Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  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.