Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  ‘I did rather wonder, if you want to know,’ he said slowly, ‘what the thing in the boat was. I remember thinking at the time it was not a man. The whole business seemed to rise quite suddenly out of the water.’

  The gale drops, but the situation is not improved, for now the two men are able to hear the sounds of the willows – ‘something like the humming of a distant gong’. Events cascade and the pair become convinced that they are on a frontier that straddles the human world and some other, unaccountable one. As readers, we too are drawn into this vortex of wind-funnelled terror, increasingly certain things will not end well. When the end does come it is not, perhaps, quite as we might expect, though no less effective for it.

  ‘The Willows’ is another of Blackwood’s stories in which his own experience is writ large. During his own first expedition along the Danube in June 1900, he and his companion (an English friend named Wilfrid Wilson, not a terse Swede) followed a comparable route downriver and camped on a similarly ephemeral islet. In the introduction to his 1938 anthology The Tales of Algernon Blackwood, he recalls how ‘a year or two later, making the same trip in a barge, we found a dead body caught by a root, its decayed mass dangling against the sandy shoreline of the very same island my story describes’. This second trip actually took place in August 1905 – Blackwood’s biographer notes the inaccuracy of his subject’s recall of dates – so the strange coincidence of finding the corpse on the island he had earlier camped on would have been fresh in his memory when he came to write the story.

  ‘The Willows’ features a landscape that does not really resemble anywhere in Britain – the Flow Country of Scotland might possess the right scale of loneliness and a hotchpotch of disorienting watery channels, but the willows themselves are absent. And those trees, while a common enough sight in isolated clumps along my own familiar East Anglian waterways, or mixed in alongside other trees in damp carr woodlands, are not found growing naturally anywhere I’ve visited in Britain in the correct, unceasing concentration. The nearest vistas I can equate to those of the story are the now-diminishing poplar plantations of the Fens. I always felt a certain otherworldliness in their angular, light-stealing uniformity when my brother and I used to visit them that puts me in mind of Blackwood’s story – despite the difference in the trees themselves.

  We were searching for golden orioles, a spectacular thrush-sized songbird that, between the 1960s and the end of the first decade of the new millennium, was confined in the UK to a small population numbering just tens of pairs in those waterside woodlands along the border between Norfolk and Suffolk. The bright-yellow males were, for such a gaudy bird, surprisingly elusive – the best chance of locating them was to listen for their flute-like piping song, delivered most frequently at a premature hour on late spring and early summer mornings. These sounds are hard to describe (the second word of their English common name is supposedly onomatopoeic), but I’m always tempted to transcribe it as ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ – the repeated refrain that the birds sing after the destruction of Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut’s time-flitting anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, one of my favourite books and one which Chris gave me for my eighteenth birthday. It was an apt present, I think, since like Vonnegut – and the biblical Lot’s wife who’s described so memorably in the book’s opening chapter – I seem unable to stop myself from gazing backwards into the ruins of my own past.

  The orioles were dreamlike, as were the woods they inhabited. The first one I ever saw flickered through the mist that clung above the surface of the Ouse’s undeviating cut-off channel, moving swiftly from the left bank of poplars to the right, a three-second flare of gold before it was gone. Its periodic song serenaded and tricked us for the next few hours, the mellifluous, questioning melody mingling with the babble of blackbirds, blackcaps and garden warblers that seemingly sang from every other low branch and bush, and transformed the early morning into a cacophonic approximation of the last verse of Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Adlestrop’ – only with Suffolk and Norfolk now taking the place of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

  The hybrid poplars at Lakenheath Fen, the orioles’ stronghold, had been planted by the Bryant & May match company to fuel smokers’ pre-lighter and pre-vaping demands, their repetitious shade-filled stands forming an unwitting place of refuge for these rare avian visitors from the continent. Bryant & May’s distinctive yellow-and-black matchboxes – a fitting Oriolus oriolus colour scheme – which depicted, oddly, an animal-free Noah’s Ark emblazoned with the word ‘SECURITY’, were another integral part of my childhood. My grandfather, an inveterate pipe smoker, had a collection of over thirty thousand matchbooks and matchboxes, including hundreds of variants of the iconic Ark safety matches, all of which now lie mouldering in my brother’s garage. As a boy I would greedily snatch a discarded box off the street to present to Grandad, who would claim to know instantly whether it was one he already possessed – a sizeable proportion of our holidays seemed to be spent searching for souvenir boxes to take back to Lincolnshire for him.

