Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  They are usually morality tales of a kind in that the main protagonist will be trying to meddle into something best left alone, to discover or dig up or get to the bottom of some relic’s or painting’s history. A nameless terror will be evoked, the sense of reality shifts, indistinct presences enter the world, partly hidden but getting ever nearer, until there is a revelation of some ghastly and disquieting kind. As James himself put it: ‘An acrid consciousness of a restrained hostility very near us, like a dog on a leash that might be let go at any moment.’

  Two of the very best such stories are ‘A Warning to the Curious’ and ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. In the first, an unemployed treasure-hunter awakens the malevolent spirits of long-dead Anglo-Saxon kings on the lonely Norfolk coast. In ‘Oh, Whistle’, a sceptical bachelor academic on a Suffolk seaside holiday accidentally conjures a baleful, unnamed demon. The moral of both stories is pretty clear. Next time you’re at a loose end mooching about in some woods or down at the beach and you find an ancient crown, amulet, bone flute or such, leave it where it is. Whatever you do, don’t blow down it. It’s just not worth it.

  Both of these stories were adapted for TV by the BBC in the 1970s as part of the fondly remembered Ghost Stories for Christmas season, which brought several of James’s eeriest stories to the screen as well as Charles Dickens’ superbly chilling ‘The Signalman’. Most of these, definitely the best of them, are directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, whose slow, almost somnolent direction suffuses the stories with a menacing stillness. ‘Oh, Whistle’, though, was directed by the young Jonathan Miller and casts Michael Hordern as Parkin, the meddling college professor. Disquieting, elegant, often funny, this and the Lawrence Gordon Clark adaptations have become DVD staples of Christmas chez Maconie. The climactic scene in which Parkin is confronted by the nightmarish wraith from the bedclothes, leaving him jabbering ‘Oh no’ like a child, has been known to reduce even the most gore-sated modern teen to silence.

  The BBC has tried to resurrect the Christmas Jamesian adaptation of late with a terrific version of ‘View from the Hill’, and the repeats of the old classics roll around most Decembers. Nicely apt, as James had originally written the stories to be read for friends and pupils on Christmas Eves over a good port and before a crackling fire. James was something of an enigma; his biographer Michael Cox wrote, ‘One need not be a professional psychoanalyst to see the ghost stories as some release from feelings held in check.’ Many commentators have speculated that he was a repressed homosexual, even possibly with feelings towards his pupils. There is certainly a sense of revulsion or at least reticence towards physical expression. He abhors it in his chosen literature too. ‘Sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it. At the same time don’t let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, “the stony grin of unearthly malice”, pursuing forms in darkness, and “long-drawn, distant screams”, are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded.’

  Taking a cue from James, the twentieth century was something of a golden age for the Middle English ghost story, or ‘strange story’, as some have preferred it. Walter de la Mare gave his stories that designation, and others have continued it. It’s a good choice. This branch of very Middle English fiction has no clanking chains or severed heads but a disquieting sense of the lost and forgotten: branch lines, James’s old churches, deserted farms, piers, windmills, weirs and remote woods. If you know de la Mare’s haunting, melancholic poem ‘The Listeners’ from schoolroom anthologies, you will have some of the flavour of his tales.

  So far, so sedate. But I love that one American internet aficionado of his work has put it more transatlantically: ‘Trying to pick the ten best de la Mare tales is like trying to pick the ten best Beatle songs. You’re screwed before you begin. It can’t be done. Might as well give up now before you make a fool of yourself & piss everybody off in the bargain. Don’t you want to have friends? What’s wrong with you, anyway? Put down that pen. Better to keep silent & be thought an idiot than open your mouth & remove all doubt. Ahhhh, who am I kidding? Since when did I give a damn …’ And then proceeds to compile the list, comparing the two canons as they go, so that ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ is ‘Yesterday’, ‘Out of the Deep’ is ‘I Am the Walrus’ and ‘A.B.O.’ is ‘Blue Jay Way’. De la Mare’s last words on his deathbed are so strange they might, as many have noted, have come from one of his own stories: ‘All these onlookers. There are so many of them. Where do they come from?’

