Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  The hummock has the archetypal appearance of an ancient barrow. With its grove of sacred beeches it reminds me of similar sites that dot the South Downs and Thames Valley, like the isolated hilltops captured in a number of early works by one of the great English artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Paul Nash, who talked lyrically about the genius loci – the spirit of the place – paints this enigmatic sense into his 1912 depictions of Wittenham Clumps and the neighbouring Brightwell Barrow (at the time located in Berkshire, today in Oxfordshire). He refers to its landscape as ‘full of strange enchantment. On every hand it seemed a beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten.’

  From this distance Clulow’s cross among the trees reminds me, just a little, of the monolith from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or of some antique phallic symbol that I could imagine Summerisle’s residents dancing around in The Wicker Man. Indeed, later, while looking up its possible purpose on the internet, I find theories are in circulation about it being a fertility stone (though most sources suggest it acted as a more mundane wayside marker) and that women wishing to conceive perhaps would circle the base of the cross in a ritualistic fashion.† Certainly, even from my vantage point, the spot has a definite sense of enchantment, and I can see why Garner places it at such a pivotal moment.

  Six miles to the north-east, as the Wild Hunt flies – this northern European folk tradition features prominently in Garner’s second book, as it does in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising – I come to another atmosphere-laden location where I’m the only person present. Behind me lies Errwood Reservoir, barely more than an idea when Alan Garner’s follow-up to the adventures of Colin and Susan, The Moon of Gomrath, was published in 1963, being completed a few years later to provide a new drinking supply for Stockport. The waters that nowadays engulf this stretch of the Goyt Valley are uninviting, with pine plantations running down to the far bank from the yellowed slopes above. There’s little life, just a pair of Canada geese that are picking at some clumps of sedge on the near shoreline. I head away from the drowned world of former farms concealed beneath the calm surface, following a well-worn track up the west side of the valley that leads to the ruins of Errwood Hall. The cobbled path rises steadily and soon enters an area of mixed woodland and introduced rhododendrons, crowding the gullied stream on my left that feeds into the reservoir. I proceed until, on a levelled-out platform above me, sprawl the remains of a once-grand Victorian country seat.

  Errwood was constructed around 1840 by a wealthy Manchester merchant, Samuel Grimshawe. The hall was Italianate in style, with a tall central tower, a sweeping drive and decorative fountains set among its extensive grounds; as I walk between the blackened stone remnants it’s not easy to imagine how striking – incongruous even – it would have seemed when it was built, more suited to the hills of Florence than the borderland of Derbyshire and Cheshire. Because there’s little left now to picture, only low walls, disembodied steps leading nowhere and empty archways that frame the sky. Briars twist through the stonework, and the charred residues of old bonfires scar what can be seen of the flagstone floor; during the early 1990s the site was, for a time, a popular venue for illicit late-night raves. At the boundary of the house’s footprint, on the cusp of a steep downward slope, I discover a collection of offerings: an oversized red paper-and-plastic Remembrance poppy; a withered heather seedling, its supermarket price label still attached; and a bag containing a hard-to-identify pot plant, waterlogged and dead, from which a small white teddy bear perches on a stick beside a handwritten card that reads ‘HAPPY grandmother DAY grandma’.

  Towards the end of The Moon of Gomrath, Susan visits the ruins in order to attempt to rescue her brother, who has been entrapped by the Morrigan – the shapeshifting female villain of the two books – in a spirit house in another plane that appears, in this world, only under moonlight:‡

  The moon rose a long time before it was seen, and it shot high from a cloud, an ugly slip of yellow, taking the watchers by surprise. And though the light it gave was small, and could not even dim the fires, the moment it touched the ruins they shimmered as in a heat haze, and dissolved upwards to a house. The windows poured their dead lustre on the grass, making pools of white in the flames.

  Susan’s own fate at the sequel’s end is left up in the air – although the books were conceived as having a concluding third part it was not until 2012, almost fifty years after the release of the second, that Garner produced the final book in the trilogy. Perhaps fittingly, given its themes, Boneland seems a world apart from the childish, mythic pleasures of its two predecessors. It’s a difficult, adult novel about memory and loss, with the now middle-aged Colin – a professor at the nearby Jodrell Bank astronomical observatory – trying to connect with his forgotten, intangible past.

  At Crewe Services I turn off the M6 motorway. As my phone has decided to stop offering me directions, I’m not entirely sure which way I should be heading. Using guesswork and sneaked glances at my atlas I manage to navigate to my intended destination, the village of Barthomley. On the higher ground in front of me, obscured by trees, is a parish church dedicated to a now-obscure Anglo-Saxon saint. St Bertoline’s isn’t, to my mind, a picturesque building, but this may be because its style is so different to those I’m used to in East Anglia.§ Its red sandstone blocks would look rusty in most lights, but this evening’s sunset lends the stonework a particularly Uluru-esque hue. It’s a squat structure that was rebuilt in the fifteenth century, though a church has stood here since at least Norman times – before that the name of the rise on which it’s situated, Barrow Hill, hints at an earlier sacred use. This previous incarnation as an ancient burial mound has ramifications in Alan Garner’s fifth novel Red Shift; it’s where, in the book’s Roman-era timeframe, a talismanic Bronze Age axe head is laid to rest.

