Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Edward Parnell 2019

Cover illustrations and chapter initial illustrations are by Richard Wells (www.richardwellsgraphics.com)

All other images are by the author, or from the author’s own collection. While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material, in some cases this has proved impossible. The publishers would be grateful for any information that would allow any omissions to be rectified in future editions of this book.

Edward Parnell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Emigrants by WG Sebald published by Harvill Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © 1996

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Source ISBN: 9780008271954

eBook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008271961

Version: 2019-10-01

Dedication

For the ghosts

Epigraph

‘And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.’

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Epigraph

6  Contents

7  ￼Prologue

8  1 LOST HEART

9 2 DARK WATERS

10 3 WALKING IN THE WOOD

11  4 THE ROARING OF THE FOREST

12  5 MEMENTO MORI

13  6 BORDERLAND

14  7 GOBLIN CITY

15  8 LONELIER THAN RUIN

16  9 WHO IS THIS WHO IS COMING?

17  10 NOT REALLY NOW NOT ANY MORE

18  11 TROUBLE OF THE ROCKS

19  12 ANCIENT SORCERIES

20  Epilogue

21  Selected List of Sources

22  Acknowledgements

23  Index

24  Also by Edward Parnell

25  About the Author

26  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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￼Prologue

Always the ghosts.

Reaching into the past concealed behind the glow-in-the-dark cardboard apparitions that decorated my childhood bedroom, the fascination was there from the start: on a family holiday to Wales, aged four, asking the tour guide in Caernarfon Castle whether we might see the place’s spectral lady; a few years later, obsessing over Borley Rectory – the ‘most haunted house in the world’ – which called out to me from my spine-creased Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World; or, at the Halloween party I begged my mother to let me have (long before such events were a commonplace British occurrence), dressing up as Dracula, my friends as the Wolfman and various grinning ghouls.

The writer M. R. James once wrote: ‘For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. “Thirty years ago,” “Not long before the war,” are very proper openings.’

And if I think back through three decades of self-obfuscation, a host of recollections give confirmation.

With me, always the ghosts.

Yet even with hindsight no disquiet comes to me from these memories; they are reassuring, I can find shelter within them. Only later were we to become a phantom family – a host of lives lived, then unlived. The disquiet comes when I realise there’s no one left to help me reconcile the real and the half-remembered.

So, I must do it myself.

I must attempt to explore that sense so many before me have felt. The shadows they too have glimpsed among the fields, hills and trees of this haunted land.

To lay to rest the ghosts of my own sequestered past.

￼Chapter 1

LOST HEART

It was, as far as I can ascertain, on Christmas Eve of the year 1994 that a young man drew up before the door of his childhood home, in the heart of Lincolnshire. He looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the fumbling of his keys and the opening of the front door. Inside, he began to study the four programmes available on his television set, pausing before a presentation that caught his eye. The time was five minutes before one o’clock, he realised. Christmas Day itself …

This, more or less, was how I first became acquainted with the work of M. R. James, my favourite – and arguably Britain’s finest – writer of ghost stories. I was home for the holidays during my third year at university and had been into town to celebrate the festivities. A little the worse for drink, I was alone in the living room, as my brother Chris – nearly six years my senior – was still out with friends. In the morning the two of us would open our presents together before spending the rest of the day at my aunt and uncle’s. In an attempt to compensate for the house’s emptiness and our parents’ absence, we’d started a tradition of labelling our gifts to each other as if from various half-remembered figures from our past: obscure family acquaintances, disliked former teachers, or people who we had given nicknames to – like Porkpie, the middle-aged man in the pork-pie hat who was a constant fixture in the pub we frequented, boring anyone who’d listen about the supermarket where he worked.

Not ready for sleep, I lay on the sofa and flicked through the TV channels. On BBC Two a grainy drama from the seventies was beginning. What I’d chanced upon was an episode of the classic ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand: Lawrence Gordon Clark’s adaptation of M. R. James’s supernatural tale ‘Lost Hearts’.

There’s a fearful symmetry to this, I’ve come to learn, because this particular film was first shown on BBC One a little before midnight on Christmas Day 1973, less than a fortnight after I was born. Had I already witnessed it before as a crying baby – perhaps my mother had happened at that very point to switch on the TV set to try and calm my tears? If she had, I doubt she would have found much respite, because the BBC version is a frightening piece of work; I was to find this out some twenty-one years later, when the ghost of a razor-nailed boy and his dark-eyed companion appeared on the screen in front of me.

Through the white gate at the back of the graveyard the ground changes abruptly, the approach from the rectory with its aged, ivy-clad trees replaced by a squat jumble of shrubs and sedge, punctuated by paths that run aimlessly to the water. The ‘lake’, as it is called, seems out of place in the west Suffolk countryside, reminding me of one of the shallow, ephemeral coastal lagoons you find in the Camargue. Lifeless trunks point upwards from its greyness like rigor-mortised fingers. The division between land and water is tenuous; there are no banks as such, just a dirty shoreline of mud over which the waves lap, adding to the feature’s temporary feel. This is not a giant puddle left behind by a flood, or some deliberately drowned world, but a spring-fed mere that has given its name to the neighbouring village.

Livermere Lake. ‘The lake where rushes grow’, from the Old English laefor-mere. I’ve known about this place for a long time too: since my brother saw a vagrant black-winged pratincole here in 1993, a rare hawk-like wading bird. I couldn’t join him to see it, which, as a keen birdwatcher, riled me for years (until I finally caught up with one myself on the Norfolk coast) and lent the location an enduring mystique in my head. Only later did I become aware of the connection between Great Livermere and M. R. James.

Montague Rhodes James – known to his close friends as Monty – was born in Goodnestone, a small Kent village midway between Canterbury and Deal where his father was then curate, in August 1862. After three years the family moved to Livermere, six miles from Bury St Edmunds, when Herbert James took up the rectorship of St Peter’s Church, whose gravestones I passed between on my way to the mere. This section is Broad Water, with the narrow tree-lined southern arm, Ampton Water, snaking off somewhere behind me, obscured by a screen of trees. The rain slants sparsely down as I scan the surface and shore: there are no rare waders today, though a typically noisy pair of black-and-white oystercatchers flies past, splitting the silence with their piping.

Across the water stands a second church, the now-ruined St Peter and St Paul of Little Livermere, derelict since the first half of the twentieth century. The tower, according to James in his 1930 work Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of their History and their Ancient Buildings, was heightened so as to be seen from Livermere Hall, itself long gone, demolished as superfluous in 1923. Its owner, Jane Anne Broke, was a relative by marriage of Herbert James, which was how he came to be offered the role of attending to the spiritual needs of the village – a serendipitous move in terms of its influence on young Monty’s future ghost stories. Stately homes and their surrounding parkland appear in a number of those tales, reflecting James’s upbringing as the son of a well-connected rector and the privileged circles in which he was to circulate during his later career as provost of both Cambridge’s King’s College and Eton’s famous public school.*

In ‘Lost Hearts’, the young protagonist Stephen Elliott stands at his open window listening to the strange noises coming from across the mere: ‘They might be the notes of owls or water-birds, yet they did not quite resemble either.’ The lake is rich with bird life, and it’s easy to picture the youthful James kept awake by their sounds – distorted by the space between mere and rectory – as he lay in his bedroom searching for sleep. Monty, however, appeared fond of his childhood home – various surviving fragments of juvenilia extol the virtues, and to an extent the eeriness, of the local landscape. In the undated poem ‘Sounds of the Wood’ he begins:

From off the mere, above the oaks, the hern

Come sailing, and the rook fly cawing home.

The scene in front of me is little changed from that the young James took pleasure in over a century ago. Sure enough, a heron is present this afternoon (‘hern’ is an archaic form of the word), roosting in the alders beside Ampton Water. A striking adult bird, its blue-grey plumage is broken up by its black-feathered shoulder and the thick stripe that extends above its eye.

I walk back towards the church of James’s father. A small deer – a muntjac, I presume – peers at me from through the sedges, sliding beneath the cover of a sallow before I can get a proper look. In the churchyard I wander among the headstones, one ghosted with the faint outline of a cherubic face, another with a lichen-covered skeleton. The commonest surname I find is Mothersole, the name James bestowed upon the witch from his story ‘The Ash Tree’. The horrifying Mrs Mothersole goes on to enact a spidery revenge on the descendants of Sir Matthew Fell, the man responsible for her hanging, delivering a chilling rebuke as she stands on the gallows awaiting her fate: ‘There will be guests at the Hall.’ ‘The Ash Tree’ is set in Suffolk, and a mere features in the grounds of the fictitious Castringham Hall; it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the now-vanished house across the park from James’s childhood home might have been the model for the story’s location.

Alongside the grave of Charles and Ann Mothersole I find the remains of a blackbird, dead a week or so and becoming one with the surrounding soil and oak leaves. Banding its leg is an identification ring from the Natural History Museum. Later, I learn the bird’s melancholy fate: ringed in Great Livermere as a fledgling the previous spring, barely moving from its place of birth.

Towards the back of the churchyard, beyond a dark rectangle of yews (which bring to mind the whispering grove from James’s story ‘The Rose Garden’), stands a spindly cross. This might be the memorial to his mother and father that James had erected. I look for the word ‘PAX’, which is meant to be inscribed on it, but can only make out the letters IHS at its apex: Jesus, saviour of mankind. The stone is crusted with pale-green moss, obscuring the writing on its base. I start to flake off the material with my fingernail in an attempt to expose further clues. There is an inscription, though it’s not easy to read – and something about the act of uncovering it feels wrong, like the sort of foolish feat an inquisitive scholar in one of James’s stories would do and later come to regret.

I decide to leave it a mystery.

Returning to where I parked my car by the front gate of the churchyard, I peer over a wall, through the rhododendrons on the other side, at a cream-coloured building. It’s James’s childhood home – a square, solid-looking place rising to three storeys, with plenty of rooms for the young James to have lost himself in on the occasions he was here and not away at Temple Grove prep school, on the outskirts of London between Mortlake and Richmond Park. This was followed by Eton, where in 1882, and already writing his own ghost stories (as well as indulging in more serious sixth-form study, including a love of the classics, ancient manuscripts and the architecture of churches), he passed his scholarship exam for King’s College, Cambridge.

I contemplate the chances of being allowed to take a closer look at the rectory, restyled as the new Livermere Hall and used as accommodation for expensive game-shooting trips, but decide that rocking up unannounced is unlikely to gain me a warm welcome and an offer of the full guided tour (I tried the same earlier, without success, at the farm neighbouring the derelict church of Little Livermere). Besides, the daylight is waning and the rain now falling more keenly. As I drive from the village, past the dark earth of countless ploughed-open fields, the final words of James’s last published story, ‘A Vignette’, resonate:

Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them?†

‘Lost Hearts’ was probably the second of James’s published ghost stories to be written (after ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’), finished at some time between summer 1892 and autumn of the following year. It appeared in print in the Pall Mall Magazine in December 1895, then in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, his first collection of supernatural tales, in 1904.

By this point, James had been made a dean (of King’s) and, from 1893, the director of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. In addition to an expert command of Latin, Greek and French, he also had a familiarity with German and Italian – and even a modicum of Hebrew and Danish. These formidable linguistic skills served him admirably: he was a noted scholar of the medieval, and of esoteric branches of study such as biblical apocrypha – the sorts of subjects the lone middle-aged protagonists of his stories specialise in. Now in his early forties – though always, perhaps, appearing a little older than his years – James was a tall, well-built man with dark hair (parted to the right) and rounded spectacles. His features were soft, apart from a strong, square jaw. He spoke quietly, often chuckling, often drawing on his curved tobacco pipe.

Photo (M. R. James) Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images

I knock and enter the opaque-paned door to the Founder’s Library of the Fitzwilliam. Inside the architecture appears largely unchanged since James’s time, when the room acted as his office. Built in 1848, it houses ten thousand fine volumes in carved oak bookcases that stretch more than twenty feet up to the white, geometrically patterned ceiling. An imposing marble-surrounded fireplace dominates the room. It’s a place of work and study where today the museum’s manuscript department is based – something James would approve of, I’m sure. A young woman at a table is leafing through an oversized illuminated book of musical scores, the only sound apart from the occasional swish of turning pages being the background hum of a dehumidifier. It is a soporific, comforting space that sends me back to another time, another world – and it’s easy on this darkening winter’s afternoon to imagine the director at his desk, squinting through his glasses in the pooled light at one of the antiquated tomes that line the vast shelves.‡

James himself appeared rather indifferent to ‘Lost Hearts’, writing to his friend James McBryde in March 1904 that ‘I don’t much care about it.’ The same was not true of Monty’s feelings for the man who was to become the illustrator of his first collection of ghost stories, his affection rising from the page as he later described McBryde in glowing terms: ‘no one who, even when he supposed himself out of spirits, brought so much enjoyment into an expedition. A smile will never be far off when his friends speak of him …’

Photo by the author, reproduction by permission of the Syndics of The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

James McBryde was a decade younger than MRJ – the three initials were how James usually signed his own name, and how he was referred to by many acquaintances – arriving at King’s College, Cambridge from Shrewsbury in 1893 to study medicine (‘Natural Sciences’ as it was then known). The dashing McBryde came to be a close companion to James, joining him on summer cycling trips, including those to Denmark and Sweden that provided the setting for the stories ‘Number 13’ and ‘Count Magnus’. After completing his medical studies in tribute to the wishes of his late father (though caring little for the subject), McBryde took up a place at the Slade School in 1903 to commence his formal artistic training – a calling for which it is clear he had a considerable talent. Early in the following year, however, he became seriously ill with appendicitis, and a second attack followed in March.

During his friend’s recuperation, James welcomed the idea that McBryde should illustrate some of his stories for the book that was to become Ghost Stories of an Antiquary – stories James had previously read out on Christmas Eve, by the light of a single candle, to the assembled King’s choristers and his fellow academics and acquaintances of the Chitchat Society. In carrying on a loose tradition popularised by Charles Dickens, the Cambridge don became the unwitting new keeper of the seasonal, supernatural flame. In folklore, ghosts had long been linked with Christmas Eve – a night, like Halloween, in which the boundary between this world and the Otherworld, the realm of the spirits, is said to be thinned. And though the festive telling of ghostly stories clearly took place before Dickens – dark winter nights lend themselves to it – the Victorian writer had brought the practice into the mainstream through A Christmas Carol and the tales he published in his own weekly magazine, Household Words.

Perhaps the most effective of these is ‘No. 1 Branch Line: The Signalman’. It too was produced specially for Christmas, as was the 1976 BBC version directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, the first of the ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ films not to have been adapted from one of James’s stories. The Signalman features a superb performance from Denholm Elliott, whose terrifying vision of his future may well be the most frightening sequence in the entire strand. The story features three supernaturally foretold railway accidents, and it seems no coincidence that it was written the year after Dickens was himself an unwilling participant in such an event.

