Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  Wood engraving of a merman by the sea. Wellcome Collection. CC BY

  Years before, at Bournemouth on a summer holiday, Dad had helped me to make a merman of my own. We rendered him from the beach itself, using seaweed for his hair and shells for his eyes. Two other boys I had been playing with assisted – they were both a little older. While I fetched seawater to help sculpt the sand, I could see they were giggling and pointing: they had given the figure breasts (one of them whispered to me later what they’d done). When Dad saw, he was annoyed at how, to him, the innocence of the moment had been sullied. He didn’t realise I was aware something had happened, but I was. I stayed back, watching, as he spoke to them, both boys looking suitably chastised as they flattened down the figure’s chest.

  ‘Let’s get this merman finished then,’ he said cheerily, as I returned with my bucket.

  Each evening on that final Suffolk holiday my brother rang for an update from the village phone box. As the week wore on it must have dawned on us that Mum and Dad would not be coming. They were checking his heart in the hospital, I recall being told, blithely expecting the whole thing would end up being a warning episode of angina brought on by all the recent stress. We returned home the following Saturday, having enjoyed the break to an extent – though it was nothing like the same without them both there, nothing like the same when we couldn’t take the mickey out of something Dad had said, or some awful tank top he’d insisted on wearing. He was still in hospital when we got back: at his bedside I tried to tell him about the birds we’d seen and the places we’d visited, but he was distracted, understandably, his interest not rising above the perfunctory.

  Days after he’d first been admitted (months if you count his unexplained pre-Christmas episode), the doctors finally decided what was the matter with him. He had lymphoma. Not the type Chris had.

  The bad one.

  They didn’t seem to have a plan to do anything about it and Dad came home, in escalating discomfort; within a day or two we’d made him a makeshift bedroom in the front room so he wouldn’t have to climb the stairs. And I remember picking up a stash of nutritional milky drinks from the chemist, because his appetite had eroded to next to nothing. Not that he wanted those either.

  I undertook increasingly long, late-night walks through the sodium-lit streets. And still – and this seems incredible to me now, makes me wish I could fucking shake my seventeen-year-old self and tell him not to waste one minute of that dwindling time that could’ve been spent with Dad – Chris and I went on birding trips. Though, in fairness, I suppose they were a way of distracting ourselves from the awful reality.

  Because the reality was like some nightmare out of weird fiction. Like the chaotic, unspeakable horrors in a William Hope Hodgson or H. P. Lovecraft story.

  Dad was readmitted to the Pilgrim. Perhaps finally they’d start treating him? I would go after school, sometimes taking Mum and Chris myself, because by this point I had L-plates and was learning to drive. And we would sit there by his bedside, among all the tubes and drips, but it was hard to chat because he was in so much pain. So broken. One day he asked me to dampen a flannel and dab it on his forehead because he was unbearably hot. The man in the bed next to the sink I had to use looked at me kindly; he had, I suppose now, a good idea of what was happening, of how it would end. Another time, after we arrived hoping for something positive, Dad told us that the chap opposite had flailed up in the middle of the night before crashing onto the floor – the huddle of doctors couldn’t revive him. And one afternoon, the paper I brought up featured a front page headline that Bernie Winters, the comedian, had died of stomach cancer – not an item of news, in hindsight, that Dad needed to read. Instead I tried talking about cricket, or football, or whatever safe subject I could think of. But all of it was hollow noise.

  Who is this who is coming?

  They cut you open, then. To see what, if anything, could be done. Afterwards your belly was distended, with an ugly, jagged scar. It seemed an unnecessary, cruel act. Too little, too late.

  Like already you were a cadaver to practise upon.

  They put you in your own room on the ground floor. Though it was not just the one room, because I remember your bed facing in different ways, with different views of the real world which must have lain outside, so they must have kept moving you around – unless the view itself magically changed. You were barely talking by this point, transformed into an emaciated silent stranger in six weeks. They hooked you up to a cube-shaped machine that churned some yellowish, viscous fluid through your veins, which the doctors said offered you a last hope. We brought you in a fan because the room was so warm, leaving it there afterwards for someone else to feel its dubious benefit.