  Red Shift is a difficult book that offers few concessions to its readers. When it came out it was marketed for children, yet it has the structural complexity that a modernist such as Faulkner would be proud of with the way its three interwoven storylines, mainly consisting of dialogue, merge into one another. (In the case of Red Shift, unlike with Faulkner, there aren’t even chapters to help break up and make sense of the writing.) I can’t say now how I got on when I originally tackled it, a couple of years after I’d read the Alderley Edge novels. I imagine, though, that I skimmed through it at pace, something I tended to do with more demanding titles. Certainly, it hadn’t lingered in my head like the earlier books, so when I pick it up again it’s like I’m reading it for the first time.

  History has a way of repeating itself in Alan Garner’s work. Sites in the landscape interconnect with chosen characters to ensure events (or, at least, a version of them) rerun their course, reaching through time to produce echoes of what’s gone before – or what has yet to take place. The majority of the action in Red Shift occurs close to Rudheath (near Northwich) and in the countryside around the Cheshire–Staffordshire border, converging on Barthomley Church and another distinctive local landmark, the summit of Mow Cop. Analogous incidents from three well-spaced periods come together: the present of the early 1970s (or perhaps the late 1960s – although Red Shift was published in 1973, the year of my birth, it took Garner six years to write); the English Civil War; and the Roman occupation of Britain and the lost ‘Spanish’ legion also commemorated in Rosemary Sutcliff’s children’s classic The Eagle of the Ninth. At the novel’s heart is the modern-day Tom, a bookish, troubled youth whose intense first relationship with his girlfriend, Jan, is on the verge of collapse. His angst seems to spill backwards into the past and the atrocities that two equally sensitive, isolated young men in the second and seventeenth centuries are tangled up with.

  Red Shift’s universe is an unforgiving one. It’s a bleak book (though it does emphasise the stubborn resistance of the human spirit) that explores relationships, betrayal, the British class system, humans’ propensity to repeat patterns of destructive b
ehaviour, the meaning of existence – and, probably, much more. Red Shift is a dazzling achievement that requires several readings to do it justice and attempt to decode what Garner is saying: it even includes its own scrambled message, printed on the end pages of the first edition, which can be cracked using Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alphabet Cipher’ and the keyword ‘TOMSACOLD’ – a phrase from Shakespeare’s King Lear that the main character repeats throughout:¶

  I love you. If you can read this you must care. Help me. I’m writing before we meet, because I know it’ll be the last. I’ll put the letter in your bag, so you’ll find it on the train afterwards. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. Everything’s clear, but it’s too late. I’ll be at Crewe next time. If you don’t come I’ll go to Barthomley. I love you. The smell of your hair will be in my face.

  Given the intricacy of the novel’s structure, it’s something of a surprise to find that Red Shift was adapted (by Garner himself) into a compelling one-off, eighty-four-minute film transmitted in January 1978 as a BBC Play for Today. Although Barthomley Church itself didn’t feature as one of the locations (the disused stand-in was in Yorkshire), the Cheshire landscape – particularly Mow Cop and its crowning folly – remains at the film’s heart. The adaptation is easier to navigate than the novel because, on the screen, the transitions between the different time periods become clearer. The television version also loses a few of the more extraneous episodes from the original – such as the conversations Tom (Stephen Petcher, in his major broadcast role) and Jan (Lesley Dunlop) have with the rector – as well as shedding something of the book’s undoubted, complex power.**

  Above me, a clattering of jackdaws are squabbling around the decorative pinnacles that top St Bertoline’s castle-like tower. I love these sociable small crows, though I’m always haunted by the memory (or, at least, the memory of being told about it by my mother) of the dilapidated aviary – like the one at Sebald’s Somerleyton – that stood in my home town’s public park. At the end of the 1970s its shit-spattered cages still contained various budgerigars and canaries, as well as a solitary jackdaw with a cell all to itself. It could mimic ‘hello’ and a smattering of other words, until some thoughtful soul decided to feed it a lighted cigarette.

  One of the grey-naped birds lands noisily on the algae-stained gargoyle of a lion that leers out from a corner of the turret, calling me back to the present not in approximations of English, but with its excited cries. I half-fancy it recognises me and wonder whether it could be the individual I liberated from Penda’s Fen’s Chaceley church a few days ago – until I realise how ridiculous the thought is.

  The tower plays a key role in Red Shift, for it is on its roof that the villagers – including Thomas Rowley, the finder, in this time of civil war, of the talismanic axe head – hole up against a company of Royalist troops recently returned from Ireland. Garner was inspired by a real, documented historical massacre that took place here on Christmas Eve, 1643: Cavalier soldiers set a fire at the base of the tower to smoke out those sheltering above, forcing them to come down into the churchyard. Accused of siding with the Parliamentarians, twelve of the local men were then stripped naked and executed where they stood. (In the novel, Thomas is deliberately dealt a non-fatal blow by his former friend Venables, which allows him to play dead and subsequently be taken to Rudheath, and later Mow Cop, by his wife.)

