The writer of a classic children’s book can go into any school or any home where there are children in any of the countries I have mentioned and he or she will be known and welcomed. I don’t mean middle-class homes only, which is where the good novels are read. I mean any home. None of the entrenched literary establishments of London, New York or Paris realize the power of a children’s book once children have fallen in love with it. Or if they do, they don’t want to admit it. Generation after generation of children continue to read a classic children’s book over and over again and school teachers keep it always in their classrooms.
I have wandered away from ghost stories. I apologize for this, but I have wanted for a long time to have my little say about children’s books and especially to pay tribute to the part that women writers have played in creating the classic library.
But to go back to Eddie Knopf and the great television ghost series. By now the series had been officially christened ‘Ghost Time’. My twenty-four choices were sent off to California and were read with immense enthusiasm. It looked, so thought the moguls out there, as if we had a winner on our hands. All we had to do now was to make the films. We couldn’t go wrong. The big boys figured that a series of chilling ghost stories flashed on to the television screens from coast to coast in the winter evenings when it was pitch dark outside would give the entire nation the creeps. No one would dare to go to bed and turn out the light afterwards. Old ladies living alone would be found dead from fright the next morning. Strong Texans would quiver in their high leather boots and fire their six-shooters at the screen to silence it for ever. Children watching the show would be afraid of the dark for the rest of their lives. Psychiatrists would double their business. The Church would protest. And everyone would watch our show every week. It was a heady prospect.
The first step was to make the pilot film. The pilot is important in any series. It has to be good. This is the film that is shown to the network bosses, the advertising agencies and to the advertisers themselves, and after looking at it they either turn thumbs up or thumbs down on putting up the millions that are required to make the whole series. The pilot indicates the flavour and quality of the series and gives a fair idea of what the other twenty-three episodes will be like.
So a really good strong story was essential for the pilot. Out of my twenty-four, the men in California selected The Hanging of Alfred Wadham by E. F. Benson. It was a good story, and it would dramatize nicely.
I wrote the screenplay. The film was shot at Elstree Studios with a first-rate director and top actors, though I’ve forgotten who they were. Emlyn Williams spoke a splendid introduction and a good introductory theme tune was chosen. When all was ready, our great pilot film (it was awfully good) was flown to America and then it was shown to the powerful men who make the mighty decisions.
It was a disaster. The film itself was all right. But we had made a terrible mistake. We had chosen the one story that no American television network would dare to show. It dealt, you see, with Roman Catholicism, and the whole plot of the story revolves around the fact that a priest must never, under any circumstances, reveal to others what he has learned during confession. Alfred Wadham is convicted of murder and is about to be hanged. He protests his innocence but no one believes him. Then, on the evening before the hanging is to take place, another man goes to the prison priest and confesses that it was he and not poor Alfred Wadham who committed the murder. The priest begs him to own up. He refuses. He also reminds the priest very forcibly that he cannot break the secrecy rule of the confessional. The priest, bound by his religious vows, is therefore unable to save the wrong man from being hanged. After the hanging, the ghost of Alfred Wadham does some horrid things to the wretched priest.
You can see it’s a good story. But the sight of it on the television screen would be guaranteed to inflame the hearts of millions of Catholics across the United States. The advertising men and the television bosses who saw the pilot were apoplectic. They threw it out and refused to have anything more to do with our splendid ghost series venture. I have still not quite got over the shock of that rejection and that is probably why I have not included Alfred Wadham in this collection.
So I was left, in the end, with nothing but a very complete knowledge of the ghost stories of the world. I still have all my notes, three large notebooks full of them. So now, some twenty-five years later, it seems a good idea to put the good ones together in a book.
Good ghost stories, like good children’s books,