Illustrated London News, 1865 (Wikimedia Commons)

On 9 June 1865, returning from France through Kent en route to Charing Cross, the train he was travelling in came to a low viaduct at Staplehurst that was in the process of being repaired. Several carriages plunged off the tracks, killing ten people and injuring fifty, although the structure stood only around ten feet above the muddy stream below; at the moment of derailment Dickens was reading through the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend. As the writer and his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan, were at the front of the vehicle in first class, they got off relatively lightly. However, Ternan suffered physical injuries that incapacitated her for weeks, while Dickens, who helped to comfort other passengers, was traumatised, and nervous of train travel thereafter. And, in an odd twist, his own death (resulting from a stroke) was to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the accident.

James McBryde completed only four drawings for Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. He died in early June 1904, five days after having his appendix operated on. James’s book was published at the end of that year, with his friend’s illustrations embellishing ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ and ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. In his preface James paid tribute to its illustrator: ‘Those who knew the artist will understand how much I wished to give a permanent form even to a fragment of his work.’ Despite his Victorian, repressed reluctance to display his emotions, Monty was devastated by the death of McBryde, picking rose, honeysuckle and lilac blooms from the Fellows’ Garden at King’s, and taking them with him on the train to the funeral in Lancashire.§ He cast them into his friend’s grave after the other mourners had departed.

Original illustrations by James McBryde (1874–1904) from the first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James

James’s sexuality has long been the subject of speculation – he was a lifelong bachelor, and surrounded himself with close, often younger, male friends. Those searching for Freudian clues about his personal life might point to the lack of female protagonists in his stories, or note that when women do appear they regularly take the role of the fiend, like Mrs Mothersole in ‘The Ash Tree’. The academic Darryl Jones refers to the ‘mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it’ inside which Mr Dunning in ‘Casting the Runes’ unsuspectingly places his hand, in the nook beneath his pillow, as a ‘vagina dentata – a nightmare image of the monstrous-feminine’. A similar horror could be ascribed to the mouldy well-cavity and the guardian-thing it harbours (‘more or less like leather, dampish it was’) in ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’.

Both of these examples may indeed, possibly, point to a fear of (or at least unfamiliarity with) women, and therefore may be indicative of James’s clandestine fears or desires. Undoubtedly, having spent his life in all-male academia, he was far more comfortable in the company of men. This stretched to an enjoyment of the rough wrestling-games of ‘ragging’ and ‘animal grab’ that he played at Eton and continued to engage in while at King’s – at the meetings of the TAF (‘Twice a Fortnight’) society, or at college Christmas Eve parties. James’s friend Cyril Alington, later the headmaster of Eton (while James was its provost), provides surprising evidence contradicting the image of James as a stilted academic who we might expect to shun such physical contact; he recalled another friend, St Clair Donaldson – the future bishop of Salisbury – rolling on the floor during one of these games ‘with Monty James’s long fingers grasping at his vitals’.

James’s tactile nature is reflected in his stories, in which the protagonists often experience the touch or feel of something that causes them revulsion, or, in the case of Stephen in ‘Lost Hearts’, wake to find his nightgown has been shredded in the darkness by the raking fingers of the ghost-boy Giovanni. However, it would be presumptuous to assume that these horrors result from some subconscious psychosexual terror experienced by James – they may have been chosen simply for their unpleasantness, or for their resemblance to the medieval visions of Hell garishly on display in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and also prevalent in the manuscripts of that period and the biblical apocrypha of which James was such a keen scholar.

Detail from Dulle Griet by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Wikimedia Commons)

Because it strikes me that an unexpected toothed mouth appearing beneath a pillow would be equally terrifying to any sleeper, regardless of whether they were a man or a woman, gay or straight.

Gordon Carey, a former King’s chorister and Cambridge student who was one of James’s closest later friends, told his son long after James’s death that he supposed Monty was ‘what would now be called a non-practising homosexual’.¶ However, a definitive answer to the question of the writer’s sexuality – something that is ultimately irrelevant in relation to our enjoyment of his stories – seems likely to remain unknowable.

The reticence about ‘Lost Hearts’ that MRJ voiced to James McBryde perhaps hints at the atypical nature of the tale. In some ways it’s grubbier and nastier than most of his stories – which might explain James’s apparent disdain for it.** One of its main characters is a child – and children rarely feature in his work. Before the action begins, the real devil of the piece, Mr Abney, has already lured two adolescents to his grand house, removing their still-beating hearts with a knife while they lie drugged before him, then eating the organs accompanied by a glass of fine port. He plans to confer the same grim fate upon his young orphaned cousin Stephen Elliott in a ritual attempt to attain special powers for himself: invisibility, the ability to take on other forms, and the capacity for flight.

I disagree with James’s own lukewarm opinion of ‘Lost Hearts’. The story is viscerally effective in exploring the loss of childhood innocence (and of the boundaries people will cross to achieve their aims), though I think the adaptation I happened upon on that distant Christmas Eve is in some ways the more frightening of the two versions: certainly the gypsy girl Phoebe and the Italian boy Giovanni make petrifying on-screen apparitions with their greyish-blue skin, yellowed teeth, weirdly hypnotic swaying, and those extraordinary claw-like fingers. The maniacal movement of Mr Abney – he’s usually filmed with the camera tracking him, or circling Stephen in the way a big cat circles its prey – was inspired by Robert Wiener’s fêted work of German Expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. And, in the appearance of the two ghost children, I see echoes of another silent German classic, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, in which Max Schreck’s depiction of the spindly-fingered vampire, Count Orlok, remains one of the most iconic images of the supernatural committed to celluloid.

Yet, above all in the small-screen version, it was the ghost-boy’s hurdy-gurdy music that I found most unsettling. The film had no budget for an orchestral score, with scratchy vinyl 78s from the BBC archives providing the unforgettable aural chills; the adaptation makes no attempt, however, to replicate the ‘hungry and desolate cries’ of the dreadful pair of ghosts, a savage detail in James’s original.

Ullstein bild Dtl./Contributor via Getty Images

‘Lost Hearts’ has its setting at Aswarby Hall in Lincolnshire – when James was writing still a real, extant country pile just south of Sleaford, twenty miles to the north-west of the Fenland market town of Spalding where I grew up (and where I first came across the story in the early hours of that Christmas morning). I cannot visit the hall, as it was demolished in 1951, the result of damage and neglect while under requisition during the Second World War; the parkland that is described so beautifully in the story, however, remains. The adaptation was filmed in twelve days, with Harrington Hall in the Lincolnshire Wolds taking the place of Aswarby. Another location in the far north of the county, the Pelham Mausoleum at Brocklesby Park, was used for one of its most atmospheric scenes – when Stephen visits the temple in the grounds with its haunting, painted glass ceiling of cherubs. The mausoleum, based on that of the Temples of Vesta at Rome and Tivoli, was built between 1786 and 1794 by the First Baron Yarborough as a memorial to his late 33-year-old wife Sophia.

The TV production of Lost Hearts ranged widely over my home county, moving south to shoot the unvarying agricultural vistas I was so familiar with; I would have recognised the landscape of the ominous opening scene, as Stephen’s carriage emerges from the morning haze of a long Fenland drove, passing vast fields where the ghost children wait.†† This premature appearance of the two grey-skinned horrors is one of the film’s weaknesses, for it raises too many questions about their motivation, and their foreshadowed knowledge of future events; in this way, at least, I think James’s original, where the spirits are portrayed as forces of vengeful hunger, works better. But the hurdy-gurdy music of the film, the wonderful visuals of its ghosts, coupled with Joseph O’Conor’s predatory Mr Abney – and of course the circumstances in which I first encountered it – means that the adaptation retains pre-eminence for me.

It has an added layer of poignancy, I now discover: the child actor Simon Gipps-Kent, who conveys Stephen’s likeability and wide-eyed terror with such effectiveness, died fourteen years after the film was made from a morphine overdose, aged twenty-eight.

From the dreaming spires, I head north-west through the drizzle and darkness, edging my way the last few miles along puddle-filled minor roads. Then, through an attractive village, an open gate and a gravel driveway, until the sturdy walls of one of the oldest continually inhabited houses in the country loom above me. It’s not quite the opening of Lucy M. Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, in which the main character comes to his great-grandmother’s – a place modelled on this building, Hemingford Grey Manor – in the middle of a flood of near-biblical proportions. But in terms of atmosphere it comes close, evoking the scene where Toseland reaches the house by boat – one of the most magical arrivals in children’s literature:

Illustration (‘Watery Arrival’) by Peter Boston from The Children of Green Knowe, reproduced here by kind permission of Diana Boston

They rowed round two corners in the road and then in at a big white gate. Toseland waved the lantern about and saw trees and bushes standing in the water, and presently the boat was rocked by quite a strong current and the reflection of the lantern streamed away in elastic jigsaw shapes and made gold rings round the tree trunks. At last they came to a still pool reaching to the steps of the house, and the keel of the boat grated on gravel.

Published in 1954, The Children of Green Knowe is another book I encountered through its BBC adaptation, which aired in four half-hour teatime episodes from late November 1986. As it was my second year at grammar school I was perhaps a little too old to be watching it – certainly the cooler boys in my class wouldn’t have admitted to doing so. However, I definitely wasn’t the only one, with my friend James gaining the nickname Tolly due to his perceived likeness to the central character (Tolly is the familiar form of Toseland). The name stuck for a while, and as I view the series again now the face of the young actor, Alec Christie, who played the main role, has become inseparable in my memory from that of my classmate.

The Children of Green Knowe is the first of six children’s novels set around the eponymous twelfth-century house of its title. Born in 1892, Lucy Boston did not start writing the series until she was in her sixties; by then she had been living in Hemingford Grey, twelve miles from Cambridge, since 1937, having purchased the riverside manor after the failure of her marriage. The house (and its topiary-strewn garden) features at the heart of all of the books, with the spirits of its former inhabitants offering a usually reassuring presence.‡‡

The Children of Green Knowe commences with seven-year-old Tolly travelling, like so many characters in bygone children’s fiction, alone by train. (John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, filmed two years before by the BBC – and also avidly watched by my younger self – is another.) Tolly, however, breaks one of the apparent rules of this kind of story by not being an orphan – his parents are in Burma and he’s been summoned from boarding school for Christmas by his great-grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, whom he has never met. The wise, elderly lady seems a version of what Lucy Boston herself was to become – she spent the rest of her days in the manor, where she passed away, aged ninety-seven, in 1990.

Tolly is entranced by the house and his ancient relative’s tales of the past, which seem to come alive in the manifestations of the three benign ancestral Oldknow children, Toby, Linnet and Alexander. Victims of the Great Plague of 1665, they appear to him, alongside various tamed spectral animals and birds, when the whim suits, and Tolly pieces together their lost existences from the fragments they reveal about themselves. More prosaically, the young Toseland might be reconstructing the children’s lives in his head from the stories his great-grandmother tells him and the family artefacts she shows him. In any case, The Children of Green Knowe is a magical piece of writing about imagination and what it is to be a child.

It’s also a book that captures the weather in an almost touchable way – from its opening flood to the dramatic later blizzard, both of which were drawn from Lucy Boston’s memories of the devastating winter of 1947. Harsh heavy snowfalls were followed, that March, by the worst flooding ever recorded along Britain’s east coast, affecting a hundred thousand homes and turning the Fens into an inland sea. It was a transformation which Boston describes in her recollections of Hemingford, Memory in a House:

It was like trying to shovel away the sky. The flakes were huge, purposeful and giddy, fantastic to watch when we sat inside. They descended on the garden, and through their rising and falling play one could glimpse the steady disappearance of all known features. The frozen moat was filled up level with its banks, the big yews were glittering pyramids rising from the ground; drifts changed all contours.

I’m shown around the manor by Diana Boston – the wife of Lucy’s late son Peter, who etched the Green Knowe books’ striking white-on-black scraperboard illustrations and line drawings. The atmosphere of the place hits me the instant I enter. Diana’s enthusiasm for the house and its story is palpable. She gets me to don a pair of linen gloves, so I can handle the numerous intricate, but now fragile, quilts that Lucy Boston also worked on; these home-made treasures feature at the core of the second novel in the series, The Chimneys of Green Knowe. I have to admit my ignorance at this point, as Diana has assumed my fandom extends to every detail of the stories. At the time of my visit I have read only the opening title and have somewhat vague, thirty-year-old memories of its action.

She seems a little disappointed in me.

I do, however, vividly remember Toby’s carved wooden mouse, which Diana takes down from a high shelf and places in my hands – I run my thumb over the comforting smoothness of its dark wood, surprised by its weight. It is exactly like its illustration in the book (executed more than sixty years ago by Diana’s husband), and happens to be the very artefact used in the television adaptation.

We head to the first floor’s imposing music room. Here, during the Second World War, Lucy held evening recitals for airmen from the nearby base – but because she was an eccentric outsider and fluent in German, many of the locals had suspicions that she was spying for the enemy, rather than doing her morale-boosting bit for the war effort. The men sat on cushions in the church-like alcoves as the industrial-sized trumpet of the gramophone crackled out its sound. Diana puts a record beneath its needle now, to demonstrate: the effect on the room is transformative, almost placing me among the milling throng of blue-suited young men to whom this steadfast, ancient house must have seemed such a place of sanctuary compared to the uncertainty of their own impermanent prospects.

We climb the narrow staircase that leads to the attic. The room at the top is dominated by a black-maned wooden rocking horse, conjuring for me the opening credits of the television series in which the camera circles the horse in close-up while the woodwinds, violins and harp of the main theme swirl in accompaniment.§§ This is the bedroom in which Tolly sleeps, and is a near facsimile of the one described in the text. As the two of us stand there and Diana recounts details of the furniture, something odd happens. A hardback novel with no dust jacket seems to propel itself, with considerable energy, onto the floorboards from the low, built-in bookcase on the wall behind the horse. Her little brown terrier, who has been following us on the tour, saunters across and sniffs it.

‘What was that?’ I ask.

‘These sorts of thing happen here sometimes,’ Diana says, picking up the book and replacing it.¶¶

I’m not someone who claims to have any predisposition to such things, and I have little experience of similar incidents, but the happening is not a frightening one and seems in keeping with the location. I suppose my rational explanation would be that our footfalls caused a vibration that dislodged the already unbalanced book, but even so the force of its flight was unsettling. The cynic in me wonders for a moment whether Diana has an elaborate mechanism to activate such a trick that she uses on all wide-eyed visitors – but I know this isn’t actually the case. Indeed, Lucy Boston comments in her memoir:

Meanwhile the house continued its own mysterious life and from time to time sent feelers out from its darker corners, such as slight poltergeistic displacements, footsteps up the wooden stairs, wandering lights, voices, etc., but so much immediate and dramatic human life filled the place that irrational trifles did not get much attention.

