if they were going to cater for paying guests. Harald immediately gained a dramatic and conspiratorial twinkle in his eye, and, edging closer on his chair, said that the owners used to take great pride in their original kitchen. When they started having paying guests, however, one family came down and managed to start a fire that gutted the entire room. All the original wainscotting, the ornamental plates, the Aga...everything was lost, so they thought they might as well get the latest and greatest when they refitted it all. When I wondered aloud how a family could possibly manage to start a fire somewhere that offered full board as part of the reservation, Harald stage-whispered to me that their daughter had apparently gone downstairs in the middle of the night and tried to make herself a glass of warm milk. Of course, she’d never used an oven like that before; never had anything like that at home. In a matter of minutes the whole thing got out of control and she panicked...got burned alive. The family didn’t want to go to court and the whole place almost shut down for a year or two after that, but it happened such a long time ago that you’d have to be from round here to remember. “What was the girl’s name?”, I asked Harald. “Rose, it was. Pretty as a rose she was too.”

On the walk up the hill to the station outside town I stopped near the peak and took off my rucksack. There was a small knoll of meadow grass beside the road, from which you could look down and see the thatched roof of the B&B and the curl of steam rising from the chimney to indicate that Sunday lunch was ready. On the top of the knoll I picked and left a single flower, for Rose, and a biscuit.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 17:01, 1 reply)

Cornwall?
From the way you describe the girl, sounds more like Weston.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 17:23, closed)