Parkins, a neat young Cambridge professor, is about to spend one of his vacation periods in Burnstow, a place modelled on the south Suffolk resort and port of Felixstowe, combined (I suspect) with elements of Dunwich. I wonder whether the town’s name is a nod to Robert Burns, though it may just have been chosen for its ring of desolation; the fictional location also features fleetingly in James’s later tale ‘The Tractate Middoth’.
Parkins is going away to improve his fledgling golf game on Burnstow’s links, as well as hoping to catch up with his research.‡‡ In a telling exchange with colleagues at the start of the story, much is revealed about Parkins’ character; he comes across as a sincere but humourless young don with an outwardly strong disbelief in all matters supernatural: ‘I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred.’ The testing of this antipathy towards the otherworldly is what drives the narrative.
Taking a break from his golf to examine the Templars’ ruin, Parkins decides to dig with his pocket knife beneath a bare patch of earth. The topsoil collapses inwards to reveal a void into which Parkins reaches.
As he withdrew the knife he heard a metallic clink, and when he introduced his hand it met with a cylindrical object lying on the floor of the hole. Naturally enough, he picked it up, and when he brought it into the light, now fast fading, he could see that it, too, was of man’s making – a metal tube about four inches long, and evidently of some considerable age.
Original illustrations by James McBryde (1874–1904) from the first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James
Heading back for the evening to his accommodation, the Globe Inn, he notices ‘a rather indistinct personage’ further along the beach, which appears to be trying to catch up with him; he outpaces the figure, not keen on a twilight meeting on the lonely shore.
After dinner, where he eats with his playing partner, the no-nonsense Colonel Wilson, he returns to his room and, after noticing perhaps the same shape staring up at him through his window from the beach, remembers the metal object he dug up earlier. Once cleaned, it’s apparent that it is an aged whistle, with letters inscribed on both its front and back. The longer inscription reads QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT, which Parkins translates as ‘Who is this who is coming?’ In order to answer the question he – foolishly, as the Colonel later comments – decides to put it to his lips.
He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain.
Parkins begins to see a vision in his mind of a dark night-time expanse, broken up by the appearance of a solitary form. His reverie is disturbed by a sudden gust of wind that makes him look up through the glass – the flash of something, a gull’s wing illuminated in the moonlight perhaps – before the window swings inwards. Later, as he struggles for sleep, he has more unsettling visions of a shingle shoreline edged by sand and the presence of a black, bobbing shape that pursues him as he flees across the groynes that bisect the beach.
The next day, after more rounds with the Colonel on the links, events gather apace as the pair accost a terrified boy outside the hotel. The lad swears he has seen a white-sheeted, waving figure in the window of Parkins’ room. No explanation is forthcoming – no one has been in the room other than the maid to make it up, and nothing has been taken or displaced, except for the bedsheets on the superfluous spare bed which are ‘bundled up and twisted together in a most tortuous confusion’. Having shown the Colonel the curious whistle, the professor turns in.
And here comes the visitor he least desires.
After an hour or so of fitful sleep Parkins stirs, certain he can hear movement in the empty bed across the room. He rises to the window, where he has propped a makeshift curtain with a stick to block the moonlight, grabbing the pole to fend off whatever is alongside him.
Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen. What expression he read upon it he could not or would not tell, but that the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is certain.