  I try the door but it’s locked, so I have to be content with meandering around outside, searching among the gravestones for a memorial to the men who were murdered here during the atrocity. There’s nothing obvious, despite several impressive headstones almost of the correct period that lie horizontal and flush with the grass.

  On the back wall of the church I notice that a small triangular fragment from one of the opaque leaded windows is missing. It’s too high for me to see through, so I hold up my camera to it. The image of the hidden interior is unnerving, revealing what appears to be a sleeping woman with a white sheet draped across her midriff: she is nothing more than lifeless alabaster, an effigy to the thirty-year-old wife of the first, and last, Marquess of Crewe.

  The flock of jackdaws on the tower calls out in sudden, metallic unison. As I look up, the whole party alights, lost to my view in the flame-orange sky.

  After leaving St Bertoline’s, I drive seven miles to the north-east, navigating my way through a maze of houses up to Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 that dominates the towering outcrop and provided the striking cover image for Red Shift’s hardback first edition. The sun is already sinking beneath the horizon as I arrive, and the evening has taken on a bitter chill, so any leisurely plans I had to explore the summit’s rocks and gullies no longer seem so appealing.

  I am, however, afforded a panorama of the Cheshire plain: the white of Jodrell Bank’s giant parabolic radio telescope is still visible in the distance but I cannot make out the Edge in the gathering darkness. Astronomy plays an important role in Red Shift (and in Boneland) – Garner’s own fifteenth-century house is situated very close to Jodrell and he has a keen amateur interest in the subject (though he’s an even more accomplished archaeologist). The book’s title, at least in part, refers to a complicated phenomenon concerned with the observable properties of starlight: essentially, as far as my rudimentary grasp of physics goes, more light is red-shifted – that is, it appears redder (of a longer wavelength) to human eyes – as it becomes more distant.

  At the conclusion of the novel, his relationship with Jan on the brink of coming to an end, Tom says prophetically: ‘Red shift. The further they go, the faster they leave. The sky’s emptying.’

  In contrast, the sky above me, above Mow Cop, is filling with new stars that flicker into my vision. I ought, I think, to search for Orion, the constellation that, early in the book, Tom and Jan promise to stare at simultaneously every night at ten o’clock whenever they’re apart.

  Only I can’t remember what it is I’m supposed to look for.

  ‘“Not haunted,” said Gwyn after a while. “More like still happening?”’

  If, when I first encountered it, Red Shift left me a little cold, then the same could not be said of Alan Garner’s previous novel, The Owl Service, which was then, and remains, my favourite of his works. I read it soon after I started at my local state grammar school (an education I shared with the book’s central character Gwyn), and it’s another challenging novel that blends the events of the past – in its case drawing on medieval Welsh folk tales – with a present doomed to repeat itself. Like Red Shift it’s a complicated piece of richly textured writing that refuses to disclose what’s going on with layers of exposition, but it is, nevertheless, more accessible than its successor. It too is a book purportedly aimed at a teenage audience, and containing strong main characters on the cusp of adulthood – but its themes and the sheer quality of the writing make it equally relevant to adult readers.

  Published in 1967, The Owl Service had a long genesis, with various factors and seeming coincidences coalescing to provide its inspiration. While Garner was working on The Weirdstone of Brisingamen he’d become familiar with the Mabinogion, a collection of stories first written down in the fourteenth-century White Book of Rhydderch and Red Book of Hergest; the tales contained within the two antiquated volumes were part of an earlier oral tradition.†† One story in particular (the fourth tale, or ‘Fourth Branch’, of the collection) interested Garner: that of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, a local lord of Gwynedd, and his adulterous wife Blodeuwedd. It’s not a straightforward narrative of a woman who marries the wrong man and then commits a desperate act to try and rectify the situation, but one complicated by layers of myth and shape-shifting magic.

  Due to a destiny placed upon the illegitimate Lleu by his mother that ‘that he shall never have a wife of the race that now inhabits this earth’, Blodeuwedd has in fact been conjured by the wizard Gwydion out of ‘the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet’ into ‘a maiden, the fairest an
d most graceful that man ever saw’. In effect it is an arranged marriage the ethereal Blodeuwedd has no say over – so we shouldn’t judge her for falling for the charms of the stag-slaying Gronw Pebyr, very much a man of flesh and bone. After meeting and becoming lovers one heady night while her husband is absent, Blodeuwedd and Gronw plot to kill Lleu, a task complicated by various magical protections his mother earlier laid on him. Lleu can only be killed by a wound delivered by a spear that has been crafted over the course of a year – as long as the craftsmanship has exclusively been carried out on Sundays. In addition, he cannot be slain either inside or outside a house, on horseback, or on foot. Today, it might be easier to get around these stipulations – the fatal blow could be struck in the office or perhaps in a car – but in medieval Wales the options were narrowed down to a particular set of vulnerabilities that the gullible Lleu readily gives up to his wife: