Ghoul Brittania

by Andrew Martin

  In ‘Appendix C’ of The Most Haunted House in England Price lists, ‘in non-technical language’, the phenomena seen by his official observers. A cat’s grave in the garden was found to be disturbed; a column of smoke was seen rising from the lawn for no apparent reason; three separate observers identified a ‘cold spot’ outside the blue room; objects were recorded as having shifted position in unoccupied rooms; more than one observer felt his coat pulled; a piece of rotten wood, a petrified frog, a ‘strange coat’ all of untraceable origin, were discovered in the house; one observer, hearing a faint click, discovered that he had been locked in the library (fortunately the key was on the inside). There were many unexplained sounds, including whisperings, footfalls, and – reported by Mr A.P. Drinkwater and friends at 1.41am on November 14th 1937 – a ‘thump’ from the upper rooms. This ‘thump’ is perilously close to a thing that goes ‘bump’ in the night, and indeed a sound specifically described as a ‘bump’ was recorded, but that was at four o’clock in the afternoon.

  Most of the phenomena reported had appeared beforehand in ghost stories. In ‘The Haunters and the Haunted’ by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for example, the two ghost hunters are locked by some spirit into their own observation room in the haunted house. Cold spots and unexplained noises appear in too many fictional ghost stories to mention. But then again they also appear in many other purportedly true ghost stories. It would surely be asking too much to expect all accounts of phenomena to be novel. If ghosts do exist then they will have certain characteristics which will be common to them.

  Reading the accounts of Borley, I can’t quite relinquish the idea that there might have been something in it all, but I find that absurdity does keep breaking out. For example, one of the Borley observers was the pugnacious and extrovert Dr C.E.M. Joad, head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Birkbeck College, London. He would go on to become famous as a panellist on the radio programme, ‘The Brains Trust’, in which his trademark was to begin his learned answers to questions from the audience: ‘It depends what you mean by…’, thus implying that his questioner was an idiot. Joad is associated with mendacity in two ways.

  On June 8th 1931, he was playing a game of doubles tennis in London. His partner was the humorist, Stephen Potter, and the two were losing badly to two younger, fitter men. One of these two served down a rocket, and Joad’s hopelessly uncontrolled return volleyed into the stop-netting a good twelve feet beyond the base line, at which point he eyed his opponent questioningly before calling across the net: ‘Kindly say clearly, please, whether the ball is in or out.’ His well bred opponents, feeling their sportsmanship called into question, went to pieces and lost the game, and Potter was inspired to write The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating), the first of a series of very successful and very funny books with a similar theme. There’s nothing funny about the second association of Joad and mendacity though. In early 1948 he was travelling by train from Waterloo to Exeter. Found to be without a ticket, he told the ticket collector he’d got on at Salisbury. He was convicted of fare evasion and fined two pounds with twenty five guineas costs. His BBC contract was terminated, and his reputation ruined.

  At Borley, Joad was one of the main sources for the reports of spontaneously appearing pencil marks on the walls, although he did introduce a note of scepticism by wondering not so much why the marks were made as how. How might a poltergeist get hold of a pencil, and always a sharp one at that? But if we are entitled to question Joad’s evidence, can we dismiss the hundreds of other accounts of phenomena from Price’s forty gentlemen and ladies? And all the accounts that predate and postdate them?

  At the Borley-related Streatham séance already mentioned, which was held on March 27th 1937, a spirit called ‘Sunex Amures’ – a somehow very convincing name thrown up by the movement of the planchette – announced that Borley Rectory would burn down at nine o’clock that night. He, or it, was out by eleven months. The house burnt down in February 1939. Its last owner, a Captain Gregson, said he had accidentally knocked an oil lamp onto a pile of books, but the insurance company believed the fire had been started deliberately. Nine years later, Harry Price died.

  But these events were not necessarily the end of either Price or the Borley ghosts, which are said to have moved their operations to Borley Church. (Even so, the residents of the house whose garden incorporates the Borley site are sick of answering the door to ghost hunters).