The academic is saved from the blanketed embrace of this apparition by the timely entrance of the Colonel. The animated air dissipates beneath the now-fallen sheet and Parkins, out cold, is watched over for the rest of the night by the older man. The next day the whistle is cast into the sea, the sheets burned in a bonfire behind the hotel. ‘There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be.’§§
In James’s story the Professor gets off relatively lightly. Yes, his nerves are thereafter never quite the same, but he has survived his encounter with whatever it was he summoned, even if his outward philosophy has not. It’s a tale that is at once terrifying, but also playful and, at times, comedic – as well as offering up all sorts of unanswered questions for those attempting to divine more of James’s subconscious psychology from what he may, or may not, give us of himself within its fifteen pages: because, rightly or wrongly, it’s difficult not to discern Parkins as a version of James himself (albeit one stripped of his obvious sense of humour), and the text as a comment on his familiar world of high academia. In Burns’s poem that provides the story’s title, the woman implores her lover to be discreet in his courting, to pretend in public that he cares not for her. This, it strikes me, mirrors Parkins’ own true opinion about ghosts – ‘A man in my position cannot, I find, be too careful about appearing to sanction the current beliefs on such subjects.’ It is, however, a charade his colleagues do not seem convinced by.
Original illustrations by James McBryde (1874–1904) from the first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James
Here again, as in so many of James’s stories, we have all sorts of allusions to the terrors inherent in touch, and of how awful it is to have the sanctity of the bed where one sleeps shattered. Yet, like the lover in Burns’s song, does Parkins – and perhaps by extension James – protest too much?
Does ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ conceal a yearning for companionship to mitigate the loneliness of the long night’s upcoming darkness?
* Coincidentally, though perhaps aptly, John Thomas also happen to be the forenames of my errant airman grandfather, who vanished from my nan’s life shortly after fathering my dad and his two younger brothers.
† Although Sebald lived in the UK for over thirty years, he continued to write his books in his native German, and therefore we also have to remember that the words we’re reading on the page have, in addition, been passed through the filter of one of his translators – perhaps another factor that adds to the oddly beguiling quality of the prose.
‡ ‘Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance’ is one of James’s most intriguing (though least frightening) stories. James seemingly buries much of his knowledge of the classics and biblical apocrypha within the tale, which itself is something of a maze. Some scholars of his work have speculated as to whether there’s a puzzle hidden at its core that involves more than the restless spirit of Mr Humphrey’s great-grandfather, and whose solution requires an expertise in early Gnostic sects.
§ I suspect the fictional town in ‘Ringing the Changes’, Robert Aickman’s excellent tale of the church bell-awakened dead, may have been inspired by Dunwich: ‘Before the river silted up, Holihaven was one of the most important seaports in Great Britain.’
¶ Walter de la Mare’s wonderful ‘All Hallows’ puts me in mind of All Saints – a remote, but grand, clifftop church miles from anywhere. As well as being under assault by the sea there are ‘devilish agencies
at work’ that are gradually rebuilding the place of worship in a darker image: the ruinous tower mysteriously contains a new sculpture of a ‘two-headed crocodile’ and a sinister ‘vulture-like’ eagle.
** The American’s masterful psychological ghost story was adapted into a 1954 opera by Benjamin Britten, this stretch of coastline’s most famous son. Britten resided just a few miles to the south of Dunwich at Snape, another of my mother’s favourite places.
†† The Terror is probably where H. P. Lovecraft came across the name, borrowing it for one of his most notable stories – the corrupted, decaying New England settlement of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (first published in Weird Tales in April 1929).
‡‡ Parkins lectures in Ontography, a philosophical subject invented in the story by James – presumably related in some way to ontology and the nature of ‘being’ – which has now been co-opted as an actual term by some academics.
§§ James gives his own view on the subject in the introduction to his Collected Ghost Stories: ‘Do I believe in ghosts? To which I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.’
Chapter 9
WHO IS THIS WHO IS COMING?
Early April 1991, and we were about to return to Suffolk. I was seventeen by this point and in the lower sixth at school. I’m sure a break felt much needed, though not because of the usual concerns I might have been expected to be preoccupied with: how I would do in my A level mocks; whatever delicate social dynamic was concerning my clique; and girlfriends – or, at least, my lack thereof. Because since the end of the previous year – what L. P. Hartley might have referred to as that ‘Golden Age’ of 1990 – things at home had taken an unexpectedly grim turn.
A situation soon to get darker still.
Mum had been sporting her pirate’s patch for several months, the vision in one eye now gone. (I have a sudden temporary sense of panic as I realise I cannot remember which side was affected, but how can I be expected to recall such details, I tell myself in defence.) Her face was puffed-up and swollen too, by the steroids meant to be keeping the tumour in her head at bay. Still, she took setbacks like these with fortitude, at least publicly. Looking back, I don’t know what her prognosis was at the start of 1991. Whether, in secret, she and Dad already feared the worst, whether they saw any kind of future that stretched beyond the immediate? (I believe they were thinking ahead: a permanent move to the Suffolk coast had been mooted, with Dad taking early retirement.) He was fifty-two at this point and had undergone a health scare of his own a couple of months before, experiencing a terrible, tearing pain in his groin that had put him in Boston’s by now familiar Pilgrim Hospital for a worrying week – the first time I’d ever known him to experience any serious signs of illness. Nothing, however, was found and no explanation was proffered by the medical staff, and by the end of January he appeared fine again; he’d resumed playing golf at weekends, so must have felt well on the mend.
And then I came home from school and into the lounge one afternoon to find Dad in a choking tide of tears. I don’t think I’d ever even seen him cry before, let alone sitting there raging against life – I could just about make out his words – about how it was so bloody unfair. Chris, he told me, when at last he became coherent, had been to the doctor’s about a lump in his neck and the blood tests had come back to show he had something called Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Which was a type of cancer. So now it wasn’t only my mum who was ill, who had that word.
But my brother too.
Chris had graduated from university in the previous summer and was working nights in the nearby bread-distribution factory, a short walk from our house – taking a year out and saving up for an extended trip he was planning to Africa in the spring. He seemed outwardly at peace with his diagnosis – even then he shared Mum’s stoicism. But he told me not to look up the disease in the black leather-bound Encyclopaedia Britannica set Mum and Dad had purchased a few years before, figuring it would be a useful, albeit ridiculously pricey investment to keep us well-informed. I looked anyway, of course – and from what I understood of the medical jargon his prospects didn’t seem great. Ignore what’s there, Chris said, the doctor reckons the treatment’s better now.
‘It’s one of the good ones to get.’
This is the time when I started going on those walks through the deserted night land – where I glimpsed that silent, white-haired old woman – to try and clear the thoughts convulsing around my head. And to be away from Dad, whose all-consuming sorrow was so difficult to witness. Who himself was trying to reconcile, I suppose, how to cope with a slowly dying wife (because that is what she was) and an eldest son about to embark on various treatments and operations from which there might not be a way back.
I’d stopped reading ghost stories by this point. Suddenly they didn’t seem as entertaining.
Who is this who is coming?
Jonathan Miller’s 1968 adaptation of James’s story for the BBC arts series Omnibus curtailed its title to Whistle and I’ll Come To You. The stripping out of the flourish of the original’s Burns-inspired name is mirrored in the film’s pared-down, black-and-white scenes, filmed on the cliffs at Dunwich and in the marram-guarded dunes of Waxham on the north-east corner of the Norfolk coastline. Where James’s story playfully examines the nature of our belief in the irrational (though allowing the possibility of the existence of things beyond everyday comprehension), Miller’s take is very much a psychoanalytical one that transforms Parkin – renamed from Parkins in James’s original – into an ageing don on the threshold of a nervous breakdown. Indeed, as the film progresses we start to hear, in voiceover, the expressed thoughts of Parkin – played by Michael Hordern – who, as he lies unable to sleep, turns over the phrase ‘Who is this who is coming?’ in his head.
I love the look of the film, especially the scenes where Parkin pokes around the clifftop graves and uncovers the cursed whistle; I can’t decide if the headstones are elaborate props or if, in 1968, more memorials were still to tumble to the beach below. Hordern’s performance, with his blank expression, his verbal tics, his indifference to and difficulty with engaging other people in the hotel, is particularly adroit. And yet, I find I prefer the playfulness and the pacing of James’s original. For me, its terrors stand the test of time better than Miller’s interpretation, which leaves us reasonably certain that what we are witnessing is the mental collapse of a vulnerable man. (James would argue that a good ghost story can ‘leave a loophole for a natural explanation’, but that such a way out should ‘be so narrow as not to be quite practicable’.)
