21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  After a false alarm – two old wellies on sticks on the ditchy margin of a mini-valley of oilseed rape – we turned south-west and hit pay dirt: a good solid mawkin a quarter-mile down the road towards Tunstall Forest. Paint-pot head, wax coat, 1982 power ballad stance. Nothing special, but getting the job done without an undue quantity of fuss. The scarecrow wore cords, like my own garden scarecrow, Warren, but his, unlike Warren’s, were more the workwear kind. Unflared. Practical. He looked healthier than Warren too, who – with arms still outstretched – had recently almost keeled over into some ivy in a pose that brought to mind the phrase ‘death by disco’. Even when he’d been healthier, before his false beard began to rot and his parka became stained with mud and rain, Warren’s life had been checkered by failure and insult. ‘Why have you got a corpse in the corner of your garden?’ my neighbour David had asked, completely within his earshot, only days after my friend Jo and I had filled Warren with straw and erected him. Even before he’d begun to ail, he’d done little to protect from birds the grass seed I’d put down. I suppose he’d just never seemed like an assertive figure. Right from the start he’d failed to command the necessary terror or awe of his kind. I am thinking particularly here of the day I collected his frame – part of an old tree my dad had found down in the field behind his garden – then headed off to meet Hannah for a walk on the moors west of Sheffield. It was my debut date with Hannah, and my forward planning, as it so often does, left something to be desired. I am a man with a scarecrow in the back of his car, driving to meet a woman who hardly knows me for a walk on remote moorland, was the realisation that hit me as I reached the outskirts of Sheffield, on the way to collect her from the train station. ‘What is that?’ Hannah asked, pointing to Warren’s frame half an hour later, as we headed in the direction of Froggatt Edge and Grindleford. ‘It’s the structural base of my new scarecrow,’ I replied. ‘Oh, cool,’ said Hannah casually and continued to talk about a Dusty Springfield record she had recently purchased.

  Upon my return home to south Norfolk from Blaxhall it began to rain lightly: long streaks on windows and grey brick, like crap finger-paint. I checked on Warren. Had he lost weight? His flares had slipped down to reveal a glimpse of straw tradesman’s bottom, and he had fallen even further down into the ivy than yesterday, the weather gradually pressing him into the earth. It would soon be time, I decided, to put him out of his misery. I opened the door of my study and wondered vaguely about continuing work on my Norfolk-based folk-horror novel. I knew I wouldn’t. I had left it too long, lost momentum, again. I’d had a notion of the book way back when I’d first moved to Norfolk in 2001 as a twenty-six-year-old of puppylike idiocy: a misty flicker of inspiration first felt on holiday in flat fields abutting the North Sea and on an atmospheric early-morning walk across Blackheath near my old flat, amid fat crows, with plague-ridden corpses beneath me, listening to pastoral witchcraft-infused music recorded in low fidelity three decades earlier. A fictional epic of occult happenings and misguided hippy idealism on lonely lanes beneath dun clouds that I had neither the skill nor commitment to bring to fruition. Did it feature musicians? Maybe. I had no idea what it was really going to be about, whether it was going to be serious, or funny, or both, but it agonised me that I could not write it. I reached a point not far short of 30,000 words, twice, and abandoned the manuscript, twice. I told myself I’d done so because I had a mortgage to pay, a partner to support, and I needed to prioritise work that paid rather than fanciful self-indulgent nonsense. All this was broadly correct, but there was another reason, harder to look square in the face, for my inability to persevere: the simple fact that I could not fully believe in a single sentence of what I had written. I had been writing about Norfolk and Suffolk as a lover of the countryside and as a casual student of its folklore, but I hadn’t truly been out into Norfolk and Suffolk. A large portion of the first part of my life there had been spent in estate agents, tile warehouses and B&Q, which might have been fine if I wanted to write about estate agents, tile warehouses and B&Q, but I didn’t. I wanted to write about life – and possibly death – in the fields, but how could I if I almost never ventured out into them? All my life I had been a walker, even when I didn’t categorise myself as a walker. I walked endlessly as a child with my parents, endlessly as an adolescent golfer, endlessly, even, as a carless resident of London with no particular enthusiasm for public transport and a keen nose for exploration. For my initial stint in Norfolk, however, I was not a walker, and if you are not a walker and you want to write believably and truthfully about rural life, you are off balance, on the back foot, before you even begin. This seems obvious but didn’t actually occur to me until I had lived in the county for almost seven years.

