Are there really ghosts at the Lit & Phil? Step inside Newcastle’s 200-year-old independent library and it won’t seem implausible. All those nooks and crannies; all those old books.
It is a popular haunt of many of its more devoted members but whatever you might be tempted to think, they’re very much of this world.
Some longer serving staff members will tell of doors mysteriously closing and books falling to the floor.
Ghost hunters love the place, finding it makes their spook sensors tingle when they stay overnight.
If a library can be haunted by stories, released only when someone pulls a book from a shelf, then this one crackles with reminders of the past. And some of the Lit & Phil’s 200,000 books go years between encounters with a human hand.
You might imagine they gather dust – but that would be to agitate the ghost of Mrs Affleck, the cleaner whose wages were recorded in the Lit & Phil accounts for more than 20 years, until shortly after the building opened in 1825, giving the Literary & Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne its first (and only) permanent home.
Paid off, for whatever reason, she then vanished into the ether, forgotten until librarian Kay Easson decided to set writers a challenge as part of the Lit & Phil’s ongoing bicentenary celebrations.
Who could bring this woman, in what was predominantly a man’s world, back to life in a monologue to be called Mrs Affleck’s Affliction?
Some 40 writers rose to the challenge, imagining into being a small and formidable gang of variously afflicted Mrs As.
Back she flew to the panel of judges, this footnote of a footnote in history, as Hester and Martha, Elizabeth and Isabella, Ginny, Eliza, Mary and others. She was grumpy, conciliatory and respectful in varying degrees. In one manifestation she spoke French.
But can it be that the winning monologue (all were judged anonymously) was the result of the ghost of Mrs Affleck choosing her own literary medium?
Anita Holbrow, who won the competition, found out about it late and wasn’t going to enter, believing she hadn’t enough time to research.
Anita’s a great believer in research but of Mrs Affleck, it seems, there is nothing beyond the Lit & Phil accounts to prove she existed at all. Inquiries by Kay Easson and her colleagues, looking in old Tyneside directories, had drawn a blank.
But then… over to Anita in rural Northumberland where she lives, she says, “in a field” near Hesleyside.
“The Friday before the deadline I had this woman land in my head, like she’d been sitting on my shoulder going, ‘You are going to do this, you know’. I truly, genuinely hadn’t thought about it until she landed.
“I had a really busy weekend ahead but I’m at my best when I have a deadline to meet. I did what research I could but then had to write in snippets of time, the longest being three hours.
“On the Sunday evening I was going to an event with a friend and I was sitting in the car, waiting. When she got in, she asked what I was doing and I said, ‘I’m just narrating this story I’ve written back to myself in a strong Geordie accent’.
“I just couldn’t get her out of my head and she wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d done it. I’ve always shied away from competitions but this time she just wouldn’t let me.
“Then I submitted my entry and that was that, although I did have this feeling I was going to win. I know you shouldn’t say things like that and this was the first thing I’d ever entered. But I was hijacked by Mrs Affleck.”
Anita is an inspiring interviewee who has led an interesting life, finishing a successful business career as deputy chief executive of a London-based company.
She was born in Wallsend and lived in Gosforth and Washington before marriage took her to rural Northumberland where she has lived ever since.
Refusing to leave the North East, she spent years commuting to and from London, getting up at 5am in order to catch a train in Newcastle a couple of hours later.
Often, she recalls, she’d be at the Monday morning board meeting ahead of people who lived up the road in Camden.
“I’m a very driven person but not driven by wealth,” she says.
“I’m driven by excitement and wonder and possibilities. I think that’s what has made me successful in that I’ve never seen anything as insurmountable. I don’t recognise barriers to what I’m doing.”
Having two children, now young men, didn’t halt her career but a cancer diagnosis inevitably brought a re-think.
“I’ve had that diagnosis since 2012 when I was presented with two scenarios. The consultant told me I might have six months but some people reach double figures. With young children, I didn’t really have an option other than to carry on and push it all away.
“Having that diagnosis makes you focus on what’s important. Every day I think there’s not a thing that isn’t wonderful, but that’s just the person I am.”
Anita says she has always written but now calls herself a writer, having done projects with Northumberland Libraries, Northumberland National Park and theatre company Théâtre Sons Frontières.
She runs a creative writing group for NHS doctors, nurses and volunteers, and says: “That’s a joyous thing because I get to give them some of the stillness and confidence that I have in me and the wonder at everything in life.
“It gives me enormous pleasure.”
There was more pleasure to come at the Lit & Phil’s 200th anniversary party when actress Jacqueline Phillips appeared as a spectral Mrs Affleck and Anita heard her words – pre-recorded by Jacqueline – broadcast to guests including Alexander Armstrong, president of the Society.
Everyone got a copy of Mrs Affleck’s poem to take away (there was always more to her, she assured us, than a woman who came in to clean and dust).
“When I won, even though I’d had a sense of knowing in advance, I was elated and so incredibly proud,” says Anita.
“I did feel a sense of imposter syndrome but I felt Mrs Affleck was happy that I’d done it. I’m firmly of the opinion that she told me her story and that’s what I wrote.
“I had a visitation and have made her voice known.”
Now Anita’s monologue can be enjoyed as a YouTube film, performed by Jacqueline Phillips, directed by Cinzia Hardy and with photography by Donna-Lisa Healy and Kit Haigh who also created the soundscape.
Mrs Affleck has been made manifest and the Lit & Phil finally has a ghost everyone can see and an unsung heroine to raise a glass to – or at least a cup of tea from the hatch.
Find out more about the Lit & Phil and its bicentenary celebrations on the Lit & Phil website.
All credit to Anita Holbrow for her wonderful story and for bringing Mrs Affleck to life in such a memorable way. Credit too, to photographer Terri H Harper, whose photograph of Ms Holbrow was used in this article.