Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  The general method of shooting bears is to stalk them, but they may be found occasionally in the round beds they make in the snow, or may be decoyed by a man lying on his back and waving his legs in the air, in which case, after getting his wind, they come slowly at first but with a final rush on what they imagine to be their prey.

  A set of magic lantern slides was produced on the expedition’s return (presumably to be used by Sir Savile to illustrate the talks he gave) and remains in Somerleyton’s archive. Alongside its picturesque seascapes of hundred-and-fifty-foot icebergs, the slides show various pathos-filled scenes. In one we are looking at the protruding, dirt-splashed head of a live bear in a cage anchored to the deck of the ship Victoria, on top of which lies a dead walrus; an earlier one shows three hunched men skinning a bear; and, most graphically, in another, two half-grown cubs consume the viscera of their mother on an ice floe. Her body is positioned on her back, her forelimbs at her sides like a portly human corpse waiting on the marble of the mortuary slab.

  In one of The Rings of Saturn’s most noteworthy encounters, Sebald’s narrator details a long conversation he has with William Hazel, the gardener at Somerleyton. Hazel recalls as a teenager how ‘his thoughts constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940’, picturing in his head the destruction taking place across the North Sea. Hazel later served in the army in Germany during the 1950s, learning the language so he could read ‘what the Germans themselves had said about the bombings and their lives in the ruined cities’. To his astonishment he finds an absence of contemporary accounts of the time – it is as if, like in Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, ‘everything had been erased from their minds’. This exchange cuts to the heart of Sebald’s work and his exploration of how we, both individually and collectively, come to forget (or at least suppress) the losses we have suffered, the memories of people and events that once came to us with such clarity, and the atrocities to which we are in some part complicit.

  I have thought a lot about the conversation between the Sebald character and William Hazel. So, at the end of the tour, I ask the guide – the one who has worked at the house for the past four decades – whether a William Hazel was ever Somerleyton’s gardener. There are puzzled looks and a discussion as the two women try and recall the name I’ve given. I tell them I’ve seen it in a book in which the hall features.

  ‘Just a minute, I’ll check I’ve got it right,’ and I fish the copy from my bag.

  ‘Is that The Rings of Saturn?’ they say.

  I nod.

  ‘Well … that’s a load of rubbish – you don’t want to believe anything in that. He made things up!’

  I’m amused at their response – and at myself, having yet again half-trusted in the verisimilitude of Sebald’s book enough to wonder whether someone with the same name as one of his characters previously tended the hall’s flowerbeds. We chat some more, and I learn that the long-time head gardener who would have been here when the purported August 1992 visit took place is now retired. Later, on the internet, I discover he was not born until 1949, so could not have harboured any imagined remembrances of Germany’s carpet-bombing by the Allied air forces: William Hazel is a fiction, a device.

  Emerging from the hall I find myself in front of the aviary, where Sebald’s narrator also found himself lingering. In the book, poignantly, these cages are empty except for a single Chinese quail described as ‘evidently in a state of dementia, running to and fro along the perimeter of the cage and shaking its head every time it was about to turn, as if it could not comprehend how it had got into this hopeless fix’. The mental image it evokes reminds me of footage I have seen of polar bears transported from the boundless white Arctic to dreary, grey terrestrial confinement in Western cities – a destiny perhaps experienced by the two live animals brought back by the first Lord Somerleyton from Svalbard.

  Sebald includes a photograph of the gamebird, taken through the narrow mesh of the aviary’s cage front. In the foreground, sure enough, is ‘a solitary Chinese quail’, but, looking closer, the background reveals a second half-hidden individual I’ve not noticed before. Sebald, however, is correct about their identity: the two birds, both males, are indeed Synoicus chinensis, sometimes known by the common name Chinese quail, but more frequently as the king quail. What the monochrome photo doesn’t show is the bird’s chestnut belly and dark-blue face. It’s a beautiful species, and one I’ve seen just once in the wild, in eastern Queensland when birding in a coastal swamp with my brother as we searched for the rare, crepuscular ground parrot. I am reminded of that trip to the far side of the world a decade ago because, although there are no quails in the aviary today, it is filled with noisy Australian bush birds. These are mostly zebra finches and budgerigars, as well as a miniature diamond dove whose airy, piping calls sound like a primary school child blowing into a recorder.

  Poo-tee-weet?

  As I watch the budgies, long-tailed and flutter-winged, chasing the length of the ornately decorated structure, it seems by and large a happy place. The one note of discord that brings me back to The Rings of Saturn’s forlorn aviary passage is that I notice a frantic immature great tit – its colours a muted version of what they will become – which has managed to get itself trapped inside, its constant flight from one end of the cage to the other reminiscent of the quail’s ‘hopeless fix’. The native songbird clings and picks at the mesh of the different skylights, trying to find its way out to the freedom it can remember. Its distress contrasts with the ignorant bliss of its exotic new companions: they know of nothing else.