Later, in the music room, we sit as Robert Lloyd Parry, a Cambridge actor and M. R. James devotee with a more than slight resemblance to Monty, reads two of the scholar’s ghostly tales by candlelight to a now-assembled audience.*** I am transfixed by MRJ’s words (and Lloyd Parry’s performance), though a growing sense of weariness seems to have taken hold of me for some reason – the effect of all the Manor’s encroaching history, perhaps? I feel a little like Tolly midway through The Children of Green Knowe, after his great-grandmother reveals to him that the house’s three elusive young visitors are long dead:

He must have known of course that the children could not have lived so many centuries without growing old, but he had never thought about it. To him they were so real, so near, they were his own family that he needed more than anything on earth. He felt the world had come to an end.

Afterwards, I traverse the monotony of the moon-risen Fens in near silence, not wanting the radio to interrupt the drumming of the rain and the hypnotic drone of my car’s engine. As I pass a stand of willows that lines a deep dyke, a winter moth – the hardiest of our lepidoptera – flutters skywards, luminous in my headlights.

Another lost heart.

* There are, perhaps, wider sociological factors as to why grand houses and their surroundings feature so prevalently in the stories of James (and other writers) – historically, ghosts have seemed largely a concern of the two extremes of British society, with belief in them concentrated among the upper and working classes. Roger Clarke’s A Natural History of Ghosts makes a neat case for these polarities: ‘Your middle-class sceptic would say that toffs like ghosts because it is a symptom of their decadence, the plebeians because they are ill-educated.’

† Written in 1935 and printed posthumously in 1936, ‘A Vignette’ is the only one of James’s works to reference Livermere and his childhood home directly. The apparently autobiographical tale tells of a malevolent, haunting face glimpsed through an opening in the rectory’s wall.

‡ It’s tempting to think the room inspired ‘The Tractate Middoth’. But the primary setting of James’s story (published in 1911) is Cambridge University’s old library – today the library of Gonville & Caius.

§ That same month McBryde’s wife Gwendolen gave birth to a daughter, Jane, with James taking up the role of her guardian; he wrote his sole children’s book, the Narnia-esque The Five Jars for her, and remained in close contact with the pair for the rest of his life.

¶ It must be remembered that the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 had added a new layer of homophobic persecution to British society, criminalising ‘gross indecency’ between men, as Oscar Wilde would discover to his cost; it was not until 1967 that these laws were partially repealed, and only in 2004 (in England and Wales) that they were fully abolished.

** In his 1929 essay ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’ James comments: ‘Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories.’

†† Although he spent so many of his seventy-three years on the fringe of the Fens, James’s stories, with the exception of the ‘The Fenstanton Witch’ (which was unpublished in his lifetime), are not explicitly set in this flat farmland world. For an excellent example of a truly Fens-located tale, R. H. Malden’s ‘Between Sunset and Moonrise’ is difficult to top. Malden was a fellow Kingsman and an acquaintance of James; his single collection of supernatural stories, Nine Ghosts, was brought out by MRJ’s publisher Edward Arnold during the Second World War. Its dustjacket made the grand claim: ‘Dr James has found his successor.’

‡‡ Except in the fifth of the series, An Enemy at Green Knowe, which gives us the malingering trace of Dr Vogel, an ominous seventeenth-century alchemist not unlike Mr Abney from ‘Lost Hearts’.

§§ The adaptation of The Children of Green Knowe wasn’t actually shot at Hemingford Grey Manor, but at the moated Crow’s Hall, near Debenham in Suffolk. Although the production team borrowed Hemingford’s rocking horse, they ended up using a near-identical one with a blonde, not dark, mane.

¶¶ When I later examine the solid-feeling shelves, I find they contain first editions of Alan Garner’s Red Shift and The Owl Service – two more important books from my childhood in which the past parallels the present. Neither, however, was the volume that flew out into the room; its identity must remain a mystery, as in the excitement I forgot to check.

*** Lloyd Parry provides the introduction to Lucy Boston’s posthumously published collection of stories written in the 1930s, Curfew & Other Eerie Tales; the title piece is particularly effective, along with the menacing water tower of ‘Pollution’.

￼Chapter 2

DARK WATERS

Something of a dread feeling starts to rise inside me as I cross the Great Ouse, a mud-edged monument to river engineering that in 1981 became home for a few days to a disorientated immature walrus that was eventually repatriated by air to Greenland. At the roundabout a few hundred yards past the bridge, close to where King’s Lynn’s now-demolished sugar beet and Campbell’s Soup factories once formed distinctive waymarkers, I turn my car onto the A17. I’m slipping back in time, back to my childhood, though time itself has seemed to slow as the traffic is moving at a slug’s pace, the line of cars in front of me having their progress curtailed by an inevitable tractor. Elsewhere, such hold-ups at least allow drivers space to appreciate their surroundings, but here, on a soot-grey day, there’s little to savour, just endless brown fields that merge into the horizon, broken up by occasional mean stands of poplars or ugly, asbestos-roofed agricultural buildings.

It’s an artificial, man-made landscape, reclaimed in part from the sea. We learnt about it at school, about Cornelius Vermuyden and the Dutch-led drainage of the seventeenth century, and of the earlier history of this ague-ridden backwater: the watery world where in 1216 King John is said to have lost his royal treasure on an ill-fated crossing of one of the estuaries of the Wash, having a few days before in King’s Lynn contracted the dysentery that would shortly kill him; or of the Anglo-Saxon rebel Hereward the Wake who led Fenland resistance to the newly arrived Normans, but was more familiar through having lent his name to the Peterborough-based radio station my classmates and I would listen to – in particular hoping they’d read out the name of our school on a snowbound day and that it wouldn’t be opening, a rare mythic event that actually came to pass on two occasions. Mostly though, the story of the area’s past is vague in my mind, like the inconstant lie of the land in the days prior to pumping stations. Even my own connections with the region seem increasingly tenuous, liable to be leached away by one of the local rivers: the Great Ouse, the Nene, the Welland. Or the River Glen, which my grandfather – a real-life incarnation of a character from Graham Swift’s Waterland – lived alongside.

Waterland was published in 1983 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year. It is a novel about the forces inherent in human nature that tear people and families apart, how past events haunt the present. But, above all, for me it’s a book about the unnerving flat landscape of my youth. Though I must qualify this, because it would be wrong to regard the Fens as forming a solid, distinctive whole; the country of my childhood had its own boundaries based upon the places we’d visit regularly as a family, stretching a varying number of miles in each direction from our house, but outside of which the more removed outposts of flatness seemed alien and otherworldly. One such locality that we occasionally passed through was the tiny cluster of residences that formed the village of Twenty. In 1982 it acquired a new black-lettered sign that sat below its official name – ‘Twinned with the Moon’ it read; soon afterwards some local joker spray-painted the retort ‘No Atmosphere’ beneath.

In my reading of the novel, Waterland has its setting among the ‘Black Fens’ beyond Wisbech, a town which is itself reworked by Swift into Gildsey, with the real Elgood’s brewery standing in for the book’s fictional Atkinson’s. Despite being only a forty-minute drive from my home, Wisbech was an unacquainted place, less familiar to me than the geographically more distant London, which most years we would make a pilgrimage to on the train. Wisbech was merely somewhere we skirted on visits to Welney, where my mother took us to watch the winter gatherings of wild swans that sought refuge on the dark fields – terrain only slightly more hospitable than their native Iceland and Siberia.

Thomas Bewick, the eighteenth-century illustrator and author of the landmark History of British Birds, whose surname is commemorated by those squat-necked Arctic swans we would watch feeding on potatoes on the floodlit washes, also features tangentially in M. R. James’s story ‘Casting the Runes’. A victim of the story’s black-magic curse is sent in the post one of Bewick’s woodcuts that ‘shows a moonlit road and a man walking along it, followed by an awful demon creature’. If he has not concocted his own work by Bewick, James is most likely referring to the same tailpiece vignette that so disturbs the young Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë’s novel – a tiny extraneous illustration tucked into the blank space at the end of the 1804 ornithological tome’s chapter on the black-throated diver.* According to Brontë’s heroine, Bewick’s terrifying etching depicts a ‘fiend pinning down the thief’s pack’. And though there’s nothing that necessarily identifies the man as a law-breaker, the act of carting a heavy bag down a dark country lane does seem suspicious; the attached medieval-looking winged devil that’s doing its best to pry open the contents of the sack does little to assuage our suspicions that the bearer has been up to no good and is getting his hellish comeuppance.

The narrator of Waterland, Tom Crick, is a history teacher who is being encouraged to take early retirement due to budgetary restraints at his school. ‘We’re cutting back on history,’ his headmaster drily informs him, though ultimately it’s the mental breakdown of his wife that speeds the process along. A precocious boy in his class questions the point of learning about what has gone before: ‘What matters,’ Price declares, ‘is the here and now. Not the past.’ So, in order to demonstrate how history does still result in consequences for the here and now, Tom Crick begins to tell them of his own eddying past, the history of the watery landscape of the ‘fairy-tale place’ of his youth.

Waterland swirls between earlier days and the present, between the personal family dramas of the Crick and Atkinson families, and of the shifting silts of greater events such as the Napoleonic or First World Wars, whose eventual settling has a future effect on the imprecise borderlands of the far-off Fens. And, in a nod to Melville’s Moby-Dick, there is even an eight-page digression into the slippery natural history of the European eel, a species my grandfather, a keen angler, was well acquainted with.

I read the novel aged sixteen, a year or two after my brother had first turned its pages. It’s testament to the book’s power that my father, who usually distracted himself with the crime novels of Ed McBain or the thrillers of Frederick Forsyth (who he recalled meeting when they both worked in King’s Lynn at the end of the 1950s), and my grandfather – more comfortable with the westerns of Louis L’Amour – both seemed to take to it. For me, I think (and probably for them too), Waterland’s initial magic came from its setting; although its events largely occurred in a time well before I was born and in a skewed version of a place some twenty miles distant, it was still a landscape I felt I knew – and a landscape I’d never seen depicted in fiction before.

The key attraction, however, was that the Cricks were lock-keepers. Because Grandad had been one too, looking after the antiquated sluices at the confluence of the Welland and the Glen, and at the terminus of the Vernatt’s Drain. In common with the Cricks of the novel, Nan and Grandad lived in a riverside cottage that came with the job. It too was a fairy-tale dwelling of sorts, located in a place whose own name was something of a misnomer: Surfleet Reservoir (though Seas End on maps), the latter word referring to the ultimately failed eighteenth-century plan to divert river water into an artificial lake to aid the drainage of local farmland. My grandparents’ post-war brick bungalow, a veritable palace among the nearby wooden holiday chalets and ramshackle fishermen’s huts that lined the Glen, was where my mother spent her teenage years before she left to marry my father beneath the leaning steeple of the main village’s church, moving six miles upriver to the house where I grew up. ‘The Res’ (as locals still refer to it) was an odd enclave populated by weekenders who moored their boats on the seaward side of the sluice – a deep tidal channel fringed by tall reeds – from where they would head out for a spot of sea fishing, or others who preferred to spend the summer sitting outside their chalets chatting to their neighbours while their children played in the river. By all accounts the place had a distinct sense of community back then, and even today has a different feel to the rest of the uniform, arable-dominated area – bringing to mind some timeless Dutch canal-side idyll.

My grandparents departed this watery haven on Grandad’s retirement, moving to a ground-floor 1970s council flat in nearby Spalding fitted with wide doorways, a high-seated toilet, and red pull-cords that would summon the local old people’s warden in an emergency. The freedom of the lock-side home I cannot remember the inside of (I would have been two when they left it) was exchanged for more practical – but more humdrum – disabled-friendly accommodation that could better cope with Nan’s ongoing, crippling physical deterioration from rheumatoid arthritis.† As her condition worsened she developed a complete reliance on my grandfather who, in a strange role reversal for a man born in 1909, became her chief carer and cook, lugging her into her wheelchair to transport her to the bathroom and bedroom. Occasionally, the pair of them would argue with a causticity that now, I think, was borne out of Grandad’s frustrated inability to improve the situation. But, at other times, there was a tenderness in the way he gently pipetted artificial tears into her desert-dry eyes.

I follow the familiar route that hugs the river and leads away from my home town – I can still recall every curve even after all this time. This was the way I would ask my parents to come if we were returning from Peterborough of an evening, in the hope I’d spot an owl sitting on one of the fence posts strung along the bottom of Deeping High Bank. Sometimes Mum would pick me up from school and drive Grandad and me at dusk over the undulating road, while we watched through the windows for the silent-winged birds. In my formative years I claimed a kind of ownership of the place, mistakenly believing it was named ‘Deeping Our Bank’ – for the hours we spent here, it might as well have been.

On the face of it there’s not much to get excited about: the first stretch skirts a grass-covered strip to the left and wide fields of crops to the right, while a barbed-wire fence borders the roadside ditch. Today it’s empty, but over the years various birds of interest alighted here before us: a pair of stonechats, neat little passerines, usually took up winter residence; once, a russet-barred sparrowhawk gripped a bloodied linnet in his talons; and in spring, Pinocchio-billed snipe crouched on the wooden posts in full view, their cryptic brown plumage offering no camouflage against the green of the backdrop. But the highlight was the ghost-lit barn owls that fluttered ethereally in our headlights, or materialised, seemingly from nowhere, in the late afternoon sunshine.

Always you wanted owls.

Past where the road jinks to the left and twists up the bank, bringing the river into view, is a pale-bricked barn that looked out of place, like some Spanish mission picked up and transposed to the middle of this flatness. Just beyond, tucked behind the bank, is a pond. We rarely saw anything on it – except once, when Mum braved treacherous snow on one of the fabled occasions when school was closed to drive the two of us along the track. The river was frozen solid, but not the pit: a redhead female smew, a small, toothed diving duck from the continent, had found the last ice-free stretch in the vicinity.

That day sits in my memory like one of my favourite childhood books, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising – the second (and arguably best) in the five-title series of the same name. The 1973 children’s novel followed eight years after the Cornwall-set Over Sea, Under Stone and, in truth, feels very different and aimed at an older audience (Cooper had not originally planned on it being part of a series). It dispenses with the child leads from the opening book (though they feature again later), retaining only the wizard Merriman – King Arthur’s Merlin. What we do get in The Dark is Rising, however, is the arrival of eleven-year-old Will Stanton, soon to discover that he’s the last of the Old Ones, on the side of the Light and tasked with keeping the forces of Dark at bay in a Manichaean struggle. It is a book I loved when I first read it (I would have been a similar age to its central character), especially its depiction of the longed-for snowy Christmas that renders its time-shifting Thames Valley setting into a magical, albeit malevolent, wilderness. It’s a remarkable evocation of the wintry English countryside (reminiscent of the snow in The Children of Green Knowe), particularly when you learn that Cooper left England for Massachusetts in 1963 with her American husband, writing all but the first of the sequence in either New England or the couple’s house in the British Virgin Islands:

The strange white world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the outbuildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away.

