Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  I have a similarly vivid early recollection from my childhood which involves Thomas Hardy. Monday 27 July, 1981. I am lying on the bottom bunk of our Post House family hotel room at Heathrow the night before we embark on our maiden trip abroad, to Canada.¶ The main difference in my recollections, however, between Canada and all the holidays that went before or came after is that my mother kept a diary. The other trips are documented only by their ramshackle selection of slides housed in plastic yellow cases, or the unsorted photographs fading and crinkling in my loft – there’s no key to help me decode the places and events depicted.

  I have her diary beside me now. A white, blue-lined notebook, approximately A5 portrait in size, with a red Canadian maple leaf emblazoned on its board cover. It contains the only written words I possess from my mother, and is the only time, to my knowledge, she kept such a record – though I wonder whether her teenage self ever wrote about boys she fancied, or of an imagined future in Swinging London, a world away from the flatness of her Fenland home.

  The opening page records that the four of us ‘watched tv until 10.30’, not saying what was on. But I remember. I’ve never been able to forget: it was John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation of Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, starring Alan Bates and Julie Christie. In the semi-darkness of dawn, Bates’s shepherd, Gabriel Oak, is sleeping in his hut. The younger of his two collie sheepdogs, inexperienced and eager to please, has freed itself from its chain and is now mindlessly harrying the sheep in their clifftop pen until they knock down one of their enclosing willow hurdles and pour forwards. I was plagued by the terrible thing that happened next – I still am – even though I was only half-awake and up to that point had barely been following what was taking place on the screen in the corner of the room.

  Oak’s dog harries the sheep one by one to leap over the side of the cliff; we see them fall, see their corpses lying on the chestnut sand as white-capped breakers roll in. The shepherd is roused and rushes out, but too late; his silhouette is framed from below as he cocks his shotgun and shoots the dog dead.

  ‘We all spent a restless night,’ Mum wrote.

  In addition to occasional visits to the prehistoric remains that proliferate this part of the south-west when I was visiting my brother, our earlier unjournalled 1983 family holiday to the New Forest and its surroundings gave me my first glimpse of two of the country’s most important ancient landmarks: Stonehenge and Avebury. I don’t remember much about that initial trip to Salisbury Plain, other than perhaps being slightly underwhelmed – a feeling fostered by Dad’s obvious disappointment at no longer being able to walk among the now fenced-off megaliths. He and Mum had come to the site on their honeymoon in 1965, the pair of them posing in turn for photographs in front of the CND-graffitied stones.

  A different black-and-white view of the distinctive sarsens comes at the start of another of those old horror films I watched so keenly in my youth. Night of the Demon is loosely based on M. R. James’s ‘Casting the Runes’, though it only really retains the central concept of the original story – the idea that a curse summoning some supernatural entity that will bring death to the victim can be enacted by handing them, without their knowledge, a slip of paper bearing certain runic symbols;** likewise, the perpetrator of this dark magic will become its recipient if the transaction is reversed. Stonehenge doesn’t appear anywhere near James’s original text, but Night of the Demon opens with an atmospheric scene of the monument – a low wide-shot filmed from behind a breeze-blown tussock – accompanied by a voiceover that informs us:

  It has been written since the beginning of time, even unto these ancient stones that evil, supernatural creatures exist in a world of darkness. And it is also said: man, using the ancient power of the magic runic symbols, can call forth these powers of darkness – the demons of hell.

  Later, the lead character, an American psychologist named Dr John Holden, returns to Stonehenge to examine the writing on the stones – a scene performed in the studio, as no such symbols have ever existed there in reality (and the symbolic graffiti my parents were witness to has also long been removed). The rest of the action veers equally away from James’s original tale of academic differences taken to their extremes, but in its way is no less memorable. Niall MacGinnis’s goateed Karswell steals every scene in which he appears, becoming a much more prominent, fleshed-out character in the film.†† At one point he conjures a mini-tornado to disrupt the annual Halloween party he’s throwing for the local village children – a sharp contrast with the print version’s magic lantern show of wolves, spectres and ‘a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings’ that sends the youngsters fleeing: in James’s story the crowning horror is that ‘he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience’.

