21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  That switch between light and dark which I’d never got quite right in my written novel was seamless in this physical lived one: it was often funny, but it could be scary too, and neither quality ever jarred with the other, because that’s what living in this part of the country, really living in it, was like. Upon leaving Buckenham Castle and returning the key to John, I stalked off on one of my regular routes, my coat dusted with the persistent mansize cobwebs of early-medieval flint. It was a great walk, an unassuming favourite, past old marl pits and wild ponds and through intensely adhesive ploughed mud which made your boots twice as heavy as they were when you started walking (a common phenomenon that has given rise to its own East Anglian word, honkydonks). Scarecrow country did not come much more prime than this. I’d found many of my best ones here or nearby: a sexless helmeted figure who somehow managed to be more futuristic space horse than person. A mechanic not totally unlike John, but with green, not blue, overalls and a head formerly containing turps. Another who, due to barbed wire and young crop conundrums, I’d never been able to get close enough to photograph clearly; even though I’d tried my best and dropped my phone in a stream as a by-product; and who was preserved as nothing more than a grey banshee cotton blur soothsaying about a coming ecological unkindness with empty billowing non-arms. My route took me via Old Buckenham church, whose early-1600s font is described in the 1958 Shell Guide to Norfolk as featuring ‘hairy animals’. In the graveyard I said a silent hello to a tombstone inscribed with the name Richard ‘Dick’ Cocking. I knew nothing about Richard but always took it as read that he had lived abundantly. I passed a stile that made me think of the habits of rats, not because I’d seen rats near it, indulging in their habits, but because I’d once talked to my parents about the habits of rats as we climbed the stile. Stiles and gates had that effect, I had discovered: you recalled something that happened when you climbed a stile or opened a gate, but on thinking harder it was something that had happened at another time that somebody had merely told you about when you climbed the stile or opened the gate. In early 2013, when my friend Russ and I opened a gate at the edge of Tyrrel’s Wood while walking near Pulham Market, Russ had not brought his football mate who lived with a pet wolf and permitted it to accompany him to Norwich City’s home games; Russ just told me about his football mate who lived with a pet wolf and permitted it to accompany him to Norwich City’s home games. I only met his wolf-owning football mate in a Norwich pub later. Regrettably, I never met the wolf.

  Two miles south-west of Old Buckenham, November started to call time on its meagre excuse for daylight. Unseen pigs I passed in stone sheds grumbled good-naturedly about the state of affairs. Unseen pigs in stone sheds in Norfolk and Suffolk always sounded restless, like pigs in a disaster film just before apocalypse hits. Later, when I’d moved far away, to the other side of the country, unseen pigs preparing for apocalypse would become one of the sounds that distinguished East Anglia from elsewhere in my mind. Another was its silence, which has a different timbre to the silence in the rural west, or the rural north, or the rural south. My walk finally took me back behind Buckenham Castle, to a lonely space occupied by New Buckenham’s graveyard, a more orderly cemetery than Old Buckenham’s (although neither village is anything close to ‘new’, almost everything in New Buckenham is orderly and compact, where Old Buckenham is scruffy and sprawling) but a less welcoming one. Being lonely and being alone are frequently two extremely different sensations and, despite the cemetery’s loneliness, I did not feel entirely alone as I walked through it. On my solitary Norfolk and Suffolk walks, particularly in the chillier months, I would often feel this ‘followed’ sensation, have the impulse to spin round to see who was behind me. I had walked in plenty of topographically threatening environments in other parts of the UK countryside but never had the same impulse. It sprang at least in part from that peculiar silence, combined with the vastness of the horizon. There are so many hiding places for the malevolent in an undulating landscape it is almost as if the brain refuses to accept them. In East Anglia the malevolent hides in subtler places, nearly in plain sight, which is ultimately more troubling. It’s the camouflage-enthused kid in a hide-and-seek game who eschews the big wardrobe on the far side of the house and instead blends seamlessly into a long vintage rug two feet in front of you. This aspect of Norfolk and Suffolk tells you a lot of what you need to know about why the nuanced ghost stories of M. R. James are the scariest and most enduring ghost stories of all, and why he usually chose these two counties as the setting for them. James, who was provost of King’s College Cambridge between 1905 and 1918, liked to use the crumbly seascapes, old manor houses and mildly sloping heaths and lings of eastern East Anglia as settings to supernaturally taunt the lonely academic sceptics often at the centre of his stories, and had a recurring interest in the malevolent capacity of inanimate objects. Perhaps he had noticed that inanimate objects radiated that capacity more here than elsewhere. James wrote of Parkins, the protagonist in Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad, which, both in its written and original TV form, successfully reproduced that ‘followed’ feeling I felt on many of my walks, ‘the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night’. The main demonic object in this case was not a scarecrow, however, but an old dog whistle, found by Parkins while digging around on a monastic site on a Suffolk cliff top. I did not do any DIY excavation as an East Anglian walker – I would defy anyone to be brave enough to, after watching my favourite M. R. James adaptation, Lawrence Gordon Clark’s 1972 BBC version of A Warning to the Curious, with its unforgettable barked instruction from beyond the grave, ‘No digging here!’ – but there always seemed to be at least one cabbalistic metal object gnashing its teeth at me from the edge of a bridleway or thicket during my hikes through the silent parts of Norfolk and Suffolk: forgotten robots of the fields, their purposes becoming ever more recondite as they sank into their surroundings, contravened by iron oxide and weeds.

