By The South Wall

The mist swirled round the churchyard in little white clumps. Except it wasn't really a churchyard for there were no graves there, but a piece of land, surrounded by a wall, on which the church itself stood. Oh, the church was gothic enough, modern day gothic anyway and I'm told it was rather nice inside.

The Vicar was a large, friendly man who obviously lived close by. He was about 55 and always had a pleasant smile or wave for everyone. He could often be seen scurrying in and out of his church.

Occasionally, a notice would go up, advertising a choir practice, or hymn meeting, but other than that, although the church was near a main road and a bus stop, there was nothing seemingly untoward about the place.

The church parish covered an area of once quite grand, now quite dilapidated, late Victorian houses, some of which had been converted into flats. In spite of the road, which was a small dual carriageway with a boulevard in the middle, the place still retained some of its original charm. There were plenty of trees about and it really was quite pretty in certain little backwaters of the area for there was still some evidence of its trams and trolley buses that used to populate the roads before the advent of the automotive bus, along, that route.

A small point of note is that quite some time ago the church had been associated with a minor scandal, involving a play being rehearsed for possible performance in the church hall, which the then vicar found most unsuitable for a variety of reasons, the most prevalent being its dark and sinister nature, perhaps because it was written by a dark and sinister human being, so the story goes.

At any rate, due to some of the suggestions in the play, not to mention some of the language used to express its theme, the work was banned by the Vicar, a fact that was quickly drawn to the attention of the newspapers by its rather irate writer, who, although deprived of one performance, was not going to be deprived of any others, for indeed he made quite a scene about it; the gist being, that as he had decided he was going to die in the near future, he would come back and haunt the church grounds, to spite the Vicar presumably, such was his apparent nature.

Obviously, the playwright must have kept his word, for, although he supposedly left this planet fifteen years ago, I saw him in the grounds tonight, by the south wall of the church, just the same as he looked in the newspaper photograph all that time ago.