Journey to Avebury possesses a Polaroid palette – oddly saturated, yet somehow washed-out colours beneath a tobacco-tinged sky (it appears to have been shot through a yellow filter). This, coupled with the absence of people, lends the film an almost post-apocalyptic look: it’s as if everyone really has been vaporised by an interstellar death ray. We’re nearly halfway in before we get reassurance that this isn’t the case: a group of kids sitting on a wall in the village wave to the camera. Apart from these ‘Happy Ones’, the only living creatures are two distantly glimpsed ridgetop walkers near the end of the footage (though even they have an otherness about them, reminding me of the strange boatman in Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’), various loafing cows, and a sprinkling of birds.
Birdsong features too, at the start and finish of the accompanying soundtrack – a 1990s addition, because originally Journey to Avebury would’ve been a silent movie. The band that bring us this later, beating-heart electronica are Coil (they also contributed to the soundtrack for Jarman’s final cinematic offering, Blue), and its pulsing psychedelia adds to the film’s unsettling nature – it reminds me, a little, of the music behind the opening credits of Kubrick’s The Shining, as the camera tracks above Jack Nicholson’s yellow VW Beetle as it heads to the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains. The journey in Jarman’s film, however, ends less destructively and dramatically: a clumsy zoom towards three far-off groves of Nash-like beeches, before a sudden cut to black.
Derek Jarman’s Garden is a poignant book – my copy made more so to me by that unremembered dedication from my brother – filled with wonderful photography by Howard Sooley of the garden’s sculptural mixture of shingle, found objects and impossibly colourful plants. In some of the photos Jarman is there tending his stony ground, his clothes by this point far too large for his shrunken frame. He’s drowning in them, which reminds me of Chris in his last months, when all of his things were too big for him too; he gave me his old jeans, but because he was that bit taller than me they dragged on the floor. I went shopping with him in Poole while he bought a new wardrobe – a couple of shirts, T-shirts and pairs of trousers – the final few clothes he would ever need. Towards the end of the book Jarman heartbreakingly records his time in St Bartholomew’s Hospital, depicting the other ‘exhausted, sick, trembling’ young men, his fellow HIV patients, unwilling participants in Lou Reed’s ‘Halloween Parade’.
‘Death stalks through the ward in this bright sunlight,’ he writes, and I know exactly what he is describing – HIV back then, cancer still: the end result is the same. I would have known it in 1995 when Chris presented the book to me, but now the image is even more ingrained into the scar tissue of my psyche.
As the summer of 2014 slipped towards autumn my brother’s physical form shrank further; the effect was striking, despite his better-fitting clothes. But still we continued to go out together on short trips. Often these would be to ‘the Lake’, Longham, his local birdwatching patch. One time, a busy sunny Saturday, all of us – the whole family – decamped to the beach at the far end of Hengistbury Head (a favourite spot Chris and I frequented on numerous, usually fruitless birding walks), my brother leading on his scooter while we straggled behind. On another occasion the two of us ventured around a nearby heath at dusk looking for crepuscular nightjars; he somehow managed to navigate the narrow, overgrown tracks as the birds’ maddening churrs mocked from the gorse, always a wingbeat ahead.
And then, I remember my sister-in-law and I dropping him off in the centre of Bournemouth (the resort where my parents had spent their honeymoon), so he could meet his colleagues from the newspaper. By now my brother had taken the decision to stop his chemotherapy – the doctor deemed its effectiveness had come to an end and if he carried on there was every danger his weakened immunity wouldn’t cope with any future infections. He was in remarkably good spirits, but I still harbour a suspicion that this was the moment – the point when he could no longer take proactive action – that his decline began to accelerate.
