Ghostland Read online

  And here is Hodgson’s name, faint but legible, sandwiched between Desmond M. Filgate and William John Jones: I wonder about their all-too-brief lives. Later, I learn that Desmond Maurice Macartney-Filgate had originally enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, but had been discharged after it was discovered he was underage. On turning eighteen he joined the Royal Flying Corps but was injured in a training flight during May 1918 when the engine of his aircraft stalled; he died at the end of the month and was buried at Wye in Kent. Before the war William John Jones worked as a bricklayer, entering front-line action on Christmas Eve 1915 with the Royal Field Artillery. It seems he also was spared from perishing in the sludge of Flanders’ fields, being relieved of duty the following December because of tuberculosis, and dying at home in Borth, aged twenty-four, in August 1917. These, though, are the barest of facts: as to who Desmond and William might have loved, who might have been left bereft by their absence – as to who they really were – I remain in the dark.

  What is certain, however, is that at some point over the years following 1919, the next of kin of these men – along with Hope’s mother and sister at Lisswood – all should have received a circular bronze plaque four and a half inches in diameter depicting Britannia holding a trident, with a lion at her feet and two dolphins at her shoulders: a so-called ‘Dead Man’s Penny’. Additionally, an accompanying memorial scroll was sent out. The text on its fine paper was composed by M. R. James in late 1916 (earlier suggestions from others including Rudyard Kipling were not adopted), after he was asked by the Admiralty to provide suitable wording. After the conclusion of the war to end all wars, it is thought that more than a million of these plaques and scrolls were posted to the bereaved.

  The left behind.

  James himself, worn down by the toll the conflict had taken on Cambridge life and his former students at King’s – including the loss of several to whom he was close – returned to Eton shortly before the Armistice to become the school’s provost, a role he was to hold until his death on 12 June 1936. He is buried in Eton Town Cemetery.‡

  Unlike his two nearest neighbours on Borth’s understated grey stone cross, Lieutenant William Hope Hodgson’s final resting place is today indeterminable, though it is thought that whatever physical traces of him endured the fatal shell’s impact were buried in situ at the foot of the eastern slope of Mont Kemmel – a glorified Belgian hill rising a little over five hundred feet in height and said to derive its name from Camulos, a Celtic god of war. Hodgson is remembered, alongside thirty-five thousand other phantoms of doomed youth whose unknown graves lie in that same night land, on the vast semi-circular arc of Passchendaele’s Tyne Cot Memorial.

  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

  * Other commentators have speculated whether the cascading waterfalls, narrow gorge and deep potholes at Devil’s Bridge, sixteen miles to the south-east of the village – the ‘dread chasm’ commemorated by William Wordsworth in his poem ‘To the Torrent at the Devil’s Bridge, North Wales, 1824’ – formed the blueprint for ‘the Pit’ that dominates the first half of the book.

  † In my teens, my dad regaled me with tales of his own trip taken with two friends during the early 1960s to the west of Ireland. I was mesmerised by the sound of its superstition-swathed scenery and the ambrosia-like thickness of the mythic stout he remembered drinking in welcoming village pubs; I was in love with all things Irish at the time, half-constructing an imagined Irish ancestry out of the pedigree of my absconded airman grandfather’s surname.

  ‡ James had spent thirty-six years at King’s when he left the college for Eton. The move could, in some sense, be viewed as an attempt to reclaim his own youthful ‘Golden Age’ – an unobtainable retreat to an unscarred ghost land.

  Chapter 7

  GOBLIN CITY

  When, exactly, the word was first whispered I cannot say. It was dressed up for my benefit to begin with, I’m sure. A check-up, a procedure. A lump.

  Just a pea-sized lump.

