Osbert Sitwell - A Spooky Tale

In a recent article I talked about Osbert Sitwell and his book 'The Scarlet Tree'. For several years as a small boy Osbert spent Christmas at Blankney Hall. Little has been written about life inside the Hall and his observations of the people and interior lay-out and furnishings, at that time, are invaluable from an historical point of view. During that period he only ever saw Blankney under a blanket of snow and had no perception of the surrounding area, not even the village itself, which was only a few hundred yards from the Hall. After spending his last boyhood Christmas at Blankney, in 1905 or 1906, it was over 30 years later before he returned. On this occasion it was summer, and as he put it, 'it was the first time that he had seen the country taken, as it were,out of cold storage'. His return to Blankney was to attend the marriage of his cousin Hugo, 4th Earl of Londesborough, in 1935. This was the last time Osbert saw Blankney, except once more in a dream. He relates the story as follows.........

It occurred in the early spring of 1937, when I was living in a villa near Vevey, on the Lake of Geneva. One night I was very restless, waking up at about two, and finding myself unable to get to sleep again for hours.....Eventually, about 6.30 in the morning, I fell into a long, troubling and involved dream, yet which did not pertain to the realm of nightmare. In it, I was in the Saloon at Blankney again, and Hugo the owner of it, was talking to me very urgently. His words were simple enough, but laden with a weight of presage, and of sad and menacing feeling, and I knew that in his last sentence he was conveying to me something of importance. He said, "There will be a party here at Blankney in ten days' time. All the relations are coming. They arrive by special train in the morning, and leave by special train in the afternoon."..... Then I woke up; to find I was being called by my servant. He handed me The Times of the previous day-it always arrived in Vevey twenty-four hours after it had come out in London. I sat up, still unreasonably distressed, opened the paper-and the first headline that caught my eye as I did so was "Serious Illness of Lord Londesborough" ....... It was impossible to misapprehend so clear a portent, although in my dream seen in reverse: but I still hoped that I might be wrong, because I knew that all the members of Hugo's family had hitherto been buried at Londesborough, and this detail, so incorrect, seemed to falsify my reading of it. Howbeit, I was still so much oppressed by the feeling of the dream, that I told two friends, who were staying with me at the time, of it and of the sequel in the paper...... For a while it appeared that Hugo was better, but a week later he died, and three days after that was buried at Blankney.