The scene reminds me of an earlier remembrance – the first time I saw proper deep snow, which had fallen on our garden overnight, anaesthetising the land and deadening all sound. Dad and I placed sticks in the snow-hills that the wind had sculpted, marking each one with a makeshift wooden trig point that reminded me of the mountains I longed to climb on the holidays we took, far removed from those flatlands.

The river is choppy, its banks a dirty green – there’s not a hint of snow in the sky – but I’m surprised by the new areas of wildlife habitat that have been cut alongside the water since the last time I was here: miniature inlets and scrapes, and a fledgling reedbed that would have been perfect back then for me to scan. In this same spot we watched transfixed on a correspondingly biting afternoon as a bare-chested man bobbed beside the river’s metal-reinforced far bank, a few strokes behind a paddling cow that he was trying to coax back onto dry land. My father knew him, he was a local farmer.

At the aptly named Crowland, a parliament of rooks is feeding amid a ploughed beet crop. I slow as I pass the town’s Civil War-ruined abbey, commemorated in a gothic sonnet by the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare, whose village of Helpston is only nine miles away, and whose wife spent her dying days in my home town:

We gaze on wrecks of ornamented stones,

On tombs whose sculptures half erased appear,

On rank weeds, battening over human bones,

Till even one’s very shadow seems to fear.

I stop in the heart of the nothingness, pulling onto the head of a dirt drove that branches off at a right angle to the main route’s undulating, cracked tarmac. It’s a bleak place, the very same stretch of road where, as teenagers, my friends and I would switch off our headlights while motoring at speed, briefly plunging ourselves into blindness. We were young and rash, fortunate not to suffer the classic Fenlander’s end and find ourselves drowning in two foolish feet of lonely water at the bottom of one of the ubiquitous steep-sided dykes that line those routes. A patch of ice at the wrong moment could have created a local tragedy and transformed us into a carload of ghouls.

If we had perished that way, perhaps one of us might have been fated to a curious, brief half-life like the main character Mary Henry, a church organist, in Carnival of Souls. At the start of the dreamlike, low-budget black-and-white 1962 movie she washes up on a sand bar more than three hours after the car she was a passenger in has plunged into the Kansas River, killing her two companions. She moves from the scene of the tragedy to Utah, where she finds herself stalked by a mysterious figure – ‘the Man’, played by the film’s director Herk Harvey – and a cast of undead dancers at the abandoned Saltair bathing pavilion that looms out of the Great Salt Lake’s fluctuating dried-out flatness, a landscape not unlike the Fens. The film’s eerie discordant organ music has a similarly hypnotic effect on Mary as the hurdy-gurdy of Lost Hearts does on Stephen. And, indeed, as both soundtracks seem to have on me.

‘It was though – as though for a time I didn’t exist. No place in the world,’ Mary says, after a fugue-like episode where she cannot hear external sounds or interact with her fellow townsfolk, before the song of a bird brings her back into the now. The young drowned organist, cast in the role of an awkward outsider, has been allowed to live out a brief window of her lost youth: events not actualised that should never have come to pass. Her limbo is a fleeting foretaste of what could have been.

Like my family’s own future among these formless fields.

Fear and paranoia were staples of growing up during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Made in 1973, the year I was born, Lonely Water is a public information film I vividly remember seeing at the cinema as a boy, before whatever main feature I’d been brought to see.‡ In recent years it has acquired a deserved cult reputation for its dark, warning content. Watching it now you’d think there was little danger that any child who saw Lonely Water would set foot on a riverbank or the shoreline of a reservoir ever again. Yet I did still go fishing with only a friend for company, and we often did end up messing about near the water, which makes we wonder whether the film’s message was lost on their target audience. Perhaps the known risk added an illicit thrill we found impossible to resist?

Just a minute and a half long, the film opens with a panning shot across a black, twig-strewn pond, accompanied by Donald Pleasance’s chilling voiceover – ‘I am The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, ready to trap the show-off, the unwary, the fool’ – before the camera lingers on a hooded Grim Reaper standing in the shallows. We cut to another hooded figure, a blue-coated boy, who is playing with his friends on the muddy bank of a gravel pit. One of his companions, a lank-haired urchin, is poking a stick at a football that’s fallen into the water. We look up at them from the position of the ball, towards the down-jabbing twig and the four shouting children; the Spirit looms behind them, unbeknown, as the boy slips on the bank. Without learning the fate of the show-off (though the implication is obvious), we switch to a bucolic scene – a tranquil duck-filled millpond. This time a lone older lad is leaning forwards, supporting his weight on the bough of an overhanging tree, again to stab at some untouchable object. Donald Pleasance’s narrator informs us with great delight: ‘This branch is weak. Rotten. It’ll never take his weight.’ We hear the snap as it falls, the cloaked voyeur observing the unfolding tragedy through the nearby reeds.

The final scene jumps to a close-up of a ‘Danger No Swimming’ sign, spelled out in large red letters. ‘Only a fool would ignore this … But there’s one born every minute.’ A pile of clothes and a pair of shoes have been left among a mountain of detritus as the camera pans to the pit where a boy is struggling and shouting for help. ‘Under the water there are traps: old cars, bedsteads, weeds, hidden depths. It’s the perfect place. For an accident.’

Watching Lonely Water again, the grisly relish Donald Pleasance’s Spirit takes in his description of these lurking dangers is one of the most unnerving elements about it – this brief voiceover role might well be the most frightening of his long career. The lad, fortuitously, is rescued from the water by two sensible passing children who chide him in thick cockney accents – ‘Oi mate, that’s a stupid place to swim’ – and the Spirit is exorcised, leaving just a discarded robe on the muddy ground that is thrown into the water by his rescuers. But Pleasance is determined to have the last word, the Spirit’s voice reverberating as the camera lingers on the cape that is by now sinking beneath the brown waves:

‘I’ll be back. Back. Back …’

In works of unsettling fiction, Britain’s inland waterways are not commonly a haunted geographical feature, though we have a vengeful spirit born of water in M. R. James’s Dartmoor-set ‘Martin Close’, and a canal trip looms large in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s ‘Three Miles Up’. There is also a story that I cannot seem to shake by an unfairly neglected author of the second half of the twentieth century: A. L. Barker’s ‘Submerged’.

Audrey Lilian Barker was born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1918, and died in a nursing home in Surrey in 2002. She wrote eleven novels and numerous collections of stories (which include several supernatural tales); her novel John Brown’s Body was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970, and her debut collection of short works, Innocents, won the inaugural Somerset Maugham Award in 1947. ‘Submerged’ is part of that collection and a powerful piece. It opens with a vivid description of a rural English river and its pastoral surrounds – of the purple loosestrife, yellow ragwort and red campion that cover its banks. Yet in this mild, sun-dappled scene we are soon reminded of the menace that lurks beneath the water’s gentle eddies.

He wasn’t supposed to swim in the river anyway, there was some talk about its being dangerous because of the submerged roots of trees. Peter knew all about those, they added the essential risk which made the river perfect.

In the striking mid-century artwork of the first edition’s cover, the story’s adolescent protagonist is depicted as a stylised green figure part-way through a plunging dive. As the boy Peter engages in his lone swims he delights in exploring the tangled willow roots and branches that form his new benthic world; as readers we delight too, initially at least, as Barker paints an intoxicating picture of wild swimming that would make Roger Deakin proud. Having discovered a sort of tree-formed underwater tunnel, Peter has the realisation that he must explore its hidden folds, an epiphany made concrete by the sudden ethereal apparition beside him of a fleeting kingfisher, ‘a flicker of cobalt, bronze and scarlet’.

I too remember my first proper view of a kingfisher, a squat-tailed sprite on the railing beneath the dilapidated railway bridge at the back of my aunt’s house. It was Christmas Day 1987 and Dad and I had gone for a walk to try out my new big joint birthday and Christmas present – a telescope, so that now on trips with my brother I would have my own optics to look through at all those distant waders and wildfowl. The kingfisher perched below us for two, perhaps three, seconds before propelling itself like a tightly wound clockwork toy down the right-hand bank of the Vernatt’s Drain, the uniformly straight channel that ran all the way to my grandparents’ former home.§ Finally the bird came into focus, on a wooden jetty that protruded through the reeds, the middle of its back illuminated electric-blue through my scope despite the dullness of the day. I was elated. Even my father, who though mildly interested in wildlife was no wide-eyed naturalist, knew we’d been honoured with a glimpse of the fantastic.

After Peter witnesses his kingfisher in the story, he dives back down to his tunnel, conquering its dark secrets, before coming to rest on the water’s sunlit surface in an afternoon reverie. This heady state is ruined by the appearance of a stranger: ‘It was a woman in a red mackintosh. No longer very young, and so plump that the mackintosh sleeves stretched over her arms like the skin of scarlet saveloys.’ The woman orders the half-concealed boy out of the water, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of her presumed partner, an oafish brute who, she tells Peter, wants to murder her. ‘He won’t lay a finger on me if there’s a witness and a chance he’d swing for it …’ Peter emerges reluctantly, remaining close to the thick cover of the bank’s vegetation. The man arrives and the pair argue, but the expected violence does not come. The boy’s sacred bathing place has, none the less, been sullied by their presence, its rhythms punctured by the intrusion of this odd, aggressive couple, with their air of illicit adult sexuality.

As the woman leaves, she steps on a weak spot on the bank and falls into the water directly above the tunnel. She doesn’t surface and the man stands half-heartedly poking a stick into the depths below – like one of the lads in Lonely Water – before fleeing across a neighbouring field. Peter concludes that the woman must have swum further along the river and emerged while he was watching the man’s cursory search. Pleased the equilibrium of his exclusive waterway has been restored, Peter makes a final dive. Reaching the entrance to the cave-like feature he finds it blocked: ‘His fingers slid on something soft; his dive carried him violently against a heavy mass. The impact swung it a little away, but then, as he crumpled on the bottom, it bore down on him from above with dreadful, leisurely motion.’ Kicking hard he manages to free himself: ‘The mystery of how the woman left the river without a trace was solved. She had never left it, she was down at the bottom, out of sight.’

Peter returns home and mentions nothing about the incident to his parents or friends, even when weeks later it’s revealed that a blacksmith from a nearby village has been found in connection with the woman’s murder and is likely to hang. He realises a miscarriage of justice is about to occur but still doesn’t say anything. We are left with the chilling image of his corrupted waterway: ‘Those two had done something to the river. He couldn’t swim there any more, his skin crept at the thought of the brown water, the soft, pulpy mud. And the underwater tunnel – it belonged to the fat woman now.’

Peter abandons his former haunt, in future joining the other boys who swim in the nearby quarry. He has developed a vital childhood coping mechanism, one that most of us, at some point I think, have employed: ‘He had the weapon of youth, the power to bury deep that which was more profitably forgotten.’

Certainly, I have.

I follow the Welland the few miles to where it runs into the bird-rich basin of the Wash. Today there are well-appointed nature reserves nearby at Frampton and Freiston, complete with proper hides and even a visitor centre. However, when I was growing up ‘the Marsh’ meant the esoterically named Shep Whites – the lonesome southern stretch of shore that stretches from the mouth of the river to just north of the village of Holbeach St Matthew. (Rather mundanely, ‘Shep’ White was a local shepherd who ended up making his home beside the sea wall.) Occasionally, we used to go to the marsh at weekends when I was small, though I could never memorise the labyrinthine set of narrow single-track roads that Dad plotted a course through to get us there – they seemed to change each time we visited.

Locating a route remains as difficult but, fittingly, for the final winding stretch Lou Reed’s ‘Halloween Parade’ shuffles into play on my phone through the speakers of my radio – my brother’s cassette tape of the 1989 album New York on which the song appears was an ever-present fixture in the car we shared at the start of the 1990s. This track, with its elegiac roll-call of those lost to Aids, seems particularly poignant today, putting me in mind of earlier visits and faces I too will never see again. Finally, assisted by the sight of a particular Second World War pillbox, and finding the familiar crucial left turn, I arrive at the makeshift parking area behind the sea wall. It’s tattier than I remember, a fly-tipper’s paradise with a broken-open piano littering the scrub, its redundant loose keys strewn among the long grass.

I used to love the anticipation before you ran up the grassy bank: would the tide be in so that you’d feel yourself standing at the seaside, or would you be confronted with a green-and-brown expanse of mud and saltmarsh, the distant water barely visible at the edge of your vision? In the summer the landscape seemed kinder, its harsh edges softened by the pale blooms of cow parsley that grew rampantly along the dykes. My grandad called it ‘kek’, and one of his sluice-keeping tasks would be to burn off it and the other weeds that would clog the drainage ditches later in the season; in his eighties and early nineties, when I drove him around his old stamping ground, he would wistfully point out tinder-dry stands of dyke-side grasses he’d like to put a match to.

Peering into the distance you could see the shimmer – a sort of Fata Morgana – of ghostly half-real structures further round the coast. Like the ugly squat slab of the Pilgrim Hospital, the name honouring the group of Christian separatists who, in 1607, attempted to sail from the port of Boston to find religious freedom in the Netherlands (and later the New World), only to be betrayed by their skipper and end up imprisoned in the town’s guildhall. Or the 272 foot ‘Stump’ of Boston’s towering church, where in September 1860 an ominous-seeming cormorant alighted, its arrival presaging the simultaneous sinking a continent away in Lake Michigan of the Lady Elgin and the loss of 279 souls, including the town’s MP, Herbert Ingram (who also happened to be the founder of The Illustrated London News), and his fifteen-year-old son.¶

The unfortunate, portentous bird was shot the next morning, the badly stuffed specimen spending the following forty years on display in a local pub before being mislaid and vanishing from view.

One time, as a teenager, I came here late at night with my friend Piete – the spelling of his name reflecting the area’s Dutch history – after we’d liberated ourselves from the constraints of small-town existence by passing our driving tests. The parking area was empty, illuminated by the full moon, but we didn’t linger long after stepping from the car because the cacophony coming over the sea wall from the roosting curlews and oystercatchers seemed amplified to an unnatural degree, like the ‘strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers’ that M. R. James describes in ‘Lost Hearts’. Later, while at university, I visited with my girlfriend at dusk and we became spooked by the weird greenish tone that the sky over the Wash had taken on: the vista lends itself to such fancies. Now I think it must have been the northern lights pushed far to the south due to an unusually high level of solar activity.

Today, as on most of my impromptu visits, the water is way out. The sky is ashen, the panorama drab. A few brent geese, small dark-bellied wildfowl that winter in East Anglia and breed in western Siberia, are flying over the far mudflats; their name is thought to be derived from the Old Norse word brandgas, denoting ‘burnt’ – a reference to the species’ dusky colouring. I follow the sweep of the sea bank around to my left. On the inland side the amorphousness of the marsh gives way to an artificial angularity: vast arable fields punctuated by ragged hedges and occasional coverts, bisected by wide drainage ditches. It’s quiet, the only sound the familiar piping whistle of a lone redshank that flicks up from a creek.