  Stonehenge also features at the climax of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and has long been a subject for visual artists too. Its first known depiction was in two fourteenth-century manuscripts, before a number of Elizabethan painters tried to capture their own imaginative response to the site’s pagan mystery and grandeur, paving the way for those towering figures of early-nineteenth-century English art, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. Turner visited the stones on several occasions between 1799 and the 1820s, his resulting output most dramatically including a watercolour dating from c. 1827.

  ‘Stone Henge, Wiltshire’ from Picturesque views in England and Wales, London (1838) by J. M. W. Turner, engraved by R. Wallis. Typ 805 38.8530, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

  In Turner’s Stonehenge, a break in the storm-driven sky bathes the monument in a bleaching, white-brown light; it’s as if all of Heaven has directed its glory, or its ire, onto this heathen place, around which unsubstantiated associations of druidic sacrifice – popularised by the antiquarian William Stukeley in the 1740s – had subsequently grown. On closer inspection of the painting, many of the sheep grazing at the base of the stones are lying prostrate, as is their shepherd, struck dead by the lightning that has speared from the storm clouds. It is an image that reminds me of the final incarnation of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass, a story about societal breakdown and the clash between generations, which was shown on ITV in the autumn of 1979, following a technicians’ strike that had kept the channel off air for seventy-five days.

  It would be three or four years until I saw the series, watching it at my aunt’s house during the summer holidays after she’d taped a repeat off the telly for me – it’s clear to me now that I owe much of my love of sci-fi and horror films to her and those VHS recordings. Although this was the last appearance of Professor Bernard Quatermass, it was my first encounter with him, and so John Mills’s elderly, worn-out version of the fictional scientist sticks with me, even though it isn’t the strongest of the character’s on-screen incarnations.‡‡

  The 1979 Quatermass is directed by Piers Haggard, the man behind the folk horror of The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Soil-bound supernatural forces are not at work here, however, but a dystopic England gone mad, in which social order has been destroyed. In the opening scene the elderly professor, having travelled down from his home in Scotland, is dropped off by a cab in a decrepit, boarded-up London street, from where he has to make his way on foot to the fortified compound of the ‘British Television’ station, the only such facility still left. He is accosted by a gang, before being rescued by radio astronomer Dr Joe Kapp, a fellow guest on the same programme. Quatermass implodes on the show, where he’s meant to be commenting on a historic link-up between the Russians’ and Americans’ space stations, using the broadcast as an opportunity to appeal for information about his missing teenage granddaughter. Shortly afterwards, live on air, the spacecraft-docking goes badly wrong. Both vessels are lost, along with twenty-seven lives.

  Kapp takes Quatermass under his wing and the pair flee in an armoured van through the anarchic outskirts of the city, back to the younger scientist’s house a
nd Jodrell Bank-esque radio telescope in the West Country. En route they encounter their first group of Planet People, a hippyish youth cult that are mobilising in numbers towards various Neolithic sites, from where they hope and believe they’ll be transported to a better existence on some distant world. At the end of the opening episode the two men (and Kapp’s wife) visit the nearby stone circle, Ringstone Round, where they are helpless observers as a pulsing sound fills the air and a beam, like the light in Turner’s painting, descends upon the hundreds of young people who have gathered there; everything within the stones becomes ash. On the lip of the ring a girl survivor has been blinded and left clinging to life by what she calls the ‘lovely lightning’.

  It transpires that analagous cases are happening around the globe at increasingly large gatherings of believers (culminating in tens of thousands at Wembley Stadium), which now begin to include other disaffected converts from the gangs we’ve earlier encountered. Quatermass comes to believe that the incidents entail the harvesting of youth by some kind of alien machine – the destroyed spacecraft happened to be in the ray’s line of transmission. At the programme’s denouement we witness the professor’s attempts to enact a plan that will prevent further materialisations of the death-bringing beam.