  When I did begin to walk, in late 2008, my attempts to write about make-believe characters in familiar but make-believe places improved, but something still stopped me pressing on as doggedly with my fiction as I desired to: a realisation that I was not ready, that I had some flavour but barely any filling. Despite this realisation’s presence I did not fully confess it to myself because the thought, as I turned thirty-three, then thirty-four, then thirty-five, then thirty-six, that I still wasn’t going to write this bastard book I believed I had been born to write, or the film script I sometimes considered writing instead, was too painful for me to address. Instead, without ever quite intending to, I did the next-best thing: I lived physically in a different story, also of a spooky nature, which did not require the typing of so much as a word. My walks became a folk-horror book or film of their own where nothing terrible ever quite happens but always might. This wordless physical novel had none of the dramatic plot twists that I’d always envisaged my real book as having, but it was long on atmosphere. That was OK, though. I was losing faith in dramatic plot twists. A film such as 1968’s Witchfinder General, about the seventeenth-century reign of the country’s self-appointed mysogynist-in-chief Matthew Hopkins and his mission to rid East Anglia of dark magic, much of which was shot in my prime Norfolk and Suffolk walking territory, and whose church I made a pilgrimage to on one of my earliest local rambles, does not stick with you because of its dramatic plot twists, many of which were downright hammy. It sticks with you because of its atmosphere, which, in its low-budget way, is so powerful that it makes you forgive the hamminess of the plot twists.

  Like Witchfinder General and so many other British films and TV shows in the horror genre from the late sixties and early seventies, my walks were powerful in a low-budget way, and, like those films and TV shows, it was their very lack of resources that was partly responsible for imbuing them with the power. My boots, the one bit of walking equipment I’d shelled out for – alongside my maps – had cost not much more than twenty pounds. So much exercise in my past had been costly or off-puttingly pedagogical. When you first walk out into the deeper countryside, especially when you do so alone, it feels amazingly rebellious: to be able to do something so soul-quenching for nothing, with no authority figures to drain the fun from it, seems like it should have some kind of catch. Even as someone with a lengthy history of not following the paths in life I’ve been told to, I remember feeling a little nervous, turning back shyly on early walks when I lost my way. Soon I learned to embrace the disorientated moments, thrived on the extra challenges of a flooded towpath or vanished hedge indentation, developing the understanding that the countryside’s job has never been to pander neatly to the needs of foot traffic and never will be. Then I went fully rogue, no longer even accepting the AA or Pathfinder as my teacher, mapping my own routes. My OS Explorer maps were in themselves as fecund with language as many a great literary novel. I became familiar with the minor complexities of multifarious gate types and began to open and shut them less in the manner of a person apologising for being alive. I eschewed GPS, as I did in the car. Looking at a map might distract you from the scenery – particularly if, like me, you sometimes found said map smothering you as you tried to refold it – but maps were more at one with the scenery tha
n a screen could ever be. A screen sucks you in, away from the moment. You can miss all manner of stuff while staring at a screen, and who knows what it might cost you? My graduation from walking books to self-mapped routes was my rambler’s equivalent of the phase where a cook breaks free from the shackles of the recipe book or a musician starts to experiment outside their customary genre. There was something massively liberating about looking on OS Explorer 230 and seeing, say, something called Alecock’s Grave a mile to my east, then thinking, I’d quite like to know what Alecock’s Grave is, then thinking, HOLD ON! I actually can go and see Alecock’s Grave and nobody is going to stop me! GPS fostered the opposite of that, a zombified extension of something the musician and rural warrior Julian Cope bemoaned fourteen years ago: ‘People don’t go anywhere nowadays unless there’s a sign.’