  I wasn’t, though, as guileless as all that and realised the gravity of what was beginning to unfold around me. The defining incident occurred when I was at my aunt and uncle’s – I had been left there while my parents went to a hospital or doctor’s appointment, so it would have been during the school holidays. I think I was thirteen, but it might have been a year either way: how is it that the timing of something so momentous can now prove so elusive? Mum phoned with an update and I could tell from my aunt’s stilted side of the conversation – I was listening from behind the lounge door – that the news was not promising. I imagine Dad took me aside that evening – certainly that became the later pattern, signalling the start of the familiar feeling that would rise in my stomach – which must have been when the word broke cover. ‘Mum’s found a little lump. They’ve done a test and it needs to come out so she’s going to have an operation. Good thing is they’ve got it early, so they’ll be able to sort it.’ Or words to that effect.

  Two syllables, that’s all.

  Cancer. The Crab, the fourth sign of the Zodiac. And the illness my mother now had, which would not be so simply sorted.

  Her own luminous speck.

  The disease’s name is attributed to the classical Greek scholar Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BC), the Father of Medicine, who is said to have first described the appearance of a tumour as akin to how a crab digs itself into the sand with its legs circled around its hard carapace – the ten folded limbs resembling the engorged blood vessels that nurture the destructiveness. (Though, perhaps, Hippocrates was likening the pain to the pinch of a crustacean’s claw?) I could add that the progress of the illness might seem as inexorable as the processionary movement of the migrating Christmas Island red crabs I found so fascinating on natural history documentaries, or its grip as tight as those two oversized crustacean front fingers. Whatever its exact etymology, my mum now had it – this word I hated to hear spoken aloud – and life in our house would not ever be the same: the disease would not bury its way back below the sands, even if my head were to.

  After the initial diagnosis comes a fog. Mum went into the same Pilgrim Hospital that shimmered, so full of malevolence, out of the flat emptiness when you gazed across the Wash from the saltmarshes of Shep Whites. There she underwent a partial mastectomy, which clearly was not a roaring success; my sister-in-law recalls her saying quite matter-of-factly as she visited her at her bedside in the immediate aftermath that the surgeon admitted they hadn’t got everything so they were going to have her back for another go. I guess I should be angry when she tells me this – it is a detail I’d wiped from my memory, or else forgotten – but I’m too resigned after all this time to feel any rage.

  I do just about remember Mum returning to hospital, which was presumably when the follow-up procedure was carried out. After she came home she had to be driven each day to the outskirts of Lincoln, the nearest location in the county where she could undertake her next course of treatment. (As a young boy I had, years earlier, been excited to see the city’s famous stone imp, carved into a pillar in the cathedral – though, expecting a huge statue, I was underwhelmed by its small size, more of a goblin than a devil.) While Mum underwent her punishing daily journey, a round trip of ninety miles, I was at school, so only got to keep her company once. I have a photo in which she stands grinning in front of a pointing arrow on which the words RADIOTHERAPY CENTRE RECEPTION are spelled out in capitals – she delighted in the incongruity of the ramshackle nature of the place and used to enjoy telling everyone that she was having radiotherapy in a portacabin. After a month or six weeks (I can’t recall exactly how long), her visits to the borders of that goblin city were done with. There followed courses of various drugs before she was given an all-clear.

  She was going to be fine, they said. She was a fighter.

  The word had been defeated.

  Coming off the M4 into the urban sprawl of Newport, the ancient Roman fortress I’m ai
ming for is surprisingly difficult to locate, with counterintuitive road signs seemingly sending me the wrong way before, at last, there’s a gap in the incessant straggle of houses and I’m crossing a muddy-banked tidal river. Finally, I’ve arrived in the small town of Caerleon – still in Wales, though a little over a hundred miles to the south-east of William Hope Hodgson’s Glaneifion. The location is steeped in history and archaeology with its impressive Roman ruins, and its later associations – it’s the site where Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century chronicle of British monarchs, Historia regum Britanniae, places the court of King Arthur, and where, some 350 years on, Thomas Malory staged the legendary figure’s coronation in Le Morte D’Arthur. Tennyson came here too, in 1856, apparently writing part of the epic Idylls of the King in the town’s Hanbury Arms. And a nearby cave is said to harbour the sleeping monarch and his knights until the day they are needed by the nation, a local variant of the same piece of folklore that was to spawn Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen trilogy.