  I cannot remember much of Quatermass when I sit down to watch it again – it’s been over thirty years since that previous summer holiday viewing. In the meantime, I’ve forgotten most of the dystopic stuff (and the amusingly prescient vision of future televisual family entertainment), but can still recall nearly every word of the nursery rhyme that’s eerily intertwined with the stone circle happenings:

  Huffity puffity Ringstone Round,

  If you lose your hat it will never be found.

  So pull up your britches right up to your chin

  And fasten your cloak with a bright new pin.

  And when you are ready, then we can begin:

  Huffity, puffity, puff.

  A ray of extraterrestrial energy descends from the heavens onto a Wiltshire ring of Neolithic stones in a cult children’s series transmitted after school on ITV two years before Quatermass, during January and February 1977. Children of the Stones, however, was set around Avebury, rather than Stonehenge. I recall little about the place from our 1983 holiday, yet of all the ancient sites we came to, this village, whose buildings are laid out among the monument, is the one I find most impressive today.

  The settlement dates to Anglo-Saxon times, with the oldest building, the church of St James, built in the eleventh century but incorporating materials from earlier structures. Even though I’d been back once about fifteen years ago, I had forgotten the scale of the place, how the stones are so intertwined with the fabric of the village – as is the vast earthwork bank and ditch – and how so many sacred-looking groves crown the hilltops about the horizon.

  As you make your approach you pass the weird cone of Silbury Hill, the largest man-made prehistoric chalk mound in the world. The massive standing stones themselves are weather-worn and pockmarked, repurposed today as scratching posts for sheep or oversized perches for birds. A jackdaw is on top of a taller sarsen; it allows me to draw near to the base, safe in the knowledge there’s no way I can reach up. One of its glossy blue-black wings is stretched down in an ungainly fashion as it attempts to air it following the shower that began as I arrived. This close I’m struck by the clarity of its eye, its pale, silvery iris in which is set a tiny pinprick of a pupil that stares down at me with more than a hint of comprehension.

  ‘Hello jackdaw,’ I mutter, conscious that these agile undersized crows seem to have accompanied me at so many of the places I’ve visited while writing this book. But, unlike the aviary-imprisoned bird in my local park from when I was little, this one doesn’t answer back.

  I didn’t see Children of the Stones as a boy (I would have been three when it was first transmitted – and it was only repeated on UK terrestrial television in the following summer), but can understand why the serial left such an impact on those a few years older than me who watched it at the time, because so much is contained within its seven episodes. There’s the theme of the villagers becoming subservient ‘Happy Ones’, unnaturally cheerful, do-gooding automatons who greet each other with the phrase ‘Happy day’ and are gradually subsuming everyone inside the boundary of the circle into their cult;§§ the driving force behind this assimilation is the lord of the manor, Hendrick, adding a touch of 1970s class warfare into the proceedings.

  We also have a cycle of events that repeatedly attempts to play itself out across the generations, like we saw in The Owl Service or Red Shift: ‘Nobody leaves the circle!’ a villager incredulously laments at one point. Actual history makes its way into the script too, by means of such details as the so-called ‘barber-surgeon’, a medieval skeleton (with an accompanying set of scissors) found beneath an unexcavated stone in 1938 – human remains which become integral to the unfolding drama.