  As for Price, according to The Encyclopaedia of Ghosts by Daniel Cohen (1999), a young man called Erson awoke in Sweden one night in 1948, shortly after Price’s death (no closer particulars are given) to find a besuited, slightly balding man by his bed. This figure spoke English, which Erson did not. But the figure did get across that his name was Price. He revisited Erson several times, and urged him to go and see a certain doctor. This doctor, it turned out, had an interest in psychical research and, on being told of the apparition, he explained to Erson all about the man who put Borley Rectory on the map.

  MY OWN LIBRARY GHOST

  The London Library is in St James’s Square, London W1. It is the largest private library in the world, and it has a very good atmosphere (see the next chapter). The staircase and the main reading room have the plush cosiness of a gentleman’s club, and this contrasts with the dusty bleakness of the labyrinthine book stacks. I like to work at the small desks set inside the stacks because there is always at least one person in the communal work spaces who constantly sniffs. On one level of the stacks there are four little desks in a row, all squeezed into the margin of an area containing English and French Literary criticism. Readers at these desks all face the same direction, like passengers on a bus.

  The front desk was free, and I sat down at it. At the one behind sat a tousle-haired, public schoolboy-type with an expensive laptop, a mobile phone and an ipod on his desk. I should think he was called… Anthony. The desk behind him was empty, and at the desk behind that – the final one – sat an elderly, dusty looking man with a small, pale head, and white hair that stuck up as though he’d had an electric shock. He was looking down at a thick book and did not seem to register my arrival, or the irritatingness of Anthony, who typed noisily and kept checking his mobile for text messages before slinging it back down.

  Towards one o’clock, Anthony got up, and with a lot of clattering of his belongings and scraping of his chair on the floor, cleared off, presumably to lunch. I turned around and looked directly at the man at the rear desk. As I did so, he lifted up his head.

  The face, thus revealed, was even whiter than his hair, and his eyes were of an extraordinarily pale blue, like the eyes of a Siamese cat. He looked both young and old because, although his face was extraordinarily white, it was completely unlined. I was shaken by his appearance, and put off my work, so I left to go to lunch myself about five minutes later.

  When I returned, Anthony was back at his desk, and the pale man was still sitting reading. Anthony left for good at about four o’clock, with more scraping and clattering. When he’d gone, I turned around. The pale man was still there, still reading. As I looked on, he slowly began to lift his head, and I turned back around quickly. Ten minutes later, I risked another look, and he wasn’t there. It would have been almost impossible for him to leave his place without my hearing, especially since my thoughts had been entirely fixed on him for most of the afternoon. But I’d heard nothing.

  The book he’d been reading remained on the desk. I walked over and picked it up. It was The Registers of the Protestant Church at Caen (Normandy), Volume 1, edited by C.E. Hart, and published in 1907… which was just about right, I thought.

  PART THREE

  ‘It had not been light all day’, or Atmosphere

  No genre is more dependent upon atmosphere than the ghost story, although it is run close in this respect by Gothic literature, which is its direct forerunner.

  The most widely-read Gothic novel in modern Britain is a parody: Northang
er Abbey by Jane Austen. The heroine, the perfectly pleasant Catherine Morland, is addicted to ‘horrid’ novels. Modern readers have assumed that the titles of some of the ones that excited her – Castle of Wolfenbach, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest etc – were made up by Austen, but these are all real books. Gothic novels might feature ghosts among a long cast list of villains both supernatural and mortal, but they were devoted to the violent and the macabre rather than to ghostliness.

  I personally think of the difference between gothic fiction and ghost fiction as encapsulated by two experiences I had while in the bath.

  When I was a boy, I once slipped when climbing into the bath, and sliced the side of my hand against my father’s razor. I didn’t notice I’d done this until I saw a red cloud unrolling within the hot water. I was transfixed by the sight, and actually put off panicking for a moment while I savoured its beauty.

  More recently – about a year ago – I was sitting in the bath in the 1940’s terraced house in Southwold, Suffolk that we had rented for the summer. It was late at night; I was alone in this house; the street beyond was, as usual, silent to the point of being disturbing, and I was bathing in the dark, since the bulb had gone, and I could not unscrew the glass globe that enclosed it. When I turned off the bath taps I heard a great juddering of the plumbing, which then gave way to what sounded like a babble of hoarse, indistinct voices. It must be some peculiarity of the old-fashioned plumbing system, I thought – air trapped in the pipes. (See ‘Six Attempts at Putting On a Brave Face’ in Part Three). I made sure that the taps were turned fully off and waited for the noise to subside, which it didn’t.

  Instead, the volume increased, and distinct, sibilant words in odd conjunctions – such as ‘necessary separation’ – seemed to leap out. I climbed out of the bath, walked to my bedroom, and turned on Radio Five, which as usual – and thank God – was broadcasting some thoroughly inconsequential time-killing football chat. I stood there dripping and listening to it, and by the time I walked back to the bathroom I was completely dry and the noise had stopped.

  Gothic literature was an offshoot of Gothic Revival architecture. Horace Walpole built the Gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill, at Twickenham in London, and also wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764), which is taken to be the first Gothic novel. The Gothic was a reaction against the placidity of the dominant neo-classical taste. Its adherents liked to imagine the jagged ruins of medieval abbeys or castles offset against a lowering sky. Gothic novels also belong within Romantic literature in their emphasis on place, and from these twin roots we get ghost story atmosphere, of which the primary ingredient is weather.

  Michael Frayn once wrote a funny piece in the Guardian about the use of weather in fiction: ‘The weather – that’s what I want to write about. What immensely evocative stuff the weather is! Whenever I look out of the window and observe the meteorological condition of the day I can feel the grand periods pulsing in the blood, the nostalgic phrases ringing in my head. Whenever I look at the typewriter and see a blank piece of paper, the thin Atlantic cloud-wrack starts to scud across it immediately.’

  Ghost story writers lay on plenty of weather, and it is seldom seen to improve when the ghost is in the offing. Rather, it takes a turn for the worse:

  GOOD BAD WEATHER: SIX INSTANCES

  1. ‘The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.’ On Christmas Eve Scrooge approaches his house and its waiting ghosts in A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens. Or see, from ‘To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt’ by the same author: ‘I took my seat in the place appropriated to Jurors in waiting, and I looked about the Court as well as I could through the cloud of fog and breath that was heavy in it. I noticed the black vapour hanging like a murky curtain outside the great windows, and I noticed the stifled sound of wheels on the straw or tan that was littered in the street; also the hum of the people gathered there, which a shrill whistle, or, a louder song or hail than the rest, occasionally pierced.’

  2. ‘The lamp in the bathroom threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense.’ From My Own True Ghost Story (1888) by Rudyard Kipling.

  3. ‘Shortly before ten o’clock the stillness of the air grew quite oppressive, and the silence was so marked that the bleating of a sheep inland or the barking of a dog in the town was distinctly heard, and the band on the pier, with its lively French air, was like a discord in the harmony of nature’s silence. A little after midnight came a strange sound from over the sea, and high overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming.’ From Dracula (1896) by Bram Stoker, preceding the arrival of the Count at Whitby. This is more of a Gothic novel than a ghost story, admittedly, but Stoker is something of a weather specialist. In ‘Dracula’s Guest’, a short story originally intended for inclusion in the novel, the manifestation of the demons in the countryside near Munich on Walpurgis Night is preceded by the narrator experiencing first a fleeting breath of cold wind on an otherwise sunny evening; dark clouds begin to muster overhead; the wind rises and the air turns icy cold. There is then both thunder and lightning and snow and – bit later on – a tornado.

  4. Ghost story writers are so keen on weather that they sometimes like to get two descriptions of it in for the price of one. In ‘All Hallows’ (1942) by Walter de le Mare, the narrator arrives at the apparently deserted, remote cathedral on the edge of the sea. It is a hot August afternoon. The great cathedral is ‘lulled as if into a dream by this serenity of air and heavens’. The narrator then wonders ‘what kind of first showing it would have made…if an autumnal gale had been shrilling and trumpeting across its narrow bay – clots of wind-borne spume floating among the dusky pinnacles – and the roar of the sea echoing against its walls. Imagine it frozen stark in winter, icy hoarfrost edging its every boss, moulding, finial, crocket, cusp!’ Or here is an interpolation in M.R. James’s story, ‘A View From a Hill’ (1925): ‘Writing as I am now with a winter wind flapping against dark windows and a rushing, tumbling sea within a hundred yards, I find it hard to summon up the feelings and words which will put my reader in possession of the June evening and the lovely English landscape of which the Squire was speaking.’

  5. ‘It was a lovely July evening, and the air was delicate with the scent of the pine-woods…As they entered the avenue of Canterville Chase, however, the sky became suddenly overcast with clouds, a curious stillness seemed to hold the atmosphere, a great flight of rooks passed silently over their heads and, before they reached the house, some big drops of rain had fallen.’ From ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887) by Oscar Wilde.

  6. ‘Sounds were deadened, shapes blurred. It was a fog that had come three days before, and did not seem inclined to go away and it had, I suppose, the quality of all such fogs – it was menacing and sinister, disguising the familiar world and confusing the people in it, as they were confused by having their eyes covered and being turned about, in the game of Blind Man’s Buff.’ From The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill. There are about three pages on this fog, which sets the scene for the start of the ghost story proper in chapter two. Susan Hill is very strong on atmosphere. She once wrote an account, in The Spectator, of a long, hot day in the country (culminating in a bee sting) that practically gave me sunstroke. She is a disciple of the master, and I recall reading another piece, about her plans for Christmas, in which she wrote: ‘This Christmas’s Dickens is Pickwick Papers.’

  *

  From a leisure pursuits point of view, ghostliness is one of the few things that British weather is good for. Ghostliness generally is a north European attribute. As Peter Davidson writes in The Idea of North, ‘Ghosts are less a feature of southern belief than are beliefs in vampires and the evil eye – both of which are direct inheritances from the Romans… But the revenant narrative is essentially of the north, and is a product of occluded weather and broodings on the fate of the
dead.’ Since there is even more weather in Scotland than in England, there is even more ghostliness there too, which is why every castle in Scotland has its attendant ghosts. And the winter days are shorter there, which also helps…

  DARKNESS

  Darkness is the other essential element of ghostliness.

  Most of us are immune from total darkness, in that we seldom walk down a country road on a moonless night without a torch. Try it, and you will see a ghost, I guarantee. I once went on an ‘investigation’ (I thought of it as a ‘ghost hunt’ but I knew the term was disapproved of) with a ghost club based at…well, I’d better just say a town in the Midlands. It was a late spring evening, and before proceeding to the haunted location – a country house just outside the town – we sat around in one of the member’s houses for a couple of hours. Ostensibly we were being briefed; the packed lunches were being handed out and the contents verified; the vehicle – it was always ‘the vehicle’ and never the ‘car’ – that would take us to the house was being loaded. But I believed that the real purpose of the delay was to wait for darkness to fall. And when we arrived at the haunted house, there was a great fetishisation of torches. The leader of the club naturally had the biggest one; but we were all equipped with two, and there was a reserve of spare batteries. As in the ‘Famous Five’ stories of Enid Blyton, torches, packed lunches and maps were all very important, but the torches especially. The torches gave light but, more to the point, they gave darkness when turned off. At certain times, certain members of the party would be sent to patrol the grounds of the house with torches switched off. I myself completed two circuits of the grounds, at about 2am and 4am. On both occasions the two men I was with – seasoned ghost hunters – reported back that nothing had been seen. I kept quiet, but on both occasions I personally saw dozens of ghosts, or what might easily have been ghosts: blurred shapes moving low over the lawn; things skimming across the surface of the ornamental lake; bushes rustling and moving unaccountably.