My true ghost story Barry Humphries didn’t believe in ghosts – until one helped him out in an Adelaide cemetery
L
ast night I found a smudge of lipstick on my COVID mask. I don’t drink or suffer memory lapses and have no recollection of any intimate encounter that might have created this crimson blemish. In my previous – very popular – column in this periodical, I described a romance with Audrey Hepburn, long whiles agone, brutally cut short by a Procrustean elevator. Audrey may well have materialised in a burst of ectoplasm on New Year’s Eve, and resumed her amorous attentions. To many, this may seem a far-fetched explanation, but it is the one that I offered my wife, who respects my interest in the supernatural. I am regularly haunted and, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I find the ghosts of past loves to be the most terrible. There is an alcove in my library which I call ‘spooky corner’. Here you will find my large collection of ‘unsettling’ literature, from Poe to Phyllis Paul. All those Victorian women writers are there, many of a rare excellence, and I believe that a well-told ghost story requires all the imaginative and technical skills of a great writer. The author of a truly spooky tale needs to have an understanding of houses, for it is in these human habitations that the most frightening phantoms frolic. This may be why Edith Wharton’s ghost stories are so effective – her first book (1897) was The Decoration of Houses. If you can describe the prosaic and palpable fabric of a house and its contents, you can the more effectively haunt it.
18 The Oldie March 2022
The flat stone (detail, left) at the foot of the obelisk is Percy Grainger’s tombstone. West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide
I am at one with the witty and acerbic Marquise du Deffand. She was asked, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ She replied, ‘No, but I am afraid of them.’ Although I have never actually seen a ghost, I am convinced that, on several occasions in my life, I have been ‘guided’. One of my heroes is Percy Grainger (1882-1961). This extraordinary musician, Melbourne-born friend of Grieg and Gershwin, composer, virtuoso, inventor, flagellant and most charming of men once shook my hand when, as a schoolboy, I visited him at the small
museum of his memorabilia on the campus of Melbourne University. Although Grainger was then resident in America, he had built this eccentric and hermetic repository in the city of his birth to encourage young music students. Entry was available by application at the Conservatorium of Music, but few students, if any, sought to inspect the exhibits, which Grainger himself came to Melbourne once a decade to maintain and augment. It was on one of his rare visits that I waylaid him and was taken on a personal tour of the museum. There were the lederhosen of Henry Balfour Gardiner, a sadly neglected British composer, and a holograph manuscript by Frederick Delius. Beside a bust of Scriabin and Roger Quilter’s toothbrush, there was a collection of vintage photographs of Percy with Grieg, who regarded Percy as the greatest exponent of his famous piano concerto, of which he made a definitive recording in 1920. A curiosity of this museum was discovered only in recent years when an enthusiastic researcher disinterred a collection of envelopes containing fibrous gleanings culled by the famous composer. A distinguished Australian diplomat and arts minister has described the source of these supposedly erotic souvenirs as clippings from the ‘welcome mats’ of Grainger’s female students. Catalogued and conserved, they may be inspected by arrangement with the Conservatorium of Music. Some 20 years ago, after a performance of one of my shows in Adelaide, a journalist friend suggested that we pay a midnight visit to the vast