  Today, Lakenheath’s poplar plantations offer only a trace of their former glory, like the now-defunct UK match industry itself.†† However, the reedbeds of the reserve that occupies the site are in fine health, having been encouraged and expanded with two decades of careful conservation management. Magnificent common cranes that stand four feet tall have colonised in recent years – Chris and I waited hours for them to show soon after they first arrived – alongside cryptic, grunting bitterns: strange squat herons which haunt these yellowed acres (the esoteric Norwich-based seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne is said to have kept a live one). Nature is being given the opportunity to make up for the broken biodiversity of the neighbouring over-farmed Fens by reverting to a fowl-laden waterland in which Hereward the Wake would feel at home – a growing wilderness that offers a suitably inspiring Blackwood-esque backdrop in which to contemplate the sublime. Members of the genus Salix will themselves feature more prominently at the reserve in future too, as its poplar plantations are being diversified to include a greater proportion of native trees, including alders and willows, among its wet woodland.

  As to the orioles, their final confirmed nesting at Lakenheath was in 2009, with the site’s last definite singing summer male ghosting through the dark canopy in 2013. The species did not return to the Fen the following year – a year when, for me, so much was to become absent.

  Poo-tee-weet?

  * Born Erik Weisz, Houdini had arrived in the United States in 1878 as a four-year-old emigrant from Hungary.

  † On Halloween 1926 Houdini failed to escape death, following a ruptured appendix probably caused by unexpected and over-zealous blows to the stomach given nine days before by a student admirer wanting to test the performer’s physical prowess.

  ‡ The Irishman Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) was M. R. James’s favourite writer of ghost stories – the boy in ‘A Vignette’ that we take for the young James happens to be reading Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard at the time he glimpses the malign face in the garden of Livermere’s rectory.

  § Three cedars flanked Blackwood’s childhood home Shortlands, near Bromley in south-east London; their night-time mystery and grandeur impressed him from a young age.

  ¶ The Cornwall-based writer of the fantastic, Frank Baker, neatly summed up the elderly author’s appearance when he recalled meeting ‘the wrinkled mummified visage of old Algernon Blackwood’ at the eightieth birthday party of Arthur Machen.

  ** ‘Wendigoes’ are also mentioned briefly in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha.

  †† The UK’s last factory producing standard household matches, located in Liverpool, closed in 1994.

  Chapter 5

  MEMENTO MORI

  I arrived with the dusk on a biting, slate-skied afternoon, a mixture of sleet and snow starting to fall as I made my way up the path that coiled around the hillside. The light, dim to begin
with, grew steadily darker as I wound higher. Three redpolls – small finches I picked out from their high-pitched, questioning calls – flew over my head, looking for somewhere to roost, though they would have more luck down in the shelter of the mound than at its summit.

  I was visiting Glasgow’s gothic monument to death, its sprawling memento mori (from the Latin ‘remember you must die’): the Necropolis. The site covers a hill behind St Mungo’s Cathedral, giving an impressive panorama of the city. Formerly rocky parkland, in 1831 it was given over to afford ‘a much wanted accommodation to the higher classes’ that would be ‘respectful to the dead, safe and sanitary to the living, dedicated to the Genius of Memory and to extend religious and moral feeling’. Since then, various extensions to its original area have been made, alongside fifty thousand burials in 3,500 brick-partitioned tombs.*

  No one else was about – they probably had more sense on this bitter afternoon at the back end of 2014. I’d gravitated here, pulled by the name, and by the pictures I’d seen of the place’s impressive architecture – as well as the melancholia of my own mood – after tagging along to the city with my partner, who was here for a work conference.