  At school one morning (I still went in each day, still carried on as if nothing at all was amiss, telling none of my friends what was happening), my geography teacher fetched me out of an English lesson and took me home, because Mum had rung and we needed to get over to the hospital: the doctors were saying it would not be long (Chris must have been away). It was the first sizeable drive I’d done since I passed my test less than a week before, but we made it there intact. This time you were in the room at the back with the hawthorn hedge outside. Its branches shifted in the wind, silhouetted through the window against the bright May sky. And I held your hand – which was clammy, yet bony as a skeleton’s – as the machine pumped its strange fluid, and as you lay there, looking up occasionally with a terrified expression before your eyes closed again. I thought it would be better, now, if you were to die. Because you looked so very ill.

  A nearly-ghost bowed by sorrows.

  But nothing changed, and we came home in the darkness. I started to cry as I waited to turn across the traffic into the top of our road, and I could not stop myself, because I remembered that I hadn’t brought you anything for your birthday, which had been only a few days before.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mum said. ‘He knows. He doesn’t mind, silly. There’s nothing he would want.’

  And the next morning I was brushing my teeth ready to go back again when Chris and Mum came in and said through suffocating sobs that the hospital had called. We clung together for support, crowded beside the turquoise sink.

  Who is this who is coming?

  I am writing this with streaming eyes, my face, I should imagine, red and contorted. I think of a scene late on in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five – the copy my brother was to give me seven months later for my eighteenth birthday – where Billy Pilgrim is moved to rivers of tears by the performance of a barbershop quartet singing a song called ‘That Old Gang of Mine’. He looks awful, and his wife asks him if he is all right (you must bear in mind the horrors of the war he has witnessed, how he has become unanchored from the traditional rules of time and space). He’s okay, he says, the reason he is so affected by the banal ditty a mystery to him: ‘He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.’

  I had not forgotten my own buried secret.

  Only I hadn’t wanted to blow the whistle.

  Not wanted, till now, to hear its sound of infinite distance.

  Not wanted to picture you lying there that morning – your eyelids pulled shut, your skin tinged blue, your mouth agape – when the three of us came to see you for the last time.

  * One of the stories contained with James’s last standalone collection is most certainly a reworking of a previous tale (‘The Mezzotint’, one of his finest). James modestly admits as much in a brief afterword to ‘The Haunted Doll’s House’: ‘I can only hope that there is enough of variation in the setting to make the repetition of the motif tolerable.’

  † The first, The Stalls of Barchester (shot on location at Norwich Cathedral), aired on Christmas Eve, 1971, with my introduction to M. R. James, Lost Hearts, following in 1973.

  ‡ The
main supporting actor, Clive Swift, does a fine job in the role of Paxton’s fellow hotel guest Dr Black. Two decades on he would play Hyacinth Bucket’s put-upon husband in Keeping Up Appearances – it feels somewhat incongruous that both of the film’s leads would end up becoming best known for their roles in two cosy English sitcoms.

  § The same huge table – ‘at which thirty people could have been seated with no difficulty’ – is described by Dr Selwyn in The Emigrants.

  ¶ Christine later confirms that the book’s photos are not of her garden and that Kimberley Hall could indeed be a good candidate, though there is no shortage of walled estates in Norfolk and Suffolk that might have provided Sebald’s anonymous photographic backdrop.

  ** To compound the alliterative name confusion, Selwyn’s visiting entomologist friend is called Edwin Elliott.

  †† In Grant Gee’s elegiac 2012 documentary film Patience (After Sebald), a still of the writer is cleverly dissolved over the top of this smoke ghost to emphasise the resemblance.

  Chapter 10

  NOT REALLY NOW NOT ANY MORE

  I interrupt a pair of elderly, grey-haired women who are eating their picnic to check whether I’ve reached Stormy Point.

  ‘It’s Alderley Edge.’

  I smile, half in frustration. ‘I mean the name of this actual spot.’

  ‘I only live five minutes away and I haven’t a clue …’

  ‘And I’m just a visitor,’ chips in her companion. ‘Ask someone with a dog. They’ll know.’

