“As I was being helped into my coat at school that October morning I remember so well, I asked my mother what was the matter, and why had I to go home.”
She replied, bravely through the tears, ‘Daddy has gone to be with Jesus...’
Edith Underwood
“That night… I suddenly found myself wide awake. I sat up, eyes wide and unbelieving…
“There, standing bathed in moonlight, stood my father at the bottom of the bed…”
“‘Mum… it’s Dad - he’s come back..’ ”
“My Mother, sleepy-eyed, followed the line of my staring eyes... her arms automatically reaching out towards the form…”
“The next morning my mother seemed very silent.
‘...you saw him too, didn’t you?’ ”
She nodded.
‘Yes, dear, I saw him, but we won’t talk about it.’
And she never has.”
“I tried many times to get her to tell me what she had seen
- until sadly, she was too old to remember.
But perhaps I saw my first ghost when I was only nine years of age.”
Underwood walking behind his brother and father while on holiday in Clacton in Essex.
Underwood walking behind his brother and father while on holiday in Clacton in Essex.
As a distraction from the loss of his father, Peter goes to the cinema as much as possible, and is struck by Frankenstein.
Underwood later wrote the first biography
of Boris Karloff, who first played ‘the monster’.
“The number of 1932 and 1933 films that we saw is quite astonishing...”
Underwood’s local cinema, The Broadway, Letchworth Garden City (where he was born).
