Great Uncle Fred? My class went on a visit to this castle and the guide was going on and on about the ghost and some people were scared but that`s all rubbish, isn`t it? Ghosts don`t exist, do they? (Inno, Spring 2008)

I don`t know. I don`t know for sure. But... Perhaps the voice I heard telling me not to enter that ruined and booby-trapped building in France, the voice which saved my life and which sounded so like the voice of my best friend Jim who had been killed a month before, perhaps that voice came from my imagination...? And perhaps, when I woke up in that large house in Somerset, and the lady in the old-fashioned pale-blue dress was sitting at the window crying, perhaps what I saw was a fragment of my dream and the lady was not the Lady in Blue who pined away after her lover was killed in the Crimean War, the Lady in Blue who was said to haunt that house... And perhaps those figures I saw at the quayside, marching into the ship that wasn`t there, at the place where had been docked the year before the ship that was straightaway sunk by a U-boat, perhaps those figures arose out of my exhaustion. For I was exhausted. Think what you like, it makes no difference.

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