Ghoul Brittania

by Andrew Martin

  I put all this down to the activity of birds. I had been taught that birds roosted at night, but I told myself that they can’t all be roosting all the time. Perhaps they spent a good deal of time moving – silently and ultra-fast – from one roosting position to another. But the real cause of my visions was the darkness.

  We have seen that medieval life was a veritable phantasmagoria, and no wonder given the lack of street lights or, indeed, streets. A walk in the dark at night would set anyone back about five hundred years. The Enlightenment, which brought the banishment of ghosts from everyday life, must in part have been a literal enlightening: the proper lighting of domestic and public spaces was not far behind, after all. We have seen that the Victorian Spiritualists preferred a reversion to low light, whether because the spirits preferred it, or for less creditable reasons – and it is said that infra-red photography (photography that can see in the dark) was the final knell for physical mediumship. But in his above-mentioned book, The Door Marked Summer (1981), the comedian Michael Bentine, provides a rationale for darkness in séances – a rationale that seems to become more disturbing with each successive word:

  ‘Darkness is mandatory for physical phenomena and it does make sense. Firstly, the darkness precludes the possibility of the attention of the sitters being drawn to the objects that, even in a bare room, catch the eye. Secondly, if, as we believed, the generation of the coarser form of ectoplasm required to contain and sustain a tangible field of force sufficient to levitate a human being is ultra-sensitive to light then, obviously, the absence of light becomes necessary.’

  (I’m not sure that word ‘obviously’ is strictly justified there).

  And here is a rationale for darkness in ghost stories. It comes from the female narrator of ‘The Lost Stradivarius’ (1895) by John Meade Falkener. She is explaining to her nephew how his late father became susceptible to ghostliness: ‘Any trouble or fear becomes, as you will some day learn, my dear nephew, immensely intensified and exaggerated at night. It is so, I suppose, because our nerves are in an excited condition, and our brain not sufficiently awake to give a due account of our foolish imaginations.’

  The writer of a ghost story often has to find a means of bringing about absolute darkness. In a modern ghost story the house is an isolated property not on the mains, and the generator packs up. A practically minded man goes outside with a torch, saying, ‘It just needs a kick in the right place – be back in a sec,’ and that is the last we see of him. The neatest rationale for darkness that I can think of is in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: ‘Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.’ But then it was generally much easier for a writer to snuff out the light in Victorian days because there was so little of it to start with. All that was required was a sudden gust of wind that might blow out a candle, and this was already a clichéd prelude to terror when Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey. (In the eponymous gloomy house, the heroine, Catherine Morland, is reading at night when the candle inexplicably blows out, which seems a bit over the top, since she’s perusing nothing more momentous than the laundry list.)

  In her book Coal, A Human History, Barbara Friese points out that Britain, alone in Northern Europe, preferred open fires to iron stoves for domestic heating, the point being that the open fire was also a source of low light. It was part of our taste for cosiness. We are a cosy nation. Consider Winston Churchill, who won the War from his bed, or Delia Smith, whom I nominate as the Queen of Cosy. Take this from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course (Classic Edition): ‘Although you can buy good crumpets, I do think they’re fun to make – especially on a cold snowy day, when everyone’s housebound.’ (I think she means ‘snowbound’, since ‘housebound’ suggests confinement owing to illness).

  Our cosiness, and correspondingly our ghostliness, comes to the fore at Christmas, which I will now consider before moving on to its poor relation, Halloween.

  CHRISTMAS

  It was Dickens who, in the words if his biographer Peter Ackroyd, ‘made Christmas cosy’. Before him, it was a rather pallid festival, somewhat like Easter in that, if you were distracted or very poor, you might not notice it.

  Ackroyd writes that Dickens’s insecure childhood gave him ‘an acute sense of, and need for “Home”’. As far as Dickens was concerned, the worse things could be made to seem outside the house, the better they were in it, hence the Christmas ghost story told around the fire. For years, anyone who received a Christmas card from me (a very select group indeed) got a picture of Mr Pickwick warming his vast rear end before a fire, above a caption reading, ‘“This,” said Mr Pickwick, looking around him, “This is, indeed, comfort.”.’ Mr Pickwick was depicted at Dingley Dell (the convivial house to which the Pickwickians often repaired) just before the telling of the first of Dickens’s Christmas ghost stories:

  ‘Ah!’ said the old lady. ‘There was just such a wind, just such a fall of snow, a good many years back, I recollect – just five years before your poor father died. It was Christmas Eve, too; and I remember that on that very night, he told us the story about the Goblins that carried away old Gabriel Grub.’

  This is the cue for a trial run for A Christmas Carol in that it is the tale of a misanthrope who apprehends the Christmas message by supernatural agencies. I watched an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, or read it, on almost every Christmas of my childhood, and in 1970 I went to the York Odeon to see ‘Scrooge’ – not the revered, unfrightening version of 1951, starring Alistair Sim, but a version made in 1970 with Albert Finney as the miser. Unaware that the film critic Leslie Halliwell had pronounced, ‘Dim musical version, darkly coloured and quite lost on the wide screen…’, I was haunted for years by that film. Halliwell conceded that ‘It has its macabre moments of trick photography’, and it was the scene where Scrooge falls towards the red hot caverns of hell that would revisit me.