Chris and I watched a lot of films together that summer, though I can’t recall most of them now. I brought books for him to read too; I know I introduced him to M. R. James at this point and he said he enjoyed the stories, but another supernatural anthology that I lent him left him singularly unimpressed. Certainly it wasn’t as good, but I wonder whether the subject matter was too close to the bone for someone who was dying. Yes, ghost stories might largely function as what MRJ would describe as a ‘pleasing terror’, but inherently they are about how we reconcile ourselves with that ultimate of endings. Stephen King, in his extended meditation on how horror works, Danse Macabre, posits that scary movies (and by extension ghost stories) are not about death, but about life. They are ‘the celebration of those who feel they can examine death because it does not yet live in their own hearts’. If there’s anything in this, then it’s little surprise Chris didn’t feel the urge. And, I suppose, for me, continuing to read such tales was an act of defiance, an act of clinging to the life my brother still held onto, and the deeper-seated memories of our faded family that we both, at that point, could still share. I’m reminded of Ray Bradbury’s children’s novella The Halloween Tree, which seems to me to strike at the heart of what such stories are for. And why I’ve always been drawn to them:
So in the middle of autumn, everything dying, apemen turned in their sleep, remembered their own dead of the last years. Ghosts called in their heads. Memories, that’s what ghosts are, but apemen didn’t know that. Behind the eyelids, late nights, the memory ghosts called, waved, danced, so apemen woke up, tossed twigs on the fire, shivered, wept. They could drive away wolves but not memories, not ghosts.
Two occasions from those final few months when Chris and I were out together stick with me in particular. In the first, we’d come to one of the tidal inlets that snakes inland from the south side of Poole Harbour. Middlebere. There’s a bird hide that overlooks the water and the mud, and it can be a good place to observe waders and the odd egret. A narrow path leads behind some farm buildings before it becomes a boardwalk beneath the cover of trees. We proceeded along this to reach the hide, a typical shed-type structure with window slats that could be opened to allow a narrowed view of the inlet. On this afternoon there were few birds – probably the tide was wrong, or we were just unlucky – so I busied myself trying to turn a distant dot of a gull into something more interesting.
We hadn’t been inside long when Chris stated that he needed some air. I went to go with him but he said he was okay and sat down on his scooter, which was parked outside on the boardwalk. ‘It’s too close in there. I’ll wait,’ he said, and it was clear he’d had a kind of panic attack, which was completely unlike him. I’m not sure what triggered it – probably he wasn’t – but I wondered then, as I do now, whether the weight of his situation, his mortality, had struck him in that instant. I felt powerless – I was powerless – to do anything to help, and it was anguishing to see him that way. Because we didn’t talk about what was happening, except in a jokey fashion – he’d asked me in a text, for instance, if I would say a few words at his funeral ‘about what a great bloke he was’ – but there were no deep, heartfelt conversations like you’d get in some maudlin drama. We just tried to carry on, which was why seeing him in that moment was so hard. By the time we’d got back to the car he was fine again, and we continued as if nothing had happened. But something had, because I was now properly conscious, properly frightened about what I would do when that hollow future arrived.
The other occasion was a few weeks later, in the middle of September, when the two of us went to Portland Bill. Described by Paul Nash in his Shell Guide to Dorset as a ‘solid and single block of limestone’ that’s ‘inhabited by people distinctive in manners and customs’, the Isle of Portland is an impressive sight, joined to Weymouth by a low causeway, the harbour on your left, Chesil Beach on your right, before the land rises steeply to five hundred feet, then tapers off towards the Bill itself.
Alongside its sixteenth-century castle, various naval buildings, and two prisons, Portland is full of quarries out of which comes its famous Portland stone, used to build St Paul’s Cathedral, the British Museum and the Bank of England, among others.†††
I first came here with Mum and Dad at Whitsun 1989 (Chris was away at university) – the last holiday the three of us took together before we started going to the far less solid-feeling Suffolk coast. On that visit I wandered off while my parents sat in the café, watching my first Manx shearwaters, miniature northern hemisphere relatives of the albatross that flashed by me, alternating white and black as they beat, then glided, past the lighthouse on their straightened wings. Portland’s location jutting four miles out into the Channel makes it a magnet for migrant land birds too; almost invariably, when I came to Chris’s in the spring or autumn, we’d end up here – though typically my timing was poor and all the good birds had come through the day before, or would arrive the minute I was home in Norfolk.