  What those with an overactive imagination, such as M. R. James or myself, might have seen as malevolent was of course nothing more than practical to many. All those old drag harrows and tractor wheels and Allen Scythes and hay tedders served an everyday purpose before they were left to rot and get groped by nature. Scarecrows, too, were not just there to enhance the folk-horror film-cum-art-gallery in my head. They warded off birds, even though there are crop scarers to do the same job now (which, for all their monotony, can add an aptly spooky and unexpected Pop! to that engulfing lowland silence). But I was convinced there was more of this ominous, backward-looking aspect of agriculture here. Even if it hadn’t been agreed upon in a barn somewhere with a handshake, it was a trend that had spread visibly – perhaps in a classically Norfolkian, taciturn way, prompted by clandestine farmerly nods, not words. In the other twenty or so counties outside the east of England where I’d walked, I’d seen scarecrows and toothy rusting metal monsters but never nearly as many as here, and it surely wasn’t just because they had bigger humps and bumps to hide behind in other parts of the country. When it came to necromantic mannequins and unwholesome, rudimentary heads in particular, Darkest East Anglia seemed to have a unique affinity that went beyond just scarecrows. Norfolk’s sole waxwork museum, the Louis Tussauds House of Wax in Great Yarmouth, had for several decades been full of shoddy monuments to the power of the inadvertently macabre, showcasing, among others, a Neil Kinnock which looked like someone had simply burned the hair off a Margaret Thatcher waxwork and made do, and a Michael Jackson which gave an impression of what the King of Pop would have looked like if he’d aged naturally from 1982 onwards, died in 1997, been buried then dug up a fortnight later and stung by a passive-aggressive remark. In this alternative universe, far more entertainingly odd than any scarecrow festival I’d attended, Daley Thompson in his prime was no longer the figure my mum once cited as the Most Attractive Famous Man of the 1980s but a slightly melted version of Burt Reynolds with zombie ears.

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bsp; In 2012, at the end of a straight sixty-mile line west of Yarmouth where the last vestiges of the Brecks tumble into the Fens, three friends and I walked to the village of Stow Bardolph, opened a mahogany cupboard in the church and were confronted by the funerary wax effigy of Sarah Hare, an eighteenth-century member of the wealthy Hare family, who owned the Stow Bardolph estate from the 1500s onwards. Following an Oliver Cromwellesque line of thinking, Hare had requested to have her appearance rendered exactly as it was in life, without prettification, so wax Sarah remained in her precise mid-1700s state, with the exception of the original whalebone in her corset, which had been devoured by insects. As we perused her warts and zombie hair, we were kind of nonchalant. Our insouciance could be blamed on context. Less than an hour earlier we’d chanced, unwarned, upon a more chilling humanoid, or perhaps scarecroid or even zomboid: the macabre, huge-mouthed, broken-lipped Marilyn Monroe dummy at the deathly quiet Hollywood Legends Diner off the westbound carriageway of the A47 near Narborough. Normally if you look at a dead woman in a cupboard you’re going to be able to say unequivocally that that was the most disturbing part of your day, but this was a different kind of day, a Norfolk kind of day. Did the diner realise how intimidating their Marilyn was, with her dark-eyed, chipped face hiding behind early-1990s grunge festival hair? I gingerly stepped up and gave her a kiss, not quite touching her cheek. It wasn’t a hollow gesture, like the air kisses I used to reluctantly receive as a young man in the newspaper business from members of the media I’d never previously met. I was just frightened. Wrapped around Marilyn’s neck like a noose was an electric cord which, when plugged in, looked like it would release air from the grate below her in a facsimile of the famous billowy dress scene in the 1955 Billy Wilder film The Seven Year Itch. Something made me deeply thankful the device wasn’t switched on.