As well as being a childhood Sunday afternoon ride out, this place was later to become a regular hangout for my brother and me, though by then we’d learnt to try and time our visits to coincide with the rising waters, arriving an hour or so before the waves were at their height, when the birds would be pushed up onto the small artificial spit of land that extends out from the pumping house. Once a tame common seal lolled in the water a few feet away, eyeing us curiously, while on other fortunate occasions we sat entranced as whirlwinds of waders newly arrived from their Scandinavian and Arctic breeding grounds, settled close by in the late-summer sunshine.

Surprisingly, this very spot was also chosen as a location for the somewhat underwhelming 1992 adaptation of Waterland. The nondescript brick pumping station was temporarily transformed into a Victorian two-storey, tile-roofed sluice-keeper’s cottage. Chris and I pushed Mum, now in a wheelchair like her mother before her, along this same stretch of bank soon after filming had finished in the autumn of 1991, the three of us impressed by the sham house in our midst; on the way back to the car, we paused to look at a fresh-in fieldfare – a wintering migrant thrush from northern Europe, its name literally meaning ‘the traveller over the field’ – that landed, cackling, on the barren ploughed ground across the dyke. Watching the film at the cinema the following year – though Mum was not with us to see it – it was hard to suspend disbelief at the Cricks in their illusory cottage, or when Jeremy Irons ascended in a few steps from what was obviously the inland Cambridgeshire Fens to these desolate coastal saltmarshes.

I stand on the bank contemplating my own history, studying the curve of two parallel creeks that meander towards the promise of the sea. I came here with my cousin a day after my dad died, to try to kill some of the empty, dragging time before the funeral. In the edgeland adjacent to the car park, a migrant grasshopper warbler – for once not skulking at the back of some reedbed – was balanced on top of a bramble, from where it delivered its song with gusto: a high-frequency staccato my ears would now strain to hear, the sound like a fishing line being reeled in. Across the mud shimmered the brooding, blocky mirage of the Pilgrim Hospital, which my father had entered a few weeks before and never left.

For me this is a melancholy place, haunted by the ebbs and flows of its past associations.

In the final paragraph of Waterland, as Tom Crick scans the surface of the Great Ouse for his lost brother, Swift surely alludes – ‘We row back against the current …’ – to one of the great last lines of literature, and a book, The Great Gatsby, I was to study a few months after wheeling my mother in her chair along the bank, all those memories ago: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

Out on the Wash a group of shrimp trawlers cluster together in what is left of the dying daylight.

I shall not rush to return.

Seven miles as the brent goose flies, though a winding eighteen by car, and I am between a white lighthouse and the canal-straight channel of the Nene. ‘Down here the river has a surging life of its own, compensating (for those attuned) for the flatness of the surrounding country,’ states Robert Aickman, author of forty-eight hard-to-classify ‘strange tales’ and also, perhaps somewhat incongruously, the co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association.** The building before me is Sutton Bridge’s East Lighthouse; its near-identical twin is located on the opposite bank. Built between 1829 and 1833 and designed by John Rennie, the architect of Waterloo Bridge, to delineate the river’s mouth, the East Lighthouse was an early home of the conservationist Peter Scott, son of the ill-fated Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Aged twenty-four, Scott arrived at this secluded stretch of river in 1933 to find a purpose for himself; he was to live here, on and off, for the next six years. It was the place where he honed his wildlife painting and wrote his first two books, and where he kept his original collection of wildfowl on the expansive pools that used to be found on the saltings between the lighthouse and the Wash.

Those tidal lagoons have long gone, reclaimed in the 1960s and 70s into arable fields that stretch as far as you can see. My father brought me here one Sunday afternoon to an open day being held by the local farmer, and often we would detour along the top of the Nene’s east bank on the way back from visiting my grandmother in Norfolk. Later Dad got me a summer job alongside my brother at a nearby, dusty vegetable-canning factory; we looked out over the wavering wheat towards Scott’s erstwhile home as we stacked boxes of tinned baked beans bound for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, while the shed’s sole soft-rock cassette compilation, Leather and Lace, played in a never-ending loop. That summer was among my best times, I sometimes think, even though the work was tedious and physically challenging – I was sixteen and my world was awash with possibilities, had yet to start coming apart.

Despite the transformation of Scott’s marshland, there are still a couple of ponds behind the lighthouse that hold a remnant selection of exotic waterbirds, including a pair of beautiful red-breasted geese and a sextet of sneering snow geese (a line of black that contrasts with the pink of the rest of the bill – the so-called ‘grinning patch’ – really does give the snow goose a contemptuous expression). This latter North American species gave the title to the bestselling novel by Paul Gallico, who loosely based his story of a reclusive lighthouse-dwelling painter on Scott and a wild pink-footed goose that, in 1936, took up residence among the lighthouse’s fledgling bird collection, returning again in following winters.††

Robert Aickman’s guide to boating holidays, Know Your Waterways, also namechecks Scott’s lighthouse as a notable landmark. Aickman knew Scott – who happened, in addition, to write the introduction to Aickman’s barge book – and the two men, surprisingly, remained friends after Scott’s first wife, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, left the conservationist in August 1947 for the thickly bespectacled and besotted Aickman. The couple’s relationship itself ended a little over four years later (in Howard’s memoir Aickman comes across as a rather jealous and controlling figure), though not before the couple had collaborated on a debut 1951 collection of supernatural stories, We Are for the Dark. Each of them contributed three tales, including Howard’s supremely ominous ‘Three Miles Up’, my favourite in the slim volume, which displays the enigmatic qualities we now regard as key characteristics of an ‘Aickman-esque’ story – pointing perhaps to the uncredited influence that Howard’s writing was to have on her lover as, mainly during the 1960s and 70s, he wrote the majority of his critically lauded work. ‘Three Miles Up’ seems autobiographical in its depiction of a narrowboat journey gone awry, and possibly prefigures the rivalries and eventual falling out between Aickman and Tom Rolt, as well as Howard and Aickman’s own parting soon after the publication of their joint collection. The story’s ending offers a purgatorial, nightmare-inducing vision that’s hard to beat:

The canal immediately broadened, until no longer a canal but a sheet, an infinity, of water stretched ahead; oily, silent, and still, as far as the eye could see, with no country edging it, nothing but water to the low grey sky above it.

The unspecified inland English canal setting of ‘Three Miles Up’ was relocated to the Fens in an effective, though loose BBC adaptation of Howard’s story, with the transformation of the central male characters into a pair of estranged brothers, and the addition of a supernatural whistle that could be straight out of M. R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. The drama’s final scenes were shot at the mouth of my own River Welland, the waterway that flowed along the top of my street and which I crossed each day on my walk to school. The crew had only a risky two-hour window, the director Lesley Manning tells me, filming where the river enters the Wash downstream of my grandfather’s Seas End bungalow and adjacent to the marshes of Shep Whites. Those inundated mudflats make a good match for the ‘infinity’ of water that opens out before the reader at the story’s grim conclusion.‡‡

The Nene flowing hurriedly before me now, which has dropped precipitously on the retreating deluge to reveal sludgy cliff-like banks, has its source in Northamptonshire, and runs through an artificially straightened channel past Peterborough, where it becomes tidal. The river’s outfall was completed around 1830, with 900 men and 250 horses labouring to dig out the last seven-mile stretch that replaced the meandering former route. And although in Waterland’s final act Graham Swift has Tom Crick and his father scanning the waters of the Great Ouse – located a few miles away at King’s Lynn – for a sign of his drowned brother Dick, the adaptation of Swift’s novel shot the scene here on the Nene, with Scott’s old lighthouse appearing briefly in frame. The mud of the river and the marshes around Sutton Bridge is often also cited as a possible resting place of King John’s fabled lost treasure. The story finds its way into a book partly set around these same creeks and channels that is regarded by many M. R. James devotees as one of the few great novels in his tradition: The House on the Brink.

In November 2017 I noticed an obituary in my local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, announcing the death of John Gordon – a 92-year-old Norfolk-based children’s author of whom I was unaware. Jack Gordon, as he was known to his friends and family, was born in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear, in the industrial heartland of England’s north-east, before moving in 1937 as a twelve-year-old outsider to Wisbech, with its antithetical landscape of apple orchards and its boundless fields of sugar beet and potatoes. In his memoir he recalled his Tolly-esque arrival in the Fenland town: ‘A full tide from the Wash had lifted the river’s face to within a foot or two of the roadway and we seemed to be riding through a flood.’ In many regards the place seemed magical to the young Jack, far removed from the abject poverty of post-Depression Jarrow. Later, after a stint in the navy at the end of the Second World War, he returned and became a newspaper reporter for the Isle of Ely and Wisbech Advertiser, where he furthered his knowledge of the town and its surroundings. This familiarity shows in his fiction, in which the unsettling flatness of the landscape is virtually omnipresent. ‘It’s the loneliness and absolute clarity of the line between the land and the sky where you can see for miles that always strikes me with a feeling of magic and mystery,’ he said in a 2009 interview about his last novel, Fen Runners.

The House on the Brink was his second work of fiction, following on two years after 1968’s The Giant Under the Snow, a highly regarded children’s fantasy that centres on the legend of the Green Man. Both were written in Norwich, where Jack had moved in 1962. He wrote his early novels while working on the Evening News, having made the same journalistic journey – junior reporter to sub-editor – that my brother would also go on to make.

I ordered a copy of the out-of-print The House on the Brink from Norwich Library – except for one loan in 2003, its previous excursions from the reserve stores had been in the late seventies and early eighties. This isn’t, it seems, a title in high demand, which strikes me as a real injustice, because Gordon’s second book is a wonderful novel. It does indeed contain strong M. R. James-esque elements within its chapters, drawing most notably on ‘A Warning to the Curious’. But, away from its cautions not to meddle with old secrets – and the arcane forces tasked with making sure any such foolish meddlers are punished – the novel is a world apart from James’s comfort zones. At its core stands a burgeoning first romance between its two protagonists, Dick and Helen, aged sixteen and living in Wisbech (and a nearby marshland village, modelled on Upwell), with a supporting affair between a fragile young widow – the mysterious Mrs Knowles – and her new lover Tom Miller.

M. R. James may well not have found the focus of Gordon’s novel on the emotional interaction of these characters – and the deliberate psychological ambiguity of the uncanny events – to his taste. In ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’ he pointed out what he saw as one of the cardinal errors ruining some modern examples of the genre: ‘They drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.’§§

Given that The House on the Brink was published in 1970 and aimed at teenagers there isn’t any sex involved, just a few stolen kisses. But there is a tenderness between the young lovers unlike anything we see in James’s stories. The novel reminds me more of the work of Alan Garner and, in particular, The Owl Service, which has similarly snappy dialogue and a clever, working-class teenage protagonist feeling his way towards a different life. (Indeed, on its release Garner wrote warmly of Gordon’s first book.)

I wish I’d read The House on the Brink as a teenager, as it would have appealed to my then whimsical romanticism and I would’ve identified with the brooding writer-to-be Dick as he biked around the vividly rendered, scorched summer Fens: ‘They went out over the flat land, knowing they dwindled until they were unseen, but still he saw the haze of soft hair on her arms.’ But beyond The House on the Brink’s appreciation of my native landscape and its timeless portrayal of adolescent angst, the novel would have thrilled me with its sense of dread, which threatens at times to overcome its characters. This fixes on a rotting ancient log (which at the story’s denouement reveals its true identity) unearthed from the saltmarsh: ‘The stump was almost black. It lay at an angle, only partly above the mud, and dark weed clung to it like sparse hair. Like hair.’

The teenagers and Mrs Knowles, encouraged by a local wise woman who possesses a feeling for such things (and an ability to divine water that’s shared by Dick and Helen), come to believe that this figure-like fragment of wood is the guardian of King John’s treasure, and has crawled out of the ooze of the marshes to protect its master’s hoard from Tom Miller’s over-curious pursuit. The wooden relic also seems to pre-empt the discovery in late 1998, just around the north-eastern corner of the Wash at Holme-next-the-Sea, of the so-called Seahenge, a Bronze Age circle of timber trunks uncovered beneath the transient sands by the vagaries of the tide.

Jack Gordon infuses an unhinging sense of horror into this stump, on the face of it an unlikely object of terror that seems to offer little threat. Yet the blackened wood’s menace is real, as shown in one of the book’s key scenes where Helen and Dick happen upon it along an overgrown marshland drove: ‘And then, where the hedge clutched the gate-post, half-obscuring it, a round head was leaning from the leaves looking at them.’ What is striking is how much of the action takes place during daylight hours and, given that, how effectively the reader, too, is frightened. Terror does not have to be restricted to the darkness: ‘He let the yell of his lungs hit the black head. Black. Wet. It shone in the sun. And he knew what he should have known before. It had come from the mud.’

Although Wisbech itself, where most of the novel’s action takes place, remains unfamiliar to me, some of its present landmarks are easily recognisable in The House on the Brink. They include the Institute Clock Tower and the Georgian residence of the book’s title, a thinly disguised version of Peckover House, now a National Trust property sited, appropriately enough, on a real (and not just metaphorical) road called North Brink, which runs above the dirty, tidal Nene. The young Jack used to walk for miles along its banks, his younger brother Frank later tells me. The old lighthouse that’s mentioned early on in the book as guarding the saltmarshes at the confluence of the river and the Wash must refer to Peter Scott’s former home – perhaps Jack ended up there on one of his long rambles.

It’s a location that can’t stop itself from appearing in different stories and adaptations, and which, now I think about it, has acted throughout my own life as a strangely unblinking marker that stands on the brink of my vision.

* Bewick’s ornithological masterpiece does include a lengthy description of the other ‘Wild Swan’ – the whooper swan – that we also came to see, but its eponymous smaller Siberian relative, the Bewick’s swan (Cygnus columbianus bewickii) was not described and named for the illustrator until 1830, two years after his death.

† Despite losing the toes of one foot and being bent virtually perpendicular by her condition, Nan was full of kindness and good humour. At Christmas she invariably got the role of quizmaster for family games of Trivial Pursuit, putting the questions to the rest of us with a Mrs Malaprop-esque disregard for pronunciation. ‘Who played Dr Strangle-glove?’ she asked. ‘Who wrote Don Quicks Oat?’

‡ I was born as Edward Heath was announcing the Three-Day Week. Towards the end of the decade – in 1977 or 1978, I think, during a power cut that was a precursor to the Winter of Discontent – I remember playing a Space 1999 card game by torchlight on the living-room floor with my mum and brother. Thrills didn’t only have to come from the supernatural; outer space and sci-fi also had its attractions.