  Then there was Dylan Thomas’s story ‘A Child’s Christmas In Wales’, which I owned in an edition with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, and which was read out at a school carol service, in about 1973, by my favourite English teacher, Mr Milner. (Or was it Mr Hurd, my other favourite?) As a story, it has excellent atmosphere. It only becomes ghostly – and then very effectively – towards the end.

  I believe that I would say the word ‘Ghost’ after ‘Christmas’ in any word association game, but the connection pre-dates the era of the modern ghost story. As Julia Briggs writes in Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story: ‘In folklore, ghosts had long been connected with Christmas Eve, just as they were with several other Christian festivals, in particular Halloween… The appearance of ghosts on Christmas Eve could be explained in Christian terms as the disturbance of souls in Purgatory, before the advent of the Saviour at midnight brought them peace.’

  But compare and contrast this, spoken by Horatio in Hamlet:

  Some say, that ever ’gainst that season comes

  Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

  The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

  And then (they say) no spirit can walk abroad,

  The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,

  No fairy takes, nor witch has power to charm:

  So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

  Briggs argues that this reassurance was not believed; that the proverb ‘ghosts never appear on Christmas Eve’ was intended ironically, a maxim for the complacent.

  HALLOWEEN

  For all its commercialisation our Christmas remains cosy, and to some extent ghostly, but that is more than can be said for our Halloween.

  When I was a boy, Halloween was a shadowy, elusive affair: the occasional carved pumpkin glowing in a window; the occasional fleeting glimpse of a reveller skipping away in a witch’s hat – usually some person you didn’t know, and had never seen before. As a festival, it was upstaged by Bonfire Night, and I was frustrated by Halloween in those days. There was nothing you could buy, or be given, in connection with it. Today, there is a grea
t deal you can buy, as a result of the promotion of Trick or Treat, by which Halloween has eclipsed Bonfire Night, and ghostliness has given way to mock horror. In the weeks before Halloween, Asda stores offer, amid a landslide of plastic tat: the Asda Squeezy Eyeball, the Asda Rat, the Asda Inflatable Coffin, the Child Grim Reaper Outfit (‘One size fits all’), the Adult Grim Reaper Outfit, the Inflatable Pumpkin Cooler (not for cooling pumpkins, you understand), the Skull Martini Shaker.

  Asda is American-owned, and Trick or Treat came to us from America. The British folklorist, Doc Rowe, believes the Trick or Treat contagion began with a programme broadcast on ITV in the early Seventies as part of a documentary strand called ‘Look Stranger’. It depicted life on the American airbase in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and showed the children trick-or-treating. ‘Within two years,’ Doc Rowe told me, ‘all the tabloids were running features on how to dress up for the occasion.’ But his point is that this was merely the re-introduction into this country of a tradition rooted in our psychology.

  It helps to think of both Halloween and Bonfire Night as outgrowths of the Celtic celebration called Samhain, which marked the turning of their year and the beginning of winter. Samhain was associated with the lighting of fires to honour the dead, and defy malevolent spirits. The medieval Church both denounced the festivals as diabolic and sought to appropriate aspects of them in the shape of All Saints Day on November 1st (on which the sanctified are honoured), and All Souls Day on November 2nd (a more democratic honouring of all Christian souls).

  According to Doc Rowe, ‘By tarring Halloween with an occult brush, by caricaturing it in that way, the church made it an occult event.’ But while the original Halloween might not have been thoroughgoingly sinister, it did incorporate games and rituals of licensed naughtiness. A remnant of these is Mischief Night, which occurs in pockets of the north of England especially on November 4th. In the York of my boyhood, the jape was to remove gates from hinges, and leave them piled up on street corners. Doc Rowe brackets this tradition of naughtiness as ‘misrule’ or ‘world-turned-upside-down’ and there are elements of it even in the Christianised medieval version of Halloween. All Souls Day, for example, was associated with Soul Caking, wherein poor Christians would say prayers for the departed relations of wealthier ones in return for food – and you can see how there might have been trouble if the rich didn’t play along. Similar traditions are associated with May Day. It is as though the arrival of a new season brings a shifting of the scenery, during which the leading actors are distracted, allowing the bit-part players to have their chance.

  It is likely that these traditions, precursors of Trick or Treat, were taken to America by Scottish and Irish emigrants of the mid-nineteenth century… So the Asda Inflatable Coffin is actually our fault. But Doc Rowe believes these customs are ineradicable in any case: ‘The more you suppress these things, the greater they become.’

  Apart from the Church, he identifies the main suppressors as ‘the health and safety camp’. I know what he means, and I wonder how long it will be before the words ‘high visibility vest’ come up in a ghost story.

  ANTI-ATMOSPHERE

  Our workplaces and public spaces are required to be adequately lit, and it seems there is never anyone sitting in on the planning meetings who will querulously interpose: ‘Yes, I agree we must do something about all the muggings in the dark alleys near the canal, but not at the expense of the atmosphere, surely?’