  In the Cambridge Folk Museum I saw arguably the most disturbing inanimate quasi-humans of all: two Aunt Sallies. Angry wooden heads on sticks, black-painted, thick-lipped, buck-toothed, penis-nosed. A male and a female, the difference in gender signified only by a bonnet. At village fairs in the 1800s people would jeer and throw rotten fruit at them. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, they are deeply unsettling, drenched in provincial racist fear and angry carnality. But who knows? There was probably a point when they seemed far more innocently comical. Time has a way of coating the mildly disturbing in an extra layer of darkness. I heard it in a lot of the songs I listened to when I drove to the starting points of my East Anglian walks: acid-folk tracks intentionally tinged with the occult when they were recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, enhanced by an extra patina of mystery in the decades since, as if the sounds themselves had been left in an an unused room to gather dust. The 1970 song ‘Graveyard’ by the short-lived Lincolnshire band Forest, for example. At the time Forest were ghost-obsessed kids barely out of their teens, messing about on recorders and violins in a budget studio, but by 2012 they had become somehow the perfect evocation of M. R. James eeriness and solo walks in empty pockets of land shadowed by a nameless, invisible beast. Stone Angel’s self-titled 1975 debut album was recorded by the Norfolk husband–wife songwriting team Joan and Ken Saul on the equipment at Joan’s teacher training college, just south of Norwich, due to financial constraints. Only three hundred copies were pressed, and in the early 1990s Joan and Ken still had ninety of them languishing under their bed. Approached by a record dealer, they sold them all to him for £2.50 each, save for a couple they kept for themselves for sentimental reasons. One of these originals will now sell on eBay for well over £600. The fragility of the recording eerily evokes the Norfolk and Suffolk legends Stone Angel sing about: the underwater bells of the sea-sunk churches of Dunwich village which allegedly still ring beneath the waves, wind-whipped marsh reeds, smudgy light, the footsteps of a demon beast. A dog endemic to eastern East Anglia, but not a normal dog you feed and stroke and patronise with a thrown stick. Black Shuck, he has been called, or Old Shef, or – presumably by the very short-sighted – Old Scarf. He is red-eyed, made of history, the rub of the earth. Above all this, Joan’s voice is a gossamer cry on an icy east wind, coming from somewhere behind old stone. She works in a library now. Ken is the secretary of the Norfolk Moth Society. ‘Don’t get him started on moths,’ Joan told me when I met the two of them in a pub in the village of Spooner Row. ‘You’ll be here until next week.’

  In 2012, when I did a short stint of volunteering at the Cambridge Folk Museum, I got more of a sense of how time could darken a work of art, particularly those characterised by minimalism or naivety. With thoughts of relocation, I was beginning to clear out my loft at the time and had noticed how much more interesting a lot of the stuff in my loft had become in the years since I’d shoved it up there. That is the big rule of lofts: everything becomes more interesting once it is in one. If you were a dull person and you spent a few years in a loft it could probably do a lot for your character. Attics aren’t quite the same, as they are posher and generally have more refined and expensive stuff in them. The museum was like a giant living loft, everything in it getting more darkly interesting all the time. It was different to Kettle’s Yard, the museum next door, which was smarter, more attic-like. If a well-groomed person in neat clothes came into the Cambridge Folk Museum, nine times out of ten it was because they’d got the wrong door. Two staircases led to the first floor. The narrower of the two functioned as a downward-only staircase. A visitor would sometimes attempt to ascend the downward-only staircase, and one of my fellow volunteers – a retiree in her late sixties – would shout, ‘STOP!’ nearly causing the visitor to fall back down the stairs in fright. Time palpably slowed once through the doors of the museum because any concept of ‘catching up’ with the world beyond the threshold was rendered moot here, since there would always be more social history to record. My job was to work behind the scenes, archiving the constant flow of new potential exhibits, sometimes guessing at what they were with wild inaccuracy. Another of the more elderly female volunteers had recently mistaken a black cylindrical candle mould of Victorian vintage for an early dildo. I was warned to watch out for vodka beetles, who had a bad habit of chewing through ancient cloth and carpet – especially, I presumed, when on one of their signature benders. I opened a box to find an exquisite dress accompanied by a letter explaining that the owner had first worn it in 1952 at a ball with her late husband on a ship bound for the Gold Coast. I formed a shield around it with my arms, fearful of what vodka beetles might do to it if they got their way.

  I began to picture an alternative life for myself amid all this gentle, cranky beauty, caring for early-Victorian horses’ sun bonnets and corn dolly windmills and eventually inaugurating my own Scarecrow Wing in the furthest corner of the building, rescuing Zombie Marilyn from an East Norfolk household waste recycling centre when the Hollywood Legends Diner met its palpably imminent end, giving her a home for eternity where she could graduate from nightmarish to downright wake-up-screaming-for-your-mother-in-the-night terrifying. But in total honesty I had reservations about my pedigree as a curator of folk artefacts. I had been genuinely thrilled to find a five-foot wicker man at Myhills Pet and Garden in Swaffham in 2003, but in time I had taken him for granted. Over two winters, uncherished, forgotten, he had rotted into my hedge until he was nothing but a couple of brittle brown ribs, barely distinguishable from the twigs around him. A true social history archivist would not have allowed such a demise to take place. There will always be generously sized garden centre wicker men, I’d thought, much like people before me probably thought, There will always be rudimentary Edwardian traffic lights, or, There will always be rusty Georgian mantraps. I’d looked high and low at garden centres across East Anglia for his replacement, but no dice. Wicker geese? Yes. Wicker owls? Certainly. Wicker men? No. I replaced him with Warren the scarecrow, lovingly stuffing and clothing him, vowing to be a better mannequin parent, but he did not last. In the same spring that I proudly worked as an archiver of rural fo
lk objects, I set Warren alight on my garden bonfire. I saw this as ritualistic, a ceremony marking my decision to move away from Norfolk, the end of this physical folk-horror book I’d lived inside, this era of straw men. But there was a more basic desire at work too: I just really liked burning stuff.