  Then there’s the striking physical backdrop of the landscape itself, the furtive sense of history it holds. At ancient sites like this the deep past haunts our present – the unknowable lives and actions of previous inhabitants from so many generations before call out to us, begging us to understand their barely uncovered existences. Yet how can we? I’ve been able to conjure little more than a trace of my own vanished parents, let alone gain any meaningful impression of the people who toiled – for whatever impenetrable reasons, more than four millennia ago – to erect these gargantuan boulders …

  The opening credits of Children of the Stones begin with a sigh of synthesisers and the silhouetted close-up of one of the gnarled megaliths; the music – weird choral voices – builds to a peak, and we pull out to an aerial shot that shows us the scale of how the village (renamed Milbury in the series) is literally encircled by the past. In the first episode we witness the arrival of astrophysicist Adam Brake, here to further his research into the stones and their electromagnetism, and his teenage son, Matthew. The professor points out ‘the hill’ – enigmatic Silbury – as they approach, and Matthew confesses his understandable fear of moving to a new home.

  ‘Suppose they all turn out to be nutters?’ he asks, an eventuality that, of course, turns out to be the case.

  Children of the Stones is not the only unsettling programme of its era to take advantage of Avebury. The penultimate offering in the original run of the ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand, 1977’s contemporary-set Stigma, was also filmed here. At the heart of its drama is the removal of one of the Neolithic stones from the garden of a cottage adjacent to the circle by workmen carrying out improvements. As it is lifted an ominous wind blows, and from that point everything changes for the occupants of the house. It’s a pared-down, quietly effective, yet incredibly bloody piece, and the last to be directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark.¶¶

  Avebury, like Stonehenge, possesses a magnetism irresistible to artists. Paul Nash first came here in 1933, the rocks featuring in his 1937 lithograph Landscape of the Megaliths, while John Piper’s 1940 Avebury Restored displays a brooding quality of light not dissimilar to Turner’s shepherd-killing lightning storm. In a more abstract series of 1973 works (he probably derived their angular forms from photos he’d taken of marble surfaces), Derek Jarman places the stones he painted among a succession of coloured vertical and horizontal lines.

  Better known now as a filmmaker, Jarman had trained, like James McBryde and Ithell Colquhoun, at the Slade (in painting and set design). I’d first happened upon arguably the most magical of his creations when my brother and I were birdwatching at Dungeness in Kent. Jutting into the English Channel, the Ness has its own magnetism to birds, its geographic pull aided by the heated outflow into the sea from the blocky Dungeness B nuclear-power station that attracts various avian visitors to feed in the raised temperatures of the water. In the middle of this most desolate of moonscapes, Jarman sculpted and grew a garden of sublime, unlikely beauty around Prospect Co
ttage, a tin-roofed, black-varnished, yellow-windowed fisherman’s hut.

  Although I had little interest in gardening (my mum used occasionally to drag me to various plant nurseries, something I dreaded due to the boredom it induced in me), at some point after our visit I saw a television feature about Jarman that made sense of the strange oasis Chris and I had stumbled upon among the shingle.*** I was mesmerised by the garden, so that whenever my brother and I subsequently went to Dungeness we stopped off to look. Our earlier visits would have been between 1990 and 1992, when Jarman was still alive and could conceivably have been present within the cottage, though we never met him; he was diagnosed with HIV just before Christmas in 1986 and died in February 1994. When the last book he wrote – about his garden – came out posthumously, my brother bought it for me. I’d forgotten that he’d written inside it, but there are his words on the title page:

  To Ed, Happy Birthday 1995 from Chris

  In the book, referring to the shingle that formed the topsoil of his seaside plot as well, perhaps, as to some of the menhir-like objects he positioned into the rocky ground of his last of England, Jarman writes: ‘I invest my stones with the power of those at Avebury.’ Clearly the Wiltshire monument had left its impression on him, as his Dungeness retreat had on me. Aside from his series of paintings of those famous standing stones, in 1971 he also produced a Super 8 film titled Journey to Avebury – part of his cinematic apprenticeship – which I find to be the most disconcerting visual portrayal of the enigmatic site. It’s a hypnotic ten minutes of grainy footage consisting of mainly static, wavering shots of the landscape around the village and nearby downs, punctuated by old straight tracks and wind-stirred verges full of wild flowers and cow parsley that my grandad would’ve loved to put a match to.