  Thanking them, I head to where the bare sandstone lips over the tree-lined cliff and fiddle with the leaflet I picked up earlier, studying it to make sense of how far I’ve come. Seeing the slit in the shelf of rock behind me, I conclude this must indeed be Stormy Point, the location in the early part of Alan Garner’s first children’s novel The Weirdstone of Brisingamen where the threat facing the pair finds form and the two young protagonists are surrounded by a horde of goblin-like svart-alfar. The creatures emerge from the cleft in the pink-tinged stone known as the Devil’s Grave, which I’d previously managed to overlook. Today, unlike in the book, iron railings guard the opening that leads down into the copper workings; peering through their prison bars all I see is a litter of dried-out oak leaves and discarded fag and crisp packets.*

  In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner’s 2018 memoir looking back to his childhood growing up on the plain directly below Alderley Edge, he tells of the time his father brought him to the Devil’s Grave one Sunday and explained to him how, if you ran three times anti-clockwise (‘widdershins’) round the square stone known as the Devil’s Gravestone, Lucifer himself would emerge. Alan excitedly asks his dad if he can try, before proceeding to enact the ritual – exactly what I too would have done as a boy:

  A screech came out of the ground beneath my feet, and screams and groans and cackling and moaning, and pebbles flirted from under the stone and out of the trench, and sand and bits of twig, and there was a stamping sound in the cave, and more screeches.

  Hilariously (though I’m sure to him it wasn’t while it was taking place), the young Alan had been set up by his father and uncle in a well-planned prank: ‘They reckoned it was time, and I was old enough to learn the Edge.’

  Published in 1960, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was Garner’s first book, drawing on his family’s centuries-old local roots and his love of the surrounding countryside – the novel focuses on stories about this geological outcrop in the Cheshire landscape a few miles south of Manchester that were relayed to the young Alan by his grandfather. Stories of a farmer on his way to Macclesfield to sell a white mare being stopped, at Thieves’ Hole, by a bearded old man who wishes to purchase the horse, an offer the farmer refuses, thinking he’ll do better at the market. ‘None will buy,’ says the tall newcomer. ‘And I shall await you here at sunset.’ The prediction proves correct. Returning that evening the farmer meets the striking figure once more and agrees to the deal. He follows the buyer to Stormy Point, then to nearby Saddlebole. Here, the stranger touches the staff he’s carrying onto one of the giant boulders in the hillside, which splits apart with a sound like thunder. The bearded man, clearly a wizard of impressive magical powers, leads the farmer down into the tunnels below where an army of time-frozen knights lie sleeping beside their steeds; the farmer’s horse will provide the missing piece for the final horseless slumberer.

  According to Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson’s comprehensive survey of English legends, The Lore of the Land, versions of this story date back to at least the eighteenth century, the first print reference appearing in the Manchester Mail of 1805. The local curate of Alderley from 1753 to 1776, the Reverend Shrigley, apparently also relayed the tale of the wizard and the farmer, stating it to be true and to have happened some eighty years before. In Garner’s retelling of the legend, which opens his novel, one hundred and forty knights are ready to come to England’s aid in time of need; in comparison, a Victorian historian spoke of ‘nine hundred and ninety-nine horses that are standing in its caverns’. Earlier versions do not identify these guardian warriors, but the Victorians, with their love of all things Arthurian, could not help but see King Arthur and his slumbering soldiers. In a letter to a friend, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote in 1838: ‘If you were on Alderley Edge, the hill between Cheshire and Derbyshire, I could point out to you the very entrance to the cave where Arthur and his knights lie in their golden armour till the day when England’s peril shall summon them to her rescue.’ A comparable story is told in several places around England, and at Arthur Machen’s Caerleon. The similarity of the tale’s theme to that of Machen’s ‘The Bowmen’ or M. R. James’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is telling too, while Susan Cooper’s The Grey King, which would follow fifteen years after Garner’s book, also features sleeping subterranean guardians beneath a hillside who wait in readiness to come to humanity’s aid.