  In particular, I was drawn to one of the Necropolis’s most imposing structures, the Aiken Mausoleum, its classical pillars and portico half-hidden by tangled ivy and creepers. Peering through the wrought-iron gates that locked across its front I could just read some of the words on the memorial plaques inside.

  More disconcertingly, in the darkness I could also make out a rectangular opening that presumably marked the steps down to the graves themselves, though the paltry torchlight from my phone did not show any detail. Was it spooky? Perhaps a little, but the lights of the city, multiplied at this time of year by those of Christmas, were close. And I was used to wandering in such places – albeit not quite as grand as this – as, for five years as a boy I had been a chorister;† for a dare we would sometimes run through the graveyard of the town’s thirteenth-century church after evensong on winter Sunday evenings, pausing midway to touch the top of the coffin-shaped tomb with the foreboding cleft through its lid.

  In my present, too, walking back from the train station to my own house after dark I have to pass along an unlit lane that runs beside the local cemetery. Just before the darkest point, where the trees crowd in from both sides, the curve of the road and the low flint wall to the left look almost identical to the Victorian artist John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Moonlight Walk – the self-taught Yorkshireman specialised in realistic, slightly unsettling nocturnal scenes – which features on the cover of my paperback copy of M. R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories. Sometimes as I enter that last stretch I picture myself as the painting’s lone figure, dwarfed by the darkness.

  So, wandering in the Necropolis at dusk – even with the ghost of a snowstorm in the offing and ghosts in my head – I didn’t find the surroundings frightening. Indeed, the stones, with their solidity and timelessness, seemed to extend a kind of comfort to me. I felt worn out and undone and, at that moment, if I had been offered the chance to step inside the bars of the mausoleum and to take an unending sleep within its walls, I might well have chosen the memory-wiped relief of that option. But the stinging wind had gathered pace and was pushing me onwards, along with a darkling winter thrush – a redwing that skittered up in front of me from a leafless tree.

  Towards the lights of the city, towards the lights of the living.

  Below Glasgow, just inland from Ayrshire’s coast, stands the roofless ruin of Alloway Auld Kirk – situated in the centre of another of Scotland’s most atmospheric graveyards. Its hallowed ground is filled with headstones that seem to have been dipped in ochreous lichen, while impenetrable-looking iron grilles guard a number of the graves: mortsafes like those in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars, placed to prevent grave robbers. Though it would be a brave man who would have dared come here on a stormy night to dig up the kirkyard’s dead, given that the location was the inspiration and setting for the ‘Ploughman Poet’ Robert Burns’s mock-epic supernatural poem ‘Tam o’ Shanter’.

  A church has stood on the site since probably the thirteenth century, with the present roofless outer walls dating from the early sixteenth. By 1791, when Burns’s famous poem was published, the church had long been a ruin, and the poet’s father William, who had earlier tended these very graves, had lain here for seven years in his own. Robert was born in 1759, just up the street in a simple thatched cottage (now part of the excellent museum complex that marks his birthplace) on, of course, 25 January, the night honoured with his name. The derelict church was associated with various local superstitions that held it to be a favoured haunt of the devil, tales that Robert would have been familiar with from a young age – his mother’s widowed cousin Betty Davidson, a lodger in their cramped cottage, was a repository of spook stories. Robert lived in Alloway for his first seven years (he was the oldest child, over time acquiring six siblings), before the family moved the short distance to nearby Mount Oliphant, where his father took the lease of an unproductive seventy acres of land in an attempt to better their prospects. Prior to that William had worked a smallholding and been engaged as head gardener for the local estate.‡

