By Martin Pearson

Rhys Cranham, the Night-Soil Man, could not help but smile to himself as he watched a flickering light dance gracefully along the pathway towards The Squid and Teapot. Even if the church clock had not chimed the hour, he would have known that it was 3a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the time when Miss Calder, the ghostly matriarch of the Pallid Rock Orphanage, made it her business to call upon Lady Margaret D’Avening and Father Ignatius Stamage. With her head tucked underneath her arm, Lady Margaret haunts the stonework of the inn’s flushing privy, and Father Stamage haunts his hat, which usually hangs on a hook nearby. As such, the pair are considered to be The Squid’s resident ghosts. Miss Calder, on the other hand, is free to wander wherever she wants, and feels it her duty to keep the island’s other, less mobile, ghosts up to date with the current gossip. Come Hell or high water (and this is meant literally when speaking of Hopeless, Maine), The Squid and Teapot’s allotted hour for her to visit is carefully diarised for 3a.m. on a Tuesday morning.

“Being a ghost takes some getting used to,” complained Father Stamage.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” said Miss Calder. “There are a lot of advantages. Being able to walk through walls, not needing to sleep, or eat… “

“But I enjoyed eating and sleeping,” replied the priest, testily. “I also enjoyed being with people and playing games.”

“You really played games?” broke in Lady Margaret, nearly dropping her head in surprise. “Football and tennis, and suchlike?”

“When I was younger,” Stamage admitted. “But I’m thinking of things a little more sedentary, like chess and Scrabble.”

“Whatever is Scrabble?” asked Miss Calder. “It sounds to be a very disorganised sort of game.”

“Not at all. Let me show you a Scrabble board,” he said, screwing his face up in concentration.

As you may be aware, ghosts have a natural gift of telepathy, and are able to project their thoughts to other ghosts.

Instantly the two ladies were seeing a rectangular board divided into a grid pattern. Miss Calder counted fifteen rows of fifteen squares. Although most squares were grey, for reasons as yet beyond her understanding, others were shaded pink, blue and red.  

“Then we have little tiles with letters,” said the priest, “and we take turns to make words.”

“Well, this all sounds fairly simple,” said Miss Calder, reassuringly. “I am sure that we could arrange for someone to make you a set.”

“Which would be just fine, if I could only pick the tiles up,” said the priest irritably, passing his hand through the wash basin to prove his point.

“Then you need someone to do it for you, silly,” said Lady Margaret. “Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezey.”

Ignatius Stamage and Miss Calder looked at each other in dismay. Where on earth did Lady Margaret pick up these irritating sayings? 

It was just a few days later that Philomena Bucket presented Father Stamage with his Scrabble game. Following Miss Calder’s instructions, she had painted a very credible likeness of a board on to a folding card-table, and Seth Washwell, proprietor of Washwell & Sons Foundry and Sawmills, had been persuaded to make one hundred little square tiles, upon which Philomena had inscribed the letters of the alphabet, leaving two blank.

“That’s amazing,” said Father Stamage. “Why you’ve even got the letter values and distribution right; twelve As, 6 Ns, three Gs and so forth.”

“It’s written on the side of the board,” said Philomena. “You remembered it well.”

“So I should. I have played the game often enough,” he replied. “But who will be playing on my behalf?”

“Septimus said that he would place the tiles for you, if you tell him what letters to put down. I’ll play for Miss Calder, and Reggie Upton is intrigued by the whole thing, and said that he had never seen anything like it, and would like to take part.”

It is one of those interesting quirks of time that exists on Hopeless that, although Father Stamage came to the island some months before Reggie, his era was somewhat later. You may recall that Reggie – or Brigadier Reginald Fitzhugh Hawkesbury-Upton, as he was then known, was waiting to board the RMS Titanic when he found himself whisked away to Hopeless, fortunately with a well-stocked travelling trunk to keep him company. That would have been in 1912, over twenty years before Scrabble was invented.

All was going well, until the inevitable disputes arose regarding the authenticity of various words. Miss Calder had instructed Philomena to put down the letters ‘NON’. Reggie immediately challenged the word saying that it was not valid and certainly not included in the only dictionary that was immediately available. Philomena pointed out that the book was ancient and intended for use in schools, but Reggie would have none of it. Then Septimus, surprisingly, came to Miss Calder’s defence.

“It is one of Mirielle’s favourite words,” he said, ruefully. “It is definitely something that is said a lot on Hopeless, especially in our house, so it ought to be included.”

After a certain amount of harrumphing from Reggie it was decided to allow NON.  After all, he reflected, it only gave Miss Calder and Philomena a miserly three points, so where was the harm?

Reggie’s next move was to put the word IBEX in the top corner. The letter I was already in place, so the triple word score had gone. However, the X fell upon a double word score, giving him a moderately satisfying twenty points.

By now the game was almost over and, although the scores were close together, Reggie looked certain to romp home to victory.

“I think we’re just about done,” said Septimus. “Me and the Father have only got vowels left to play.”

The ghost of Father Stamage winced at Septimus’ bad grammar, then smiled, raised a finger and said,

“We are not finished yet, lad. Put these letters down…”

Following the Jesuit’s instructions, Septimus put an E between the X of IBEX and the word NON, which was immediately below.

“XENON. Very good,” conceded Reggie, with a twinkle in his eye, “but a score of twelve won’t be quite enough to beat me.”

“Hold on,” said Septimus, “there is more to come – and then we’ll be out.”

He proceeded to follow the first E with UOUAE.

“EUOUAE? What on earth is that supposed to be?” asked Reggie.

“You-wah-wee,” enunciated Father Stamage, “It is a perfectly legitimate word, old chap.” 

“Absolute balderdash!” exclaimed Reggie. “You have just made it up.”

“How dare you,” said Father Stamage, angrily. “I am – or was- a man of the cloth. I would never…”

“Then what does it mean? Go on, tell me.” Reggie’s face was becoming flushed.

Philomena and Miss Calder wisely stayed out of the altercation.

“It is a musical mnemonic used in Latin psalters,” said Father Stamage, adding triumphantly, “and I should know!”

“But.. but..” spluttered Reggie, but before he could say another word, the door burst open and Drury raced in, dragging a sheet that he had found hanging a little too low on the washing line. As the skeletal hound charged by he knocked over the table and the Scrabble pieces flew across the room.

Strangely, no one seemed too upset that Drury had ruined their game. Indeed, his intervention had diffused the situation.

“Ah well, that can’t be helped,” said Reggie, his face going back to its natural pallor. “Shall we call it a draw?”

“A draw it is,” said Father Stamage, receding into his hat, and the quiet of the hallowed corridors of his old Alma Mater, Campion Hall.

“A draw? Definitely,” said Philomena, adding, under her breath, “Good old Drury!”