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capabilities. Even in the daytime I am unable to rise unaided from my chair, and by night I am a prisoner in my bed!
    What ill have I ever done to anyone, that I should be condemned to this now that my back is broken, and partial paralysis makes me a helpless cripple?

Thursday, 7th May
    Nothing happened again last night, thank God; and Julia should be here today. Even if it means upsetting Helmuth, and a certain amount of inconvenience, I am sure she will have me moved when she hears what I have to say.
    I shall try to persuade her to let me go back with her to Queensclere. She’ll oppose that because of the number of air-raids that they get down there in Kent; but, war or no war, it would be lovely to be living in the same house with her again.
    Writing that reminds me that yesterday I had meant to go into the matter of the ghost that I saw when I was a small boy, but put off doing so because I suddenly decided that I felt up to setting down on paper a description of the Thing that is haunting me here. That affair took place not very long after I first went to live with Julia, and her knowing all about it is one of the things which will enable me to talk to her of my present plight, without giving her the idea that I’ve gone nuts.
    I always think of this ghost as ‘my burglar’, because that is what I believed it to be at the time; and no doubt I should have continued to believe that up to this very day had it not been for aquite unexpected encounter several years later; but I will record that in its proper place.
    At the age of eight years and four months I lost both my father and grandfather. They were killed together in October 1929, having gone up in the prototype of a new air-liner to inspect her performance for themselves; but something went wrong with the wretched kite and she crashed.
    I never knew my mother, as she died in giving me birth. From her picture and all accounts she must have been very lovely, and she was a rising film star when my father first met her in Hollywood, but she gave up her career when she married him. She was an American of Norwegian extraction and I evidently take after her. My hair and moustache are a shade darker than the red-gold curl of hers that we found in a locket among father’s things; but I have her large grey eyes and straight features. Like her, I am tall and strongly built, and her Norwegian blood must have come through very strongly, as my friends in the R.A.F. nicknamed me ‘The Viking’.
    Anyway, my father’s death left me an orphan. Whether I have any living relatives on my mother’s side I have no idea. I have never heard of any, so she may have been an orphan too. On my father’s side, my grandmother had been dead for years and grandfather had only one sister, my Great-aunt Sarah. She never married, as her fiancé, young Llanferdrack, who owned this place, was drowned just before the happy day; and she has lived here mourning him in seclusion most of her life. But the poor old thing’s romance going wrong unhinged her mind and she is a harmless half-wit, so there was never any question of my being placed in her charge.
    Apart from Great-aunt Sarah my only living relative is my father’s younger brother, Uncle Paul; so the trustees decided that I should go to live with him. I have since gathered that there was quite a bit of argument about it, because Uncle Paul was regarded as the black sheep of the family, and neither my grandfather nor father approved of him at all; but naturally, I knew nothing of that at the time, and he offered to have me. I think the thing that really decided the trustees to accept his offer was that about a year earlier he had married and at last appeared to be settling down.
    All this seems quite irrelevant to the affair I started out to write about; but having begun this journal I find it rather soothing just to ramble on, setting down any thoughts and memories that come into my head, and, after all, it is only for my own edification,