§ The waterway was named after Philibert Vernatti, one of the Dutch ‘Adventurers’ behind the financing of the early seventeenth-century drainage of the Fens.

¶ Despite his outward respectability, Herbert Ingram MP had a reputation as a womaniser; there were allegations that he’d sexually assaulted the sister-in-law of his business partner. His ill-fated trip to America may in part have been a means to gain respite from his troubles back home.

** Aickman’s fellow founder Tom Rolt was another writer of the supernatural. L. T. C. Rolt is noted for his solitary collection Sleep No More (1948), a number of whose excellent stories use an industrial British setting of railways, mines and canals.

†† In another coincidence the Hawaiian goose, a species that Scott’s Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust was instrumental in preventing from becoming extinct, shares its Hawaiian name – the Nene – with the river where Scott spent those formative years.

‡‡ Parts of the 1995 television version of Three Miles Up also happened to be filmed on the Great Ouse at Hemingford Grey.

§§ James was in his late sixties when he wrote this. Taking into account the properness of his personality and the mores of the time, I think there’s every chance he intended the word ‘sex’ in this context to have a wider meaning encompassing romance and relationships, rather than referring to the physical act.

￼Chapter 3

WALKING IN THE WOOD

Growing up surrounded by the sterile farmland of the Fens I was starved of trees, a feeling that made me appreciate their pathless pleasures all the more whenever the chance came.

The woods enthralled me.

Our nearest woodland of note required a half-hour drive to the edge of the neighbouring town of Bourne, where the hills begin to rise from the flatness – to get there on one of our infrequent sylvan family outings we had to pass through Twenty, the village with the idiosyncratic sign. The woods I became most familiar with, however, were not on the far side of that Moon-twinned place, though they seemed a world away. In the opposite direction, across the River Nene and its nearby Norfolk border – the same stretch of monotonous mud and water where the moribund King John may have lost his treasure some seven hundred years before – were the meadows and woods that encircled my grandmother’s house. Those fields and trees, which seemed so full of stories, shadows and secrets, scorched themselves into my memory and into the pages of my first novel.

I loved to explore the woods in the company of Uncle Gordon and Great-Uncle Billy. The countryside was dense and wild, and formed part of a large estate. Both uncles worked on the local farm and lived with Nan in a tied cottage. There were crystalline streams forded by narrow planks we would cross on our hikes over the rippled landscape, watercress beds we would wade through in our wellies (‘waterboots’ to Uncle Billy), and numerous birds and other signs of wildlife all around. Bill, a kindly giant of a man who had barely left Norfolk apart from brief twice-yearly visits to us in neighbouring Lincolnshire, would impart rural lore and show me how to find the best branches to carve into walking sticks, or how to make a bow and shoot elder-tipped arrows.

Photo c. 1900 by William Henry Jackson (1843–1942) (Wikimedia Commons)

Sometimes all of us would go on a ramble together after dinner, Mum and Nan taking delight in picking the pale-yellow primroses that emerged through the damp leaf-litter of early spring while Dad and Uncle Gordon reminisced about sport or bickered about politics. I spent several summer holidays there too, loving the freedom of being able to explore the woods every day on my own. One time Billy pointed out the enticing, but potentially fatal, deadly nightshade berries that swathed the crumbling flintwork of an old barn. Much later, when I read L. P. Hartley’s most famous novel, 1953’s The Go-Between – set at Brandham Hall, a fictionalised version of West Bradenham Hall, a few miles across the fields from Nan’s house – I was reminded of that plant, which is imbued with layers of symbolism in the book: ‘It looked the picture of evil and also the picture of health, it was so glossy and strong and juicy-looking.’*

Leslie Poles Hartley was born at the end of 1895 in the Fens at Whittlesey, not far from our home. One of his earliest pieces of writing was a schoolboy essay about nearby Crowland Abbey, the partial ruin for which John Clare had composed his sonnet; the Abbey reappears as a key location in Hartley’s 1964 novel The Brickfield, in which its central character Richard declares: ‘we were Fenlanders, as accustomed to the horizontal view as clothes-moths on a billiard table’. As fellow flatlanders, Hartley and I were bewitched by the otherness of the wooded Norfolk countryside after being raised among the empty expanse of all those breeze-stripped washes and ruler-straight droves; the same River Nene of John Gordon’s The House by the Brink and Peter Scott’s lighthouse flowed less than half a mile from the gothic Fletton Tower where the young Leslie grew up, and which Hartley’s solicitor father had overstretched himself to buy in 1900.

Aged twelve, Hartley was packed off to prep school in Kent in the autumn of 1908, but was invited to Bradenham in the following August by a rather grander classmate, Moxey (his surname an approximation of The Go-Between’s Maudsley). The hall – the ancestral home of Henry Rider Haggard – had been rented by the Moxeys, and it was at Bradenham where Hartley found the inspiration for his book’s class-warfare cricket match, its grand dances, its late dinners, and one of the most memorable opening lines in literature: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

The novel’s thermostat-breaking weather, however, did not occur in the course of Hartley’s stay at Bradenham, but was based on his earlier recollections of the burning first Fenland summer of the nascent century. I originally read The Go-Between in a similar heatwave, when I was travelling across the Australian outback on a Greyhound bus – the landscape of the familiar never seems so appealing as when you are adrift in an utterly foreign one. I was captivated by the book, which was set in the Edwardian era – though Edwardian isn’t quite accurate as its action mostly takes place during August 1900, five months before Queen Victoria’s death and the end of what Hartley himself would come to see as a lost ‘Golden Age’.

The Go-Between isn’t a disquieting novel in an M. R. James sense – although the childish spells and curses that Leo casts unwittingly possess more efficacy than the conjurings of Mr Abney in ‘Lost Hearts’ – but L. P. Hartley did also happen to be a solid teller of macabre tales. A number of these were assembled in The Killing Bottle (1931) and The Travelling Grave (1948); the latter collection was brought into print by the American publishers Arkham House, set up a decade before by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to preserve the ‘weird fiction’ of the early twentieth-century New England writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft.† Lovecraft himself praised Hartley’s ‘A Visitor from Down Under’ as an ‘incisive and extremely ghastly tale’ – its title is a play on words, as the visitor in question happens to be the revenant of an Australian who is coming to enact icy revenge on his murderer (newly arrived in the comfort of a London hotel), and to ‘fetch him away’.

The Go-Between is a different kind of work, far subtler and more refined. And yet, I find its pervasive atmosphere of regret (an emotion the repressed Hartley had strong personal experience of) and its dissection of the difficulties of trying to make sense of what has gone before more unsettling than his ghost stories. Re-reading The Go-Between it resonates even more strongly with me now than on my first encounter, as I, like the aged Leo Colston, attempt to exhume my past.

Unlike Leo – and possibly Hartley himself, who later hinted that he had experienced a similarly character-forming event during his stay at Bradenham – I did not see something nasty in the woodshed during those Norfolk summers. Hartley’s book, with its naïve narrator – the embodiment of ‘greenness’ in his newly gifted Lincoln Green suit – who is privy to an adult world beyond his comprehension, certainly fed into my novel The Listeners. However, the most outwardly apparent influence was Walter de la Mare’s enigmatic thirty-six-line poem which gave me the title, as well as a template for my novel’s mood, and its key location: a tumbledown cottage among the trees being subsumed by the unrelenting forces of nature. There was no such ‘ghost house’ in the woods around my grandmother’s house – at least not one I ever came across – something I should probably be grateful for. Spooky cottages in the heart of the forest are not safe retreats for youthful visitors in ghost stories and fairy tales.

Take, for instance, another notable ethereal woodland dwelling, one that exists in the hugely atmospheric ‘Brickett Bottom’ by Amyas Northcote, son of the noted politician Sir Stafford Northcote.‡ The young Northcote attended Eton at the same time as M. R. James (though there appears to be no evidence of any connection between them while fellow pupils), before going up to Oxford and then – following the death of his father – on to a business career in Chicago. It was in the States that his talent for writing was first publicly displayed in various pieces of journalistic political commentary. He returned to England around the turn of the new century, though little is known about his subsequent activities, except that he acted as a justice of the peace in Buckinghamshire. In 1921, out of nowhere, Northcote’s sole book, In Ghostly Company, was published. Its contents are, on the whole, subtly mysterious tales that can seem slight, but possess a lingering ability to haunt the reader. Like ‘In the Woods’, in which a seventeen-year-old girl becomes beguiled by the wildness, beauty and otherness of her surroundings – ‘The woods enthralled her’ is a repeated refrain – it is a story bathed in a dreamlike atmosphere that’s reminiscent of Blackwood’s ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ or Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’.

However, it is ‘Brickett Bottom’ that is, rightly, the most well-known of Northcote’s stories. Its setting is ‘a small and very remote village in one of our most lovely and rural counties’, and I can easily picture its events unfolding in the birdsong-filled thickets around my grandmother’s house. Separated from her more sensible sister – I can’t help wondering if the innocuous ankle injury that sidelines Maggie’s level-headed influence stems from some unnatural agency – Alice becomes bewitched by the red-brick building and the polite, yet slightly odd, elderly couple she encounters tending its neat garden in the gully beneath the Downs. And then Alice is gone from that place in the woods – a kind of ominous Brigadoon that only manifests itself every so many years to lone young women traversing the little-used track through the tree-shaded glen. She has been spirited away.

‘Brickett Bottom’ has familiar fairy-tale overtones of children led astray by malefic faeries or witches in the woods, or, more recently, balloon-carrying clowns; I’m almost surprised we weren’t read it at school alongside the disturbing never-go-with-strangers public information films we were shown. Its execution is chilling and bleak, despite being stripped of gruesome descriptions or over-elaborate explication – a characteristic of Northcote’s pared-down style. The detail that stays with me is the anguishing sound of Alice’s voice, which addresses her sibling and pastor father (his religious conviction seems of little use against these forces) as they realise that no brick house has stood in the wooded gully for decades, and that their sister and daughter will never be coming home:

Before Maggie could answer a voice was heard calling ‘Father! Maggie!’ The sound of the voice was thin and high and, paradoxically, it sounded both very near and yet as if it came from some infinite distance. The cry was thrice repeated and then silence fell.§

Amyas Northcote produced just a single collection of eerie stories – thirteen in all – in contrast to the fertile output of the man who imagined that other lone phantom-filled house in the woods. Today, Walter de la Mare is sometimes regarded, rather unfairly, as a writer who was old-fashioned even at the height of his interwar popularity. He was a contemporary of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot – both admirers of his poetry – but his work, unlike theirs, eschews the obvious trappings of modernism, instead focusing on atmosphere and the inexplicableness of life. In this sense, his poems and stories have a timeless quality, redolent with existential unease (which, it could be said, aligns them with the tenets of the new movement) – a quality also present in the best of Northcote’s handful of tales.

Photo (Walter de la Mare) Hulton Deutsch/Contributor via Getty Images

We must have read ‘The Listeners’ (the title poem of de la Mare’s second collection, published in 1912) at school, because I was already aware of it when it came a surprise third in the BBC’s 1995 Nation’s Favourite Poems survey – beaten by Kipling’s ‘If—’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’. Later I was to learn it was a favourite of my great-aunt, who had grown up alongside my grandmother in the same cottage before emigrating to Australia as a ten-pound Pom in the early 1950s; the poem perhaps reminded her of the sleepy village’s ‘starred and leafy sky’, ‘of the forest’s ferny floor’, as she tried to reconcile Norfolk’s ever-distant memory from the opposite side of the world, and as she contended with the oppressive heat of Adelaide’s dry-hot summers, which most years left Leo’s thermometer-busting August of 1900 in the shade.

I think a lot about the separation of the two sisters: I never met my great-aunt, but I have come to be close to her sons – my dad’s younger cousins – on the opposite side of the globe, and their children, who are around my own age. From them I’ve learned that my great-aunt missed her native Norfolk and her sister (my grandmother) immensely – despite the possibilities her new life afforded her. The pair wrote to each other with metronomic regularity: I remember staying at Nan’s during the summer when the postman delivered the latest weekly missive from South Australia, sending her into a kind of reverie. Yet, even after a telephone finally arrived in Nan’s cottage at some point in the 1980s, the two sisters still never spoke, let alone considered the possibility of meeting up in the flesh and of my great-aunt returning as a visitor from down under.¶ If they had seen each other, or heard each other’s voices, I think the pain of that infinite distance would have been brought home and become a heart-breaking, unsolvable conundrum; certainly, it breaks mine now to think of it, bringing to mind Maggie and Alice’s forced displacement in ‘Brickett Bottom’.

In any case, my grandmother always had a sadness about her. Not only did she miss her sister terribly, her husband – my mysterious grandfather, an officer in the air force – abandoned her before the war’s end for another woman, leaving her to bring up three sons. She got on with things, supported by her mother and her younger brother, but her opportunities were limited and her circumstances – and perhaps her own pride – closed her off from experiences and happiness that, in a later generation, she could have had. Yet I am making these assumptions through the filter of so much dead time, more than seventy-five years after whatever took place between her and my grandfather – so what, really, do I know? The unfortunate Seaton, the protagonist of one of de la Mare’s finest and most-anthologised supernatural stories. ‘Seaton’s Aunt’, expresses this perfectly: ‘Why, after all, how much do we really understand of anything? We don’t even know our own histories, and not a tenth, not a tenth of the reasons.’

Walter de la Mare was born with the rather more prosaic surname Delamare in 1873, adding the Gallic twist when he started to pursue his poetry in earnest. His father, who worked at the Bank of England, died when Walter was four years old; one of six children raised by his mother, Walter could not afford a university education, so he took employment as a bookkeeper, aged seventeen, at the Anglo American Oil Company in London. He was to work there for the next eighteen years, marrying Elfie Ingpen – a name that could be straight out of one of his poems for the young – and raising four children of his own, before a life of office drudgery was cut short with, in 1908, a welcome award from the government of the sum of £200 (equivalent to around £23,000 today). By this point he had already brought out the poetry collection Songs of Childhood and the gothic novel Henry Brocken, both under the pseudonym Walter Ramal; the former was well received, but his first work of fiction sold only 250 copies. After his Civil List award, however (and the granting of an annual pension of £100 a year from 1915), he devoted himself full time to writing.

De la Mare died in 1956 and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. He was a prolific poet with almost fifty collections published during his lifetime – his posthumous Complete Poems stretches to nearly a thousand pages. His verses have a tendency towards the dreamlike and the gothic, full of powerful pastoral allusions to the natural world. But, as in his most famous work, ‘The Listeners’, the supernatural is never very far away, and it is this atmosphere of disquiet – of moonlit phantoms and mysterious promises – that has given the poem its popularity and longevity.

