by Tom Cox
I do not class Cambridge as part of true folk-horror East Anglia, nor its surrounding villages, which are more Camberwick Green than anything you see in even the most genteel stretches of Norfolk or Suffolk. Cambridge is a different drink, served in fragile bone china with milk and two sugars. But it is still an early gateway to the Badlands of the East, a point where a rustic wheel very slowly starts to turn after miles of patchy post-London almost-countryside and repressive commuter sprawl. It was a very convenient base for M. R. James to make the excursions north-east that inspired his stories. On the coldest day of 2013 I went to the Leper Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, on the city’s harsher, less leafy north side, to watch a man called Robert Lloyd Parry – another Cambridge academic – spend an hour and a half pretending to be James. Parry’s one-man theatre company, Nunkie, doesn’t settle for simply reading aloud the stories that James wrote in the first three decades of the last century but attempts to recreate the experience of the author himself reading them to rapt students and fellow scholars at King’s or Eton College in the final part of his life. Parry’s shows invariably sold out well ahead of opening night. He was only forty-two but looked uncannily like James did in late middle age, albeit much taller, his huge shoulders crammed into a waistcoat and jacket, with thin-rimmed round spectacles and a slicked-down flick of receding mousy hair. He’s toured the eight stories in his repertoire all over England, but tends to favour old buildings in East Anglia. ‘Remember to wrap up warm,’ he told me before I set off for the Leper Chapel to see him perform the stories Count Magnus and Number 13. I took this for nothing but a pleasantry, something anyone would say to another going anywhere on a snowy January evening, but it turned out he really meant it. Nine centuries old, with no heating and a ceiling of such a towering nature that its finer details remain a mystery, the building smelled like every damp cellar that I’d ever been in had got together and formed a damp cellar supergroup, but also like the damp itself was suffering from hypothermia and needed help. The temperature inside hovered an elk’s hair above freezing. At the interval everyone in the crowd of fifty or so got up, not because we had anywhere to go – in a toiletless one-room building like the Leper Chapel there isn’t anywhere to go – but because we needed to stamp our feet to bring some semblance of circulation back to our legs. Candlelight waltzed up walls, illuminating the drooping tongues of gargoyles. Not your everyday gargoyles, but serious, primal gargoyles who remembered a time before clocks. I began to realise that the performance had been mismarketed. It was not a solitary show after all. There were two performers here, both equally vital: Parry and the building.
In the century and a bit since James’s first stories emerged, human brains have been voluntarily reprogrammed: they flit between forms of entertainment at an infinitely higher speed, distracted by the tyranny of choice. In an era of compressed attention spans how do you get an audience to focus on James’s slow-moving world of solitary academics weekending in off-the-beaten-track hotels and admiring the cupolas on Suffolk churches? Parry’s method is to make as few concessions to the present as possible, pulling you with a primitive thud back to the dark of an early-twentieth-century room then, in his storytelling itself, pulling you even further back to an earlier era – typically the 1880s or 1890s. ‘Turn off your mobile phones,’ we had been told by the man on the door. ‘Don’t just put them on silent. Turn them off properly.’ Parry read without preamble or thanks to his audience, illuminated only by a couple of candles. ‘Some people complain it’s too dark,’ he told me afterwards. ‘But I’m afraid I ignore them. The pale light, uncertain shadows and flickers of candlelight reflect James’s storytelling method: the sense that there is something just out of sight, on the periphery of your vision, something you have to peer at to see, and even then you don’t see it clearly.’ He adds to the atmosphere with props, including old books, photographs, a vintage armchair, a leather bag containing notebooks and, often but not tonight, a bust of Zeus and an old coat stand. In the Leper Chapel he paused at turns in the narrative to take a swig of brandy and milk. His style was somehow exasperated, troubled, wry and utterly commanding all at the same time, an exaggerated amalgam of two or three very old tutors he had had at university, ‘terrifically erudite men with very dry wits and faintly satirical twinkles in their eyes’. When he deliberately, violently dropped the leather bag on the floor at a crucial juncture in Count Magnus – another James tale featuring a disbelieving, lonely academic being haunted by a terrible presence – I jumped in a manner that I hadn’t since the first time I watched Jamie Lee Curtis walk home from school through the ominous suburbia of John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween: a testament to how thoroughly Parry’s performance had transported me. Three years later, when I saw Parry perform Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad in a smart, conventionally decorated theatre in a converted early-twentieth-century factory he was equally commanding and convincing, but something was palpably missing: the vital extra element called Place.
The general thinking is that the fictional setting for Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad is based on the area around Felixstowe, but it’s Dunwich, thirty miles further north along Suffolk’s coast, that I always think of when I read the story or – particularly – see the original BBC adaptation: the drowned port, Britain’s Atlantis, the place where Scarecrow Country begins to be nibbled by the sea. When I see Michael Horden, who plays Parkins in the 1968 TV version, finding the dreaded dog whistle in the weeds and sand above the sea, it’s the crumbling cliff beyond Dunwich’s ruined thirteenth-century Franciscan priory I think of. When I have been alone, walking along Dunwich’s ever-shifting shingle, soundtracked only by the cries of terns and the rough indistinct conversation of my footsteps with a wind made garrulous by a long lonely journey over water, I can’t help thinking of Horden being chased along the beach by the white sheet ghost in his dream. ‘Who is this who is coming?’ reads the inscription on the whistle, translated from Latin. In Dunwich on a cold lonely day the something-behind-me feeling of emptiest Norfolk and Suffolk reaches its apotheosis: the sense that, while you have no place to hide here, whatever might follow you has plenty of very subtle ones. For my last decade in Norfolk it was the nearest stretch of coastline to my home, a place I visited regularly to read, to swim, to think, which got a few feet closer to me every year. When I revisited Suffolk for the first time after two years in Devon, in 2016, it was, for reasons of a magnetic nature, the first place I headed for.
I passed through Blaxhall on the way, stopping to watch corvids and buzzards weave above geometric fields. Twenty-four months had given hills enough time to alter me. I felt the full force of that dizzy, shrunk disorientation for the first time. The Blaxhall scarecrows were still not there, but outside a farm shop near Middleton I stopped to photograph a couple of others, also apparently joined in matrimony. They were good ones, especially the husband, who sat on an old camping chair dressed in a brown suit jacket and cravat, with a cheap toy scarecrow cat – Great Yarmouth gift shop was the thought that sprang to mind – on his lap and an expression on his white cotton bag face that found the middle ground between dreamy and psychotic. I’d have liked to have seen him a bit more weatherblasted but that was nitpicking. I was forty now, the age when people should be writing novels, and the written version of my scarecrow novel had still not emerged. I was much more relaxed about that fact than I used to be. It either would happen, one day, or it wouldn’t. I’d written a couple of other books in the meantime, very different books, which I felt proud of and had enjoyed writing, tuning in to a frequency that suited me. My novel, if it had happened in one of its initial forms, probably would have been inferior. I saw now that in the writing of it I’d been striving for something unreachably big while neglecting all the little stuff that was a vital part of making something reachably big or even something reachably medium. Some of us, especially if we have perfectionist tendencies, want to create our best work when we’re unblemished. But that’s not typically the natural patte
rn of events. Sometimes the best work doesn’t arrive until we’re a collection of wood in a mud-caked boiler suit, alone in a field, being buffeted this way and that by a cold wind. Of course we have to learn this for ourselves because one of the central characteristics of being temporarily unblemished is not having any awareness that you’re temporarily unblemished.
I’d chosen one of my old walking mixes of spooky folk songs for the drive to Dunwich, including Lal and Mike Waterson’s ‘The Scarecrow’, a song so broken it barely exists, but so ripe with death metaphor and circle-of-life awareness it cannot help but exist for ever in the mind of anyone who’s ever heard it. Aptly, as I drove past Dunwich Heath, Stone Angel’s ‘The Bells of Dunwich’ kicked in, although ‘kicked’ wasn’t really the word. It floated in on a ghostly tide. Underwater sounds. Sounds as smudgy as the light let in by an M. R. James story. Even if the bells had been ringing right now under the sea and I had listened very closely, I doubt I’d have been able to hear them above Poseidon’s violent whistling breath. Extreme weather warnings had gone out across the UK the previous evening. In other parts of the country people were mocking them as a false alarm. Not here. A tree was down, blocking the main route to the beach, although because of the angle at which the trunk had fallen and the ivy overwhelming its limbs my initial impression was that a lane I’ve travelled dozens of times had vanished into thin air. This was not the part of Dunwich most associated with the supernatural, but it was a junction I’d often thought of as singularly enigmatic and eerie, perhaps the nearest to an archetypal blues musician’s Devil’s crossroads as you’ll get on the Suffolk Heritage Coast. Arriving at it on foot one early-winter evening in 2011 I’d come face to face with a huge stag, the two of us staring each other out for what felt like an eternity. During those thirty seconds or so I felt like I’d crossed some sort of metaphysical divide. In another incident flavoured with arguably no less paranormal excitement two years prior to that, I had happened upon an unmanned table of home-made jam in some woodland on the other side of the road.
Now, in 2016, I took the longer route around to the deserted beach car park. Miscellaneous fragments of tree and bin and fence were flying through the air, and everyone who was outdoors – essentially me, a bold crow, a man hurrying towards the village pub and a woman wrestling with her weekly rubbish – looked like they’d just had their eyeballs pressure-washed. I hadn’t planned to come here in the middle of the most destructive storm of the year, but for appropriate historical ambience I could not have chosen a better day. Is there another part of the English coastline that has been more altered by strong weather over the last thousand years than the four-mile stretch from Walberswick, a couple of miles north of here, to Sizewell, a couple of miles south? It’s doubtful. In the early 1300s Dunwich was one of the major ports of East Anglia, but over the next six centuries the sea staged a series of devastating attacks on it, bringing the coastline over a mile further inland and destroying all of the town’s original eight churches. The last one crumbled down the weakened cake-like cliffs in the 1920s, its final standing buttress being removed and placed safely in the graveyard of the current, relatively modern (1832) church on the furthest side of town from the waves. Despite the place only having around one hundred residents, a trace of the fish trade remains. ‘Do you have any Dover sole?’ a man in the queue ahead of me once asked at the beachside fish hut. ‘I’ll just check,’ said the man at the counter, disappearing around the back in the direction of the beach. ‘You’re in luck,’ he said, upon returning thirty seconds later. ‘The boat has just come in.’ In the 1800s it was still not unheard of for herring to be used as currency in nearby inns.
I could easily have stayed overnight with friends in Norwich or south Norfolk, but I checked into a B & B up the road, in the neighbouring village of Westleton, alone. It seemed the M. R. James thing to do. I used my debit card to pay for my room, not having any herring to hand at the time. I noted with pleasure that the B & B had the Jamesian name of the Crown, instantly evocative of an item another James protagonist, in Warning to the Curious, finds buried near the eastern seashore. ‘Brian is finding it difficult under the table with his legs,’ said a talkative woman at breakfast with a strong West Midlands accent. Everyone in the room except me had a strong West Midlands accent, which of course made perfect sense, us all being only 179 miles from Walsall if we stuck to major road networks. It was a ridiculous thing I had done, coming double that distance from my own home in Devon to stay in this place amid holidaying strangers, but the ridiculousness was freeing. I crossed the road to a second-hand bookshop in a converted chapel, where a lovely man in apparent nightwear sold me five books and loaned me three more, and his impossibly polite adolescent assistant offered me a cup of tea. When I came back the following day to return the loaned books the shop was deserted, but there was a stick and a dented sunflower-oil can next to a sign reading BASH CAN WITH STICK TO GET ATTENTION, an instruction that came across as much as a recommended life philosophy as a retail-themed instruction. I bashed it, and the lovely man appeared, again in apparent nightwear. It turned out he’d been to school ninety yards from where I now lived. I didn’t find out if he also wore apparent nightwear back then.
In 2003 I had viewed a house for sale directly across the heath from the bookshop that I couldn’t afford, motivated by the regular optimistic thought of my late twenties and thirties that I would imminently become a person who wasn’t constantly scrabbling around for next month’s mortgage. The man who showed me the house, which seemed to have last been updated in the less auspicious part of 1974, had not lived in it; it had belonged to his late father. He confessed that, while it was peaceful for much of the year, the ‘kiss-me-quick crowd’ going past on the nearby road in the direction of the beach could be a problem in summer. It had struck me as a strange observation then, and did so even more now. There could be few less intrinsically kiss-me-quick places in England than Dunwich. Drag-a-cold-icy-finger-down-my-spine-slow maybe. Kiss-me-quick? No. And that way it had stayed, with its excellent museum and seasonal 1950s fish and chip hut the only concessions to tourism, a lack of development potential being, along with a strong supernatural ambience, one of rampant coastal erosion’s undervalued plus points. Dunwich is that bit more desolate and ragged than its near neighbours Southwold, Thorpeness, Aldeburgh and Walberswick, especially on a gale-wrecked March day. A wooden gate swung furiously in the wind as I arrived on the beach, revealing a rusted generator like some deeply anticlimactic birthday surprise. As I climbed the sea wall, I was lifted slightly off my heels and almost knocked onto my back on the shingle. These are itinerant stones, moving constantly southwards, and a few centuries ago many of them might have cited Norfolk as their home county. Half an hour’s walk further up the coast a dead porpoise provided another reminder of the sea’s ever-encroaching bully-boy wishes. It was pushed up against the last shelf of shingle, beyond which was only sandy heathland and heathery marsh. It was the second porpoise I’d found on this stretch of lonely coast, to add to the pristine one I had discovered in almost the exact same spot five years earlier. I’d called the coastguard about its predecessor and would like to think the body was put to good use: an example of perfect porpoiseness to be shown off for generations in a museum. This one was smaller, and birds – herring gulls, oystercatchers and the terns from the light green, sandy, sectioned-off nesting area behind me – had already begun to feast on its face.
The murky waters of Dunwich conceal so much: not just more porpoises but old merchant houses and graves and churches and even, perhaps most astonishingly of all, an ancient aqueduct. It is still an aqueduct of sorts now, wherever it is. One of Dunwich’s most calamitous storms, in 1740, not only destroyed more of the cliff but, to the villagers’ horror, uncovered bones and buildings lost to the sea centuries before. When you’re on the beach in summer and burying a person to her neck in pebbles, as I did with a group of Norwich friends here one summer, a macabre note is added to the activity by the realisation
that a matter of yards away actual human remains are submerged beneath dark water and turbid stone. In March with a storm raging and the beach full of fresh driftwood and flotsam, it’s even more possible to look at the horizon and picture Dunwich’s old frontier, more than a mile out there, in the waves: a place that, had Poseidon been feeling more benevolent towards it over the last millennium, might have gone on to outshine Norwich as East Anglia’s finest city. Staring at the sea is always a cathartic reminder of human insignificance, but there’s an extra cathartic element on this stretch of coast that perhaps gives it its unique power: a reminder not just of our insignificance but of the way the things around us with a strong illusion of permanence can crumble, a reminder of change and the lack of choice we have in life to do anything but embrace it.
Looking back in the direction of the rest of Suffolk and Norfolk from the back ledge of the beach here I sometimes get the sense that the angry saltwater has already got the better of the land, imprinted itself onto it: that, lacking the big rocky walls which defend so much of Britain’s west coast, East Anglia’s big horizons and quiet spaces, its horror-film emptiness, are creations of the sea’s force – or at least its strong salty air. I feel another aspect of this nine miles north of Dunwich at Covehithe, a very different stretch of beach, possibly even more desolate. Since 1830 its cliffs have been forced back more than five hundred metres, and there is no sign of a slowing of the erosion. Almost exactly a year after my Dunwich trip, on another dizzy day when my suppressed love for soft scary East Anglia tripped me over, I walked from Covehithe’s double church – a vast ruin, courtesy of Cromwell’s armies in the Civil War, and a smaller, newer church inside it – north up the beach and was rendered open-mouthed by the latest dramatic leap the shoreline had taken backwards. It was if someone had popped a balloon or crisp packet next to the shoreline when it had not been expecting it. What I thought impossible had happened: Covehithe looked even more post-apocalyptic than it had half a decade before. The remains of a cliff-top copse I had walked through on my way to Benacre Broad in 2012 were now scattered on the beach, the salt-blasted roots of its trees being shaped by the tide more each day into something an elaborately branded corporate think tank might give a sculptor in Southwold or Aldeburgh a handsome cheque to produce. The stretch of beach beside the broad itself – already becoming a salty lagoon on my last visit – was now unnegotiable unless the tide was right out, freshwater and saltwater having finally become an irreversible cocktail. ‘Can we get across that?’ I asked Isabelle, a long term walking companion I’d been reunited with for the morning, assessing the churning sandbanked natural well where sea met broad. ‘Yeah!’ we chorused. But we couldn’t. We didn’t even give it a proper try. We’d have been up to our waists in no time. Bad things could happen here despite the soft lull of the land. This was the place where Charles Halfacree, an Essex factory worker, made a failed attempt to float the body of his sister’s transsexual ex-husband out to sea on a lilo, in one of the less run-of-the-mill East Anglian murder cases of the last two decades. The church had its own infamous personal interior breeze, which still whistled inexplicably around the pews on the calmest of days.