  I first read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen when I was at primary school, around the same time I was enjoying Tolkien’s The Hobbit and shortly before I embarked upon The Lord of the Rings. I used to stay up way later than I was meant to after I went to bed, thinking my parents couldn’t see the light from my reading lamp through the gap of the doorframe when they came upstairs; once I almost caused a fire because, on hearing Dad’s ascent, I quickly took off my polyester pyjama top and smothered it over the bulb to deaden the glow. A burning smell and smoke soon started to emanate from the fabric, which now sported a melted hole.

  Garner’s abortive spell studying Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford coincided with Tolkien’s literature professorship in the city (at Merton) – he once found himself in the same room as the creator of Middle Earth, alongside C. S. Lewis, another icon of children’s fantasy fiction. Garner left after his second year, to write The Weirdstone of Brisingamen – being amused to find out decades later that Tolkien had apparently read his book and hated its ‘trivial use of language’. And although his Edge-set novel shares with Tolkien Gandalf-like wizards, goblins, elves, magical charms and journeying quests, the thing about Garner’s debut that made it stand apart for me, and which I loved when I first read it, was its blurring of the real and the fantastic: even though I’d never been to Alderley, I instinctively realised it was an actual location. Indeed, all of the book’s place names except the fabled cavern beneath the hillside, Fundindelve, can, according to Garner, be found in the local vicinity (or at least on old Cheshire maps). That in turn lent the possibility to me as a young reader that other episodes within its pages might also be true.

  It’s a sunny April Monday morning when I set out onto the six-hundred-foot Edge. Despite another local legend Alan Garner tells of that says no birds sing there, plenty of noise is coming from the trees on my visit, even though they are not yet in leaf and the majority of summer migrants have yet to return. Although the weather is pleasant and warm, I’m still surprised by the number of people who are strolling, or running, around the tracks that meande
r among the predominant covering of beeches and Scots pines. Now I have my bearings and don’t feel the need to ask specific directions, every other person I see seems to be exercising a dog. Most seem too smartly dressed for a woodland walk, perhaps reflecting the large proportion of expensive, oversized SUVs and sports cars in the parking area – the village of Alderley Edge, down the hill beyond the Wizard of Edge pub, is regarded as one of the most upmarket, gentrified outer suburbs from which to commute into Manchester.

  Never having visited before, and being such a fan of the two Alderley books from childhood, I’m slightly disappointed by my surroundings. It’s not because of how they look: they’re beautiful, and nearly every bit as filled with mystery – with their enigmatic rocks, sheer cliffs, and sudden mineshafts – as I would expect; in one spot I stand transfixed by the carved graffiti that peppers a reddish sandstone outcrop, trying to discern a meaning from the timeworn jumble of letters.

  However, having been in the gift of the National Trust since 1948, the Edge is far more managed, far less wild than how it is fixed in my mind. And although menace and adventure probably still do exist here, they’re harder to picture than in the pre-war landscape Garner was looking back to and writing about as a young man in his early twenties, during the second half of the 1950s. Today’s clement weather and the time of year don’t help – a duller morning later in the season with more leaves on the trees would close me in and insulate me from the people out casually enjoying the views and fresh air.

  I begin to wish I hadn’t come.

  In the afternoon I drive ten miles to the south-east, to the fringes of the Peak District and the setting for The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’s climax. Despite the traffic noise drifting from the nearby A54, with no one else in sight this feels altogether more in keeping with the landscape of the book – and the landscape of my imagination. At the far side of a bright-green pasture of spring grass rises a rounded hummock fenced off from the grazing sheep. It’s crowned with beeches, bare-leaved and reddish against the whiteness of the sky. I peer at it through my binoculars – signs on the gate in front state there is no access. I consider traipsing across the field in any case, but think better of it; for one thing, it would be wrong to disturb the mother ewes and their lambs. Besides, I don’t need to get any closer to appreciate the scene – the view from where I am is enough, and through the glass held to my eyes I can make out the dark gritstone pillar, thought to date from Anglo-Saxon times, that crests the mystical hill. This is Clulow Cross (spelled Cluelow on my map), the location at the end of the book where the dwarf Durathror makes his heroic last stand against the forces of darkness.