There is a little hut in Newnham gardens, between the college and the Old Labs, sheltered by trees and shrubs, where one can, if so inclined, disappear. I used to sit there, on rainy days when it wasn’t too cold, to read stories; Shirley Jackson’s were my favourite. They went well with the gloomy atmosphere. It never stops raining in her short story ‘Home’, in which a young couple move into an old house in the country. The house itself isn’t haunted, but the road that leads to it might be, by a little child and an old woman, standing in the rain, demanding to go back, to go back, to go back…
First published in The Ladies Home Journal, August 1965. Collected in Just an Ordinary Day, Bantam Books 1997)
A Personal Anthology 