It is fitting that the second horror novel of local author, David E. Gates should be set in and around Portsmouth, and be filled with embellished and fictionalised memories of his teenage years. Some of the locations featured in The Wretched are now long-gone. Others have been developed and are unrecognisable as the places he once knew. Some you may recognise, especially if you were in Portsmouth and Southsea during the seventies and eighties. In the following extract, included here with the kind permission of the author, the narrator muses on his childhood experiences of a Stamshaw pub, The Mother Shipton. This hostelry, on the junction of Wilson Road and Twyford Avenue, is resonant with local myth:

I’d heard stories of a prophetess named Ursula Southeil, pronounced ‘sooth-tell’, that was known locally as ‘The Mother Shipton’. A hideous woman, born from a fifteen-year-old mother rumoured to have existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She was a strange woman, both in looks and in nature. Her nose was large and crooked, her back bent and her legs twisted. She allegedly became a magnet for people from far and wide who came in search of her strange powers and remarkable prophecies. Prophecies that were made folklore only by the fact her surname bore semblance to ‘sooth-teller’. Mother Shipton’s orphaned fifteen-year-old mother, Agatha, was said to have cavorted with the Devil. The Devil, it was said, tricked her into unseemly behaviour, giving her the power to shapeshift, change the weather, tell the future and the past, heal or destroy. And it was believed some, if not all, of these powers were transferred to her offspring.

There was even a pub, located near to where I grew up in Portsmouth, named after her. I’d scare my sisters with stories of how she would be coming to get them and how she would tap upon the windows as she flew from house to house seeking out rotten souls before returning to a derelict property to hide away.

Award-winning novelist and writer, David E. Gates was born in in Horsea Road, Hilsea, and grew up in Winstanley Road, Stamshaw. Since his early teenage years, David has written short stories, film reviews, poems, scripts, novellas and books. He is the author of Access Denied, The Wretched, The Roots of Evil, and Motorcycle Man the screenplay, *The Projectionist, and numerous short stories, poems and articles, including The Ghost of Clothes, First Words and Unzipped: The Mind of a Madman.

His first book, Access Denied, a true story based on events from his life, was nominated for the 2017 Readers Choice Awards and selected for Book of the Day by Indie Book Butler in November 2019. His novel, The Wretched, won Silver in the AuthorsDB 2017 Cover Contest, while his latest anthology of short-stories, poems and articles has made the semi-finals of the AuthorsDB 2019 Cover Contest. Full details of David’s awards are available here.

David's poem, ‘The Magic of Mushrooms’, was runner-up in the Grow Wild poetry competition. Other poems, such as ‘Vape Away’, ‘Terminators’. and ‘Outrunning The Rain’ have been featured in The Poetry Festival, while ‘The Ode of Phineas Gage’ is featured on the PoetrySoup website.

David has written film reviews for Starburst and Samhain magazines and interviewed the likes of Clive Barker, Terry Pratchett, and James Herbert, and his work has been featured on Express FM radio and Solent TV.

During childhood, David loved to explore the harbours, scrapyards and dockyards in and around Portsmouth – sometimes trespassing into those sites to further his own sense of adventure. Not knowing how dangerous the sites he explored could be was part of the innocence of his youth.

A prolific and versatile writer, David is currently working on UFO, a compilation of stories and reports of unexplained sightings and encounters, a full-length novel, The Climbing Frame, developing and writing the second sequel to The Roots of Evil, and putting together a third collection of short stories and poems.

If you have any comments, queries, or suggestions about any of the map entries, please contact the Map Director, Mark Frost: mark.frost@port.ac.uk