  My trust in maps, in the Ordnance Survey itself – that artful, loving institution, simultaneously historical and progressive, which as far back as the 1950s made a point of paying male and female employees equal wages – became immense: a renewed love affair that had begun on walks in my childhood and on long car journeys with my parents when I was often the one in charge of the atlas. Perhaps the trust was too immense at times. When maps were old and beginning to lose their marbles, they still seemed wise to me, which gave me an unwavering faith in what they told me, even when it made no sense. On an eight-mile walk near Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast I learned one of the big rules of East Anglian coastal rambling: avoid using maps more than a decade old, as this can result in erosion-themed death. I noticed that I was drawn to the darker places maps told me about, as well as the ones they didn’t. On a more successful walk in next-to-zero light I guided my friends Jack and Hannah to one of the two Bronze Age barrows in south Norfolk alleged to be the burial place of the first-century Iceni warrior queen Boudica, then on to an isolated orchard two miles north where the annual Kenninghall village wassail was taking place. ‘What is wassailing?’ asked a friend from London. ‘Is it a bit like abseiling?’ I texted him back to say that it was quite a lot different, and that you had to be a fair bit braver to do it, attaching a photo of the master of ceremonies at Kenninghall, a robed figure with a face made of leaves known as the Lord of Misrule. In truth, the wassail – which means ‘be healthy’ in Old English – was definitely the warmer, more comic side of the physical novel that I was now living inside on my walks, a manifestly unscary gathering around a big bonfire, involving the singing of Kenninghall’s own wassailing song, ‘Dance Around the Firelight’, and the splashing of apple trees with cider to banish the frost giants and encourage a healthy crop for the coming season, all led in jolly fashion by the Lord of Misrule, who explained to me that when he was not wassailing he was a homeopath named Steve. You could call it silly, but most of the best things for the human spirit are, and it would be a mistake to see such rituals as being conducted in a purely postmodern way. In the contrast between the upbeat chatter in the heat of that fire and the stark place we had walked to an hour earlier was an illustration of the immense necessity of such events in centuries past: the communal respite they provided from the cold, stripped vertebrae of the land in winter. Back at the foot of that burial mound, as the oaks and whitethorn on it above us bent back in the January wind, there had been no levity. It was a pocket of old black something enfolded in weather and history. It retained its own energy – magic, threatening, unviolated by architecture.

  That mild-faced demon in Norfolk and Suffolk that I’d perceived even as an unprobing tourist in my own region stayed mild-faced when I became a walker, but grew fangs, subtle ones, deep-rooted, their edges poking up just above the flat earth. I met the demon head on, often very close to home, alone with only an OS map to hand for protection. In a field straddling the Norfolk–Suffolk border within plain sight of the brown tourist sign that welcomes visitors to the historic market town of Diss, with its fourteenth-century church and cut-price Friday market Duracell multipacks, I met one of my first scarecrows. Even a few hundred scarecrows later, it would remain the most literal and chilling in my scarecrow backlist: half a bag of sand and a subhuman arrangement of six old dark grey planks, the top two of them more eye-catching than the others, owing to the three dead crows nailed to each. In all the sub-Wicker Man imaginings of my failed novel there was nothing this starkly horrifying. In Rumburgh, near Bungay, I happened upon a field of ten immaculate white bedsheet ghosts, not dissimilar to the one seen in the 1968 BBC adaptation of the M. R. James ghost story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad. The ghosts were overseen by a fake bird of prey on a wire. This was crop protection escalated to performance art. But on closer inspection there was even more to the tableau than I’d first assumed. In the far corner of the field I found a faceless scarecrow ‘boss’ in a turquoise boiler suit, hanging from a tree by a noose. A foreman of death. At the north Norfolk village of Wolferton, during the same summer, I queued to park with crowds stretching into the hundreds to witness organised and elaborate scarecrow exhibits, but found nothing nearly this inventive or disturbing. The scarecrow censors would have banned it. It found its place, out of necessity, Off Grid, outside the rules, where it had space to be itself – as increasingly did I.