  I arrive beside the imposing yew maze, designed and planted in 1846 for Peto by the landscape gardener William Andrews Nesfield. Sebald’s narrator gets lost within its walls, having to draw lines in the gravel floor with his boot as a navigational aid. I struggle even to find my way in, as there is both an outer and inner entrance to the fiendish semi-circular structure. Walking around the maze is a frustrating experience, as it seems so simple, particularly when I notice that the couple who were at one point only marginally ahead of me have now reached the rotunda at its heart. Eventually, I get there too; I wait a while until the others have started to head back out and then contemplate the silence. Did M. R. James ever visit here? There is no mention of the hall in his Suffolk and Norfolk (just a puzzled reference to the old painted screen in the village’s church, which, mysteriously, includes ‘someone with a saw’), nor of any acquaintance with the Crossley family in either of his two biographies. Yet Somerleyton is not far from Aldeburgh, where James was a frequent visitor both in his childhood and in his later years, and it is not inconceivable that the maze filtered into the writer’s imagination as a model for the yew hedges at the centre of ‘Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance’, which appeared in his second collection, 1911’s More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.‡

  The dank labyrinth in the story captures the sense of unease and fascination that these living structures elicit; certainly, I’ve always felt that way about them. A ‘Jubilee Maze’ (though leylandii, not yew) was planted in the formal bulb-industry show garden, Springfields, located on the eastern limit of the town where I grew up, to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Queen’s 1952 accession to the throne. A contemporary article in a local magazine made a grandiose claim about the upcoming attraction: ‘This maze, which should grow by three feet per year, by 1979 should lose the most energetic of children and will rival in popularity the famous Hampton Court maze.’

  Its dark green walls, which, when I visited during the early 1980s, were already taller than a man, could be surreptitiously accessed via a door in the side of my dad’s neighbouring office. Once or twice in the evenings after the gardens were closed to the public he would let us both through and we would walk around the maze together. I came again in my later teens – the first time I’d been back since I was at primary school – climbi
ng over a gate to gain illicit access. I hoped, indeed believed, it would still be exciting; I think I was expecting it to be vast and impressive, as that was how I remembered it, but the experience left me empty, producing nothing of the earlier childhood thrill: people had made shortcuts through some of the now-patchy hedges and the place seemed small and unkempt compared to how it was fixed in my mind.

  A few years after my return visit the straggly leylandii were grubbed up when the gardens were built over and remodelled to become a retail park (though a fragment of the planted area was retained). My father’s stark 1960s office block is still there, but today has an air of dilapidation out of place against its new surroundings, the white paintwork of the wrought-iron railings of the balcony that led off Dad’s room and overlooked the long-gone maze now tainted with rust.

  We started coming to this stretch of the Suffolk coastline for family holidays in 1988, by which point Mum’s cancer was a familiar companion. Over the next four years we stayed for short breaks in the same rented holiday home not far from Lowestoft and Somerleyton, and the polite seaside resorts of Southwold and Aldeburgh – two of my mother’s favourite towns. Keeping me occupied was the flagship nature reserve of Minsmere, where I was happy to be left for hours. During the Second World War its low-lying grazing marshes were flooded to deter the spectre of German invaders; as a result, in 1947, the country gained its first nesting pairs of black-and-white avocets for more than a century.

  When these once- or twice-yearly holidays began my brother was studying French at university in the Midlands, but because the visits tended to be during Easter or the October half-term he would often join us. Sometimes my older cousin Patrick would come along, or one of Chris’s friends. I have fond memories of those trips, though my diaries tell me little about what we did, detailing only the birds I encountered: on our initial visit in April 1988 my notes gushed that a ‘brilliant Great Grey Shrike was showing well (for over twenty minutes) on Westleton Heath’. The shrike, a scarce silver-and-black passage migrant and annual winter visitor to Britain in small numbers from Scandinavia, remains among my favourite songbirds. Its evocative, monster-like name had drawn my attention years earlier, when I first read about it in one of my books. I can still picture that same individual as it surveyed the brown heather from the top of a birch sapling; I remember Dad, who was not particularly interested in wildlife but enjoyed having attractive or interesting species pointed out to him, got into a minor argument after he looked through a birdwatcher’s telescope without permission – an incident that we’d joke about for the remainder of the holiday.

  Nearby, where the land meets the sea, lies another strip of heather and gorse: Dunwich Heath. This is the place where, just over halfway through The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s narrator gets lost, imagining himself to be trapped in a yew labyrinth like the one he visited earlier in the book, before experiencing a vision not dissimilar to the astral flights of fancy taken by the Recluse in William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland:

  It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand. From my resting place in the pavilion I gazed out across the heath into the night. And I saw, to the south, entire headlands had broken off the coast and sunk beneath the waves.

  Today, with the warm breeze, the clear blue sky, and the bright, late-afternoon sunshine that caresses the back of my neck, it’s hard to imagine a less claustrophobic place – though there are a few more shadowed pockets among the heathland’s shallow dips, and some of the paths do seem to meander counterintuitively, leading you away from where you wish to go. On a grey day with no one in sight and with the skies pressing in the feeling might be different, of course. Certainly the dome of Sizewell’s nuclear power station in the distance adds a slight frisson.

