THE GHOST BEHIND THE WALL

Andersen Press, £9.99. Publication date: October 2000

The idea for this story came originally from a news story. Some of you might remember the Ratboy - a boy who kept escaping from care and hid in the ventilation shafts of a block of flats. Each night he'd creep out into the flats and steal whatever he needed. This story really seems to have captured my imagination, as I've used it a number of times - once in short story called The Visitor, in a Dolphin book called Growing Up, edited by Wendy Cooling, and again in Bloodtide. But I still wanted to do a novel about it. As usual, by the time it was finished, it was nothing like the story that inspired it.

The first draft was a simple adventure story, in which David, our hero, was creeping out of the vents to torment and old, old man, Mr Alveston. Mr Alvesten is a bit of a rogue, as sharp as a pin in many ways, but he's beginning to go a little senile, and it scares him very much. Then the ghost put in an appearance, and I started thinking about all those phrases we use to describe people who are getting a little bit senile .. loosing your memory, loosing your mind, forgetting who you are. What if the old man really had lost his mind, or at least a part of it? Perhaps that might be an explanation of what a ghost really is.

By the time the book was finished, it had turned into a story about growing up, but also about growing old and the desire to leave this life. As David gets out of his depth with the ghost, he comes to love the old man, and in his efforts to reunite the old man with the ghost of the young boy, he is not sure is doing the right thing..

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