  Arthur Machen was an almost exact contemporary of de la Mare’s and his writings grow more influential with every passing year, spreading beyond the literary world into realms like popular music. The contemporary English label Ghost Box attempts to recreate what we might call this Middle-English strangeness in sound, the sound of partially remembered school science programmes, Public Information Films, radio call signs, long-forgotten advertising jingles. One of their artists, The Belbury Poly, describe their music as: ‘Soundtracks to televised versions of Arthur Machen tales, beautifully filmed in grainy day-for-night lighting, yet too disturbing and explicit ever to be broadcast.’ There is a host of other writers in a similar vein, operating in Middle England through the late Victorian period and onwards: Oliver Onions, J.S. LeFanu, and H.R. Wakefield whose collection They Return at Evening is surely the best title for such a volume ever. The work of comedy troupe The League of Gentlemen and their stalwarts Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss is indebted to them.

  Dyson and Gatiss have dramatised on radio and film two of the best stories by one of the key figures of this very English literary scene, Robert Aickman, who, like de la Mare, called his pieces ‘strange stories’. Aickman’s Middle England is drab, lonely and unutterably weird. It’s a place of cheap hotels, quiet estates, dowdy backstreets and tawdry fairs in Midlands towns. A fan and blogger Peter Coady has written: ‘Robert Aickman would have enjoyed a visit to my home town, Leamington Spa, in the heart of the English midlands. With its air of foregone luxury and faded Georgian grandeur, it is the sort of place he would have approved of. There is a decent museum, and several art galleries to muse in, as well as two excellent second-hand bookshops. This time of year, mid-autumn, would have been an especially suitable time to come, when the few tourists have moved on and a melancholy calm pervades the damp streets. Autumn is a good time, too, to take account of the town’s ghosts, timid and scattered as they may be.’

  Aickman was a curious man, self-absorbed, moody, pessimistic. He wrote chiefly in his spare time, when not engaged in his day job at the Inland Waterways Association, which he helped found. He loved canals and boat people and viewed most of the trappings of the modern industrialised world with suspicion at best and usually downright hostility. Sex, viewed murkily as if in a weed bed, is never far from the surface of his fiction. In ‘Ringing the Changes’, a honeymooning young wife is seemingly lured away by undead beings in a nasty little seaside town and returns changed and strangely sexualised. In ‘The Trains’, two young women on a walking tour stray into a remote valley peopled by threatening yokels and see an isolated house by a railway line with desolate figures in the window. I won’t spoil it for you beyond saying that they end up being the figures in the window, their pockets stuffed with railway tickets and the heady scent of lesbianism in the air. Appetite whetted? Aickman, like many of the above, can now be read in beautiful editions from private presses such as Tartarus and Ash Tree. The stock and reputation and level of interest in all these writers has never been higher.

  So for me, Middle England’s fascination, obsession even, with the dark and macabre runs like an icy underground river beneath the cosiness of the surrounding countryside and the respectable, proper veneer of the village and market town; all this in much the same way that David Lynch’s movies expose the dark and disturbing interiors behind the white picket fences of Middle America. In every vicarage, country house and subu
rban semi, resentment, jealousy and revenge seethe, and murder waits its turn with revolver, rope and lead piping.

  In February 1946, our old friend George Orwell contributed one of his most famous pieces to Tribune magazine. It began thus:

  It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

  Naturally, about a murder …

  Murder as comfort food, murder as toasted muffin if you like, is a very English concept. For Orwell, there was a very specific kind of slaying that went well with sleepy Sundays by the fire.

  The murderer should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semidetached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery.

  To this I would add rivalry at the bridge club or scone envy at the WI as possible motives. These teacup-rattling murders are not just popular amidst the snoozing Shires of the Home Counties. The Americans are a sucker for traditional Middle English slaughter too. They may call it Clue not Cluedo and Sherlockiana rather than Holmesiana, but the country-house-murder board game and the deductions of the great detective of Baker Street are both hugely popular across the Atlantic. The long-running American TV series Murder She Wrote is, essentially, Miss Marple relocated to New England and given a job: writer of country-house-murder mysteries.

  A New York Times piece in the late 1980s headlined ‘Murder Most British; Homicidal Passion As National Pastime’ nicely articulates some of our felonious predilections. ‘The British take particular delight in uncovering the secret scandals in such pockets of respectability. They excel at constructing tense, claustrophobic studies of homicidal passion, the burning-ember kind that smoulders behind a bourgeois facade of arch-propriety until flaring up in a desperate act of violence that shocks and thrills the neighbours and sends a shudder down society’s moral spine.’

  But in nearly every case, we want to see the damage done to the social order restored and repaired by detection, arrest and subsequent punishment. That is why we love reading reports of trials in our papers and why trial-scene set pieces feature so much in our crime dramas. They serve a nice double function. First they reveal all the juicy details, thus satisfying our prurience. Secondly, they show justice being done.

  Who brings the miscreants to book? Well, you’d think it would be a pretty specialised job, wouldn’t you? Requiring a bit of training or something? Not at all. In England, it appears, the investigation of serious crime and the apprehension of dangerous criminals is best left to little old ladies, chinless aristocrats, posh novelists, professors of literature or magician’s assistants. The enduring popularity of Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Paul Temple, Gervase Fen and Jonathan Creek are all manifestations of our love of the amateur sleuth. It is a love that writers and TV commissioning editors often stretch to breaking point, as they did with the ludicrous Rosemary and Thyme in which Pam Ferris and Felicity Kendal played crime-fighting horticulturists vanquishing the forces of evil across the begonias of Middle England.

  Our love of the amateur sleuth says something fairly profound, I think, about our national character. We are nonconformists, and not just in the narrowly religious sense. Essentially, we are a nation of gentlemen adventurers and enthusiastic laymen rather than dull credentialled experts or state-sanctioned law enforcers. It speaks of our deep-seated mistrust of authority, of what the Americans would call ‘big government’. Wimsey is only pretending to be a fool. He actually has a mind like a vice and, from time to time in the Dorothy L. Sayers stories, we see a flash of steel behind the silly arse demeanour. In this, of course, he echoes the greatest of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes. Eccentric, unpredictable, dissolute even, but navigating by his own unerring and singular moral compass, he is clearly and deliciously the alpha male, the sine qua non, the intellectual heavyweight compared to Inspector Lestrade and the pompous second-raters at the Yard and the dead orthodoxy of the state’s lawmen. This is very English. It is hard to imagine a Chinese Sherlock Holmes.

  On the other hand, we will develop a fondness for policemen providing that they are mavericks, that they are flawed, that they, and this is axiomatic, ‘do not do things by the book’. Sometimes, as I watch DCI Frost flying off the handle or Morse disobeying his superiors’ orders, I fantasise about writing a detective drama about a cop who does things completely by the book, assiduously follows protocol and where whole episodes are taken up with him requisitioning new stationery or painstakingly writing up his notes with very minor witnesses before comparing his findings with a representative from the Crown Prosecutions Service and deciding, on balance, not to go any further with the case. Perhaps I could sell it to Burmese state TV.

  In 1987, a writer called Caroline Graham introduced her policeman creation to the world in a book called The Killing at Badger’s Drift, a title which immediately and cosily set the tone for her subsequent detective novels, all set in the fictional south-eastern county of Midsomer, and the colossally successful TV series to come. Tom Barnaby is, by the standards of Morse or Frost or Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, not much of a maverick. Kindly, decent and happily married, the man who has brought Graham’s creation to chubby and amiable life, John Nettles, says of him: ‘Tom Barnaby is so normal, it almost hurts … He drives an Astra and likes to go to the garden centre. He dotes on his wife and daughter. He’s moving house and because he’s such a domestic soul, this represents a major event. But he also has a brilliant investigative mind and can solve crimes that would, in real life, take an entire police force years to penetrate. I find that juxtaposition rather fascinating.’ He drives a Jag these days actually. But it hasn’t gone to his head.