  This too is a place on the borderlands: the ancient Kingdom of Gwent (now covering Monmouthshire and Newport) once spanned the area between the Usk and Wye rivers, while the course of the latter, twelve miles to the east, still forms much of the modern-day boundary between Wales and England. Caerleon and its surrounding hills, and tracts of timeless woods, was also the childhood home of one of the most remarkable writers of the supernatural: one whose work reaches out with an inherent strangeness, straddling a landscape of the recognisable and another, concealed world of the sort of ‘sequestered places’ and beings that M. R. James alludes to in ‘A Vignette’.

  The writer is Arthur Machen (pronounced ‘Macken’), born a year after James, in 1863, although he made his literary name earlier, during the decadence of fin-de-siècle London, with his novella The Great God Pan. Much to Machen’s delight the Manchester Guardian described the book as ‘the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable we have yet seen in English. We could say more, but refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a work advertisement.’ The 1895 review’s level of criticism appears harsh today, and Machen’s novel, though far from his best, remains effective and atmospheric. In it he sets out many of the themes that were to become key features of his writing. Most noticeably, we are introduced to Machen’s search for the meaning of life’s hidden mysteries – ‘the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes’ – and the timeless pagan forces of (and beyond) nature, embodied as a carnal, faun-like deity, which corrupt both the flesh and the spirit of those exposed to them: those who ‘see the god Pan’.

  The appearance of Pan reflected the zeitgeist, as the goatish figure (depicted rather androgynously in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration for Machen’s first edition) was to become prevalent in literature over the course of the next three turbulent decades, celebrated by writers as diverse as Aleister Crowley, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster. Perhaps most notably (and unexpectedly), a gilded, horned Pan appears on the cover of Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s novel of anthropomorphised badgers, moles, toads and water voles, The Wind in the Willows, in which he takes the form of a protective god of nature and the wild – the ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’.*

  A number of supernatural short stories of the period feature a more ominous, feral Pan, however, including two of my favourites. Henrietta Dorothy Everett’s ‘The Next Heir’ contains an eerie vision that reminds me of the unearthly boatman glimpsed in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, while Saki’s (the pen name of the Edwardian English writer Hector Hugh Munro) ‘The Music on the Hill’ warns against treating local rural folk traditions with disdain. Jumping a century forwards, the Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro’s admiration for Machen can be seen in his Spanish Civil War-set fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth.

  Photo (Arthur Machen) Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images

  Arthur Machen was, like M. R. James and William Hope Hodgson, the son of an Anglican clergyman. (In an odd twist of fate, he was to share another familial tie with the Borth-based writer – Machen’s only son, Hilary, was to marry Hodgson’s niece.) His father John Edward Jones had adhered to the family tradition, studying Divinity at Jesus College, Oxford and thereafter becoming curate at Alfreton in Derbyshire before taking over as the interim vicar of St Cadoc’s in Caerleon on the death of Arthur’s grandfather in 1857. In the following year John Jones was given his own parish, Llanddewi Fach with Llandegfedd, a sprawling rural collection of farms and cottages five miles north of the town. In March 1863 Arthur was born in his grandmother’s house on Caerleon’s main street: a blue plaque marks the site, though there is little other obvious commemoration of the author elsewhere in the town today. He was christened Arthur Llewellyn Jones-Machen, as his father incorporated the surname of his Scottish wife into their name as part of a family legacy settlement; Arthur would later drop the Jones.

  Contemporary Caerleon is dominated by its three grand reminders of the Roman legionary fortress of Isca: the amphitheatre on the edge of the town – lauded, by the reign of Elizabeth I, as the site of King Arthur’s Round Table; the Fortress Baths, which remained buried in Machen’s day, being painstakingly uncovered between 1964 and 1981, and now housed inside an impressive edifice; and the Roman Legionary Museum – known in Machen’s time as the Museum of Antiquities – which, along with many items from its collection, features in The Great God Pan, and in his semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams. Here in this hard-to-classify novel we can explicitly see the influence the landscape of Machen’s youth had upon his writing. I particularly love the atmosphere of the scene in which its protagonist Lucian takes an unfamiliar route home across the Gwent fields: ‘A dark wild twilight country lay before him, confused dim shapes of trees near at hand, and a hollow below his feet, and the further hills and woods were dimmer, and all the air was very still.’

