Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  The adaptation of A Warning to the Curious features a wonderful central performance from the late Peter Vaughan, who at this point in his career was best known for his role in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs – though he later would gain greater recognition for playing the elderly butler, Stevens senior, in the film version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and as the comically menacing criminal godfather Grouty from the sitcom Porridge. Vaughan makes Paxton a sympathetic figure, aided by changes in the script from the original that transform him into a lower-middle-class clerk who’s recently been made redundant, rendering his search for the crown more forgivable.‡

  Another major change to the story is the film’s opening. During the Great War, twelve years before the action of the present, we witness a previous archaeologist’s attempt to dig up and steal the artefact; as a result he is hacked to death with a billhook by William Ager, the guardian of the legendary object, who at this point is still flesh and blood. I think this scene perhaps reveals a little too much too soon, though Ager undoubtedly presents a scary-looking figure – albeit the violence we watch him carrying out is more suited to Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre than something we’d normally expect from one of James’s avenging angels. But the altered opening does give us a memorable line absent from the original, as the consumptive Ager rasps from the top of the pine-clad hillock at his imminent first victim, his cloak fluttering ominously in the breeze: ‘No diggin’ ’ere!’

  Paxton, of course, comes to discover where the crown is hidden, though the cost to him is prodigious, causing him later in James’s original to lament, ‘… the worst of it is I don’t know how to put it back.’

  Digging up the past can be a dangerous pursuit.

  When W. G. Sebald moved to Norfolk in 1970, to take up a post as a lecturer in European literature at the University of East Anglia, he lived, to begin with, in the small market town of Wymondham, my own home now for several years. Enquiring as to the whereabouts of Sebald’s residence, in a strange coincidence I discover that the rooms he initially took were within a house owned by a friend of mine, which I was due to be visiting for the first time later that week, to attend a meeting of a local arts group. The building is a grand, late-Georgian mansion in view of the west tower of the town’s looming medieval abbey.

  I arrive early and am greeted by my friend Christine at the door; the pair of us head inside and sit at the oversize table that dominates the high-ceilinged entrance hall, where we begin to talk about the man who lived here, for a short spell, almost half a century ago.§ Christine never knew Sebald, having moved in with her husband a few months after the German writer left. However, the story soon becomes far more convoluted than I had anticipated, as I learn that the house the narrator and his wife Clara (not the name of Sebald’s actual wife) come to in the opening chapter of The Emigrants, Sebald’s first ‘prose fiction’ work, is clearly modelled on this one and not, as described in the book, a chateau-like residence in the small town of Hingham, some seven miles to the west. (The key clinching architectural detail, now demolished, was the former presence of a strange bathroom on stilts, accessed across a kind of footbridge – Christine shows me where its iron supports used to stand.) Moreover, it transpires that the character of Dr Henry Selwyn, the subject of the book’s first chapter, is in many aspects a thinly disguised and easily recognisable version of Christine’s father-in-law (their names are very different, and of course, being Sebald, it is not an accurate biographical portrait). He too was a rural doctor, and his wife, Christine’s mother-in-law – who is rather unflatteringly painted by Sebald – was indeed a Swiss woman of redoubtable business acumen responsible for the household’s wealth, like her equivalent in the novel.

  Christine tells me about the authentic Dr Selwyn, and as she talks he comes alive again within the walls he would have once walked. Her father-in-law was a polymathic classical scholar, oarsman, amateur dramatist and keen naturalist (Sebald’s initial encounter with the grass-counting Dr Selwyn is not far wide of the mark), never happier in his final years than when growing the delicious fruits and vegetables that Sebald’s not-quite-himself narrator so vividly describes. Later, as Christine walks me around the extensive grounds, pointing out the vegetable patch that has now been left to go to seed, she herself takes on the role of Dr Selwyn, presenting me with two gnarled, furry-skinned quinces to take home; they do indeed prove to be delicious. The book locates a tennis court to the side of the house, but the photograph of it Sebald uses in The Emigrants was not taken here – the wall and trees are wrong, and the court is aligned in the opposite direction. However, I’m more disappointed to find that the castellated, flint-studded folly depicted as the doctor’s almost full-time retreat – Sebald includes one of his characteristic grainy photographs of the fairy-tale structure – never existed here, and that the actual corner of the garden given over to him is occupied by a rather more mundane brick outbuilding, which is gradually being subsumed by ivy and other creepers.

  One Sunday afternoon last winter I stepped out of my own home, a ten-minute walk away, for what I had planned to be a quick circuit of the town. However, for some reason I ended up pressing onwards much further than I intended, following the course of the small river, the Tiffey, downstream along its valley to the imposing Kimberley Hall – its grounds landscaped by Capability Brown – which stands two miles north of the town. Once into the estate I walked alongside a bare-leafed wood into which mysterious deep, brick-lined pits were dug, perhaps, I wondered, part of an old drainage system. (Though, briefly, I also questioned if there was a more outlandish or darker purpose to which they had ever been put.) A rusting iron ladder was angled into the dark sludge at the bottom of one of them, begging the thought as to why anyone would want to climb down: presumably it was there more as a means of escape? In any case, I did not investigate.

  A line of poplars inadequately decorated with giant pom-poms of mistletoe straddled the sheep field crossed by the path, and at some point I passed through the walled gardens of the hall which were, if not exactly derelict, then decidedly unkempt; they seemed like a location from a book or film – at the time they brought to my mind the lost domain of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. Looking today at the photographs of Dr Selwyn’s gardens in the first section of The Emigrants and comparing them to my own taken on that afternoon, I now think that Kimberley may well be where Sebald’s images were obtained; certainly, at least, the one that shows, through out-of-focus foliage, the outbuildings and greenhouse.¶

  The whole atmosphere of the place, with its air of winter decay and the oddness and emptiness of the various locations – I saw no one else on my walk – put me in mind of Sebald. This feeling was heightened when, on retracing my route back towards the town, I found the initials ‘W. G.’ scored into a fence post next to a stile I had to climb; coming from the other direction I’d not noticed it. I wondered whether this was evidence that the writer had passed this same way years before, but almost as soon as the thought came I had to dismiss it, because below the two letters was inscribed the year ‘2008’, meaning that if Max Sebald had added it then it must have been carved by the hand of his white-moustached ghost.

  As well as the semi-fictionalised Selwyn and his wife Elli, the opening chapter of The Emigrants also features the house’s maid, Elaine – and it should come as no surprise that she too had a real-life counterpart. The similarly named Eileen was of Anglo-Indian origin and came to the family, in somewhat mysterious circumstances, during the 1950s. From what Christine remembers, she seems an even more interesting and enigmatic subject than the few lines of description given over to the novel’s stand-in suggest. For instance, Eileen would barter for goods with the local shopkeepers (on more than one occasion she was picked up by the police for alleged shoplifting, before being bailed by her no-nonsense Swiss employer), and would loudly lament the length of her working days and the conditions in which she had to live – a mischievous, dramatic p
ublic act she loved to perform, but which had little basis, Christine assures me, in reality. One thing Eileen, who died over a decade ago, did share with Sebald’s Elaine was her collection, which takes me back to that creepy New Forest guest house bedroom my brother and I had shared:

  Only once did I manage to snatch a glance, and saw that her small room was full of countless dolls, meticulously dressed, most of them wearing something on their heads, standing or sitting around or lying on the bed where Elaine herself slept – if, that is, she ever slept at all, and did not spend the entire night crooning softly as she played with her dolls.

  Christine admits that when The Emigrants came out she was annoyed by the way Sebald had stolen, without attribution, a version of the family’s history – his words often misrepresenting the people concerned – and particularly by the portrayal of her mother-in-law (Sebald’s Elli) who, throughout our conversation, she touchingly refers to as Granny. At the time of the book’s publication Christine’s niece was especially upset, and that made Christine herself take against Sebald. The passage of years, however, has softened that sentiment, and she no longer has strong feelings about the subject.

  She fetches two photographs of Dr Selwyn’s doppelgänger: one of him in, I would guess, his sixties, and another as a much younger man – a handsome figure with an exotic air. Ironically, Selwyn’s stand-in did not have a hidden, foreign past (nor an earlier interest in mountaineering): he was, like M. R. James, the son of a Suffolk vicar, and likewise educated at Cambridge – in his case Sidney Sussex College. In real life the true emigrants of the house were its women, over whose presence Sebald rather skims. The similarity of the names he bestows upon them, Elli and Elaine, adds to the sense that he is conflating the two, deliberately trying to confuse the reader.**

  I’ve been skirting around the key passage in The Emigrants’ opening chapter, but feel the time is right to address it.

  ‘Can I ask what happened to your father-in-law?’

  ‘He killed himself,’ Christine says, almost matter-of-factly, as if the subject is both ancient history and common knowledge – and I suppose if I were older and had lived in the town longer I would be aware of the story.

  ‘Did it happen the way Sebald writes?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘A shotgun.’

  His reasons, in so far as we can try to second-guess the mind of another, were not the tale of regret that the doctor shares with Sebald’s narrator at their last meeting (though the opening chapter of The Emigrants does, correctly, capture a sense of the fractured relationship the real Selwyn’s counterpart had with his wife). Christine’s father-in-law had been plagued by severe arthritis and associated health problems for a number of years. As a doctor he would have known his prognosis, Christine tells me, known he would not be getting better. Doctors, she says, have a higher rate of suicide.

  As we sit at the vast table contemplating the way things end, the silence is scattered by a rap on the door. The other members of our meeting have arrived.

  Earlier, I said that events in my own story were going to get worse.

  Perhaps by now you might have guessed how my father was to meet his maker? All his gut-wrenching sorrow when my brother was given his diagnosis. All his built-up stress from years of trying to reconcile himself to my mother’s illness.