Never confining himself to poetry, de la Mare went on to write two further novels including The Return, which deals with supernatural possession, as well as critical works about Lewis Carroll and the dashing nearly-poet of the Great War, Rupert Brooke. De la Mare and Brooke had met in 1912 when they both contributed to an important anthology of ‘Georgian’ poetry (the grouping’s name referred to King George V, who came to the throne after Edward VII, in 1910). Following Brooke’s death on the Aegean island of Skyros – fittingly, perhaps, on St George’s Day 1915 – de la Mare was surprised to find himself named as a beneficiary in the younger man’s will, sharing future royalties with two other Georgians, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie.**

Walter de la Mare wrote a large body of short fiction, both for children and adults, among which are a sizeable number of exquisitely crafted and highly atmospheric stories of the uncanny. Interestingly, M. R. James was an acquaintance and fan of de la Mare, whose tales certainly do not suffer from the ‘blatancy’ of which the elder man disapproved. They are largely subtle works, their horrors elusive – illusive even: often, the reader is unsure if there are any actual horrors. In, for instance, ‘Missing’ – a tale of 1920s London (published in 1926) that captures the oppressiveness of the ensuing heatwave as vividly as L. P. Hartley does the scorched summer of The Go-Between – we are left little the wiser as to what the mysterious Bleet, up for the day from the country to escape the boiling temperatures, is bleating on about to the unwittingly accosted first-person narrator. There might have been a murder – there has, at least, been an inquiry into the disappearance of Miss Dutton, a lodger at the house of Bleet and his sister – but beyond that little is clear; De la Mare, it could be said, deliberately makes sure that much is ‘missing’. There are no obvious manifestations of the supernatural, but the story’s atmosphere is disconcerting, with the odious Bleet talking at the narrator as if he might as well not be there.

In ‘Crewe’, another stranger accosts a presumably different narrator – on this occasion in the first-class waiting room at Crewe railway station. Here, the interloper, an old man in an oversized coat – a country-house servant going by the name of Blake – proceeds to deliver a narrative full of gossip, rumour and betrayal, which sets off a chain of events involving a vengeful, animated object from beyond the grave. No less an authority than the Welsh writer Arthur Machen was impressed by the story, commenting in his review for the New Statesman that ‘in that tale there is a scarecrow which is luminous, but not in the light of the sun – a hideous terror.’

There were scarecrows in the fields around my grandmother’s house too. And straw bales that I would haul about and arrange into forts with the handful of other local children. But it was always the beguiling woods that held the greatest appeal, where I wanted most to walk. Sometimes we would, the whole extended family, go together, Uncle Gordon and me pressing ahead. He still lives in that same cottage, and laughed when I saw him last a couple of years ago, recalling how I always led us along the most tricky paths; I was able to duck beneath the branches of blackthorns while he would be skewered on their spines. The swathes of stinging nettles were far easier for our sticks to deal with – we could bash them down, uncovering half-forgotten tracks that reached in front of us like the ghost road in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Way through the Woods’:

You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet

And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

Steadily cantering through

The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

The old lost road through the woods …

But there is no road through the woods.

The eerily atmospheric poem prefaces the short story ‘Marklake Witches’ in Kipling’s 1910 Rewards and Fairies, a collection of stories grouped together like those in its predecessor Puck of Pook’s Hill, with each tale fronted by a related verse. In the books, the eponymous sprite from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is roused to spin yarns, with the help of characters summoned from the past, to bring alive a history of England – or at least a version of it that Kipling has fashioned – to two Sussex children, Una and Dan. ‘I belong here, you see, and I have been mixed up with people all my days,’ says the now aged Puck as he introduces himself.††

‘Marklake Witches’ is itself a story of no little poignancy, in which Una meets Philadelphia Bucksteed, the high-spirited, sixteen-year-old daughter of a Napoleonic-era squire. We learn of the girl’s irritating cough, and the illicit efforts her nurse makes to enlist the local ‘witch-mater’ to cure her, aided by an affable French prisoner of war who is something of a medical innovator and turns out to be René Laennec, the inventor of the stethoscope. As adult readers (I’m not sure the subtext would be obvious to a child), the tragedy is that we know the vibrant, thankfully unaware, Philadelphia is dying from consumption – which is why her after-dinner rendition of ‘I have given my heart to a flower’ so overwhelms her father and a visiting general. On being introduced to her new Napoleonic friend, the Edwardian Una comments about Marklake: ‘I like all those funny little roads that don’t lead anywhere.’ Given that the poem informs us in its opening line that the woodland way was shut ‘seventy years ago’, we can deduce that the estate of Philadelphia’s father has long gone, like the teenage girl whose tale is being told by her swish-skirted shade.

H. R. Millar (1869–1942), illustration from Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) by Rudyard Kipling (Wikimedia Commons)

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (today Mumbai) in 1862, yet educated back in England, to which he was shipped, at the age of five, by his parents. He spent the next six unhappy years being boarded with a bullying foster family in Southsea, before going on to a military school in Devon, and then returning to India where he worked as a journalist and where his first successes as a writer were to come. This was followed by further spells in London and Vermont where, by this time married, he wrote The Jungle Book. Now famous, he returned once more to Britain, settling in Torquay, and then in Sussex; these wanderings, and his troubled childhood, perhaps go some way to explaining his desire to construct his own mythic version of a history of England, the country in which he was thereafter to remain.

While on a winter visit back to the States in 1899, Kipling, along with his six-year-old daughter, Josephine, contracted pneumonia. Kipling recovered from the illness, though it took him months; his daughter – for whom he had earlier written The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories – was not so lucky. A charming gold-framed pastel drawing of young Josephine hangs in one of the bedrooms of his Jacobean Sussex house, Bateman’s – she looks out of the frame, intent on something unseen – alongside a monochrome photograph that shows the pretty, smiling little girl, then aged three, being held by her doting father.

A hint of this personal tragedy is present, I think, in Kipling’s depiction of the life-affirming Philadelphia in ‘Marklake Witches’. His younger daughter Elsie, the only one of Kipling’s three children to survive him, recalled in her memoir:

There is no doubt the little Josephine had been the greatest joy during her short life. He always adored children, and she was endowed with a charm and personality (as well as an enchanting prettiness) that those who knew her still remember. She belonged to his early, happy days, and his life was never the same after her death; a light had gone out that could never be rekindled.

In common with many other Victorian and Edwardian writers of note, Kipling occasionally turned his hand to supernatural tales, a good number of which reflected the mysticism of India. A few though take place in Kipling’s adopted Sussex, the land of Puck – among them a work of utmost poignancy that reveals the depth of his sorrow following his daughter’s death.

Kipling’s ‘They’ first appeared in the August 1904 edition of Scribner’s Magazine, and was anthologised later the same year in Traffics and Discoveries. An illustrated standalone version was published by Macmillan in 1905, which indicates the story’s popular appeal – George Bernard Shaw, for example, sent a copy of Scribner’s to the leading actress of the age, Ellen Terry, wondering whether she would consider playing the part of its main female character if Shaw could persuade Kipling to adapt the story into a play; she declined, stating that it was ‘wondrously lovely’, but that the ‘stage would be too rough for it I fear’.‡‡

In ‘They’, Kipling writes beautifully about the wooded enclaves of the Sussex countryside. Clues in the text point to the story being set somewhere around the hinterland of the village of Washington, a few miles north of Worthing and forty miles west of Bateman’s. When we are first introduced to the narrator it is very late spring, for – despite the brightness of the sun, at least where it’s able to puncture through the tunnels of hazel, oak and beech – there are reminders of the fleetingness of the seasons and the implacability of time in the already gone-over spring flowers: ‘Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked bluebells nodded together.’

The narrator freewheels his vehicle along a leaf-strewn track, descending into sunshine and a vision of an archaic house set among a great lawn populated by topiary horsemen and their steeds. Stopping his car in the grounds of this idyll of Old Albion, the protagonist spies two children watching him from one of the house’s upper-floor windows, and hears juvenile laughter coming from behind a nearby yew peacock. The owner of the Tudor mansion appears, a redoubtable blind woman (we learn in passing that she is Miss Florence) who we half-expect to berate the motorist for his noisy intrusion. The narrator expects to be scolded too and begins his excuses about taking a wrong turn, though the lady isn’t at all bothered, and instead hopes an automobile demonstration can be put on for the elusive children.

‘Then you won’t think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once or twice – quite slowly. I’m sure they’d like to see it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but –’ she threw out her hands towards the woods. ‘We’re so out of the world here.’

After driving his host around the grounds the visitor departs. When he returns again a month later, by which time the trees are in verdant full leaf, his car develops a fault in the woodland not far from the house, and he makes a noisy show of repairs, hoping it might entice in and amuse the shy youngsters. The blind proprietress instead appears and the two chat good-naturedly, though the narrator thinks he is being left out of some enormous secret by the lady and the little ones, who have by now gathered stealthily behind a bramble bush with their fingers held to their lips. Any revelation is halted by the arrival of a lady from the village, Mrs Madehurst, the owner of the shop; it transpires her infant grandson is seriously ill, and so the motorist volunteers to use his vehicle to fetch a doctor, before being enlisted on an extended expedition to taxi in a nurse.

When the narrator returns for a third and final time, autumn is beginning to set in on the hills and woods, with a chill fog permeating well inland. Kipling writes of the change that has come upon the natural world: ‘Yet the late flowers – mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden – showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea’s breath there was little sign of decay in the leaf.’ En route he calls in to the shop, where he is met with Mrs Madehurst’s tears: young Arthur died two days after the nurse was brought. His mother Jenny, the shopkeeper’s daughter, is out now walking in the wood.

‘Walking in the wood’ – it’s an expression repeated by various locals throughout the story, and whose meaning will soon become clear.

Pressing on, the visitor reaches the house, proceeding within for the first time. There are signs of the recently present children everywhere in their hurriedly discarded toys.§§ His hostess takes him on a tour of the place, which is every bit as beautiful inside as out. The pair of them pass through the attic rooms set aside for the children, who remain out of vision. Finally, he spies them in the hall, hiding behind an old leather screen, and wonders whether today he will be introduced. While he sits in front of the grand, comforting fire (kept always lit for the little ones), there is a diversion as the lady of the house deals with one of her tenant farmers, Mr Turpin – a latter-day highway robber of sorts – who is trying to take advantage of his landlady by getting her to fund him a new cattle shed. In business though she’s far from unsighted, and Turpin, who throughout appears in a state of unbridled anxiety at being in the house, is sent off with nothing. While this is going on the narrator continues to try to attract the attention of the skulking infants:

I ceased to tap the leather – was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed – when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers …

The narrator’s patience has been rewarded, though the gift is a dubious one. His utter despair conveys an authenticity that reflects Kipling’s personal and recent familiarity with bereavement. Of the loss of his Josephine.¶¶ ‘Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window.’

For this, and its studied, unsentimental build-up and beautifully constructed setting, there are few short stories (ghost or otherwise) that come close to so perfectly expressing the kind of sadness and grief that is on display in ‘They’. The visitor ‘from the other side of the county’ finally accepts why the children are there, and what they are – all that has gone before was wilful self-delusion on his part. Yet even though by this point we too have surely worked out their nature, the story’s denouement is still devastatingly sad: our narrator is hit with the certainty that the hand which grasps his own belongs to his late daughter, and that he must never return to this shade-filled house again.

He has learned what the villager meant when she spoke of ‘walking in the wood’. It is what the bereaved do to commune with their departed.

* Deadly nightshade’s Latin name belladonna is thought to have derived from one of the plant’s medicinal properties – extracts employed in eye-drops were historically used by women to dilate their pupils and enhance the attractiveness of their eyes.

† Arkham is a fictional Massachusetts university town that features in a number of H. P. Lovecraft’s tales.

‡ Sir Stafford Northcote served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Disraeli, between 1874 and 1880.

§ Quite probably in a deliberate nod, Northcote here employs a phrase – ‘infinite distance’ – that is also used memorably in M. R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’.

¶ You had to press a button on the top of the phone before making a call, and check that the house across the lane wasn’t on the line at the same time. To me as a sophisticated town-dweller this ‘party line’ seemed hilariously primitive.

** Brooke won a scholarship to study at King’s College, Cambridge in 1906, a year after M. R. James became its provost. Brooke’s death in 1915 was not the result of a bullet fired by a German sniper, but from sepsis caused by an infected mosquito bite while the naively patriotic twenty-seven-year-old waited to see action with the Royal Navy. James spoke warmly about Brooke in that year’s Vice-Chancellor’s oration, his words echoing those he had earlier written about James McBryde. ‘No one, I think, must call that short life a tragedy which was so fully lived, and spent itself so generously upon all who came in contact with it.’

†† Rewards and Fairies is also notable for containing the first appearance of Kipling’s most famous and popular poem ‘If—’, which topped the survey of Britain’s favourites; ‘The Way through the Woods’ came forty-eighth.

‡‡ Terry’s last theatre role – in 1925, a little less than three years before her death at the age of eighty-one – happened to be a non-speaking performance as the ghost of Miss Susan Wildersham in Walter de la Mare’s now-obscure ‘fairy play’ Crossings.

§§ The youngsters have, I think, something about them of the playful shyness of Tolly’s elusive Restoration ancestors in The Children of Green Knowe.

¶¶ Kipling would also go on to lose his son prematurely. Eighteen-year-old John was shot in the head at the end of September 1915, while serving in France; the boy’s poor eyesight would have rendered him ineligible for active service, but he persuaded his father to pull strings to get him enlisted in the Irish Guards. Two days before his death, knowing he was about to be sent to the front, John wrote home: ‘This will be my last letter most likely for some time.’

￼Chapter 4

THE ROARING OF THE FOREST

A coil of movement down by the path. It’s not easy to pick out, as the leaf-heavy branches of an ancient oak cast the forest floor in shadow, but something is there. Something flesh and blood.

‘A snake,’ whispers my brother to my dad.

‘Don’t get too near, just in case.’

And now it becomes apparent not merely that this is a solitary two-and-a-half-foot grass snake, but that its mouth is crudely clamped around a shape – the back of a still-moving frog – which is gulping and blinking with a resigned calmness as the reptile stretches its jaw the final inch and envelops the amphibian’s head. Saliva bubbles from the taut corners of the snake’s mouth, and the frog lets out a high-pitched squeak.

I imagine this is roughly how it happened, because I was not a first-hand witness to this demonstration of nature’s brutality, but was playing a few hundred yards away with Mum in a New Forest car park as my dad and brother made their discovery. On their return, though, my jealousy was palpable – I’d never even seen a live snake in the English countryside before, let alone one performing a gruesome act resembling something from Life on Earth. We all set back out together into the hazy greenness of the late-summer woods, only to find the Eden beneath the oak empty, the unseen serpent watching us through the undergrowth.

