The Sandpit Twins ( VILLAGE TALES EP. 18 )

During the 1930s two children playing by a sandpit see the ghost of a man which they are able to describe accurately. 

Many years later after the children are both killed as adults fighting in the WW1

 they appear to a man dressed identically as the man described nearly a hundred years before. Coincidence?

 How can someone appear as a ghost to two children before he was even born and then be haunted by them?

To the east of our village on the edge of the Blythe estate there is a deep hollow which is an ancient sandpit. It gives its name to the lane nearby though the lane has long since ceased to reach the pit other than by a footpath. The sandpit is famous for the experience that a pair of twins had there before the first world war. The children, who were closely related to the Blythe family, were supposed to be under the supervision of a governess, but they had found the sandpit and were playing in the sand, as children do. When the governess eventually found them their sailor suits, a popular fashion at that time, were in a sorry state but worse and to her horror, they reported talking to a man who was behaving strangely. They hurried back to the house where the children described the man as being tall, bearded, dressed in green, wearing a large hat, carrying a long walking stick, and had a bag slung across his chest. Workers on the estate went searching for the man but no one was found, and no one was seen answering the children’s description. They both gave creditable accounts of the meeting but one thing couldn’t be understood was how they both said, ‘ . . . they could see the man and not’. It was interpreted as meaning the man was hiding or following them, so for several weeks the estate organised regular patrols in case the man was still in the vicinity. 

Further details began emerging. The twins insisted that he was not a threat, on the contrary he seemed confused. What they meant by ‘seeing the man and then not’ was,’he was like smoke, real at the same time not real’. A clergyman was appointed to investigate and he declared the event was typical of an angel’s visitation. A local historian suggested it was the ghost of a seventeenth century soldier, carrying not a long walking stick but a pikestaff, who had died during the civil war and his remains would be lying buried somewhere in the area. Dressed in green and wearing a large hat would be typical of a Royalist. A few wondered if the children might have been eating mushrooms, and some thought they probably just made it up to excuse their absence.What brought the event to a wider audience was a prominent artist producing a somewhat sentimental canvas depicting the twins and the ‘Sandpit Angel’, now in a private collection. 

Soon after the outbreak of the first world war both twins signed up and after their basic training they were posted to different parts of the front. However this didn’t last long as both twins died within a month, both on the same day, and some estimate at the same time, but at least eighty miles apart. Some prominent villagers proposed a memorial but Lord Blythe though thankful thought that something of use to the village would be a more fitting tribute and a perpetual reminder of their sacrifice. Some years later the Blythe family sponsored an extension to the village hall that could serve as the village museum as well as detailing the event at the sandpit and commemorating the lives of the twins. It contains various artefacts found in the locality and a display dedicated to the twins with their photographs, a copy of the artist’s painting and various other memorabilia associated with the village, its history and its activities. I recommend a visit.

There was little more I can tell you about the twins and the sandpit, that is until about a week ago.

Rachael, who I have mentioned is a genealogist and part time researcher phoned me late one evening with some disturbing news. Jack Dawson, he of the accident prone family, had been found collapsed near the sandpit. He is a keen ornithologist and several times I have seen him dressed in his camouflage walking towards the lake at Blythe Hall a favourite spot for bird watching. He had been taken to the hospital on the outskirts of Shipston and so far had not recovered consciousness. His wife, Gill, and daughter Amy, were at his bedside. Rachael and Gill have become friends since Rachael has been assisting with a book about the Dawsons, their bookselling ancestry and their many outstanding achievements, and catastrophes.

A week later Rachael paid an unexpected call one evening. She was unusually reluctant to come to the point but I could only conclude it was something to do with Jack Dawson and his ‘accident’ so I asked her how he was. She told me he had regained consciousness and there appeared to be no lasting physical problems.

‘Physical,’ I prompted, hoping to nudge her into what she really wanted to say.

‘Gill tells me,’ she began, ‘that Jack insists he saw something.’

‘Where?’ 

‘At the sandpit.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well,’ Rachael started, ‘apparently Jack was walking up to the lake, the usual route he took. He had his binoculars and was dressed ready for the rain. It’s quite a steep climb and he paused where the ground levels off at the sandpit. He turned to the side and he then he saw two small figures crouching by the base of a tree on the edge of the sandpit. He tried to make out who they were, he called out and they jumped up. They were surprised to see him and appeared to speak but Jack couldn’t make it out so he took a step closer which alarmed them and they turned away and sort of evaporated.’

I asked Racheal if she knew what Jack was wearing and she told me, 

‘His green camourflage outfit, leather bush hat, the walking pole he has to steady his binoculars which he keeps in a bag hung round his neck with his camera.

‘Is he still bearded,’I asked and Rachael replied he was.

‘Coincidence?’ I suggested to which Rachael shrugged her shoulders.

The story of the twins and the vision is well known in the area. A period of dizziness walking a steep hill, a trick of the light and you think you see what you have read in the museum.

‘Next you’ll be telling me they were wearing ‘sailor suits’.’

Racheal nodded.

I awoke in the middle of the night with a thought I couldn’t dismiss. In the morning Rachael and I met at the sandpit which appears now no more than a hollow edged with several large trees, crowded by bushes and saplings. The remnants of two large trees remain, one having torn up a section of the pit as it toppled during an autumn storm. Another, once majestic, only half still stands, the rest lies rotting beyond the pit leaving a sentinel behind, over ten feet covered in moss and bracket fungi. 

We part the undergrowth and I delve into a dark interior of the tree’s base, my gloved hand waiting for something to bite or scratch but all I feel is dry dust and rot, until a hard edge, then a corner, and something is in my grasp.

The rusting tin falls apart as I remove it from the hollow in the tree. Four lead soldiers are all that are left. Four lead soldiers whose comrades had spent their many years up at the big house waiting for their return.

‘So that proves Jack Dawson really did see the boys,’ said Racheal.

‘And saw them putting what they’d taken from the house, secretly hidden in a tin, in a hole in the tree.’

‘The question is,’ Rachael said,’ how can a man who isn’t dead, haunt two children before he was even born?’

‘The question is, Rachael my friend, what is the nature of time?’

Listen to Village Tales and other short stories from the HONKEYMOON CAFE

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Written and read by Barkley Johnson.