  You would forgive a man in such circumstances for taking his own life. For stepping into the space below from a tall headland, or for putting an antique shotgun to his head like Sebald’s Dr Selwyn. Looking back, I think I might have forgiven my father too if, at that critical point, confronted with the despair of what was happening around him, he had decided he could no longer bear to watch things unravel.

  But that is not what happened.

  My father had no agency in what was to follow. He was as helpless as the German who, at the time of his death, was being tipped by some as a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In December 2001, only a few miles from his home, Max Sebald suffered a massive heart attack at the wheel of his car, which ran into the path of an oncoming truck. In 2005, close to the point on the A146 where the accident occurred, the artist Jeremy Millar set off, in an act of ritual, a firework to commemorate Sebald’s passing. He photographed the event, interested in the Sebaldian transience of the liberated smoke. Four of the images he took showed a rising pale plume beside the roadside railings and, if we trust it has not been manipulated, the last of these can perhaps be seen to contain (depending on how your brain wishes to process it) a face-like outline that sports a wide, white moustache.†† Though when I stop at the spot en route to Dunwich I, unsurprisingly, see nothing.

  Afterwards, on my way home, I visit Sebald’s final resting place in the village of Framingham Earl. It’s late when I get there and the day has almost gone. I’m about to give up when I find it – the last grave I examine, cast in shadow by the adjacent Norman church, the overhead branches of an enormous pine tree, and a sculpted, globe-shaped bush.

  Across the top of the headstone a row of rounded pebbles has been balanced – almost identical in their shape and smoothness to the stones on Dunwich beach. ‘W.G. MAX SEBALD’ reads the name, below which are his dates and an arrangement of lilies that steals the last of the light.

  During the opening months of 1991 my brother was admitted to the Pilgrim Hospital for various procedures for his Hodgkin’s disease. Dad and I drove through the darkness to see him shortly after he’d had the lump in his neck excised. (I don’t know why Mum wasn’t with us – perhaps she was already there, waiting at his bedside?) Chris was in a ward high in the hospital, to which we had to take the oversized lift. There he was, among a room of old men, a scared twenty-two-year-old left groggy by anaesthetic. By early April, however, he appeared remarkably on the mend. He was fit to go on holiday, though Suffolk must have seemed scant consolation compared to the cancelled African safari he was supposed at that point to be enjoying.

  As it transpired, it was my father who failed to make it to the coast.

  My recollection of the exact timing of what took place is sketchy; I suppose I’ve blocked much of it out. A day or two before we were due to depart Dad began complaining of abdominal pains. He identified a kind of firm lumpiness, a mass, he could feel in his chest; I recall him asking Chris and me to see if we thought it was normal. At his insistence we both prodded it, reluctantly, but couldn’t discern anything that, to us, seemed unusual. I can’t now remember if he saw the doctor then – I think he might have done and been told not to worry, it was probably stress – but the sensation wouldn’t go away. When it came to the Saturday we were meant to be setting off for Suffolk we went in two cars, because Chris’s then girlfriend was coming too, along with our cousin. Dad must have been driving Mum, who by this time because of the loss of her sight in one eye and the onset of her epilepsy could no longer operate a vehicle. I’m not sure precisely what happened, but I know we didn’t get far – to the brooding pinewoods of Thetford Forest, in fact – when Dad had to stop, because the pain was making it impossible to continue. Various scenarios were debated and it was decided we should proceed as planned, with Dad and Mum waiting there, in a woodland car park, for my aunt and uncle (who we called from a telephone box) to relay them back to Lincolnshire. We hoped – I think assumed – Dad would feel better in a couple of days and the two of them would then join us.

  Genuinely I think we did, though it seems naïve and ridiculous now.

  The four of us carried on to the Suffolk coast, and my parents were ferried back to the flatlands. Soon after – that night, or if not, the following morning – Dad was admitted to the hospital where Chris had recently resided. We spent the week birdwatching: the highlights recorded in my bird diary were an exotic hoopoe in the dunes at Kessingland – the location of an earlier, unrecollected family holiday from when I was a toddler (I have here its yellow box of slides) – and watching a great skua, a dark-brown piratical bonxie, muscle its way north past
Dunwich’s decaying cliffs.

  During the week I remember, too, climbing Orford’s castle, where, during the twelfth-century reign of Henry II, local fishermen out in the estuary were said to have caught a Wild Man – a merman – in their nets. He was naked and bearded, and seemed to prefer raw fish to other food. They imprisoned him in the castle and tortured him – the same polygonal keep features as a place of cruelty at the brutal climax of Witchfinder General – though the creature did not appear capable of speech (at least, not in any language they could decipher). Eventually, his captors began to view him as less of a threat (either a supernatural one, or as a foreign spy), growing tired of the rigmarole of guarding him. Their routines became more slapdash and somehow he slipped back unnoticed to the sea.