That mid-September afternoon in 1994 was another quiet one, apart from large numbers of hirundines – swallows and martins – that were flying south. There were the usual reports of rarities some lucky soul had happened on – a tawny pipit from southern Europe, a barred warbler from Scandinavia – but we didn’t see much during our cursory examination of the area near the car park and bird observatory. I made my way around the bramble-fringed path that skirted the top of the miniature former quarry located between the two to check if the resident little owl was in its customary hollow in the rockface. Sure enough it was, though Chris couldn’t see it from where he was on the main track.
‘Do you not want a look?’ I asked, but he said he wasn’t bothered, that he’d seen it plenty of times before. So I borrowed his camera, which he had tucked into the bag on the back of his scooter, and snapped off a photo that I showed to him on the LCD screen.
‘That’s nice,’ he said. But it was all I could do to stop myself from dissolving in front of him, because the thought struck me that, most likely, he would never see that yellow-eyed owl again. Because by this point his decline had gathered a velocity that couldn’t be stopped.
Always it is owls, always we are destroyed.
There is a final occasion. The hardest one for me to go back to.
A few weeks after visiting Portland, my partner and I called in to Dorset for a night or two on our way to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, where we were going for a holiday. Chris was in decent spirits, not different from how he’d been when I was last there ten days before. I felt okay leaving him, because I could still ring, and we would stop off on our return in a couple of weeks’ time. In any case, I was looking forward myself to trying to forget about everything for a week, and to wandering around the islands he had first brought me to. I only called my brother once, on the second day we were there – I didn’t want to be constantly bothering him, as he was having a break with his family too, a short trip to Devon. But we texted each other – he told me about a dotterel, an attractive mountain-nesting wader that neither of us had seen for years, which had turned up on the island where I was staying, and we joked about ridiculous birds that I might hope to find.
On the Monday morning I was wandering along the track beside Tresco’s Great Pool, a pine-fringed stretch of brackish water that fills a dip in the island’s topography, checking through a flock of goldcrests, when my phone rang. It was my sister-in-law, telling me that Chris had been rushed into hospital. His heart had stopped but he was stable now. Talking, but not making much sense.
‘You need to get here,’ she said.
I got hold of my partner (she’d gone for the morning to Hugh Town on the main island), before returning to our cottage and sorting out our stuff, then taking the next inter-island boat. From St Mary’s we managed to catch a flight to the mainland at the end of the afternoon – passing over some of those familiar valleys in the last of the westernmost light – finally arriving where my car was parked just outside Penzance at dusk. If ever there’s a time for your vehicle to decide not to start, this really wasn’t the moment. But that’s what happened. The breakdown man, when he eventually turned up, couldn’t get it to go and it had to be towed to Dorset; we were dropped off somewhere en route to pick up a hired replacement – I can’t remember where.
All of it’s a shadow now.
What I do know for certain is that we finally got to Poole Hospital at around two in the morning, to find my brother largely insensible. He tried asking about my holiday, but it was an effort for him to speak, so I said I would tell him about it later when he’d rested. Now and again he attempted to pull out the oxygen tubes that were loosely fixed in his nostrils; he was being his characteristic stubborn self, at least. The nurses put him in his own small room, like the ones Mum and Dad had been in at the end. My partner and I stayed past dawn – apparently we ate breakfast in the canteen, though I have little recollection of this – then headed briefly to Chris’s house to freshen up. When we returned I fetched my youngest niece out of school; she skipped along the pavement as we arrived back at the hospital: it was devastating to watch. You don’t know, do you, I thought. And I am glad that she didn’t, glad that both of my nieces are today both so good and strong in spite of what they have lost.
