Ghostland Read online

  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 t
wice – 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 e
mpty, 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.