  Alloway Auld Kirk is today managed by the National Trust for Scotland. It’s tucked between affluent-looking houses, opposite the new parish church on a busy tree-lined road. Perhaps my timing is fortunate, because it is midweek and the only other visitors are leaving as I arrive – yet once through its gates suburbia slips away. An ancient, gnarled sycamore has grown up the outside wall of the ruin, its bark near-identical in colour to the stone of the building. Many of the graves are graced with elaborate carvings including the usual skeletons and cherubs, but also featuring pictorial representations of the trade of the deceased: a miller, a farmer, a blacksmith. I soon locate the grave of William Burns. Inscribed on the rear of his much plainer memorial are eight lines of verse composed by the poet in honour of ‘The tender father, and the generous friend’. The headstone is not the original from the end of the eighteenth century, but the third to have been erected at this spot: the previous two were vandalised by souvenir hunters wanting a morbid Burns keepsake, a memento mori worthy of the name.

  Burns’s epic is written in a mixture of Scots and English, composed to add folkloric colour to his friend Francis Grose’s inclusion of Kirk Alloway in The Antiquities of Scotland. It begins with the eponymous, probably alcoholic, Tam drinking and sharing stories by the fireplace in an Ayr public house with his pal Souter Johnny (a souter being a cobbler), the pair of them putting away ‘reaming swats [creamy ales], that drank divinely’. Outside it’s a foul night, a night on which the Devil himself has ‘business on his hand’. The time eventually arrives for the bonhomie of the pub to come to an end, and Tam bids farewell to the evening’s passing pleasures. He heads towards home and his long-suffering wife, riding his grey mare Meg. His pace understandably quickens as he approaches the ruined Kirk Alloway – a spot where ghosts and owls cry, and where various unfortunates have met sticky ends: drunken Charlie broke his neck, Mungo’s mother hanged herself, and the body of a murdered child was found there.

  It doesn’t seem like a good place to linger.

  Tam presses forward, emboldened by the earlier beer and whisky. Before him he sees an incredible sight among the ruins of the church, a dancing mass of warlocks and witches. There in the upper window of the ruin ‘sat auld Nick, in shape o’ beast’, taking the form of an oversized, shaggy black hound – the whole thing certainly has the ring of a shaggy dog story – who is playing unearthly music on the bagpipes. The scene is scattered with open coffins that ‘shaw’d the dead in their last dresses’ – perhaps those mortsafes were added later to prevent the corpses from rising, rather than robbers from digging down? Tam is spellbound by the leaping, withered hags who dance wildly in their underskirts. In particular, there is one attractive younger witch in her short skirt – her ‘Cutty-sark’ – who cause
s him to cry out in praise of her efforts, breaking the reverie and alerting the ‘hellish legion’ to his presence.

  Tam flees on his dependable steed, the witches, warlocks and other ungodly creatures in close pursuit, praying he can make it the few hundred yards to the keystone of the old bridge: ‘A running stream they dare na cross’. His horse moves swiftly, but the young Nannie, the short-skirted witch, is not far behind. Flying at Tam, she grabs Meg’s tail, ripping it clean off just as the mare jumps to safety. The bridge today, in the wan spring light, offers a more serene vista: a couple are posing for their wedding photographs while a piper regales them on the cobbles; later, I suspect, some reaming swats may be sunk at the reception in tribute to Tam.

  Nearby, in the extensive gardens of the museum, stands the Burns Monument. A small building at its base hosts two full-scale sandstone statues of Tam and Souter Johnny, sculpted in 1828 by a local, self-taught stonemason, James Thom. I find the seated figures, which are arranged so that both stare blankly past me into the distance, rather disconcerting. I’m not sure why – I think they remind me of the clay Golem from the silent German expressionist film by Paul Wegener of the same name, a rampaging statue animated by a sixteenth-century Prague rabbi in order to save the Jewish population from the tyranny of Rudolf II (golem means ‘unformed matter’ in Hebrew); I half expect the pair to come to life of an evening when all the visitors have left.