Smile through THE SADNESS

Driving past an old pub in a Gloucestershire village, Dad caught my eye in the rear-view mirror.

‘That’s a haunted pub, there, Becki,’ he told me. ‘Cavaliers haunt this place. It was a royalist stronghold in the civil war…’ As he talked, I listened, transfixed, from the back of the car. I loved his stories about ghosts – he told me amazing, spooky stories about haunted pubs and buildings, headless Cavaliers riding down the dark lanes. He was a great story-teller – and we moved around a lot when I was a child, even living in Australia. Everywhere we went seemed to have a ghost story.

Dad didn’t believe in the paranormal as such but he loved to talk about the