  The house in which Arthur Machen grew up is tricky to locate, and even more difficult to get a decent look at, perched as it is on the upslope of a hill climbed by a narrow minor road with no passing places. Eventually I manage to abandon my car in the least dangerous spot and proceed down the blind track until I am standing at the cast-iron gates of the former Llanddewi Fach Rectory. From this angle I’m looking at the side of the solid two-storey, grey-brown building designed by Machen’s father. On its impressive chimney stack he inscribed the year it was built; fittingly, given the location, this was carved in Roman numerals – MDCCCLXIV – alongside his own initials.

  I drive the short distance to the church of St David’s where Machen’s father preached – and where both he and Arthur’s mother are buried – a private home since the mid 1990s. From here I can look back across undulating fields of grass and brown-wooded gullies to the rectory, whose cream-edged windows are just visible through the leafless trees. Another winding lane, down which half a stream appears to be flowing, past various cottages, and I arrive at an ‘old foot bridge tremulous with age’. This is the country where Machen, an only child with an invalid mother, grew up, finding entertainment in his love of reading and explorations of impressive local landmarks such as Twyn Barlwm, his ‘hill of dreams’ six miles to the west.

  In addition to the Gwent countryside, Machen’s work is dominated by the vast mystery of London – the place where he was to spend the majority of his of adult life.† The seventeen-year-old Arthur was enchanted by the city from the off, after taking the six-hour train journey from south Wales with his father for the first time, in June 1880. On that foremost evening they walked along the Strand: ‘it instantly went to my head and my heart, and I have never loved another street in quite the same way.’

  Machen returned the following summer for his initial attempt to become a journalist and learn the craft of writing, a time spent living alone in Turnham Green, which he described later as ‘rather a goblin’s castle than a city of delights’.‡ Things were gradually to improve for the young Arthur after he moved to Clarendon Road in Notting Hill Gate and procured
a job at a small publisher’s. One of his tasks was to catalogue a collection of esoteric works on the occult, though he still occasionally terrified himself by trudging northwards through grim suburbs to the ‘goblin city’ of Kensal Green Cemetery – ‘a terrible city of white gravestones and shattered marble pillars and granite urns, and every sort of horrid heathenry’. This was a vast Victorian land of the dead, like Glasgow’s Necropolis; its famous under-the-earth dwellers would come to include Wilkie Collins, author of the sensation novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone.

  In August 1887, only a few weeks after the death of his father, Machen, who by this time had been living on and off in London for six years, married the bohemian Amy (Amelia) Hogg. Thirteen years his senior, and an acquaintance of Jerome K. Jerome (soon to find fame with his comic novel Three Men in a Boat) and A. E. Waite, she introduced Arthur to Waite – a folklorist and member of the so-called Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society devoted to occult, alchemical and spiritual study – initiating the two men’s lifelong friendship. Algernon Blackwood was also to join the Golden Dawn towards the end of 1900, having recently returned to London from his first trip along the Danube that would lead to ‘The Willows’. However, the order’s most notorious adherent was Aleister Crowley, ‘the Beast’ – later, perhaps, to inspire the demon-summoning Karswell in M. R. James’s story ‘Casting the Runes’, and the title character of Somerset Maugham’s The Magician – whose involvement and rivalry with fellow adherent William Butler Yeats would splinter the Golden Dawn into factions. Maugham’s novel was made into a 1926 silent movie of the same name, directed by Rex Ingram and starring Paul Wegener – who had previously played The Golem – in the role of Oliver Haddo, the figure inspired by Crowley.§