The room was different now, because Chris was no longer speaking, his breathing measured, like my mother’s had been. Later in the afternoon – some hours before the instant when the colour drained from his face and the rise and fall of his abdomen stopped – I went in with him alone, talking away in the hope he could hear me, but equally trying to cover the awful near-silence and that familiar feeling I knew from before.
‘We were all right, weren’t we?’ I said to him.
And I swear – though it sounds like something trite I’ve made up – a tear glided down his cheek from the corner of his eye.
We were, weren’t we Chris?
* The rural Herefordshire setting of the story was probably inspired by the landscape around Kilpeck, just south-west of Hereford, where the late James McBryde’s wife Gwendolen and daughter Jane lived after the artist’s death. MRJ was a regular visitor there over the years.
† This is borne out by recent data, which shows a sizeable increase in the raven’s British breeding range during my lifetime. Yet our largest crows are still mostly absent from the east coast, so every time I hear their calls I’m taken back to our earlier holidays in the uplands, or weekends at my brother’s in Dorset.
‡ Although he rarely turned his own hand to writing tales of an overtly supernatural nature, ghosts (and memories of the departed) feature frequently in Hardy’s poetry. Yet we know Hardy was a fan of the genre – his second wife Florence told of how he sent a Christmas card to M. R. James ‘in a fit of enthusiasm’ after reading the Cambridge don’s ghost stories.
§ This archaic definition of ‘overlooked’, now I think of it, fits neatly with the name chosen for the building at the heart of Stephen King’s The Shining – the Overlook Hotel.
¶ On our unprecedented three-week family holiday we stayed with friends on the outskirts of Toronto – not far from the location of Algernon Blackwood’s failed 1891 dairy-farming adventure.
** Night of the Demon (1957) was directed by the Frenchman Jacques Tourneur, who, fifteen years earlier, was responsible for two of RKO’s classic horror movies, Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie. Although it’s an excellent film, most critics lament the ropiness of Night of the Demon’s unconvincing monster that pursues the recipients of those wind-wafted slips of paper. I’d tend to agree – I don’t think there’s any need for the audience to see the close-up of the demon so early on – but the flickering lights and swirling smoke that herald its arrival remain a chilling effect.
†† MacGinnis’s first major role was the lead in Michael Powell’s Foula-shot The Edge of the World, two decades before.
‡‡ For me that honour is reserved for Quatermass and the Pit, which I
watched one Sunday afternoon following Dad’s recommendation. It’s another story warning of the dangers of digging up mysterious objects – in this case a devilish Martian spacecraft that’s intertwined with the dark history of humanity and which, in the 1967 Hammer film version of the earlier BBC series, is buried beneath the wonderfully named Hobbs End tube station.
§§ This sinister takeover reminds me of the alien pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the robotic, docile women of The Stepford Wives.
¶¶ Stigma was the first new work commissioned specially for the strand that was not an adaptation of an existing tale by Charles Dickens or M. R. James (though elements of the story are reminiscent of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’). The following year’s The Ice House (written by Robin Redbreast’s John Bowen) is strange to the point of distraction – more akin to Robert Aickman meets Flann O’Brien.
*** I imagine the television piece was connected with the release of Jarman’s 1990 film The Garden, which focuses on the existence-affirming plot of shingle situated in the shadow of so much that’s seemingly at odds with the creation and sustenance of life.
††† Portland and Weymouth act as the backdrop to The Damned, an odd 1961-shot Hammer offering directed by Joseph Losey. In the film a group of radioactive children are kept imprisoned beneath the limestone cliffs as ‘buried seeds of life’ in readiness to repopulate the world in the aftermath of a nuclear conflict. An even more-ridiculous slice of sci-fi/horror – the laughably entertaining Night of the Big Heat (1967), starring both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing – also features location footage of Portland (doubling for a fictitious northern isle).
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