Kitabı oku: «Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country», sayfa 2

‘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.