When a performance is over, it always feels a bit sad. It’s gone! You want to do it again! You think about the audience – and for our Enchanted Evening of songs and stories this week, the audience couldn’t have been more delightful or more delighted. Afterwards, several asked which of the four stories I’d told was my favourite. It’s not a question I can answer. However, this morning, one of the four came strongly back to my mind as if it was wanting to be told again right then. This is why.

We were at the railway station in Haverfordwest. Paul was catching a train back to London and I went to buy him a newspaper from the station’s newspaper stall. To my knowledge, the man behind the counter has been been there for over 50 years. He is extremely friendly and this morning he was keen to talk  about ghosts. 

Seeing ghosts:

When I arrived at the newspaper stand,  he was chatting to a group of four young women. I gathered that the subject was ghosts.  So when the girls had gone, I asked the newspaper man if he’d ever seen a ghost. ‘Yes,’ he said eagerly. ‘I’ve seen five.’ ‘Really?’ I exclaimed before asking if they’d looked like ghosts. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not at all.’ Then, after describing each one exactly – for instance, ‘a short man in a schoolboy cap but with a very old-looking face ‘ – he went on to make what was obviously a key point for him. In each case, when he’d looked again, they were no longer there.

I guess that’s when the Chinese ghost story I’d told in our Enchanted Evening on Wednesday took its chance to creep back into my mind.

The story of Li Wang-Chu

Li Wang-Chu was a civil servant (at least that’s how I portray him). Young and hard-working, he was determined to establish a strong position for himself in life. Often he’d be sent on assignments to other places and on one such occasion he found lodgings in a very old-looking inn. Some days had passed before he caught sight of a young woman at the end of the hall-way. Soon he saw her again, quite often, and before long, they bumped into each in the passage-way to Li Wang-Chu’s room. She turned out to be the inn-keeper’s daughter and soon the two of them were deeply in love and Li Chang-Wu was entirely sure that he wanted her to become his wife.

But Li Wang-Chu also felt determined that before he could marry, he must make himself secure in the world. So when the three months of his assignment were over, he left to return to the city with a very heavy heart, but also with the conviction that he’d return very soon.

Back in the city, Li Wang-Chu was kept very busy and, what with one thing and another, eight whole years had passed before he was able to get back to the village where he had fallen in love. When he reached it, he was dismayed to see that the inn where he’d stayed was in disrepair. When he knocked at the door, an old woman answered and told him that the innkeeper had died three years before. And when,  with fear in his heart, he asked about the innkeeper’s daughter, the old woman replied that she too was dead. She’d pined away four years before.

Then, looking at the sadness that came over him, the old woman recognised Li Wang-Chu. It was a good thing he’d come back, she told him, because the innkeeper’s daughter had given her a message to give him if he ever returned. She’d told the old woman to promise to ask him to spend one more night in the inn so she and he could be together once more in spirit.

That night as the evening darkened, Li Wang-Chu suddenly thought he saw something moving in one of the corners of the room. It was the room where he’d stayed before.  As he rose from his bed, there she was, as lovely as ever and as real. She could only be there for that one night, she told him, and when morning came she’d have to leave. But she was very glad he’d  come so she could assure him how much she loved him.

All night they spent in each others’ embrace. When Li Chang-Wu thought he saw the dawn arriving, he called out in anxiety to the old servant woman below. ‘Is the Morning Star yet in the sky?’ When she replied that it was, he felt a terrible fear. But it was then that his loved one drew him to the window and together they looked out at the Milky Way. The stars would always be there, she said, and in the same way she hoped he would always remember that their love was real. Then from the robe she’d been wearing, she took out two things which she gave to Li Wang-Chu – a poem she had written for him and a beautiful piece of jade. He looked intently at these things and when he next looked up, she was gone.

Next day, on his way back to the city, Li Wang Chu felt a terrible sadness and also some kind of strength. The strength came from his new conviction of the reality and power of love. He felt it each time he put his hand in his pocket and felt the smoothness and the edges of the piece of jade he’d been given.

And that’s the story.

PS: All taken in Pembrokeshire this week. my photos aren’t of ghosts but of ghostly things. The top one is of  a dead crab on the beach, all the more ghostly because of its completeness. The bottom one  was taken inside a very spooky cave.

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