I first came across British novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson when one of her books appeared in the mail as part of my postal reading group. I read The Honours Board last year, which has an academic setting. The story revolves around the staff and students at a boy's school in the 1970s. Unfortunately I didn't write about it (I think I only mentioned a couple of books in passing but now wish I had kept notes for myself), but I recall enjoying it very much. So now I see she has a short story in one of the collections I am reading from, The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Ghost Stories edited by Peter Haining.
Pamela Hansford Johnson began writing as a result of a challenge and her first novel was published in 1934. According to the biographical material in the introduction she had quite a good reputation for her novels set in post-WWII London. She married Sir Charles Percy Snow who was a "formidable novelist and physicist" and was one of the central figures in literary London. She wrote novels, short stories, biographies, plays and other critical works. She sounds very formidable in her own right. Her story, "Sloane Square" was written in 1947.
"It owes its inspiration to post-war London. The tale makes ingenious use of a modern locale--in this instance, the Underground--and heralded a whole new era of ghost stories. It describes a visionary experience on the subway system in which dream and reality are blended during a train journey that few of us would wish to undertake..."
"Sloane Square" has a dreamlike quality, but better to say nightmarish. A man gets on a series of trains. He's trying to get home as he's tired and ready to drop.
"When he told me this, the distress of it was still with him, though he recognizes now its many absurdities. I must emphasize that at the time it happened he was on the edge of a breakdown. He had had four years' fighting in Africa and the Far East, he had spent a solid month struggling to learn German with a view to some job that fell through at the last moment, and he had just ended a long, exhausting and utterly wretched love affair."
He had been attending a dance and was planning on staying with friends in an area of London he wasn't familiar with. When he left, he went to King's Road to catch a bus to Sloane Square. At Sloane Square he finds he gets on the wrong train, gets off, changes platforms to board a train back, but every time the doors open, they open onto strange and unreal vistas. There are three other people on the train--a clergyman beating a drum, an old woman carrying an enormous bunch of immortelles the color of dried blood, and a girl who holds her face in hands from either sadness or drunkenness. He's a soldier, and there are things weighing on his mind--a failed relationship and a failure to learn to speak German or perhaps do his duty as expected.
An unknown narrator tells us this story of Philip and his terrifying journey, which he doesn't understand. When he at last arrives at a station that seems once again real and is ready to embark on his final journey he sees a clergyman sitting in the compartment, turns around and leaves. Perhaps luckily for him he collapses, or it might really have been his last journey. Later he wonders about that third train--was it part of a dream or a trap. He could return to the station and ask whether anyone remembers him. A girl porter was there, and surely she could recall, but he knows he will never bring himself to do that.
This is not your typical ghost story, the chills come from the idea of being thrust into an unknown and strange world that is surely found in the inner workings of the mind that are not so clearly understood. Honestly, I'm not sure what any of it means, are the people and their actions symbols, or are they just those strange things that swirl about the mind from everyday life events and come to the fore when in sleep we have no control over them? In any case, I think the story's success comes from the uncertainty and the unnerving feeling of being not in control and the horror of not being able to tell the real from the unreal.
More stories read for the RIP Challenge: Miriam by Truman Capote, Sophy Mason Comes Back by E.M. Delafield.