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Classic Ghost Stories

Green Holly by Elizabeth Bowen

Classic Ghost Stories

Tony Walker

Fiction, Drama, Science Fiction

4.9686 Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Get the Book that this story comes fromhttps://amzn.to/3Uu4kGX (affiliate link)A most wonderful Christmas Ghost story. I know I tend to over-enthuse, but Green Holly by Elizabeth Bowen is, for me, one of the best ghost stories in English from the mid-20th Century.Bowen removes ghosts from their history of clanking and scaring and contrasts them with the ordinary world or ordinary importance (the war effort in 1944) and suggests that our aspirations for romance and glamour are phantasms, which nevertheless we prefer to real life.See what you think.Elizabeth Bowen (1899 to 1973-Dublin). Bowen believed in ghosts and other strange things. Her stories about England during World War I. Bowen did not just sit back and watch the war. She was an air raid warden. When bombs fell, she walked her route to make sure people were in shelters and had turned off their lights. When she was writing her stories, it wasn't at all clear who would win the war. Bowen later said that she had never felt more alive than when the blitz was going on.Download my narrations of some stories at my Bandcamp sitehttps://theclassicghoststoriespodcast.bandcamp.com/ New Patreon Request Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the showVisit us here: www.ghostpod.orgBuy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalkerIf you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcudMusic by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Green Holly by Elizabeth Bowen.

0:19.0

Green Hockey by Elizabeth Bowen.

0:24.6

Mr. Rankstock entered the room with a dragging tread.

0:27.6

Nobody looked up or took any notice.

0:31.0

With a muted groan, he dropped into an armchair,

0:33.0

out of which he shot with a sharp yelp.

0:36.8

He searched the seat of the chair and extracted something.

0:41.4

"'Your Holly, I think, Miss Bates,' he said, holding it out to her.

0:45.7

Miss Bates took a second or two to look up from her magazine.

0:46.8

"'What?' she said.

0:49.4

"'Oh, it must have fallen down from that picture.

0:52.1

Put it back, please. We haven't got very much. I regret, interposed Mr. Winterslow,

0:55.0

that we haven't had any. It makes scratchy noises against the walls. It's seasonable,

1:01.4

said Miss Bates firmly. You didn't do this to us last Christmas. Last Christmas, she said,

1:07.6

I had Christmas leave this year. there seems to be none with berries,

1:11.6

the birds have eaten them. If there were not a draft, the leaves wouldn't scratch the walls.

1:16.8

I can't control the forces of nature, can I? How should I know, said Mr. Rankstock lighting his

1:22.6

pipe? These three by now felt that like Chevalier and his old Dutch, they'd been together for 40 years, and to them it did seem a year too much.

1:33.7

Actually, their confinement dated from 1940.

1:37.2

They were experts in what the censor would not permit me to say.

1:41.2

They were accounted for by their friends in London as being somewhere off in the

1:46.2

country. Nobody knows where, doing something frightfully hush-hush. Nobody knows what. That is, they were

...

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