That said, when the sheets rise from the spare bed in the darkness of Hordern’s room – accompanied by his guttural, open-mouthed baby sounds – their simple horror is still perhaps the most powerful image of a ghost in any film I have seen.
There is another, later tale by James also set in coastal Suffolk. ‘A Warning to the Curious’ was the title piece of the collection of the same name dating from 1925, the final of the four separate volumes put out during James’s lifetime (though his Collected Ghost Stories of 1931 did include four lesser works which had not appeared in book form before). The story, which takes place in the fictional Seaburgh, a counterfeit copy of the upmarket Suffolk resort of Aldeburgh, shares a number of parallels with ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. A notable addition is a fragment of invented folklore about the last of the three lost crowns of East Anglia. Buried in a secluded tree-lined hillock away from the town, the legendary object is said to confer protection on the nation in times of trouble – a little like Machen’s Agincourt archers in ‘The Bowmen’.
‘A Warning to the Curious’ is a good story, and on the face of it contains greater menace than James’s earlier tale in the shape of the crown’s guardian, the spirit of the late William Ager, who is capable of inflicting more than bed-wetting night fears (we can see the potential source of John Gordon’s subconscious inspiration for The House on the
Brink). But it does feel a bit of a rehash, and I can’t help wondering whether by this point in his life James, saddened by the toll of the Great War on the young men of Cambridge and Eton (and the more general toll that the passage of time was taking on his friends and contemporaries), had his best stories, his best days, behind him.*
Lawrence Gordon Clark’s adaptation of ‘A Warning to the Curious’, the second in the BBC’s then annual ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand, was broadcast during the final hour of Christmas Eve, 1972.† It’s a very different beast from Jonathan Miller’s film, and one I have come to prefer; in fact, I’d choose it over James’s original text. Clark’s version doesn’t include the elements of scepticism about the supernatural that pervade Miller’s piece – the rational, very much open ‘loophole’ – and keeps the ghost ‘malevolent or odious’ as James would deem necessary. The setting does, though, shift Seaburgh from Suffolk to Norfolk, the harbour and pine woods of Wells-next-the-Sea – where we often went for the day with my parents and my nan, and where Chris and I would subsequently spend many hours birding – providing the main locations. Later in the film we see a church and lighthouse; these distinctive landmarks were filmed further east along the coast around the collapsing cliffs of Happisburgh, where in 2013, archaeologists uncovered a set of 800,000-year-old hominid footprints – the most ancient marks of primitive humanity found outside Africa.
Wells Woods manages to look both beautiful and menacing in Clark’s A Warning to the Curious, shot in grainy colour 16mm beneath a wintry sun that causes the near-sculptural trees to cast long, sinister shadows. As for the night-time scenes, they rival The Blair Witch Project for the creepiness of their glimpsed torchlit horrors among the shadowed trunks. Although its seemingly unending expanse of sandy beach – which features in the opening sequence and again, briefly, to devastating effect at its climax – is now, even in the heart of the winter, a busy tourist destination, the belt of dune-strengthening, Victorian-planted Corsican pines can be disconcerting once you get away from the crowds; I certainly remember feeling unsettled as I wandered around on my own birdwatching as a teenager while Mum and Dad pottered about the town. Pine needles smother the thin grey soil, the knotted trunks and thick canopy block out the daylight and, apart from a few hard-to-see goldcrests and coal tits calling listlessly from somewhere above, the woods often appear lifeless. And though the narrowness of the strip of trees means you shouldn’t become disoriented, it’s still easy to lose your bearings and find you’ve walked much further than you intended.
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