  The TV series was originally called ‘Barnaby’ but its new name better reflects the sense of place. Barnaby’s patch, the small town of Causton in Midsomer, is fictional but the series is filmed in the Vale of Aylesbury and around the M40 corridor. In the show the bloodstained villages of Midsomer are naturally given fictional names, nice ones too: Aspern Tallow, Martyr Warren, Goodman’s Land, Midsomer Mallow, Morton Fendle. As well as them being aesthetically pleasing, one of the reasons for the invented names is to stop the actual locations becoming overrun by tourists and pilgrims from all over the globe. They still come, though, to the villages of Penn, Taplow, The Lee and Long Crendon (controversy here when filming in a local’s house caused disruption in the small hours), and the towns of Aylesbury, Amersham and Beaconsfield.

  The last of these three is where I’m headed now, on the neat blue Chiltern Line train from Marylebone, out beyond Neasden junction and through a tunnel beneath Lord’s cricket ground, past the new Wembley, out beyond Denham golf club and Gerrards Cross to Beaconsfield, the ‘clearing in the beeches’. There are Beaconsfields in Iowa and Nova Scotia, in Sydney and Melbourne, Perth and Queensland, and Beaconsfield
Tasmania was once the richest gold town on that far-away island. But this is the very English Beaconsfield: prosperous, pleasant and frequently murderous, at least on telly.

  The high street is replete with the staples of Middle England: a Waitrose, a Lloyd’s chemist and a Help the Aged with an indigo DKNY blouse in the window. In amidst this standard fare are some oddities: one shop advertises ‘Foreign Films converted’ whilst its neighbour sells ‘Specialist toys’. Evidence of Middle England’s darkly passionate hidden nature? Probably not. Probably nothing more dubious than region-2 DVDs and wooden spinning tops. There’s also a High Class Shoe Repairers, which implies that somewhere there’s a Low Class Shoe Repairers; perhaps a beery man in a stained vest smoking a roll-up who says, ‘I could put an elastic band round it for you.’

  Beaconsfield is a model town and, appropriately, it has a model village: Bekonscot, perhaps the most famous in the world, and certainly the first. It was created in 1929 as a labour of love by one man, an accountant called Roland Callingham, who built the village in his back garden purely for his and his guests’ amusement. Sweet, really, and again perfectly fitting as Middle England is the spiritual home of the hobbyist. All the proceeds from visitors, 13 million of them over the last seventy-five years, goes to charity. They’ve raised somewhere in the region of five million quid. Rather sadly, then, given all this good work, at the time of writing it has had its enormous sign pinched, a case for Tom Barnaby perhaps, if the killing spree in Midsomer Magna ever abates. This bit of petty thievery seemed a very un-Beaconsfield thing to happen. It’s certainly very un-Bekonscot. The village is unashamedly and indeed gleefully stuck in a time warp, portraying an idyllic, idealised rural England as it was in the 1930s. There’s no Starbucks, no KFC, no Bargain Booze. There’s no CCTV or hoodies drinking cider in the bus shelter, although a policeman is chasing a bloke by the racetrack. Just six little villages set in a rolling, nostalgic landscape of farm and pasture castles, churches, woods, lakes. Enid Blyton, who lived nearby, loved it here and visited often. A model of her house, Green Hedges, nestles in a leafy lane. There are trams and a zoo called Chessnade and piers and, in one corner, the tiny people are watching a game of cricket. There’s no sledging, match-fixing or ball-tampering here, I’ll bet.