  A mile or so to the north is the village that gives the heath its name, with its shingle beach along which we used to stroll on those long-ago holidays. Dunwich, too, can seem a melancholy place, though its history could be seen to justify such thinking. Once it boasted up to twelve churches and two monasteries, a Domesday Book population of three thousand souls, and, until the beginning of the fourteenth century – before longshore drift did for it – perhaps East Anglia’s finest harbour.§ Fierce storms coupled with the wrong geology, however, meant the town’s flaking cliffs were prone to be washed away by the unrelenting waves, with hundreds of houses and, today, all but one of the churches lost below the waters.

  Legends say you can still hear the ringing bells of the submerged places of worship – a folk tale repeated at various other sites around the British Isles. Dunwich’s sunken chimes are apocryphal, but stories of bones protruding from the cliff face beneath the old graveyard are not. A few years ago, the man running the village’s charming museum tells me, a Norwegian television crew were filming by the site of the last surviving memorial from the now-vanished All Saints – the clifftop headstone is dedicated to Jacob Forster who departed this life in 1796, aged thirty-eight years – when the cameraman looked down to see half a skeleton laid out on a ledge. The story of an over-excited dog racing down the street with a human skull clamped between its teeth is probably not to be believed, however, though bones do have a habit of finding their way back decades later, when people come upon their labelled remains (‘discovered on Dunwich beach’ on such and such a date) in a loft or cupboard when clearing out an elderly relative’s possessions.

  They tend to be placed in the next open grave to be dug in the churchyard, the museum man says: a disembodied eternity in the intimate company of a stranger.

  The settlement’s decline lent the place a certain cachet for Victorian writers, including the Decadent poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who features in The Rings of Saturn. He lodged nearby in 1875 (and again two years later), walking the brittle cliffs with his friend, the critic and poet Theodore Watts-Dutton. Here he wrote the poem ‘Where Dunwich Used To Be’, which details the slow destruction of All Saints Church;¶ Sebald shows us an underexposed old photograph (taken around 1909) of the same structure, highlighting the fictionality of his text by also including – along with a nonsensical explanation of how it remained standing – one of the ruined Eccles Church. The beach-marooned tower stood, in reality, some thirty-five miles to the north on the Norfolk coast, until the waves took it too, in 1895; the last vestige of All Saints (its north-west buttress) was moved from the adjacent cliffs in 1923, relocated a few hundred yards inland to the graveyard of the village’s sole current church, St James’s. Dunwich also inspired Swinburne’s long poem about mortality, ‘By the North Sea’; its evocative opening line – ‘A land that is lonelier than ruin’ – seems apt on a deserted winter’s day, but not on this Indian Summer Sunday, when the top end of the beach is busy with cheerful family gatherings who fill the air with their chatter and the smell of barbecuing charcoal.

  Swinburne was not the only writer or artist to be attracted by the romance of the place’s faded glory. Painted around 1830, J. M. W. Turner’s storm-riven scene titled simply Dunwich looks south towards the cliffs atop which All Saints still (at this point) stands, fully intact, beside the ruins of Greyfriars Priory. The poet Edward Fitzgerald, translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, spent his summers here during the 1870s. During his own 1897 visit – the same year he wrote The Turn of the Screw – Henry James stayed in the cottage that previously had housed Fitzgerald, noting later in his travel book English Hours that ‘Dunwich is not even the ghost of its dead self; almost all you can say of it is that it consists of the mere letters of its old name.’** And Arthur Machen, though I have no idea whether he himself ever came here (the Evening News did send him to East Anglia in 1915), mentions a fictitious Welsh village called Dunwich in The Terror, his 1917 novella (serialised in the previous year) about how the First World War was causing nature to tu
rn against mankind.††

  M. R. James too was familiar with Dunwich and its long history of religious houses and subsiding cliffs, with the remains of its Templar church possibly finding its way into one of his best stories, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. Although the town’s Preceptory of the Knights Templar is thought to have been irrevocably lost to the waves during the seventeenth century (the order itself had been disbanded some three hundred years earlier), a local geographic feature bearing the name ‘Temple Hill’ evaded erosion by the sea for a good while longer. Indeed, an archaeological dig was carried out at the site in 1935. So when, around 1903, James wrote his story, the preceptory’s location was almost certainly still extant, as were the atmospheric nearby ruins of the Franciscans’ priory, which today continue to cling to their clifftop field behind the gravestone of Jacob Forster.

  The title of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ comes from a light-hearted love song of the same name whose lyrics are by Robert Burns. But in James’s story it is not a lover who is coming, but an apparition swathed in bedsheets – an archetypal image of the ghostly rendered here, for all of its seeming familiarity and physical impotence, as terrifying as any of the revenants and medieval demons that haunt his other tales.