Ghostland Read online

  ¶ 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 1
915), 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.