  It would be useless to complain. It’s just that adequately lit usually means overlit. Take our buses. The original interior colour scheme of London’s fabled double-decker, the Routemaster, featured Burgundy lining panels, Chinese green window surrounds, and Sung yellow ceilings, all illuminated with bulbs of the lowest possible wattage. ‘Even fifteen years ago,’ writes Travis Elborough in The Bus We Loved, ‘to travel on a Routemaster with the remnants of its original decor intact felt like being conveyed about the city in the lounge of an illustrious, if by now gone-to-seed, club.’ The Routemaster’s successors have sky blue interiors and fluorescent yellow interiors. In the Evening Standard, Andrew Gilligan wrote that being inside them makes him feel as though he’s at the bottom of a swimming pool.

  A measure of gloom might once have denoted poverty. It is now only the smartest places that have subdued lighting. And only the smartest establishments have a real fire – such as Claridge’s Hotel. Here is what Dickens could see in a fire: (It’s from his story of 1848, ‘The Haunted Man’): ‘When it was just so dark, as that the forms of things were indistinct and big, but not wholly lost. When sitters by the fire began to see wild faces and figures, mountains and abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals.’ Can you have a ghost story told around a radiator? It might be an interesting challenge to create that frame; to have the narrator beginning his story after asking for the heating to be turned up in the Community Centre, while one of his supposed listeners takes a mobile phone call and, in the background, the commercial radio station that presumptuously calls itself ‘London’s Heart’ plays ‘Money’s Too Tight To Mention’ by Simply Red for the fifteenth time that day.

  The simplest thing is to set a ghost story in the past, so as to access the real fires, candles, rectories etc. But the usual trappings might be abandoned for two reasons: firstly for comic effect. In any ghost story collection, you can spot the one trying this by its title. In The Virago Book of Ghost Stories (1987), it is ‘The Haunted Saucepan’ by Margery Lawrence. (A woman rents a modest, modern semi and finds herself somehow mesmerised into cleaning the place). In a similar, bathetic vein is The Celestial Omnibus (1911) by E.M. Forster, which is about a bus that goes to heaven, although the protagonist – a nine year-old boy resident at Agathox Lodge, 28 Buckingham Park Road, Surbiton – doesn’t know it. As the bus ascends, he muses, ‘even if it were Richmond Hill they ought to have been at the top long ago.’ Let me invent a few titles in this line: ‘The Karaoke Night Ghost’, ‘The Haunted Mobile Phone Shop’, and I would have written ‘The Haunted Tesco’s’, except that there really is one. In The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings (2008) Pater Haining writes: ‘The 24-hour Tesco Superstore in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, has been plagued by a spectre that has been haunting the store’s cafeteria in the small hours…The supermarket stands near the remains of the medieval St Saviour’s Hospital, traditionally home for the ghost of a “Grey Lady”.’

  The other reason for spurning traditional atmosphere is to boost your ghost – to show that the spirit can assert itself outside its comfort zone – and the best ghost story writers do take on modernity. Dickens addressed the disturbing development of high speed train travel in his story, ‘The Signalman’ (1865), of which more below. Even the antiquarian M.R. James arranged, in ‘Casting the Runes’, for a supernatural message to appear in the space reserved for adverts on a tram. The eponymous public house in Kingsley Amis’s ghost novel, The Green Man (1969), is very carefully located: ‘With the A595 just too far off for individual vehicles to be heard, and no-one, for the moment, moving about in the forecourt, everything seemed quiet…’

  Actually the A595 is already starting to sound quaint, but some modern phenomena are ghostly from the moment they are built or invented. We saw with regard to spiritualism that this was true of wireless telegraphy. The same goes for space travel in my view. Science Fiction and ghost stories are two genres that prop each other up. There is darkness, broken by bursts of luminosity; time travel; science and cod-science; the infinite.

  Mobile Phone Cameras are also ghostly. I photographed myself once, in order to review a haircut I’d just had, and when I looked at the portrait it blinked at me. I assume there’s some rational explanation for that. CCTV is in the same category. A crime is committed, and the police proudly publish a photograph of… a ghost, and one just as likely to cause dissension and recrimination as those taken at the Victorian séances.

  THE HAUNTED HOUSE

  If ghost stories arose from the Gothic tradition, which was as much architectural as literary, it is a
lso the case that persistent ghosts need a persistent location in which to manifest. So no wonder houses are haunted.

  Haunted houses tend to be old and big. Such properties appeal to the romantic idea of faded grandeur, and also a baser snobbery. Every account of the above-mentioned Borley Rectory, ‘the most haunted house in England’, describes it as hideous, but when I look at the pictures I wonder how much it would cost today if it were still standing, and whether the seller would take a low offer in view of its poltergeist infestation. Reading ghost stories we are torn: yes, a malevolent spirit stalks the east wing, but at least there’s an east wing for it to stalk. Ghost stories, both real and fictional, sometimes come with floor plans of the haunted area – literally, property particulars – and very mouth-watering they usually are.