OMG! And there was I thinking I was safe with Aldi's. (sobs).
This one happened in the mid 1960s, when I was in what they now call Reception.
I went to the same village primary school my mum had, thirty years before and I think I went some months or a year early. Forget why. At the time I started school, I was very unhappy as I'd rather have stayed home with mum. I loved being at home. But school was awful. Our teacher was this brutal, vile woman who took a dislike to me, even though I was only 4, and humiliated me at every turn - holding up my drawings to get the other kids to laugh at them, etc. Which made me hated by the kids - classic bad teacher "Divide and rule". I was a brainy kid and a tomboy. Anyway net result was I probably looked desperately unpopular and lonely, to my parents but in myself I was perfectly content having few friends. I thought the other girls were lame and boring. And I enjoyed playing alone, in my garden and our orchard.
This was the old farmhouse I mentioned upthread with the abusive old man ghost. Best thing about an 18thC farmhouse was the tumbledown outhouses that cam along with it, that we'd play in. An old wash house, a gig house, a small barn - but my favourite thing was the hen house. Which stood right the bottom of the orchard, an acre away from the house and out of sight behind a drystone wall and down a steep slope. I could play there alone. My mum was always scheming to invite other kids round and make kids play with me. But I loathed that. I was happy doing my own thing.
Every night, my dad would come down to the hen hut at dusk, and we'd feed them inside then shut them in for the night. We often used to sit on the roosting boxes watching the glow worms, in the dark. Sometimes, I'd go down there alone and watch the glow worms whilst I waited for dad. I had no problem with being alone - which is why my parents assumed I had an imaginary friend.
Now to the point of all this blather. I wasn't alone at the bottom of the orchard. We had barbed wire fences and Keep Out Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted signs. But people in the village often came and went in the orchard - and it was nothing to go down there and see some random stranger wandering across our land. (Never anyone I actually knew). Sometimes the person would creep you out, sometimes not. They'd leg it when they saw you, though. Or we'd leg it.
But in the hen house, one night - and I was only 4 or 5 so don't remember details - this teenage boy was there. These days you'd be calling the cops if your infant daughter said she'd been down the garden in the near dark chatting to a 15 year old. But in those days - no-one batted an eyelid. It was a large village so everyone didn't quite know everyone. And I didn't recognise him. Also - that year a little French boy was in my class with some double barrelled first name like Jean-Paul, I forget. But anyway to my 5 year old brain, "foreign". And I remember thinking the boy in the hen hut had a foreign name like Jean-Paul. It was a weird name I had never heard before. And his clothes were weird but I was so young I can't actually recall them, just remember thinking he was...unusual.
He was friendly and nice. Kind of the big brother you wish you'd had.
I saw him often and looked forward to seeing him. As I appeared friendless, my parents probably assumed it was an imaginary friend. As they humoured me when I talked about him. Odd thing was, I'd sit on the roosting boxes with him and by the time dad came down to shut up the hens, he'd never be there. I know I told my parents about him, though.
And like I say, if he wasn't imaginary, he could quite easily have been a real boy who just ducked under the barbed wire - plenty of other people did.
I have no memory of what he looked like, or much at all except for my abiding memory being the last night I ever saw him. I would have been about 5. And we were talking, as usual and he said he was never going to come along to see me ever again. I remember being absolutely heartbroken. I don't remember his reasons or if he gave any - but my only memory of the whole thing is the last time I saw him, and him preparing me to never see him again. And being very upset.
No doubt when I told dad and mum they just laughed.
Fast forward thirty years. My dad wanted to sell the house with planning permission in place for a bijou housing estate on the orchard, so he could make enough money to live off in his old age. Him and the man with the neighbouring orchard - just the other side of the wall - went in together and got planning permission. Then they both sold up.
As the construction company moved in and started digging foundations, they demolished the old drystone wall between the two orchards and presumably our by now fallen down hen hut. And right by the wall, just the neighbour;s side of it but only a few yards from my hen hut they found... two stone sarcophagi. Everything had to stop whilst the rescue archaeologists came in. My dad - who had a lifelong passion for all things Roman - was told the only people to have stone coffins at the relevant (late Roman, christian) dates were probably soldiers. As the sarcophagi were by a long forgotten Roman road that must have run by or through where the hen hut stood, yards away. Apparently, they think they were at a crossroads, common for military graves.
When the sarcophagi were lifted, work continued. It was already known a Roman road, long gone, had run the other end of the village but no-one knew where it went. Must have gone right up the hill that happened to be my back garden.
My dad told me about this on the phone and it was only later I realised that the boy who was my 'imaginary friend', just yards from where those two coffins were found - might well have been a young soldier.
Although how he spoke modern English and not Latin is anyone's guess!
I did freak my parents out with another imaginary friend, though. Every time I went to my great aunt's (weekly) I would chat to the middle aged, balding man with specs and a pipe. No-one else ever spoke to him. One day I asked my parents who the man was I always saw at Auntie Blah's. What man? There is no man. They made me describe him. Apparently he was the spitting image of Auntie Blah's late husband who died ten years before I was born. She had no photos of him up anywhere in the house, and I have never owned one of him either (all the family pics came to me).
When I told my parents I never saw him again.