The day before, we’d arrived at the end of a narrow track where our bed-and-breakfast was located – a two-storey cottage hung with weather-bleached deer skulls – just as an enormous pig was ambling around the dusty yard. In my memory, the setting came to resemble something out of an American horror film like The Evil Dead, though I supposed I’d accorded it a far more backwoods-gothic atmosphere than the reality until years later when my brother and I stumbled upon the place, its brickwork unchanged and still antler-ridden, as we searched for rare honey buzzards in the forest’s depths. I’ve been obsessed with these wasp-eating raptors – special feathering on their head helps safeguard them from stings – from the moment a pair I never managed to witness was rumoured to be nesting in a wood close to Nan’s house in Norfolk. At the time it was a species I had yet to see anywhere, but the birds – if they ever existed at all – eluded me for the fortnight I was there, despite a handful of spurious half-sightings that I tried to convince myself might be the real thing.

If the exterior of this lonely farm cottage was somewhat off-putting, then the inside was worse: ramshackle and dirty, so that Dad took the anarchic step of piling us straight back into the car and doing a flit, driving to the tourist office in Lyndhurst where alternative accommodation was found. The new guest house was better in the eyes of my parents – no dead trophy animals at least – but in my opinion (with which my brother agreed) it was spookier. The out-of-time bedroom the two of us shared was inhabited by three antique china dolls; Chris had to get up and twist them towards the wall, because we both found them menacing. It didn’t help that our bedtime reading included Chris’s newly purchased copy of Raymond Briggs’ nuclear Armageddon parable When the Wind Blows, or that it was stiflingly hot – the whole 1983 holiday, which had encompassed a grand tour of England’s south-west, was sun-baked, everywhere the grass dying and brown, like Leo’s fateful summer in The Go-Between. At regular intervals my brother called out ‘cold pillow’, an instruction to turn over our head supports in an attempt to claim temporary relief from the oppressiveness, and an opportunity to check that the staring dolls were still facing the other way. The landlady was frightening too, an old woman with bleached hair and excessive make-up – she had something of the artificial appearance of a porcelain figurine herself – who, my parents joked, looked like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

I had no idea who they were talking about, though I would have if they’d namechecked The Watcher in the Woods. I’d seen this Disney children’s horror film – set in England, it was filmed largely at Pinewood Studios and in the surrounding Buckinghamshire countryside – the previous year with two of my classmates. To my shame, that night after the cinema I’d had trouble sleeping. My companions felt the same, I was relieved to learn, as we joked with daylight bravado about the movie at school the following Monday, having had the whole weekend to muse over it. The main source of our thankfully short-lived terror did not stem from Bette Davis’s creepy performance, but from the film’s copious use of tracking shots through the branches, captured from the voyeuristic perspective of the watcher and accompanied by a dramatic, jarring orchestral score. As my friends and I watched the film in our local Odeon – a building that was to close soon after, looming empty and abandoned for the next four years like the ominous pavilion in Carnival of Souls – we were left with a genuine fear that something malevolent was in the trees, unobserved yet observing us.

Like that frog-swallowing snake I would later fail to find.

The name ‘New Forest’ is something of a misnomer, as it is clearly anything but new, and large swathes of it consist of wide-open gorse- and heather-filled heathland, rather than the dense fairy-tale forest that is my landscape of memory from that family holiday. The region’s poor soils have supported this mixture of lowland heath and woodland since well before 1079, when William the Conqueror declared the area to be his Nova Foresta, a stretch of land reserved for the pursuit of deer and wild boar by the monarch (the original meaning of the word ‘forest’ is hunting ground, and maiming physical punishments were meted out to commoners caught breaking the rules).

The first Norman king’s successor, his ruddy-faced son William Rufus, was killed in the forest in August 1100, shot through the breast by a rogue arrow supposedly aimed at a stag by one of his companions (though assassination is not out of the question). William Rufus’s older brother Richard had also died some years previously in a hunting accident in his father’s preserve. And three months before, in May 1100, the king’s illegitimate nephew had likewise been slain hereabouts by another arrow gone awry. These two earlier incidents should perhaps have served as a warning to the country’s new ruler about the hazards, if not of the forest itself, then of his chosen pastime. But, even if the memory of how his relatives had met their end no longer weighed upon William II, various contemporary warnings and omens do appear to have had an effect and led the king to postpone the departure of his ill-starred stag hunt. However, this was to delay his doom for just a few short hours.

We visited the Rufus Stone, which marks the spot of the regicide, during that same sunburnt summer: the original stone, according to the 1841-erected replacement, was ‘much mutilated, and the inscriptions on each of its three sides defaced’. Among my box of old family photos and slides I can find only a solitary picture of the marker post – an image of my father engaged in the act of capturing the monument on film; the photo possesses a grainy, otherworldly hue that now would have to be digitally fabricated by some Instagram or iPhone filter. In more recent years the unobtrusive turnoff on the A31 has beckoned me to the place every time I’ve passed it on my way to see my brother at his nearby Dorset home.

Today is different – I’m heading in the opposite direction and there is no prospect of the two of us meeting later and searching the skies for twist-tailed honey buzzards. Before, though, I have often given in and broken my long journey, turning across the busy dual carriageway to absorb the atmosphere of the forest around the monument, wondering if this was also where Dad and Chris happened upon their infamous serpent. If so, perhaps another less grand marker would now be appropriate?

That the spot where an event so memorable might not hereafter be forgotten – close to here a man and his son watched a grass snake devour a fully grown frog.

Philip Hoare’s book England’s Lost Eden relates the strange events and portents surrounding the death of William Rufus in wonderful detail, before going on to catalogue the hypnotic attraction that the mysterious, superstition-filled Arcadia offered towards the end of the Victorian age to those who came here seeking a higher plane. He tells of how the forest became host to Mary Ann Girling, a farm labourer’s daughter from Suffolk who claimed to be the stigmata-scarred Messiah, but ended up encamped in increasing squalor with her rag-tag band of followers outside the village of Hordle; their Rapture never did arrive, just starvation and disappointment and, for Mary Ann, the cancer of the womb that would kill her.

At the same time as Mary Ann’s New Forest Shakers were attracting day-tripping tourists to gawk at their sorry spectacle, an eccentric Spiritualist barrister, Andrew Peterson, channelled the ghost of Sir Christopher Wren at séances and built a monument to the lure of the esoteric at nearby Sway. Today, as I walk along the narrow lane at its base, the 218ft folly – believed still to be the tallest non-reinforced concrete structure in the world – seems somewhat forlorn, squeezed in among houses and bungalows and crying out for a grander backdrop. Glimpsed, however, from a distance, jutting above the breeze-blown trees, its incantatory effect remains undiminished.

A mile and a half south-east of the Rufus Stone is Minstead. At the back of the village’s delightfully ramshackle, red-brick All Saints’ Church lies the grave of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, another who found comfort in the forest, drawn to Spiritualism after the death of his eldest son Kingsley, who was wounded at the Somme and died in 1918 from the resulting complications. The originator of Sherlock Holmes had famously been taken in by the fairies photographed by two girls, sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, at Cottingley near Bradford. The images came to Doyle’s attention via the Theosophical Society, and he broke the sensational story in a December 1920 article in The Strand magazine; the women finally confessed to the fakery more than sixty years later, long after Doyle had printed his full investigation of the pictures in his book The Coming of the Fairies. Doyle maintained that ‘there is enough already available to convince any reasonable man that the matter is not one which can be readily dismissed’, albeit adding that: ‘I do not myself contend that the proof is as overwhelming as in the case of spiritualistic phenomena.’

Glenn Hill/Contributor via Getty Images

By this late point in his life Doyle’s faith in Spiritualism was seemingly without scepticism. He was by no means alone in his beliefs, as the unprecedented slaughter of European youth that had taken place during the First World War had led to an upsurge of interest from those of the bereaved who wished to attempt communication with their dead loved ones. In 1927 Doyle published Pheneas Speaks, a catalogue of comforting messages received from the other realm at private family séances by his second wife Jean, who acted as medium. Pheneas was their third-century BC Mesopotamian spirit guide, who directed first Jean’s automatic writing (referred to as ‘inspired writing’ by Doyle) and later ‘semi-trance inspirational talking’. Many of these séances were held at their mock-Tudor New Forest retreat, Bignell House, a couple of miles east of the Rufus Stone; Pheneas even requested a room of his own in the cottage, decorated in mauve, which would psychically lend itself to ‘clearer vibrations’. The family conferred with departed relatives including their late, war-wounded son Kingsley, and Doyle’s brother-in-law – the novelist E. W. Hornung (husband of Doyle’s sister Connie), author of the Raffles ‘gentleman thief’ stories and a renowned non-believer in Spiritualism while alive. John Thadeus Delane, a former editor of The Times who had died in 1879 – a person and name, according to Doyle, apparently ‘quite unknown to my wife’ – also appeared in the ether for a chat. When asked whether he still edited a paper in the next world, Delane replied: ‘There is no need here. We know everything. It is like wireless in the air, and all so much bigger and larger and so splendid. It is great, this life.’

Later, at the same June 1922 séance, Doyle’s thirteen-year-old son Denis, ‘a great lover of snakes’, asked Kingsley: ‘Where are the snakes with you?’ To which his ghost brother replied: ‘In their own place, old chap. We are so proud of you, Denis, and the way you are developing in every way.’ Reading these transcripts now it’s difficult to imagine how the man responsible for the creation of the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes could accept these banal messages so unquestioningly as solid evidence of an afterlife, and not as the understandable attempts (either consciously or subconsciously) of his wife – who had also lost her brother during the Great War – to bring comfort to a grieving old man and his family.

At the beginning of the 1920s Doyle struck up an unlikely rapport with Harry Houdini, the American magician and escapologist who was starting to engage in a mission to expose fraudulent mediums, hoping in the process to find a genuine means of communicating with his dead mother.* In the same month that Denis asked his vanished brother about the snakes, Jean engaged in automatic writing in the presence of Houdini, producing seven paragraphs purporting to be from the showman’s mother. Houdini was unimpressed – the deceased woman’s English was poor for one thing, and Jean’s transcript failed to capture her way of talking. The two men’s friendship began to fracture thereafter, their disagreement later magnifying into a high-profile spat. Reading them now, the words alleged to have come through to Jean from the late Mrs Houdini bear a striking resemblance to those received from John Thadeus Delane: ‘It is so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful …’

In a 1927 magazine article Doyle argued the case that various Victorian writers – notably Oscar Wilde and Jack London – continued to produce works from the other side. Doyle also conducted a conversation himself, through another medium, Florizel von Reuter, with a figure he reckoned could well have been Charles Dickens, and who went on to provide him with the solution to the mystery of Edwin Drood: ‘Edwin is alive and Chris is hiding him’ (‘Chris’, according to Doyle, being the Reverend Crisparkle).

‘Every year spring throws her green veil over the world and anon the red autumn glory comes to mock the yellow moon.’ Purported communications from Wilde like the preceding sentence (part of a larger tranche of writing said to emanate from the dead aesthete) were, however, Doyle’s favoured evidence of posthumous literary work. They were transmitted to the hand of a medium, Mrs Dowden, which was in turn laid upon their transcriber, a Mr Soal. Doyle seizes on their florid language and use of colourful adjectives as proof of their famous sender’s identity: ‘This is not merely adequate Wilde. It is exquisite Wilde. It is so beautiful that it might be chosen for special inclusion in any anthology of his writings.’ Doyle does not seem able to countenance the possibility that he is being duped:

What then is the alternative explanation? I confess that I can see none. Can anyone contend that both Mr Soal and Mrs Dowden have a hidden strand in their own personality which enables them on occasion to write like a great deceased writer, and at the same time a want of conscience which permits that subconscious strand to actually claim that it is the deceased author? Such an explanation would seem infinitely more unlikely than any transcendental one can do.

LMPC/Contributor via Getty Images

It would not be long before the 71-year-old author joined his fellow literary giants London, Wilde and Dickens, as well as his eldest son, Kingsley, and his former friend Harry Houdini.† At eight thirty on the morning of 7 July 1930 – seated in a basket chair in his bedroom, looking towards the window – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle passed peacefully at his main residence, Windlesham Manor in East Sussex. He was buried in the gardens of the house, surrounded by a sea of well-wishers’ flowers, next to his writing hut. In the immediate aftermath of his death – on occasions including the memorial service held at the Royal Albert Hall six days later, at which a vacant chair was left for him on the stage beside his wife – numerous mediums asserted that they had received beyond-the-grave communiqués from Spiritualism’s grand flag-bearer. With reports of these alleged messages threatening to become overwhelming, his widow pushed back, stating: ‘When he has got anything for the world he will communicate with us first.’ And it was not long before the family resumed their contact. Jean continued to hear Arthur’s voice at the sittings she conducted right up to her own passing in 1940, even claiming that her husband’s spirit had diagnosed her own cancer before her doctors; whether Pheneas was at this point still her otherworldly guide, I could not say.

We do, however, have irrefutable proof of at least one last earthly trip Doyle was to make, a quarter of a century after his body had departed this life: a hundred-mile hearse ride. In 1955, after the Windlesham estate had been sold, his remains were exhumed, moved and reinterred, along with those of his spouse, beneath a mature oak in the southern corner of Minstead churchyard, close to their beloved New Forest retreat. It is a pleasant, peaceful final spot of rest; when I visit, ponies are galloping after each other in the adjacent paddock. Someone has placed a bent smoking pipe on top of his headstone too, which seems an appropriate touch.

Since the Doyles’ purchase of nearby Bignell House in 1925 it had acquired a reputation for being haunted – locals knew the family held their séances there, with the 1929 fire that gutted the property adding to its aura. Doyle put the blaze down to psychic forces, though sparks from the kitchen that ignited the thatched roof are the rational explanation. And, although he brought in builders to restore his house in the woods (today a private home set back from the busy main road), Doyle did not live to see the work completed. In 1961 Bignell’s new owners – both doctors trained at the University of Edinburgh, the same institution at which Doyle had also studied medicine – had the place exorcised. No more unexplainable noises were reported, and there were no further sightings of the tall, moustachioed, slipper-wearing figure of Conan Doyle’s ghost, said to search the attic for a missing red leather diary the late author required for his spectral memoirs.

Something of the new beginning that the Girlingites hoped for, as well as hints towards the answers to the existential questions that those others drawn to the forest longed to find, are also present in the work of Algernon Blackwood, a prolific Edwardian writer of ghost stories and what is often classified as ‘weird fiction’. (H. P. Lovecraft defined the ‘true weird tale’ as one that possesses a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces’.)

On the suggestion of his publisher, Blackwood also penned a number of crossover tales intended to cash in on the success of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, successfully introducing, in 1908, the psychic investigator John Silence, who used his detective skills and other more esoteric abilities to bring about a resolution to various occult mysteries. The brilliantly named Silence is a figure similar to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Hesselius (from the tale ‘Green Tea’ some forty years earlier) and was followed two years later by William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki ‘the Ghost Finder’, and several lesser imitators right up to The X-Files

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