[Doug]

My first real contact with a Sprit was around 1964. I was asked to go and get something out of my grandmother’s bedroom. The house still exist today, a typical two up two down house in church. No 15 Canal Street.

I’d gone up stairs and was messing about at the top just outside of my Nan’s front bedroom. I was aware that someone was with me; I stopped playing and looked up towards the back bedroom to see who was there. My eyes met with those of a tall elderly man dressed as you would have expected to see someone of the era give or take 10 years he was upright in stature but leaned heavily on two walking sticks.

He was a mild mannered man who engaged me in conversation he would ask a question often raising one of his sticks and pointing it in my direction, we talk for what seemed to be a long time. I then became aware of my mother shouting me from down stares. I looked to the gentleman and said I had to go back down to my mum and Nan. He nodded and pointed his stick once more in the direction of the stare way and away I went.

When I got down stairs my mother asked me what I was doing and why was I talking to myself. I explained that I was talking to the man. My mother and Nan went very quiet and almost white. My mother got up and ran upstairs fearing that someone had broken in through the back bedroom, my Nan sat fixed to her chair waiting for my mother to come back, which she did after a minute. Little sod, she said theirs no one up there. My Nan said sit down and tell us about the man, my mother and Nan now sat smiling at me as if to say “Idiot”.

I told them what I could remember what I could of the conversation, my Nan smiled sweetly and said what was he like, how did he look. I began to describe the elderly gentleman, I was half way through my description when I notice that their smiles had gone and disbelief was now written across their faces. I finished by describing his walking sticks. My Nan said bloody hell it was William? I was then told that the gentleman was my great Grandfather, William Archibald Douglass. William had lost a leg in the Great War and had use two sticks later in life. He had died in the December of 1955. I often sat at the top of the stairs hoping he would come again, he never did.

At the end of last summer I visited this Gentleman’s and his good wife’s Grave in Burnley Road Cemetery. Theirs currently no head stone, something I hope to remedy later this year.