  Similarly agriculturally enthused spiritual brethren sometimes told me about scarecrows via the Internet and gave me the grid coordinates of their locations, but if I followed their leads I always felt like a fraud. A lot of the thrill of the hunt came from the fact that it was not meant to come replete with a user-friendly digital guide. I didn’t want to be a customer at Scarecrow Argos. I had no wish to browse laminated or virtual pages for the scarecrow I wanted, type the scarecrow’s number into a keypad and wait for it to emerge, flat-packed in wastefully proportioned cardboard. Scarecrows weren’t supposed to be accessed via a gleaming online portal. If anything they were supposed to be behind a real, three-dimensional door set in an old wall, made of heavy oak, weathered with arcane scratch marks and opened with a long iron key that you usually had to rattle in the lock for three minutes before it worked. I found most of the best scarecrows – and most of the other finest examples of the macabre lurking in the soft creases of rural Norfolk and Suffolk – by the ancient art of Going Outside And Looking Really Hard, or by the almost as ancient art of Going To A Small Settlement Of Houses Based Around A Place Of Worship And Talking To Some People Who Might Know. On a regular walk which circled the villages of Old Buckenham and New Buckenham I became intrigued by the remains of Buckenham Castle: a keep of an unnervingly perfect circularity, thought to be the oldest of its kind in Britain, guarded by a moat and a padlocked gate. A patron of the Gamekeeper pub in Old Buckenham who sat and chatted to me in front of an inglenook fireplace he was visibly proud to have built told me that you could visit the castle but only if you gave John at the Robin Reliant garage in New Buckenham two pound coins. On the brink of Guy Fawkes night 2012 I visited the garage – one of those charmingly shabby ones at which Norfolk still excelled, harking back to the days when you still needed to say petrol pumps were ‘self-serve’ to acknowledge they were different to the norm – half-expecting John – sixtyish, blue overalls, blue dungarees – to sigh at another practical joke his friend had played on an innocent, but sure enough, after I had handed him a couple of quid, he bestowed upon me the hallowed key to the padlock, but not before he had extracted a promise that I would return before closing time and spun me a yarn about the castle being the place where the gunpowder plot was born, members of the castle’s owning dynasty, the Knyvets, providing sanctuary for the plotters. ‘Is this confirmed?’ I asked John. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘By me.’ I got the distinct impression that he had a different story like this for every big date on the national calendar, this innocuous pile of stacked earth and old flint a few minutes’ walk from the local butcher’s, vitally, inexorably, shaping our island’s history.

  I had driven past John’s workplace countless times, but it was not until I walked away now, turning back to admire its proud fleet of R
obin Reliants, that I took in its name: Castle Hill Garage. Not totally a statement of sarcasm. It was a hill, of sorts. You got a few of them in this soft sandy twenty-mile run up to Norwich from the south, where the heaths of Breckland and the last fragmented chunks of Thetford Forest fall away. Norwich itself was built around one, with another castle on its summit. I stood halfway up it that same autumn with another shadowy Norfolkian storyteller who favoured a monochromatic colour scheme: the Man in Black, the host of Norwich Ghost Walks. Pointing to the steep grass bank above us, the Man in Black told me and the rest of the evening’s crowd about urban Norwich’s own sort-of-scarecrow, the rotting spectre of the sixteenth-century rebel leader Robert Kett, who was often still seen up there, wobbling in the breeze in his phantom gibbet. The Norwich Ghost Walks didn’t begin until 1997. Their original host, Ghostly Dave, retired four years ago to open a pub in King’s Lynn, allowing the Man in Black to step in: a narrator with a skull-headed staff and an impressively hawkish, Victorian face. His mystique was in sharp contrast to, say, the ghost walks in Dudley, which Seventies Pat, who lived there, reliably informed me were hosted by a man simply called Craig. That said, the Man in Black’s blood-red business card did lose something of its spine-tingling aura by having an ad for his other business, Richard’s Driving School, printed on its flip side, which promised a ‘friendly and patient service’. As well as the ghouls and witches paid to jump out at punters on the walk – including the Faggot Witch, who will curse you with her sticks, a skull-faced man to whom one member of the party offered a tenner to stop growling at her, and the Grey Lady and the Lonely Monk, who lurk amid the plague pits in the city’s Tombland district – we got a few uninvited additional guests. In Cathedral Close a stout figure limped aggressively out of the fog towards us, and we braced ourselves for another ghoul, but it was only the bag lady who had been living on one of the benches there for a couple of years and had once thrown an apple at my friend Jenny for no apparent reason. Later a wino tagged along for a while to see what all the fuss was about, and the Man in Black stole away into a dark corner in St Andrew’s churchyard to make a deal with the owner of a new Chinese restaurant, the outcome of which being that the restaurateur was permitted to hand flyers out to us advertising cut-price chow mein. Part-way through the walk the Man in Black stopped outside the window of the London Street branch of Bravissimo. ‘There aren’t any ghosts here,’ he told us. ‘I just like it.’