Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Frank Baker

  When his son was a young man his father told him much about their earlier days and quoted the words of the Trevelyan motto. ‘There’s a very great deal of wisdom in those three words,’ he said, ‘and I’d like you to remember them.’

  The son did not forget them – for who could? And one day with a girl he loved, he found himself in that part of the West country where he had lived for a short while as a child. They walked across a cornfield on a September evening when the sun went slow and red and large down the sky; and climbing a wall lost in brambles and thorns they looked at the crumbling ruins of the cottage. Masses of yellow lupins had spread over the ground.

  ‘This is the place,’ said the boy. ‘And this is my first memory – do you want me to tell you? It’s not really interesting.’

  The girl, being in love with him, was interested in everything about him. So he told her.

  ‘I don’t really remember the cottage at all. I can’t have been more than three and it’s all gone from me. But I know we lived here for a time. It was called Lupin Cottage – and there are the lupins – see?’

  He stood on the hedge, suddenly growing excited, and taking her hand helped her down to the other side. ‘There’s something I’m trying to remember,’ he said. ‘But from here – no, I can’t.’ He paused and battered his fist impatiently against his forehead. ‘We must go inside,’ he told her. ‘Come on. I shall remember then.’

  The padlocked door was choked by a mass of willow herb and nettles. But the glass in the windows was broken and it was easy enough to climb in. Smashing a way through the nettles, he encouraged her to one of the windows. She was not happy about it.

  ‘It doesn’t look safe. Need we go in?’

  ‘Yes, we must. Come on.’

  Now he was through the window and leaning over to help her inside.

  ‘I don’t want to come,’ she cried. ‘It’s horrible in there – dark and smelly and full of spiders.’

  ‘Please – please come. I’m here, aren’t I? You can’t come to any harm. It’s important to us. You must come.’

  Suddenly she realized that if she wanted to retain his love for her she would have to follow him wherever he went. Shivering and trembling with fear, she climbed over the sill and joined him inside.

  They went upstairs, all the time the boy filled with an excitement she could not properly understand. Then they went into a room where some of the boards were rotted away and the sky showed through the fallen roof. Taking her hand, he led her carefully to the window-seat where great chunks of plaster and slates and laths of worm-dried wood had fallen. He looked through the window to the wide field where the sun shimmered in the corn. And then he gave a great sigh and tears were in his eyes as he clutched her hand tighter.

  ‘Yes, this must have been my room,’ he said. ‘This is the view I’ve always wanted of that field. The first thing I can remember, seeing that field from here one evening, about this time, when the sun was setting. Something odd happened, which probably hasn’t got any significance; but it’s very clear in my memory. I must have got out of bed and stood on this window-seat. I had something in my hand and was tapping the window and looking at the field. It seemed immense – like the whole world. I could see my father in the garden, standing down there with a saw in his hand. And I tried to attract his attention, but he wouldn’t look up. I called, I think; but he didn’t hear me. Then something happened – what was it?’

  He rubbed his left fingers across his eyes and with his right hand still held hers. ‘Yes, I remember. It was only this. A man suddenly appeared on the top of the hedge. He was a very old man, or so I remember him; with a grey beard. And he looked terribly tired and miserable. But suddenly he looked up to this window and smiled at me. I remember that smile – it was very sweet and trustful; the sort of way a child would smile. But I was very angry. I wanted my father to look up and smile at me and he wouldn’t do so. Then the old man turned and jumped back again into the field; and suddenly my father dropped his saw, climbed over the wall, and started to follow the old man right across the field. I watched them both. The old man was hurrying as though he was scared; and my father was chasing him. I believe he was running. You see right across the field – by those fir trees?’

  The girl followed his pointing finger.

  ‘Over there, I could hardly see them, the sun was so bright – my father caught the old man by the shoulders and swung him round and stared at him. Then they disappeared together. That’s all I can remember. Doesn’t it sound silly?’

  The girl looked at him. ‘No, it doesn’t. Nothing that you tell me about yourself seems silly.’

  By the window, overlooking the broad field, these two plighted their troth.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Frank Baker was born in London in 1908. From a young age, he had a deep interest in church music, serving as a chorister at Winchester Cathedral as a boy from 1919 to 1924. From 1924 to 1929, Baker worked as a marine insurance clerk in the City of London, an experience that he later fictionalized in The Birds (1936). He resigned in 1929 to take on secretarial work at an ecclesiastical music school where he hoped to make a career of music; during this time he also worked as a church organist.

  He soon abandoned his musical studies and went to St. Just, on the west coast of Cornwall, where he became organist of the village church and lived alone in a stone cottage. It was during this time that he began writing; his first novel, The Twisted Tree, was published in 1935 by Peter Davies after nine other publishers rejected it. It was well received by critics, and its modest success prompted Baker to continue writing. In 1936, he published The Birds, which sold only about 300 copies and which its author described as ‘a failure’. Nonetheless, after the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s popular film of the same name in 1963, The Birds was reissued in paperback by Panther and received new attention. Baker’s most successful and enduring work was Miss Hargreaves (1940), a comic fantasy in which two young people invent a story about an elderly woman, only to find that their imagination has in fact brought her to life.

  During the Second World War, Baker became an actor and toured Britain before getting married in 1943 to Kathleen Lloyd, with whom he had three children. Baker continued to write, publishing more than a dozen more books, including Mr. Allenby Loses the Way (1945), Embers (1946), My Friend the Enemy (1948) and Talk of the Devil (1956). Baker died in Cornwall of cancer in 1983.