On Christmas Eve in the village of Willerby, the children sing carols door-to-door.
The adults and older children lead the littler ones down the only street, past the old pub, past the barrows, past the hardly ever open post office and the church.
Then, pools of light falling from open doors, they sing.
At the end of the evening the singers gather at the green and then on to a kindly house for mince pies, hot cocoa and mulled ribena in front of an open fire.
There is always a girl who both belongs and does not belong, who is there and also not there.
She wears the same clothes and is always the same age.
She smiles as she sings, correct on every word.
She never speaks. When the last song is sung, before the pies and cocoa, she goes back down the lane where – it is presumed – she returns to her forgotten grave lost somewhere in the undergrowth of the ancient churchyard.
Nobody is alarmed by her. She does no harm.
There is no question of interfering priests or exorcism. She is welcome.
She just likes singing with other children.
For many living in in Willerby she’s a comfort – a sign when we are gone there may be something else after.
She was a particular comfort to Jane and Dan Johnson who brought up four children – three long departed and living miles away – and one buried one in Willerby; Andrew – hit by a car on a nondescript Tuesday in February the week before he his eleventh birthday – the worst day of their lives.
The worst day in Willerby in living memory.
A thud everyone heard.
Jane screaming and Dan shouting for someone to call 999 while the driver staggered around shouting he was sorry again and again.
This never stopped bothering Jane.
“As if anyone cared he was sorry,” she said to Dan many times, a splinter she couldn’t pull, “as if that mattered at all, as if it were relevant, as if anyone even gave a fucking shit.”
Then after the shouting and screaming the sirens and after that – worst of all – the awful deadly silence that fell over the houses and the villages and never really went away.
“If she’s here,” Jane said to Dan, “then that means a part of us goes on.”
Then one year there were no children in Willerby because all the old ones were grown and there were no young families.
That year for the first time no singing was arranged, and nobody thought about the girl from the graveyard.
Until – looking out of the bedroom window together – Jane and Dan saw she had come anyway.
She was under the lamp that lit the lane that went to the graveyard, her features shadow-edge distinct in the island of electric light. She looked left and right, down the street, took a step forward – uncertain and uneasy – and then stepped back.
“Dan,” Jane said. “We can’t leave her there. Not on her own. Not tonight. Not at Christmas.”
Dan shifted uneasily – but while the girl was eerie and he was afraid he knew his wife was right.
“I’ll get our coats,” he said.
They were in the hall by the door when they heard her singing.
Joy to the World – a child’s voice, clear and high and unaffected and almost unbearably lonely.
They opened the door and went to go to her, but before they took a step, they saw they were not alone.
In the front gardens of all the houses in the village stood small groups of children.
They were singing too and walking out onto the street as more children appeared behind them.
It went on and on until there were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
Ghosts?
Perhaps but if they were, some at least were ghosts of children who did not die because Jane and Dan knew the living adults they had become.
Familiar faces with the years peeled away from them – old neighbours and friends – children who had moved away and they’d never seen again.
Children who’d been funny, cheeky and kind, and sad, disappointed and discouraged, who’d laughed and cried, loved and been loved.
Children who’d grown to travel the world and children who’d never moved far from where they were born, some who’d grown to have children of their own and a few who did not get time to do much at all.
Children who’d become adults, their memories bleeding into an abstract wash, fuzzed with nostalgia and half-remembered secrets, exiled from a kingdom they could now hardly see.
And their own children.
“Jane,” Dan said. “Look it’s Sally”. And although Sally was now forty-five and living in Australia there she was, seven again and stepping along the street hand in hand with an older boy she’d adored so many years ago and Dan had forgotten all about.
And then next to Sally they saw her older brother Max, and her younger sister Sarah -all grown now but children again on that night – singing and smiling in the dark.
Jane could not settle to the miracle.
She moved into the small front yard to see the whole street. She scanned the road, head turning left and right, looking through and past the singing crowd.
Then with a gasp that was also a sob she reached back and pulled her husband to her. “Dan,” she said. “Look! Look by the churchyard gate! He’s come! He’s here!”
There – where the girl had been before -stood Andrew wearing a coat his grandmother had given him many years before.
“Andrew!” Jane shouted, waving, “Oh my boy, Andrew! Is it really you?”
Dan was shouting too. “Andrew! Andrew! We love you! We never stopped loving you! We’ll always love you! We think about you every second. Oh, our boy, our beautiful boy, we never forget you! We never did, we never will!”
And Andrew did see them because he was waving back and grinning, mouthing that he loved them too, before he ran to his two sisters and his older brother, who swept him up onto his shoulders to carry him to the green where all the children were now gathering.
They sang Silent Night, close together and swaying slowly until – although not a drop had been forecast it began to snow so heavily they were hidden, their voices muffling then dropping away to nothing.
It snowed the whole night, and Christmas day too, covering the street and the cars, folding the hedges into the fields, painting the world as blank and timeless as eternity.
On Boxing Day – when it finally stopped – there was no sign of them.
“It’s funny really, thinking only the dead can be ghosts,” Jane said to Dan long after it was all over and they’d both cried the healing tears they’d waited so long for, “because we die every minute don’t we? We’re only ourselves for a moment. We’re not the same a day to the next. Perhaps we all leave ghosts everywhere.”
Ben Newmark 