Such ordinary things make me afraid. Sunshine. Sharp shadows on grass. White roses. Children with red hair. And the name Harry. Such an ordinary name.
The narrator here is a mother who has adopted a daughter named Christine. If you can believe that a person is truly afraid of shadows of on grass and kids with red hair—okay, maybe that last one is believable, but sharp shadow!—then you can well imagine terror awaits when the narrator discovers that the invisible imaginary friend young Christine is talking to named Harry is, or so she claims, her biological brother. The opening lines of this story set its tone for exploring fear: any intrusion into the starkly drawn outlines defining her sense of normalcy. It is essentially the same threat of horror which Kubrick deliberately pursues in The Shining and there are a few parallels between the two works. One interesting detail: the very same paragraph also comprises the story’s closing lines with one exception. Instead of a period, it ends with an exclamation point.
“Oh, now I understand! You mean Bessie’s father! But Bessie and I are only stepsisters. My poor father died years and years ago.”
“Harry” is a story all about tone and creeping dread. “The Corner Shop” is another story where the establishment of mood prevails. More precisely, it is a story about juxtaposing two opposing concepts of mood. One is light and happy and the other dark and foreboding. The chasm separating the experiential tones affecting the protagonist creates the mystery at the foundation of the story. This forces the story to become one which inexorably and inevitably leads to a final revelation which explains everything, including the divergence in mood and atmosphere. The final line situated here out of context is meaningless, but stuck snugly back into its place in the literary jigsaw puzzle that is the story, the information provided therein explains only everything.
“Damn, damn, I ought to have had the thing disconnected before we ever left London.”
British ghost stories, in particular, seem to have a peculiar fascination with the potential invested in the telephone as a means of transmission of communication between the dead and the living. This was also true of American ghost stories in the first few decades following the invention and expansion of telephone use and that makes perfect sense. This story, however, was published in 1955, long after the novelty of the device had long worn off. And yet, Mary Treadgold’s story is but one link in a long chain of phone-based tales of communication with ghosts.
The twist here is less about the ghost than the circumstances: Allan’s wife Katherine died of heart failure in London while he was with his lover—the narrator—in their little love nest up in the Scottish highlands. Katherine’s calls from their London home is made all the more terrifying to the narrator because her affair with Allan was not secret, but part of a sophisticated “arrangement.” So the drama here is not created by the appearance of the ghost, but rather the paranoia of what—or who—Allan really wants.
