Here are the winners of my “Ghosts of the War” writing competition, organised to mark the centenary of the 1918 Armistice. The cash prizes were sponsored by the Scribophile Writing Contest Prize Fund. My co-judge was the writer Ambrose Hall (whom you may wish to follow on Twitter: he has his own 1920s horror novel in the editing stages).
First Prize ($100): Coming Back Home, by Amy Ward-Smith
In the middle of these stories about ghosts of people, of histories and of ideals, this particular “ghost” represents an unfamiliar, little-heard voice. He doesn’t conform to a single line of The Last Post; his flat-voiced fortitude isn’t shell-shock from the Great War, but derives from a longer war; the Great War was his chance at life, but this aftermath is the same as death – losing family, losing the taste for his “oysters and pippies”, becoming all but invisible.
Second Prize ($75): Blackberry Days, by J.F. Murphy
This is a moment held too long: the end of a summer, a woman denying that a choice has been made, and a very sick man. Collecting blackberries and apples on a hot day with Matt, Rosie distracts herself with details, of a collar, of hair. However, other details do the talking for her, revealing that it’s over: the apples all around them are windfalls – fallen, bruised, free for the taking – and the over-ripe blackerries leave stains of unacknowleged, unconsummated sensual guilt.
Third Prize ($50): Test Day, by Jesse Bryant
It’s hard to know what the “ghost” is here: whether it’s “the inescapable darkness” or the “myths (which) protected people from the truth in the past.” After all, these boys – barely into their teens in December 1918 (the date of the story) – would live through the 1920s and 1930s and see new myths arise, as grand ideologies, and would go to war against the darkness. Perhaps, alternative histories are not killed off, but simply alternate, like the picture “Mr Razem” draws for them: “circles within circles that seemed to recede into the board; a trick of perspective. […] Just variations on a theme, endlessly repeating themselves, on and on.”
Hon. Mention: Just a Couple of… You-Know-Whats, by Tim Wagstaffe
Here are some more perverse ghosts, who start to live and change not just after death, but only because they realise they are dead, and it’s very fine to see this “couple of you-know-whats” surviving their lost, cut-off past, to enjoy the new. The new possibilities see gaslight give way to electricity, carriages stored in a barn in favour of motorcars, old women marginalised by working young women with short skirts. There’s so much of the twentieth century Zeitgeist here: even Cubism makes an appearance, an attempt to capture movement and the cinematic moving image on canvas.
Virginia Marybury 